On August 31, hundreds of Guatemalan national police officers carried out the eviction of nearly sixty Mayan Q’eqchi families from a small strip of land in the municipality of Cobán, Alta Verapaz. The families had lived there for nearly four years, living in makeshift housing made of tarps, wood, and bamboo, and demanding that the Guatemalan military return the lands to them.
In the 1980s, the Guatemalan military expropriated a portion of the land to build a munitions factory. The government evicted the families that lived on the future building site, including those who worked on a former coffee plantation there. In 2018, the Guatemalan military ceded the land from the munitions factory to the municipality of Cobán, which at the time was being used as a clandestine waste dump.
When the families’ occupation began, they struggled to clean up the garbage, remains of animals, and waste in order to return the land to its former condition. Many of those who joined the occupation had documents and photographs showing they were born there and lived on the land that they are now demanding be returned.
Jeff Abbott
Dozens of Mayan Q’eqchi families in the Guatemalan city of Cobán have struggled to clean up the waste from an old munitions factory on their indigenous land.
One of the occupiers, Rosa Yat, was born on the land that made up a part of the coffee plantation. She carries her weathered identification documents issued in 1965. “I was born here, I lived here, and I worked on this land,” Yat, who is seventy-five, told The Progressive in an interview in October 2020. “I worked a long time here.”
She estimated that she worked twenty years on the farm, earning two Quetzales per day at the time. She explained that the occupiers have been taking care of the land, restoring it after years of neglect, but now they will not be able to continue.
Guatemala has a fundamental problem related to land. The deeply ingrained land inequalities have been the source of uprisings, coup d’etats, years of war, and in recent years, migration.
Land was one of the central causes of the country’s internal armed conflict that ended after thirty-six years in 1996. There were more than 400 massacres carried out during that time, and survivors of these military-backed massacres often returned to find that their land had been given to allies of the state. It is estimated that there were more than 1 million people internally displaced by the war.
Land conflicts in Guatemala have continued in the decades since the December 1996 signing of the peace accords between the Guatemalan state and guerrillas. The department of Alta Verapaz is among the regions with the highest rates of land conflict, registering 272 of the nation’s more than 1400 land conflicts as of May 2020, according to the Secretariat for Agrarian Affairs (SAA).
But the administration of President Alejandro Giammattei has shown contempt for resolving these conflicts through dialogue, as previous administrations had done. In July 2020, the administration of Alejandro Giammattei announced the closure of the SAA.
The continued inequalities in land and opportunity have driven many to seek to migrate from the region.
“The Q’eqchi’ people do not migrate,” Lesbia Artola, a community leader with the Campesino Committee of the Highlands (CCDA) said in an interview in August 2017, noting the Mayan Indigenous people’s long history of struggling for land rights in this region. She notes that even during the internal armed conflict people didn’t migrate en masse to the United States. But the story seems to have changed since then.
“Migration [from Mayan Q’eqchi regions] is just beginning,” Pedro Pablo Solares, a lawyer and migration analyst, told The Progressive in an interview in November 2020. “It is the first phase of massive migration that didn’t happen in the last few years.”
The wave of people migrating from the department of Alta Verapaz, a province in northern Guatemala with a large Q’eqchi population, first became apparent during the past five years. The International Organization for Migration noted the number of Guatemalans from Alta Verapaz who were deported from Mexico and the United States increased from 322 in 2017 to 2,641 in 2019.
During the pandemic these numbers have fallen slightly but remained constant, with 2,258 Guatemalans who reside in the department being deported in 2021. In the month of June 2022, 2,067 of the 51,954 Guatemalans deported from the United States were originally from Alta Verapaz.
Yet even as the people increasingly migrate, the lack of land ownership means that many lack the resources to use as collateral to fund their trip to the United States. Thus, many people who have been evicted do not have the means to travel north. In spite of this, elevated migration from the region and the surrounding departments continues apace.
“Before, in Cobán, I did not see people migrating,” Ricardo Valdez, a pediatrician with the organization Comunidades de Esperanza, told The Progressive. “Now in Alta Verapaz, well, you can see much more.”