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  • Sandra Moran marches alongside other activists to demand respect for women's rights and end to violence against women.

    Sandra Moran marches alongside other activists to demand respect for women's rights and end to violence against women. | Photo: Facebook / Sandra Moran

Published 13 December 2015
Opinion
teleSUR English spoke to activist and politician Sandra Moran about the links between resource extraction and violence against women in Guatemala.

Many Guatemalan activists and human rights defenders have drawn attention to the connection between the violation of human rights and the capitalist resource extraction model that dominates the Central American country. In particular, women and especially Indigenous women, often face attacks, sexual violence, and social and political repression for their work defending land and natural resources.

teleSUR English spoke to Sandra Moran, feminist artist, human rights activist, and member of Guatemalan Congress, to learn more about the impact of resource extraction on women’s rights.

teleSUR English: How do mining and other resource extraction projects disproportionately impact women in Guatemala, especially Indigenous women?

Sandra Moran: Resource extraction projects destroy the land and social fabric, and both are fundamental for the lives of women and communities. The land is history, identity, beauty, culture, and life, and the social fabric is relations, history, future, heritage, culture, and identities. Women are directly affected by the changes that happen to the land. Water for example, can be contaminated or diverted, making it impossible to wash, cook, and bath.

“Sandra Moran: artist, lesbian, and congressperson.”

In terms of growing food, if husbands or women themselves cannot plant close by (due to contamination), they must walk a lot to be able to plant corn, beans, or vegetables.

Women also suffer effects on mental health due to worries about the family or life itself, fear of all kinds of violence, including repression and persecution for opposing such projects. Illnesses are also a product of contamination, such as skin problems above all or respiratory problems.

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Women also suffer harassment or sexual violence or threats against them, they suffer damage to their dignity. They have suffered violence exercised by authorities, both local and national, including jail time.

teleSUR English: Who can be held responsible for the physical, sexual, psychological violence many women have faced while struggling to defend their territory and natural resources?

Sandra Moran: Those responsible can be national police, the military, or private police. They can be men paid by the companies or can be direct workers of the companies that have been sent to (carry out violence) or who in their own minds are defending their jobs.

These are the ones who are responsible, but whether they are held responsible depends on whether legal processes are achieved.

teleSUR English: What are the continuities between resource extractivism in Guatemala and the long history of violence against women and Indigenous communities in the country?

Sandra Moran: The territories affected are the territories of Indigenous people. In Guatemala, there have been previous plunders, one with the (colonial) invasion, which was the first big plunder of the original peoples’ territories, and the second in 1871 with the liberal Revolution, in which the government dispossessed the people of their communal lands, making them into ejidos owned by large landowners for the coffee development.

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Another came during the (civil) war, in which communities were massacred to make way for hydroelectric projects or dispossessed of very productive lands for sugar cane or other export products.

In the face of this, communities have been occupying land that has been given to them or that they have fought for. It is from these lands that (companies) want to remove the people, which could constitute yet another plunder in history.

This is why the people are defending their territories, because they have been stripped from community memory over multiple generations, and communities in resistance are mostly Indigenous and campesino women, working in defense of life, the population, and future generations.

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