In the latest of ongoing violent attacks against the rural community of Lajeb Kej, private security forces destroy the resident families’ homes and force them off their land located in Alta Verapaz, a department in the mountainous northern and central highland regions of Guatemala, infamous for land disputes and forced displacement.
On 22 January 2025, a community of families living near Tucurú, Alta Verapaz, was forcibly displaced from the land they had been inhabiting. Denominated unofficially as Lajeb Kej, this Maya Q’eqchi community has had to vacate their home after years of legal and social struggle to defend their rights to land, housing, and health.
After concerted community efforts to resolve the legal battle regarding the land in question and to halt violent intimidations of the families, private security forces finally decided to destroy the families’ houses, forcing them to flee.
Sandra Calel, coordinator of Ixoq Mayaj, a women’s association focused on supporting young people and Maya women in rural areas, and expert on the Lajeb Kej case, has made a statement referring to the displacement on social media: ‘The families’ crops and houses were destroyed. Supposedly, this was a peaceful displacement. They say it is peaceful, but it is violent. They are destroying the people’s cultural identity, which affects the communities’ human rights’.
Calel collaborates with members of a network of farming communities supported by the umbrella organization Unión Verapacense de Organizaciones Campesinas (UVOC). Before meeting with government officials about land conflict, Calel stated, ‘We know that defending a right means risking your life and losing your territory. That’s why we are here [at the National Palace], looking at how the government can help resolve land issues’.
In her role as a member of UVOC, Calel participates in regular dialogues with the current administration under Bernardo Arévalo to address land conflict in Q’eqchi’ territories, but institutional support for vulnerable rural communities has been difficult to establish under a municipal political structure that regularly prioritizes private companies’ and landowners’ interests over community wellbeing.
Notably, just 5km from Lajeb Kej, the hydroelectric company Santa Teresa began installing a dam in 2006 to extract resources from the Polochic River. It has been documented that community members have been offered money in exchange for their land under the guise of advancing hydroelectric works.
The ¡No más desalojos en Guatemala! [no more displacement in Guatemala] campaign (a collaboration between Land Rights Now, International Land Coalition de América Latina y el Caribe, Plataforma por la Defensa de la Tierra y el Territorio, and Coalición Nacional por la Tierra Guatemala) represents a collective effort to highlight patterns of displacement and community experiences that are ignored and repressed. The campaign confirms that private motivations to enrich extractive companies continue to put local communities at risk.
The corrupting power of private land ownership
The case of the Lajeb Kej community’s struggle to defend their right to land, water, and health is not unique to the area. Alta Verapaz, a department located in the mountainous northern and central highland regions of Guatemala, is well-known for land disputes, forced displacement, and socio-economic vulnerability in Indigenous communities.
The territory upon which the modern map of Alta Verapaz was drawn pertains to Indigenous peoples of Maya Q’eqchi’, Achi, and Poqomchi’ heritage. Having inhabited the area and cultivated the land for centuries, these communities persist in the defence of their cultural and communal claims to live safely within the territory.
Q’eqchis, Achis, and Poqomchis have experienced a long history of land dispossession, from initial Spanish colonization of their lands 500 years ago to the local and multinational exploitation of their lands today. At the crux of the matter is conflict between individualistic and communitarian approaches to land.
In the late 19th century, after the Guatemalan Liberal Revolution of 1871, the idea and practices of private property took hold more strongly in the country and greatly changed Mayan communities’ experiences of life and land. Within the Mayan cosmovision, land was never something to be bought, sold, or owned by an individual. According to many Indigenous philosophies and worldviews, land is conceptualized within a broader framework of territory that encompasses much more than the physical characteristics of a piece of land. It includes community-oriented visions of land and territory as material, spiritual, and life-giving; to be taken care of collectively.
Under today’s economic conditions in Guatemala, like in most parts of the globe, individualistic notions of land as private property dominate. According to the International Land Coalition, the long-standing agrarian conflict in the country seriously affects Indigenous and peasant communities, exacerbating violence and inequality in rural areas.
The families of Lajeb Kej, who survived through subsistence agriculture in the small land area they lived on before their forced displacement, were exposed directly to the imposition of private property.
