Women's Empowerment and Violence Reduction Project

Mujeres a la Marcha

In November 2007 Café Conciencia sponsored a trip to Guatemala City so that over 60 women from the Loma Linda, Nueva Alianza, and Santa Anita communities could participate in the annual march for the International Day of No-Violence Against Women.

Fundraising Progress Tracker:
Project Budget $9,000
Amount Raised to Date (March 17, 2008): $4,485

Further Readings:
Guatemala Human Rights Commission 2007 "Report on Violence Against Women"
Amnesty International 2005 Report "No protection, no justice"
Amnesty International 2006 Update to above report
U.S. House Resolution 100, passed on May 1, 2007
U.S. Senate Resolution 178, introduced May 1, 2007
www.sectordemujeres.org (Spanish-only website of Guatemala's largest women's organization)

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Full Project Proposal

Basic Project Info:

Women's Empowerment and Violence Reduction Project in the Communities of Loma Linda, Nueva Alianza, and Santa Anita, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala

“Combating violence against women requires challenging the way that gender roles and power relations are articulated in society.”
- United Nations Dept. of Public Information, February 1996

18 Workshops

Peer-led. Leadership development, consciousness-raising, self-protection and solidarity.

75 Women

Rural working women, ages 16 to 65. Mothers, daughters, grandmothers, granddaughters.

3 Communities

Worker-owned coffee-growing communities in Southwest Guatemala.

Violence Against Women in Guatemala

Since the year 2000, over 3,000 women have been murdered in Guatemala and less than 2% of cases have resulted in convictions, making Guatemala “the most dangerous place for women in all of Latin America”. In 2008 the United Nations ranked Guatemala worst in the entire Western hemisphere in terms of gender-related development, based on low levels of female literacy, schooling, earning power, and life expectancy. Guatemala also has the lowest percentage of women in congress in the hemisphere (8.2%).

Our Response

A series of 18 peer-led empowerment workshops with 75 women in the agrarian, worker-owned communities of Loma Linda and Nueva Alianza, carried out by trained women members of the Santa Anita community. Workshops focus on leadership development, social and political education and empowerment, and violence reduction. Specific topics include indigenous identity, discrimination, history of feminism, domestic violence, and women's legal and human rights and how to demand them.