LETTER 1

9th March 1993

At this moment I am sitting in a very simply built house in a Guatemalan refugee camp called Quetzal Edzná in the south of Mexico. It is about two hours bus ride from Campeche, the nearest large town. It has a concrete floor, walls made of poles which let the air and the mosquitoes in, and a roof made of corrugated fibre sheet. The midday meal of rice, beans and tortilla is being cooked over an open fire on a raised hearth made of clay and concrete on a wooden framework, which is the usual thing in this part of the world, and prevents people having to stoop. The fuel is wood, which is sometimes hard to get hold of, as this large concentration of people uses up quite a lot. My hammock, which I carry round with me, is slung between two of the roof stays, and I am sharing the living space with the family.

Tortilla, by the way, is not what some of you may be used to in Spain. It is everybody's basic diet here. It's a kind of pancake, a chapatti-type food, made of crushed maize dough. It's a whole way of life: the men spend a lot of time growing the maize, harvesting and drying it, sorting the seed for next year's crop and so on. Sacks of dried maize are stored in the house (as well as beans and peanuts), and every day the women soak the grains, boil them, take them to the mill to get them ground - or grind them themselves in various ways -, shape them into flat pancakes and cook them on a piece of metal or a pan over the open fire. The family where I live at the moment, father, mother, four girls and a few grandchildren, get through up to four kilogrammes of tortilla each day, which is a lot of tortilla, and a lot of preparation time.

The toilets for the community are earth latrines, pits in the ground with a concrete pedestal over them. They tend to be clustered near each other in little huts at the end of each group of streets. The nearest toilet is at least 100 metres from the house where I live: imagine being taken short in the middle of the night!

You wash yourself from a tub of precious water, using a scoop to slosh yourself down. All the water has to be carried in from taps in the street. It's only turned on for about five hours each day. The "bathroom" is four poles with green plastic sheet draped over them so that you can have some privacy when you wash your intimate parts.

I find being in the camps very pleasant and comfortable. It's plain food and a simple life, but people are very welcoming indeed, and lying in my hammock at night looking at the moon through the wall poles is a great pleasure.

I actually only come out here on short visits. The rest of the time I spend in Campeche in my own house with running water, electricity, telephone and other familiar luxuries.

When I came, I travelled by plane to the United States and then carried on by bus for the last 3000 kilometres, which took nearly three days, but buses are the cheapest way to get around. I took just one rucksack with me, and most of the space in it was taken up with my computer, tape recorder and radio, all of which are essential for the work I'm doing, but didn't leave much room for clothes and the like.

So what's it all about?

Guatemala has for hundreds of years been a country more or less owned by a small number of rich families who have made enormous fortunes by producing especially fruit and selling it cheap to the United States and other parts of the world. They have managed to do this by cruelly exploiting the labour of the local American Indian population. (They prefer to call themselves "indigenous peoples", because as you probably know they aren't Indian at all, and don't like this label which was given to them 500 years ago by the Europeans. So that's what I always call them too.)

The indigenous population has often protested and fought back, but then always been violently beaten down. There is a long history of disappearances, kidnapping, torture and the wholesale massacre of whole communities.

In the early 1980s this got so bad that thousands of Guatemalan country people went into hiding in the jungles and mountains in the north of the country, with the army and airforce in pursuit, burning, bombing and shelling them. Eventually things got to the point - remember that there were children and old people there as well, and babies actually being born during the flight - there was death by malnutrition and disease as well as by violent means - that great waves of people fled into Mexico, the neighbouring country, and have been here ever since.

Things in Guatemala have got no better, and it is estimated that about 100,000 Guatemalans are still in the south of Mexico, in official camps like this one, or scattered amongst the general population, or even in hiding.

But the ten years of exile have not been wasted.

It's probably hard to imagine country people who have lived very simple lives for a long time, never having to do much more than exist together and run their own community, producing enough food to live on and a bit more to sell, suddenly for no explicable reason being bombed and terrorised by the army of their own country, which is accusing them of assisting the guerrilla fighters in the mountains, who are trying to beat the government by military means.

When they at last arrived in Mexico, most of them had no idea at all about how to talk to government officials, very little idea about human rights, and most of them could neither read nor write. The women especially had never had any experience of taking an active part in their own village community, making decisions on behalf of themselves and their families.

All these things to do with

communication and organisation they now started to learn. They were helped a lot by the Mexican government in these early years, though gradually this help has dwindled. Many of them learned to read and write. They elected representatives to negotiate with the governments of Guatemala and Mexico. They have campaigned for the right to go back to their own lands and to be left in peace without military harassment. Most of all they now want to go back to do something about the brutality and injustice which still exists in their own country. They are not just concerned with themselves, but with all the other people still suffering injustice in Guatemala.

