LETTER 11

8th October 1994

I have just paid another short visit to El Quetzal. It was my fourth to that part of Guatemala. The first took place in April last year, the second in July, and the third and fourth in July and October this year. I have seen Petén in summer and winter.

In this part of the world there is heat almost all the year round, though it does get cooler in November and December. But the big difference is the rain. When the rainy season gets into full swing the forest becomes a patchwork of water and mud, and with the warm wetness come mosquitoes as never before.

I have complained in these letters about being bitten, but I have only just this week discovered what swarms of flying attackers can do to you. They aren't worried by shirt or trousers, especially when they are drenched with sweat and the water which was sometimes above our knees as we waded towards our destination. You know how we sometimes exaggerate and say: I was bitten all over. Well this time it was true, and I won't exaggerate again.

I got my hammock and mosquito net up, but in these conditions they still seemed to get in, and I almost fancy that the boldest of them actually enjoy insect repellent and get drunk on it.

The forest is never empty of people. When we arrived in El Quetzal, the xate-gatherers were there again. (Pronounce it "shat-ay".) Conversation nowadays is a bit different because everyone slaps themselves the whole time to keep the insects off. I also noticed that the man who made the tortilla in the morning mixed the dough with one hand, keeping his left hand free to drive off unwelcome visitors. Later in the day the huntsman, Don Elias, arrived on horseback with his little rifle slung in front of him.

I remember him from last year because he sings loudly, when he isn't actually stalking something, and you can hear this eery song from far away in the forest. I followed the sound and went to meet him, and we greeted each other warmly, even though we hadn't seen each other for twelve months or more.

I also recall that when he came here then he had a bout of malaria in the night, and I remember him shouting and groaning from the high temperature and the hallucinations that sometimes come with it.

Malaria is the real danger that mosquitoes bring, and most of the people who live there don't have access to the drugs which ward it off. So it's a hazard over the whole region.

The background to this visit is that things seem to be very nearly ready for the setting of a date for the return, and the first real step will be the arrival of work-teams of refugees from Mexico to start clearing areas of forest, building the basic housing that's needed, the digging of toilets and the setting up of a clean water supply.

There is no doubt in our mind after this visit that it will be a tough assignment. The teams will have to arrive in difficult conditions, bringing tools and equipment with them on foot or on horseback - though the horses have almost as much difficulty as the people. They will have to live and work in the wet and the mud until they can construct some sort of reasonable housing for themselves. And they'll have to fight the insects, the malaria and other health hazards which these conditions might bring.

Then, as usual, there's a lot of talk as to when the return should be. Although everything is so much closer than it was before, the refugees still haven't got final permission from the authorities to settle in that particular area, which means they still don't legally and finally own the land, and they can't strictly speaking move until they do.

So there's quite a group of people who are saying: "Well, let's go anyway. If 2000 people arrive at the frontier, people who have a right to be in their own country, and especially if we can get international press and television coverage, they'll have to let us into what is after all our own land."

It's a strong argument and they'd do it. Many of them are fed up enough by now to get up, as a mass, and walk, if necessary, to the Guatemalan border. What a bad advertisement that would be for the Guatemalan government! They don't even let their own people, driven out by massacre and persecution, back into their lands again.

The refugees have been so patient for so long. They've waited for this and that agreement to be signed. They've waited through all the endless discussions about the land; they've waited for money to pay the enormous costs of the return, and now that they can almost see it over the horizon, one government department won't put its signature to the paper. No wonder people say: "Let's get up and go. We don't want to wait for another year and another growing season. Twelve years has been a long time."

Then there are other arguments as to why a return at this moment would be a good thing.

I've probably mentioned to you before that there are about 100,000 Guatemalan refugees altogether in Mexico, most of whom want to go back to their native country. But they are only a small part of the total of Guatemalans who fled from the violence of the 70s and 80s. It is reckoned that there are about a million altogether, most of them still far away from their original homes, or displaced, as it is called, inside the country itself, hiding in the forests or huddled in the slums around the capital.

Add to that number hundreds of thousands more people who may not have fled their homes, but are still living in poverty, working, if they're lucky, for wages which add up to about £1.50 a day, and the victims, the widows and the orphans, of 35 years of war between the Guatemalan army and its own people.

The people are crying for peace, and the guerrilla, which is the opposition army, inside the country, fighting back against the government, is going through the long process of sorting out terms of a peace which will be acceptable to everybody.

