Survival off the Land

Take a right off the Southern Highway some 14 miles from Punta Gorda and the journey starts on the bumpy, unpaved, narrow road that takes you through the Ketchi villages of Santa Teresa, Mabilhox, San Lucas, Corazon, Otoxha and then finally, Dolores.  Life here is perhaps what Belize City must have been ages ago. There is no electricity in these villages; no BEL lampposts in sight and the most elaborate building is the village school. Houses are traditional Mayan homes of bush planks and the roofs are masses of thatch. There are no indoor bathroom facilities; there are no cement or board floors. The earth is the floor and villagers cook over open fire. BUT, there are no sporadic sounds of gunshots breaking the silence here.

The villagers explain that before the roads were built, the journey through the thicket in the villages and over the Temash, Moho and Sarstoon Rivers took over a week. Today, the sojourn to the most southern Ketchi village takes less than a day. After an hour and a half trek in the rugged terrain from off the Southern Highway, we finally arrive in Dolores.

Dolores is a village of about 80 families, one of the larger villages in the area spanning some 2000 acres. It is one of the oldest and most remote villages in the Toledo District, situated some 50 miles southwest of Punta Gorda and two miles from the Belize/Guatemala border. Part of the village is said to be in the reviled adjacency zone. You can see from a distance, the mountain top which the alcalde points to and which he says is Guatemalan territory.

The original founders of Dolores were Guatemalan Qe’qchi Mayas who settled in the area towards the end of the 1800s seeking farmlands. They were already in the area when the Cramer Estate Company was establishing a coffee and cacao plantation. The Company was in need of labourers so these families went to work for the Cramer Estate. However, after only five years in operation the company closed down and left. The people remained behind and established the village of Dolores around 1920.

There are no jobs in the village; the people live off the land. They plant their corn and rice utilizing the traditional slash and burn system. Each family works five acres of land annually. Then the next year, they proceed to slash and burn another five acres of land. This is repeated each year. At the end of the fifth year, the families return to slash and burn the first five acres of land.

It is hard work, but every member of the family helps out, must help out as that is how food is put on the table.

But the villagers’ mode of survival off the land is being threatened.

A logging license has been granted to a big landowner to cut trees in of all places, the village. The landowner already has over 16,000 acres of land adjacent to the village. But yet, he has been granted a logging license to fell trees in the village.

So far the big landowner has cut trees in three areas within the village parameters. The trees are then churned out to the sawmills, producing lumber that is whisked off for sale.

True, some form of employment is being created for those who work for the big landowner. But that of course, is only temporary.  At the same time, the villagers’ ability to survive off the land is permanently being lost. The same land in the village which the big landowner is engulfing to fell trees, is the same land the 80 families need to slash and burn so that they can plant crops for their survival. The big landowner is saying too, that he actually owns the land on which the village sits. He is now demanding that the villagers vacate the land.

It is a clash of villagers’ right to survive and quest for profit that is brewing in the remote village of Dolores. The villagers say that the area representative and the government have refused to intervene on their behalf. They do not know what the future has in store for them as the big landowner has been acting very bombastic, threatening villagers that they must move off the land.

It seems incredulous that a village which has a history that goes back to the end of the 1800 can be literally erased from the map of Belize because of the greed of a big landowner and government is doing nothing to redress this situation.

As the former area representative for Toledo East (the constituency within which the village is situated) Mike Espat says: All these people want to do is survive off the land. But it seems that in Belize today, that is not a right again.

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