Guatemala - Context and Land Governance

^{Aerial view north of Posa del Nance, Sipacte, Escuintla photo by UNDP Guatemala  CC BY-NC 2.0}

Known as the cradle of Mayan culture, 43% of the population self-identifies as indigenous, belonging to the Mayan, Xinca and Garifuna peoples. Although it should be noted that this percentage, based on self-identification, could be questioned considering that discriminatory policies caused many indigenous people to assimilate as "ladinos".

Despite being considered the largest economy in Central America, poverty and inequality rates are among the highest in the region and particularly affect the rural and indigenous majority. In 2019, 54 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line, rising to 59 per cent in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic.¹ Between 2014 and 2019, inequality is estimated to have increased from a Gini of 0.483 to 0.541, which is considered high.²

The current situation of land governance in Guatemala, the main focus of this text, has been marked by the 36-year internal armed conflict. The conflict mainly affected the rural population and especially the Mayan population. It claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people³ and caused a high number of displaced persons, although there are no definitive figures - according to estimates by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) in 2017 there were 242,000 people displaced due to the conflict.⁴ The signing of the Peace Accords in 1996 attempted to address the challenges caused by the conflict with regard to land tenure and the agricultural sector, although in some cases implementation has been poor and in others there has been a failure to fulfil parts of the agreements.

The lack of specific legislation to resolve land conflicts and regulate indigenous lands, coupled with the fact that current legislation in Guatemala does not recognise indigenous communities as legal subjects, makes it difficult to implement land governance that redresses inequalities and meets basic needs. Furthermore, the criminalisation of actions to demand land and the lack of adaptation of procedures to implement the legislation continue to generate exclusions of both poor peasants and women in their access to land.

^{Lake Atitlán, photo by Edgar de León, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0}

Land legislation

The 1985 Guatemalan Constitution, as amended in 1993, guarantees private property as an inherent right of the individual (Art. 39). Some authors argue that the Guatemalan Constitution adopts a conception of absolute private property and the national legal system does not recognise or accept the social function as an intrinsic characteristic of property.⁵ This would imply the pre-eminence of the right to property over other fundamental rights to food, housing or employment, which contradicts Guatemala's commitment to the international human rights treaties it has signed. According to this argument, this particularly affects poor peasants and indigenous peoples who cannot claim historical rights or the dispossession of property in court.⁶ This argument is supported, for example, by the requirements for expropriation. Despite the fact that constitutionally, private property can be expropriated for reasons of collective utility, social benefit or duly proven public interest (art. 40), in practice, the requirement to have a resolution of the Congress of the Republic to carry out an expropriation makes it inoperative and null and void for poor peasants and indigenous peoples.⁷ Thus, the expropriations carried out have been more for the construction of roads or works for the state or large companies than for the benefit of agrarian or rural development.⁸

The absolute nature of property is reinforced by the use of the Civil Code and the Penal Code to resolve land conflicts in the absence of a specific law for this purpose. On the one hand, some authors point out that civil legislation is ineffective in resolving agrarian conflicts because they are strictly formal rules, their processing is written and land claim trials have a long duration (five years on average).⁹ The use of the Penal Code has served to criminalise and repress land claims under the term "land invasion", a problem that is reported in the press as a national threat,¹⁰ , and to which attempts have been made to respond by increasing penalties. Thus, in 2018, Congressman Fernando Linares-Beltranena presented a bill, known as the Anti-Invasion Law, which proposed raising the penalties for encroachment to 6-8 years (from 2-6 years); those for encroachment taxed to 8-10 years (from 2-6 years); and creating the criminal offence of disturbing possession by an organised criminal group with a prison term of 5-8 years.¹¹

According to critics, actions arising from cases of basic human needs cannot be set against the absolute nature of property guaranteed by such codes.¹² In 2011, for example, a judge ordered the forced eviction of 14 Q'eqchi communities over a land ownership dispute between a local company claiming ownership and indigenous communities claiming to have lived on and farmed the land for 30 years.¹³ The evictions left more than 2500 people homeless and resulted in the death of one community member. Amnesty International denounced that the evictions were carried out without consulting the affected communities or providing them with adequate alternative accommodation, and expressed concern about the Guatemalan authorities' failure to protect the human rights of the most vulnerable communities.¹⁴ Ten years on, forced evictions continue to be practised, as was the case in the Chinebal community in the north-west of the country, when the houses of 100 families were burnt down.¹⁵ The communities had settled on a farm owned by a company that grows African palm, claiming the land because they had been dispossessed of it during the armed conflict. Between January and March 2023 the Presidential Commission for Peace and Human Rights (COPADEH) assisted in 70 evictions and blockades.¹⁶

