Hundreds of people began gathering around the police station shortly after midnight. After several hours of protest, 1,000 people stormed the building, forcing the cops inside to flee. The local police director promptly announced that all state forces would abandon the area.

Eight days earlier, thousands of peasants, many of them from indigenous peoples, had erected 100 roadblocks in a one-day protest supporting their demands for land reform. Indigenous peoples form the majority of the country's 11 million people. President Alfonso Portillo agreed to meet with peasant leaders, but refused to consider large-scale land reform.

Working people in Guatemala are being forced to bear the brunt of the semicolonial country's deepening economic problems. The Central America–wide drought laying waste to many crops has compounded problems of landlessness, poverty, and low prices for crops. The United Nations Childrens Fund reports that 46 percent of the country's 5 million children suffer chronic malnutrition. Some 16,000 families depend on supplements from the World Food Program.

According to the October 1 Hoy, Guatemala City "is filling up with people from rural areas, who gather on the corners to beg." Local radio in the Northwest of the country, reported the New York Spanish-language daily, has "revealed that a food shortage in the eastern communities of Jocotán and Camotán, on the border with Honduras, took 40 lives this year and that more than a dozen children were among the victims."

The coffee harvest, which is due in a few weeks, remains in the balance, stated the paper, as thousands of cash-strapped farmers grapple with the effects of the drought and the likelihood of low market prices.

The Guatemalan government has instituted a number of security measures at airports and foreign embassies following the September 11 attacks in the United States. Foreign Minister Gabriel Orellana claimed on October 7 that, given its position straddling the isthmus, the country is vulnerable to use by "international extremist groups."  
 
 
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