Scorched Earth in a Time of Peace

...Judge Roberto Roda DeLe6n these lands again in 1994, the villagers have suffered five evictions...

...A fter 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...

...threatened anyone who returned to the land with ten to 12 years in prison...

...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...

...Forty residents were injured from beatings with sticks, three were shot, and 15 leaders were imprisoned for four months...

...The managers at Shell also made their own threats...

...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...

...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...

...One notorious example is the La Perla hacienda outside of Chajul, El Quichd, which has been accused of expropriating over 8,700 acres from four surrounding villages over the last century...

...In light of the recent assassiez, nation of Bishop Juan Jos6 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 families and their communities...

...Article 37 of the Women fro Agreement on Socio- and husband economic Issues and the Agrarian Situation specifically requires that the national government carry out a "legal reform" and a "prompt resolution of land conflicts...

...Everything was burned to the ground...

...The contents of Article 37 of the Peace Accords notwithstanding, most im Sololi and San Jorge protest the arrest of ds during an eviction in 1993...

...After complying with this demand, one former resident said that the community heard "nothing more about the owner...

...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...

...While the Arzd 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...

...Such statements run counter to the government's commitment to address Guatemala's longstanding land tenure problem made when it signed the Peace Accords with the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) in 1996...

...Many of the hundreds of newly evicted homeless families were forced to sleep in the surrounding wooded areas or with relatives in town...

...The land titles documenting ownership were never disclosed to the community...

...The cases of La Perla, Suchi Tres and La Laguna illustrate the lengths to which the Arzti Administration is willing to go in order to protect the "property rights" of landowners...

...When they found no one there, they returned to Suchi Tres...

...Landowner and industrialist Rafael Castillo reportedly created a fund for hired assassins who would be paid some $17,000 for every community leader they murdered...

...After its owner, Luis Arenas Barrera, was assassinated by the Guerrilla Army 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...

...When they involve use of the military as in the cases of La Perla, Rio Cacao, La Refineria 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 same time, CONTIERRA, the Peace Fund and the Land Fund do not have sufficient resources or the capacity to fully address the situation...

...In 1990, multi-millionaire Rafael Castillo Blamex, owner of the National Brewery liquor monopoly and RAYO-VAC batteries and director of the Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial and Financial Sectors S (CACIF), the pre-eminent industrialists' lobbying association, started threatening and harassing the community while b simultaneously destroying their fields with chemicals and cattle...

...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...

...Yet the inefficiency of the mechanisms established to implement the Peace Accords as well as the scorchedearth 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 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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Residents met with INTA representatives in 1997, who told them to request a titling procedure to register the lands...

...Instances of incompetence and corruption in the titling process constitute violations of Article 37, primarily under item (a), which provides ince the signing of the Pea, Accords in 1996, there has een little change in nation atterns of land tenure, wit 65% of arable land in the hands of just 2.6% of the population...

...Legal evictions usually follow years of private efforts to intimidate, coerce or use violence to force a community off their lands...

...A well-known local drug trafficker, Edgar Duarte Osorio, was then hired along with four others to do the job...

...After his tortured body was found, the squad was apparently disbanded...

...The El Tablero hacienda, in El Tumbador, San Marcos has been occupied by the army since last year...

...Seven other villagers were injured by security forces, who also threw a grenade at one community leader...

...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...

...Castillo began circulating accusations that the farmers were heavily armed...

...On March 12, 1998, after one failed attempt, the police entered La Laguna to evict the residents...

...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...

...Distribution of arable holdings remains among the most unequal in the hemisphere...

...The army's direct involvement in these actions and the government's silent approval make it patently clear that for the Arzfi Administration, the interests of transnational corporations take precedence over those of campesinos...

...The idea," said one local community leader, "was to annihilate all of the community leaders from Suchi Tres and Media Luna," another local community...

...11UPDATE / GUATEMALA ment and land-owning elites to uproot and dispossess communities engaged in land disputes across the country, which currently number over 500...

...The documents did not name Castillo as the owner before this 'repair.' We have documents from 1992 in which his name does not appear...

...Since they began cultivating according to newspaper accounts, "homes were razed and people were shot at from low-flying helicopters...

...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 Refineria were forcibly evicted...

...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...

...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...

...the definition of compensation 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...

...CONTIERRA, for example, reportedly accepted 174 cases in March of this year and resolved only 16 of them...

