It was early in the morning on August 6, just days before the country’s presidential election, when indigenous Mayan Mam residents of Cajolá, Quetzaltenango, began to arrive in the street in front of Guatemala’s presidential palace in the center of the capital, 130 miles east of their homes. The more than 300 families brought with them all the basics for a long occupation. They came to stay until the country’s president meets their demands: compensation for stolen land.
“We have come here to demand that the government pay for the land that they promised to purchase for us three years ago,” Silvia Castro, a twenty-six-year-old resident of Cajolá, tells The Progressive while sitting on the sidewalk outside the presidential palace. “They have not complied with their agreement.”
In the week since the families’ arrival at the palace, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, visited Guatemala with a bipartisan delegation including Representative Norma Torres, a fellow California Democrat, to discuss solutions to the migration of tens of thousands of families from Guatemala to the United States.
In addition, voters on August 11 gave a resounding victory to conservative candidate Alejandro Giammattei, a former director of Guatemala’s prison system. Giammattei has vowed to renegotiate the recent deal pushed by the Trump Administration to declare Guatemala a “safe third country.” Giammattei has also stated that he would use force against any protesters who block the the country’s highways.
Meanwhile, the government has ignored the pleas of the indigenous Mayan Mam occupying the street outside the palace.
Mayan Mam communal lands were originally dispossessed from the community of Cajolá by the Guatemalan government in 1910 during the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, and were distributed to military officials.
Residents began to demand the return of their land during the 2012-2015 administration of Otto Pérez Molina. But the administration never followed through on the agreement it made with residents. Then in 2015, corruption charges against Molina led to his resignation and arrest.
The families began to negotiate anew with the administration of Jimmy Morales in 2017. Juventina López, the spokesperson for the families from Cajolá, says they reached an agreement in which the country’s land fund would facilitate the purchase of new lands. So far, this has not happened.
Jeff Abbott
Nancy Pelosi stands with the bipartisan delegation to Guatemala on August 8.
“The president signed an agreement with us,” López tells The Progressive in the street outside the palace. “We have been waiting for seven years.”
Pelosi and Torres, who was born in Guatemala, criticized the “safe third country” agreement with the Trump Administration signed on July 26, but their solutions focused on strengthening the country’s education system and bringing more foreign investment, rather than land redistribution.
“We engaged in meaningful dialogues with civil society leaders and representatives from international NGOs,” Pelosi said at a press conference. “The leaders underscored the positive role of U.S.-supported initiatives in ensuring regional stability and the well-being of Guatemalans, which in turn reduces migration to the U.S. The delegation believes that given the proven success of these projects, U.S. support must be restored.”
Their proposal echoes the efforts of the Obama Administration’s Alliance for Prosperity, which focused on militarization, security, and judicial reform to promote more foreign investment in Guatemala. Yet these efforts aimed at economic growth did little to curb northern migration from a country with some of the region’s most severe inequity.
While members of Maya Mam families from Cajolá have waited for the government to comply with the land compensation agreement, many decided to leave for the United States, driven by poverty, lack of opportunity, and the lack of access to the land. Ten years ago, more than 700 families advocated for return of their lands, but this has fallen to about 300 families in recent years.
“Many have left due to the situation here,” Castro says. “There is no work and there is no land for the people. People leave to maintain their families.”
It is a dangerous migration, and the militarization of immigration enforcement has made the routes only more so. In March 2019, twenty-three Guatemalan migrants including two people from Cajolá were killed in a crash in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas when the cargo truck carrying them went off the road.
“The pain stays with us in Cajolá,” López tells The Progressive.
Jeff Abbott
Residents from Cajolá wait outside Guatemala’s presidential palace under the gaze of police.
“There is no dignified employment, there are no labor services that help people develop,” López says of the reasons compelling people to attempt the dangerous journey. “What remains is the struggle for a small plot of land to sow and a place for people to cultivate something that allows them to survive.”
“Many youth graduate, thanks to the strength of their parents, but find there is no employment, so they migrate,” López concludes. “This is the only way they can develop. They are obliged to migrate.”
According Eduardo Jiménez, who works with the migrant advocacy Cajolá Group, at least 30 percent of the population of Cajolá has migrated to the United States.
“The lack of opportunity in Cajolá, the lack of employment, the lack of education causes many people to leave,” Jiménez says.
The root causes generating the migration, he emphasizes, are “poverty caused by not only the dispossession of land, but also military repression during the thirty-six years of war and lack of access to health care and education.”
In 1954, the CIA carried out a coup d’état against the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz after his administration carried out agrarian reform that expropriated the lands of the Boston-based United Fruit Company. The goal of the reform was to distribute unused lands to poor farmers, but following the coup, the lands were returned to the previous owners, including United Fruit.
The coup directly contributed to Guatemala’s thirty-six-year-long internal armed conflict, which killed more than 200,000 people and led to the forced disappearance of 45,000 others. Often, anyone demanding his or her rights to land was targeted by the Guatemalan military.
Yet the roots of land dispossession are even deeper.
Indigenous communities across Guatemala suffer from extreme inequality in land access. Less than 3 percent of Guatemala’s population owns at least 80 percent of its land.
Indigenous communities across Guatemala have been plagued by violence since the Spanish invasion in 1524, and suffer from extreme inequality in land access. Less than 3 percent of Guatemala’s population owns at least 80 percent of its land. Nearly 60 percent of the nation’s population lives below the poverty line, according to the World Bank, over half of whom are indigenous. And although the country has Central America’s largest economy, its benefits are not shared; rural and indigenous people experience some of the region’s worst rates of malnutrition and maternal-child mortality.
While indigenous people in Guatemala continue to suffer from severe inequality, the Trump Administration pushes for a “safe third country” agreement, which will require asylum seekers to apply in Guatemala.
Activists and residents in Guatemala continue to reject the agreement.
“The people shouldn’t have to migrate,” López said. “Our country is rich, but the state does not want to develop within its own territory. The ‘safe third country’ agreement is nothing but show.”