Land rights

A Guatemala Mission Network notice alerted network participants to an underlying trend in Guatemala: a systematic effort by the Guatemalan military and police and private security guards to aid Guatemalan business interests and try to satiate their need for additional land by evicting indigenous families off their land. Indigenous families often lacked secure deeds, even though the peace treaty that the government and rebels negotiated in the early 1990s ostensibly guaranteed them land rights anyway. With mining, timber, and agricultural interests in search of more land, the weak government – even an ostensibly center-left government – is apparently only too willing to cooperate in transferring land to these interests, or unable to stop it. Apparently the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has taken in interest in this process – perhaps all the more so because the alliance of security forces have greeted organized efforts to the land confiscation with violence, including apparent assassinations in eastern Guatemala (including the woman pictured speaking above on a boat trip across Lake Izabal). It remains to be seen what the election of a new government – probably a right-wing government with links with Guatemala’s right-wing death-squad past and a vow to restore law and order. As far as the drug cartels and gangs, they were rumored to have connections with the center-left government, but they may be endemic enough to make their way – or be in charge – whoever is in power.

-- Perry