Guatemalan Refugees Return From Mexico to an Emotional Welcome

Ending more than a decade of exile, almost 2,500 Guatemalan refugees crossed into their native land Wednesday and prepared to rebuild their lives, despite continuing civil war and uncertain futures.

Their return from refugee camps in southern Mexico clears the way for the repatriation of tens of thousands of Guatemalans who fled violence and military repression in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

A 76-bus caravan carrying the refugees rambled into a border checkpoint at La Mesilla, Guatemala, about noon, as hundreds of waiting friends and supporters cheered and set off fireworks. With marimba music filling the air, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Rigoberta Menchu, herself a Guatemalan Indian forced into exile by the war, gave the refugees an emotional welcome.

“When you return home for the first time, more than just your life changes,” she told them. “This is a great happiness for those who come . . . and a symbol of hope for those who remained behind.”

After a 40-minute celebration, the convoy maneuvered about 50 miles over the winding Pan American Highway to the provincial capital of Huehuetenango, where the refugees were placed in large tents while awaiting processing.

Many, looking dazed and tired, carried a few belongings in plastic bags as they got off the buses. Menchu shook their hands; a Protestant minister blessed them. The refugees, who number 2,480 including hundreds of children, will spend a few nights in Huehuetenango before heading to Guatemala City for a weekend rally. They will end up in remote settlements the government has established for them.

The repatriation, repeatedly delayed as President Jorge Serrano’s government and refugee leaders argued, comes as talks aimed at ending Guatemala’s civil war have stalled. Nevertheless, with the war winding down, and fed up with squalid conditions in the Mexican camps, many refugees believed this repatriation offered them the best chance they would ever have for coming home. Many will be allowed to buy small plots to farm or raise sheep.

“There is no problem being here because here we have land, and that is why we returned,” said Santos Caal, 27, coddling the smallest of his three children. “We have a right to be here. I feel good, because I am Guatemalan and I am in my country.”

Caal, whose father died while in exile, left his tiny town in the Ixcan region of Guatemala in 1982, when the army began kidnaping villagers.

But Francisca Ortiz Ordonez, who also left Guatemala in 1982 when the army burned down her village and all the villagers’ crops, was less optimistic. “We ended up then (in 1982) like we are right now--with nothing,” said the pregnant mother of seven.

More than 100,000 people were killed and a similar number forced into exile by Guatemala’s civil war and by a “scorched earth” policy carried out by the military, which often accused peasants of supporting leftist guerrillas. Army patrols destroyed entire villages.