And while the execution of Ellis Meighan Sr. is shocking for the circumstances under which it happened, shock cannot even describe what the community in Big Falls, Toledo feels after armed men robbed and killed one of the villages best known storeowners and residents. Francis Johnston – who you may recall as a Belizean farmer who famously resisted Mayan communal land rights (and we'll have more on that later) was killed in his store on Saturday night.
Police report that at 7:20 Johnston and his wife were closing up their store when two Hispanic men armed with handguns held them up. Johnston tried to fight them off while his wife dashed into a neighbour's yard. But he couldn't fight off both of them and they shot him once in the stomach. The men left him to die, stole cash and phone cards and then drove off in his Ranger pickup truck plus the trailer he had hitched to it. Neighbours and relatives rushed to Johnston's aid and rushed to the PG Hospital but he was pronounced dead on arrival.
The pair of robbers ditched the trailer about a quarter mile away but the pickup has been recovered near Jalacte – which is a village that borders Guatemala. And that's where critics of the police performance point to the fact that to make it to Jalacte – the truck had to pass 5 village substations on a very rough road in a journey that took at the very least one hour. No check-points were set up to intercept them. Still, police say they are seeking three suspects who are known to them. So far, no arrests have been made.
And while that is the tragic death of Johnston the shopkeeper, Francis Johnston the farmer who rose to national prominence in June of 2008. That's when he became embroiled in a controversy over Mayan land rights versus the property rights of an individual landholder. You see, Johnston's lease was for a piece of land in Golden Stream Village, a Mayan community and when he asserted to his rights over that property and pushed off an encroaching Mayan farmer's crops, well, it almost caused a riot in that small village. But Government and Johnston maintained that he was within his rights – and that flashpoint between communal and conventional land rights brought the substance of the dispute over the two kinds of rights into sharp focus on the public stage.
To his credit, he didn't come across as a publicity-seeker but instead, was a plain-spoken, straightforward southern farmer who was trying to develop the land he had privately acquired. He was joined as an interested party in the recent hearing covering the case of 38 villages seeking a declaration on their communal land rights from the Supreme Court.
