Tonight, there is a significant setback to what has been called a revisiting of confidence-building measures between Belize and Guatemala. News Five has been able to confirm that a high-level meeting scheduled for Sunday in Antigua, Guatemala was postponed following a shooting incident within the Chiquibul National Park on Saturday. There has been no comment from official sources, but both a government release and Police report confirm that on Saturday evening at around four-twenty, a Guatemalan national was shot and killed during a shootout with B.D.F. personnel in the Chiquibul National Park.
The report from Police states that the incident occurred three point four kilometres within Belizean territory in the Chiquibul in an area called Cebada Camp. A joint forestry, Police and B.D.F. patrol encountered armed male individuals, and when those persons were ordered to halt, they instead opened fire. Members of the Belize patrol returned fire, and twenty-six year old Tomas Desdicho Ramirez, a resident of San Marcos in the municipality of Dolores, was fatally hit in the chest, the abdomen and right leg. According to that report, the members of the patrol retrieved a shotgun from Ramirez at the site, and also found a plastic bag containing one hundred and seventy-one grams of cannabis seeds. News Five has learnt that minutes before the shooting, the joint patrol uprooted a small marijuana field of about forty to fifty plants measuring between two to four feet in height. The body of Ramirez was brought out of the Chiquibul Sunday morning to the San Ignacio Hospital.
A joint release from the governments of Belize and Guatemala is significantly longer and packed full of diplo-speak. It states that both Prime Minister Dean Barrow and Guatemalan President Otto Perez have spoken by telephone. The eight point document makes clear that the government will investigate the incident and justice will be meted out if necessary. Guatemala has been invited to participate in the autopsy and to support the investigation, and the support of the O.A.S. has been requested in that regard.
The release ends with a mutual declaration of commitment to the maintenance of peace and the promotion of friendly relations between citizens of both countries.
The meeting in Antigua, with the attendance of a fourteen member Belizean delegation led by Foreign Ministry C.E.O., Alexis Rosado, was set up to strengthen bipartisan relations as outlined in a Road Map and Plan of Action signed in January, 2014. Tonight there is no word on a new date for that session.
On a related note, Guatemala’s Prensa Libre Newspaper is reporting that two farmers, Thomas and Feliciano Ramirez, were attacked by a Belizean patrol for no reason. Their headline article states that the so-called attack happened in San Marcos in Guatemala, and the two farmers were innocently clearing land to plant corn.
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