‘A lot of people started to see a lot of people going to the U.S. starting to build big houses, and we wanted the same,’ says Francisco Santizo. //

Phillippe Marcos Domingo, a subsistence corn and bean farmer of Yalambojoch, poses with the two new eight-bedroom homes he is building on remittance money from sons and daughters who emigrated to work in the United States for that express purpose. The family plan is for their return in a couple of years to live in them. //

Hamlet leaders and residents readily said that powerful desire to replace traditional mud-brick and wood residences with the big new ones—enabled by discovery that the American “Flores Settlement” loophole allowed immediate release inside the U.S. of any illegal entrant with a child—were the only reasons so many left when they did. //

The families building the houses believe their loved ones will return once construction is complete. This debunks the claims of grinding hunger, government persecution, and government-enabled gang violence peppering most media reporting, human rights group accounts, and asylum claims. More than 615,000 asylum claims were logged in just 2019, and one of the top nationalities in recent years was Guatemalans, according to Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) statistics. //

According to the town’s mayor, vice mayor, and randomly interviewed residents, though, crime is so absent here that Yalambojoch doesn’t even need a police officer. No one has detected government persecution since the civil war ended a quarter-century ago. And Yalambojoch is one of thousands of indigenous villages with a proud ancestral heritage of subsistence farming that always provided reliable food security.