For Guatemalan Campesinos, the Civil War Continues

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RETALHULEU, Guatemala -- An infant girl lying on a paper-thin blanket in the dirty ditch next to the highway does nothing to hide the mosquito bites that cover her tiny legs. When she awakes from a feverish nap, an elder picks her up and turns away from me -- hoping, unsuccessfully, to keep the yellowish color of her eyes a secret.

But the presence of about one hundred Guatemalan campesino farmers squatting next to the Nueva Linda finca plantation, on the main highway that links Champerico on the Pacific Coast with the country's interior, is hardly a secret. Now that the Christmas holidays have passed without any action from the government to satisfy their demands, the campesinos are planning to occupy the plantation again.

No matter how much Guatemalan president Oscar Berger, a member of the land-owning oligarchy who took office a year ago, hopes the Nueva Linda pests would go away, they remain an open sore -- a painful reminder that eight years after the United Nations-backed peace accords were signed, officially ending this country's bloody, 36-year civil war, all is not well for Guatemala's majority, the poor and downtrodden Mayan farmers.

"Berger sleeps and lives well, and meanwhile we are in poverty, living in a ditch," says Marianno Caleb Aguilar, a large man with a gruff voice who acts as a de facto spokesperson for the Nueva Linda campesinos.

Campesinos here began occupying the Nueva Linda plantation for the first time in October of 2003 to protest the disappearance of their friend and organizing leader, Héctor Reyes Pérez, who has not been heard from since he vanished one month previous, though kidnapped might be a better word.

In a story that sounds eerily similar to the horrendous tales from the days of the civil war, Reyes was summoned by his boss, a Spaniard named Carlos Vidal Fernandez who owns the Nueva Linda finca, and picked up by the land-owning criollo's bodyguard, Victor Chinchilla Morales, on the morning of September 5 of that year, under the pretense that they were to deliver burlap sacks of corn to another finca owned by Fernandez. Reyes' disappearance came just days after he informed Fernandez that he was leaving Nueva Linda after 10 years of devout service, and asked for his pay.

Héctor Reyes Pérez left behind seven children, most of whom are living in the ditch along the highway to protest his disappearance. His wife, Floridalma Reyes, has apparently fled to the United States and gained asylum out of fear that the Spaniard will hunt her too.

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