The Yaxan story:

...This time they were not offering gifts...

...Too often, however, their well-intentioned efforts lack the necessary guidance to make it effective...

...State Department that visited the area last October found, however, that the effort was neither "well organized or comprehensive...

...They say that far fewer people have become ill since the clinic was held...

...They offered us some gifts like drinking water, fertilizer, and some money in the form of credit...

...Very few women and children speak it, their native tongue being Chuj, a Mayan dialect...

...What we need here," he gently explained, "is more food...

...Nevertheless, the Indians remained in their villages until July 17 - a year ago - when the massacre of more than three-hundred men, women, and children in the tiny village of San Francisco convinced them it was no longer safe to remain in their own country...

...No one eats meat or vegetables...

...The diocese of the San Cristobal, headed by Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia, has tried to bring aid to the displaced Indians, but its effort has been circumscribed by a lack of both funds and people, plus a reluctance on the part of its priests and nuns to let outsiders take a part in their effort...

...By manipulating various regulations, the administration has already managed to sell the Guatemalans fifty cargo trucks and one hundred jeeps and last January announced its willingness to back a straight commercial sale - not requiring congressional approval - of $6.3 million worth of military equipment to Guatemala, including earthmoving machinery and spare parts for helicopters and the A-37 attack aircraft used in counterinsurgency warfare...

...When we went there, we saw that they had killed the.people and burned all the houses...

...The residents of Yaxan are a small part of a mass exodus of Guatemalan Indians...

...Our first job is to help the Mexican peasants, so when the Guatemalans complain that there isn't much food or help they don't understand that there isn't much of anything or anybody to go around...

...there are perhaps as many as 500,000 refugees displaced inside Guatemala...

...Ramirez explains...

...The law of the government came down upon us to kill us because they thought we were guerrillas...

...Great as these numbers seem, they may merely represent the vanguard in a refugee migration of catastrophic proportions: last year a Mexican government commission pointed to 40,000 Guatemalans waiting near the border, ready to enter its territory...

...That [medicine] is needed by those down in the hotter climate...

...Nor can we go looking for work...

...Malnutrition is widespread, not only because the refugees have no land to farm, but because the official relief effort is fragmented, in disarray and, some believe, the captive of corruption and political calculation on the part of the Mexican government...

...We can't go back there," says Mr...

...THEY HAVE, it seems, traded for their safety...

...Several days before our arrival, Yaxan got its first visit by one of the nuns from nearby Xiscau...

...A team from the U.S...

...The corn flour and beans we get from him lasts three or four days...

...If they are unlucky, like the . people of the village of San Francisco, many will die...

...Torres, a native of Ushken.'' We left our work...

...The people of Yaxan come from a number of small villages with names such as La Cieniga, Yuxquen, Ushken, and San Mateo Ishtatan...

...Ramirez, "but we think the bishop at San Cristobal sends it...

...There were some women from a village where all the men had been killed who had left before us, and the government's soldiers met them on the road, killed them and left them there...

...Diarrhea, they add, is widespread among the children, who average five per household...

...Some of them have tried to help on their own with an ad hoc assistance program...

...The army of the government of Guatemala came again in their uniforms," says Andreas Torres Garcia, a soft-spoken man who, when he recounts his last days in Guatemala, has eyes brimming with tears...

...Another man, declining to give his name, adds angrily to this: "The army of the government of Guatemala is destroying everything...

...Employment is minimal to non-existent...

...The immigration people told us that we can't do anything, we can't touch anything...

...The refugees now talk of learning about better care of their food and better practices for personal hygiene...

...News about occasional massacres and a government-sponsored terror campaign had reached these border villages more than two years in advance, but the danger seemed far away until the late spring of 1982, when the government paid an unannounced visit...

...Should the war in the countryside again intensify around Guatemala's Indian population of three and one-half million, the numbers of them entering Mexico can only swell...

...We saw them, eighteen dead women...

