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Fighting Discrimination
In Guatemala
Latinamerica Press
For two years, Marta, an illiterate,
43-year-old Maya Kaqchikel woman, worked
as a housemaid and was abused by her
employers. The non-indigenous family she
worked for in San Lucas Sacatepequez,
around 35 kilometers from Guatemala City
forced her to sleep in a tiny wooden
shack with no door among garden tools
and buckets filled with dirty laundry,
said Marta, who asked that her name be
changed, fearing reprisals from her
employers.
They barred her from using the family
bathroom and she was forced to bathe in
the yard, said Marta, originally from
the highland department of Totonicapan.
To add insult to injury, her employer´s
husband regularly subjected her to a
torrent of verbal abuse. “You´re
useless. You´re a dirty woman. You ought
to wash and be grateful for the fact
that we´ve given you a job,” were some
of the remarks that she had to endure on
a daily basis, she said.
After quitting her job last year, Marta
decided to seek help from the Defensoria
de la Mujer Indigena, known by the
acronym Demi, a government-sponsored
office tasked with defending indigenous
women´s rights.
More than 40 percent of Guatemala´s 14
million people consider themselves
indigenous, though some experts believe
the percentage may be as high as 60
percent.
According to Demi lawyer Azucena Socoy,
such cases are rarely reported because
it is considered “normal” for indigenous
domestic workers to be forced by their
employers to abandon their traditional
clothing, speak Spanish, and suffer such
abuse and degradation.
Legislation on paper
In October 2002, Congress added a new
article to the Penal Code that
classifies various forms of
discrimination, including racism, as a
crime.
“Discrimination will be understood as
all forms of exclusion, restriction or
preference based on factors such as
gender, race, ethnic origin, age,
religion, economic status, health,
disability, marital status or any other
circumstance that prevents a person or
group of people from exercising their
legally established rights, including
the right to exercise customary law,
enshrined by the Guatemalan Constitution
and international treaties on Human
Rights,” says the law.
But discrimination is still a common
feature of daily life for Guatemala´s
indigenous population.
“The law has many loopholes that make it
difficult to prove discrimination cases
in court,” said Dilia Palacios, the
Presidential Commissioner Against Racism
and Other Forms of Discrimination, or
Codisra.
The justice system requires proof that
the victim was subjected to racist
abuse, such as the testimony of a
witness, which is extremely difficult in
cases such as Marta´s and those of other
domestic workers.
“First of all, you need to persuade the
Attorney General´s Office that a crime
has been committed and that an
investigation should be opened.
Discrimination needs to be proven;
otherwise the authorities say that it´s
merely a ´problem´ that needs to be
solved through conciliation”, says
Xiomara Vásquez, a legal advisor for
Codisra.
In cases such as Marta´s, victims can
rarely obtain proof or the testimony of
a witness, making it impossible to bring
the perpetrators to trial. “You need a
videotape to record what someone did or
said which is complicated,” says Socoy.
Another hurdle is that for a
discrimination case to be tried, it must
be tied to another crime, she says, as
the Attorney General´s Office does not
consider discrimination to be a serious
offence.
Cristian Otzin, another legal advisor
for Codisra, adds that the maximum
penalty for discrimination is a
three-year prison sentence.
According to Vásquez, the rare cases
that have reached the courts have
required the intervention of experts on
indigenous culture – known as “peritaje
cultural” – which brief the judge on the
cultural background of the victim and
the importance of certain words or
actions.
However, the cost of this intervention
is usually around Q10,000 (US$1,200) and
ought to be met by the Attorney
General´s Office, although the
authorities often refuse and demand that
the victim should pay for this.
Considering that the minimum wage in
Guatemala is Q1,800 ($225) a month, it
is usually impossible for victims to
meet the cost, so in most of the cases
that have been successfully tried, the
victims have had financial and legal
support from a human rights
nongovernmental organization or a
government body such as Codisra.
Landmark cases
“The law imposes many hurdles for such
crimes to be brought to trial”, stresses
Socoy.
According to Palacios, “there is still
much to be done to raise awareness about
discrimination among the judiciary and
society at large”.
However, a number of landmark cases are
a beacon of hope for victims of racial
discrimination like Marta. Palacios
quotes two recent cases that were
successfully brought to trial under the
law against discrimination with the
support of Codisra such as that of a
domestic worker who was forced to
abandon her traditional Maya Kiche
clothing and wear a uniform, and a
school girl from the highland city of
Quetzaltenango who was also forced to
abandon her native attire to attend
school.
For Mayan political scientist Álvaro
Pop, these cases illustrate that even
though more needs to be done for the
impact of discrimination to be
understood and taken seriously by the
authorities, “more has been achieved
over the past two decades than over the
past 200 years”. |
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