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The following excerpt is from a July 13, 2010 article, published by CNN.com. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
(CNN) — An appeals court ruling has raised the possibility that Guatemalan women will be able to seek asylum in the United States because of the high rates of femicide in that country.
A Guatemalan woman seeking asylum based on her belief that she would not be safe in her native country will have her case reviewed, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday.
Lesly Yajayra Perdomo, a native of Guatemala who entered the United States illegally as a teenager to join her mother in 1991, was facing deporation in 2003.
She requested asylum “because she feared persecution as a member of a particular social group consisting of women between the ages of fourteen and forty,” according to the court document. In particular, Perdomo argued that women in Guatemala “were murdered at a high rate with impunity.”…
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The following excerpt is from a June 21, 2010 article published by IPS. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
Rosenda Gómez, a 53-year-old mother of five, knows all about challenges. To overcome them, she started a modest sausage business in Guatemala, and thanks to her leadership skills and training and other support she received, she is now an example of the economic empowerment of women.
Sixteen years ago she began to make homemade sausages in her village, Laguna Ocubilá, to sell in the nearby city of Huehuetenango, the capital of the northwestern province of the same name.
But her business was a micro-enterprise that allowed her family to just barely scrape by — until things changed radically three years ago, when the Centros de Servicios para los Emprendimientos de las Mujeres (CSEM) came to her village.
CSEM, a network of centres providing technical and financial services for women entrepreneurs, is sponsored by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in association with Guatemalan institutions…
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The following excerpt is from a May 3, 2010 article published by Grassroots International. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
Last week, I met with representatives from the National Women’s Commission of the Via Campesina – Guatemala. The Commission comprises women from four different peasant and indigenous organizations…
The women of the Via Campesina – Guatemala have denounced the national government for neglecting the results of 40 community referendums, each demanding the immediate halt to mining and agribusiness operations in their native indigenous territory. These transnational companies hope to confuse or sedate communities with false promises of development. In fact, however, foreign investments in mining, hydro-power dams and agribusinesses threaten to uproot families from their native land and destroy local environments, all without the full and informed consent of local communities.
Women representatives of the Via Campesina – Guatemala are leading the way for an overall change in the development policies for Guatemala…
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The following excerpt is from an May 6, 2010 article published by Relief Web. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
In the southern highlands of Guatemala people are hungry. Recent prolonged droughts and a drop in remittances due to the worldwide financial crisis have left many families unable to grown or buy food. Guatemala, which has one of the world’s worst rates of chronic malnutrition for children under five (an estimated 47%), is facing a worsening food crisis.
To combat this problem, MADRE and Muixil have expanded Farming for the Future, a food security and microenterprise project for Indigenous Ixil women in El Quiché…
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The following excerpt is from the inaugural issue of EVFP: The Human Development Magazine. To learn how to order this magazine, and to view a preview of its entire first issue, please click here.
The Women of Lake Atitlan (by Marcelle Renkin and Dana Kulchawik)
 Many of the traditions that define and sustain the Mayan culture remain today but not without the effort of local and international organizations and individuals who strive to protect traditional knowledge and local resources through its practical application…
Jane Mintz, an experienced social worker and weaver herself, began working with indigenous women artisans and families in 1988. This collaboration was the beginning of Maya Traditions, an American-based Fair Trade wholesale business and Guatemalan-based production and social service organization.
A WEAVING GROUP BORN OF TRADEGY
Antonia is the founder of her weaving group which formed in response to a massacre in her mountain village in the highlands of Guatemala in the early 1980’s. Antonia works to help her group gain markets for their weavings, aiding in the economic vitality of her community. Antonia’s group began working with Maya Traditions in the development of new samples. This Fair Trade relationship thrived and now supports the 22 members of this weaving group. In collaboration with the Maya Traditions, her group received and paid back a loan for communal land where group member’s plant and harvest corn to sell when yearly weaving supplies dwindle. These funds serve as capital for the group’s weaving projects.
A CENTER BUILT FROM WEAVING
… One of [the group’s] successful initiatives resulted in the building of a community center in 2002 for their group on their communal land.
The weavers and their families provided labor needed to build the community center while Maya Traditions and the Canadian Government’s fund for Local Initiatives paid for the materials…
To learn more about EVFP magazine, please click here. To read more articles about women in Guatemala, please click here.
