[ad_1]
The way land is distributed in Guatemala is the most credible example of the persistence of colonialism, racism, and classism; it is a historical, structural problem that has kept the majority of the country’s population in poverty and prevented them from accessing basic rights such as housing, food, health, and education.
You cannot live with dignity without land to live on, to feed yourself, and for individual and collective stability. The way land tenure is structured is the result of five centuries of dispossession, genocide, forced displacement and assimilation. Until today, this has been an issue that governments have avoided, and the only land reforms that exist have been resisted by the US and local elites who strongly oppose the redistribution of land because it would mean a loss of power and privilege.
This situation has not improved, but has become more complicated over the years due to the increase in extractivism and the expansion of drug trafficking. Unfortunately, indigenous peoples, peasants and subalterns continue to be under siege by the state, peasants, landowners, extractive companies, drug traffickers, who have expropriated entire communities through violence, leaving them without everything. Everything.
(frasepzp1)
These evictions demonstrate how the State favours large landowners and extractive companies, allowing them to use the entire State apparatus to destroy people’s livelihoods and to violently expel them, excluding where they can go or what they can do. Every year, dozens of families are forced to live on the streets without any form of protection, creating a crisis that affects them now and for future generations.
June 2 of this year marks the seventh anniversary of the expulsion of the Laguna Larga community in Petén, which has since taken refuge in a refugee camp on the border between Guatemala and Mexico, in dire conditions and completely abandoned by the State. Unfortunately, not only is there no political will to address these problems, but the expulsions continue with the same destructive and violent mechanisms, without any measures for relocation and support for families who clearly do not have the resources to buy land or housing, which is economic and therefore requires State intervention.
The most recent evictions took place on May 22 in El Este, Izabal, and San Miguel Petapa, Guatemala. Legal certainty over land is a privilege and a mechanism for consolidating the wealth of the rich, who enjoy the rights that private property gives them, using which they can legally dispossess lands that belong to them and which have historically been stolen from indigenous populations.
[ad_2]
Source link
