Guatemala: in the home of the former guerrillas

Nuevo Horizonte is a small community in northern Guatemala that keeps memories of the darkest period in the recent history of the Central American country.

When the combatants handed over their weapons, they had a moment to meet and look at each other on a farm where they would start a new life project. The rigor of clandestine life was over and the first thing they did was to tell each other their true names.

It was like a simultaneous birth of hundreds of people just out of the mountain where they had spent decades fighting within the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) against the Guatemalan Army.

During three decades of participating in an internal war that left 200,000 people dead or missing according to the Guatemala report, memory of silence, the Central American country lived in times when thousands of families were destroyed and others, to avoid that fate, were dismantled with the march of one or several members towards the mountains to join the militias that fought the regime.

This is how they started a new life from scratch: without food or basic services, but the experience acquired during decades in the mountains helped to build what they have today, a piece of land where they live in peace.