Kawok Waqlaju, a friend of mine in Guatemala has sent me some very distressing material that I will be posting here on the Agonist over the next few days. Take it away Kawok:

Urgent Update, March 20, 2011, 4:30 p.m.:

At 4:27 pm I was talking to a compañero from Finca Los Recuerdos when he told me that a
truck full of police and security forces was coming. I could hear him scrambling, and he told me almost in a whisper, "We have to hide. I'm going to have to hang up the phone."

Earlier today, March 20, 2011, the private security forces and national police arrived at the Finca Los Recuerdos again, as they had promised that they would do on March 18 when they forcibly evicted this community of Q'eqchi' Maya subsistence farmers without any prior warning. On March 20, when they entered the property and found the community members in a meeting, they began to threaten them. "Get out of here! This is the property of Carlos Widmann, because he already paid Q46 million to the president! We have the eviction order. We are going to kill you right here if you do not get off this land!" The police and security forces began shooting. They went into the fields, where they found one man harvesting maize and shot him three times: in the back, the stomach and the leg. He had to be evacuated by ambulance to a hospital in serious condition.

This Q'eqchi' community of 49 families (including 92 children) that farms subsistence crops on this land was evicted by force on March 17, when army soldiers, police, anti-riot police, and paramilitaries hired by the Chabil Utzaj sugar company, their faces hidden by ski masks, used chain saws, axes, machetes, guns and tractors to destroy the community members' homes and crops, and robbed their belongings. Because they have nowhere else to go, the Q'eqchi' community stayed on the property, where they had been suffering in the rain without shelter, food, and potable water, for the past two days.

The eviction at Los Recuerdos is one of a series of violent and illegal evictions of 13 communities affecting 670 families that have been taking place over the past 7 days resulting in one death, many serious injuries , and the loss of millions of quetzales worth of property and subsistence crops.

Company owners, army, violently evict 13 Q’eqchi’Maya communities in the Polochic

In the Municipality of Panzós, located in the Polochic Valley of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, the military, police, anti-riot police are in the process of violently evicting 13 communities of Q’eqchi’ Maya subsistence farmers from the lands they have planted for generations. Carlos Widmann, one of the owners of the Chabil Utzaj sugar company (Ingenio Guadalupe), and Ricardo Díaz, the manager of the company, are directing the evictions, accompanied by hundreds of workers they have hired to act as paramilitary forces to rob and destroy the Q’eqchi’s’crops and homes.

The evictions began on March 15, when these men violently removed the communities of Miralvalle and Aguacaliente from their lands, leaving 35-year-old Antonio Beb Ac dead and several more wounded. On March 16, they evicted communities from El Quinich.

On March 17 the armed men evicted the communities of Bella Flor, 8 de Agosto, Rio Frío, San Pablo, Santa Rosa, and Los Recuerdos. On March 18, they removed Q’eqchi’ familes from Tinajas and Paraná.

Chabil Utzaj filed a complaint in the First Instance Criminal Court of Cobán (the state capital) requesting that the communities be evicted from traditional Q’eqchi’ lands the company purchased for sugar cane production in 2006. The eviction orders were issued on February 7, but none of the communities were notified, in spite of the fact that all parties have been in formal negotiations for months over these lands at the highest level of government with the Permanent National System of Dialogue. The communities, represented by the Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC), have been negotiating to purchase the lands on which they live and plant in meetings with the owners and management of Chabil Utzaj, the Secretariat of Agrarian Affairs, the National Land Registry (RIC), the national Land Fund (Fondo de Tierras), the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office, and the Presidential Commission for Human Rights (COPREDEH). They have also been in dialogue with the Central American Bank of Economic Integration (BCIE), which is trying to collect the more than Q30 million it loaned to the Widmann family to establish Chabil Utzaj in Panzós in 2006. Owner Carlos Widmann is the brother of former First Lady Wendy Widmann de Berger, whose husband, Oscar Berger, was president of Guatemala (2004-2008) at the time of the loan. Carlos Widmann personally has been directing the evictions.

Q'eqchi' communities have been farming these lands for centuries (much prior Chabil Utzaj’s arrival five years ago), and because the entire Polochic Valley and Sierra de las Minas is being given over to large-scale production of African palm, mining, and other “megaprojects,” the Q’eqchi’ have nowhere left to go to plant crops to feed themselves. With these evictions, President Colom and the owners of Chabil Utzaj have reversed the progress made toward peaceful resolution of this longstanding ongoing conflict and returned to the same tactics of war used by landowners, the government, and the military during Guatemala’s thirty-six year Internal Armed Conflict (1960-1996) and prior phases of economic “development” in the Valley.

Speculation is that the owners are determined to hold onto the land to convert it to the cultivation of African palm for biodiesel, and thereby repay their loan and make a profit for themselves.

Ironically, the BCIE touts a commitment to “sustainable development,” clean energy, and the eradication of poverty. In the process, the projects they fund are killing poor Q’eqchi’s with vast environmental destruction, bullets, and starvation. In the almost 33 years since the Panzós Massacre, nothing has changed.