Other shortcomings identified in national legislation include the failure to impose taxes on idle land as a stimulus for its sale, as well as the lack of a precise definition of what is meant by "idle land", leaving room for different interpretations depending on the interests. ¹⁷

Land governance in Guatemala has been marked by the consequences of the armed conflict. After the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, different challenges arose regarding the impact of the conflict on the population and the agricultural sector. The high number of internally displaced persons led to the signing in 1994 of the Agreement for the Resettlement of the Population Uprooted by the Internal Armed Conflict. In the Agreement, legal security of land tenure is considered essential for resettlement.¹⁸ But the uprooted population had difficulty showing proof of their land rights due to the absence of records, disappearance of files, cancellation of rights on the basis of "voluntary abandonment" or customary tenure systems. To address this challenge, the government undertook to avoid the consideration of "voluntary abandonment" and to ratify the imprescriptibility of tenure rights in order to return land to original possessors or, if this was not possible, to seek compensatory solutions. In the latter case, the government undertook to identify lands that could be used for the settlement of uprooted people and to implement a productive integration strategy within the framework of a sustainable development policy.

Through the Agreement on Socio-economic Aspects and the Agrarian Situation, the Guatemalan government committed itself to promote peasant access to land ownership, the productive organisation of the rural population with special support for smallholders, and to establish the legal and institutional bases for the implementation of an integral strategy that provides legal security and favours conflict resolution.¹⁹ The measures proposed for access to land were the creation of a Land Fund with authority over public financing for land acquisition; and the creation of an active land market that would allow land acquisition by landless or land-scarce peasants under special economic conditions. The main criticism of this agreement is that it does not propose a comprehensive state-led reform, but rather that the land market is privatised.

In 1999 the Land Fund Law created FONTIERRAS, a decentralised public entity to facilitate access to land and generate conditions for integral and sustainable rural development through productive, agricultural, forestry and hydrobiological projects (art. 2).²⁰ Its objectives include defining and executing the policy for access to land and administering public financing to facilitate such access. The action of FONTIERRAS is regulated by the Regulations for the Regularisation of State Land Tenure (Reglamento de Regularización de la Tenencia de las Tierras Entregadas por el Estado, 2001).²¹ The implementation of this regulation has been a challenge as several of its provisions have not been put into practice. Among them is the recovery of misappropriated land, although, according to some sources, thirteen years later not a single estate had been recovered and the planned Land Bank had not been created.²²

According to the Law, FONTIERRAS' support to peasants is not limited to land acquisition, but includes covering the costs of technical assistance during the first three years of productive management (100% in the first year, 65% in the second and 30% in the third) (art. 32). However, some authors argue that the role of the state was limited to facilitating the purchase capital, either through subsidies or credit, for the poorest peasant groups.²³ Others even speak of the privatisation of technical assistance systems for the peasantry and the elimination of credit for production and productive infrastructure, thus generating more poverty among peasants who acquired land.²⁴ Added to this is the poor quality of some land, which prevents peasants from being able to benefit economically from it and repay their debts.²⁵ A 2011 report states that in the first twelve years of the Fund, 19,000 families were allocated land out of a demand of approximately 300,000.²⁶ In terms of hectares, a total of 81,221 hectares were handed over from 1998 to 2004.²⁷ In 2020, the Land Fund benefited 583 families, 86% of the planned number of families.²⁸ Of these, 96 families benefited from access to property via credit and subsidy and 487 families received the capital loan subsidy. The majority of the beneficiary families (82%) belong to the Maya people and the rest are mestizos.²⁹

Another problem added to FONTIERRAS' management has been the corruption associated with the overvaluation of land and complicity in the acquisition of land by criminal groups. An example of this is the Génesis case, in which the criminal network led by Walter Obdulio Mendoza Matta appropriated farms granted to peasants through the Land Fund in the department of Petén by intimidating and threatening their owners so that they would sell them at prices lower than their real value, falsifying signatures and using data of deceased persons to legalise the supposed purchases. According to a report by the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), the criminal network counted on the participation and complicity of FONTIERRAS officials, "who arbitrarily and illegally drafted reports and resolutions so that the lands could change ownership".³⁰ The consolidation of the corrupt scheme allowed Mendoza Matta to participate in the direct purchase of 11 farms and one of his accomplices, Gustavo Adolfo Ramírez Ortiz, of another 17 farms. ³¹

Other land-related laws are the 2005 Land Information Registry Act,³² the Governmental Agreement No. 325/2005 on the Land Registry³³ and the Municipal Code Decree No. 12/2002. ³⁴

At the institutional level, a 2015 report points to the lack of institutional coordination leading to overlapping and inefficiency in the operational practice of the different institutions responsible for land management, responsibilities otherwise well defined in the laws.³⁵ As examples, he points to the similarity of activities carried out by the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources and the National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP), resulting in the duplication of actions. Another example is the cadastral surveys carried out by the Land Fund, when this is an action that could be carried out by the Registry of Cadastral Information (RIC) in support of the Fund.

