Guatemala refugees return home after 25 yrs

La Cienaga (Guatemala), Apr 2: A group of refugees who fled Guatemala's civil war more than two decades ago returned home after an ordeal of fear, poverty and exile that took them thousands of miles from home.

The 150 mostly destitute subsistence farmers with no possessions other than a handful of spare clothes landed in Guatemala just after dawn in a charter flight from Bolivia, where they had lived since the early 1980s.

It was the last large group of refugees to return to Guatemala since the end of the country's 1960-1996 civil war that killed over 200,000 people.

''For them, the war only ended today,'' said Rene Martinez, a human rights advocate who greeted the Guatemalans at an airport in the Peten region, before they were taken to their town, La Cienaga.

The refugees, mostly Mayans, fled Guatemala in 1981 and 1982 for the apparent safety of neighboring Honduras, but Guatemalan soldiers who suspected the villagers of supporting leftist guerrillas tracked them down.

Troops crossed the border and abducted 17 of the refugees, torturing most of them before the United Nations stepped in and sent the group to rural Bolivia for their own safety.

''Then everyone forgot about us,'' said Fidel Garcia, a community leader who left Guatemala in the middle of the night in 1981 with his mother.

Garcia returns to his native country with even less than he had a quarter century ago. He lost most of his belongings in a devastating flood in Bolivia in January.

''Most of them didn't even know where Bolivia was,'' said Raul Najera, a church worker who fought for years for the refugees return.

Both the Guatemalan and Bolivian governments long ignored pleas from the villagers to be sent home until Bolivia's first indigenous President Evo Morales highlighted their cause.

Germany paid for the flights home under a development program it has with Guatemala.

Some 35,000 Guatemalans fled the war to live in exile in camps in Mexico. Most returned under a government-sponsored amnesty declared before 1996 peace accords were signed.

Yesterday afternoon, the refugees were taken by bus to a jungle plot of land in La Cienaga town surrounded by banana trees and coconut palms near the country's largest lake.

The Guatemalan government will give the refugees free housing with running water and solar-powered electricity.

It will provide food for a year, while helping promote fruit and cattle farming on communal land.

Vilma Villeda, who fled to Honduras at 18 with one baby, was united with her parents who had not yet met eight of their nine grandchildren.

''Where we were living before was so sad. It had wood walls, a tin roof and a dirt floor,'' she said of her home in Bolivia.

Reuters