LEFT: Augustin Noel. RIGHT: Natalie Gonzalez

The planned “invasion” of Chaguaramas by claimants to land owned by the State is on for tomorrow morning, even though their attorney, Prakash Ramadhar, is warning that they will be breaking the law. “I have already advised them they cannot take the law into their own hands and expect the protection of the law,” Ramadhar told the Guardian yesterday. Ramadhar said he was heading a legal team wading through voluminous legal records preparatory to filing an appeal against a January 2002 Privy Council ruling against the Chaguaramas Legal Land Owners (CLLO).

That job will be completed in two weeks, he said, adding that if owners of Chaguaramas land had not been properly compensated back in the 1940s, “that injustice cannot be allowed to continue...” The State, Ramadhar said, must “set the highest example of fairplay and honesty.” The late Port-of-Spain mayor George Cabral, who served two terms in office between 1947 and 1953, owned 103 acres of land in Chaguaramas, where the heliport is now situated.
Now his descendants have come forward and identified themselves as siding with the CLLO who have been fighting, so far without success, to reclaim thousands of acres of land from the State. They, too, are claiming discrepancies in how the Cabral land was leased to the US to be part of a Chaguaramas military base.

St James businesswoman Natalie Gonzalez, 42, a descendant of Cabral, told the Guardian she echoed the sentiments of militant CLLO leader, 72-year Augustin Noel, and is prepared to back him on the planned “invasion” of Chaguaramas tomorrow. Gonzalez operates a disc jockey business with her brother, radio personality George Gonzalez. She said they will be at Noel’s side when the march into Chaguaramas begins from the Alcoa installation from 7 am tomorrow, even though the Chaguaramas Development Authority (CDA) chairman Noel Garcia has promised that security personnel would resist the challenge with the full brunt of the law. The march is an “in-your-face” challenge to the CDA, as Noel and his colleagues intend to occupy lands they are claiming was owned by their ancestors. Noel says the CDA will have to physically prevent them from moving into Chaguaramas.

Target areas include the grounds of the heliport, convention centre and hotel school, Mount Pleasant in Macqueripe and Scotland Bay. Gonzalez said the Cabral family had never been satisfied with how the land was taken from them by the State and leased to the US as a military base in 1941. She said former chief minister Dr Eric Williams led the march to Chaguaramas that persuaded the US to give up the military base but she believed he should have handed the land back to the original owners instead of vesting it in the State. “Yet Williams is treated like a big hero,” Gonzalez said. She agreed with Noel that there were many discrepancies over how the land was acquired; for instance some owners were just paid for crops, not their land, while others were not paid at all for their land because title could not be established.

“Anything to do with Chaguaramas is a problem and I think everybody has a right to get back their land,” said Gonzalez, adding that trying to secure legal documentation from Government agencies about the peninsula was like pulling teeth. Noel responded this week to Garcia who had stressed the CLLO did not have a case because the Privy Council had ruled against them in 2002. He said Chaguaramas was an extension of slavery in the sense that freed slaves began buying land in the peninsula from around 1880 and faithfully paid tax of one shilling a year to the Crown. The payment vouchers in his possession from 1941, however, showed numerous discrepancies and he wants the State to explain these to the Privy Council.