Guatemalan Detained with 2000 Xaté Leaves 14 Kilometers Inside Belize

Over a month ago, new rangers graduated from the Friends for Conservation and Development, also referred to as the FCD rangers program. The now eighteen rangers have been deployed to critical hot spots in the Chiquibul.  Since then, they have been active and their training has resulted in two separate detainments of Guatemalans illegally within the Chiquibul. One incident happened just this weekend and another one a few weeks ago. On Sunday night, one Guatemalan was found and taken to the police station in San Ignacio. Although he was unarmed, he was found with two thousand xate leaves and about fourteen kilometers inside Belize. Executive Director of the FCD, Raphael Manzanero tells us more.

Raphael Manzanero

Raphael Manzanero, Executive Director, FCD

“Since the graduation of the rangers, we have been able now to send them out to the greater and more remote areas of the Chiquibul. And so we have been able to monitor even much more closer now the activities. So we have been sending them out also for multi-days activities and patrols. So they came about…there were actually two Guatemalans that were observed and one of them was able to escape and so one of them was detained. He was brought out last night around ten o’clock. He was doing Xatero activity so he had with himself the leaves…apparently the leaves would have been extracted out and sold in Santa Elena, which is in Petén. So there is one of the other intermediaries in that area. Now more than likely Melchor De Mencos have some areas where people would by the xaté and then from there it is taken off to Guatemala City and then thereon exported out from Guatemala. So the person was brought out; more than likely he will be charged for illegal entry and then the forest department would lay a charge for the extraction of xaté without a permit. So those will more than likely be the two charges that the guy will be passing under. Actually in that moment, two Guatemalans were captured. They had about six thousand four hundred plants along with them…these were the xaté leaves and they were detained, they were brought out and processed in court. They were charged for the xaté. They were charged a thousand dollars plus six months in jail. So I would suspect that they are serving their jail time right now and that was separate from the immigration charge. The immigration was probably also synonymous to the first one so in practice they probably would have ended up paying two thousand dollars and one year in jail; I believe if that was the case.”