Guatemala remembers conflict victims as new battles ignite over resources

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/oct/24/guatemala-battle-resources

Version 0 of 1.

Hundreds of photographs lining a cemetery wall by a main road serve as a daily reminder of the massacres carried out by the military in this central Guatemalan town. Inside there are long lists of the dead as well as memorials representing the communities affected.

The killings in Rabinal may have taken place decades ago, in the early 1980s, but the wounds remain raw, not least for Mario Chen. His mother, Martina Rojas, disappeared in 1982, but he received her remains only last month.

"It was in March 1982 when they took her," says Chen as he stands by his mother's tombstone. "On that day, army patrols opened fire without warning. They took my mum by helicopter to the military base in Cobán. Her remains were found in a well. I am still waiting for reparations."

Death came to the town when the Maya Achí farming and fishing community of Río Negro opposed government plans to confiscate indigenous lands and natural resources, specifically water, to be used for the Chixoy hydroelectric dam. The government believes opposition to the dam was conflated with guerrilla activity.

The army came down hard on the area after the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), a militia, destroyed a military command centre in nearby Cobán, in Alta Verapaz department, home to the regional military base. In retribution, hundreds of people from the Rabinal region were killed between September 1981 and August 1983.

The massacres in Rabinal, a town in the valley of the Sierra Chuacas mountains, are of more than historical interest. Only now is the country trying to tear down the wall of impunity surrounding some of the leaders during the bloodletting that engulfed the country from 1960 to 1996, when a peace accord was signed.

In May, former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and other human rights violations. The verdict, however, was quickly annulled by the constitutional court amid suspicions of outside pressure after a witness placed Otto Pérez Molina, Guatemala's current president and a former military man, at a massacre site. The decision forced the original three-judge panel to withdraw, sending the case to a new tribunal, which is due to meet next year.

There are echoes of Rabinal in today's social conflicts that pit mining and hydroelectric companies against indigenous communities. In a particularly contentious case in the north-western department of Huehuetenango, the municipality of Barillas – consisting mainly of the indigenous Maya Q'anjob'al people – has been protesting against a dam project. The area has been in upheaval since 2010, when the government issued a licence to Hidro Santa Cruz, subsidiary of the Spanish-owned company Hidralia Energy, to build the Cambalam hydroelectric dam.

Adrián Zapata, a former guerrilla now executive secretary of rural development, recently laid out the reasons behind Guatemala's social conflicts to visiting European journalists.

"Much of social conflict stems from mega projects," he said. "In hydroelectric projects, a company comes in and destroys the land, so of course the people oppose these projects. They are not consulted and they don't see the benefits of the electricity for themselves. Taxes and land distribution are taboo in this country. They are always at the centre of conflict. Land ownership is extremely concentrated. To speak of it is like speaking of the devil – and business has an ideological block against land distribution."

Guatemala has one of the world's highest rates of land concentration, where 3% of private landowners – a white elite – occupy 65% of the arable land. Small farms (those with fewer than four hectares) occupy only 11% of agricultural land.

Poor indigenous farmers scrape out a living through subsistence agriculture, often on the poorest soils, while wealthy plantation owners, or <em>latifundistas</em>, benefit from an agricultural system based on international exports such as coffee, sugar cane and African palm oil – and cheap, mostly indigenous, labour. It has been a recipe for conflict.

In 1952, the government of Jacobo Arbenz launched a reform programme that redistributed land to the country's farm workers. The scheme included the nationalisation of some of the idle plantations owned by the US-based United Fruit Company, the largest single landowner in Guatemala at the time.

The US denounced Arbenz as a communist and within two years he was ousted in a CIA-sponsored coup. His ousting sowed the seeds of conflict that left some 200,000 dead or disappeared, most of them indigenous Maya. The land question is complicated by the fact that not all disputes pit indigenous people against hydroelectric or mining companies but sometimes against one another. But the most contentious conflicts revolve around disputes between big business and indigenous communities, as was the case in Rabinal.

Saqchuumiil Alvarado (not her real name) remembers a massacre that took place during an independence day parade in Rabinal on September 1981 as if it were yesterday. "We heard what sounded like firecrackers at the parade," she says. "As we walked home we could see people lying like dogs in the street, bleeding. We made it home safely. But at night they came to people's homes. They had a list. If they didn't find who they were looking for, they killed anybody they could. The killers wore plain clothes and had masks."

Like Chen, Alvarado, who lost uncles and cousins, believes the killings had to do with the opposition to the dam, which was funded by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

"People opposed the projects because they knew their lands would be flooded," she says. "The company guards killed one or two, so people got angry. It started with the dam, but it became an excuse to kill. We left for Guatemala City and stayed there for 20 years before coming back. There is still no justice. Ríos Montt is sitting quietly at home."

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.