^{Agriculture in San Marcos, photo by FAO Americas, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0}

Land tenure

Guatemalan legislation recognises various forms of land tenure including: 1) private ownership, by individuals or legal entities with legal title. Included within private property are forms of collective property such as communal lands; 2) co-ownership, when a property or a right belongs jointly and severally to several persons; 3) possession, where the possessor is the one who exercises over a property all or some of the powers inherent to ownership; 4) temporary possession, where the temporary possessor is the one who exercises immediate possession over a property, with mediate possession corresponding to the person who conferred such right.³⁶ In addition, there are state lands, municipal properties and ejidos or lands of common use.

Leasing can be of three types: lease, lease-purchase and lease for special cases.³⁷ Between 2004 and 2012, according to official figures, the Land Fund's Leasing Programme delivered a total of 204,466 hectares, more than USD 80 million in leasing credits and more than USD 14 million in subsidies, benefiting 301,791 people.³⁸ In 2020, the programme benefited 19,288 families with access to land via credit and land lease subsidies, reaching 76% of the planned amount.³⁹ Of these, 18,960 families benefited from the credit and subsidy for productive projects and 328 families from the subsidy for seed capital.

Studies indicate that Guatemala has one of the highest levels of land concentration in Latin America. The 1979 census showed that 2% of the country's largest farms covered 67% of the agricultural land, while 80% of all farms covered only 10% of the land.⁴⁰ A 2020 report estimates that almost half of the producers own 3.2% of the land while 56.6% of the arable land is in the hands of 1.8% of producers.⁴¹ On the other hand, data from the 2003 Agricultural Census indicate a downward trend in the size of census farms compared to previous censuses of 9.5%, except in the department of El Petén, probably due to the increase of the agricultural frontier in that department and the increase of urbanisation in the rest of the departments.⁴² Most of the farms surveyed in 2003 (718,585 out of a total of 830,684 farms) have an area between 0.4 and 3.5 hectares, occupying 609,755 hectares out of the total 3,750,855 hectares surveyed (16.2%).⁴³ 10 farms have a surface area of more than 4,516 hectares and occupy 62,503 of the total number of hectares surveyed. ⁴⁴

One of the challenges facing Guatemala is informal settlements. According to official sources, in 2013 there were an estimated 800 human settlements, half of which were located in metropolitan areas.⁴⁵ Guatemalan legal regulations establish that informal occupants can acquire rights to their land or housing through usucaption and supplementary titling. Usucapion or acquisitive prescription is the way of acquiring ownership by possession for a certain period of time. The Guatemalan Civil Code establishes as requirements for acquiring possession through this figure that the possession must be in the concept of owner, that there is a just title, that it is in good faith, public, peaceful, continuous and that it is exercised for the time established by law.⁴⁶ The Law on Supplementary Titling (1979) guarantees the possessor of real estate without title inscribable in the Land Registry the right to apply for supplementary titling before a judge of first instance of the civil branch. In order to do so, the interested party must prove legitimate, continuous, peaceful, public possession, in good faith and in his own name, for a period of no less than ten years, with the possibility of adding that of his predecessors.⁴⁷

Official figures also indicate that, between 2010 and 2012, the Land Regularisation Programme delivered 19,743 deeds, securing land tenure for 60,997 families and regularising 740,882 hectares. ⁴⁸

Community land rights

Collective land rights in Guatemala mainly affect indigenous peoples and therefore a large percentage of the population considering that more than 6 million inhabitants (43%) self-identify as indigenous from the Mayan (41.7%), Xinca (1.8%) and Garifuna (0.1%) peoples, according to the 2018 Population Census. ⁴⁹

The Guatemalan state is constitutionally obliged to protect the lands and agricultural cooperatives of indigenous communities "or any other forms of communal or collective tenure of agrarian property" (art. 67). This implies maintaining the lands that historically belong to them and that they have traditionally administered. In addition, the state must provide state lands to indigenous communities that need them for their development (art. 68).

Some authors criticise that the constitutional recognition of indigenous lands does not include the concept of "peoples", which implies talking about lands but not territories - a broader term suggesting indigenous self-government - and thus reduces indigenous peoples to communities dependent on the state. ⁵⁰

Another criticism is the lack of specific legislation on indigenous lands. In addition to the Constitution, community lands are mentioned in Decree 12/2002 Municipal Code, which establishes that the municipal government shall establish, after consultation with the community authorities, the mechanisms that guarantee community members the use, conservation and administration of community lands whose administration has been traditionally entrusted to the municipal government.⁵¹ But indigenous communities are not considered subjects of law as such, so many indigenous lands are titled as associations, cooperatives or communal lands, and there is no recognition of the ancestral right to the land.