The army and the government have a lot to lose by this peace, and they don't give in that easily. The terms of the peace demand many of those basic human rights which we take for granted, schools for everybody; hospitals and nurses and doctors; decent roads and transport throughout the country. It's nothing out of the way. What people want is the chance of a decent life, work, health and better opportunities for themselves and their children.

Most people in the country at the moment have practically none of these things. Guatemala, its land and its industry, is owned by very, very few rich families. Elections for parliament are a fraud, and only about 20% of the population take part and elect the same people over and over again.

The worst of it is that these few people keep themselves rich by paying very low wages, by keeping all forms of protest under control with the help of the army and the national police, and, in the case of industrialists, refusing to invest in better machinery which would be safer for the workers and indeed more profitable for them in the long run. The quick buck is still made through cheap labour and heavy-handed control.

Add to this an important point which I've mentioned before. The army and many of the rich families also profit from a lot of illegal dealings, especially in drugs and logging, since Guatemala - Petén, in fact - has some of the best and most valuable rain forest timber in the world.

Do you imagine that they want to give that up because of a bunch of peasants returning from exile, or a bunch of factory workers demanding better wages and conditions? It would cost money. It would destroy the life-style they've enjoyed for literally hundreds of years.

So why would this moment be a good one to return?

First of all, I'm sure you're aware that no country can just do exactly what it likes without a response from other countries. For many years the United States, Guatemala's superpower near-neighbour, supported the government and army in Guatemala. In practical terms it meant that they could buy cheap coffee, fruit and meat from them. Nowadays, however, they are singing a different tune. They have started a Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and the long-term idea is to extend this over the whole continent.

If you want another country's population to have enough money to sell your goods to them, they have to be reasonably well paid. If you want your workforce to take more part in complicated modern production methods, using computers and so on, you have to educate them better. In fact, you see, what Guatemala is doing inside its own country now is old-fashioned, out of date, as far as the modern world of Free Trade Agreements is concerned. They can hardly even take part. And this is one of the strongest reasons why human rights are more important to people now than they used to be.

Mexico wants to be a modern country like the United States and is having enough problems with human rights in its own southern region, let alone with being lumbered with 100,000 refugees from a neighbouring country. Mexico wants the refugees out, and Guatemala wants them back because it doesn't like all those accusations of human rights abuse being thrown around, and it too wants to be seen to be part of the 21st century world. It has just agreed with the guerrilla that a United Nations human rights delegation should be allowed into the country to monitor how things are going on. They arrived a couple of weeks ago.

So that's the situation. Guatemala wants people to think it's a democratic modern state. It wants tourists to come and enjoy its scenery and its traditions. But the rich ruling class certainly doesn't want to give up its life-style and its privileges. This is exactly why some people feel that now is the moment for the refugees and displaced people of Guatemala to rise up in an organised, collective and peaceful way and say: "Stand and deliver!" because the gamble is that at the moment the government can't refuse.

You remember that last time I explained to you about the four frogs. One of the most powerful of them was the "mad frog", which represents the political process, and I've just been off on a long red herring about politics in Guatemala and North America. Why?

The point is that sometimes, often in fact, people like you and me, people we call 'ordinary' people, become like the pawns in chess when the game of big politics is being played. If a government declares war, it knows that lots of 'ordinary' people who don't want to fight at all will have to do so, and be killed. How do they measure whether the human cost is worth while?

If the leaders decide that there has to be a return now, the refugees will have to set off, old people, children, ill people, pregnant women, everybody, and go to the place called El Quetzal, whose name you now know so well, in winter time, to a landscape of mosquitoes and mud. There will almost certainly be casualties, of disease and accident, more than would happen in a better season and with more time for planning.

Today is October 8th 1994, the second anniversary of the signing of the agreements between the refugees and the Guatemalan government, two long years since the government said, in the presence of the United Nations and other international witnesses, "Yes, you can now come back and on your own terms." In two days' time, in Campeche, there will be an important meeting in which the leaders of this group of refugees will make their decision about what to do. How do you make such a decision? How do you decide on what human cost is acceptable for the sake of what you hope will be a better future?

LETTER 12

December 28th 1994

Suddenly, a few weeks ago, things began to move forward. It was decided by our group of refugees to scratch together all the money they could lay their hands on and send a small team of about 20 people to El Quetzal to make a start on the work which would lead to the building of the new settlement.

