They started shooting at people. Then they threw tear gas grenades and torched the houses. We fled for almost a mile, but then I fell when a grenade hit me and burned my ankle. Everything was burned to the ground I went hungry for the next three days, as there was nothing to eat.
Such an account of armed repression against Mayan communities in rural Guatemala would be commonplace if it were describing the counterinsurgency campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s. But the events described by this Ke’kchi woman, who along with 135 other families lost her home and all her possessions, took place on September 3 and 4, 1997 in a massive eviction of three villages carried out by national police and military forces in Sayaxché, El Petén. One man and one infant were killed during the evictions, and another man was shot and killed by anti-riot forces while protesting the arrest of several campesino leaders. Sixty houses and some 218 acres of crops from the villages of El Cedral, Selimón and Las Mercedes were destroyed, amounting to some $33,000 in damages. About half of the families left homeless by the evictions are now living in a camp for the internally displaced at Las Posas, where they have no potable water or steady supply of food or income. Far from being an anomalous footnote to an otherwise tranquil rural landscape, this raid highlights a continuing campaign on the part of the government and land-owning elites to uproot and dispossess communities engaged in land disputes across the country, which currently number over 500.
The ideological impetus for the violent land expropriations taking place across the Guatemalan coun-tryside was clearly laid out by President Alvaro Arzú last August when he affirmed before a meeting of coffee planta-tion owners that his gov-ernment would move “aggressively to stop attacks on private prop-erty rights. ” Such statements run counter to the government’s commitment to address Guate-mala’s longstanding land tenure problem made when it signed the Peace Accords with the Guate-malan National Revo-lutionary Unity (URNG)in 1996.
Article 37 of the Agreement on Socio-economic Issues and the Agrarian Situation specifically requires that the national government carry out a “legal reform” and a “prompt resolution of land conflicts.” While the Arzú Administration has complied with some of the land reform measures outlined in the Agreement, such as the establishment of institutional mechanisms like the Presidential Office for the Resolution of Land Conflicts (CONTIERRA), the regime’s tolerance for terror campaigns and forced evictions and its lack of support and funding for mediation and development programs reveals its ultimate role as guardian of the traditional structures of rural power.
Since the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, there has been little change in national patterns of land tenure. Distribution of arable holdings remains among the most unequal in the hemisphere. In 1997, 65% of arable land was in the hands of just 2.6% of the population. Meanwhile, 81% of farms, mostly owned by subsistence farmers, were minuscule, at 1.5 acres or less. The contents of Article 37 of the Peace Accords notwithstanding, most smallholders involved in title disputes with large landowners, banks, companies and state institutions continue to be categorically denied access to mechanisms of peaceful dispute resolution.
Indeed, for many of the peasant communities that make up Guatemala’s rural-based majority, this exclusion has been decisive in cementing the expropriation of village holdings by landed interests, which have been granted impunity or explicit legal sanction to evict whole resident populations. This surge of violent activity on the part of private hacienda guards and public armed forces amounts to nothing less than a new scorched-earth campaign which, as URNG spokesperson Arnoldo Noriega stated, is “totally against the spirit of the Peace Accords.”
EI Cedral and Selimón, two of the evicted villages from Sayaxché, were camps of internally displaced people who fled massacres in Alta Verapaz and other departments in the Guatemalan highlands during the 1980s. Families first started farming at El Cedral in 1990 and were told two years later by the National Institute for Agrarian Transformation (INTA), the central government agency on land ownership, that the land was abandoned and open for their use. The following year, however, the INTA announced that there was in fact an owner and that she had just sold the land to Juan Gerba Airma Canus, a prominent local landowner. The land titles documenting owners were never disclosed to the community. Gerba waged a five-year campaign of coercion and terror before he finally succeeded in driving the families off the land permanently.
According to many groups of campesinos threatened with displacement, INTA officials have often accepted bribes or simply identified with the interests of large landowners, providing them with forged titles or supporting the claims without ever showing written evidence to residents. Such was the case in the village of Selimón, which was created by a group of refugees in 1995. Residents met with INTA representatives in 1997, who told them to request a titling procedure to register the lands. After complying with this demand, one former resident said that the community heard “nothing more about the owner. We had no more contact or negotiations with INTA until the eviction.” According to an organizer with the National Committee of Displaced Peoples of Guatemala (CONDEG), “It is not unusual that lands in El Petén are not titled in the registry. This makes it easy for INTA to hand them over to the landowners or the army.”
Since 1980, a group of 70 families outside of Puerto Barrios, Izabal, have grown corn, beans, vegetables and other crops on about 550 acres of previously fallow land in Aldea Suchi Tres. In 1990, multi-millionaire Rafael Castillo Blames, owner of the National Brewery liquor monopoly and RAYO-VAC batteries and director of the Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial and Financial Sectors (CACIF), the pre-eminent industrialists’ lobbying association, started threatening and harassing the community while simultaneously destroying their fields with chemicals and cattle. At the residents’ request, an INTA representative came to discuss the titling process and assured them that according to his map, the area was national land without title. Two months later, allegedly after meeting with Castillo, the same engineer told them the land was private property.
