GUATEMALA CITY – The Guatemalan government will spend $13.51 million to build 3,000 homes in 144 communities battered by the country’s 1960-1996 civil war, the head of the National Reparations Program said.

Cesar Davila told reporters the project is the second of its kind in the Central American nation and that work will begin next Monday.

Made of concrete block and corrugated iron, the three-room houses will be provided with electricity, water and sewer service, he said.

Nearly half of the homes are to be built in the Ixil region of the northwestern province of Quiche, an area that bore the brunt of the 36-year-long conflict between leftist rebels and a succession of repressive governments.

The project will also benefit communities in the provinces of Alta Verapaz, Baja Verapaz, Peten, San Marcos, Chimaltenango, Huehuetenango, Solola, Mazatenango and Zacapa, Davila said.

Reparations to victims were mandated in the 1996 accords that ended Guatemala’s civil war, which left some 200,000 dead, most of them Indian peasants slain by the army or its allied militias.

In May, President Alvaro Colom’s government handed over 299 homes built in the first such effort carried out by the reparations commission. EFE