By JULIA PRESTON

Published: January 18, 2010

The Guatemalan government has issued a public protest after three Guatemalans were arrested this month by immigration agents at a Federal Express office in Florida, when one of the immigrants went to pick up a package containing his newly issued Guatemalan passport.

Suspecting that the passport was fraudulent, Federal Express officials called Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to alert them when the Guatemalans arrived to collect the package, officials of the immigration agency said. Two of the Guatemalans were illegal immigrants who have been deported, and one is in deportation proceedings.

Guatemalan diplomats said that Federal Express and American officials had examined and seized legitimate passports without notifying them and had improperly disrupted their dealings with Guatemalan citizens living in this country. Felipe Alejos, the Guatemalan consul in Miami, said the events appeared to violate basic diplomatic protocols.

“They seized official documents, and they did not let us know,” Mr. Alejos said. “There was coordination between FedEx and ICE to detain people.”

Federal Express officials said they had followed routine company procedures when they contacted immigration authorities after detecting packages that suggested organized document fraud. Officials from the immigration agency, known as ICE, said they arrested the Guatemalans only after two of them tried to flee from the Federal Express office. Both the company and the immigration agency denied that they had collaborated to lure the immigrants to the office.

The arrests started a rumor mill of fears in communities along the Florida coast, where many immigrants, both legal and illegal, have settled.

“When people in the community perceive that FedEx acted as an agent for immigration, it undermines their belief that they can collect their mail and trust in their government,” said John De León, a lawyer for the Guatemalan consulate in Miami.

The now disputed chain of events began in November when Guatemalan consular officials based in Miami held a daylong session in Jupiter, Fla., to help Guatemalans in the area resolve problems with birth certificates, passports and other documents. Dozens of Guatemalans signed up for new or renewed passports, which are useful as a form of identification in this country.

The Guatemalan government prints and distributes passports for its citizens living in the United States through a private company, De La Luz, in Metairie, La. In December, the company sent the new passports in Federal Express packages to the Guatemalans who had applied for them.

At least 30 packages could not be delivered to the addresses listed, said a Federal Express spokeswoman, Allison Sobczak, and the shipper in Louisiana did not respond to telephone calls. FedEx employees opened several packages searching for better address information, she said.

“This was a normal routine for us to open a package and inspect it to try to get a correct shipping address,” Ms. Sobczak said. Since the passports included no paperwork indicating they were official, Federal Express contacted ICE “to make sure the documents were legitimate,” she said.

Damaris Roxana Vasquez, 21, a Guatemalan living in Jupiter, said that on Jan. 6, she and three Guatemalan men drove to a Federal Express office in Riviera Beach to pick up a new passport for one of the men. When they arrived, she said in an interview, Federal Express employees told them to wait because they could not locate the package.

Federal Express employees called ICE agents, who were already on their way to the office, to advise them that customers had come to pick up a suspect package, ICE officials said. When the agents arrived, two of the men tried to flee, said an ICE spokeswoman, Nicole Navas. One escaped; the other two men and Ms. Vasquez were detained, and the men later deported. Ms. Vasquez has been released while her deportation case proceeds. Her 5-year-old son, who was with her, was not detained because he is a United States citizen.

ICE seized the undelivered passports, agency officials said. After an investigation showed they were legitimate, ICE officials returned them to the Guatemalan consulate last week.

“Document fraud poses a severe threat to national security and public safety,” Ms. Navas said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/us/19immig.html?scp=1&sq=Guatemala%20Protests%20Arrest%20of%203%20in%20Florida%20Over%20Passports&st=cse

Today, January 11th, is National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. Earlier this month President Obama issued a proclamation declaring January National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month where he acknowledged that “forms of slavery still exist in the modern era, and we recommit ourselves to stopping the human traffickers who ply this horrific trade.” Soon after, the local organization Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking or CAST, based here in LA, launched their “From Slavery to Freedom” campaign. More than 20 events will be taking place now through February 12th to draw attention to the issue of slavery. Each year about 17,000 people are estimated to be trafficked into the US. Los Angeles is considered among the top three points of entry into the United States for trafficked people. As part of their campaign CAST is working with local organizations like CARECEN, the Central American Resource Center, KIWA, the Korea-town Immigrant Workers Alliance, and PAC, the Pilipino Workers Center, as well as local and national law enforcement agencies.