Indigenous peoples were particularly affected by the armed conflict. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reports that 83% of the victims of the conflict were members of the Mayan people, against whom acts of genocide were committed.⁵² This and the high level of discrimination suffered by indigenous peoples in Guatemala justified the signing of the Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples between the government and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) in 1995 in Mexico as part of the Peace Accords. In this agreement, the government undertook to adopt and promote measures to:⁵³

•  regularise the communal possession of land of communities that lack land titles, including titling of municipal or national lands of communal tradition;
•  guarantee the right of access to lands and resources that are not occupied by communities but have been traditionally used by them;
•  guarantee the right of communities to participate in the use, management and conservation of natural resources on their lands;
•  obtain the prior favourable opinion of the communities for the exploitation of resources that may affect them;
•  cooperate with communities in the protection of the environment;
• suspend the processing of supplementary property titling due to community rights claims;
•  suspend the statute of limitations for actions of dispossession of indigenous communities' lands and promote legislative provisions to this end;
•  compensate for land dispossession when land titling cannot be suspended;
•  provide state land to communities that need it for their development and promote legislative provisions to this end; 
• legally recognise the right to land administration according to indigenous customary laws;
•  increase the number of courts to deal with land issues;
•  create legal advice for land claims;
•  provide interpreters to communities for land claims;
•  disseminate agrarian rights and legal remedies among communities;
•  eliminate discrimination against women in access to land, housing, credit and participation in development projects.

A study by UNDP and the Maya Programme shows that, 20 years after the signing of the agreement, its implementation with respect to the land issue has been significantly insufficient. Of the aforementioned commitments, only the first is considered to have been implemented through the enactment of Legislative Decree No. 41, Law on the Registry of Cadastral Information, in 2005, which refers to the tenure of communal lands and indigenous ceremonial sites.⁵⁴ The study notes that, since its creation, the activity of the Registry of Cadastral Information has been limited to taking a census of properties and determining whether they are regular or irregular properties. In 2008, the board of directors of the Registry issued the Specific Regulations for the Recognition and Declaration of Communal Lands. ⁵⁵

^{Mayan women at the market, photo by Antoine Vasse Nicolas, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0}

Land use trends

Most of Guatemala's land area is rural - 105,527 km2 out of a total of 107,160 km2 according to 2015 data.⁵⁶ In the same year, the urban area occupied only 2,901 km2 .⁵⁷

Data from 2020 indicate that 36% of the rural area is agricultural land, a percentage that has remained stable since 2015 after the slight rebound that followed the progressive fall from 2003 (46.2%) to 2013 (34.7%).⁵⁸ The agricultural sector is one of the main pillars of the Guatemalan economy, contributing 10.8% to the Gross Domestic Product and generating 32% of employment.⁵⁹ The sector is divided into two main groups: the more developed agricultural sector that uses state-of-the-art technology, participates in international markets and is dedicated to exports; and small producers who supply the domestic market and make little use of technology, making them more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. ⁶⁰

In recent years, changes in the agricultural sector have led to the diversification of crops and the commercialisation of non-traditional products, displacing coffee as the main export crop due to the fall in its price on international markets. Thus, Guatemala became the world's leading producer and exporter of cardamom (10% of exports), the most traded crop in Guatemala, followed by bananas (7%), coffee (5%), African palm oil (5%) and sugar cane (4%).⁶¹ Sugar cane is one of the most productive and environmentally sustainable crops due to the use of cane varieties that require less water and are more resistant to pests, and the use of the residues to generate electricity, condition soils and fertilise crops.⁶²

In 2022, the government implemented a financial and technical assistance plan for 180,000 farmers to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine on the global increase in the price of raw materials for the production of agro-inputs, in order to guarantee the supply of the domestic market.⁶³

With regard to livestock, there has been a significant decrease in bovine livestock in the last decade from 1.8 million in 2003⁶⁴ to 481,568 head in 2011 and 292,372 head in 2020.⁶⁵ Of these, 216,123 head are destined for domestic consumption and the rest for export. Sheep has also halved to 8,136 head in 2020. Pigs, on the other hand, have increased slightly from 412,699 in 2011 to 447,169 in 2020.⁶⁶

32% of the Guatemalan territory is protected areas that safeguard 52% of the forest cover.⁶⁷ Protected areas are regulated by Decree 4/89 Ley de Áreas Protegidas (1989) and are under the responsibility of CONAP.

