Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA

ANOTHER EVICTION, ANOTHER DEATH

November 15, 2005

Opinion piece by Marielos Monzón

Published in Prensa Libre

Some 500 National Civil Police (PNC) officers PNC, supported by 50 army soldiers, on November 10 evicted 3,000 campesinos from the Santa Gertrudis finca (large farm), in Jalapa. The campesinos were from the community of Santa María Xelapán.

There was a dialogue process, there were broken promises, there was an unclear intervention by President Óscar Berger, and finally, there was a new confrontation between the security forces and the occupiers.

As a result, there is one campesino dead, one disappeared, and four police officers injured, four with bullet wounds and one with machete wounds. There are nine campesinos injured, the majority with firearms. Forty-three of the occupiers are detained, among them five women, whom—according to the Campesina Pastoral—are being kept without clothes, shoes, and medical attention, in spite of their wounds..

The versions about how the events occurred are confused. The PNC chiefs accuse the campesinos of using firearms. They mention high-caliber pistols, assault rifles, homemade shotguns, and mortars.

The campesino leaders deny these deeds and say that those who opened fire were the finca owners bodyguards, who entered the area while a solution was being negotiated, fired on the campesinos and police, and burned fifty huts, which the campesinos had built for their survival. They also reported that at the time of the eviction there was a provision injuction issued by the court of appeals of Jalapa, ordering that the eviction be stopped.

At the heart of this lies a legal dispute, in which the campesinos hold a title from the nineteenth century which gives them ownership of the land. The finca owner presents more recent titles; and this is something that must be resolved.

Nonetheless, what this new death clearly exposes is the failure of all institutionality designed to resolve agrarian conflicts, the inability of the authorities to avoid violence, and the persistence of methods and patterns aimed at leaving campesinos always with the worse part.

Since the first eviction in Nueva Linda in which there were fourteen deaths, a year has passed, and all remain unpunished. Also unpunished is the murder of five campesinos by the son of a finca owner in El Corozo. There is another dead in Santa Gertrudis, a new person disappeared, and the story of giving no signs of change.

So far under this government, violent evictions of campesinos have tripled, and a latifundista and business-oriented agrarian policy has been stressed. How many more deaths must there be before the failure of this policy is recognized and the agrarian conflict is addressed? How long is the justice system going to continue to criminalize poverty? That is something that also must be discussed.

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