GUESTS: Lisette Arsuaga, Director of Development and Communications at CAST, and Ima Matul, a member of CAST’s Caucus of Survivors

Find out about CAST’s calendar of events at http://www.castla.org/campaign-calendar

…

By Matthew Preusch, The Oregonian

Working as a Peace Corps volunteer, Lincoln High School graduate Laura Kutner (fifth from the right in a black shirt) directed the construction of a school building in Guatemala using discarded plastic bottles. In Guatemala, Laura Kutner noticed, plastic trash was everywhere.

And in the rural Guatemalan community where Kutner was until recently a Peace Corps volunteer, there were classrooms without walls.

Kutner, a 2002 graduate of Portland’s Lincoln High School, saw a solution to both problems. Thanks to her, the village of Granados in central Guatemala now has two new school rooms whose walls are made from discarded plastic soda bottles and other litter.

Kutner, 25, came up with the idea and saw the project through. And in so doing, she learned plenty — too much, really — about plastic and a fair amount about building community.

“First of all, there is so much plastic. Everything is packaged in plastic,” said Kutner, who was in Portland last week during a break from her work in Guatemala, where she remains assigned, but to a new location and job. “I got so sick of plastic.”

Who can blame her? She rallied the agricultural community of 900 people and surrounding mountain villages to collect more than 4,000 used plastic drink bottles from ditches, gutters and trash piles.

Students, volunteers and school staff then stuffed the bottles with plastic bags: potato chip packaging and grocery sacks. As many as 250 were crammed into each bottle using hands and sticks: this to contain plastic trash while adding heft to the bottle structure taking shape.

“We all got blisters from stuffing,” Kutner said.

Stacked side by side and row atop row, bound with chicken wire and coated with a cement-sand mix, these became the building blocks for walls that now enclose two small classrooms for Granados’ elementary school students.

“For me and for the community, seeing these two classrooms standing is truly a dream come true,” Kutner said.

Kutner applied to the Peace Corps while a senior at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she graduated in 2006 with a degree in anthropology and Spanish.

Helping others came naturally. Kutner, whose mother was a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1970s, was active in Lincoln High’s service club and other charitable endeavors.

Her father, Douglas Kutner, a Portland psychologist, remembers driving her as a child to Hat Point on the edge of Hells Canyon in the far northeastern corner of Oregon, the Seven Devils range in the distance.

“She said, ‘It’s really hard to look at all this beauty when you know how much suffering there is in the world,’” he recalled. “She was 9.”

Kutner is now based in San Miguel Dueñas, one of 128 Peace Corps volunteers from the Portland area, which ranks 11th among the nation’s metro areas for producing volunteers. Oregon ranks fifth among states per capita for Peace Corps volunteers.

When Kutner arrived at her posting in Granados in April 2007 to teach life skills to children, a metal frame and roof was all there was to the roughly 1,300-square-foot school annex building. The village government didn’t have the money to finish the project.

The elementary school’s principal told her they needed the space, and could she help find a way to finish the school?

Kutner got the idea to use bottles from a Guatemalan group called Pura Vida, which was using bottle-filled “eco-blocks” for community construction projects.

“A bottle project had never been done with metal before, always out of wood, but I figured why not look into it,” she said.

The project ended up costing about $3,000, Kutner said. It was finished with the help of local businesses that donated materials and labor; the goodwill organization Hug it Forward, who sent five volunteers to Granados; and Peace Corps volunteer Rebecca Wike of Washington, who succeeded Kutner in Granados.

In the fall, the gray walls were painted a vivid orange. Welders were still finishing the windows during the inauguration Oct. 26. This month, students will begin using the classrooms.

“I think one of the biggest things I learned is to not just have faith in yourself, but to have faith in other people,” Kutner said. “The end result of what we were able to accomplish was way greater than I ever imagined.”

While it got new classrooms, the community also got a new awareness of the litter all around it.

Kutner remembers being on a bus and for the first time hearing a mother tell her child not to throw an empty bottle out the window, a common practice. Another resident has begun collecting cans and hauling them into the capital, four hours away, to collect the deposit.

And though she got the project started, it was the local community that saw it through, Kutner said.

“With development work, you have to find a real balance. It has to be something the community really wants or needs, but they also have to be able to do it themselves,” Kutner said. “Otherwise it’s not sustainable.”

Kutner, whose name adorns a wall plaque at a new library in Granados she also helped build, has eight more months in Guatemala with the Peace Corps. After that, she plans to pursue a master’s degree in international studies and environmental management, perhaps at the University of Washington so she can be closer to her family, before continuing with a career abroad.

