Ex-Fighters Adrift in a Guatemala Without War

FINCA LOS BRILLANTES, Guatemala — For 15 years, Ana Castellanos lied and deceived. Sometimes she passed herself off as a nun. Once, she rented a room from the sister of two army colonels and eavesdropped on their conversations while she helped her landlady serve coffee and cookies.

Her mission: gathering information to pass on to Guatemalan guerrillas.

She could not make friends, much less form a stable relationship. She cut herself off from her family, for their safety and for hers.

“I knew what I was doing, and I have no regrets,” Castellanos said, although her dark eyes often filled with tears, in an interview at this government shelter for former guerrillas a few miles outside Mazatenango in southern Guatemala.

Now, seven months after Marxist guerrillas made peace with the Guatemalan government, Castellanos is 32 and in poor health, with nothing left but her old comrades in arms. Like many Guatemalans from both sides of Central America’s longest civil war, Castellanos feels cut adrift by the end of the 35-year conflict.

From guerrilla field doctors to military police, these former combatants are struggling to learn new trades and adjust to civilian life.

The $450,000 that international aid agencies have promised for retraining has been slow to arrive, in part because some of the ex-antagonists have been slow to decide what trades they want to learn; 90% of the 3,000 former guerrillas left government shelters before vocational training programs began.

In March, guerrillas began turning in their arms at eight camps throughout the country run by the International Migration Agency, an intergovernmental group.

The last camp closed last week, and former insurgents with no place to go were moved to four shelters at sites like this Agriculture Ministry experimental station, where Castellanos and 53 others--including four children--sleep on cots in two sturdy wooden buildings and a tent. Their diet is potatoes and tortillas.

Most former guerrillas have taken their Red Cross package of civilian clothes along with their demobilization certificate and left. Optimists say that shows they are being reabsorbed into civilian life. But the people in charge of training programs acknowledge that providing the vocational training promised in the peace agreement will be more difficult now that the former insurgents have dispersed.

“We had hoped to have training programs for you the first day you arrived,” April 28, training supervisor Francisco Ureta told Castellanos and her comrades at a recent meeting. “But finding out what you wanted and getting the funding took time.”

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Vocational training started Monday, with accounting and administration courses. The instruction that this group requested in farming and animal husbandry probably will not begin until next month. Until then, the group plans to stay at the shelter.

“We want to leave together, to form a community of ex-combatants,” said Timoteo Navarijo. They have no land and no livestock but insist they will stay together.

“This is an entire project,” said Castellanos, recalling the words she used to explain to her middle-class family why she is staying at the shelter. “This is my commitment. This is where I have left my youth. I have no social status, no economic security. What else can I do? . . . Sometimes I wish I had been killed during the war.”

Like Castellanos, Navarijo lost everything to the conflict. Born a peasant in southern Guatemala, he migrated with his wife and two children in 1973 to the Peten jungle in the north, searching for land.

His affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church led him to the guerrilla movement in 1978, he said.

“The church never said, ‘Join the guerrillas,’ but you learned about injustice and knew that fighting was the only way to change things,” he said.

By 1981, when the government began a scorched-earth policy that forced the guerrillas into the mountains, Navarijo and his wife had four children and another on the way. She sought refuge in Mexico, and their oldest daughter, 11, stayed with her father. Navarijo was separated from his daughter a decade later when he was sent to southern Guatemala to form a new guerrilla front. He did not meet his youngest daughter until he was captured in 1995 and his wife brought her to visit him in jail.

On that same visit, his wife told Navarijo that she would not return to Guatemala. She had made a new life for herself with a new companion in Mexico. Navarijo was the first person to receive amnesty under the 1997 Conciliation Law and left prison to join his old comrades at this shelter.

Even the former guerrillas with the most to look forward to are finding the adjustment difficult. Johana, for example, still prefers to use her nom de guerre from the days when she oversaw triage, administered anesthetics and prescribed antibiotics at guerrilla field hospitals. Now 33 and expecting her second child in September, Johana said this pregnancy, spent at a government shelter, is far different from her first, six years ago.

“My daughter was born behind the lines, with the risk that the enemy could break through any time,” she said. “She grew up with the sound of gunfire. That was her world.”

Now, Johana and her companion, a former guerrilla commander who works for a foundation contracted to provide vocational training, have one of the few private rooms at the shelter.

Still, Johana worries about her own future.

She would like to be a doctor but has only a sixth-grade education. Her youth was spent fighting, not studying. She has taken a high school placement examination and is awaiting the results.

“I worked in medical services for 12 years,” she said. “I want to use that, not to become rich, but to benefit the community.”

The former guerrillas are not the only Guatemalans who say their society now undervalues their skills.

Members of the notorious Mobile Military Police also say their contribution has been overlooked. Known by its Spanish initials, PMA, the 690-member unit was the first demobilized under the government commitment to reduce the armed services by one-third.

“The PMA conducted searches and supported the police in riot control,” said Hugo Mendez, a onetime karate instructor for the unit. “Their services are still necessary, and the unit should not have been disbanded.”

But the PMA had also developed a reputation for extreme abuse of authority, human rights activists say.

About one-third of PMA troops were shifted to other branches of the armed services, and another third were hired by private security companies. The rest received a mustering-out pay of about $575 and an offer of vocational training; 34 have accepted.

Ten of them, including Mendez, are studying to become auto mechanics or electrical technicians at Kinal, a vocational center associated with the Catholic organization Opus Dei.

They receive three- and six-month courses at a spotless brick-and-tile campus. Besides their training, they get a $58-a-month stipend, about what most of them earned in the PMA.

The difference, said Oscar Barrientos, an eight-year PMA veteran with short-cropped curly hair and a build like a defensive lineman’s, is that now he must pay for rent and groceries; he used to live in the barracks and ate at a mess hall.

At 29, he admits he is finding the transition to civilian life difficult because he is unused to living on a budget. The oldest of eight children, he sends money home to his parents--farmers in southern Guatemala.

He is studying to become an auto mechanic, a trade likely to earn him about $140 a month if he can find a job. “I would like to open my own shop, but I don’t have the money,” he said.

“I don’t feel bad about being demobilized,” Barrientos said. “I understand that the government had to keep its commitments under the peace agreement for the good of all Guatemalans. So many people suffered during the armed conflict.”

Mariachi singer Miguel Angel Reyes is less understanding. A musician who was contracted full time by the PMA to direct a band that sang at parties and weekend gatherings, he is bitter to find himself studying electronics at age 52, with seven children younger than 15 to support.

“Mariachis were important because they helped to soften the bad image of the military police,” he said. Now he spends his mornings writing letters and calling on military commanders in hopes of getting performing jobs.

He arrives early each afternoon so he can get help from the teacher of his electronics course. Despite his extra effort, he is pessimistic about his prospects.

“No one will hire a person over 50,” he said. “I thought I was going to die at the PMA, as long as I went to work every day and did not cause a discipline problem. I do not deserve this. I have done nothing wrong.”