The Medina administration says that none of the claimants of property in El Seibo that had carried out several pilgrimages to the Presidential Palace to call attention to their plight are wrong. The government says that the inter-institutional commission that investigated the case presented by the Union of Agricultural Producers in the provinces of El Seibo and Hato Mayor cannot claim the land because it never belonged to the Dominican state.
The government says that the occupied lands do not correspond to the plots indicated in the government’s intention expressed through Decree 486 of 1975 to carry out an agrarian settlement for area farmers.
It points out that while the decree was issued in 1975, neither the lands involved in the case, nor the adjacent lands, also occupied by the peasants, were or have been property of the Dominican state. The government says that the process of expropriation, economic compensation and creation of the settlement was never completed, so there is no formality that can legally accredit any of the claimants as owners of the property. The farmers were recently evicted from the lands they had occupied for years. The government says that the rightful owner of the land claimed by the farmers is Pedro Guillermo Varona (aka the Cuban), a representative of the commercial company La Carmita. He is the person who had evicted the farmers.
The government said it will carry out consultations to identify other state-owned farm lands and to determine the feasibility, proposed distribution and possible creation of a settlement in a prudent timeframe per the needs of the claimants.
The investigative commission carried out the census from 20 to 22 November 2019 to obtain general data on the 613 peasants who were allegedly evicted and thus validating the other necessary information on their occupations.
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El Dia
13 January 2020