“I miss my family,” she said. “But I feel like I come alive when I do this kind of work.”

By JULIA PRESTON

In an unusually protracted and closely watched case, the Obama administration has recommended political asylum for a Guatemalan woman fleeing horrific abuse by her husband, the strongest signal yet that the administration is open to a variety of asylum claims from foreign women facing domestic abuse.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times. Rody Alvarado is shown at a lawyer's offices in San Francisco. The Obama Administration has recommended a granting her asylum.

The government’s assent, lawyers said, virtually ensures that the woman, Rody Alvarado Peña, will be allowed to remain in the United States after battling in immigration court since 1995.

Immigration lawyers said the administration had taken a major step toward clarifying a murky area of asylum law and defining the legal grounds on which battered and sexually abused women in foreign countries could seek protection here.

After 14 years of legal indecision, during which several immigration courts and three attorneys general considered Ms. Alvarado’s case, the Department of Homeland Security cleared the way for her in a one-paragraph document filed late Wednesday in immigration court in San Francisco. Ms. Alvarado, the department found, “is eligible for asylum and merits a grant of asylum as a matter of discretion.”

An immigration judge’s order granting the asylum is still required, but Ms. Alvarado’s lawyer, Karen Musalo, said that since the government had raised no new opposition, it was highly likely that the judge would approve her claim.

Ms. Musalo, director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at Hastings College of the Law at the University of California, said Ms. Alvarado’s “has been the iconic case of domestic abuse as a basis for asylum.”

Jayne Fleming, a lawyer specializing in asylum at the San Francisco office of the law firm Reed Smith, called the recommendation “a giant step forward.” Advocates and immigration judges, Ms Fleming said, “now have some pretty solid guidelines from D.H.S.”

In a phone interview Thursday, Ms. Alvarado, who has not been detained and lives in California, where she is a housekeeper at a home for elderly nuns, said she was pleased but also a little dazed and disbelieving.

“I thank God it came out well,” she said, speaking in Spanish. “But it wasn’t easy to wait this long for immigration to make a decision.”

She said she hoped the outcome in her case would mean that other abused women would receive quicker decisions from the courts.

Homeland Security Department officials were cautious in assessing the implications of the administration’s recommendation. The department “continues to view domestic violence as a possible basis for asylum,” a department spokesman, Matthew Chandler, said. But such cases, Mr. Chandler said, continue to depend on the specific abuse. The department is writing regulations to govern claims based on domestic violence, he said.

After enduring a decade of violence by her husband, Francisco Osorio, a former soldier in Guatemala, Ms. Alvarado came to the United States in 1995. Over the years, immigration judges have not questioned the credibility of her story. According to court documents, she married when she was 16, and became pregnant soon afterward. In a beating that he apparently hoped would induce an abortion, Mr. Osorio dislocated her jaw and kicked her repeatedly. He also “pistol-whipped Ms. Alvarado, broke windows and mirrors with her head, punched and slapped her, threatened her with his machete and dragged her down the street by her hair,” a court filing states.

In 1996, an immigration judge in San Francisco granted Ms. Alvarado’s asylum petition, but an immigration appeals court overturned that decision in 1999. In 2001, Attorney General Janet Reno threw out the appeals court decision, but did not grant Ms. Alvarado asylum. (Because the immigration courts are part of the executive branch, not the judiciary, the attorney general is the highest legal authority.)

In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security, which represents the government in immigration cases, argued for the first time in favor of asylum for Ms. Alvarado. Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered a new review but did not reach a decision. In September 2008, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey sent the case back to the immigration appeals court, encouraging the court to issue a precedent-setting ruling. Such a ruling can come only from an immigration appeals court or a federal court.

The large legal question in the case is whether women who suffer domestic abuse are part of a “particular social group” that has faced persecution, one criteria for asylum claims. In a separate asylum case in April, the Department of Homeland Security pointed to some specific ways that battered women could meet this standard.

In a recent filing, Ms. Alvarado’s lawyers argued that her circumstances met the requirements that the department had outlined in April. Now the department has agreed, in practice making the case a model for other asylum claims.

