Resistance is futile… as always

There seems to be this belief that the violence we’re hearing more and more about in Central America is due to simply narcotics smuggling.  No… it’s due to the insatiable appetite for commodities north of our borders, including bio-fuels.  From The Agonist, Nat Wilson Turner passes along this report by Kawok Waqlaju:

In the Municipality of Panzós, located in the Polochic Valley of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, the military, police, anti-riot police are in the process of violently evicting 13 communities of Q’eqchi’ Maya subsistence farmers from the lands they have planted for generations. Carlos Widmann, one of the owners of the Chabil Utzaj sugar company (Ingenio Guadalupe), and Ricardo Díaz, the manager of the company, are directing the evictions, accompanied by hundreds of workers they have hired to act as paramilitary forces to rob and destroy the Q’eqchi’s’ crops and homes.

The evictions began on March 15, when these men violently removed the communities of Miralvalle and Aguacaliente from their lands, leaving 35-year-old Antonio Beb Ac dead and several more wounded. On March 16, they evicted communities from El Quinich.

On March 17 the armed men evicted the communities of Bella Flor, 8 de Agosto, Rio Frío, San Pablo, Santa Rosa, and Los Recuerdos. On March 18, they removed Q’eqchi’ familes from Tinajas and Paraná…

Q’eqchi’ communities have been farming these lands for centuries (much prior Chabil Utzaj’s arrival five years ago), and because the entire Polochic Valley and Sierra de las Minas is being given over to large-scale production of African palm, mining, and other “megaprojects,” the Q’eqchi’ have nowhere left to go to plant crops to feed themselves. With these evictions, President Colom and the owners of Chabil Utzaj have reversed the progress made toward peaceful resolution of this longstanding ongoing conflict and returned to the same tactics of war used by landowners, the government, and the military during Guatemala’s thirty-six year Internal Armed Conflict (1960-1996) and prior phases of economic “development” in the Valley.

Speculation is that the owners are determined to hold onto the land to convert it to the cultivation of African palm for biodiesel, and thereby repay their loan and make a profit for themselves.

Ironically, the BCIE touts a commitment to “sustainable development,” clean energy, and the eradication of poverty. In the process, the projects they fund are killing poor Q’eqchi’s with vast environmental destruction, bullets, and starvation. In the almost 33 years since the Panzós Massacre, nothing has changed.

Guatemala is sometimes called Mexico’s Mexico… our poverty-stricken southern neighbor, whose displaced have no option but to become undocumented immigrants here.  Those that remain are expected to depend on the need of the wealthy countries for what their labor, and their environment can provide — even if it means sacrificing their own means of sustenance.

Should they still have any land of their own, to pay for the food they can’t grow, the people will need to produce (by their own labor, from their own environment) something the wealthy countries will buy… right now, the only commodity being bought that isn’t under corporate control being… you guessed it… narcotics.

Isn’t globalization wonderful?