1.85% of the total territory (slightly more than 200,000 hectares) is considered a reserve under state ownership.⁶⁸ The delimitation of the State Territorial Reserve Areas is done using the shores of seas, lakes, navigable rivers and around springs and fountains. The Constitution establishes the limits of these reserves as follows: "a land strip of three kilometres along the oceans, counted from the upper tide line; of two hundred metres around the shores of lakes; of one hundred metres on each side of the banks of navigable rivers; of fifty metres around fountains and springs where the waters that supply the populations are born" (Art. 122). Exceptions are properties located in urban areas and properties registered in the Land Registry prior to 1 March 11956.

The State may lease real estate located on these lands with some limitations on its use. For housing and recreational purposes the lease of real estate in areas located along the oceans may not exceed 2,000 m2 ; for industrial, commercial and tourist purposes up to 20,000 m2 ; and for agricultural, livestock, poultry, fish, salt works and hydrobiological and scientific research purposes up to slightly more than 225,628 m2 .⁶⁹ In the case of properties along lakes and rivers, they may be leased for housing and family recreation up to 2,000 m2 and for tourism, industrial, commercial, scientific research and permanent tree crops up to 6,000 m2 . These areas are not leased for agricultural crops.

^{Peasant girl in Guatemala, photo by Nicoletta Fabbri, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0}

Investments and land acquisitions

Two main sectors can be identified in the Guatemalan land market: a generally informal sector for small and medium-sized properties and a formal sector for large properties.⁷⁰ The land market developed mainly in the colonisation areas such as El Petén and the Norte Bajo. The Norte Bajo region concentrated 70% of the total supply, the Boca Costa Sur region accounted for 26% of the land on the market, and the least amount (3.5%) was located in the Altiplano, where smallholdings for agricultural use predominate.⁷¹ The Petén and the Norte Bajo also had the largest land areas, mainly forests and pastures, and to a lesser extent agricultural land. One of the reasons for this distribution of the land market is that the Petén is where land was still available and its market was activated by colonisation (massive land allocation initiated by the Empresa Nacional de Fomento y Desarrollo de Petén in the 1960s with the aim of boosting population growth in the area through colonies and agricultural cooperatives),⁷² while large plantations were established in the south.

Initially prices in the Norte Bajo and El Petén were low due to the difficulty of access, the distances between farms and product markets, and the poor quality of the land for intensive and environmentally friendly farming, among other factors.⁷³ But in the 1970s and 1980s prices quadrupled due to infrastructure and telecommunications works announced by the government, plans for the construction of hydroelectric plants, and the possibility of the return of people displaced by the armed conflict.⁷⁴ This influenced the real price of land but also encouraged speculative price increases. Since 1990, following the land purchase programmes promoted by the state in compliance with the Peace Accords, land prices have had to follow the parameters used by the Land Fund to value the land and estimate its productive capacity and profitability. These parameters are based in turn on independent evaluations and on the indications of organised peasants for the purchase of land.⁷⁵

As a mainly agricultural country, investments in the intensive production of export products such as African palm, bananas and coffee stand out. The cultivation of African palm started in the 1970s, but expanded mainly in the 1990s, from 31.1 thousand hectares to 152.7 thousand hectares in little more than a decade.⁷⁶ Most African palm production is concentrated in the departments of Escuintla and Izabal, although its expansion has reached the department of San Marcos, the Franja Transversal del Norte, El Petén and the South Coast. The acquisition of land and investment in products for export by large companies was favoured by the signing of free trade agreements such as CAFTA-DR between the United States, the Dominican Republic and Central America, signed by Guatemala in 2004.

A 2021 report on investment in Guatemala notes that gaps in land titling and land registration can lead to conflicts and land ownership claims, especially in rural areas.⁷⁷ In fact, problems in land registration have been one of the obstacles to land market development in Guatemala, especially affecting poor, landless peasants and smallholder families. A 2003 report notes the high costs associated with verifying information in land registries, such as the need to hire lawyers to travel to where the registries are located and resolve frequent inaccuracies in the registries.⁷⁸ Other difficulties that have constrained the demand and participation of poor, landless peasants and smallholder families in land purchases have been the lack of capital, both money and access to financial markets, restricted market information, legal obstacles, and fragmented credit markets. ⁷⁹

Women's land rights

At the legal level, Guatemala has made efforts to include the gender dimension in land governance. At the general level, the Constitution recognises the equality of all human beings and the Civil Code provides for distribution of property between spouses and recognises both men and women as heads of households. The Land Fund Law incorporates gender-sensitive language and provides for co-ownership of land for married couples or couples in common-law unions and individual ownership for single women. However, this has not necessarily translated into the promotion of land ownership in the name of women.

