The Mexican government restricted the involvement of other NGOs in the camps, claiming that assistance was adequately provided by the UNHCR and COMAR. Maintaining national sovereignty was an equally important consideration, as was buffering the government from international criticism. “In Mexico we are not accepting either direct or bilateral assistance from another government or from the NGOs,” said COMAR coordinator Oscar González. “[The NGOs] wish to maintain a physical presence in the areas where refugees are assisted, and there's no reason for that. We function in a totally open manner and with an infrastructure that adequately allows the Mexican state to deal with the situation.”26
The camps and settlements were located in three principal areas: the first area extended from Tapachula to Comalapa; the second included the municipalities of La Trinitaria, Las Margaritas, and Independencia; and the third area, the most populous, consisted of the municipality of Ocosingo.27 The settlements in Las Margaritas and the Lancandón jungle were the most difficult to assist because of their geographic isolation. Aid was flown in by single-engine plane or transported by canoe, jeep, or pack mules. Conditions in all the settlements and camps were poor, reflecting the general poverty of Chiapas, the UNHCR's stretched budget, and to some extent, government policy. Refugee assistance personnel accused the Mexican government of deliberately making conditions as disagreeable as possible in order to discourage further migration. They also accused some COMAR officials of corruption, charging that UNHCR aid, especially food, was not reaching its intended destination (a charge that eventually contributed to a restructuring of the organization in 1983).28 Clearly, domestic policy considerations played some role in the amount of aid that was directed to the camps. Government officials wished to prevent the resentment and conflict that would inevitably follow if refugee aid exceeded the amount of social services available to the local population in Mexico's poorest state.29 At the same time, the government viewed repatriation as the long-term goal of refugee assistance, and thus little emphasis was given to projects that offered “durable solutions” or opportunities for long-term integration into Mexican society. Whatever the government's rationale, UNHCR personnel learned not to challenge the Mexican government. When Pierre Jambor, the UNHCR representative in Mexico, was viewed as too interfering, Mexico filed an official complaint with the UNHCR and soon after Jambor was replaced.
The refugees provided aid workers with a number of challenges. They arrived malnourished and with a host of gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses. Infant mortality was estimated at two hundred deaths per thousand live births. Doctors, nurses, and midwives from regional clinics and hospitals volunteered and found a population in dire need of health care but distrustful of state-sponsored medicine. In order to halt the spread of disease, aid workers worked around the clock to build wells, sewers, and latrines in settlements that seemed to spring up virtually overnight.30
Refugees were directed to government-run camps, but COMAR also allowed refugees to establish their own settlements, usually consisting of individuals from the same village or language group, in order to encourage the survival of communities and traditional forms of self-government. Residents were allowed to play a role in planning and organizing schools, health care, and cultural and recreational activities.31 However, the camps and settlements offered few opportunities for wage-earning labor, land cultivation, or vocational training. The refugees did not qualify for work permits, but in some areas local authorities allowed them to engage in wageearning agricultural work, which unfortunately also exposed them to exploitation.32 The Roman Catholic Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas reported that over the years the generosity demonstrated by the local Mexican population began to wane, and some ejidatarios (members of cooperatives) began to treat the refugees as servants and peones, punishing them by withholding wages.33 Not surprisingly, the majority of Guatemalans who arrived in Mexico preferred to remain outside the government's reach, relying instead on their own networks for survival.34
The refugees also presented the Mexican government with one of its most serious diplomatic challenges of the late twentieth century. The governments of Romeo Lucas García and later Efraín Ríos Montt and Oscar Mejía Víctores claimed that guerrillas used the refugee camps and settlements to channel weapons, food, and medicine to their compatriots-inarms. The Guatemalan government demanded that Mexico repatriate the refugees, or at the very least relocate them further away from the border zone. When the Mexican government failed to act decisively either way, the Guatemalan army expanded its counterinsurgency campaign into Mexico. From 1982 to 1984, the counterinsurgency units, known as the kaibiles, crossed the border to kidnap, interrogate, and murder alleged guerrillas and their supporters, and Guatemalan planes and helicopters strafed or bombed refugee camps and settlements to intimidate the population.35 From May 1980 to May 1983, the Guatemalan army conducted sixty-eight incursions into Mexican territory: nine Guatemalan refugees and seven Mexican farm workers were killed; twenty Guatemalans kidnapped; and seven detained, beaten, and/or tortured.36 However, the casualties were underreported, the Diocese of San Cristóbal claimed, because of the isolation of the refugee settlements and the Mexican government's militarization of Chiapas, which restricted access to the camps and to information. The raids occurred regularly along the border and sometimes several miles into Mexican territory, terrorizing the refugees and the local population, and forcing thousands to flee into the jungles or further inward.37
The Guatemalan army was assisted in its actions by Mexican allies, some of them on the government payroll. In 1982, for example, in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, Chiapas, the local director of Servicios Migratorios, César Morales, unilaterally decided to continue deporting Guatemalans en masse, whether or not they had protected status. Gobernación eventually transferred Morales out of the area but only after COMAR officials threatened to withdraw.38 Refugees were often detained and starved and tortured while interrogated.39 Soldiers, lawyers and prosecutors, and local police and security guards were implicated in these actions.40 Local caciques (power brokers), many of them wealthy ranchers and growers, also conducted their own immigration policy. Fearing the impact leftist guerrillas might have on Chiapas's politics and economy, they funded their own paramilitary groups, popularly referred to as the Guardias Blancas (White Guards), to safeguard their interests. The Guardias kidnapped and murdered refugees, clergy, and aid workers suspected of guerrilla sympathies.41 In March 1982, for example, the Reverend Hipólito Cervantes Arceo, the parish priest of Mapastepec, was found murdered, both thumbs tied behind his back and his head beaten in with a church statue.42 Local government officials claimed that he had been a victim of robbery, but residents and church officials blamed the paramilitaries as well as the government that gave them carte blanche to operate. Over the next few years, dozens of clergy, nuns, and aid workers were threatened, kidnapped, and assaulted. In June 1984, for example, Mexican police kidnapped three aid workers from the Puerto Rico camp, a doctor and two nuns, and transported them to secret locations, where they were bound, blindfolded, and interrogated at length on their—and the church's—suspected ties to guerrillas.43
The Mexican government clearly feared the role the refugees might play in destabilizing the state of Chiapas, which in spite of its poverty was of strategic importance to Mexico's long-term development programs. Chiapas was the agricultural heartland of southern Mexico, producing coffee, corn, cacao, tobacco, sugar, fruit, vegetables, and honey for export. It was also a key state for the nation's petrochemical and hydroelectric industries. By 1990, 82 percent of PEMEX's petrochemical plants were located in southeastern Mexico; and 21 percent of Mexico's oil and 47 percent of its natural gas were extracted in the Chiapas-Tabasco region.44 Fifty-five percent of the nation's hydroelectric energy and 20 percent of its electricity were produced in Chiapas. Corporations made enormous profits from the land and the labor, but contrary to the federal government's assurances, the wealth did not “trickle down” to the municipalities. In 1990, two-thirds of Chiapas's 3.5 million residents did not have sewage service, and half did not have potable water. Despite its energy production, only a third of the homes in the state had electricity. More than half of the schools in the state offered only a third-grade education, and seventy-two out of every hundred children dropped out of school by the first grade. There were more hotel rooms for tourists than hospital