...In fact, they were changing the registry...

...In 1982, some 70 residents of El Tablero and Australia were reportedly massacred by the army when they sought to reclaim lands their great-grandparents had registered in 1893...

...The case of La Refinerfa, a 60acre parcel located directly behind a Shell Oil storage facility, has brought a major multinational corporation into the equation...

...Both areas are registered with INTA as part of the same original parcel which dates back to the 1890s...

...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...

...Dispossession of the rural poor by private terror and public collusion runs counter to the terms of the Peace Accords...

...Two months later, allegedly after meeting with Castillo, the same engineer told them the land was private property...

...Gerba waged a five-year camtheir sons paign of coercion and terror before he finally succeeded in driving the families off the land permanently...

...If you build your houses here once more," they warned, "we will bum you alive in your houses in the middle of the night...

...Since the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, there has been little change in national patterns of land tenure...

...The ideological impetus for the violent land expropriations taking place across the Guatemalan countryside was clearly laid out by President Alvaro Arzfi last August when he affirmed before a meeting of coffee plantation owners that his government would move "aggressively to stop attacks on private property rights...

...They were ousted five hours later by army troops and pri- vate hacienda guards--several of whom participated in the 1982 massacre in Ilom and now administer these lands...

...I went hungry for the next three days, as there was nothing to eat...

...Sixty houses and some 218 acres of crops from the villages of El Cedral, Selim6n and Las Mercedes were destroyed, amounting to some $33,000 in damages...

...hese 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...

...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...

...The evictions are clear violations of the Accords, which provide for reinstatement or compensation for land taken by abuse of authority...

...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...

...F 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...

...Such was the case in the village of Selim6n, which was created by a group of refugees in 1995...

...Far from being an anomalous footnote to an otherwise tranquil rural landscape, this raid highlights a continuing campaign on the part of the governVol XXXII, No I JULY/AUG 1998 9 0 0 o k a James Black is an independent researcher who travels frequently to Guatemala...

...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...

...During the violent evicVol XXXII, No 1 JULY/AUG 1998 13UPDATE / GUATEMALA tion, 18-year-old Francisco Escobar Bil of Sotzil was shot and killed...

...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...

...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 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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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 their claims without ever showing written evidence to residents...

...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 application of dispute-resolution procedures...

...The hit squad failed to complete its mission before Duarte himself was disappeared, most likely by other traffickers...

...National police forces carried out the most recent raids last May when, Residents from El Tablero protest their eviction...

...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 ce peace process will be the continued destruction of impoverished communities throughout the countryside, carried out al with complete impunity :h through legal maneuverings or military interventions on behalf of landowners...

...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...

...Finally, all of these cases point to an ongoing deployment of the military in the Guatemalan countryside...

...According to an organizer with the National Committee of Displaced 12 NMJIA REPORT ON TIlE AMERICAS a i2 NACIAREPORT ON TH S 12UPDATE / GUATEMALA Peoples of Guatemala (CONDEG), "It is not unusual that lands in El Pet6n are not titled in the registry...

...We had no more contact or negotiations with INTA until the eviction...

...This makes it easy for INTA to hand them over to the landowners or the army...

...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...

...Meanwhile, residents continue receiving death threats from La Perla managers, apparently to dissuade them from another occupation...

...If Guatemala is to avoid a return to open armed conflict, the Arzd 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...

...E1 Cedral and Selim6n, two of the evicted villages from Sayaxch6, were camps of internally displaced people who fled massacres in Alta Verapaz and other departments in the Guatemalan highlands during the 1980s...

...He later issued a press release denying the action, but local residents presented his spent AR-15 cartridges as evidence...

...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 Sayaxchb, El Pet6n...

...At La Perla, all land reclamation efforts were effectively suppressed until 1996, when the villagers occupied some hacienda lands to protest the situation...

...Meanwhile, 81% of farms, mostly owned by subsistence farmers, were minuscule, at 1.5 acres or less...

...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...

...Neither title, however, shows official changes in ownership that date to the present...

...These underfunded institutions are ultimately the result of the Arzfi Administration's spending priorities...

...The banner reads: "Roberto Felipe Veldsqu martyr of the struggle for our lands...

...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...

...Arrest warrants have since been issued for them and for all the community's leaders...

...In 1997, 65% of arable land was in the hands of just 2.6% of the population...