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Monetary stability in Guatemala and protection of savings against inflation, quetzal devaluation and currency crises.

Does the State Know Who Owns Its Land?

In Costa Rica, Argentina and Chile, monetary and fiscal decisions dramatically reduced the value of people's savings. Guatemala also experienced a severe currency devaluation before adopting constitutional restrictions on government financing through its central bank. This essay examines why monetary stability should never be taken for granted and what is at stake when the Bank of Guatemala's technical independence is weakened.

More than four decades ago, during the government of Fernando Romeo Lucas García, the municipality of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, in Alta Verapaz, was created. The land on which its town center was built belonged to the Petersen family: 15 caballerías, about 677 hectares. Houses, streets, the church, and the town hall were built there. Some 3,000 residents were caught in the middle of a dispute that the family won in court in 1999. As late as March 2025, Canal Antigua documented that the court ruling still had not been enforced. Almost half a century after founding a town on private land it never bought, the State still had not resolved its owners’ claim.

The consequences reached the residents as well. In 2020, Ojoconmipisto documented that the uncertainty over ownership made it difficult to approve public works in the town center. Since then, the municipality has pushed new projects, but the national problem persists. In September 2026, Segeplan reported that 467 public investment projects had pending proof of property rights over their land. There are works Guatemalans want built whose files stumble over an elementary question: whose land is it?

Fray Bartolomé made the press as an extreme case: the State founded a municipality on private property and, decades after a court ruling, still had not resolved the claim. But the uncertainty repeats itself across the country: the inherited plot never registered in the children’s names, the farm whose measurements don’t match its boundary markers, the lot registered under two different owners. Who builds a second floor or installs irrigation without certainty about their rights? An owner may have land, resources, and the will to invest, yet lack legal security. When investment stops, the wealth it could have created is lost too.

To know who owns each piece of land, we must answer two questions. The first: where is it, how large is it, and what does it border? The second: who does it belong to, how was it acquired, and what encumbrances weigh on it? The first task belongs to the cadastre; the second, to the property registry. Guatemala has both institutions, but their information does not always match. When the land and the registry tell different stories, problems begin that can take decades, even entire lifetimes, to resolve.

Guatemalan law recognized the problem more than twenty years ago. The Cadastral Information Registry Law of 2005 provides for regular and irregular surveyed parcels and requires declaring them after the corresponding analysis. A November 2019 study, with data attributed to the RIC, documented 244,259 declarations, without distinguishing how many were regular and how many irregular. The law requires identifying the problem parcel by parcel, yet its national scale remains publicly unknown.

Other countries have shown that faster progress is possible. Rwanda delimited 11.4 million parcels in its land regularization program, with more than 110,000 participants, 99% of them hired from the communities themselves. Neighbors helped mark the boundaries. The World Bank documented the national scope of that effort. But measuring is not the same as handing over titles: a Rwandan government report recorded 8.6 million printed titles and 7.2 million collected by their holders. Rwanda showed that mass surveying is possible; completing formalization takes additional work.

Peru took a slower path. In 1996 it created Cofopri, an institution dedicated to formalizing property, which in thirty years reported 2,879,000 titles. The most interesting part came afterward. The economist Erica Field found that, during the four years following titling, the number of home renovations rose 68%. Most of it was financed without bank loans. Families didn’t wait for credit: with greater security of keeping their homes, they invested their own resources to improve them.

Denmark solved a different problem: the slowness of the counter. In 2007 it centralized its property registry, previously spread across 82 judicial districts, and in 2009 it digitized it. According to data released by the Danish court administration itself, in 2023 approximately 87% of files were processed automatically and about 90 employees staffed the centralized system, which also records other rights and assets. The key wasn’t merely installing computers, but creating uniform procedures capable of operating without human intervention in most cases.

In Central America it hasn’t been easy either. Costa Rica undertook a Cadastre and Registry Regularization Program with a projected cost of US$92 million. The executing unit finished its work in May 2014, but the Real Estate Registry continued the coverage and cadastral updating work. The experience shows that a funded project can end without the permanent task of maintaining reliable territorial information coming to an end.

In Guatemala, the Cadastral Information Registry reported 26 municipalities declared as surveyed, out of the country’s 340. In 2018 there were 13. In eight years we advanced thirteen municipalities, fewer than two per year. If we kept that pace, the last municipality would be surveyed around the year 2220. By then almost two centuries will have passed, and no one alive in Guatemala today will see the work completed. The 2020–2028 Strategic Plan starts from 3.8% of municipalities surveyed in 2018 and sets a goal of reaching 15% by 2028: barely 51 municipalities. Consider that this extrapolation reveals how much we need to speed up if we want to solve the problem within our own generation.

The General Property Registry doesn’t offer an encouraging picture either. Article 1127 of the Civil Code establishes eight days to register a document, extendable by six when it requires several operations. According to Registry data compiled by the Property Rights Observatory, the average time to register a sale went from 6.7 business days in 2018 to 20 in 2022. It tripled in four years. When you buy a house, it isn’t enough to pay for it and sign: you must also wait for the State to register the transaction. The twenty days are a historical average for sales, not the current time for all procedures.

But there is something even more serious: we found no published consolidated national figure for the number of properties registered in the two property registries. And in February 2026, María Andrea Cáceres of the Property Rights Observatory told Prensa Libre that there is no statistic on how many people hold possessory rights versus registered rights. That doesn’t mean the registries are unaware of each entry: it means the country lacks a sufficient public measurement to size the gap. We don’t even know how big the problem is that we need to solve.

To begin solving it, we don’t need to reform the Constitution or pass another law. We need to demand results. First, that the RIC publish quarterly how many parcels it has surveyed and how many it has declared regular or irregular. Second, that both property registries publish consolidated figures on registered properties and actual processing times. Third, that legal deadlines be respected, including their exceptions. We can’t demand results from institutions if we lack sufficient public indicators to measure them.

There is a fourth task: ensuring that the cadastre and the registry work with compatible information and clear responsibilities. The cadastre identifies where each piece of land is, how large it is, and what it borders; the Registry reports what rights are recorded over it. When their data don’t match, owners get trapped between files and endless procedures. It isn’t enough to measure the land if that information doesn’t allow identifying the registered rights. The cadastre must tell us where the property is; the Registry, what rights exist over it. And both must be talking about the same piece of land.

In Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, residents have suffered the consequences of a dispute over the land beneath their town center. But there is also the Petersen family: it obtained a court ruling more than twenty-five years ago and as of March 2025 still had not gotten it enforced. I have found no information confirming that it has received compensation since then. Everything indicates the conflict continues. What message does anyone thinking of investing in Guatemala receive when they see that not even a court judgment guarantees a timely solution? Are you willing to keep waiting for the State to clarify whose land is yours, and for your great-grandchildren to have to wait as well?

Ramiro Bolaños, PhD.

President of the Centro de Pensamiento y Acción Factoría Libertatis

References

Picture of Dr. Ramiro Bolaños

Dr. Ramiro Bolaños

Doctor en Investigación Social de la Universidad Panamericana de Guatemala, obtenido con honores summa cum laude. Además, posee un Máster en Investigación de Operaciones de la Universidad Francisco Marroquín, con distinción magna cum laude, y es ingeniero civil por la Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. Actualmente, es CEO de Improvement & Progress, S.A., empresa especializada en soluciones de inteligencia artificial y humana.

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