Mexico’s Guatemalan refugees: where are they now?
How Guatemalan refugees found peace and prosperity through farming
©Alex Webb/Magnum Photos for FAO
Perched on gently rolling hills, San Lorenzo village in southern Mexico has been home to some 50 refugee families who fled Guatemala’s civil war.
The Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees (COMAR) estimates that over 45,000 people fled to Mexico in the ‘80s, mainly from villages and cantons of Guatemala’s Huehuetenango and Quetzaltenango regions.
Nicolás Gómez Domingo, an indigenous chuj, was 11 when he crossed the border with his parents, four sisters and brothers. His wife, Emilia Felipe José, an indigenous Acatenca, was eight.
Those were gruesome times. Times neither Emilia nor Nicolás can forget.
“We were camping in paddocks . Some of our relatives died because we were attacked even on the way…We slept in the trees, under the rain,” recalls Emilia, her dark eyes in constant motion, running this way and that as if filled with the same fear she must have felt 35 years ago.
The first years in Mexico were full of uncertainty, continues Nicolás.