So I believe everyone was once told that going green is the best thing for us as people and for our planet. I felt we were lead to believe that going green will take a world effort and also will take a lot of compliance. Well this recent story out of Guatemala may have you look at going green from a different perspective.
According to the Guardian, Guatemala is one of the fastest growing hubs for biofuel production and the demand for it’s fertile land has been bad news for it’s farmers. Just recently it was reported that security forces forcibly forced out out thousands of people from their land, so European biofuel companies could move in and began growing crops for biofuel.
John Vidal has the full story:
Ethnic Maya Q’eqchi communities of smallholder farmers said they were being violently evicted by state security forces from land they had farmed for generations. Helicopters with armed men leaning out were flying overhead, private security guards and paramilitary forces were attacking people, and houses and crops were being burned. The farmers could not speak Spanish and needed help dealing with the police, as well as legal advice on how to stop giant biofuel companies taking their land.
When Macz and Pascual, human rights workers from the Guatemala Campesino Unity Committee (CUC), arrived after a six-hour drive from the capital, Guatemala City, two of the communities had been brutally evicted. Over the next four days, 10 more villages were cleared. By the end of March 2011, around 800 families – about 3,200 people from 14 communities – had been forced off land they believed they had a right to live and work on. Within months, hundreds of hectares of the lush valley in the province of Alta Verapaz were being planted with sugar cane that would be turned into ethanol for European cars
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