by TRISTAN CALL (Guatemala Solidarity Project)
Juan lived in the village of Paraná until August, when for the second time in six months the private security forces of an international sugar company reduced his home to ashes and tilled his crops under to plant sugarcane. Now he lives across the road from Paraná, a short walk that took us just a few minutes. Where he lived and farmed corn with dozens of other families just a few months ago, there is now an unbroken expanse of tightly-planted rows of sugarcane. At left, he stands with his daughter at the site of the formre village. Where he lives now, the houses are temporary, crowded, cobbled together with sticks and plastic sheeting. He shows us the one-room house he shares with his displaced wife and children; he shows us the cacao residue they add to hot water and drink in the mornings instead of coffee. They drink it without sweetener, he explains apologetically, because they can’t afford to buy the bags of sugar.
The Polochic Valley is now full of farmers, surrounded by a sea of sugarcane, who can’t afford to feed their children sugar. This snapshot is a telling example of what hunger and poverty look like today –according to the FAO three-fourths of the people who experience food insecurity live in rural farming areas –and the most recent round of dispossession in the Polochic dramatically illustrates the larger pattern of how small farmers become landless laborers.
Resistance to land theft is something of a family tradition in the Polochic. Some of the old-timers still remember their parents’ stories of the 19th-century colonization of highland Alta Verapaz by German and American coffee planters. They pushed the indigenous Q’eqchi’ population from their lands, leaving many land-poor Q’eqchi’ to seek new homes in the Polochic lowlands. The oldest campesinos there were children when President Arbenz’s 18-month attempt at agrarian reform was cut short by a CIA-backed coup. The valley is still haunted by memories of the popular movement of the 1970’s that culminated in the infamous massacre of Panzós, during which over a hundred Q’eqchi’ campesinos were killed by the army as they agitated for legal recognition of their land titles. The children of today – those that survive the 3rd-highest child mortality rate in the hemisphere – will grow up remembering March of 2011, when 3,000 indigenous farmers in 14 communities were violently evicted by a combination of private mercenaries, army troops, and federal police.
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