"Guatemala: poor against the poor"

- By Grahame Russell
September 1995

A great land heist
Irony amidst the suffering and injustice

"You are spies for the returnees", we were told. Not an upbeat beginning to our meeting with the Directorship of the Xalbal Cooperative, in the Ixcan municipality in northern Quiche, Guatemala. Working for MINUGUA (the United Nations Human Rights Mission to Guatemala), a colleague and I had gone to Xalbal on Sunday, August 27 1995, to ask the Xalbal people how they felt about the pending march to Xalbal of close to 350 returned Guatemalan refugees from the long forgotten and abandoned community of Veracruz, some 4 miles away. As we quickly found out, the Xalbal people did not feel good about the march at all -- they were angry, bitter and threatening.

Since 1993 a group of Guatemalan-returnees have lived stranded in poverty in Veracruz, a dusty crossroads on the 'Franja Transversal', a very rough dirt road that crosses northern Quiche from east to west. From Veracruz, one heads south to Xalbal, west to Mayalan, north to Pueblo Nuevo, and east to Cantabal. Never meant to be more than a crossroads, Veracruz has been a wayward home to close to 400 people since 1993 when their return home from refugee camps in southern Mexico was aborted because the "new" people living on their lands in Xalbal obviously did not want to lose their lands, i.e. their livelihood to survival.

A great land heist

The tension between the Veracruz former owners and the Xalbal present owners should be understood within the context of one of the greater land heists in the history of the Americas: in the late 1970s and early 1980s over 1,000,000 mostly poor Guatemalans fled their homes due to the armed conflict between the Guatemalan government\army and the armed URNG rebels. Specifically, the majority fled the horrendous repressive tactics of the Guatemalan army and security forces. The Ixcan was one of the regions most affected. (Ricardo Falla's "Massacres in the Jungle" is an extraordinary account of the systematic repression and massacres in the Ixcan in the early 1980s.)

Xalbal was a typical small community: a massacre, and then flight by the survivors. Xalbal is typical in another sense -- a victim of the great land heist. Using a provision in the Guatemalan Land Reform Act, INTA (the National Institute for Agrarian Reform) determined that much of the land that massacre survivors fled from was "abandoned", in this way 'legalizing' the heist ("abandoned" lands revert to the State) and making it possible to grant these lands to other poor landless farmers, "campesinos".

It gets worse. By 1983 the army, along with the willful or coerced collaboration of INTA, began to repopulate the "abandoned" lands with other needy, poor Guatemalans (some from nearby, some from other regions of the country). In most cases the new communities had no choice but to work closely with the army, setting up local PACs, integrating themselves into the system of military commissioners. The new communities became, effectively, part of the army's counterinsurgency strategy.

Ten years later, beginning in 1993, exiled Guatemalans began to return home from Mexico, many to find their homes "legally" occupied by new owners -- a classic, deliberate and successful strategy of poor against poor. Moreover, part of the government\military's counterinsurgency strategy was the propaganda war, whose results are now being felt. Many of the returning poor are labeled as "subversives" and "guerilla supporters".

"All those refugees are guerilla supporters. We know them. Some of them are former guerilla commanders," continued the Xalbal Directorship members. After having us wait 30 minutes, we were ushered into a large, simple room. They sat us down on a bench in the middle. Before us the Directorship sat; all around, inside and outside looking in the windows, close to 70 men sat and stood. As they invited us to speak our piece, they pressed the record button on a large 'boom-box', recording our every word.

The initial tension got worse. For close to 40 minutes, different men spoke about how we, "linked to the guerrillas and the refugees," had come to scout out Monday's march, and help the Veracruz returnees in their plan to take this land from the Xalbal people. The Directorship then laid out part of their "plan". "We are going to let

everyone enter Xalbal tomorrow, the returnees, you international observers, the accompaniers, ... everyone. Then we will shut off the road behind, not allow anyone to leave, and then detain everyone."

As we learned, the plan was then to have everyone arrested and charged with invasion of private property. Moreover, they would bring charges against certain persons for being commanders of the guerilla. The leader of the Directorship finished off: "And we will carry out our plan peacefully. If anyone who marches here uses violence or provokes us, then we have other plans and ways of dealing with this as well." While the PACs have been officially disbanded in Xalbal, it is widely rumored that the community has many army issued rifles.

It was only after another 90 minutes of slowly and painstakingly explaining that we were not spies, that we were not scouting out a returnee land-grab, and that we were not "with" the returnees, that the mood in the meeting changed. Hatred, fear and anger subsided, and they shared with us their concerns. Their concerns are real -- in their own way they are as much victims of the war as the Veracruz returnees.

The marginalized are still perceived antagonists: After we left, we quickly met with the Veracruz returnees and national and international organizations, explaining the mood of anger and hatred, the potential for violent confrontation, and the "plan". The march was then suspended for 10 days. Clearly the Veracruz returnees were using the "threat" of the march (most national and international organizations that work with refugee issues told them in no uncertain terms that they would not support the march) to apply political pressure, NOT on the people of Xalbal but rather on the government and national and international organizations responsible for guaranteeing safe, prompt and proper returns.

On Monday, September 11, they did march to Xalbal. By this point there had been a dialogue between the Veracruz and Xalbal people. The latter, demonstrating a change of tactic if not heart, 'allowed' them to enter Xalbal. (Obviously the Xalbal people have no authority to allow or prevent them or anyone else to march peacefully down a public road). 350 men, women and children -young and old- marched the three hours to Xalbal, and then set up camp for two nights on the site of a former Guatemalan army outpost (destacamento) that had recently been withdrawn.

Irony amidst the suffering and injustice

They held extensive meetings with the Xalbal people -- some fears and misconceptions (based on propaganda and lies) were dispelled for the Xalbal people by meeting face to face with the "enemy". Amidst the two groups of people there are old friends and even family members -- not all the people in Xalbal are new; there are former owners as well. Two days later (Wednesday) the Veracruz returnees marched peacefully away from their home, from what was rightfully their land, stolen from them in the 1980s. They went back to their now less forgotten and abandoned crossroads community. Any hopes of returning home to Xalbal were finally and fully abandoned.

As of December 1995, they are still living precariously in Veracruz. But through their insistence and antagonism, they succeeded in pushing their return back to the top of the refugee return agenda. There is no happy ending to this recent chapter in their long journey 'home', except to admire how they remain subjects and protagonists of their own lives, even when they have so little real power.

The challenges for this two-year pending return, and other returns, remain: how to pressure the Guatemalan government to do more than the absolute minimum to deal with the "problem" of the displaced; how to focus, perhaps for the first time, real attention and pressure on, and hold the Army accountable for the role it played in the 1980s effectively robbing tens of thousands of people of their land and homes; and how to sustain international interest and support for the displaced Guatemalans, not only during the troublesome and difficult returns, but also during the following years as they work hard to rebuild lives that were so terribly torn asunder.

Grahame Russell, a Canadian human rights lawyer and development activist, is director of Rights Action, an NGO with offices in the US, Canada and Guatemala. Rights Action supports community human rights and development work in southern Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

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