LETTER 5

2nd August 1993

I am sitting at this moment in my hammock in the middle of the rain forest in a remote place in Petén in the north of Guatemala, not too far from the Mexican border. I don't usually have much of a chance to write, but this time I've taken the day off because I did so much jungle walking yesterday and got so wet that I was completely shattered.

It's quite a tough place to be. The distances are great and the pathways muddy and overgrown. We hired some horses to carry the luggage. They too struggled, and one of them stumbled and fell over and dropped its load in the mud.

I'm travelling with a group of ten refugees, and a number of other accompaniers. The refugees are looking for land where they can return and build a community and settle again after over ten years of exile.

If this turns out to be the place for them, they would of course be thinking of decent roads, clean water, a school, a clinic, some sports facilities and an electricity power supply, all the things which a community would need. But at the moment it's almost untouched jungle territory.

Almost... because fifteen years ago there were flourishing communities in this area. Earlier, a mixture of events had caused the Guatemalan government to encourage large numbers of people to move north and settle in this part of the country. One of the reasons was that the Mexican government had threatened to start a large hydro-electric power scheme in the area. They argued that it was uninhabited and a large dam on the river Usumacinta, flooding the region, would do no harm. The Guatemalan government was against this.

There were already many poor people in Guatemala, without land and without work, who had for a long time been campaigning for the right to a patch of land of their own. The government decided to bribe these discontented people with offers of land in the north, and this would also prevent the Mexicans from damming the river to produce electricity.

The problem was that apart from offering them the land, the government had done almost nothing to support these new communities and life was extremely hard.

But with the help of some missionary priests from Spain and the United States they started to organise themselves into groups called cooperatives. This is a way of living together so that everybody in the community shares equally the work and responsibility - as well as any profit which may come from selling products. The cooperatives were very successful, and had managed to solve some of the problems of poverty, with no thanks to the government.

Meanwhile the war inside Guatemala had been going on for twenty years or more. It was (and still is) a war to try and change the conditions in Guatemala, to try to force the government, the rich landowners in the country, and their army which controls everything, to do something about human rights abuse and the poverty of most of the population.

It is a war for the poor, fought by what are called "guerrilla" forces who hide in the mountains and jungles, attack military and government targets from these remote vantage points, and melt back into the forests again. You can imagine that the government would accuse these struggling communities in the co-operatives in the north of being involved with the guerrilla. They were living in the same areas and also had more than one axe to grind with the government.

In the 70s and 80s the army stepped up its attempt to control these communities. First of all it removed their leaders and tortured and killed them. Then in the early 80s they started the wholesale massacre of the people in the cooperatives. They said they would "starve the fish of water", or in other words cut off the guerrillas' supply lines, which - they assumed - were these very cooperatives.

Thousands were killed in the most brutal way, and it was at this time that thousands more fled the country, into Mexico.

The cooperatives were abandoned; the jungle closed in again, and here I am sitting in my hammock working with people who now, more than ten years later, are planning to return.

It is a beautiful place, full of the ghosts of the past, though I don't know how you would feel about living quite so far from your kind of civilised life. When we arrived, the men very quickly built a wooden house with a sheet plastic roof where there is room for eight hammocks. Today we dug a hole for the toilet, and they built a lovely seat over it out of scrap wood, which happens to be mahogany, one of the precious tropical hardwoods which grow here. They used only machetes to cut the wood. They seem to invent and build things with almost no tools.

Our little camp is by a river, and if they decide to settle here, they might well build their village here too. Obviously, water is absolutely essential for any kind of human life, though at the moment we are having to boil it over wood fires to purify it and put in drops of chlorine. It's revolting, but at least it's safe.

As far as wild life is concerned, the river houses some pretty evil-looking alligators and friendly-looking turtles. There are plenty of snakes which you have to be really careful about. And there are masses of monkeys which swing around high up in the trees, including some little black ones called howler monkeys, I think, which make the most terrifying noise. The Guatemalans have shown me the tracks of other creatures as well which I haven't seen.

