By Eduardo Garcia

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia, March 30 (Reuters) - A group of refugees who fled the massacres and terror of Guatemala's civil war will return home this weekend after 24 years living in grinding poverty in Bolivia and a 13-year battle to go home.

The return of 158 people, including refugees and their offspring, signals the end of Guatemala's long history of exile, since it is the last large group of organized exiles expected to go back to the Central American country.

The group had no luck getting the Bolivian or Guatemalan governments to help them return until they attended the January 2006 swearing in ceremony of Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, and his new government pledged to get them home within six months.

"It took much longer than that, but we are very grateful to Evo's government," says Fidel Garcia, who fled Guatemala in 1980, the bloodiest part of the 1960-1996 civil war that killed 200,000, most of them Maya Indians.

The group lived in refugee camps in Honduras until 1983, but the United Nations found them a home in Bolivia because they feared the Guatemalan army could threaten them in Honduras.

Now Germany is paying for their flights back and Guatemala, a country still plagued by the inequality, poverty and discrimination at the root of the civil war, has donated land and concrete block houses with electricity and running water.

Tens of thousands of Guatemalans fled into exile during the civil war, with as many as 35,000 of them to camps in Mexico.

Dorotea Hernandez, 75, who left Guatemala with her six children in 1981 "pretty much at gun point," said she is bittersweet about returning because two of her children and twelve grandchildren will stay in Bolivia.

Hernandez has lived 25 years without a television, does not know the name of her country's president or that Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu, a champion of indigenous rights in the Central American country, will run for president this year.

"We're very poor. We sold everything for $200," says Hernandez, referring to a wooden shack with a thatched roof, ragged pieces of furniture and a small plot of land in Bolivia.

"All I have is some clothes in a bag, just like when I left Guatemala a long time ago," she said.

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