And there was reason to relax just a little yesterday when we saw a press conference hosted by the Guatemalan Minister of Defence, William Mancilla who said that the whole thing about three thousand troops being mobilized was an exaggeration.
He explained that there are three thousand total troops in the Peten, and a few hundred of them were simply being moved, not mobilized, to the border areas. Here are portions of his press conference with captions in English:...
William Mancilla, Minister of Defence - Guatemalan
(Translated)"In this regard, of those three thousand men, what was done was reinforce the adjacency zone. So if we had five hundred, right now we have about one thousand men. So then, as soon as that act of mobilization of three thousand men from here, the capital, to the city is a lie- that is false. What is being done is that the mechanism in place at Peten reinforced the detachments at the adjacency zone, and I repeat again, to guarantee the life of the persons living in those, approximately 35 communities, in the entire adjacency zone and of course the naval base of the Sarstoon River was also reinforced with 40 persons."
"So I want to say, if it was misinterpreted, this was not a mobilization, it was a movement of the zones already in Peten and well those are the actions that are being carried out."
"Yesterday I went to that area and we met with the Ambassador of Guatemala to Belize, with the OAS, who administers the adjacency zone, and we made it clear that we were not doing any operations of intimidations or to escalate a situations, which is not the intent of the Government of Guatemala."
"What we offered was to bring the father of the child, because he needs attention due to the injury to his knee, and to the little brother who has an injury in his elbow, we offered transportation, and if it is not possible for a hospital to see him, we will take care of him at the medical military center. The commandant is in communication with him and that is the most concrete thing I can tell you about the help that he is receiving."
So, to clarify, he said 20 to 40 troops were sent to the Sarstoon Naval base, and another 500 troops along what they call the adjacency zone - which is the western border of Belize. He says that if they had 500 troops across those 35 Guatemalan communities, they now have one thousand. The Minister had to also defend the spending on this movement of troops, saying that they did not require any additional budgetary allocation. This is an indication of the acute domestic pressure that the Jimmy Morales administration is under in Guatemala.
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