After Castillo used his own security forces to evict the farmers in 1994, community leaders discovered that he had brought in an engineer under armed guard to measure the parcels of Suchi Tres and La Laguna as one property. “When we asked for the records at the Property Registry in Xela, they told us that the books were unavailable and ‘being repaired,”‘ says Alfredo, a farmer from Suchi Tres and an organizer with the Committee for Peasant Unity (CUC). “In fact, they were changing the registry. The documents did not name Castillo as the owner before this ‘repair.’ We have documents from 1992 in which his mine does not appear.” Castillo now claims to possess a 1990 title for the two properties and succeeded in obtaining his first legal eviction using national police forces in February 1998.
These few examples illustrate the crucial failures of the mechanisms created by the Peace Process to clarify and resolve land conflicts, and point to much deeper problems of violence and impunity in Guatemala today. Instances of incompetence and corruption in the titling process constitute violations of Article 37, primarily under item (a), which provides for the simplification of title awards and an accessible legal framework for land ownership, and item (g), which establishes the regulation of INTA titling for communities in legal possession of their lands. At the same time, CONTIERRA, the Peace Fund and the Land Fund do not have sufficient resources or the capacity to fully address the situation. CONTIERRA, for example, reportedly accepted 174 cases in March of this year and resolved only 16 of them. Although the National Coordinator of Campesino Organizations (CNOC) has submitted 100 cases for resolution, the Land Fund’s 1998 budget of $9.7 million is only enough to cover the purchase and distribution of four properties.
These underfunded institutions are ultimately the result of the Arzú Administration’s spending priorities. Their shortcomings must be understood as a violation of item (f) of Article 37, which calls for “the prompt settlement of land conflicts” through the establishment and ap-plication of dispute-resolution procedures; the definition of compen-sation formulas for situations in which “farmers, small farmers and communities in extreme poverty have been or may be dispossessed for reasons not attributable to them”; and the reinstatement or compensation for land taken by abuse of authority. The likely results of such near-paralysis in the institutional machinery of the peace process will be the continued destruction of impover-ished communities throughout the countryside, carried out with complete impunity through legal maneuverings or military interventions on behalf of landowners.
Legal evictions usually follow years of private efforts to intimidate, coerce or use violence to force a community off their lands. One notorious example is the La Perla hacienda outside of Chajul, El Quiché, which has been accused of expropriating over 8,700 acres from four surrounding villages over the last century. After its owner, Luis Arenas Barrera, was assassinated by the Guerrilla Anny of the Poor (EGP) in 1975, La Perla became a military outpost during the Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt regimes from where massacres were launched and from which forced labor was extracted from Ilom and other neighboring communities. At La Perla, all land reclamation efforts were effectively suppressed until 1996, when the villagers occupied some hacienda lands to protest the situation. They were ousted five hours later by army troops and private hacienda guards-several of whom participated in the 1982 massacre in Ilom and now administer these lands. During the violent eviction, 18-year-old Francisco Escobar Bil of Sotzil was shot and killed. Seven other villagers were injured by security forces, who also threw a grenade at one community leader. Meanwhile, residents continue receiving death threats from La Perla managers, apparently to dissuade them from another occupation.
After burning crops and employing private thugs to evict residents at Suchi Tres and La Laguna, landowner and industrialist Rafael Castillo allegedly met with a group of local banana and coffee industry leaders at a National Coffee Association (ANACAFE) conference sometime between 1996 and 1997, where they reportedly created a fund for hired assassins who would be paid some $17,000 for every community leader they murdered. “The idea,” said one local community leader, “was to annihilate all of the community leaders from Suchi Tres and Media Luna,” another local community. A well-known local drug trafficker, Edgar Duarte Osorio, was then hired along with four others to do the job. The hit squad failed to complete its mission before Duarte himself was disappeared, most likely by other traffickers. After his tortured body was found, the squad was apparently disbanded.
Later in 1997, Castillo and an armed group of guards burst onto community lands, fumigating and burning the crops and firing their weapons into the air. He later issued a press release denying the action, but local residents presented his spent AR-1 5 cartridges as evidence. Castillo began circulating accusations that the farmers were heavily armed. Despite the fact that the charges were formally investigated and dismissed by the UN Human Rights Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA), he obtained a legal order of eviction on February 19, 1998. On March 12, 1998, after one failed attempt, the police entered La Laguna to evict the residents. When they found no one there, they returned to Suchi Tres. In violation of the eviction order, which was limited to La Laguna, the police illegally entered the village and demanded the names of three campesinos who were working in the cornfields under the pretext that they were usurping the fruits of land that did not belong to them. Arrest warrants have since been issued for them and for all the community’s leaders.
