Assistant Professor Liza Grandia of Clark’s International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE) department recently served as an expert witness in a landmark case before the Supreme Court of Belize.  The court ruled in favor of twenty three Maya communities of southern Belize to allow them to manage their territory according to customary law and also stated that the judgment could apply to the remaining ten villages not involved directly as plaintiffs and possibly other Maya villages in other Belize districts.  This will enable them to not only protect their land from privatization but also timber and oil concessions that the government had been pursuing in this region.

The decision requires the Government of Belize to put the brakes on any leases, grants, concessions and contracts that would affect Maya land rights in the Toledo District.

Prof. Grandia said this was an expanded case following the victory of two test communities in October 2007 (and she had carried out ethnographic research in one of those).

Dr. Grandia  joined the Clark faculty as a cultural anthropologist in the fall of 2007. She received her B.A. (summa cum laude) in Women’s Studies from Yale University in 1996 and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley in 2006. From 2006-07, she returned to Yale University as a fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies. Having carried out almost seven years of fieldwork in northern Guatemala and southern Belize, Dr. Grandia speaks fluent Spanish and is proficient in Q’eqchi’ Maya.

Since 1993, Dr. Grandia has collaborated with a Guatemalan environmental NGO called ProPetén in the greater Maya Biosphere Reserve region—working to expand the typical conservation package of forest and park management into new arenas such as health, organic agriculture, ethnobotany, gender and ethnic equity, environmental justice, and agrarian reform. Most notably, between 1997-2000, she founded an integrated health and environment program called Remedios, which established family planning services for more than half a million people living in northern Guatemala. After ProPetén’s separation from Conservation International, Grandia became a founding member its board of directors.

Grandia wrote about her participation as an anthropological witness (“Milpa Matters: Maya Communities of Toledo v. Government of Belize”) in an edited anthology, Waging War, Making Peace (2009, Left Coast Press, eds. Barbara Rose Johnston and Susan Slyomovics).

More information about Belize’s Maya movement and the legal rationales for these cases can be found at:

http://www.law.arizona.edu/depts/iplp/advocacy/maya_belize/index.cfm?page=advoc

Additional news articles on the June 28 judgment can be found at:

http://www.amandala.com.bz/index.php?id=10012

http://www.lovefm.com/ndisplay.php?nid=12254

http://7newsbelize.com/sstory.php?nid=17213