ECHO-OXFAM GB
EMERGENCY SUPPORT FOR THE RESETTLEMENT OF THE INTERNALLY DISPLACED IN GUATEMALA
A Brief Background
Over the past three years the European Unions Humanitarian Office, ECHO,
through Oxfam GB and six Guatemalan non governmental organisations, has been
developing an ambitious programme of humanitarian assistance and emergency
rehabilitation to benefit more than 1,360 families who have been resettled in
permanent communities two decades after they fled their homes at the height of
the 36-year civil war. They are mostly poor indigenous Mayan peasants, who spent
almost 15 years living as nomads in the dense forests and highlands of northern
Chajul in the province of Quiché, unable to return to their villages because of
the threat of repression from the army and its paramilitary groups.
 A
United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission has said that these peasants,
who formed communities known as the Communities of the Population
in Resistance, (CPRs), figured among the survivors of more than
344 massacres which were carried out by the military in the province
of Quiché in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Now, four years after
the end of the war, they are looking to rebuild their lives, and
the life of their communities, on land which they themselves negotiated
with the Guatemalan government within the framework of the Peace
Agreement.
With its long history of experience and accompaniment of both internally
displaced communities and refugees of the war, Oxfam GB was the natural partner
for ECHO in its commitment to provide assistance in the era of post-war
reconstruction in Guatemala. Oxfam GB had been on hand with support when the
representatives of the CPRs first ventured down from the mountains and set up an
office in the capital in order to negotiate with the Government their claims for
land in which to resettle permanently. And, after five years of intense
deliberations, "The government bought us the land and took our people
there. But we arrived at our new homes with nothing," recalls one of the
leaders of the displaced, Agapito Pastor Lopez. "We looked to the
international community for its moral and financial support in this long
struggle," he adds.
 The
CPRs were often resettled in land far from their original communities.
This meant that they were faced with important cultural and climatological
changes as well as changes in methods of agricultural production.
The first resettlement took place in El Tesoro in Uspantán in May
1998. In June and September of the same year this was followed by
Maryland and El Triunfo, former cotton estates on the southern coast.
At the end of 1999 another group was resettled in Tesoro Nueva Esperanza
and six more communities were resettled around the town of Nebaj.
In April 2000, the last of almost 10,000 displaced people were finally
resettled on a farm called El Salvador in the province of Chimaltenango.
Adopting a participative strategy and working in close consultation with
community representatives to determine what they considered were the priority
needs, the Coordinator of the ECHO- Oxfam GB project, Patricia Miller took on
the hughe task of meeting the immediate and basic needs of the resettled
families, providing food, emergency shelter, cooking utensils, corn-grinding
equipment as well as seeds and farming implements. They were also provided with
medicines and medical attention by doctors who also trained members of the
community to be health promoters and midwives . And, most importantly of all,
each resettled community was provided with a permanent water supply and each
house with a drinking water tap. Once the initial emergency stage of the arrival
at the new communities was concluded, the project has gone on to set up an
extensive preventive health programme and a programme of housing
improvements.
In all, more than 1,770,000 EUR have been ploughed into the projects,
benefiting a total of 7,000 people. "This has been a solid first step in
the process of reintegration of these displaced communities," says Oxfam
GB's Patricia Miller and she adds "even though they have land to cultivate
and have benefited from the humanitarian aid offered by ECHO-OXFAM, these
communities still need technical support and training in agricultural production
inorder to be able to use their resources to the best advantage and change from
a system of subsistence farming to a system of production geared to the market
which will allow them to improve their quality of life and maintain their hope
in the new context of peace", explains Miller.
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