...Conditions at many of the Mexican refugee camps have been awful...

...She also offered to provide paper and pencils, to help them set up a school so the children could again study Spanish...

...It's fairly common knowledge, but nothing is being done to stop it...

...Malnutrition is most pronounced among the young, and may in part have been responsible for the several infant deaths the refugees say have occurred since Yaxan was founded...

...While both the Mexican government and the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees estimate at 30,000 the number of Guatemalan refugees inside Mexico, unofficial counts run much higher...

...And so we saw there was no difference between women, children, and old people...

...We must stay here and wait until things get better in Guatemala...

...One European woman living in San Cristobal and familiar with the relief effort claims that supplies are not getting to the refugees "because the officials [Mexican] in Comitan who are supposed to be distributing it are stealing it instead, and selling the goods on the black market...

...The pay for their work, they say, is three handfuls of corn or fifty pesos per laborer a day...

...Olivia L. CARRESCIA has just completed a documentary film, "Todos Santos Cushumatan," on Guatemala...

...In our village (La Cieniga) no one remains...

...The Guatemalan government said it lacked the resources to make this purchase, but since then a $10 million sale of military equipment to the Rios Montt regime has passed the Senate...

...We aren't sure where it's coming from," says Mr...

...m to be able to get by in life...

...Less than two kilometers from the Guatemalan border, they had come to the outskirts of Lagunas de Yaxan, one acre of mud-and bush, where 385 Indian refugees are waiting for an end to their country's bloodshed...

...The refugee camp of Yaxan, within view of the border, keeps them tantalizingly and agonizingly close to the land and lives they left behind...

...She offered help in organizing the camp's women into collectives so they could make their palm floor mats, called petates, which they use to line the mud floors of their huts...

...We agreed on that...

...Several of the men have taken part in a Mexican government-sponsored clinic set up to improve both sanitary conditions and health care in the border camps...

...Last October, the Mexican press reported the number entering Chiapas in one week at 10,000...

...Outbreaks of malaria, tuberculosis, dengue fever, diarrhea, and flu have caused havoc...

...For this piece of land we are thankful to Mexico," says Mateo Ramirez, the elected political leader (representante) of Yaxan...

...All the people were killed, children too...

...We've only come here to protect our lives and our families," says Mr...

...The people of Yaxan have been reduced to waiting for meager, erratic handouts of food, medicine, and clothing, and to performing occasional surreptitious labor for the Mexican campesino on whose land they live...

...We want them to be able to get by in life...

...At first sight, under a gentle sun, Yaxan appears to be a little patch of paradise...

...Then they threw bombs into it and burned almost everyone in there...

...Against this backdrop, it will be bad news for Guatemala's Indians the day the Reagan administration resumes military aid to the regime of General Efrain Rios Montt...

...They were soldiers of the government, that is sure," says Mr...

...We don't want the children growing up without learning to read and write Spanish...

...There are perhaps a dozen chickens in the community providing each family with about three eggs per week...

...As a Swiss couple and two American journalists gazed across the hills to some distant mountains, a military helicopter with no insignia hovered over a piece of land their guide called home: Guatemala...

...It is because of them that we are still alive...

...Yaxan, one of a number of like refugee settlements that string the border area, is supposed to be receiving aid from both the Mexican government and through the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees...

...Thousands have been killed and many communities destroyed in what the National Council of Churches has labeled, "gross and consistent violations of human rights carried out by the armed forces of Guatemala...

...They all have a similar story to tell, that of escaping across the border one step ahead of the Guatemalan army...

...We left at night, the very night we found out...

...It has also placed them under suspicion by the United States, Mexican, and Guatemalan governments as guerrillas or fellow-travelers...

...There we had coffee, corn, bananas, and palms...

...We had cattle too...

...For the group of fourteen camps that Yaxan is a part of, two priests and two nuns bear the full weight of ministering to the myriad needs of thousands, not all of them refugees...