In practice, such efforts have not always yielded the expected results. Statistics show that women's access to land has been much lower than that of men. Data from 2010 indicate that only 6.5% of agricultural land is managed by women.⁸⁰ In 17 years, from 1998 to 2014, only 2,225 women accessed credits to buy land granted by the Land Fund compared to 18,438 men.⁸¹ From the sex-disaggregated data available from the Land Regularisation and Adjudication Programme in the years 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2014, 4,712 women benefited from the programme compared to 14,207 men. ⁸²

This is due, according to some authors, to the fact that women continue to be excluded in the articulation of the mechanisms and procedures for applying the norm. For example, technical assistance to organised beneficiaries in the Land Fund regulations does not take into account the fact that women are generally not considered by peasant organisations as representatives at the time of legal registration for the acquisition of credit or assistance, which perpetuates the advantage of men.⁸³ Thus, although the norm may explicitly include the gender dimension, it does not tackle the source of exclusion that is built from within households, communities and organisations, and institutionalised in administrative processes. Aware of this, some women have made symbolic demands in this regard, for example, in relation to having achieved co-ownership of land. Thus, women from 20 communities in the municipality of Chisec, in the department of Cobán, demanded that the Land Fund return to the communities and hand over the deeds to them before the municipal and local authorities in a public act, deeds which, while appearing as co-owners, had previously been handed over to the heads of families.⁸⁴

The statistics change in the Land Leasing Programme, where in 2020, 81% of the beneficiaries were women (15,602).⁸⁵ The difficulty in this regard, as expressed by the women, is that the search for land is delegated to women in conditions of poverty and, in the absence of a contract or advisory service, they have to face disadvantageous negotiations with landowners in insecure situations.⁸⁶ On the other hand, in the year 2020, the distance between the men and women beneficiaries of the land access programme via credit and subsidies for the purchase of land from the Land Fund decreased, with 52% men (303) and 48% women (280). ⁸⁷

The prevalence of patriarchal culture means that most women continue to access land through men, that they are often excluded from inheriting land, and that the male head of the household makes the important decisions on land use.⁸⁸ Added to this is the difficulty for women to exercise their rights in collective forms of land tenure due to social norms, which continue to give preference to men, coupled with the lack of specific legislation.

Where to go next?

Author's suggestions for further reading

To learn more about the situation of rural women in Guatemala, the analysis Rural Women in Guatemala, published by the International Land Coalition, diagnoses the problem, illustrates it with testimonies of rural women, provides information on some local responses and makes recommendations.⁸⁹ In the report La repercusión de la tenencia de la tierra en el respeto a los derechos humanos sociales y económicos de los guatemaltecos, lawyer Astrid Zosel Gantenbein reviews the historical evolution of land tenure in Guatemala and analyses FONTIERRAS in depth from an institutional and procedural point of view.⁹⁰ The author includes in her analysis access to land through the market in the Central American country. In 2019, Land Portal organised the webinar Land, territory and human rights violations in Guatemala, in which peasant representatives and experts addressed the violence suffered by indigenous and peasant farmers in Guatemala because of their demand for land. ⁹¹

Timeline - milestones in land governance

1877 - Beginnings of the General Land Registry

The operation of the General Property Registry of Guatemala began in the 19th century. Over the years it has been modified by creating registries in different departments until its current state consisting of two registries: the General Registry of the Central Zone based in Guatemala City and the Second Property Registry based in Quetzaltenango.

1952 - Land reform

The revolutionary government (1944-1954) promoted agrarian reform through Decree 900/1952, the Agrarian Reform Law, with the aim of putting an end to the feudal regime that characterised the rural sector in Guatemala. The aim was to free the peasantry from serfdom and turn it into a social and economic subject by increasing its purchasing power. To this end, idle land was expropriated and granted in usufruct for 30 years. Previously, the Law of Forced Leasing (1949) obliged land leases to be extended for two more years and required landowners to lease idle land, charging a maximum of 5% of the value of the harvest obtained.

1954 - Overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman

The US incursion into Guatemala, joined by the Guatemalan army, motivated by an attempt to prevent communism from taking hold in the country, overthrew the government. This brought the land reform process to a halt.

1956-1985 - Counter-agrarian reform

The new government promulgated Decree 559 for a new agrarian reform characterised by the abandonment of land expropriation and the promotion of access to individual ownership through the colonisation of state land, which gave rise to the so-called "parcelamientos".

1960-1996 - Internal armed conflict

The armed conflict in Guatemala had a high impact on the rural sector, provoking the abandonment of land by peasants fleeing military repression. Between 1980 and 1985, the army promoted the repopulation of these lands among the peasants in its bases. The conflict caused 200,000 deaths, more than 100,000 peasants exiled and half a million internally displaced.

1962 - Agrarian Transformation Act and creation of INTA

The Agrarian Transformation Law (Decree 551) created the National Institute for Agrarian Transformation (INTA) and promoted agrarian development mainly in jungle areas in the north of the country such as Petén and El Quiché, among others, expanding the agricultural frontier through crop diversification and massive deforestation.

