NUEVO QUEJA, Guatemala — 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.
His mother was disconsolate. “I begged him not to go, that we could live here,” she said, again and again, “but the decision had already been made”.
He and his parents shared a small lunch – a couple of chiles with sesame seeds – in silence. His mother’s gloom weighed upon him; he announced he had to find somewhere to charge his phone. “to receive calls so the coyote can tell me where and when we will finally meet.”
He set off on a bumpy, dirt road, looking to hitch a ride to any place with electricity. A motorbike pulled over and drove him to the nearest outlet, miles away.
According to AP, this story is part of a series, After the Deluge, produced with support from the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting.
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 US was the only way out.
Eleven men from his town 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. He had served in the army, mustering out as a corporal. An indigenous Mayan who speaks Pocomchí, he failed to find work in Guatemala City. When the pandemic hit, he joined thousands who fled the capital to return to their agricultural hometowns in the mountains.
His father’s land in Quejá, with its coffee, cardamon, corn and beans, sounded like a safe place. At least there will be food, he thought.
He was wrong.
In his worst nightmare, he could not imagine that a hurricane’s rains could bring a mountain down and destroy it all – house, land, town. He and his parents were left destitute by a fierce hurricane Eta, displaced and dependent on relief from international organizations in a desperately shabby settlement called Nuevo Quejá.
Now, he was hours away from leaving it behind. His phone charged, he returned home after sunset. A group of friends awaited him, but he was in no mood for goodbyes.
He packed quickly. Not too many things fit in a small yellow backpack: a shirt, a sweater, jeans and a pair of extra shoes. He lost pretty much everything else when the landslide buried his house.
It had been raining for 25 days. The people of Quejá had been cooped up in their homes for 10 days; access roads had been cut off by flooding.
Without electricity, all the telephones were dead. Nobody told the villagers that the rain that fell over the previous 24 hours had been five times the average monthly amount; no one told them they were at risk, and they should leave.
It was lunchtime last Nov. 5 when the first trees fell and the hillside began to melt. The townspeople left their food on the fire and ran.
“Those of us who had time to flee could only carry our children on our backs” says one of the survivors, Esma Cal, 28, an energetic, articulate woman who would assume a role as a community leader in the aftermath. (Many of the people of Quejá share the same last name, Cal, though it is not always clear how they might be related.)
Fifty-eight people disappeared in seconds. Most of the bodies will never be recovered. Forty homes were buried under tons of mud and dozens of others were left inaccessible.
Crossing torrents of water on ropes, the survivors walked to the nearest town. Residents shared with them their remaining food and put them up in schools and at the market. Due to the isolation, no trucks could arrive with supplies. When helicopters finally arrived, “some of us had been without food for almost two days,” said Esma Cal.
Quejá was never an affluent place. But there had been hard-earned progress over the decades, and it was wiped out in minutes.