Wild game is the only source of meat in this remote spot, and a local hunter shot a deer a day or two back: the non-vegetarians (everybody except me!) had a feast of roast meat cooked over a home-made wooden barbecue.

Apart from that there's just thousands of mosquitoes and other little biting insects which are a real pain.

Our job at present is to explore the land and see how well it could be used for growing food, keeping animals and producing goods for sale outside. We have to look and see which parts are most likely to flood in winter, where the best place would be to build the village, and where trees can be cut down for building and fuel without damaging the rain forest, one of the largest and most valuable in the world.

Conservation of the forests is very important. Some people call them the lungs of the planet. We in England and in Europe cut down most of our native woodland long ago and now depend on these tropical forests for our oxygen supply. My friends here are quite aware that we in the north have brought this problem on ourselves, and that it's our own factories and cars which are polluting their world as well. They are angry that we are trying to control what they do with their own forests in order that we should be able to keep ourselves alive, and don't seem to do much for our part to stop polluting the planet which we all share. It's not a very cooperative way of doing things.

But there is something which makes them even more angry. While they try to use the forest wisely and in what is called a "sustainable" way, which means not taking more out than can be put in again, there are large logging companies and small illegal loggers who are still coming in and taking out the hardwoods. There's very big money in this, and, it seems, a blind eye is being turned on it all.

We have sat round the fire or in our hammocks talking about these things. The refugees are very poor people, and people who in the past have suffered more than we can begin to imagine. But they are also very unusual people, because during the period of exile in Mexico they have had to organise and educate themselves from scratch again. They have studied law and human rights; they have taken part in international negotiations with governments and international organisations which they would never have met before.

They have come to understand that they have to fight every inch of the way back into Guatemala, and that their fight is not just for themselves but for all the other people suffering unnecessary poverty in one of the most undeveloped countries in the Americas. But most important, they have come to understand that they have many allies, all over the world, and that they are not alone.

A lot of things are still to come. First they have to decide, back in the refugee camps in Mexico, whether they want to return to this particular spot. Next, the Guatemalan government has signed an agreement with the refugees that it will provide them with land, so the money has to be found to pay for it. Then there will be a period of incredibly hard work to prepare this wild place to receive perhaps 2500 people. And they will have to find a way of protecting the environment and coping with the illegal loggers as well.

As a final thought, a Guatemalan recently said to me that in order to have "rule of law" you have to have people. The reason we feel reasonably safe in our beds is that we live in communities where on the whole people have agreed on the laws and agreed to keep them. In Petén there are hardly any people. The only authority is the army, and people still have vivid memories of what the army did not so long ago.

The new communities of returned refugees will have to build much more than just houses and roads and drains: they will have to build a whole way of living together, of looking after each other and their new world in the rain forest. Try to imagine some of the things they might be having to think of now. How will they maintain law and order? What will they do with their criminals? Who will keep lists of all the people who arrive, who are born, who die, who get married? Will there be enough work for everybody? Who will pay the wages and from what? How will their young people get the education they deserve, so that they can follow the careers that they want?

It's a fragile situation, just like the life of the rain forest itself. Everything depends on the right balance, which the slightest disturbance can destroy. When I look at the rain forest, with its flourishing mixture of living creatures and systems, one feeling I have is that it is incredibly powerful and must be able to go on for ever. But when I dug a latrine for our group the other day, I saw that it all survives on about 7 inches of topsoil. In no time a rain forest can be turned into a desert.

And the refugees? Sometimes I think of them as people who have survived against all the odds; as a group of people who were once "just a bunch of farmers" and who now talk to ambassadors and heads of state; as people who have taught me in a few months as much as I ever learned in school and university. At other times I am frightened at how vulnerable they are, like a collection of tiny ants, with an army boot just coming down to crush them.

But there's a ray of hope in the fact that they and the forest might be going to live together again.

