Antonieta Castro Abaj

Antonieta Castro Abaj helps marginalized, indigenous Guatemalan women become knowledgeable civic participants who are willing to defend their otherwise neglected human rights and even pursue leadership positions.

Through the organization of citizenship study groups, Antonieta equips rural, often illiterate, indigenous women with the knowledge, confidence, and tools necessary for active civic participation. In communities where discussion of women’s rights can be contentious, futile, and thus unappealing to women, Antonieta offers instead the promise of economic opportunity, using microcredit and productive projects as an incentive for women to engage in the citizenship study groups. The study groups explore themes that range from local community issues to national politics and indigenous women’s rights. Antonieta simultaneously helps the women obtain identity cards and register to vote. Through this process, participants become active daily citizens, not only voting, but also defending their rights and running for public office.

The signing of the Peace Accords in 1996 brought an end to the 36-year civil war in Guatemala, which had arisen due to the social, political, and economic exclusion of indigenous Guatemalans. Although some doors have now been opened for the indigenous population—for instance, the Guatemalan state has established a law against discrimination and made indigenous languages official—real change has been limited. More than 50 percent of the poor, rural, primarily indigenous population lacks basic services and only 7 percent of its homes have access to telephones, radios, or other communication methods. Despite the law, indigenous people effectively have been denied the use of their own languages. When Antonieta as a Spanish speaker accompanies women to municipal offices, they receive more effective, less scornful attention than when the non-Spanish speaking women go by themselves.

The problems of the Guatemalan indigenous population are common to the rest of Central America and southern Mexico. For a region still recovering from revolution, insurrection, and persistent fighting, the risk of continued exclusion of significant portions of the population is more violence and all its ramifications.

Indigenous women, in particular, remain marginalized across the region, discouraged from participating as full citizens. Women do not have the same opportunities as men to study, to learn Spanish, to leave their communities and expand their reality, to serve in public office. Although other organizations have made efforts to reach out to this population, results have been limited because of the persistent lack of political voice and power. After years of oppression, even mistreatment at the hands of their own communities has become normal for indigenous women. Traditional approaches to women’s rights have little appeal in these collective societies where everyone is struggling just to survive economically.

Using the attraction of economic opportunity, Antonieta involves indigenous women in a process of education for political engagement. She offers women financial support for productive projects in return for their agreeing to participate in citizenship study groups. These groups provide a forum in which Antonieta can provide human rights training, get women talking and learning about community and political issues, help them engage in political processes, and develop a new cadre of trainers who can spread the model to other communities. Finally, she develops tools for information dissemination both to quickly spread pertinent information within the network of indigenous women and their communities and to sensitize relevant external audiences to the women’s human rights challenges.

Because indigenous women have generally accepted a particular lot in life to serve their homes and husbands and not speak out, outright discussion of human rights does not come easy. Additionally, because they often live in extreme poverty, women are more attentive to making sure that their families are fed than that their rights are respected. Even if they are interested in the meetings, at some point they will start missing them because they have to work. Antonieta, therefore, recruits women to participate and stay involved in the study groups not through promises of liberation but rather that of financial support. With a small seed grant, she began offering women no-interest credit to assist or create productive enterprises if they would join a local women’s group. Once formed, the group itself controls the process, deciding how much money to give to whom based on different productive needs and income levels. Some women use this opportunity without fully engaging in the meetings, but most become active participants. In addition, the financial support helps convince the women’s families to allow them to attend the meetings.

Twenty-eight groups now meet on a regular basis to educate themselves and discuss pertinent issues. Themes range from local issues to national and international politics, including the maquila plants where many of the women’s daughters work in poor conditions, Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, definitions of human rights particularly as they relate to indigenous women, and national political reality. Through discussion, the women not only come to understand what their rights are but also develop civic interest and responsibility.

