Email

Print

On Saturday, the Toledo Alcaldes Association, the Maya Leaders Alliance, and the Julian Cho Society invited the press for an extended information session. Our news team spent about 3 and a half hours talking with the hosts about this complex topic. Daniel Ortiz examined a few of the arguments raised this weekend, and here's his report:

The 3 host organizations had an interesting presentation for the members of the press who attended what they classified as career professional development on the Maya Land Rights struggle.

The information-sharing began with a history of the Maya Traditional System of Governance.

Dr. Filiberto Penados - Maya scholar
"Indigenous Peoples often report the negative indices of poverty, inequality, and all of that. A few years ago, the World Bank produced a report on poverty, and it says, poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean has an indigenous face. They're put in a position because they're struggling to address this question marginalization that they're experiencing. But it puts them in a position where they're confronting certain structures that produces that. They're forced to confront that legacy of colonialism and the structures that produce that exploitation, that marginalization, and the kinds of thinking that sustain that."

As part of the maturation process, indigenous peoples have learned that fighting as a unified group is exponentially more effective than struggling as strong-willed individuals.

Dr. Filiberto Penados
"If you have no way of organizing yourself, you're extremely vulnerable. So, now, the communities are isolated, they're struggling by themselves. So, now today, you talking about the international indigenous movement, and we talk about the revitalization, the renaissance of indigenous people as if indigenous people were not struggling before. It's not that they were not struggling before, but the difference is that they were struggling, a little community here, and a little community over there. They were not talking to each other."

Pablo Mis - Program Director, Julian Cho Society
"The policy of the colonial state in the past was to fragment the community. Isolated, it's easier to get them."

That unification process took place through the alcalde system, which according to these presenters, eventually evolved into the Toledo Alcaldes Association.

Pablo Mis
"The Maya Communities, even before there was a Belize, even before the British, even before the Spanish set foot here, had to have been organized societies. That happened to be the Alcalde system. It's also important to understand that the Alcalde system, just like the Mayan Communities is in a constant state of evolution. So, this conversation about coming back together actually started in about 1988, and the subject of the conversation is why aren't we coming together because our issues are not being resolved. It was leaders journeying from the village to build consensus around it, and the Alcalde Association came into being in 1992. So, in 2009 then, the Alcalde Association basically took its rightful place to lead the land rights [struggle], to unify the voices, to pool resources, to essentially consolidate power within the communities."

These presenters insist that throughout that evolution, the core principle of final decision-making continues to be the domain of the village and the individuals who reside in each of the 41 villages.

Pablo Mis
"What is important is not the office, not the person. The alcalde system is the community. It's the community that says what goes forward."

But, according to Greg Ch'oc a former Maya Rights Champion who now serves as the Commissioner of Indigenous Peoples Affairs, the traditional Maya system of governance is under threat of what he describes as individuals who are attempting to "corrupt" the system, by focusing too much on leaders and the office of Alcaldes, and not enough on the community.

Greg Ch'oc - Commissioner, Indigenous People's Affair
"Maya Customary law is that the decision and the authority for decision making rest at the village level with the villagers. What they're trying to do, what is being done is to corrupt a system. That's fundamentally the naked truth. It's to take a system, where the decision-makers are the villages, and they're now trying to make the alcaldes collectively take that control. The community as far as I'm aware has not ceded that authority to any organization, to any association or NGO."

The representatives of the Appellants insist that if Ch'oc and the new government were so concerned about that supposed "corruption", then they would not have omitted some forward-thinking ideas to preserve the community influence that was a feature of the first FPIC Protocol, which the new administration scrapped.

Pablo Mis - Program Director, Julian Cho Society
"This is what we were told by both the Alcaldes and the chairperson, to include in the FPIC so that it is clear that it is driven by the community. We put this in here because there shouldn't be any confusion, we said. And here we said 'Li Ab'ink' - the village meeting - means the fundamental authority, and the primary decision-making body is a Maya Village. In the latest iteration that the government gave us, none of this was taken. So, if they were legitimately concerned about not 'corrupting' a system, why not include that?"

Cristina Coc - Spokesperson, MLA/TAA
"The real corruption is that the Government is the one making the decision. They are saying, this is the FPIC protocol that you will have to live with. That's it. Not even they are upholding - this is the irony - not even they are upholding what they are saying, that it is the village that has to decide. They have decided."

And, according to the appellants, further distortions are now taking place that is slowly eroding the confidence of the Maya that this issue will be resolved amicably and sometime soon.

Pablo Mis
"We see the Government now wanting to define the Alcalde system, to define the Toledo Alcalde Association, in fact, to define who the appellants are."

Leslie Mendez - Attorney for the Claimants/Appellants
"Much like the previous government, the government challenges the legitimacy of the TAA and the MLA, and they do this under the umbrella of 'inclusion'."