There were several reasons for this decision. Everyone felt it was important to get started, if only in a small way. It was thought that if a team actually went to El Quetzal and began the work, it would help to fight the disappointment and depression that so many people were feeling about the general lack of action towards the return. Most important, the gamble was that if the refugees actually started to move in and build their community, the government might at last decide to do something positive to help them on their way.

It is a real gamble. Instead of waiting any longer for government and United Nations money to pay for their travel and food, their tools, equipment and materials, they have decided to spend every penny they have to kick-start the return. By the time they have paid for axes and chain saws; wheelbarrows, picks and spades; diesel oil and cement; boots, lamps, protective clothing, transport and food for 20 people, the money they have won't last them for more than a few weeks - and what happens then?

It is a difficult and risky decision, but one which they took without dispute at an assembly of all the leaders just over a week ago, and the date for the team to leave Mexico on the journey south was set at January 5th.

For me myself the final setting of a date for the brigade, as the work-team is called, to leave, has come just too late, since my time here is now at an end, and on January 20th I shall be setting off back to England.

But the last few weeks have been very busy. As soon as the idea of sending a brigade was agreed and people began to think seriously about the reality of going off into the jungle and starting to build a new town, they realised how much in the way of preparation still had to be done. There were still no final maps and plans, no clear ideas about how to cope with the water supply and the drainage, where the roads and churches and schools and health centres would be.

I've explained to you before how difficult it has been to make proper plans - which cost a lot of time and money - without knowing whether you will really be able to move on to the land or not.

Now however the decision had been made and suddenly there was a tremendous amount of work to do. We had behind us many many hours of discussions, notebooks full of schemes and ideas which we had gathered from workshops and meetings and conversations with a large number of people. What was needed now was to draw it all together into a plan which would work for everybody.

One of the big subjects of discussion had been whether the people should all own the land and the forest together, farm it together, sharing out the work and sharing out all the crops and products which came from it, or whether they should divide it up, so that each family was just responsible for its own little bit, bearing its own costs and keeping its own profits. The first way of doing things could be called a "collective" way of managing the land, and the second an "individual" way.

It's been a long discussion. One of the problems is that most people want their own piece of land, but they also want schools and clinics and roads and a waste disposal system which belong to everybody. So the community needs its own money to pay for its public services, and the question has been where this money will come from.

Another question they have talked about a lot is how the community, once it starts its own new town, can bring itself more up to date and share more of the benefits that richer countries enjoy. They don't just want basic health care and basic education and a continuation of the sort of life they had before they were forced to leave the country. They want a secondary school and a technical institute so that young people can have a chance to get qualifications and move on to become engineers and teachers and lawyers. They want good communications with the rest of the country and with other countries. This means roads and telephones and newspapers and well equipped offices. They want to be able to produce goods and sell them and buy other things from outside which they don't produce themselves.

There's a single word which describes the whole complicated mixture of ingredients that I've just been talking about. It's the word "development", and it's these very ingredients which make the difference between "developed" countries, as we call them, and "less developed" countries. What the returning refugees want in their new community is the chance to develop, and, even more important, to help the whole region where they intend to settle to develop as well. The long-term scheme is a development plan for the north of Petén.

It's complicated. It's difficult. And to some extent it's dangerous - because it's exactly the kind of competition that the Guatemalan government and army want to prevent. They don't want the poor in their country to better themselves in this way.

But let's get back to the nitty-gritty. Imagine picking up a pencil and starting to design the first step in this process. On January 5th, twenty people, with a small team of technical advisers and helpers, will set off for El Quetzal to fell the first tree and dig the first spadeful of soil. How exactly do they start?

You have probably gathered that there is very little public money paid in Guatemala to help the poor. There is no public health service, no unemployment benefit and no government policy at all for providing people with shelter. If you want a house, you build your own, and most people do so out of whatever materials they can get hold of. Very few people can afford breeze blocks and cement and steel reinforcements. So it's clear that to build decent houses for 250 families you have to find a large sum of money from somewhere.

Fortunately, when the question of the land is settled, this money can be found. The international community - including the European Union - is willing to pay to help towards the return of the refugees. But the problem is this: you give someone money to build a house. They build a house. The money is gone. They've got a house, but they're still poor.

One of the development plans for the new town is to spend some of the money on setting up a number of small factories, one for example to make breeze blocks, another to cut up felled trees into planks, some of which can be sold and others used for building. In this way they will produce their own building materials cheaply, and, later on be able to sell them to neighbouring communities and train other people to set up their own factories and workshops as well. So the money they spend will not just dry up, but turn into a source of more money and more benefits for the people.

