The civil war in Guatemala in the early 1980s caused thousands of Guatemalans to flee the country. Starting in 1981, the massive arrival of Guatemalan refugees to Mexico began. This marked the beginning of the operations in Mexico of the UN agency specializing in refugees. Today, the settlements have become fully integrated into Mexican life.
Smiling, Adelina Hernández Reyes waits under a huge tree on the edge of the central park of Los Laureles, in the state of Campeche, Mexico. Her eyes light up as she sees the truck arrive. UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). “I thought they were no longer in Mexico. How nice to see them again,” she says.
Adelina was eleven years old when she arrived with her parents and seven siblings in Boca de Chajul in Chiapas on December 8, 1981, fleeing the Civil War that was affecting Guatemala and her hometown, San Miguel Uspantán, in the department of Quiché at the time. . Her sister stayed because she was already married and lived in the capital.
Adelina was 11 years old when she arrived with her parents and her seven siblings in Boca de Chajul in Chiapas in December 1981 fleeing the Civil War in Guatemala. Today she runs her collection center and sells honey.
His father of Quiché origin was a farmer and on his plot he planted cardamom and bananas and had cattle; but the military repression made them flee. First, one of his brothers decided to go to the border with Mexico and crossed with one of his friends. Later the rest of the family followed the same steps.
“We came when in some places they had already massacred hard. We left walking, we brought a horse with some things and we arrived in Mexico and we were well received, ”he says.
Adelina, now 51 years old, still has those memories of the journey very marked in her memory. “It was pretty strong what happened.”
The Civil War in Guatemala in the early 1980s caused thousands of Guatemalans to flee the country. Starting in 1981, the massive arrival of Guatemalan refugees to Mexico began. It is estimated that around 46,000 Guatemalans took refuge in different settlements in the state of Chiapas, on the border with Mexico, particularly in the municipalities of Las Margaritas, La Independencia, La Trinitaria and Frontera Comalapa.
Guatemalan girls in the refugee settlement of Los Lirios, Quintana Roo.
There are also reports of people who arrived in the municipalities of Maravilla Tenejapa, Marqués de Comilla and Benemérito de Las Américas.
This situation marked the beginning of operations in Mexico by UNHCR and the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR) at the end of 1982. In 1984, 50% of the refugees were relocated to the states of Campeche and Quintana Roo, where several settlements were created in Maya Tecún and Quetzal Edzná, in Campeche; as well as Los Lirios, in Quintana Roo.
Later, the settlements of Santo Domingo Kesté and Los Laureles were created in Campeche, while in Quintana Roo the settlement of Los Lirios disappeared and people were relocated to Kuchumatán, Maya Balam and La Laguna. These settlements are now formal towns integrated into the social, political and economic life of those states.
Repatriations to Guatemala began in 1987, although it was not until the Peace Accords signed between 1991 and 1996 that massive returns to Guatemala took place.
Refugees board a UNHCR-funded Hercules plane for voluntary return to Guatemala from the Campeche airport.
stay in mexico
However, many refugees decided to stay in Mexico and their integration into the country was sought through naturalization and different types of support to achieve their socioeconomic inclusion in the country.
“UNHCR’s two durable solutions model was unique in the world. They had the option of repatriation and integration. Here there were very defined groups that had already decided to stay in Mexico under whatever conditions they were”, indicates Marlen Pozos Lanz, who worked at UNHCR from 1987 to 2000 in the office then located in Campeche.
In Campeche, around 4,000 of the 12,000 relocated refugees chose to stay. In Quintana Roo, approximately half of the 7,500 Guatemalans installed in the settlements remained. Those who stayed were able to naturalize as Mexicans. Many of those who returned to Guatemala, particularly those who were born in Mexico, later decided to return to Campeche and Quintana Roo because of the better living conditions in the country.
Like Adelina in Los Laureles, Pablo Lorenzo Bernabé decided to stay in Maya Balam, in the state of Quintana Roo, where he has lived for 39 years after running away from his home in the department of Huehuetenango when he was barely 15 years old. In Chiapas, he met his now wife, who also fled Guatemala, before relocating to Maya Balam, where they founded his family.
