Guatemalan prosecutors are investigating claims that riot police summarily executed dozens of peasant squatters in a violent eviction on a ranch this week. Deputy Interior Minister Juan Carlos Villacorta said prosecutors had begun digging up a possible mass grave at the ranch, where police and armed squatters clashed on Tuesday. "I understand they are digging to see if these accusations ... are true," Villacorta said. A battle erupted at the Nueva Linda cattle ranch, near the southern town of Champerico, when about 2,000 police arrived to evict some 3,000 squatter peasants. Police said earlier on Wednesday that the death toll from the clash was nine, while 20 policemen and an unspecified number of squatters were treated for gunshot wounds. But the government-appointed human rights ombudsman, Sergio Morales, said up to 40 people were missing after the eviction and squatters believed that many had been summarily executed by police and buried in a mass grave. Daniel Pascual, leader of the National Coordinator of Peasant Organizations agrees, "A total of 40 people have disappeared. We are worried some of them may have been summarily executed by police."

At the request of Human Rights Prosecutor Sergio Morales, a Champerio municipal judge and investigators from the Guatemalan Attorney General's Office gained entry into the farm on Wednesday to search for the missing. According to Pascual, "soldiers and police dug holes where comrades who might have been summarily executed were said to be buried."

Attorney General Juan Luis Florido announced Thursday he would ask the courts to issue an arrest warrant for police officer Boris Morales, who headed the eviction operation. The Human Rights Prosecutor's Office believes Morales is responsible for the "extrajudicial execution" of three peasants in the operation. Morales is also accused of ordering police officers to attack journalists who were covering the eviction. Reporters say that after the police discovered that members of the press witnessed them, they chased the reporters down, and beat and verbally abused them. One reporter was hospitalized. Police stole their equipment and destroyed it, most likely to eradicate evidence of extrajudicial execution

Florido said he will request warrants for the arrests of the farmers' leaders in connection with the deaths of four police officers in the course of the eviction.

Mid-day on August 31 approximately police officers descended on a group of farming families, some armed with AK-47s, that have been occupying the land since last September in protest of the disappearance of campesino leader Hector Rene Reyes. A statement released by the Mutual Support Group, says that campesinos may have purchased the weapons to protect themselves from heavy drug trafficking that takes place in the region.

Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann classified the campesinos as "members of organized crime," hinting that the farmers were to blame for the violence..

Campesino organizations strongly denounce the claim that the evicted families have any ties to organized crime, and insist that the government is to blame for not investigating the September 5, 2003 disappearance of campesino leader, Hector Rene Reyes. Rene Reyes was allegedly abducted by the private security of the owner of the Nueva Linda plantation, Spaniard Carlos Vidal Fernandez Alejos. In protest to the disappearance, the campesinos occupied land on Nueva Linda and stated firmly that they would stay there until the Rene Reyes case was clarified. The government did not attempt to negotiate with the campesinos, but rather issued a court order and deployed police to violently evict them from the land.

Further consequences of the conflict were the arrest of thirty-two campesinos, including one woman, Julia Cabrera, a single mother of ten children. According to Cabrera she was selling vegetables on the plantation when the police arrived and started throwing tear gas canisters. She witnessed her sixteen-year-old son David Natanael López shot twice in the back and killed. "But I did not see who took my six-month old baby, because the police grabbed me by the hair and began to hit me," Cabrera stated. When she came to, she found herself inside a car and in police custody. Cabrera has been denied the right to attend her son's funeral and she is concerned for the health and safely of her infant child. Sources: EFE, Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA, Reuters Alert, Counter Punch

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