[OPIRG-EVENTS] Oct. 8 - Land Reforms and Indigenous Rights in Guatemala

[Donna <dsmiley@sprint.ca>]

Land Reforms and Indigenous Rights in Guatemala

Alfredo Ché, of The National Coordinating Body of Campesino Organizations of
Guatemala (CNOC) will speak: Tuesday, October 8th at 7 PM at Fourth Avenue
Baptist Church, 109 A Fourth Avenue (corner of Bank Street; entrance on
Fourth Avenue).

Since April 2001, witnesses claim paramilitary groups, employed by large
landholders, have assassinated six land activists and threatened hundreds of
landless peasants in Guatemala's eastern Izabal department. The sixteen
documented land conflicts in Izabal illuminate the historical issues that
underpin the unequal system of land tenure in Guatemala. Multinational
corporations, absentee plantation owners, hired gunmen and campesinos¹
demands for land have been constant factors in Guatemala's bloody history.

Alfredo Ché, a Maya Q'eqchi', is Regional Secretary of the Executive
Commission of CNOC in the Petén region of Guatemala. He will discuss the
organization's experiences in the context of historic and on-going struggles
over land rights in Guatemala, with special attention to indigenous rights.

For more information, call 237-1549

Sponsored by the Guatemala Solidarity Committee of Ottawa (GUASCO)


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