The Bladen Nature Reserve in southern Belize – its 100 thousand acres should be a pristine area, completely free of all activities that would interfere with its bio-system. And that’s why reserve rangers were surprised to find licensed Guatemalan xateros in the reserves happily harvesting xate on Monday. The surprise was not finding them, but find out that they have a permit to extract the leaves. That’s impossible in a nature reserve and today Yash-Che executive director Lisel Alamilla told us why it is a strange and revealing case.
Lisel Alamilla,
“They had encountered some xateros within the Bladen and had asked them what were they doing there and they explained that they had gotten a license to extract xate from there and that they were working for a license holder. Our rangers told them there is no possibility that they could have a license to do that because it is a nature reserve like I explained earlier. But there was nothing much our rangers could do because this is a large number of men and we only had two rangers out on patrol. They gave our staff the name and the number of the licensee holder which is really helpful and we called the person and we said look, we had this encounter and we understand that you hold a license for xate extraction in the Bladen. He said he does hold a license and I said we are the co-managers of the Bladen and we are not aware of this, can you send me a copy. He never sent me a copy of the license but he did send me some communication that indicates that he is the holder of license. We came to realize that in fact he has a license for the Swasey-Bladen Forest Reserve and additional forest reserves which are separate areas and I called him back and I said sir you don’t have a license for Bladen, you have a license for the Swasey-Bladen Forest Reserve which is further north and across the road so how could you have made a mistake to have your men in our area. So I gave him notice that he needed to get them out immediately otherwise we will arrest them if we found them in there. So we deployed our entire team yesterday who went in and got all our information from the villages that are around the Bladen and we knew where they were going to be coming out from and we had gone into the areas that we suspected they were in and we found 16 men in there and we arrested sixteen men because we have special constables licenses. So we arrested the 16 men and we took them into Independence and we found that they had 26 bundles, and bundles are huge amounts of xate. As I explained to you earlier Jules, each bale has 70 bundles and each bundle has 40 leaves for a total amount of 72,800 leaves and that based on the information we have, it would mean an income of BZ$4,500 to the licensee holder. We don’t know how much these men are paid.”
Jules Vasquez,
For 72,000 leaves and they are hiring 16 men?
Lisel Alamilla,
“16 men. So when you look at the numbers this doesn’t make sense because for us who are trying to manage these areas its costing us a lot more money and effort to try to protect these areas against this kind of pillaging and it just doesn’t add up.”
The detainees were handed over to the Forestry Department.