The families of Lajeb Kej have a photocopy of an 1894 land title stating the community as owners of their territory. But this document, which has been passed down from generation to generation, is no longer recognized by the authorities.
The area that the families of Lajeb Kej inhabited was designated by the Registro de Informacion Catastral (RIC) as terreno baldío. In Guatemala, terreno baldío refers to land that does not have an owner. Despite this official designation, the people of Lajeb Kej were not safe from displacement. Throughout several years, a private landowner, armed with private security forces and supported by an institutional narrative painting subsistence farmers and local Indigenous communities as dangerous “usurpers” of private property, laid claim to land that technically pertains to the state.
These private security forces carried out systemic attacks against the community In January, the private imposition upon the terreno baldío culminated in the forced displacement of 186 people.
Long time, no solution
Since 2021, UVOC has been accompanying the Lajeb Kej community, lending support on legal and logistical matters in their fight to recuperate their rights. This comes after multiple attacks – including the destruction of their homes by chainsaw and fire in 2010, the beating of a local leader in 2023 and his son’s ear being cut off by attackers, as well as regular disturbance from drones and gunshots fired into the air.
After many years of advocacy, members of UVOC were hopeful about making progress with land dispute cases when Bernardo Arévalo took office in January of 2024. ‘[We had] so many years of suffering, without being able to express the needs of the communities. We believed that with this new government, there would be an opportunity’, UVOC’s general director Carlos Morales stated in an interview in February 2025.
In a positive political turn, the current administration did not take long after Arévalo’s inauguration to prioritize land issues and to sign the Acuerdo Agrario, committing to direct collaboration with community organizations to advance on conflicts related to land distribution and ownership.
However, the institutional barriers to change have proven to be significant, with over 1,000 land conflicts continuing actively in the country. Guatemalan media outlet Factor 4 has called out how little national and international attention is given to these conflicts, especially to the “silent crisis” of forced internal displacement. Often, public rhetoric follows a narrative blaming vulnerable populations for their circumstances, describing community members as “invaders” and “property usurpers”.
This narrative serves to protect private interests over collective welfare. In the case of Lajeb Kej, it is important to remember the link between private land ownership and extractive industries, such as hydroelectricity.
For the members of UVOC, the current administration has provided a window of opportunity to advance on solutions Q’eqchi’ community leaders have been advocating for since the early 2000s. For example, a robust government mechanism of attention to crisis, a stop to forced displacement, the provision of alternative housing in cases of legal displacement, reform of land policy, recognition of community-held and ancestral land rights, to name a few.
The recent displacement of the families of Lajeb Kej is just one piece of a larger puzzle of the structural violence underpinning land disputes in the country. Land disputes that are rooted in decades, if not centuries, of inequalities and unjust land management practices.
However, as the second year of Arévalo’s administration begins and violent displacements continue, it is clear that these solutions are still far from being actualized. The recent displacement of the families of Lajeb Kej is just one piece of a larger puzzle of the structural violence underpinning land disputes in the country. Land disputes that are rooted in decades, if not centuries, of inequalities and unjust land management practices.
UVOC’s Morales verbalizes the communities’ desires to best make progress: ‘we want to make structural changes. People with lots of power have been criminalizing the Indigenous and farming sectors. […] If we can improve the mechanism of attention to crisis, I believe things will get better. Things must change’. What the communities UVOC accompanies require is actually quite simple, even though the historical and political context have made them almost unattainable: peace and land access, to allow for small-scale subsistence farming and rural community development.
As long as socio-political divisions remain stark, whether rural-urban, public-private, or Indigenous-ladino, progress will remain slow. To ensure forced internal displacements finally come to an end, to attend to the varied land crises in Indigenous territories, and to support communities in their rights to land and life, structural change is non-negotiable.
Leonie Malin Höher is a University of St Andrews (International Relations and Sustainable Development) and Oxford (Latin American Studies) graduate who specializes in research, writing, and advocacy around a variety of social justice-focused topics. She is especially interested in adaptation responses to the climate crisis (e.g. migration), social movements led by environmental defenders, state-society interactions regarding the regulation of corporate interests, and female leadership of justice movements.
Header image: composite of author’s photo of the mountains surrounding Lajeb Kej and still from the documentary ‘Lajeb Kej, la resistencia del valle Polochic – Todas Somos Defensoras’.