The very first brigade will start by clearing enough land and felling sufficient trees to build some simple, basic structures for the brigade itself to live in, though even at this stage everything they build will be used later for some purpose or other, so as not to waste materials.

Right at the beginning they will divide into smaller groups, each responsible for a special task, one for building, one for timber, one for digging toilets (or latrines), one for water, one for cooking the food and one for communications, two people whose job it will be to write up everything that happens, take photos and videos, and keep in touch with the refugee population in Mexico.

As soon as they have built accommodation and services for themselves, they start on the bigger tasks of preparing for the arrival of the next, big brigade which will be 100 people or more. But meanwhile the smaller groups will be working on the water supply and the latrines and on the major task of marking out the boundaries of the settlement and plotting the areas where all the houses, the factories and public buildings will be.

The group in charge of timber has the task of going through the whole area, marking with paint the trees which will be used for building and the valuable hardwoods which will be carefully selected, sawn up and sold. Other wood can then be used for fuel.

The conservation and management of the forest is one of the most important tasks that the community will have in the long run. It is their most valuable natural resource, and, with proper use, wood will pay a lot of their bills for them. But it is also important because, as you will know, the care of the rain forest is a vital element in keeping their own land fertile and in looking after the health of our planet earth.

Perhaps you will have gathered that in everything they do, from the moment the first brigade arrives, they will have to be thinking not only of their needs just at the moment but of how things will develop in the more distant future. Every step is part of a development plan designed - by them - to give them a better and richer life-style in years to come.

When the second, big brigade arrives, serious work will begin on the access road and the building of the breeze block production unit. The road is the key to everything. Without the road it is almost impossible to bring diesel for the machines, the generators and the water pumps, cement for building, tools, food and medical supplies for the brigades. Without roads you could almost say that development was impossible.

When the refugees talk about development, they are talking about the possibility of working their way out of generations of poverty into a kind of life which is more like what you and I are used to, nothing out of the ordinary to us, just to have the basic resources and services which make life more comfortable and more creative. Things being what they are, it is almost out of the question to do this without a considerable sum of money being invested in making it possible for them to take the first step. After that, it is essential for them to use the investment in such a way that it continues to bring more wealth, rather than drying up and leaving them where they were.

One of the most important questions which we have asked but not answered is: how does the community own the land and manage its money, as a "collective" or as a series of individuals all trying to make good in their own way? The refugees' answer so far has been a mixture of both. The forest will belong to the community, and whatever income it brings will be shared, as will the work that goes into it. But each family will have its own patch of land and will be able to do with it what it likes, feeding itself, buying and selling its products and so on.

The whole community has organised itself into a co-operative, which is a legal form of organisation in which the rules state that the property and its products are a collective responsibility, and it is assumed by many people though still not finally decided, that projects like the breeze block factory and the wood-workshop will belong to the co-operative and bring public income to the community, so that they can pay their teachers and their nurses and their engineers and bricklayers, who may not have time to grow their own food.

Many of these questions have still no final answers. One thing is for sure. What was once a community of farmers who lived entirely on the produce of their own land, has already changed during the years of exile in Mexico into something else. There now exists, as part of this new period of development, a new sort of person, the wage-earner, maybe someone who has no land at all but lives on being a shoemaker or a carpenter, a doctor or a lawyer. Part of the refugees' future will have to be how they deal with this new group of people, which in our countries is the commonest group of all, but which for them has only recently started to exist.

These decisions, which they still have to make, about how they own the land and how they employ their own wage-earners, may turn out to be the most complicated and difficult they have ever yet faced.

LETTER 13

January 2nd 1995

The agreements signed with the Guatemalan government on October 8th 1992 were the first big milestone on the return road for the refugees. They made perfectly plain the intention of the refugee population to return to Guatemala when and as they wished, in conditions of dignity and safety, and in a collective and organised manner. In a much more down-to-earth way they also made sure of their right to land and to the loans of money - on easy terms - which would allow them to settle and start working constructively again.

At the time, the most immediately important parts were spelled out in detail: the land, the money, the interest they would have to pay on loans. What lay behind them, the right to their own organisation, the right to meet and move around without fear, the right not to be called up for military service, the right to a humane and dignified life-style, had a lot of unexplored corners still. Somewhere there, hovering in the background, was a dream that life when they returned would be better than when they left, that they might have a chance to avoid the poverty trap to which so many, indeed most Guatemalans were condemned.