The cases of La Perla, Suchi Tres and La Laguna illustrate the lengths to which the Arzú Administration is willing to go in order to protect the “property rights” of landowners. Yet the inefficiency of the mechanisms established to implement the Peace Accords as well as the scorched-earth tactics being utilized in the Guatemalan countryside reveal that the government is not only acting to protect landed property and its own corruption rackets, but is also using the army to underwrite the interests of national and transnational capital.
In Puerto Barrios, for example, more than 500 families were displaced on January 15 and 16, 1997, when the communities of Rio Cacao and La Refinería were forcibly evicted. Both areas are registered with INTA as part of the same original parcel which dates back to the 1890s. Neither title, however, shows official changes in ownership that date to the present. Rio Cacao residents were forced off the land based on a claim by Banco Industrial, which has a title that the community believes to be fraudulent. Despite the allegations of community residents, government officials recognized the authenticity of Banco Industrial’s title, and local representatives, the Governor of Izabal and the Public Minister brokered an agreement in which residents agreed to leave peacefully if the armed forces refrained from burning their homes and their possessions. The agreement notwithstanding, 200 army soldiers and national police burned down all houses, arrested 15 people for being “on private land” and destroyed some $27,000 in crops and personal possessions.
The case of La Refinería, a 60-acre parcel located directly behind a Shell Oil storage facility, has brought a major multinational corporation into the equation. Shell claims that it signed a rental agreement back in 1951, while residents insist that Shell rented it from a local business that had illegally taken it over in that year. All the houses were burned down, including two on properties outside the disputed area, by a contingent of 150 police operatives, some 1,000 anti-riot troops and 300 army soldiers. Forty residents were injured from beatings with sticks, three were shot, and 15 leaders were imprisoned for four months. The Shell plant managers gave gasoline to the police to burn residents’ homes and crops and paid employees to destroy all trees, crops and belongings while the community was still occupied by army troops. Many of the hundreds of newly evicted homeless families were forced to sleep in the surrounding wooded areas or with relatives in town. Judge Roberto Roda DeLeón threatened anyone who returned to the land with ten to 12 years in prison. The managers at Shell also made their own threats. “If you build your houses here once more,” they warned, “we will burn you alive in your houses in the middle of the night.” The army’s direct involvement in these actions and the government’s silent approval make it patently clear that for the Arzú Administration, the interests of transnational corporations take precedence over those of campesmos.
Finally, all of these cases point to an ongoing deployment of the military in the Guatemalan countryside. The El Tablero hacienda, in El Tumbador, San Marcos has been occupied by the army since last year. In 1982, some 70 residents of El Tablerc, and Australia were reportedly massacred by the army when they sought to reclaim lands their great-grandparents had registered in 1893. Since they began cultivating these lands again in 1994, the villagers have suffered five evictions. National police forces carried out the most recent raids last May when, according to newspaper accounts, “homes were razed and people were shot at from low-flying helicopters.” The ongoing military occupation of El Tablero also ensures that peasants will not cultivate the land and keeps the press away from the destroyed houses and fields.
Dispossession of the rural poor by private terror and public collusion runs counter to the terms of the Peace Accords. The evictions are clear violations of the Accords, which provide for reinstatement or compensation for land taken by abuse of authority. When they involve use of the military as in the cases of La Perla, Rio Cacao, La Refinería and El Tablero, their illegality can also be questioned using Articles 35 and 38 of the Agreement on the Strengthening of Civilian Power and on the Role of the Armed Forces in a Democratic Society, in which the role of the military is limited to the protection of the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of the nation. At the most fundamental level, however, violent and/or illegal evictions are anathema to the spirit of peace in Guatemala because they consolidate and perpetuate the domination of the landed oligarchy over the impoverished majority living in the countryside. In terms of the Peace Accords, this violates items (c), (d) and (e) under Article 37, which call for controlling underutilization of land resources by landowners who only cultivate small portions of their vast holdings, protecting the commons and municipal lands from private expropriation and insuring local autonomy over community-owned lands.
In light of the recent assassination of Bishop Juan José Gerardi and the subsequent reemergence of the “Jaguar of Justice” death squad, which has claimed responsibility for the murder of Gerardi and other activists, it is imperative that the government put an end to both its tacit and active support for the terror campaigns being waged by landowners against peasant fanilies and their commumties. The tides of reaction are swelling around a sinking island of hope that the Accords would help to break the oligarchy’s stranglehold on rural power and land. The opening of public spaces for political expression, which many consider the only substantive accomplishment of the Accords, is increasingly threatened by the oligarchs and their allies. If Guatemala is to avoid a return to open armed conflict, the Arzú Administration and its successors must act promptly and decisively in support of land redistribution and put an immediate end to public and private military campaigns against indigenous and campesino communities.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
James Black is an independent researcher who travels frequently to Guatemala.
