NUEVO QUEJA, Guatemala (AP) — The day before he left for the United States was a busy one for Victor Cal. He went from relative to relative, collecting money to buy food during the journey north.
He and his parents shared a small lunch in silence. His mother’s gloom weighed upon him.
At age 26, Cal felt he had no choice but to leave. The makeshift town where he lived, born of disaster, offered only hunger and death. It seemed the U.S. was the only way out.
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This story is part of a series, After the Deluge, produced with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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Eleven men from his town, Nuevo Quejá, have gone north in 2021. American authorities say they have stopped more than 150,000 Guatemalans at the border this year, four times the number in 2020.
Many were like Victor Cal, famished and impoverished.
An indigenous Mayan who speaks Pocomchí, he had served in the army and returned to his agricultural hometown in the mountains.
His father’s land, with its coffee, cardamon, corn and beans, sounded like a safe place. At least there will be food, he thought.
He was wrong.
A hurricane’s rains brought a mountain down and destroyed it all. He and his parents were left destitute and displaced in a desperately shabby settlement, Nuevo Quejá.
He packed quickly. Not too many things fit in a small yellow backpack: a shirt, a sweater, jeans and an extra pair of shoes.
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The people of Quejá had been cooped up in their homes for 10 days; access roads had been cut off by flooding.
It was lunchtime last Nov. 5 when the first trees fell and the hillside began to melt.
“Those of us who had time to flee could only carry our children on our backs,” said one of the survivors, Esma Cal, 28. Fifty-eight people disappeared in seconds. Dozens of homes were buried under tons of mud.
Quejá was never an affluent place. But its hard-earned progress over the decades, was wiped out.
In the ’80s, some men started joining the Guatemalan army. Then, riding the wave of violence that has plagued the country, they hired on as private guards.
Shacks turned into colorful cement houses with tiles, big windows, refrigerators. “I had a laptop, a sound system and cable TV,” said Erwin Cal. All gone.
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By February, Esma Cal, Erwin Cal, childhood friend Gregorio Ti and others had founded a temporary settlement on a third of their original agricultural land.
Thus was born Nuevo Quejá, home to about 1,000 survivors. “We know how to work,” said Ti.
The toil is constant, and backbreaking. All day long, men, women and children cut and transport wood and clear land with their machetes.
The shacks are constructed with zinc sheets donated by a priest and wooden planks made from pine trees the villagers cut down. Some have big stones on the floor. Holes in the roofs allow rainwater to pour inside.
Esma Cal’s 37-year-old uncle, Germán Cal, is trying to bring electricity to Nuevo Quejá. It’s an almost impossible task. The government of Guatemala declared the new settlement uninhabitable. If officially, Nuevo Quejá does not exist, it is not eligible for electric poles or road repairs or improved water supply.
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César Chiquin, 39, is the head nurse in charge of the area. At least once a month, he visits Nuevo Quejá;
Children cried in fear when they were placed on the scales. The results are bad. “Malnutrition has doubled. One in three are stunted,” he said.
He does not have many options. “The only thing I can do is to give them some vitamins and advice they are not ready to follow. Even if they want, most of them cannot do it because they lack the resources.”
This is the central plight of the people of Nuevo Quejá. They can’t raise enough food to sustain themselves. They also have just a third as much land as they did. And a lot of the soil has been degraded by torrential rains.
“Our community is under collapse and we need a permanent solution. This place is not fit to live,” said a frustrated Esma Cal. “We, as a farming community, need land.”
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The people of Nuevo Quejá are well acquainted with death.
They have designated Julio Cal, 46, to monitor rain and the mountain. There is an evacuation plan: Over a small hill, they have built a bigger shack where hundreds of people could stay.
“At any moment that mountain could come crashing down and we all die,” Julio Cal said.
Death is one of only two ways out of Nuevo Quejá. The other is emigration to the United States.
Stay, and you might earn $4 for a full day’s work. Leave, and you could maybe earn $80 a day in the U.S.
Most of them say the only thing that prevents them from emigrating is that they cannot afford it.
Víctor Cal contacted a distant cousin who has been in Miami for years. He advanced the $13,000 to pay a coyote.
It was four in the morning when Victor Cal wrote his number on a piece of paper and the number of the coyote and left it on a table. “My objective is to be able to send money so my parents have a real house again and some land.”
He added: “If I had a choice, I wouldn’t go. I will be back as soon as possible”
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