Over the last two years and a few months, since October 1992, I have not had a chance to see the dream become a reality, but I have seen it become clearer, no longer a dim vision of the future, but now a series of very concrete plans. People have a much clearer idea of how they're going to do it.

I've given you some idea of the training and thinking and planning that's gone on, though there have been many other important developments which I haven't been directly involved in, an these I've had to leave out. I haven't for example said anything about the strong and growing women's organisation which has gathered strength over this time, sent representatives abroad to Canada and the United States and taken a large part in designing projects for the new community. I haven't said much about the schemes people have worked out for farming the rain-forest so that it can go on thriving as well as providing people with food and materials and income.

I've given you just a few photos from my album, to show you how things are going, and how a group of once terribly damaged people have managed to get on their feet and take control of their future.

I want to write you this last letter about the dream, what they and their leaders see as a future which doesn't yet exist, and about which maybe another day I shall start sending another set of letters your way.

The war in Guatemala has gone on for over thirty years. At present the government and the guerrilla - still fighting back from the forests and the mountains - are discussing a peace agreement. There had been hopes that it would be signed by the end of 1994, but the start-stop process goes on, and the Secretary-General of the United Nations is urging them to bring the process to a close. Guatemala is now the last country in Central and South America in which a war with its own people is still going on.

The guerrilla still say that signing a piece of paper is not enough. They have fought this long war against poverty and injustice in the country, and they won't give in until there are real signs that the government will take action to help its own people out of the desperate poverty in which most of them live.

War doesn't help to make a country less poor. On the contrary. But, they argue, when everything else has been tried, and tried again, and failed, and when poverty and human rights abuse continue, there is no other choice but to fight back. The government, they say, must give guarantees and show that the guarantees can and will be carried out, before real reconstruction can begin to take place.

The guerrilla believe that the government must agree and take action on all the points in a long and complicated set of conditions before the state of war can be declared at an end.

The dream of our small group of refugees works in a different way. The agreements signed in October 1992 are small in their scope compared with the wide sweep of the agreements being discussed with the guerrilla. But small though they are, they are sound and clear and strong. The agreements aren't the whole bridge, but they are a firm, well-fashioned keystone - and the dream goes further still.

I mentioned in my last letter how they were going to build houses by building factories first. I mentioned how they would then start helping other communities to build their own houses or schools or churches - and factories. In everything they plan for themselves there is a plan for the region as a whole. The dream is that the new settlement in El Quetzal will be a seed, and that the seed will grow into a tree whose branches will spread over a wide distance.

They have planned roads far too big for them, but which will eventually bring traffic and goods to the whole region. They will build a secondary school big enough for young people from further afield. Their first small health centre will stand in grounds big enough one day to hold a hospital. Their cultural centre will be a place where Mayan life and history can be celebrated. Their guest-house for workers and accompaniers will grow into a hotel where tourists interested in the rain forest and its wild life can come and share and learn from their experiences.

More than this, the women's organisation has produced a series of projects, the most ambitious of which is for no less than twelve crèches in the new settlement, to enable women to take a fuller part in the life of the community, to provide activity and education for tiny children and give them a richer start in life. Another of their schemes is to cultivate a number of experimental plots for the production of new food crops, for instance to start soya bean production as an alternative source of milk protein.

The dream is no longer a vague longing for better times. It has been nailed down into a series of very down-to-earth, possible projects, each one of which is intended not only for them but for the whole region in which they live, the beautiful, fertile land of Petén. In fact, as they would put it, they intend to make a start, however small, at raising Guatemala out of its poverty.

The idea of the breeze-block factory which I mentioned in my last letter applies to every aspect of the dream. To build a house you first build a factory, because then, when you've built your house, you won't be poor all over again. The key-word in the dream is the word "economic", a word I haven't used much before, but I'll risk it now at the end of my last letter.

The idea of an "economic" solution to poverty and conflict in Guatemala almost certainly means years of long, hard work. It may not be an alternative to the war, but it could be a powerful instrument with which to make war no longer necessary. Obviously they can't start without help from the outside - and from the government. They need investment. Indeed they argue that as citizens they have a right to such support. They are not asking for a gift, like a beggar asking for the price of a cup of tea. To repeat words recently heard in the news, they are not asking for a "hand-down" but for a "hand-up". Once they're on their feet, they'll walk without help.

This is the dream. In some ways the thirteen years of exile in Mexico, difficult though they were, have given them a chance to think and learn and charge their batteries. So many dreams have seemed better in the making than in the fulfilling. Let us hope that the future gives these people a chance.