This very week there was news of more military attacks on civilian populations. Two villages were destroyed. Eight hundred more people have fled into the rain forest in the south of Mexico.

The decision to return is an incredibly brave one. Some 3000 or so went back in January. They were accompanied by a number of international "observers" who are making sure that human rights are being respected. Even so a bomb was planted in the new community and exploded recently.

Life isn't safe in Guatemala, but they are still determined to go. The ten years have changed them. The people I have met are still essentially country people who want to go back and farm their lands and live in peace. But they are now - so they tell me - much more confident and open and communicative than before. They have never lacked bravery, but now somehow they have organised their bravery into a powerful force which is going to take them back and defy the government to deny them their rights.

And part of this strategy is to call us all to be witnesses of what is going on.

They are constantly in touch with other countries. Tomorrow

there is a delegation coming from Canada to stay here for a while. I in my little way will try to keep you all informed of what happens, and occasionally I phone up our local radio in Britain and am given a few minutes' broadcasting time. If we don't keep our eyes open, more people will be killed. Believe me, us watching does make a difference. Criminal governments like operating in the dark. They don't like being seen.

So what am I doing?

At this moment it is pitch dark and I am writing in an exercise book by the light of a lamp made out of a Nescafé jar full of paraffin, with a hole in the lid stuffed with rags as a wick. This is cheaper than candles, and these people are very poor. The house I am staying in belongs to one of the refugee community leaders, and they have asked me to help write a history of the refuge from Guatemala, and the ten years in Mexico, and the return.

It's exciting, because history is happening in front of my nose, and as far as I know nobody has written it all up before. I carry my tape recorder around with me and a supply of batteries and record lots of people telling me their story. Some of it is almost beyond belief, not just the horror, but the bravery and the kindness as well.

I suppose British TV has given you a lot of blood and massacres recently, but it's different when people tell you themselves. I listen to BBC news regularly, and I know that you are being bombarded with Bosnia and Somalia and Angola and Afghanistan. Not a word about Guatemala. This is why I am writing, so that some of you should know.

I'll write to you again soon.

LETTER 2

April 4th 1993

It might seem strange to you if I say that I am here in Mexico, working with Guatemalan refugees, and haven't yet even been to Guatemala. I thought I would tell you something about the background to this, especially since next Saturday I shall be setting off on my first visit to the country itself.

I don't wish to praise Great Britain particularly for the freedoms we have as citizens except to say that there are enormous differences between a country like ours and a place like Guatemala. One of the biggest of these is that in Britain we can usually say what we feel and think about things in general, work, food prices, the government, or our daily lives, whereas in Guatemala this is not so. It has been part of everyone's experience that if you spoke your mind about something you didn't like, if you objected to something the government was doing, if you got a group together to try to protest, there was a danger of being kidnapped, tortured or "disappeared", as they call it here.

It's a country where most of the land - which of course originally belonged to the indigenous population - has by now been taken over by a handful of very rich families. Typically, these families have produced fruit and agricultural products, which they sell cheaply on the international market, and especially in the US. For this they have used local cheap (almost slave) labour, and jumped down hard on anybody who tried to change things at all. In a nutshell: to make the most money, you have to have a lot of good land and a supply of cheap, almost free labour, and to keep this state of affairs going, you have to make sure nobody objects, and get rid of them if they do.

The wealthy controlling group in Guatemala has the government firmly under its thumb, even if you may read that it's a democratic country. It isn't. It has an extremely efficient national army, supplied and trained by experts from a number of other countries, and the army has one of the best secret services in Latin America, which has eyes and ears in every corner of public and private life. Telephones are supervised and tapped; teachers in schools and priests in pulpits, doctors... all people in public positions are constantly watched. The army controls everything, including the government. You never know who your friends are, and everyone has to be suspicious all the time, because, literally, it's a matter of life or death.

Inside the country there is a simmering civil war which I have mentioned to you before. A guerrilla movement has existed for about 30 years, fighting back against government forces from the mountains and forests, attacking strategic targets and then withdrawing, and protecting rural communities from the worst of army savagery. But the army retaliates by attacking the country people themselves, accusing them of supporting the guerrilla, and over these last years tens of thousands of peasant farmers, many - perhaps most of them indigenous people, have been slaughtered.

The government has been through a number of phases in its attempt to crush the opposition. For many years it picked out individuals who it thought were leaders and "disappeared" them. Later it started exterminating whole villages, destroying buildings, burning crops, killing animals, bundling hundreds of people into churches or public buildings and incinerating them alive.

At this stage the people who survived fled into the jungles and mountains and tried to live in hiding. Some of these secret communities in the mountains have managed to survive there for over ten years, though the army still tries to root them out by mass bombings with helicopter gunships and by burning and destroying large swathes of the jungle itself. Many, many people (over 100,000 in all) eventually managed to take refuge in neighbouring Mexico.

