Politicization and underfunding have dogged indigenous institutions

Louisa Reynolds

29/05/2013

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On May 16, a group of young indigenous representatives, dressed in traditional Mayan attire, were gathered at the headquarters of the Guatemalan Indigenous Development Fund (FODIGUA), in Guatemala City, to take part in a workshop on leadership and governance.

As well as these workshops, FODIGUA provides weaving materials for indigenous craft cooperatives, computers for indigenous primary schools, basic medical supplies for indigenous midwives, and pays the salaries of the Mayan translators working for the Guatemalan courts.

FODIGUA was created in 1994 as a US$51 million trust fund to be spent over a 20-year period, meaning that each year the government uses these funds to allocate its annual budget. However, funding has been woefully inadequate, says FODIGUA’s executive director, indigenous Mayan, Guadalupe Zamora. This year, FODIGUA received $5.3 million, which amounts to 0.0002 percent of the national budget, to further the development of indigenous people, who represent around 40 percent of the Guatemalan population.

To make matters worse, the trust fund is due to be wound up in 2015, which means FODIGUA will cease to exist unless Congress approves a bill that would turn it a ministry or government bureau.

The Presidential Commission Against Racism and Discrimination Against Indigenous People (CODISRA) faces similar problems. CODISRA was established in 2002 to provide legal counseling for victims of discrimination and racist abuse. Since discrimination became a criminal offense in 2002, for which the highest penalty is a three-year prison sentence, 607 cases have been reported to the Attorney General’s Office, which has secured five convictions.

CODISRA has six regional offices, each of which has three members of staff. However, due to budgetary constraints, CODISRA’s office in the highland department of Quiché only has one member of staff. Presidential Commissioner Against Racism and Discrimination, indigenous Mayan, Jacobo Bolvito, also complains that CODISRA lacks the necessary resources to launch campaigns to promote tolerance and respect, which is a fundamental part of the organization’s mission.

Underfunding has led many indigenous institutions to rely on foreign aid. The Bureau for the Defense of Indigenous Women (DEMI), set up in 1999, was allocated $2 million this year, of which $1.2 million are government funds and $795,000 come from foreign donations.

DEMI’s Indigenous Women’s Ombudsperson, Gloria Laynez, says that although DEMI strives to employ indigenous staff that is fluent in Mayan languages, indigenous women’s lack of access to education has meant that it has been hard to find enough female indigenous lawyers and counselors to fill vacancies.

Indigenous organizations and party politics

Party politics often interfere in indigenous institutions. FODIGUA, CODISRA and DEMI, were directly set up by the Executive, which has the power to scrap them at will, through an executive decree or acuerdo gubernativo. This also means that government representatives usually take part in the process of choosing the institutions’ directors.

The only autonomous indigenous institution is the Guatemalan Academy of Mayan Languages (ALMG), founded in 1961, which publishes dictionaries, textbooks and works of literature in Mayan languages, and also runs the Mayan Channel, TV5. The ALMG has full control over internal administrative and technical procedures — including the election of its president — but relies on the government to allocate a yearly budget.

“In every administration we’ve had conflicts with the official party. It is thought that the government only wants projects from communities who support the official party to be approved”, says Zamora.

In January this year, Mayan anthropologist Irmalicia Velásquez, claimed that Vice-President Roxana Baldetti, of the right-wing Patriot Party (PP), had changed the procedures in order to choose DEMI’s Indigenous Women’s Ombudsperson in order to ensure that the position was taken up by a member of the PP. Since 2008, DEMI — the only government bureau in Latin America that specifically addresses the needs of indigenous women — has assisted 229,234 victims of domestic violence, discrimination in the workplace, and other rights violations.

Laynez, DEMI’s Ombudsperson, is a Mayan Kaqchikel woman from the municipality of San Andrés Itzapa, in the department of Chimaltenango, about 77 km (48 miles) west of Guatemala City, who managed to build a career in local politics after suffering from domestic violence for 12 years.

She openly admits that she belongs to the PP but claims that rural women’s organizations supported her election and that a small number of women’s organizations from Guatemala City were monopolizing the election process, which led rural organizations to ask the Executive to intervene and secure her election. The incident illustrates existing tensions between rural and urban civil society organizations and the vulnerability of institutions that lack full autonomy.

Indigenous offices

As well as the four bureaus set up exclusively to address indigenous issues: FODIGUA, CODISRA, DEMI and the ALMG, most government ministries have indigenous offices or ventanas indígenas. The largest and most important is the General Directorate of Bilingual Education (DIGEBI), which is part of the Ministry of Education’s Vice Ministry for Bilingual and Intercultural Education. DIGEBI is in charge of providing bilingual education for indigenous students, a right enshrined in Guatemalan law. However, due to budgetary constraints, DIGEBI only covers 22 percent of the Guatemalan municipalities with a predominantly indigenous population.

The Ministry of Health’s Unit for Indigenous People and Inter-Cultural Relations advises the public health authorities on how to make their services more culturally appropriate; one of its achievements has been securing women’s right to have an upright birth following indigenous customs.

The Ministry of Culture and Sport has a Commission on Sacred Sites — which includes Mayan shamans and government representatives —, who put forward a bill that seeks to guarantee indigenous organizations’ right to manage ancestral Mayan sites autonomously and which has yet to be approved by Congress.

The Judiciary has a bureau that provides translators fluent in indigenous languages and the Police have an Office for Intercultural Relations.

However, grassroots indigenous leaders question the representativeness and scope of these institutions. “Considering their budgetary constraints and lack of decision-making power, these offices do not address structural problems. The day indigenous leaders are given full control over these institutions, they might begin to further the political agenda of Guatemala’s indigenous people”, says Udiel Miranda, a member of the Council of Peoples of Western Guatemala.

Source: Latinamerica Press. http://www.lapress.org/articles.asp?art=6832&lng=2

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