GUATEMALA CITY, Mar 29, 2011 (IPS) – “We have nowhere to plant our corn, we have nothing,” Jorge Chocoj told IPS while waiting with his wife and three children for the police to evict them from the land they farmed in northwestern Guatemala.
The police evictions had started nine days before. In the early hours of the morning on Mar. 15, more than 1,000 police and soldiers showed up in the Polochic Valley in the northern province of Alta Verapaz to evict more than 3,000 Q’eqchi Maya Indians living on land claimed by an agribusiness firm.
The security forces burnt or bulldozed their humble shacks and destroyed their subsistence crops with machetes and tractors. Nearly a dozen farmers were injured in the fray and one farm worker, 30-year-old Juan Antonio Beb Ac, was killed,
via GUATEMALA: Evictions of Native Families Add Fuel to Fire Over Land Access – IPS ipsnews.net.
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