Former Guatemalan war refugee Emiliano Ramirez complains about conditions in the village to which he was relocated in 1997 on his return from Mexico.Stringer photo.
HUACUT, Guatemala, Sept 5 (Reuters) - Lured by a promise of peace and a plot of land to farm, Emiliano Ramirez left a refugee camp in Mexico with his family in 1997 to begin a new life in a nation whose wartime horrors he fled more than a decade before.
But after three years scratching out a living on an almost inaccessible mosquito-infested savanna in Guatemala's frontier Peten district, Ramirez, 49, is having second thoughts.
"What advantage is there to living here? There's nothing," the Mam Indian said, sitting in a threadbare hammock slung over the mud floor of the single-room shack he shares with his wife and two daughters. "We spent 15 years in Mexico and returned to poverty."
Up to 150,000 Guatemalan refugees fled into neighboring Mexico in the early 1980s during the bloodiest years of the Central American nation's destructive civil war. Most were Mayan Indians, an ethnic majority that bore the brunt of a 36-year conflict that claimed 200,000 lives.
More than 40,000 have since returned to tend land provided under a 1996 peace accord between the state and leftist guerrillas. But the failure of cash-strapped governments to meet their expectations has led many to regret the move.
Guatemalan daily Prensa Libre recently reported more than 500 such families had returned to Mexico since 1999, fleeing hunger and poverty. This number could not be independently confirmed, but the Guatemalan government has conceded conditions for returned refugees are far from ideal.
MUD AND RAVENOUS RODENTS
"I know the conditions these people are living in," President Alfonso Portillo told reporters. "I know that some people have just been given roofing material and some stakes."
Ramirez and his family settled in a sparsely populated lowland area of Guatemala in the early 1970s after poverty drove them from their highland village. But the frontier Ixcan region became a guerilla stronghold, drawing heavy army repression.
As tensions still run high in many such former conflict zones, most returnees have been sent to specially built communities far from their former homes.
In Ramirez's case, that meant Huacut, a former cattle ranch in the vast Peten district, another lowland frontier region in the north that constitutes about a third of the country.
Set in a soggy savanna that turns bone-dry when rains recede, the collection of wooden huts lighted by candles is home to some 150 former refugee families. Although they were promised a new road on arrival, a mud track that turns into a river in the rainy season remains the only link to a distant highway.
While surrounding land is fertile, cultivating crops has proven difficult. When a nearby river burst its banks last year, hundreds of hungry rats went on a devastating rampage through fields ripe for harvest.
"It's extreme poverty. You have to see it to believe it," said Orlando Rodriguez, one of a handful of Cuban volunteer doctors running U.N.-sponsored clinics in such settlements.
Since January, Rodriguez has detected 60 probable cases of malaria among Huacut's inhabitants.
A GOVERNMENT SCORNED
A sign on the wall of Rodriguez's wooden office thanks four aid organizations and "the community itself" for providing the facilities. The government does not get a mention.
"The government always says there's no (money)," said Francisco Lopez, one of eight volunteer village "health promoters" who assist the doctor.
Even in Huacut, where a highly organized peasant cooperative has pooled resources to fight off hunger, conditions have led some to desperation. A peace observer stationed in the village for the U.S.-based Guatemala Accompaniment Project said some 15 families have so far left to join relatives in Mexico.
The huge task of rebuilding postwar Guatemala and combating the extreme poverty that swelled guerilla ranks now falls to Portillo, elected in December in a wave of popular support.
But returned refugees are not the only ones needing help.
"We're not just 10, 15 or 20,000 people in Guatemala," said Fernando Lopez, spokesman for the country's National Peace Fund. "We're 11 million and this government doesn't have a magic wand to solve problems stemming from a 36-year war in six months."
While they wait for their turn, some returned refugees like Q'eqchi' Indian Maria Chacon, who lives in a nearby village, are left to lament a decision that was never even theirs to make.
"I never wanted to come back," said Chacon, 43, who fled a massacre in which her mother, father and four more relatives died. "My husband just said, 'We're going.'"
A boy eats at the Dandora Municipal Dumping Site in Kenya's capital Nairobi December 10, 2009. The dumping site was declared full and a health hazard for the neighbouring population in ...