In Britain we have certain hard won rights and freedoms. If you don't like the way things are, it is your right to support opposition political parties, even to set one up yourself, if you wish. You have the right to take part in protest marches in the streets. There are many powerful interests and groups which try to undermine these rights: we have problems with Official Secrets and Data Protection and all that, but on the whole we have gained a remarkable degree of freedom, and it's fairly unlikely if we oppose the government that we'll be carried off by thugs in the night.

In Guatemala, as I have said, there are people taking part in guerrilla fighting inside the country, and there are also those brave organisations who continue to protest publicly, at great personal risk. But a lot of the thinking and planning for the future takes place outside Guatemala, not just in Mexico, but in other parts of the world as well. Making links with other friendly countries and groups is a very important part of the work, and, even in Leicester, there are people who in their own small way support and help people in Guatemala who are fighting for their lives and their basic rights as human beings.

I mentioned in my last letter to you that the refugees have not been sitting on their backsides for ten years, waiting for something to happen. Quite possibly, when they left their country, many of them hardly knew why all this was happening to them. All they knew was that the sound of the helicopters brought death and terror and loss and misery to them all, that fathers and mothers and children and babies were being mindlessly tortured and killed.

Later, as they began to think and piece things together, and especially as they began to get in touch with churches and international groups, they realised that there were such things as human rights, and that they would get support if they decided to campaign for these rights. Many of the adults learned to read and write and to get ideas about how people in other countries thought. One of the bonuses of being in exile has been that a whole new generation of young people can now read and write as well, and are using their skills to take a leading part in the life of the community.

There is a lot of pressure on Guatemala from other countries to change its ways, to reduce the size of the army, to "demilitarise" the country and to give people the rights which are theirs. Taking advantage of all this international pressure, the refugees have carefully negotiated an agreement with the government, which was signed last October. It has put them in a very strong position, on paper, but the Guatemalan government is well known for its dirty tricks, and still needs to be watched carefully.

In January this year nearly 3000 refugees went back to settle again in north-west Guatemala. One of their conditions was that groups of international observers should go with them to make sure that all the conditions were kept to and no dirty tricks were played. Many more are now planning to return, and, as you can imagine, there is a lot of nervousness and real fear around. It is after all not that long ago that the same people were running for their lives from the helicopter gunships sent by the very same government to kill them. Who knows whether it will happen again?

You may well be asking why they want to go back. They are reasonably comfortable here. They are out of danger, and they have time to think and organise themselves in preparation for a time when things could be better. There has been no real change yet in the attitude of the Guatemalan government. So why move now?

There are many reasons. The most obvious is that if you've been away from home for ten years in a place which is all right but not the same, you just want to go back. Another connected reason is that they are mostly farmers, and depend on the land for their food and the little bit of income they might get, and the places where they now live in Mexico are not nearly as good as the places where they came from. It makes sense: if you're a farmer, you want good land.

But the chief reason - I would call it the "political" reason - is that now that they've thought things out a bit, and got themselves organised, and (as I said) got themselves into a strong position as far as the government is concerned, they want to go back and see if they can help their friends in Guatemala change the country into something better for themselves and their families and their future. They want to go back and fight - not with weapons, the way the guerrilla are fighting - but with all the skills and experiences and alliances they have acquired over the last ten years in exile. From being just a bunch of farmers, they have become a really strong, experienced and well organised group of people. They want to help achieve peace in Guatemala.

Going back is a complicated business. You can't just lift so-and-so many thousand people out of one place and dump them in another place and hope for the best. They need land, good land, and roads and houses and water and electricity and drainage and hospitals and schools and agricultural machinery and tools and seeds and fertilisers and money to start with... The list goes on and on. And according to United Nations conventions and declarations they have the right to go back freely, without harassment, and to make these decisions for themselves: they will not be pushed around and treated like second-class citizens in their own country any more.

I started off this letter by saying that in a week's time I would be making my first journey to Guatemala. Maybe you will have partly guessed why.

There is a small group of a dozen people who have been elected by their fellow-refugees to go on a sort of reconnaissance journey into Guatemala, to inspect those places where they might choose to return to, to look at the land, to suss out all the sorts of things I have mentioned that they will need when they get there. They are of course all Guatemalans, but they have not been back to their country for over ten years, and have this incredibly responsible task of deciding on behalf of hundreds of other families whether the situation will be all right for them when they return.

I shall be travelling with them, together with a couple of Canadians, as one of the official "international observers" I mentioned before. We have to monitor the situation and make sure that there are no dirty tricks, and that human rights are respected. We will be away for about three weeks in all, travelling to the capital and then to the areas in the north of the country where they hope eventually to settle.

I'm not going to say anything here about how I think it will be. I think I've given you some idea of what Guatemala is like, enough for you to be guessing a bit. But I have every intention of writing to you again after I return in mid-May.