“My parents, my brothers, my uncles, they all fled because of the fear that there was that [los militares] kidnap us, torture us or kill us. And the most unfortunate thing there is that we realized that they were walking and burning houses and so we had to flee, no longer on the roads, but we had to go through the bush, through the mountains, where there was shelter under the trees, and really there was no food there. But by the will of God we live here ”, he recounts.
To generate sources of employment, UNHCR created different productive projects managed by the refugee community, such as this pig farm located in the now town of Maya Balam, Quintana Roo.
final integration
Since the relocation to Campeche and Quintana Roo in 1984, the Government, with the support of COMAR and UNHCR, had developed different projects to support refugees.
The settlements were created in uninhabited areas where the same refugee population built their houses on lots donated by UNHCR. For example, in Santo Domingo Kesté, Campeche, a private ranch was purchased through a trust that had an area for fruit production and a cattle ranch.
“At the beginning of the project, what was done was to organize the population so that those who wanted to and had a vocation for ranching could use and produce the ranch. And the women were offered the production of fruit trees”, comments Marlen Pozos Lanz.
The recoverable support fund created by UNHCR also allowed farmers to be financed with credits to produce the land and they, at the end of the harvest, were obliged to recover that money.
“What happened with this fund is that, given the development dynamics that existed, both in Kesté and Los Laureles, it forced us to modernize the field and then the irrigation units were created. In the case here, companies were created that also worked via credit”, explains Marlen.
“We began to produce okra for export; In the case of Kesté, the export of watermelon to the United States was large. Today I don’t know if the irrigation units are still working, but at the time they were a very important factor for the development and takeoff of this town”, he adds.
Later, towards the end of the 1990s, communal credit banks were created to finance entrepreneurship in the agricultural, beekeeping, pig and livestock sectors, among others.
Through the credits from the communal funds, Adelina was able to finance her honey collection center promoted at the time by her husband, who passed away a few years ago. Pablo developed her agricultural production, while Rosa González Ventura, from Chinique de las Flores, in the department of Quiché, was able to boost her small stationery shop over time, in addition to the production of fruit trees.
Transformation of settlements into formal towns
Rosa is one of the founders of the town of Santo Domingo Kesté. She and her husband decided to move from the settlement established in Maya Tecún in 1989, when they offered to donate one and a half hectares of land to the people at the Santo Domingo Kesté ranch to plant cornfields and other products.
The population organized to build the town from the beginning, since the land was pure mountain.
“There was no street, there was nothing, the plots were simply delimited when they delivered it to us, nothing more. Through a plan they told us to mark the plot that we wanted, but we did not know physically, only the plot. So I marked where we are right now and we stayed here and we started with the development of the community”, she recounts.
Her husband was part of the group that installed the water system in the town to connect with the municipal well. The streets appeared little by little, the wooden houses have been disappearing or have been transformed to now be made of concrete. A school, a park, and businesses have been built to form a town that is now part of the social, political, and economic life of the state of Campeche.
Isabel Cano Juan prepares food in the kitchen of her house in Maya Balam, Quintana Roo, where her family settled 36 years ago. She continues to speak her language and works to preserve her traditions.
Something similar happened with the settlements installed in Quintana Roo, since they were initially virgin fields, where everything had to be built.
“It was pure bush, but later they began to build, they gave us the house and they began to dig for the pipes and for the water, we had to measure the water because at first they gave us five buckets,” says Juana from her home in Kuchumatán. Marcos Francisco, originally from Huehuetenango.
When touring the settlements more than 20 years after leaving the region after the closure of the UNHCR office in Campeche in 2000, the now deputy representative of this agency in Mexico, Renée Cuijpers, said she was “pleasantly surprised” by the achievements obtained. since that time.
“Today what we see are people who are already naturalized as Mexicans, obviously there are also already a second and third generation that were born here and even, what at the time were the settlements, are already Mexican towns fully incorporated into the structure political, economic, administrative also of the State and of the municipalities”, he expresses.
“I am grateful to COMAR, to UNHCR, to past Mexican governments. Grateful. Very sheltered. When the last returnee left, well, in one of the returns they asked the government, what will happen if we go to Guatemala and we don’t like Guatemala, what are we going to do? If you can get there, you are welcome here, she replied. What more do we want! Who is going to say that to one? We were very happy about that and we are very grateful”, concludes Adelina.
