Guatemala

Country Overview

In 1996, Guatemalans signed peace accords that marked an official end to the country's 36-year civil war, the longest and bloodiest of the century's Latin American conflicts. Behind the smokescreen of "fighting communism," military groups trained and funded by the US killed 200,000 mostly Indigenous People and destroyed 440 Mayan villages. More than a million people were uprooted from their homes and over a quarter million became refugees in surrounding countries.¹

Despite the peace accords, Guatemala's Indigenous Peoples continue to face systematic discrimination and a creeping "remilitarization" threatens true Guatemalan democracy. Meanwhile, the country's most fundamental crisis, the unequal distribution of land, remains a major problem, with two percent of Guatemalans controlling 72 percent of the country's arable land.² This inequality was at the core of the civil war, which was fueled by US-backed efforts to monopolize land for the benefit of US-based agribusiness.

Today, the United States pushes for more neo-liberal economic policies, such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). These trade deals make it nearly impossible for local businesses and small farmers to compete with US corporations. By allowing US corporations increased, unregulated participation in the Guatemalan economy, such agreements promise to further exacerbate poverty and unemployment, displace more poor farmers and Indigenous Peoples, destroy natural resources and biodiversity, and create many more maquilas (sweatshops).

US-driven economic policies also seek to privatize critical services, such as health care and education, placing access to medical care even further out of reach for poor women and families. In Guatemala, women's and children's health is already jeopardized by inadequate medical services: maternal mortality among Indigenous women is 83 percent higher than among non-Indigenous women and, with only one doctor for every 10,000 rural Guatemalans, most women and girls lack even an annual medical check-up. Guatemala has the highest infant mortality rate in Central America and malnutrition among Guatemalan children is one of the worst in the world.

Maquilas

Unable to feed their families, many rural Guatemalans have flocked to the city to work in the country's maquila sector, producing name-brand clothing for export to the US. Without the protection of unions, Guatemala's 80,000 maquila workers suffer deplorable conditions. Most earn subsistence wages and spend more than a quarter of their pay on water in the under serviced shantytowns where they live.

Like their counterparts in Taiwan, the Philippines, Haiti and elsewhere, over 80 percent of Guatemala's maquila workers are young women who work longer hours than men and are paid half of men's wages. And many maquila workers are the sole providers for their families. Without adequate labor laws and enforcement of those laws, workers suffer human rights violations, including physical assaults, humiliating treatment and the forced consumption of amphetamines to increase output. Garment workers often sustain permanent lung damage from textile dust. Other workers live with chronic injury from the strain of repetitive manual work. Poised to create more maquilas in Guatemala, US-backed free trade agreements offer no increased protection for maquila workers. Privileging profit over workers' safety, health, and other human rights, these agreements give US corporations the right to sue governments for enforcing labor laws that could improve conditions in maquilas and protect women's human rights.

Increases in Violence and Human Rights Violations

Since 2000, Guatemala has witnessed a sharp rise in violence and intimidation directed at union leaders, human rights activists, and journalists. Indigenous communities in rural areas have been particularly affected by the escalating crisis as landowners increase their violent harassment of campesinos organizing for land rights. The violence has been attributed to illegal groups and clandestine security structures that have, until this point, received impunity from the Guatemalan government.

Guatemala has also experienced an alarming increase in violence against women, including rape, torture, and extra-judicial killings. The government has tried to dismiss the violence as a product of gang activity and drug trafficking, but human rights organizations claim that the precipitous rise in attacks against young, mostly poor and Indigenous women in Guatemala may be related to a larger pattern of abuse directed at Indigenous communities and social justice activists. In total, more than 2,200 women have been murdered since 2001, and the rate of murders continues to rise each year.³ Most are young women who migrated from rural areas to shantytowns of Guatemala City, in search of better wages.

End Notes

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1. "Assessment for Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala," Center for International Development and Conflict Management (31 December, 2003). http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/mar/assessment.asp?groupId=9002> May 10, 2002
2. "The Limits on Pro-Poor Agricultural Trade in Guatemala: Land, Labour and Political Power," Human Development Report 2005, UN Development Programme. http://hdr.undp.org/docs/publications/background_papers/2005/HDR2005_Krznaric_
   Roman_17.pdf
3. "Murders of Women in Guatemala Increasingly Frequent in 2006, New Amnesty International Report Finds," Amnesty International, 18 July 2006. http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/guatemala/
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