We need two lenses to understand Guatemala: Interview with Jovita Tzul
Photo: Cristina Chiquín.
Interview • Dawn Marie Paley • September 28, 2023 • Translated by Matthew Chovanec for Ojalá • Leer en castellano
In the second half of our interview with Maya Kich'e attorney Jovita Tzul, we discussed the current context in Guatemala, in which dozens of justice system workers have had to flee the country and entire communities are being forced off their land.
These days, Tzul is busy with the legal proceedings related to the Alaska Massacre, the name given to the massacre of eight men by the army during a protest in Totonicapán on October 4, 2012.
"It was a peaceful demonstration, and the police were there," said Tzul. "The riot police arrived, but didn’t intervene. They were at a distance and everything was fine, nothing happened til then. Then the army arrived, it didn’t comply with its protocols, and soldiers fired on the crowd." The hearings for the Alaska Massacre will continue for months, to date only about a quarter of the evidence has been presented to the court.
In the second part of our interview, we asked Tzul about ongoing struggles over land led in large part by Mayan communities, evictions carried out to suit powerful economic interests, and the possibilities represented by the incoming government of President elect Bernardo Arévalo.
You can read the first part of our interview, which was conducted in early September, here.
Dawn Marie Paley: I’d like to talk about what’s taking place in Guatemala in relation to the evictions of entire communities from their lands, as well as the search for justice for displaced people and those who have engaged in protest.
Jovita Tzul: Evictions are taking place across the country. I would even venture to say that in coming months, from October to December, before the new government—which could potentially bring about change—takes office, they could intensify, and that the incoming government could go on to create a facade of legality for all of the arrests and warrants for arrest that have already been issued.
The chamber of commerce proposed a governance agreement to the president-elect. One of the major points in this regard is that of private property.
I don't know if they don't understand, don't want to understand or simply don’t get it, but [when they talk about private property] they’re talking about evicting thousands of families, in the Northern Transversal Strip and along the southern coast.
We have been accompanying people who have faced these arbitrary rulings.
Today, at the national level, private interests can influence a judge in favor of one group or another. But no one wants to get to the heart of the matter and discuss the legitimacy of claims over [the ownership of] land, about whether the person who claims to be the owner is really the owner of the property or has claimed it through some kind of abuse of the notarial registry and in reality the communities are the owners.
This is also the case for protected areas, where it is the state that is evicting families that have cared for and preserved nature for years. But now they’re declared "invaders." At the level of the courts in the interior [in the mostly Mayan territories outside the capital], judges don’t want to deal with discussing the merits of the cases.
Their expectation is that ultimately people will leave, and that families will be charged with alleged usurpation.
DMP: Let's say they are charged. Where are they going to go?
JT: The number of evictions that are being carried out has a lot to do with migration. If you no longer have land, if you no longer have a house, if everything you had was burned down... What’s left?
Migrating becomes the only alternative.
I believe—and this is my personal view, we’ll see what happens—that between now and the end of the year the evictions will intensify. They do it with such impunity that they don't even need police. They do it with groups of thugs, [evictions are] carried out arbitrarily, and will continue to take place.
This new government isn’t going to be able to fight with the sugar companies or with the palm plantations. Apart from the fact that they believe they own the land—which they do not—they are the ones who have capital. I don't think the situation for these communities will improve with the new government.
DMP: What signs are you seeing from the incoming government and from the president-elect regarding the seriousness of the land issue, dispossession, forced displacement and forced migration?
JT: They’ve said they’re going to respect private property in response to a propaganda campaign against them, which alleged they were going to expropriate land to give to others. The Semilla Party came out and said: "That's not true, we're not going to do that, we're going to respect private property."
My question is, who is going to be the director of the National Council of Protected Areas? Because evictions in communities located in protected areas depend on that office. Who will take the job and how are they going to approach that? Who’s going to be the Property Registrar?