LETTER 6

15th October 1993

I often start writing these letters at moments when for one reason or another there's nothing else immediate to do. I am sitting on the bank of a river called Río Lacantun which is a branch of the great river Usumacinta which I've mentioned to you before. The Usumacinta has quite a long stretch which is the border between Mexico and Guatemala. This time I'm on the Mexican side. We've just walked for an hour through very muddy jungle. It's the rainy season and there's a lot of water around, though for much of the day it's still sunny and hot, and then it rains hard again.

We are waiting for a river boat which might arrive any time in the next few hours and will take us on to a little place called Tenejapa. From there we have another three hours' walk through the rain forest to a small town called Flor de Café (Coffee Flower). We'll have to stay the night there and then catch a bus early the next morning to Comitán.

There are very few people living in this part of Mexico, but there are always signs of humanity, such as the river boat itself, the paths which criss-cross the jungle, the odd plantation of rice or beans, and the banana plants which are shading us at the moment. There are also lots of very tame, brightly coloured butterflies and even more lots of stinging insects which always spoil the fun.

We have spent a couple of days working in a small and very remote community, deep in the rain forest. Since this area is close to the Guatemalan border, it was one of the regions to which thousands of Guatemalan refugees fled round about 1982. Here they were given shelter and support by the Mexican communities living in the area, many of them extremely poor, and with many problems of their own, though none had suffered as much as the Guatemalans had.

It took a long time, a few years in fact, for the Mexican government to decide what to do with the refugees, and meanwhile the area in the south remained a war zone, with the Guatemalan army often crossing the border and continuing their attacks.

In 1985, large numbers were moved from the south to refugee camps a long way from the border, in the interior of Mexico, but a large number also stayed behind and decided to resist being organised in this way. They had a variety of reasons for doing so. Many simply did not want to move away from contact with their home country. No-one imagined at that time how long the period of exile would be. They thought they would stay close by and return as soon as things calmed down. Quite a few in fact attempted to return, early on, but found everything, their houses, farms and animals destroyed, and a situation in which they were still in danger of violent attack from the army.

In the end many of them remained in hiding, staying on Mexican farms, living on small patches of land allowed them by local farmers to live and work on in exchange for a share of the produce, and some setting up small communities on their own. Eleven or so years later, now that the return of large numbers of refugees to their own country seems to be for real, slowly they are coming out of virtual hiding and signing up for the return to Petén in Guatemala, which is where I wrote you the last letter from.

For them the situation has been very different from that of the people in the camps. They have been out of touch with Mexican town life. They have not had the benefit of the money and training which has come from the Mexican government, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and from a number of other organisations. Many people have still not learned Spanish, since in their communities in Guatemala they spoke only local, Indian languages. Many are still very frightened of returning: being close to the frontier they listen to Guatemalan radio every day and know very well that things have not improved much.

They can hear it with their own ears when the army continues bombing areas in the north of Guatemala. And most important of all, perhaps, they are only about one-and-a-half hours' walk away from the place where the first major refugee return arrived in January this year.

In some ways they are very cut off, but the other side of that coin is that they are in direct touch with life as it continues to be lived in the north of Guatemala. They have perhaps not had the same chances as the people in the camps to educate themselves and develop their communities, but they have been much more in contact with events in their own country and have had more practice in coping with the hardships of everyday life than the people in the camps, who have had more things provided for them.

Yesterday, when we were working with them, I asked them a question about what they considered to be their real strengths as a community. One man quickly answered, without much hesitation: "We are eating."

I've thought about that answer a lot, since I wonder how many of you, or how many people in Europe, would give me that answer. And what does it really mean? To him it was a very concentrated way of saying a lot of things, such as:

"We were driven out of Guatemala. Our villages were bombed, our crops and animals were destroyed, thousands of our people were killed. We escaped to another country. We were helped by local people. We built houses. Again. We started sowing crops. Again. We started to think about education for our children and some kind of health care for all of us. Again. And here we are, more than ten years later, alive, surviving, eating."

Then when we asked them what they thought their weaknesses were, the first answer was: "We ran away to Mexico," a strange thing to say when you think about what happened. But this too isn't as simple as it seems. Not everybody fled to Mexico. Many people stayed in Guatemala, some scattering to other, safer parts of the country, some to the shanty towns in the capital, and quite a large number stayed in hiding in the forests in the north and north-west of the country.

