Rights Monitor
Guatemala
Land of injustice
In 1992 workers at Maria Lourdes Farm began to claim the proper minimum wage and labour entitlements. Despite court judgments in their favour, by 2003 they had still not received their outstanding wages. They occupied the farm to bring pressure to bear on the farm owner. Subsequently their lawyers were charged with "threats and coercion"; and community members were arrested for usurpation, intimidated and threatened by security guards employed by the farm owner, and had crops and property destroyed. They were forcefully evicted in March 2004 and their houses were destroyed. In July 2004 a security guard allegedly in the pay of the farm owner raped the 15-year-old daughter of one of the community leaders. In October 2004 the workers were finally given an area of land worth approximately half of what they were originally owed. The community consider this a success by Guatemalan standards.
The Maria Lourdes Farm case is typical of disputes in rural areas between campesinos who work the land and large landowners. Since 1524, when Guatemala was directly ruled by Spain, to the present day, the structure of land tenure and labour relationships between campesinos and landowners have been a source of dispute, often violent. The vastly unequal distribution of land, placing the majority and highest quality land in the hands of a few wealthy owners, coupled with generalized poverty, continues to be typical in Guatemala. As a result, disputes involving land and rural labour relationships continue to be widespread.
This report looks at agrarian disputes in Guatemala. It describes a series of human rights violations including denial of access to justice; forced evictions and house demolition without effective consultation, assurance of adequate alternative accommodation or due process of law; excessive violence during evictions; and patterns of intimidation and threats against campesinos. It examines the failure of the judicial system to ensure due diligence and impartiality when dealing with agrarian disputes. It also examines the failure of the executive branch to adequately tackle agrarian related problems, despite the agreements reached in the 1996 Peace Accords, which brought an end to the 36-year internal armed conflict.
Agrarian disputes are complex because of cultural, historical and social factors that influence them and the complicated domestic legal framework. Agrarian disputes, in particular, are affected by cultural differences between indigenous communities (the vast majority of which are Mayan), and ladinos, those of non-indigenous descent.
Indigenous people constitute 66 per cent of the population but are disproportionately represented in the poorest sector of Guatemalan society: 87 per cent of indigenous people are considered poor compared to 54 per cent of ladinos.(3) There are 24 different languages spoken in Guatemala and many indigenous people either do not speak the official language of Spanish (used by all government officials) or do not speak it well.
The case studies in this report embody different types of agrarian disputes. The common factor is the abdication of responsibility by state authorities when it comes to the rights of the campesinos coupled with a forceful and direct support for wealthy landowners.
The legacy of violence in rural areas from the internal armed conflict, the implementation of the Peace Accords which set out a route towards the long-term resolution of agrarian disputes, and recent government policy are all examined. The context of agrarian disputes is also examined before detailing a series of case studies, representative of most agrarian disputes in Guatemala.
Amnesty International (AI) has been monitoring human rights in Guatemala for 40 years, during which it has consistently documented human rights violations in rural areas.(4) In particular, AI has observed that since the arrival of a new government in January 2004, there has been a marked increase in the number of forced evictions in rural areas.
At the end of the report Amnesty International makes recommendations to prevent further human rights violations in the context of land disputes and offer redress to victims of violations in such disputes as well as ensuring the consistent application of national and international human rights law and standards where evictions are deemed necessary as a last resort.
Source: Amnesty International.
