Guatemala

The example of Guatemala helps us better understand the processes at work that made what is a financial project at the surface level into a grassroots political-organizing tool in El Salvador.

As in El Salvador, the history of exploitation in Guatemala was paralleled by one of organized resistance movements by indigenous people, campesino farmers, urban poor, and plan­tation day laborers. In the 1970s and 1980s, diverse leftist guerilla movements and the right-wing owning class (includ­ing the military, political, and business elite) across Central America became proxies for the wider Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, receiving military train­ing, arms, and aid. The proxy wars, tied to international-level political maneuvering, enabled the localized conflicts, fueled by deep personal hatreds, racism, and greed.²⁷

Meanwhile, international economic processes over the last thirty-five years also helped maintain the structural inequali­ties that have long characterized Guatemalan society. Today, Guatemala has the highest rate of malnutrition in Latin America and the fourth highest rate of chronic malnutri­tion in the world,²⁸ rates comparable to a desert country like Mali. About half the children in Guatemala are undernour­ished (including 80 percent of indigenous children),²⁹ even as Guatemala’s main export products are foodstuffs: coffee, sugar, bananas, vegetables, and ethanol (made from corn).³⁰

Oxfam chose to introduce Saving for Change in the regions of Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz in central Guatemala, where large indigenous populations overlapped with high rates of poverty and women’s illiteracy and where few other interna­tional development organizations already worked.³¹ Alta and Baja Verapaz are also in the middle of the drug-smuggling corridor.

There was another major pull for choosing to launch Sav­ing for Change in these neighboring central regions. Both regions were home to many experienced grassroots com­munity organizers and existing women’s committees.³² We would be working not only in an area with great need, but one full of people already engaged in the sort of locally owned and locally managed development that Saving for Change embodies. We knew from our experience in El Salvador that if we could engage the strengths of women organizers who already embraced an empowerment methodology, then Sav­ing for Change would reach far more women—and it would offer the organizers a useful financial tool with which to increase participation in their broader economic and social justice repertoire. This was a great way for us to support that work without directly intervening in or directing it.