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Some residents of Duck Run 3 in the Cayo District say that their own area rep is trying to run them off the land on which they've built their houses and their farms.
They claim that they've been using the land for about two decades, but the village council and Minister Orlando Habet has decided that they want to use the land for a cemetery, since the village doesn't have one.
However, it gets complicated because some of the residents using the land have leases, and others don't.
Yesterday we asked the Minister about it, and he said the allegations aren't exactly factual. Here's what he explained.
Orlando Habet, Minister of Sustainable Development
"True that I have been trying to build a cemetery on the portion of the land, not true that they have been there for 20, 25 years. This all commenced I would say 5,6 years ago, it was like a year before the last elections and there was a plot of land that was national land and there as a company, a business in Spanish Lookout that was selling the land, in a way illegally, but the residents from Duck Run 3 were paying their fees to the person who assumed he had the land and so all of them paid their fees and then when we noticed because we had designated an area for a cemetery because they don't have a cemetery. That area for the cemetery was then shortly after occupied by someone who lives in Duck Run 2, without any lease just started to squat. As we all know, if you leave someone to squat, eventually they will claim squatter's rights after 12 years, and if you leave 1, then 3, 4, 5 more will come, which is now the situation so we had attempted to ask the person to vacate the area because there was a purpose for that portion of land where Ministry of Health had already approved to the village council that it is a good area through the public health officer who had visited the place and they had also received a letter from the Ministry of Rural Development at the time under the last administration but this area was appropriate to build the cemetery and so it was that portion plus the other portion of the land that was then later surveyed and everyone had given their monies and then they were expecting that portion of land so they applied to the Ministry of Natural Resources at a mobile we had just about two years ago and these people got their recommendation to get their parcel of land so now how do you tell someone who has paid their 2 or 3,000, has paid heir survey fee that somebody else is occupying your land and you can't move from there so how do you get that back, who's gonna pay these people for their land? So the idea was to try to get these people out, I don't know what's going to happen because it's not our jurisdiction, it is the Lands Department that has to go there and deal with it."
We'll keep following the story.
