Maya Leaders and Alcaldes deeply disturbed by Rosewood sale

Forest Minister Lisel Alamilla returned to the country on Thursday from her trip to Turkey, but up to news-time there has been no official word from her Ministry on the controversial sale of harvested rosewood. But there is plenty of word coming in from other areas as public outrage continues to grow since the two-week amnesty was announced. Today, the Maya Leaders Alliance and the Toledo Alcalde Association issued a joint release stating that they are deeply disturbed and utterly outraged by the government’s decision to allow persons who illegally harvested rosewood in Toledo to now export the wood and share the profit from these sales with the government. Cristina Coc of the Maya Leaders Alliance told News Five that their sense of outrage is justified, since the decision by the government is a slap in the face of the Mayan people.

Cristina Coc, Maya Leaders Alliance

Cristina Coc

“For a long time, in being true to our stewardship to the forest, Mayan people have raised concerns over this issue; we have highlighted incidents where we have tried to work with the government officials, the forest department, to bring attention to this illegal logging. We have helped, in many instances it is the Mayan people, the Alcaldes themselves who report the findings; who go to the forest department and say there is another container going; here is what we know, please come and assist. And so while the Mayan people themselves have been hard at work monitoring and bringing to what we had hope would be officials who would bring aid and bring these people to some form of repercussion for their actions. The Mayan people have helped the state of Belize to monitor this illegal logging. So with the decision that the government has taken to give amnesty to those who have logged illegally; to go ahead and finish the illegal process of sale of our raw material abroad and make millions of dollars out of it—that is an insult. That is an insult to the efforts of the Mayan people who have worked hard to try to put a stop to the illegal logging. It is not the government officials themselves, it is not the forestry department themselves that have been successful at confiscating these logs. It is through the direct support and assistance from our community leaders who are not paid to do that job, but do it because they are truly the stewards of the forests that they have long preserved and feel very disturbed that as much as we had helped, it is essentially a waste of time when the same government would turn [and] instead of bringing these people to justice will turn around and help silicate these perpetrators to profit from the resources that we have long protected.”