There's an ongoing land dispute in Concepcion Village in the Corozal district - and it's getting ugly. Villagers say that they are being moved off parcels of land, to make way for those favored by the UDP area representative. Now, they don't dispute that they are squatting, but they insist that they are being treated unfairly.
The fact is that the lands in question have been at the Lands Department awaiting the assignment of parcel numbers, but during that time someone illegally sold them to villagers - who went and used them as their own. They now feel that they have rights to those lands, and that puts them into a dispute with the Lands Department which maintains they have no rights at all to those lands.
On Monday, Village Councillor Rodolfo Lainez and a few dozen other villagers gathered to demand answers from the Lands Department and their own Chairman. Emotions were very high:
Lucios Medina, Aggrieved Villager
"If this land is mine this land is mine, if you have worked for it they cannot just come and take you off the land. And for me it's unfair. "
"If the people take away the land which others have been working on previously, they won't leave the land. If you do a violation like that here, they will start to kill people, you understand? And I don't think something like that should happen in this village, like how it has happened in Salvador, Guatemala, and all those countries. We don't want to reach to that point."
Villager
"We want to make it known that the Chairman cannot give away land without the consent of the 7 councilors. 7 members make up the village council. It's invalid, it's invalid. Only he and Campos, we want he and Campos to come tomorrow to talk to all of us."
Rodolfo Lainez, Member, Village Council
"The people heard what the lady from the lands department had to say and they are taking her advice, like how she's saying she's not promising nothing, she just came with information and instructions. And I think the people are satisfied with what she said, lands that are applied for cannot be applied for again because the system does not allow it. Now the problem will be in Belmopan the minister of natural resources is the one that has the final say."
Police were there with no less than three pickups accompanying lands officers who made no commitments, other than agreeing to look into specific cases. UDP Area Representative Dr. Angel Campos told us that there's a lot of duplicity and games being played with the land which he has been work for over two years to get regularized. He says some villagers have told him they own three parcels - but he has told them they can only have one and he has to distribute the other parcels to those who have genuine need.
7News for Thursday, April 27th, 2017 from 7News Belize on Vimeo. | 