Thread: FLA. Collier, Lee counties home to thousands of Guatemalan transplants

Collier, Lee counties home to thousands of Guatemalan transplants

By VICTORIA MACCHI
Posted May 7, 2013 at 5:30 a.m.

NAPLES — The smugglers’ corridor funneled Guatemalans seeking personal and economic security from the rural highlands of their home country to Southwest Florida.

One route the so-called coyotes ran was from the farming communities of Huehuetenango to fields here. For that reason, many Guatemalans in Collier and Lee come from a cluster of Mayan towns, like Santa Cruz Barillas and Santa Eulalia.

About 11 percent of Florida’s approximately 62,000 Guatemalan immigrants live in Collier and Lee counties. While it’s not unheard of, the country’s unresolved past makes returning difficult.

Frances Dixon, who runs an organization (formerly based in Bonita Springs) in Huehuetenango called Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala, said that even as she helped a Mayan community move forward, the past surged from the ground.

“When we began building a road through the mountains to our school site, the bulldozer dug up the bones of two people killed during the war. No one wanted to talk about it, but the families knew whose bones they were and came and collected them for burial,” she recalled.

Estimates of the war’s toll are as high as 200,000 people dead and missing. The majority of victims were Mayan. Witnesses to the tortures, killings and rapes have received death threats as trials against military members took shape in the last decade. Guatemalan courts have already sentenced several individuals to thousands of years in prison for massacres.

In 2006, Jordan Buckley, now a farmworker rights activist in Immokalee with Interfaith Action, spent 11 months living and traveling with witnesses as they prepared their testimonies, to diminish their chances of being assassinated.

Observing the Guatemalan community here, even decades after the war ended in the 1990s, he sees scars.

“They’re dealing with some serious trauma,” he said. “They are not people who are prone to laugh a whole lot.”

Current social and economic conditions in Guatemala make going back even harder.

Eighty percent of the indigenous population and 40 percent of the non-indigenous population live in poverty, according to a 2011 U.N. report. The country’s murder rate makes it “one of the more dangerous countries in the world,” the U.S. State Department notes.

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For more information about nonprofit organizations with ties to Southwest Florida working in Guatemala:

Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala

1264 NE 156th St., North Miami Beach, Fla. 33162

Email: guatvillage@aol.com

Website: www.adoptavillage.com

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http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2013/...s-guatemalans/

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