These people made a conscious decision not to leave. They stayed because they didn't want to go to a foreign country, and because it was their decision to go on trying to live together in their own way, as a challenge to the continuing violence of the army, which as I have said is still going on to this day. I shall tell you more about them in another letter. But it has meant that there has always been a shadow in the minds of those who escaped that perhaps they should have stayed on and not run away.

It was interesting to talk about the strengths and weaknesses quite separately. Quite clearly they were conscious of how much they had actually achieved, but on the other hand they knew how vulnerable they still were. Many as I said still don't speak Spanish. Many are frightened of coming out of hiding, frightened of the towns, frightened of what life might be like in Guatemala when and if they return.

17th October 1993

I have taken up my pen again a couple of days later, having got back to what we might call (rightly or wrongly) civilisation. The boat I was waiting for when I started this letter was four hours late, and when it arrived it had in it a number of people and a very pregnant cow about to give birth at any moment. The river was vast and brown and swollen with rain. It had been a great problem getting the boat to a suitable point on the bank. Two people had had to hold the boat tightly in position. The cow had been upturned, its legs had been tied together and six strong people had slowly got it into the boat. This was the cause of the delay.

Then, as the journey continued, the boat got fuller and fuller. An enormous fridge (a Brazilian model which ran on gas) was loaded on; six large mattresses; many large, heavy sacks of maize, which sometimes were thrown on from the bank, and sometimes arrived on the shoulders of someone actually jumping off the bank into the boat; a dog, a parrot and many more people, including children and two mothers with small babies.

We came to a fork in the river. The original boat was going one way, and another boat was waiting for people going in the other direction. Those of us changing boats - not the cow, fortunately - had to clamber from the one into the other, and on we went for another half hour to our eventual destination. It was already practically dark. A further 15-minute scramble up a very muddy slope and along a path by torchlight took us to the nearest little village.

As a result we could go no further. We were four hours on foot away from Flor de Café, had missed the night bus and were a day behind schedule. We found a house which gave us food and space for the night on the floor.

We set off the next morning at 5 am, an hour before daylight, and after a long struggle through deep mud and the most beautiful jungle scenery, if you could spare an eye for it, got to Flor de Café by 9.30 am.

I've gone into a bit of detail on this, not to describe our exploits in the jungle, but to try to give you an idea of why the people are there, and how difficult simple communication is when you have no electricity, no telephone, no roads, and when you depend on walking and unpredictable boats in difficult weather conditions for very simple things like taking messages or going to town to buy supplies.

Then the boats aren't cheap, especially when you have no real income at all. The boat journey on the way back cost us the equivalent of £3 each, which is a small fortune to people there.

I'd like you to try to put together what I've just said with some of the information I've given you before in other letters.

The planned return of 3000 or so refugees to Petén needs an amazing amount of complicated organisation, and when you're trying to organise anything, even when you and your friends want to go out together on a Friday night, you have to be able to communicate.

People in our countries, and in the towns in Mexico and Guatemala, go to the telephone, make a few calls, sort out what they're going to do, when, where. You make sure there's transport there and back, that you've got enough money, the right clothes and so on. So: you get your dad to drive you to town, where you meet up, go to the cinema, then to a night club afterwards, or whatever it might be, and later on you've got some way of getting home, and even if you have to walk there's probably street lighting to help you on your way.

You get the point? Now start again from scratch and try to organise the return of 3000 refugees from Mexico to Petén, and when you do so don't forget that it's not just what we might call a logistical exercise. I mean, it's not just a question of money and transport and communication and electricity and so on. Don't forget the situation I have described in Guatemala, and most especially don't forget the mental state of all the people concerned.

Yes, maybe they have survived, they are alive, they do have enough basic food and they do feel relatively safe, but the world is a big and threatening place. They still have nightmares about the past, and now it's almost as if there are new nightmares about the future.