The following excerpt is from an April 23, 2010 article published by the Latin American Herald Tribune. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
GUATEMALA CITY – The majority of Guatemala’s textile and food-processing plants are exploiting their female workers, according to a study presented here Thursday by the London-based Doctors of the World aid organization.
The study was carried out between 2006 and 2009 among 530 female workers at maquiladoras, or textile mills, and agro-food-processing plants in the southwestern provinces of Chimaltenango and Sacatepequez, Pilar Giraux, who has headed up the DOW mission in Guatemala since 2005, told reporters.
These factories, which import materials and equipment duty-free and target most of their production for export, exploit and discriminate against their female workforce, taking advantage of their low educational levels, according to the study…
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The following excerpt is from a Fall, 2006 article published by Roselyn Costantino. To view the article in its entirety, please click here.
Violence against women in Guatemala is not a new story; the staggering increase in the number of crimes and level of violence against women, however, is shocking. Since 2000, the Guatemala National Civil Police records document 2,170 murders of women; in 2005, the average was forty-eight deaths per month (Trujillo 2006). These killings manifest a systemic denial of women’s most basic human rights and a culturally embedded misogyny that expresses itself in the brutalization of women. This violence inflicts a generalized sense of fear and intimidation on a society still not healed from the atrocities of the thirty-six-year internal conflict (1960–1996) marked by genocide of civilians, mostly indigenous, by military and clandestine security forces. Despite the efforts of the 1996 Peace Accords, Guatemala’s institutional structures and traditional communal systems are proving incapable of protecting women. They fail to act upon the network of forces that function within strategies for power that target women who live in relative obscurity and extreme insecurity in this mostly rural country, which is 25 percent smaller than the state of Illinois, with a population of about 13 million, a high percentage of whom are indigenous. In spite of national and international efforts to stabilize Guatemala, it remains one of the world’s poorest and most insecure nations.
The new level of brutality against women exposes a strained, complex web of social, political, and economic relations; the tensions are borne on women’s bodies at a moment when women have begun to conceptualize and construct a social agency and identity that were rare a few decades ago…
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Roselyn Costantino, Associate Professor of Spanish and Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University Altoona, has received a Fulbright Scholar Award for Spring Semester 2011 to do research in Guatemala and to lecture at the Universidad Del Valle Guatemala, Department of Anthropology.
During the six-month award, Costantino will conduct qualitative research on the internal organizational dynamics of civic organizations founded and led by women since the end of the Guatemala civil war in 1996; document alliance building and female agency development by non-governmental women’s organizations that provide leadership training, health care, and other services to Mayan women and non-indigenous women in the Western Highlands; and lecture at the Universidad del Valle Guatemala Department of Anthropology on Latin American feminist theory and methodology. This research forms part of a larger project on violence against women and femicide in Guatemala, topics on which Costantino has lectured and published in the U.S. and internationally.
Dr. Roselyn Costantino received her M.A. from Montclair State University (1988) in Spanish Peninsular Literature with a focus on 19th-century Spanish and Latin American narrative, and her Ph.D. from Arizona State University (1992) in Spanish with specialization in Latin American theatre and narrative; Latin American Studies; and Women’s Studies.
Her areas of specialization include Feminist Theory and Gender Studies; Performance Studies; Social Justice and Violence Against Women; Latin American Women Writers, Playwrights, and Performance Artists; Latin American Studies. She is a member of the Altoona College Arts and Humanities and Integrative Arts faculty; Women’s Studies Faculty; and the University Graduate faculty. She is coordinator of Women’s Studies
To read more about Dr. Costantino, and to see a list of her publications, please visit her Penn State webpage. An excerpt and link to her article, “FEMICIDE, IMPUNITY, AND CITIZENSHIP: The Old and New in the Struggle for Justice in Guatemala” can be found here. You can read more about her recent Fulbright, by clicking here.
The following excerpt is from an April 21, 2010 article published by Inside Costa Rica. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
GUATEMALA – Guatemala’s official and social entities disagree on the number of Guatemalan women killed this year in a violent way, but they do agree it has increased uncontrollably.
The National Civil Police reported 154 assassinations until April 5, while the Human Rights Office said to have registered 173 by the end of March.