...If they are both lucky and quick - like the people who finally came to Lagunas de Yaxan - they will become part of a great, faceless mass of humanity, the political refugees...

...Houses are at best pole and thatch huts, and at worst little more than plastic coverings...

...Up here in the mountains," they were told by Mr...

...Ramirez when he learned of their gift, "there is a good wind, and so there is no malaria...

...Cut off from aid in 1977 (but still receiving items "in the pipeline" until 1980), Guatemala has been pressing to obtain spare parts for its fleet of helicopters, some of which are civilian helicopters quietly purchased in the last two years from commercial suppliers and armed in Guatemala...

...The settlement lies virtually in the middle of nowhere, part of a hilly terrain cleared from the dense surrounding forest...

...Following a meeting of Yaxan's men to discuss the offer, Mr...

...Rice and beans are the staples of the adults, and a watery rice gruel is standard fare for the sizable flock of children morning, noon, and night...

...Another article (in the New York Times) claimed over a year ago that some 70,000 refugees had already moved from the border area deeper into Mexico, while unknown numbers of fearful Guatemalans remained hidden deep in Mexico's Lacanddn jungle...

...When the soldiers arrived they got all the men together, put them in a house and closed it tightly...

...What they got in return is Yaxan, with its mud, forced idleness, anonymity, and hunger...

...They are taking whatever is left, cutting our coffee and eating the people's cows...

...It was maybe one kilometer from us, and a little boy came running to tell us what happened...

...A narrow footpath winds its way from the camp to the Mexican outpost of Benito Juarez, a tenuous contact point with the outside world...

...Because of the war in the Guatemalan countryside, government school-teachers had been absent from the villages for over two years...

...Ramirez...

...A closer look around belies any picture-postcard impressions...

...There is a fairly large community of Europeans and Americans living in San Cristobal among Chiapas's already sizable Indian population...

...Situated snuggly along the blue-grey waters of a lagoon, the silvery brown of thatched palm roofs glimmer, and smoke from cooking fires gently wafts from every house...

...The primitive Mayan huts, which are damp all day, can freeze one to the marrow overnight when the cold mountain wind whips through the camp...

...Some weeks later, say the refugees, government troops again made a sweep of the territory...

...On the House side, the Foreign Affairs Committee has voted $10 million for use by Guatemala in military-sponsored construction and medical projects but not for arms...

...ROBERT DiNARDO is a New York-based freelance journalist with a special interest in Latin America...

...Really, we're not here primarily to help the refugees," says Sister Gloria Leon...

...There was no way out, they were just killing everybody...

...They burned our houses...

...The people of Yaxan are taking advantage of what little assistance has been offered...

...Several times since their arrival in Yaxan last August, word has come from Benito Juarez that food has been delivered...

...We heard about it from the survivors, the people who were in the field when the government arrived," says Representante Ramirez...

...The more military assistance Rios Montt has, the more he will be able to push his counterinsurgency campaign - currently in a pause but likely to be revived in the close future - against Indian communities...

...It was better that we leave...

...Everybody saw it, and there wasn't smoke for nothing...

...One walks everywhere in ankle-deep mud, surrounded by the insistent cries of hungry children...

...The few survivors began spreading word of the massacre, and within a matter of hours of learning the people of La Cieniga decided to flee...

...They asked us what we needed, and when they looked around they saw that everything was okay...

...Such was the case of the Swiss couple, who brought a supply of malaria medicine to Yaxan...

...We know because where we live is very close to here, and we saw the smoke...

...And so we left rather than stay there and die...

...There was a place nearby called Ialtoia," he continues, "where there were many corpses on the road, 55 dead on the road...

...Ramirez, "because you could hear them coming in helicopters...

...It was very quick," explains Mr...

...Yet the residents of Yaxan seem content to be where they are...

...Ramirez...

...We took everything we could carry, including the children and old people...

...Ramirez explained: "Yes, we're going to have a school...

...The government is like a heavy rain," Mr...

...The first time they came was to look us over...