In a declaration filed recently to bolster Ms. Alvarado’s argument that she was part of a persecuted group in Guatemala, an expert witness, Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey, reported that more than 4,000 women had been killed in domestic violence there in the last decade. These killings, only 2 percent of which have been solved, were so frequent that they earned their own legal term, “femicide,” said Ms. Paz y Paz Bailey, a Guatemalan lawyer. In 2004 Guatemala enacted a law establishing special sanctions for the crime.

“Many times,” she said, violence against Guatemalan women “is not even identified as violence, is not perceived as strange or unusual.”

The resolution of her case is coming too late for Ms. Alvarado to be able to raise her two children, whom she has not seen since she left them in Guatemala. The children, now 22 and 17, were raised by their paternal grandparents, whom they call Mama and Papa.

“It has been tremendously painful for me to know that they do not see me as their mother,” Ms. Alvarado said in court papers.

By Michael Parenti and Lucia Muñoz

First Publish July 14, 2007

On the outskirts of Guatemala City the body of an 18-year-old woman of indigenous ethnicity was recently discovered by her frantic parents who had been searching long and hard. Forensic evidence showed that she had been repeatedly raped and tortured and that her head had been severed from her body with a blunt knife while she was still alive.

This killing was more than just a passing aberration. Nightmarish crimes against women have been occurring with horrifying frequency in Guatemala. In the last seven years, over 3,200 Guatemalan women have been abducted and murdered, with many of them raped, tortured, and mutilated in the doing. The number of victims has shown a striking increase in the last few years with some six hundred murdered in 2006 alone.

The victims often are from low-income families deracinated from their rural homesteads during the civil war and forced to crowd into Guatemala City and other urban areas in search of work.

We might recall Guatemala’s horrid history of violence. From 1962 to 1996, a popular insurgency was defeated by that deranged murder machine known as the Guatemalan Army, trained, advised, financed, and equipped by the United States. A United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission in 1999 characterized much of the counterinsurgency as a genocide against the Mayan people, a holocaust that left 626 villages destroyed, approximately 200,000 people dead or disappeared, including many labor union leaders, student leaders, journalists, and clergy. Hundreds of thousands more were either displaced internally or forced to flee the country.

Those years of untrammeled massacres provide some context for the current wave of femicide sweeping the country. The 1996 peace accords officially declared an end to the butchery but the war against women continues albeit in more piecemeal fashion. Guatemalan women are enduring the whiplash of decades of dehumanizing violence—boosted by the same kind of deep-seated sexism and gender-specific crimes (rape) that are perpetrated in many societies around the world.

Independent investigators charge that the vast majority of present-day atrocities against women have been committed by current or former members of the Guatemalan intelligence services. Having escaped prosecution for human rights violations during the internal war, these trained killers are now members of private security forces or police and paramilitary units that have been strongly implicated in the crimes of the last seven years.

For the most part, authorities show little inclination to bring the perpetrators to justice. Some officials blame the victims for their own deaths, implying that the women bring it on themselves because of their supposed involvement in gang activities or drugs, or because in some way or another they refuse to lead properly conforming lives within the safe confines of a traditional family and community

Some of the victims indeed may have been entangled in shady operations. But many more have been working women, including those of indigenous stock, trapped in poverty. They are the prime victims of a broader “social cleansing” that reactionary hoodlums are conducting against a variety of groups including street children, teenagers, gays, and homeless indigents, a campaign that has claimed thousands of additional victims.

Guatemala is known as the country of “eternal spring.” Some analysts have called it the land of “eternal impunity,” given how right-wing thugs continue to get away with rape, torture, and murder. Statistics reveal that hardly one percent of the perpetrators are ever tried and convicted and the sentences are outrageously light.

Even those rare cases that make it all the way to a prosecutor’s desk have little chance of resulting in a conviction due to the lack of reliable evidence. Recent reports reveal the continuing failure of investigators to collect and preserve essential evidence from crime scenes. More than ordinary incompetence is operative here. Guatemalan authorities manifest little interest in training skilled cadres who might unearth really damaging information about who is behind the crimes.

Anonymous death threats have been sent to the volunteer exhumation teams that locate and examine the bodies of the murdered women and who try to publicize the evidence they discover. In May 2007 the leader of one such team was informed that his sister would be “raped and dismembered into pieces” if he continued to investigate the crimes.

While these murders may seem like little more than random thrill killings to some observers, in fact they serve a function of social control much as would any form of state terrorism. The violence perpetrated against individuals creates a pervasive climate of fear and horror within the victimized families and communities, thereby discouraging social protest and popular resistance. Instead of organizing around any number of crucial politico-economic issues, many of the demoralized and traumatized families cower in stunned silence.