Everyone talks about who’s going to be the Minister of Economy, and yes, that's important, but who’s going to be in charge of registering land titles? That official is the one who registers or can cancel anomalies that exist in the registry. We do not know who will be the Minister of Energy and Mines, who will manage the existing mining and concessions—there are more than 900 concessions already approved.
On those issues I don't expect much change. Publicly they haven’t said anything about mining, nor protected areas, nor land ownership, except that they’ll respect private property. I agree that they should respect [private property], but only if it’s legitimately obtained and wasn’t stolen.
Many are confident that when President Arévalo takes office, there’ll be a push for the resignation of Attorney General Consuelo Porras, but the truth is that evictions are not her fault. The evictions go back to the time of Thelma Aldana. She knew about them.
She is now in exile, which is unfortunate for her, but there were also terrible things that happened in her time, which continued during Consuelo’s tenure. I think it will be very hard for Arévalo to remove [Porras], first because he cannot legally do so. She would have to resign.
I think it’s going to be very difficult. The evictions will continue, the persecution will continue, perhaps with less intensity, but it will continue. Unfortunately, I don’t think real change will happen for communities in regards to evictions, mining, and territory.
DMP: Within Guatemala, are evictions discussed in the media? Or is this only talked about among the people from affected communities? How is this information and knowledge transmitted?
JT: Social organizations that support the communities and alternative media are the ones that help disseminate that information and right now they are both focused on other issues. They are focused on the issue of the bribing of judges and the capture of prosecutors, and there is not a lot of interest at this juncture in what is happening with the land or the criminalization of journalists, or other types of cases, such as the debate around the Alaska massacre.
They don’t cover these topics because they are busy talking about how they arrested someone else, or how they’re going to annul the Semilla Party. The situation is not conducive to publicizing the situations I’ve told you about. It falls on the community, on local spaces, to make themselves known, for example through community radio, although even at those levels they only talk about the proposed elimination of the Semilla Party or that there are people who want to kill Bernardo.
The situation that is being experienced in the territories stays out of the spotlight.
DMP: We recently published an article by your sister Gladys Tzul and María Guarchaj Carrillo, in which they highlighted the importance of municipalities, where the same right-wing parties will continue to govern.
JT: I think Semilla won around two or three mayorships out of 340, and they don’t have parliamentary strength either. The only thing they have is the executive branch, they do not have Congress and they do not have support from the municipalities.
DMP: What do you think is the most important thing to understand about Guatemala in order to have a clear idea of the situation there?
JT: That the underlying problems that this country has are not going to be resolved if Bernardo Arévalo takes office or not, or if the people who are exiled return or not. They did something difficult, which was to flee the country. Now they’re abroad, and they’re far from their families.
But in my opinion, its even more important to pay attention to the people who can't leave, who have to stay in the country. At the end of the day, they’re the ones who end up being sacrificed, so to say. They’re the ones who are going to have their land taken away, they’re going to have a mining company forced on them that pollutes their water and their territory.
We are all in a situation of crisis. But some have the opportunity to leave and live abroad, in other conditions.
There are many others who have to stay here and face the crisis from conditions imposed on them by impoverishment: defending their lands, taking care of their homes, taking care of their rivers.
Guatemala as a country has this dual nature. On the one hand there’s the media, judges and prosecutors, but there are also community leaders, community authorities, women, and young people who have to stay, who are living in very difficult conditions but who are still here facing the situation.
Unfortunately, their problems have nothing to do with whether we’re going to expel corruption from the country, with whether we’ll remove one corrupt minister and appoint another. In either case, extractivist capitalist policies will continue.
Guatemala should be read through these two lenses: one trained on the situation in cities and another on what is taking place in the territories across the country.
These are similar realities, but they are experienced in very different conditions.
Read part one of our interview with Jovita Tzul, a Maya Kich'e woman from Totonicapán who works as a lawyer in some of Guatemala’s most high profile human rights cases.
