Community Empowerment Facility Profile

BACKGROUND

Suchitepéquez, Escuintla, Retalhuleu, Quetzaltenango and Sololá departments are situated in the southern cost of Guatemala. The majority of the inhabitants are indigenous people whose main occupation is agriculture.

The areas of cultivated land (sugar cane, banana trees, palms, rubber trees and livestock) are in the hands of few large national/international landowners who have been repressing land workers.

This discrimination, coupled with the work instability, results in most people leaving to search for work in Mexico or the United States, leaving their families alone in very precarious conditions.

There is social and economic insecurity affecting families in the rural area of Guatemala as well as is a high level of malnutrition and illiterateness. The majority of people are unable to exercise their political rights. Moreover, the exploitation of the soil and the use of pesticides and weed-killers have negative effects on the environment and the well-being of rural people.     

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GOAL AND OBJECTIVES

The general purpose of the project is to create a juridical office for individual and community land conflicts, work conflicts and problems relating to access to land by people and organizations in the southern coast of Guatemala .

Specific objectives are:

• Set up a juridical office for farmer groups who currently rely on one lawyer, two attorneys and one secretary.
• Build up a team of literate women and men, to be trained on juridical issues, to facilitate and guide the juridical processes inside the communities which depend on juridical advice and support in the struggle for the defense of land and labour rights.
• Share information on agrarian and land issues (bulletin).

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WHO WILL BENEFIT?

CODECA is an association of farmer development committees. Codeco works with 117 communities in 11 departments involving 7017 individual associates, all heads of family. The associates are farmers' families, mostly indigenous and agricultural workers.

The affiliates of CODECA benefit from legal advice and negotiation of their land conflicts. The cadres are constantly trained on juridical and legal issues to give them the opportunity to better address their land-related problems. The trained teams permit their organizations to develop and deal with socio-economic and political matters in a more significantly manner.

Beneficiaries of the project are: (a) groups demanding legal formalization of their committees; (b) peasants having land but no legal tenancy documentation, and (c) farmers participating in the ECAS (empresas campesinas asociativas). These groups are guided and supported in the legalization of their committees or estates which do not have legal tenancy documentation.

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CONCLUSION

The project supports collective interests and gives the farmers' organizations useful tools with which to organize themselves in order to confront legal and juridical land issues. When enabled and empowered, the Organizations can reduce the number of cases where the rights of peasants and land workers are not respected, and where landowners' privileges are protected illegally

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