In time people grow numb to the violence. Feeling helpless they almost routinely check the news each day to see how many additional victims have been reported. The effects on children can be especially telling. Growing up in a climate of fear, they learn that their parents and community cannot keep them safe and that homicidal fury might strike anyone at any time.

Family members of murdered women report that authorities show hostility towards them when they request government intervention.

Guatemala’s legal system is rife with provisions that minimize the seriousness of violence against women, a system codified and enforced by men who have seldom displayed any concern for the safety of women. The Guatemalan Penal Code long reflected this bias, treating domestic abuse as a minor offence and generally offering scant protection from gender-based violence.

Guatemalan president Oscar Berger voices a commitment to confronting the crisis but has done next to nothing. Rather than devoting the necessary resources to investigation and enforcement, Berger appeared on national television in 2005 to announce that, for their own safety, women would do best to stay at home.

In 2005 Guatemala appointed its first female Supreme Court President, Beatriz De Leon, and two years later a female police chief. But there is little indication that high-placed female officeholders are going to buck the Old Boys network. Until the government makes some significant efforts towards implementing the recommendations outlined by human rights organizations (such as Guatemala Peace and Development Network, MIA, NISGUA, GHRC-USA, Rights Action, and Center for Gender Studies), the lives of Guatemala’s women will hang in the balance.

There are some encouraging signs. The Human Rights Committee of the Guatemalan Congress is giving serious consideration to a bill that purports to guarantee life, liberty, dignity, and equality for women along with stiffer penalties for those who physically and mentally abuse women and otherwise violate their rights.

Meanwhile a growing number of Guatemalan women are moving into nontraditional careers. In the upcoming election, at least one hundred women will be running for Congress. Some parties have designed campaign strategies intended to promote electoral victories for more women. At present of a total of 158 seats in the Guatemalan Congress only fourteen are occupied by women.

There also are efforts by human rights organizations to create a central, unified database of femicide victims, as well as an emergency response system for missing girls and women that would include utilization of state-of-the-art internet capabilities, DNA testing, and the like.

Awareness of the atrocities has been reaching other countries and gaining international attention. There is a growing demand from abroad that Guatemalan law enforcement agencies get serious about responding to the gender-based atrocities. The U.S. Congress is being pressured to get into the act. A House resolution condemns the murders and expresses condolences and support to the families of victims. The resolution urges the government of Guatemala to recognize domestic violence as a crime, and to investigate the killings and prosecute those responsible.

The U.S. Senate passed a resolution calling on the Guatemalan Congress to approve the actions of the U.N.-sponsored International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala. The commission intends to investigate the clandestine groups that use violence to advance their illicit political and financial interests.

Meanwhile innocent and unoffending women continue to suffer nightmarish fates at the hands of misogynistic maniacs who, some years ago, developed a taste for inflicting rape, torture, and death “in service to their country.”

— Michael Parenti is a noted author and social commentator. His recent books include Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights); The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories); Democracy for the Few 8th ed. (Wadsworth/Thomson) and The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press). See www.michaelparenti.org

— Lucia Muñoz is founder and executive director of MIA, Mujeres Iniciando en las Américas, and founder member of Guatemala Peace and Development Network. She has lectured across the United States and Guatemala on the struggles facing Guatemalan women.

Redacción La Hora | lahora@lahora.com.gt

Una corte de Los Ángeles, California, en Estados Unidos, condenó a cinco personas por haber obligado a la prostitución a varias mujeres, entre las que sobresalen algunas guatemaltecas.

Gladys Vásquez Valenzuela fue señalada de liderar una banda de traficantes de personas y trata de mujeres. Ella recibió la condena de 40 años de cárcel. Su hermana y sus dos sobrinas, recibieron también 30 años de prisión, así como el novio de una de éstas, quien purgará 35 inviernos, por su vinculación a esta banda.

Según la resolución, esta banda tenía la estrategia de atraer con engaños a guatemaltecas, quienes recibían el ofrecimiento de trabajo y cumplir el sueño americano en los Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, lejos de posicionarlas en un empleo, las obligaban a prostituirse.

La condena fue la sumatoria de delitos, como la asociación delictuosa y tráfico de personas por medios violentos y fraude. Según el testimonio de las guatemaltecas afectadas, eran obligadas a prostituirse; algunas llegaron al extremo de tener sexo hasta con 30 hombres al día.

