By Samin Huq
Introduction
In a world where over 117 million people find themselves forcibly displaced as refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs), land constitutes a key factor influencing the compulsion of individuals to leave their homes, their motivation to return, and their ability to reintegrate. The case of Guatemala is especially instructive in this regard: in the 1980s, the Guatemalan genocide and refugee crisis, occurring under the umbrella of the broader Guatemalan civil war, led to around 200,000 people dying or vanishing, 80% of them Maya; additionally, it forcibly displaced 150,000 indigenous Maya from their lands and drove them to Mexico.
When the Guatemalan government later tried to encourage the refugees to return from Mexico in the late 1980s, the refugees collectively organized under the Permanent Commissions of Guatemalan Refugees (CCPP), intending to return only if they received guarantees of security, political rights, and, in particular, land rights. While the CCPP paved the way for the return of thousands of refugees and proved more successful than government-organized return processes in achieving better outcomes for returnees; government mismanagement and corruption, military violence, and conflicts with ‘’secondary occupants’’ over land rights still significantly obstructed land access and impeded Maya refugee returns and reintegration. This case demonstrates that while providing land access is key to securing successful refugee returns, it is also vital to address land disputes, government failure, and insecurity to ensure successful reintegration.
Repression, Repatriation, and the Right to Land
The Guatemalan genocide traces back to pre-existing marginalization of the indigenous Maya at the hands of European ‘’conquistadores’’ and their descendants, the Ladino. In the 1980s genocide, General Efrain Ríos Montt and other military elites perceived indigenous communities as allies to resistance fighters due to proximity between both groups in the highlands; driven by this perception, these elites perpetrated numerous war crimes; they massacred men, raped women, poisoned water sources, killed livestock, and burned villages. The government would subsequently seize and redistribute the lands the Maya left behind. While the Guatemalan refugee crisis was largely a response to political terror rather than economic conditions, the restoration of land would also be a key condition for durable refugee return, be it ancestrally owned land held by Maya for generations or frontier areas where the state settled Maya in the 1960s-70s.
Guatemalan refugees in Mexico underwent two distinct forms of return: one form included the 1986 repatriations, where repatriados participated in the strictly government-organized return to ‘’model villages’’ with limited agency; the other form was the CCPP-organized collective return, where retornados made their return conditional on land and credit access. The retornados, instead of participating in the government-organized return programs like the repatriados, collectively negotiated a return program separate from the government-organized return programs under which they required guarantees of political rights, security, and land rights from the government before returning.
In the case of the repatriados, the Guatemalan government sent delegations to Mexico to encourage refugees to return, promising amnesty, restitution, and support via the Special Commission to Aid Repatriates (CEAR). Under the CCPP, the retornados then signed an accord with the Guatemalan government in late 1992: the October Accord, the world’s first known return agreement between a country’s government and its exiled citizens. The October Accord required refugee returns to be voluntary in nature, with the consent and participation of individual participants who benefited from free association and organization, and contingent on safe conditions and, in particular, the promise of land.
Several Mayan retornados explicitly stated receiving land was their primary condition for returning home, especially when it involved owning land and their children being able to inherit it; several didn’t consider returning to Guatemala until after the October Accord was signed. To that end, the Accord included a pledge for land restitution enabling all adult returnees under the CCPP to obtain and take ownership of land under which they would repay loans for land purchases to not the state, but a community development fund instead. In this case, refugees were willing to return not necessarily to their original land or home, but in many cases, anywhere in Guatemala where they could live off the land to develop livelihoods; in fact, many did not want to return to their original homes because the latter were unsafe or nonexistent.
On paper, the October Accord understood the challenge of restoring Maya returnees to their original land: many of these lands now had new ‘’secondary occupants’’, who were themselves poor. Accordingly, the state chose to negotiate with these secondary occupants so they would leave the lands, with returnees eligible to pursue judicial action or receive alternative land in case negotiations failed. Additionally, the Accord formally guaranteed that adult returnees could participate in a revolving credit program to acquire land if they did not have any, with the funds going to a community development fund instead of the government.
The Accord also provided for freedom of movement for the returnees once they came back to Guatemala, as well as securing their right to life and access to land. It became a blueprint of sorts for Guatemala’s separate June 1994 Accord on the Resettlement of Populations Uprooted by the Armed Conflict that helped end the civil war, and organize the resettlement of refugees who would return to Guatemala. Both Accords played a positive role in advancing the return and reintegration of Maya refugees. In this regard, return did not wait for peace, but rather contributed to it: 80% of returns occurred before the 1996 Peace Accord.
The first significant return of Maya retornados would take place in 1993, with 2,500 returnees returning to Guatemala, supported by governmental and non-governmental institutions and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The CCPP enabled returnees participating in the program to acquire land, which represented a ‘’safe start’’ and relative economic success. Here, the returnees, while benefiting from the support of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and development organizations, also gained significant support from organizing themselves. Around 30% of retornados regained their lands, while the remainder received new lands through purchase programs. On balance, the repatriados may have returned earlier, but the retornados enjoyed superior reintegration outcomes, with greater access to land and rights to education and political participation.
