the Condemav election slate

In Guatemala, a very special political victory was born out of the organizing around Saving for Change. Carmelina Chocooj was working for the Rigoberta Menchu Foundation on human rights in 2007 when she founded a community organization to focus on indigenous people’s rights.

Once she brought all the women in her village together, they mobilized their collective strength into a voting bloc.

Then they took it one step further:

There was a community assembly in which the commu­nity authority said a new authority would be elected in fifteen days. So the women from the savings groups organized themselves and proposed a ballot with a woman candidate to be Mayor. [Our] other candidates ended up being another woman, a man, and one more woman. It was an inclusive ballot, but the women were going to hold key positions. They called this ballot “The Star.”

So there were three ballots: a ballot of the outgoing authority, a ballot from the men in the community, and one from the women of the savings groups.... That Sunday came and we were all nervous, worried because it was our first experience trying to take power. The voting hour came. They all went and voted.

When they counted the votes, 95 percent of the votes were for the inclusive ballot—the women from the savings groups won! Now these women were part of the community authority. This, to me, is the biggest success we have had in Guatemala and more specifically in Alta Verapaz, within the communities of Tipulcan....

After two months, we had elections at a regional level. There are fifteen to twenty communities [in the region]. Now [our candidate] is the mayor at a higher level, twenty-eight communities. She has [support from] savings groups and continues to win, so she is the mayor of the community and the region.⁴⁵

The Star slate of candidates won 90 percent of the vote in the local election.⁴⁶ CONDEMAV’s victory demonstrates the power of organizing: once women have a reason to get together, they can act together. In this community, organized women were able to take on an entire political system. The useful nature of Saving for Change makes it a particularly good tool for engaging women despite a culture of masculin­ity that discourages women’s public participation.

Catalina Hernandez⁴⁷ is a survivor of domestic violence and poverty and an outspoken advocate on behalf of indig­enous people’s land rights and environmental justice in the face of mining corporations. She joined a Saving for Change group in 2011, was elected president of her group, and then volunteered to train more savings groups, helping to form about twenty-five of them. Catalina united all the savings groups in her community into a women’s network. She sums up the transformative power of feminist organizing through Saving for Change:

The thing is that there are a lot of men who do not let [women] participate.... The men are opposed to it because they say the women are going to go learn how to give them orders and tell them what to do. They believe they have to tell us what to do. The fear that they have is that the women will wake up and say that the men can no longer give them orders. That’s what they say in some cases [but] in others, there are men who have finally understood that saving is good, and they are doing it too. The situation has gotten better.

Now some of the women say that they do not have to obey the men.... Now [men and women] can be in communication, be at home and share the work.

Although all the savings groups in El Salvador and Gua­temala took full advantage of the financial benefits afforded by Saving for Change to pursue small business ventures and to smooth irregular income, many of the groups were able to use the savings groups for much more than saving and lend­ing. In Central America, Saving for Change became a plat­form for broader community organizing and empowerment around important social and political issues.