TRAVERSE

STATELESS
“Being in South America has allowed him to be
more free to be Hmong.”
place. But that time the war had been overtaken
by a conventional war and the Hmong had
outlived their usefulness.
As many as 20,000 Hmong soldiers died
during the Vietnam War. Hmong civilians, who
numbered about 300,000 before the war,
perished by the tens of thousands.
POSTWAR STRUGGLE
During the war the Hmong in Laos had been
sharply divided, with some factions supporting
the royalists, some supporting the opposition and
some remaining neutral. About the only thing
that unified them was their opposition to the
Communists. In Thailand, ironically, many
Hmong supported the Communist Party of
Thailand in their struggle with the Thai government
in the 1960s and 70s. In both Laos and
Thailand the Hmong ended up on the losing side
and suffered as a result.
After the Americans left Laos in 1975 and the
Communist Pathet Lao gained control of the
country, the Hmong were quickly overrun by
Communist forces, who later launched a
campaign to eliminate minorities—-particularly
the Hmong—-who had assisted the Americans
during the war. Hmong villages were burned and
by some estimates thousands were massacred.
The new pro-Vietnam Communist government
in Laos used Soviet artillery, napalm and
chemical weapons against the Hmong. An
estimated10 to 25 percent of all Hmong in Laos
were killed during and after the Vietnam war. By
one count there were 400,000 Hmong in Laos at
the beginning of the Vietnam war and only
300,000 when it was over.
FINDING A SAFE HAVEN
Many Hmong are now dispersed across several
continents; some whose lives have greatly
improved. Many have found new peace and a
home in the country of French Guiana. Long
viewed as outcasts in Laos and other parts of
Southeast Asia, the Hmong here are known for
their success, on display in their large homes
with new Peugeot and Toyota pickup trucks
parked outside. Their nearly homogenous
enclaves in Cacao and two other villages,
Javouhey and Régina, are unlike anywhere else
on this continent.
Walking Cacao’s dirt roads one hears mostly
Hmong, interspersed with a bit of French. Some
women wear sarongs. Merchants sell tapestries
depicting the saga that led them to this jungle,
after treks in the mid-1970s to Thai refugee
camps from their mountain homeland in Laos,
a former French colony.
France gambled that the Hmong refugees,
some of whom were living in French cities, could
successfully develop a hinterland that repelled
earlier colonization efforts. “The gamble worked
because after all the years of war we were ready
to do something else,” said Mr. Ly, the agronomist.
“We were even ready to work the soil.”
The first Hmong arrived from France in 1977
and were greeted with protests from the Creoles,
an ethnic group descended from African slaves,
who chafed at what was viewed as preferential
treatment for a new ethnic group in an impoverished
area. French authorities initially gave each
Hmong a few dozen francs a day to survive. The
settlers pooled those payments to buy fertilizer and
tractors. Slowly, after years of labor, the Hmong
42 TRAVERSE