En febrero pasado habían sido encontradas culpables, pero tras el tiempo de las apelaciones, se dictaminó ayer la condena de más de tres décadas, al menos. Según testigos del juicio, ninguno de los hoy sentenciados mostraron señales de arrepentimiento.

http://www.lahora.com.gt/notas.php?key=53953&fch=2009-08-18

Marina Wood

Though I have had Guatemalan friends in the past, it wasn’t until I befriended my coworker Farah that I became interested in going there. She spoke of her country with such fondness and at the same time criticized our activism and our social movements here in the U.S. as compared to in Guatemala. According to her, it was life and death, and people were fighting for human rights every day. Here in the U.S. she said that people might go to a protest every once in a while, but it wasn’t direct. I was intrigued. I couldn’t imagine what she was saying and just kept impressing upon her that she just needed to get more involved, that the immigrant’s rights movements were strong. At this time we were in the midst of the walk-outs and attended the Great American Boycott together on May 1, 2006 and a counter protest of the Minute Men in Hollywood. She was unimpressed. Then I took her to see one of my favorite political scientists at a KPFK event in LA and we got to meet Michael Parenti!! I was incredibly excited. When I found her outside afterward she said she met a woman from Guatemala who is working to end femicide there.

“What? What’s going on in Guatemala?”

“Well they’re killing people, but not just women. But she wanted me to work with her, she’s in Orange County and she’s the only one doing this kind of thing here.”

I was overjoyed. Finally Farah had found something she could be involved in! But then she lost her information and was all depressed over it. That November Farah and I visited her country for the Day of the Dead and as we left the airport with her uncle and cousin, my first impression was complicated. Farah was describing “el reloj de flores,” a grass & flower clock on an island in the street we were taking to leave the city. She said it is the only thing like it in Central America. But simultaneously I was noticing that all the cars were old, and that thick black smoke was emitting from them. I asked Farah’s uncle if there were emissions regulations and he said that there aren’t anymore because there were too many cars that didn’t meet them so it wasn’t an economically sound idea. My brain grew a little as I listened to his answer and contemplated how environmental regulations affect the poor so differently.

We went to Farah’s friend’s house and dropped off our luggage so we could backpack in Sampango for El Dia de los Muertos since it is up a very steep hill. Once there, I saw the most beautiful cemetery. As a lover and frequenter of cemeteries, I was pleased to see that this cemetery was incredibly colorful. The locals were placing food, alcohol and flowers on the graves; they were large crosses with the deceased’s name and year of birth/death and a person-size pile of dirt sticking out of the ground. All over, people were flying roundish paper kites and there were also huge ones that were stationary and you could walk up and see the pictures on them. It was beautiful. The women were wearing vibrant huipiles tucked into long skirts and the men were colorful too, but in pants. The women had ribbon-cloth braided into their hair and pinned atop their heads. When we left, Farah used the “sanitario” on the street. It cost money and had a sign that said “pee only” because there wasn’t water. Now, a lot more happened, but suffice it to say that we saw the beautiful lake Atitlan, went shopping, partied in Antigua, pre-screened a documentary on reformed gang members-turned activist clowns/street performers and spent a day in the jungle before returning home.

A few months later I come across an article about the Guatemalan femicide co-written by a Guatemalan woman named Lucia Munoz and Michael Parenti! I knew it had to be her and contacted her to meet us. Since I was taking a Women and Violence class at Long Beach State I decided I might as well hook up and interview her as well for a project I was working on and we went to her house. Once there, Lucia showed us a BBC documentary called Killers Paradise and I was horrified at the amount of impunity in Guatemala and the high rate of incredibly torturous rape-murder-dismemberment cases. Lucia then described how her non-profit, Mujeres Iniciando en las Americas (MIA) helps by funding and supporting non-profits in Guatemala, described her delegations, the first of which she just returned from, and her baby project, what she called the “men’s movement” that she would soon be implementing in a private school there. I was hooked. After the meeting I asked Farah if she was so excited and she said she didn’t have much time, but that it was a good cause and she would help translate. But I knew that I needed to work with Lucia more and from then on found ways to incorporate her cause into my school papers and eventually brought her to school a few times, and went on the summer delegation that next July.

