Government denies Guat. incursion claims

The Government of Belize is on the defensive tonight after reports in the Guatemalan press have accused B.D.F soldiers of making an incursion into Guatemalan territory last Friday. A Government release denies that any such incursion was made. They claim that the Belize Defence Force patrol in question was en route to a scheduled link-up with their Guatemalan counterparts near Machaquila on the Belize side of the border and met up with and talked to two Guatemalan nationals in the area without incident. But a report in the Guatemalan daily, Prensa Libre, suggests that the Belize Foreign Ministry may be referring to a different occurrence. The article states that Belizean soldiers arrested six Guatemalan nationals at their homes in the community of Las Flores de Chiquibul on the Guatemala side of the border as they returned from cutting xate leaves which grow abundantly in the area. San Ignacio police would neither confirm nor deny that six Guatemalans are in their custody, but a source in Cayo tells News 5 that the men were in fact brought in by the Forestry Department, having been detained on the Belize side of the border, allegedly harvesting the leaves. The six men, who according to Prensa Libre, range in ages from twenty to fifty-two, were taken to the San Ignacio police station and that twenty bags of leaves and ten horses and mules were confiscated. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs says that a diplomatic note has been sent to the Government of Guatemala, in which Belize stated its willingness to cooperate in an investigation by the now operational Adjacency Zone office of the Organisation of American States. Belize’s Ambassador in Guatemala City, Alfredo Martinez, has been instructed to assure the government of President Alfonso Portillo that Belize fully respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Guatemala and is satisfied that no violation occurred as reported by the Guatemalan press.