1986 - Access to land through the market

With the democratic governments, the colonisation process came to an end and access to land became market-based. Land was bought on the market with state funds and granted in credit to the peasants.

1992 - Creation of the Fund for the Labour and Productive Reinsertion of the Uprooted Population.

The Fund is created with the objective of facilitating their resettlement through the provision of productive assets and land.

1996 - Peace Agreements

The signing of the Peace Accords put an end to 36 years of conflict and had a major impact on the land issue as it implied the recognition of land rights and the reorganisation of the rural sector to respond to the high number of people displaced by the conflict. Three agreements were particularly relevant: the Agreement for the Resettlement of the Population Uprooted by the Internal Armed Conflict, the Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Agreement on Socio-economic Aspects and the Agrarian Situation.

1998 - Creation of the Land Fund

The Land Fund was responsible for the design and implementation of land policies, as well as for administering public funding to facilitate access to land.

2005 - Creation of the Registry of Cadastral Information of Guatemala.

Decree 41-2005 created the Registry of Cadastral Information (RIC) of Guatemala, responsible for establishing, maintaining and updating the national cadastre; defining policies, strategies and work plans in cadastral matters; registering and updating cadastral information as the exclusive responsibility of the State, as well as issuing cadastral certificates, among other functions.

2006 - Entry into force of the Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Central America and the Dominican Republic.

The objective of the Treaty was to stimulate the expansion and diversification of trade in the region, eliminate obstacles that hindered it, promote fair competition and facilitate the cross-border circulation of goods and services. Some studies point out that the Treaty limited the Guatemalan state's ability to promote redistributive processes in the agrarian sphere.

References

[1] World Bank. Guatemala overview.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Commission for Historical Clarification (1999). Guatemala: memoria del silencio.

[4] Cristosal, Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean (2021). Internal Forced Displacement in Guatemala. Estudio Exploratorio del Municipio de San Juan Sacatepéquez. UNDP. USAID.

[5] Velásquez, H. (2011). Legal Frameworks for Access to Land Study Guatemala. International Land Coalition. No. 7.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Velásquez, H. (2011). Legal Frameworks for Access to Land Study Guatemala. International Land Coalition. No. 7.

[10] González, L. (2020). "Invasión de tierras: la intranquilidad que acecha la propiedad privada". República.

[11] Álvarez, C. (2018). "Presentan pliego de reformas para endurecer castigos a invasiones". Prensa Libre.

[12] Velásquez, H. (2011). Legal Frameworks for Access to Land Study Guatemala. International Land Coalition. No. 7.

[13] Amnesty International (2011). Guatemala forcibly evicts indigenous peasants.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Pérez, S. (2021). "Guatemala: peasants' houses burned in violent eviction". AP News.

[16] Presidential Commission for Peace and Human Rights (2023). Work report. First quarter.

[17] Velásquez, H. (2011). Legal Frameworks for Access to Land Study Guatemala. International Land Coalition. No. 7.

[18] Government of the Republic of Guatemala. Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (1994). Agreement for the resettlement of populations uprooted by the armed conflict. Oslo.

[19] Government of Guatemala. Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (1995). Acuerdos sobre Aspectos Socioeconómicos y Situación Agraria. Mexico.

[20] Congress of the Republic of Guatemala (1999). Decree 24-99. Law of the Land Fund.

[21] Governmental Agreement 386-2001. Reglamento de Regularización de la Tenencia de las Tierras Entregadas por el Estado (2001).

[22] Velásquez, H. (2011). Legal Frameworks for Access to Land Study Guatemala. International Land Coalition. No. 7.

[23] Alonso Fradejas, A. (2004). "Identidades cuestionadas. El pueblo maya de Guatemala ante el ALCA". Anuario de Acción Humanitaria y Derechos Humanos. University of Deusto.

[24] Velásquez, H. (2011). Legal Frameworks for Access to Land Study Guatemala. International Land Coalition. No. 7.

[25] Hernández, O. (2015). "Fontierras: Arrendamientos en lugar de créditos para favorecer a los mismos. Plaza Pública.

[26] Velásquez, H. (2011). Legal Frameworks for Access to Land Study Guatemala. International Land Coalition. No. 7.

[27] Gantenbein, A. Z. (2006). The impact of land tenure on respect for the social and economic human rights of Guatemalans.

[28] FONTIERRAS (2020). Land Fund 2020 Final Report.

[29] Ibid.

[30] International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). (no year). Guatemala: A State Captured.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Congress of the Republic of Guatemala. Ley del Registro de Información Catastral Decree 41/2005.

[33] Governmental Agreement No. 325/2005.

[34] Municipal Code Decree 12/2002.

[35] Miranda López, U. E. (2015). Improving Land Governance in Guatemala. Implementation of the Land Governance Assessment Framework LGAF.

