Louisa Reynolds /

Pz

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from the country’s eastern and southern departments. 
Thus, by establishing villages and peasant cooperatives, 
the government aimed to conquer Petén, which was, and 
remains to this day, Guatemala’s last frontier.

But parallel to this planned colonization process, news of the 
vast extensions of arable land that could be found in Petén 
had reached many impoverished peasants, who arrived, 
like the cowboys of Western movies, and put a stake in the 
ground to claim that land as their property. 

This is how Federico Aquino Ruano and Marco Reyes 
arrived at Dos Erres and were given the task of dividing 
the land among the new settlers on behalf of FYDEP. In 
order to do this, the two community leaders divided the land, 
numbered the plots- which were never properly measured - 
and drew lots so that no one could claim that the distribution 
had been unfair.

When Juan Pablo Arévalo heard about the new community 
of Dos Erres, he didn’t think twice about packing his 
belongings and taking his family to Las Cruces, which in 
those days was a village with barely 20 houses, a small school 
with walls made of guano and a football pitch. This was 
where he left his wife and children while he undertook the 
arduous task of clearing his new plot of land in Dos Erres, 
which took him five years.

That’s what most peasants did: their families initially stayed 
in Las Cruces and would gradually migrate to newly created 
villages and hamlets such as Josefinos, Palestina and Dos 
Erres, once they had managed to build a small shack there.

“In Dos Erres, you could obtain a plot that measured between 
90 and 135 hectares and up to four families could live there