The latest includes the 64 murders occurred in March, the deadliest month ever…
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The following excerpt is from an April 13, 2010 article published by The Independent. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
NEIU Professor Brett Stockdill returned from his trip to Guatemala to speak with the university about their issue of domestic violence and what is being done currently to combat it on March 30.
Violence has been embedded into the country’s culture, going back to the civil war, said Stockdill. The past has played a big role in the current manifestation of violence throughout the country, primarily domestic abuse.
A group called Nuevos Horizontes, however, is attempting to give women a new start. They are an agency dedicated to sheltering, caring and supporting women who left their families due to violence. Nuevos Horizontes has seven different groups to the organization such as legal, community service, psychological care, medical care, shelter, childcare and job training.
Stockdill visited Guatemala to study, research and volunteer. He spent seven weeks with the group and during his time there, conducted several interviews with the workers there.
“The interview responses parallel some of the tensions within scholars and activism against violence,” said Stockdill . He acquired a diverse range of people for his interviews from ages 20 to 40…
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The following excerpt is from an April 12, 2010 article published by The Cutting Edge News. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
In 2009, some 847 women were murdered in the Central American republic of Guatemala. Over the last 10 years, some 5,000 have been similarly killed. So far in 2010, the death toll for women now stands at 160. These are not cases of domestic violence: the victims are women who were tortured and killed in public places. In nearly all the cases, no perpetrators have been identified.
Since 2008, Guatemala has “feminicide” on its law books: the murder of women simply because of their sex or out of hatred for their sex. According to Walda Barrios-Klee, a Guatemalan activist, “We consider feminicides to be impersonal crimes. Those who kill a woman have not relationship to her. It is an anonymous crime. The one who kills does not know the victim and kills her because of the fact that she is a woman. This is what is new about the phenomenon,” said Barrios-Klee…
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The following excerpt is from an April 12, 2010 article published by the Eurasia Review. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
By Louisa Reynolds
For two years, Marta, an illiterate, 43-year-old Maya Kaqchikel woman, worked as a housemaid and was abused by her employers.
The non-indigenous family she worked for in San Lucas Sacatepequez, around 35 kilometers from Guatemala City forced her to sleep in a tiny wooden shack with no door among garden tools and buckets filled with dirty laundry, said Marta, who asked that her name be changed, fearing reprisals from her employers.
They barred her from using the family bathroom and she was forced to bathe in the yard, said Marta, originally from the highland department of Totonicapan.
To add insult to injury, her employer´s husband regularly subjected her to a torrent of verbal abuse. “You´re useless. You´re a dirty woman. You ought to wash and be grateful for the fact that we´ve given you a job,” were some of the remarks that she had to endure on a daily basis, she said…
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The following excerpt is from a February 9, 2010 article published by The Latin American Herald Tribune. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
GUATEMALA CITY – The climate of insecurity in Guatemala is forcing women to arm themselves to protect themselves and their families, the official Diario de Centroamerica newspaper said Monday.
A report by the daily says that, regardless of their profession, more and more women are acquiring weapons and are registering them with the Digecam regulatory agency.
Some 9,200 weapons have been registered at that agency in the name of women, a figure that represents 4 percent of the total weapons registered.
Digecam assistant director Guillermo Mejia said that while it is not very common for women to approach the institution, each day they are showing more interest in carrying a firearm for self-defense.
What is motivating women to arm themselves, the official told the daily, is the need to feel more secure and protected, because many of the women own businesses and have been the victims of crime…
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The following excerpt is from a Janaury 7, 2010 article published by Antigua Daily Photo. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
Women. They are the subject of these pictures. Why? The gruesome brutality hasn’t stopped. In fact, it has barely dipped. The Latin American Herald Tribune reports that 708 women were violently murdered in Guatemala in 2009. That figure is down compared to the 773 reported violent deaths in 2008, but not by much. There is simply no justice:
According to activist Norma Cruz, who heads the Survivors Foundation that provides help for abused women in Guatemala, no plans exist to guarantee women’s safety. In a statement to reporters, Cruz said that more security agents are needed in areas considered extremely dangerous for women. The activist regretted that even though police and prosecutors nab the aggressors, the courts tend to free them with such substitute measures as letting them out on bail.
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