Bridging Ideologies, and Rivers, in Central America

Bickering between former guerrillas and people who sided with the army during Guatemala’s civil war has long strangled development in this remote jungle village.

Plans by foreign aid groups for a water project, a farm project, houses and more were canceled in recent years as pro-government factions refused to approve programs they saw as pro-rebel.

“They shouted down women’s projects. They shouted down development projects,” said community elder Alfonso Monzon, recalling uproars over a basketball court and a day-care center.

“They would say: ‘These people are no good. They were guerrillas. They were involved in the war,’ ” Monzon said. “Foreign agencies saw that if they helped that side, they would anger this one.”

Finally, the U.S. Agency for International Development found something both sides wanted: a 130-foot steel trestle spanning the Pescado River to link impoverished Mayalan with the rest of the Central American nation.

The span, which opened in June, is part of a four-year, $4.1-million project in which the U.S. agency is building up to 10 bridges and repairing about 100 miles of gravel road to improve access and allow export of goods from the long-ignored Ixcan region of northern Guatemala. All the better, villagers say, if the bridges also unite divided communities.

“This bridge is going to help this community,” said Rodrigo Montejo, a Mayalan resident. “We hope it will bring materials for houses and a water system, as it has now brought materials for the school and health clinic.”

Montejo is a former guerrilla who became Mayalan’s community president after the 36-year civil war ended in December 1996. He was ousted later because of what some said were his leftist sympathies.

Former Enemies Live Side by Side

Despite the peace accord that ended the war, such squabbling and suspicions remain common in the remote communities of Ixcan.

The region has long been neglected by the central government, and it suffered greatly during the long guerrilla war. Now former rebels and government supporters live in the same communities.

Once, no one lived in Ixcan’s pristine jungles. Then, in the 1950s, land-poor farmers began moving in despite the area’s thin soil and endemic tropical diseases.

When the civil war raged in the 1970s and 1980s, four army battalions controlled Ixcan’s eastern half. The rebel Guerrilla Army of the Poor controlled the west.

Thousands of settlers caught in the middle took refuge in neighboring Mexico. Thousands more were killed, many of them in the estimated 52 massacres committed in Ixcan--most of them by soldiers or their civilian paramilitaries.

Nationwide, the conflict left 200,000 people dead or missing. The era’s hatreds remain.

In Mayalan, the infighting flared in May 1997 when a half-dozen of the community’s estimated 400 residents publicly admitted they had fought with leftist rebels. Afterward, any project they proposed was turned down.

Then came the idea for a bridge.

Bridge Transforms an Isolated Village

Separated from the rest of the province by 9,000-foot mountains, Mayalan’s only access to the world was a potholed, bandit-plagued road that meandered to the east, away from the capital, Guatemala City, to the south.

Mayalan is one of more than 160 villages in 620 square miles that share four police officers, three high schools and one health center.

But villagers hope the Mayalan bridge will change that.

The coffee-colored river that the new bridge spans is only 12 feet wide and about 4 feet deep. But during the rainy season, from April to November, it swells to depths of 20 feet and becomes impassable except by small boat.

Before the bridge, Monzon said, “We had to walk [about a mile] at 3 a.m. in the mud to get to the river to cross and meet the trucks on the other side. Sometimes goods fell in.”

The bridge lets traffic reach the village, such as the trucks that brought building materials for a new school and clinic. During a recent malaria outbreak, doctors drove in to distribute medicine.

Nature can still intrude, though. When Hurricane Mitch hit Central America in early November, the USAID bridges escaped unharmed, but flooding damaged some of the new roads leading to them.

Another bridge was recently completed over the Tzeja River in nearby La Trinitaria, a palm-thatched village 95 miles north of Guatemala City as the crow flies, but 200 miles by winding road.

Regional leader Carlos Osler said the 150-foot bridge is a new beginning for La Trinitaria.

Even before President Alvaro Arzu finished his speech inaugurating the bridge in late September, representatives from at least nine communities presented petitions to have the proposed road extended to their villages.

In another project, USAID is spending $5.5 million in Ixcan to help grow crops like pineapple and hearts of palm as a way to bring in desperately needed cash.

“Because of the war, we lost a great deal,” Osler said. “We lost houses. We lost crops. We lost animals. We were left with nothing. We know we cannot recover what was lost. But there is hope.”