The history of the campesinos of Guatemala
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- Campesinos Charge Plantation Owners with
Land Invasion
- Cerigua Weekly Briefs, 11 January
1996. Claiming to uphold the right to private property
based on titles, Guatemala's agricultural elite has
called for legal measures to oust campesinos who occupy
the estates they occupy by right of customary law. But two
indigenous communities have brought a suit against local
estate owners for invading the lands for which they can
document a legal right.
- Clear head, solid heart and combative fist
of the rural workers
- Declaration of the Fifth National Assembly of the
Committee of Peasant Unity (CUC), 15 April 1996. On the
occasion of the Fifth National Assembly, a message of
solidarity.
- Campesino Protest Meets Official
Indifference
- Cerigua Weekly Brief, 25 September
1997. Campesinos marched to the Presidential Office on
Land Conflict Resolution and the Agrarian Transformation
Institute (INTA). The list of demands was greeted by
silence, and tempers flared. CONIC had given the
government time to comply with its obligations on the land
issue as laid out in the December 1996 peace accords, but
nothing had happened.
- CPRs to Put Down Roots
- Cerigua Weekly Briefs, 11 December
1997. Government's timetable for the resettlement of
more than 8,000 people in the Communities of Resistance
(CPRs) of the Sierra. In the early 1980s, the campesinos
who later formed the CPRs fled the army's scorched
earth campaigns by going into hiding in the jungle, where
they were constantly hunted and bombarded by the
military. They went public about their plight in
1991.
- Massive Rural March Extracts Gov't
Promises
- By Celina Zubieta, IPS, 13 October 1999. Peasant farmers
demonstrate in front of the presidential palace, demanding
an explanation for the
minimal progress
made in
complying with Guatemala's 1996 peace agreement. CONIC
said that the march achieved its goal of forcing the
government to receive the rural delegation and listen to
rural communities.
The delegation asked the government
to comply with the 1996 peace accords.