Creating a Better Life: Participatory communitarian development among Guatemalan returnees
Working Paper Nr. 2000.3
Abstract
The paper explores the (re)creation of community and identity among returned
refugees in Petén, Guatemala. The returnees settled in a previously uninhabited
jungle area in 1995, after having spent more than ten years in different
refugee camps in Mexico. They are now in the process of creating a new
multiethnic community based on common experiences of violence, exile and
return, as well as on new forms of co-operative organisation, aiming at
solidarity and equality considered necessary to prevent the injustice
and disorder of the past. After a short presentation of the circumstances
that transformed these indigenous peasants into refugees, and later on
into returnees, emphasis is put on the process of construction of a new
community. In their effort to build a way life that is both economically
viable and culturally fulfilling, the returnees mobilise knowledge, skills
and social networks that they have established during their years in exile,
together with some of those they had acquired before they became refugees.
The paper illustrates how extremely poor and oppressed people, who received
nothing but persecution from their government, have been able to change
their situation under new circumstances. Through their own organisations,
and with support from the international community, the returnees have
obtained results that serve as models for social policies beyond their
own community.
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