Guatemalan Women's Cooperatives and State Neglect

Over the past several years, I have taken college students to Guatemala as part of a course called "Social Justice and Human Rights in Guatemala." Last January, the group visited a former squatter settlement on the outskirts of Guatemala City called UPAVIM (Unidas Para Vivir Mejor, or United for a Better Life) and its adjacent neighborhood community center. During the 1980s, the location served as a garbage dump for the sprawling city, which became increasingly crowded with internally displaced victims of the brutal thirty-six-year civil war. A group of women, many of them war widows without a livelihood, arrived from the countryside and squatted on the site to establish a new community. After years of diligent work, they succeeded in establishing an influential neighborhood community center in newly emerging townships, now called La Colonia Esperanza and Mezquital. Today, with significant and regular assistance from committed and often private U.S. donors, female community leaders manage a center that offers a primary school, a health clinic, a bakery project, and a skills training office that specializes in outreach to adult women. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.