Equipped with the knowledge and confidence provided by the study groups, women are then ready to engage. Antonieta encourages several opportunities to do so. She teaches the women about the importance of having personal identification cards and helps them obtain them. With these cards, the women can then register to vote. She also supports women’s participation in community directive boards and contacting municipal authority offices with issues of concern. Finally, she encourages the pursuit of elected office. Three women from her study groups have run in local elections, unheard of for indigenous women. Although none of the three were elected, they have set an inspiring precedent for this traditionally marginalized segment of the population, starting a process that is likely to continue bringing indigenous women into the public sphere.

With a growing network of women, dissemination of information presents an important challenge. Antonieta and the women have begun to use radio to extend their reach. For instance, when elections are taking place, rather than traveling to numerous individual communities, Antonieta can use the radio to quickly encourage a wide audience to go vote. Additionally, she conducts educational tours in communities. For example, when people started dying from a cholera epidemic that spread through Guatemala, Antonieta and the women went to communities to discuss it. The tours, in which they go door to door inviting people to come to informal meetings, serve to disseminate information and encourage more women’s participation in education and action.

Recognizing that her model is relevant throughout Central America and indigenous regions of southern Mexico, but that she and her small staff cannot alone reach much beyond the current state of 28 groups, Antonieta intends the current participants to be the multipliers. Before spreading to new communities, however, she is focusing on the growth potential of the existing groups to become effective multipliers. In addition, Antonieta’s has been part of regional networks of Central American women’s groups and has begun disseminating her concepts and techniques. She is pulling together her approach to serve as a comprehensive model that she wishes to spread not only within Guatemala but to indigenous women far beyond.

Although Antonieta’s central concern is to empower indigenous women through their own education, she knows that the struggle for her community’s human rights also depends on the education of those beyond that community. Because many of the women with whom she works are illiterate and do not speak the region’s common Spanish language, she is documenting their stories to provide outsiders with an understanding of the citizenship challenges and human rights violations that these women face. The writing also serves as documentation for legal cases.

Through initiative, diligence and family support, Antonieta pushed her own way out of the marginalized existence of an indigenous woman. Born into a rural Mayan-Kaqchiukel family, she had the rare opportunity to obtain a university education. Her parents encouraged her and her eight siblings to study, and the nine of them made a pact that each who made it to university would assist the one behind do the same. In this way, all of them were able to study, none marrying before the age of 30, which was highly abnormal in their community. Antonieta now boasts a veterinarian, doctor, teacher, and pilot among her brothers and sisters.

Antonieta herself, from secondary school on, became involved in various organizations and companies, many related to social work and education, eventually leading her to the work she does today. To fulfill a seminar requirement at university, Antonieta organized a business administration workshop, through which she invited companies to the community in hopes of bringing money there. The seminar served to review how companies were run and make recommendations. A health services company that participated later hired Antonieta, the first indigenous employee in the institution.

After several years there doing administration and research, she left to conduct a research project on the Guatemalan indigenous population and was then called by another organization to work with poor migrant girls and women in neighborhoods on the outskirts of the capital city. She convinced the institution to allow her to change everything about the project and developed a participatory research model through which the women defined the framework for their own learning and developed as leaders. Antonieta eventually published and disseminated the simple process to various groups, and it has been translated into three indigenous languages, helping her prove that research is not just for university students.

Called again to a new position, she joined the Association of Evangelical Churches, which gave her the opportunity to travel throughout Guatemala. It also sent her to the United States to negotiate projects with churches. She took advantage of this role and the money available to the association to negotiate beyond the building of churches to include social work elements as well. She suggested that while building churches has value, the problems are outside, and then she would negotiate adding a school or economic and civic training for the community. Little by little, she began to change the scheme of the organization’s plans.

In the early 1990s, with the support of her husband, Antonieta stopped working to take care of her two children, during which time she traveled to rural areas to meet with women and learn about their challenges. Through these meetings, she began laying the groundwork for what has become Kichin Konojel (“for all of us”) Women’s Economic and Social Development Program. She also began serving on the Boards of several indigenous organizations that have allowed her to travel throughout Central America. She is currently the director of the Mayan Organizations Council of Guatemala and a delegate to the Central American Indigenous Council, giving her the connections necessary to spread the Kichin Konojel idea to indigenous communities throughout the region.