[36] Presidential Commission for the Coordination of Executive Policy on Human Rights (COPREDEH). Government of Guatemala (2013). Questionnaire on Security of Tenure, requested by the Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and on non-discrimination in this context, Ms. Raquel Rolnik in accordance with Human Rights Council Resolution 15/8. OHCHR.

[37] Velásquez, H. (2011). Legal Frameworks for Access to Land Study Guatemala. International Land Coalition. No. 7.

[38] Ibid.

[39] FONTIERRAS (2020). Land Fund 2020 Final Report.

[40] Carrera, J. (2003). "El mercado de tierras en Guatemala". In Tejo, P. (coord.) Agricultural land markets in Latin America and the Caribbean: an incomplete reality. ECLAC. GTZ.

[41] Setem (2020). Land grabbing in Guatemala: a look from human rights and critical feminisms in Latin America.

[42] National Institute of Statistics (2004). IV National Agricultural Census. Volume I.

[43] FAO. Agricultural Census 2003.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Presidential Commission for the Coordination of Executive Policy on Human Rights (COPREDEH). Government of Guatemala (2013). Questionnaire on Security of Tenure, requested by the Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and on non-discrimination in this context, Ms. Raquel Rolnik in accordance with Human Rights Council Resolution 15/8. OHCHR.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Ibid.

[49] National Institute of Statistics. Results of the 2018 Census.

[50] Velásquez, H. (2011). Legal Frameworks for Access to Land Study Guatemala. International Land Coalition. No. 7.

[51] Public Prosecutor's Office (2010). National and International Legislation on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

[52] Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2003). Country Report Guatemala.

[53] Government of Guatemala. Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (1995). Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Mexico.

[54] UNDP. Maya Programme. (2016). Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Progress and Challenges 20 years after the signing of the Peace Accords.

[55] Ibid.

[56] World Bank. Rural land area (square kilometres) Guatemala.

[57] World Bank. Urban land area (square kilometres) Guatemala.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Turcios Lara, H. (2021). Agricultural sector in Guatemala. Oficina Económica y Comercial de España en Guatemala.\

[60] Ibid.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ibidem; Azúcar de Guatemala (2023). "Uso sostenible del agua en el cultivo de caña y producción de azúcar" (Sustainable use of water in sugar cane cultivation and sugar production).

[63] Government of Guatemala (2022). Financial and technical assistance plan for farmers is implemented.

[64] Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food (no year). National Cattle Policy.

[65] National Institute of Statistics Guatemala. Agricultural Statistics 2020.

[66] Ibid.

[67] National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP).

[68] Gálvez, J. (2012). OCRET and the State's territorial reserves. Plaza Pública.

[69] Decree 126-97. Ley Reguladora de las Áreas de Reservas Territoriales del Estado de Guatemala (1997).

[70] Carrera, J. (2003). "El mercado de tierras en Guatemala". In Tejo, P. (coord.) Agricultural land markets in Latin America and the Caribbean: an incomplete reality. ECLAC. GTZ.

[71] Ibid.

[72] Grünberg, J., Grandia, L. and Milian, B. (2012). Land and Equality. Challenges for Land Administration in Petén, Guatemala. World Bank.

[73] Carrera, J. (2003). "El mercado de tierras en Guatemala". In Tejo, P. (coord.) Agricultural land markets in Latin America and the Caribbean: an incomplete reality. ECLAC. GTZ.

[74] Ibid.

[75] Ibid.

[76] Setem (2020). Land grabbing in Guatemala: a look from human rights and critical feminisms in Latin America.

[77] US Department of State. 2021 Investment Climate Statements: Guatemala.

[78] Lastarria-Cornhiel, Susana (2003). Guatemala Country Brief: Property Rights and Land Markets. Land Tenure Center.

[79] Ibid.

[80] USAID (2010). Property Rights and Resource Governance Guatemala.

[81] Castillo Huertas, A. P. (2015). Women and land in Guatemala: between colonialism and the neoliberal market. Serviprensa.

[82] Ibid.

[83] Ibid.

[84] Ibid.

[85] FONTIERRAS (2020). Land Fund 2020 Final Report.

[86] Castillo Huertas, A. P. (2015). Women and land in Guatemala: between colonialism and the neoliberal market. Serviprensa.

[87] FONTIERRAS (2020). Land Fund 2020 Final Report.

[88] USAID (2010). Property Rights and Resource Governance Guatemala.

[89] Vay, L. and Cuc, V. (2017). Rural women in Guatemala. Rural Women and Land Rights. International Land Coalition. CODECA.

[90] Gantenbein, A. Z. (2006). The impact of land tenure on respect for the social and economic human rights of Guatemalans.

[91] Land Portal (2019). Webinar: Land, territory and human rights violations in Guatemala. Written summary.