BELIZE CITY, Thurs. May 5, 2016–Amandala received reports today that the Sarstoon-Temash Institute for Indigenous Management (SATIIM), which represents the indigenous communities of Barranco, Midway, Sunday Wood, Conejo and Crique Sarco, was barred from accessing the Sarstoon River today by members of the Belize Defence Force (BDF).

When the matter was raised in this afternoon’s press conference led by Prime Minister Dean Barrow, he said that the area remains off-limits to civilians unless they get permission. He did not specify how that permission was to be obtained.

The legislation penned last Friday does not sit well with the indigenous Maya and Garifuna communities of southern Belize, but the Government of Belize plans to keep it in place for one month, while it tries to come to an agreement with Guatemala over access to the southern waterway.

Barrow said today that “…there is the regulation in force which prohibits civilians from going to the Sarstoon without lawful authority. Presumably, if the SATIIM people were denied access to the Sarstoon by the BDF, it is because they did not in the context have lawful permission.”

In a report dated April 6, 2016, the day after Guatemala’s military told SATIIM that it had to get the military’s permission before accessing the Sarstoon, the NGO highlighted concerns over an upsurge in illegal activities inside the Sarstoon Temash National Park, which covers 41,898 acres of land bounded by the Temash and Sarstoon Rivers in a stretch of ancestral lands accessed by both members of the Maya and Garifuna communities.

SATIIM said that, “There is little doubt that unless areas are monitored, illegal activity takes place. Such is the case when a recent SATIIM patrol documented fishing camps along the Temash and Sarstoon as well as logging. The suspected offenders are believed to be non-Belizeans.”

Pablo Mis, spokesperson for the Maya Leaders Alliance, told Amandala that the Toledo Maya are deeply concerned over the legislation and its adverse impact on their freedom to access traditional resources and on their access to the rivers for transportation to access markets for trade.

Mis said that the assertion of Guatemala that they have established sovereignty over that area is clearly a repeat of a historical injustice to alienate a people from their land and resources, and a threat to their right to life and their ability to continue existing as indigenous peoples—both the Maya people and Garifuna people.

“It is even a more direct threat to the Garifuna community in Barranco,” said Mis.

Barranco leader, Dr. Joseph Palacio, a noted Garifuna and Caribbean anthropologist, also shared his concerns with Amandala.

“The Prime Minister did mention that if the people from Barranco want to go to the Sarstoon, he would not stop them, but he has not come here and nobody has been here to talk to the people to find out from them, how are you reacting to this new dimension of this new reality? How does it affect your daily livelihood? I think people [in the village] are not expressing their real fear; they think, ‘we’ve been through this before’ and ‘there will be a settlement,’ but there is an underlying feeling of tension,” Palacio said.

The legislation, he said, also impinges on their right to fish in traditional grounds.

“There is reliance on fish for the diet. There are not that many fishermen in the village now, but we do get our fish from around here…. The question is, ‘Where would they go now to fish?’ That is one of the areas where we would go and access our fish,” said Palacio.

“There is also the issue of logging. As you know the Sarstoon Temash National Park, which borders our community, is now and has not been monitored by the Belizeans for quite some time now. The last time when SATIIM attempted to do their patrol [on the Sarstoon], they were stopped by the Guatemalans. That is a serious question,” Palacio said.

“There are also concerns about the use of that area for loggers and also for people to cross over, settle, do their plantations—maybe not as bad as the Chiqubul but the fact is there is no monitoring and we don’t really know”, he added.

So what is the way forward? “There has to be some idea of the border. The previous situation where we knew where the border was and where SATIIM could, for example, do regular checks on our natural resources, we could go over and do fishing, those things have been removed from us.

“I think it’s serious negligence by Central Government of this part of the country, namely Barranco, and the neighboring communities as to what is next now on defining of the border and on defining how the resources are going to be used by the people from Belize. Obviously, the people from Guatemala now feel that they have rights. I hope and pray for a peaceful solution,” he said.

Mis told us that the recent S.I. goes against the spirit of international instruments that safeguard the freedom and rights of indigenous people to access resources that have been a part of their existence. He said that the communities have for a long time now expressed a lot of concern about the incursions into Belize and they hope that the Government will see the benefit in sitting down with leaders who have knowledge of what has been happening to help resolve the problem before any decision is taken about the border situation.

According to Mis, Maya alcaldes and other village leaders are planning to meet in Indian Creek this Saturday to consider the latest developments and to see how best they can move forward in addressing the matter.

“We will perhaps be reaching out again to other stakeholders, like the teachers. In the past, we have talked about the need to educate our people and to find a collective position on this matter,” Mis added.

Furthermore, the Maya communities of Toledo plan to highlight the matter in their 2016 report to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), as well as other United Nations bodies to which they file reports.

Mis also pointed to “blatant historical human rights abuses haunting that country,” speaking of Guatemala.

“That is why [Guatemalan civilians] are looking at greener grass on the other side of the border and coming here,” he said.

Mis said that they must be able to call out Guatemala on its failure to provide for its people that level of protection and rights. As for Belize, he said: “we still have a lot on our side of the border as a nation; let’s do better to protect the freedom and rights of the Maya people.”

Of note is that the Maya of Toledo had also previously lived in Guatemala, and newly settled nearly 40 villages in Toledo in the 1900s in what they contend has been a return to their ancestral lands from which they were pushed out by European colonizers. Belizean courts have affirmed their customary land rights.

Only last year, the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), Belize’s final appellate court, has upheld the indigenous land rights of the Maya of Toledo, as well as their right to access to traditional resources.

Palacio said that there is no regional mechanism that the Garinagu of Belize are accessing today when it comes to their customary land rights. “I hope that the [National Garifuna Council] will look at this very seriously in context of the IMPACT Conference [held last week in Belize]. One of the offshoots is that there will be a focus on Garifuna and other indigenous people within the Caribbean to be able to make their case very strongly to CCJ and domestic courts, as well as courts through [Organization of American States] like the IACHR,” he said.