However, many refugees still chose not to return home due to concerns of continued exclusion or violence from their original neighbors and new settlers, including violence against women, mistrusting government corruption (including officials ‘’losing’’ land titles and diverting funds), bureaucracy, and the continuation of anti-Maya discrimination in land provision. Some refugees also believed the government knowingly made a promise of land provision it could not keep, agreeing to the Accord to shore up its legitimacy after the world condemned its genocide and to obtain foreign aid. The ‘’sniper-like’’ assassination of a young female returnee, the Xaman massacre in 1995 of 11 returnees who protested military presence, and the kidnapping of UN and NGO staff all endangered security and slowed down returns.
When they did agree to return home, returnees continued to experience poverty; they did not receive proper training in crop production and marketing from NGOs. Perhaps the most serious challenge to peaceful reintegration was land conflicts between returning refugees and secondary occupants, which largely saw unsuccessful mediation. While returnees could on paper choose where to resettle, land supply was limited, and in practice the Guatemalan government and military elites intentionally limited choices through blocking sales, engaging in divide-and-conquer practices among returnees, and intimidation. Dispute resolution mechanisms also had significant weaknesses: courts were prohibitively expensive and not accessible to many due to education barriers, The Presidential Office for Legal Assistance and Resolution of Land Conflicts (CONTIERRA) lacked the ability to pursue corruption or the teeth to punish it, and UNHCR mediation was controversial due to bypassing national mechanisms.
Land access slowed to a halt for returnees, with some even facing internal or external displacement; at least 500 refugee families who had returned to Guatemala ended up returning to Mexico again, citing ‘’economic violence’’ that included starvation. Land purchase programs were flawed as they essentially made victims fund their own reparations, not helped by difficult debt schedules, exaggerated prices, and the offloading of poor land by the elite. One telling quote from a returnee was: ‘’We are not being killed by bullets, we are being starved to death.’’ Lost homes and lands remained unrecovered and refugees uncompensated even by the end of 2003. One especially telling statistic claims that it would take at least 800 years to provide land to all citizens who were seeking it.
In May 2025, the UN Human Rights Committee found that Guatemala broke its promises to compensate or resettle displaced members of the K’iche’, Ixil and Kaqchikel Mayan indigenous communities, who were uprooted and internally displaced in the 1980s civil war, forced to live in the capital city, which also resulted in the abandonment of their cultural practices. The Committee found that the state violated not only the rights of the displaced but also their children. All in all, Guatemala’s continued failure to restore land to indigenous Maya is directly tied to its historical failure to treat the latter as an actual part of the national community, instead practicing violent exclusion. Many communities still face social and economic injustices, remaining dependent on subsistence farming. The state has historically treated indigenous land as its own property in the name of development, settling outsiders there and providing concessions on logging and mineral rights, causing refugee flows and militarization; thus, indigenous communities have few rights to land.
Looking Ahead
For voluntary repatriation to succeed, refugees must have the right to choose whether to return or not on their own terms, ideally from a position of dignity and safety; furthermore, the more active participation refugees have in negotiating their repatriation, the safer and longer-lasting repatriation tends to be. Maya refugees, to that end, actively and collectively negotiated their collective and organized return contingent on guarantees from the Guatemalan government, pertaining primarily to land rights but also political recognition.
According to studies on Uganda, giving land to refugees not only increases their welfare, but also positively affects the local economy in the form of income spillovers, increasing annual real income by $1106 if in cash and $866 if in-kind. Land assignment consistently boosts refugee incomes, while reducing aid dependence. Income from household activities even increases over 50% at the ‘’average land size.’’ As seen in Burundi, post-war land restitution itself is connected to state formation, and appropriate land granting and restitution require paying heed to political dynamics and contested tenure histories.
Ultimately, the majority of Maya refugees who chose to return cited land guarantees as their primary condition for returning home, and land guarantees indeed contributed to facilitating successful returns. On the other hand, the government’s limited success in actually providing land to returnees, tied with persistent poverty and economic bureaucracy, eventually weakened the drive of other potential Maya refugees to come back home. As seen in the case of Liberia, having a claim to land is not enough; who has the power to exercise it also matters, with returnees and ex-combatants fiercely disagreeing, and thus the question of return, by itself, requires asking the question of return or reintegration to what.
While land guarantees technically exist in international law, governments in practice do not meaningfully address the needs of returnees; this has been a significant challenge in Guatemala especially, which not only faced a notable flow of returning refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) but also saw its government decide among competing claims of returnees, secondary occupants, the military, the state itself, and major landowners. Reintegration, therefore, requires solving conflicts in land and property ownership.
Land is a vital cornerstone of not only successful refugee return but also sustainable reintegration after the fact. For land returns to work, they must be enforceable, consider what land currently exists and can be used, equip returnees with the knowledge and processes to appeal for land rights, and establish guardrails against government corruption.
Samin Huq is a scholar with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Vassar College, as well as two master’s degrees from the American University School of International Service (AU-SIS). Before graduating, Samin led the Journal of International Service as Associate Editor and later Operations Director, which is committed to fostering high-level scholarship in international affairs and international service.
As someone deeply passionate about the human rights of displaced populations, Samin has felt Guatemala’s genocide and displacement of the Maya and subsequent attempts to redress its wrongs, as well as the immense courage, initiative, and insight Maya refugees demonstrated in collectively negotiating their returns with an emphasis on securing land rights and security beforehand. Through this piece, Samin aims to contribute to the knowledge of what conditions facilitate or hinder safe, voluntary, and sustainable refugee returns, with an emphasis on the necessity for solutions that are inclusive and representative of returnees themselves, as well as strong and enforceable land rights in securing initial returns and sustaining land rights afterward.
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