The delegation was like nothing I had ever experienced before. Afterward, I came home traumatized but also longed for what we had there. Farah was right about the movement being different-I was amazed at its vitality and size. Lucia was connected to the most cutting-edge and also the most historically revered leaders and groups that were working for social change and I felt so privileged to meet them and hear what they had to say. We met with between 3 and 5 groups or individuals every day. Some people provided historical accounts of pre-war, wartime, and post-war conditions, some people invited us into their homes and spoke to us about the daughters they lost, many showed us what they are working on which ranged from documentaries about the social movements there and the hidden genocide of indigenous people during the 36 year civil war to news articles for a feminist newspaper to skill-sharing workshops for sex workers. Almost every group we met with used activism as tactics to make change: some used hunger strikes, kiss-ins (the lesbian group), graffiti art, and marches. We also went to the US Embassy and met with a Congresswoman and some leaders of the leftist party that grew out of the movement during the war and had a chance to bring the messages from the people to the decision-makers. This process was a bit tedious and frustrating but incredibly important.

During the delegation we also had a chance to bond with some of the college students at Guatemala’s only public university and with our translator, a veteran activist named Julio who also was the facilitator for the “men’s movement” Lucia had told me about previously. He ran workshops in a couple of private schools on gender equity. The program was called “Hombres Contra Feminicidio.” Along the way we were able to see the poor living conditions of the people, and since our hotel was in a zone where you don’t want to go outside after dark, we saw what the streets felt like in the day and at night for the people of Guatemala City. There were sex workers on the corners, drunks in the alleys and excrement and urine on the streets. The plumbing there is a nightmare: you can’t flush toilet paper and in many places, you can’t flush anything. It’s no wonder that many people don’t bother looking for an indoor restroom. Also, like I noticed on my first trip, the cars and buses emit heavy black smoke which would make my eyes tear up since I wear contacts. But at the same time, when we would go to the mountains, the air would be fresher, and there was more plant life, and animals, and the indigenous people weren’t only the maids and tortilla makers but fulfilled every role because the mountains are where their communities are. And that was nice. Except that on every corner there were churches blaring protestant sermons, competing for members, and the public schools were too far to send the children to so they either didn’t go or had to pay for books, tuition, and uniforms plus transportation to a private one. It seemed like everywhere you looked, life was bitter-sweet.

When I came home, my brain was filled with experiences and memories and stories, and my life suddenly seemed so small and my activism so trivial in comparison. I brooded for awhile and wrote to my new friends and debriefed with my friend from college that came with me and finally decided that I wanted to go again. Needed to. My friend agreed to go again as well, partially to understand better because so much happened so fast and neither of us were quite fluent in Spanish, and partially because we were hooked on the movement and the urgency of it all. So we did it all again and this time I was certain I would come back feeling like that was my last trip and I saw everything and learned everything and experienced everything as well I wanted and could go home fulfilled. This trip was different in many ways, we saw different people and we even got to participate in a huge march against violence against women to the Presidential Palace, but the feeling was the same: we were there as learners not as teachers and we were plugged into the movement, same as before. When I came home again however, I again felt pulled back to Guatemala. I longed to be there, to see more, hear more, write more. In the simplest terms, I missed it.

The next summer I was invited to Ecuador for a medical mission as a translator for a gynecologist and I leapt at the chance. It was also a 10 day trip but so very different it is hard to describe. We spent every day at the hospital, helping people, but never did we get a chance to meet with them as equals. There was an enormous power dynamic: we were rich American doctors coming to reach down and help the Ecuadorian people. In Guatemala, we were Americans, but we were coming to learn. We were humble and modest and ate and drank with the people. In Ecuador, we never entered the house of an Ecuadorian-we ate every meal at the hotel or at a restaurant. We weren’t there as activists, we were there as volunteers, and trust me there is an enormous difference. Also, there were huge differences in the general feeling there. It felt incredibly safer and you could even flush your toilet paper. I loved Ecuador and I felt good when I was in the hospital room, but being there only made it clear to me that I needed to go back to Guatemala, where there was more poverty and likewise more activism. When I returned, I met with Lucia and we made a plan: I would be an intern for MIA and re-instate “Hombres Contra Feminicidio” and co-facilitate with an amazing poet-activist named Simon Pedroza. This time I am going for 10 weeks and I finally get to be involved and work directly with the people. And I couldn’t be happier.

IPJ Daylight Series at USD Joan Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice

Thursday, September 3, 12:15 – 1:45 p.m.

