Canadian Land Interests in Guatemala

Before I begin I feel the need to justify my decision to not talk about Chavez's recent remarks about George W. Bush at the U.N. My focus for this posting is partly based on my desire to avoid the subject of Chavez, because I feel it will be sufficiently represented by my classmates. My other reason is to bring light to certain issues that may be forgotten as the media gossips about who said what about whom. Having said that, I will indulge myself for a moment: Chavez's firey rhetoric is designed to make news; in Venezuela, his most fierce political enemy is the "independent" media, owned and supporting the interests of the Venezuelan wealthy elite. Chavez himself uses the media - the nationwide, government owned channel 8, as well as local radio and newspapers outside of Caracas - to communicate regularly with the Venezuelan people, so I am not surprised to see him inciting an international media frenzy.

Now, back to the matter at hand: about 350 Mayan families in Guatemala are challenging a Vancouver-based, Canadian-owned mining company over a land-claim dispute. Technically, the Vancouver company, Skye Resources, owns the land near the indigenous community of El Estor. They purchased the mine from the Canadian International Nickel Company, who operated it from the 1960s to 1981. Andrew Buncombe, in his article "Mayans occupy Canadian-owned Mine in Campaign for Farming Land", states that the U.N. sponsored Truth Commision of 1996 that helped end a brutal civil war in Guatemala "demanded that indigenous communities with historical claims to land have the right to determine how it is used". The Mayan people are asking for land for subsistence farming, and have occupied the mine. Buncombe quotes Grahame Russell, from the Canadian-based group Rights Action, who argues that this is not an isolated case, but a pattern of North American businesses and interests in Latin America.

Currently, the Canadian government is involved in numerous land claim disputes with the First Nations peoples in British Columbia and around the country. As we try to reach some sort of agreement for the appropriation of land over the past centuries, and hopefully make some recompense for the injustice, Canadian companies are engaging in the same appropriation strategies with strikingly similar indigenous groups. Are we tacitly approving these neocolonialist ventures through our ignorance of Canadian business practices in Latin America? Are we responsible for our own ignorance, or the ignorance of the Canadian/North American population, or does the popular media, which focuses so greatly on gossip and political posturing have any responsibility to us?

Works Cited
Buncombe, Andrew. "Mayans Occupy Canadian-Owned Mine in Campaign for Farming Land". The Independent 22 Sept. 2006. 24 Sept. 2006

tag: last301