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GUATEMALA STILL NEEDS TO KNOW WHO OWNS WHAT.

Article Excerpt
"To give everyone the land to which they claim title," goes the old saying, "Guatemala would have to be five stories tall." Seven years after the December 1996 Peace Accords, which mandated a land registry, were signed, the saying has ceased to provoke smiles. Municipal boundaries are in dispute, all manner of business cannot be concluded, and people are being injured, killed, and thrown bodily off lands they claim as their own.

The Congress is obligated by the accords to promulgate a law establishing a Registro de Informacion Catastral (RIC), a land registry. Failure to do so has been the basis of innumerable conflicts (see NotiCen, 1997-08-21). A first attempt at compliance was in 1998, when then President Alvaro Arzu (1996-2000) created the Comision Paritaria de Derecho Relativo a la Tierra (COPART). COPART was made up of representatives from the Coordinadora Nacional de las Organizaciones Campesinas and governmental agencies having a bearing on land tenure. The new entity drew up a proposal for the Congress.

The proposal languished, but COPART, working with other organizations, revised the proposal and by 2002, during the Alfonso Portillo (2000-2004) presidency, had a...

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