KIPJ Room C

This past summer USD sent a team to Quiché – the department in the western highlands of Guatemala that was hardest-hit during that country’s 36-year civil war – to conduct a workshop on conflict transformation. Panelists including the new IPJ Executive Director Milburn Line; IPJ Program Officer Elena McCollim; Community Service Learning Director Elaine Elliott; and Anu Lawrence, M.A. in Peace & Justice ’09, will discuss the outcomes of the workshop and its relevance for peacebuilding efforts in Guatemala. No RSVP required. Feel free to bring a lunch; light refreshments will be provided.

University of San Diego: 5998 Alcala Park, San Diego, CA 92110-2492

Tel: 619.260.4600

Washington DC: Take Action on the DC Crime BIll

Sex trafficking is horrific crime whereby a person is forced or coerced to take part in sexual acts in exchange for something of value. In Washington D.C. such abuse of women and children is not uncommon. Unfortunately, in many cases a person who is sex trafficked is treated as a criminal rather than a victim who is unable to escape the physical abuse and psychological coercion to which she is subjected. Now, the D.C. Council is poised to vote on legislation, entitled the Omnibus Crime Bill 18-151, which includes a provision that will make a third arrest of a prostituted person a felony level crime. These penalties are far too stiff for the prostituted person, will do little to address the instances of prostitution or sex trafficking in D.C., and may cause further damage to trafficking victims.

Polaris Project serves clients throughout the D.C. metro area, as well as in NJ, who have been forced or coerced into prostitution. In many of these cases the victim, even at the age of just 18, will have a litany of arrests or convictions for prostitution both in DC and other jurisdictions. This demonstrates the transient nature of the pimps’ operations. Arresting the prostituted person does little to deter the trafficker/pimp or provide relief or rescue for the prostituted person. In fact, if enacted, this provision may cause further victimization as well as present increased obstacles as a woman with a felony conviction attempts to rebuild her shattered life.

Sex traffickers and pimps are motivated only by money, and the people they prostitute are easily movable, disposable and replaceable. Therefore we urge you to join with us and ask the D.C. Council to oppose the overreaching penalties for prostituted persons, and consider focusing their attention on the pimps and purchasers of sex or “johns”.

Polaris Project strongly supports the increased penalties for johns proposed in this bill. Johns exercise meaningful choice when they engage in commercial sex transactions, so efforts to deter their activity will have a greater impact in reducing prostitution and sex trafficking, which are inextricably intertwined.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

The crime bill was passed by the DC Council on July 30th and the bill now moves to the Mayor. Your quick action is imperative to helping victims of sex trafficking in DC!

1. Please take a moment to call AND email Mayor Fenty and urge him to send the DC Crime bill back to the Council and recommending that they remove the increased penalties for prostituted persons.   Contact Mayor Fenty here.  In your call you can simply say:  

”My name is …. And I live at…. I am calling to urge Mayor Fenty to send the DC Crime Bill (18-151) back to the Council to remove the increased penalties for prostituted persons.”

2. Be sure to follow up with a quick email.

Additional Talking Points:

• The proposed penalties are far too stiff for the prostituted person – up to 2-5 years in prison and or up to $4,000 to $10,000 in fines. These fines will simply result in the re-victimization of the prostituted person or trafficking victim, and there’s no evidence that this approach will decrease prostitution in the District.

• Victims of prostitution and sex trafficking commonly have many arrests or convictions for prostitution because pimps and traffickers are constantly moving them around to different areas to profit off of them [we never call this work]. Increasing penalties for the victim will do little to deter the trafficker/pimp or provide relief or rescue to the prostituted person.

• Greater penalties for prostituted persons may cause further victimization as well as present increased obstacles as a woman with a felony conviction attempts to rebuild her shattered life.

• The vast majority of states retain the misdemeanor penalty for subsequent convictions of the prostituted person. In the handful of states which make subsequent convictions a felony for the prostituted person, there is no correlation between these higher penalties and a decrease in prostitution and the closely related activity of sex trafficking. This is likely due to the fact that traffickers and pimps are motivated only by money, and the people they prostitute are easily movable, disposable and replaceable.

• Studies have shown that focusing criminal prosecution on the purchasers of commercial sex will have an immediate and long-term effect in curbing the demand for prostitution.

http://actioncenter.polarisproject.org/component/content/article/35-action/618-crime-bill-proposes-third-time-arrest-be-a-felony