Blanca Julia Ajtun Mejía is a human rights and mother land defender.
A Mayan Quiché woman from the southern coast of Guatemala, she has been a member of the Peasant Development Committee (CODECA) for 18 years.
Despite having suffered criminalisation, she dedicates her life to the fight for the individual and collective rights of peasant and indigenous communities, focusing especially on the rights of women and children.
We spoke to her to find out about the challenges she has faced, and to understand the importance of capacity building for environmental and human rights defenders.
What made you become a land and environmental rights defender?
As a mother and a woman who has always worked the land, I became aware of the exploitation of peasants and indigenous people, but especially of women. It was little by little, in the face of all the exploitation, criminalisation, looting and pollution that the companies do around our communities, that I began to find my way to CODECA. I started as a member in my community, then I moved on to the municipal, departmental and finally the national level.
Today I am part of CODECA's political leadership. I decided to be part of it because I knew that we were not going to defend the rights of a group or of individuals, but the demands of the nation. I am also the coordinator of the Women's Network at the national level, where I work with a team and we carry out education sessions every week.
How do you evaluate the context in Guatemala for the defence of human rights?
While it is true that there is a State, it is for a small group of businessmen and transnationals. For us, the Indigenous Peoples, there is no State. It is a flawed State. We know that there is an institution born out of the Peace Accords, but it is manipulated, in the hands of the corrupt.
In Guatemala, it is the same State that persecutes and criminalises human rights defenders. When I talk about the State, I am talking about judges, the Public Prosecutor's Office, the Courts of Justice.
As a movement we have experienced this first-hand. Since 2018, 28 defenders from CODECA have been murdered, simply for their efforts in the defence of human rights. The State does not give us the guarantee for defending human rights and we, the indigenous peoples, are the ones who are hit the hardest because of this.
Blanca is the national coordinator of the women's network ‘Tejiendo el Buen Vivir’ (Weaving the Good Life). The persecution and criminalisation of Blanca grew as she assumed leadership in her community.
Have you been criminalised for your work as a defender?
Defending rights is very complicated in Guatemala. Transnational companies, in complicity with the chauvinist and racist State, do not hesitate to persecute defenders. And that is what happened to me and two other defenders. In 2014, the State itself kidnapped us and locked us up illegally. They accused us of crimes such as ‘instigation to commit a crime’ and ‘terrorism’, among others. The whole system was against us, including the media, which defamed us, exposing our names and photo on the front pages. The criminalisation was palpable.
We were offered an ‘abbreviated process’, which meant accepting a guilt that we did not have, but we chose the long road to prove our innocence. The process was taken to international courts and the UN issued a resolution telling the State of Guatemala that it had made an arbitrary arrest. We won the case and the State has yet to pay damages.
Criminalisation harms our families, our communities, and the organising movement, but we have to confront this system together. We are ready to give our lives because we are thinking of the generations to come. And above all because we have to recover what belongs to the communities, what is around our territory, our rivers, our mountains, our lands, because they have privatised everything, and then, when we confront this, criminalisation comes. But it is our home, our home is called Guatemala. That's why we have to fight.
Why is it important to provide training for land and environmental defenders? In your experience, what capacities need to be urgently strengthened?
It is very important to train women defenders of Mother Land. We come from the land, it sustains us and we return to it. My time at CODECA has taught me many things and I continue to learn. It is crucial that the training reaches not only defenders but also the population, especially youth, women and academics. This system is killing us more and more every day, in one way or another, and we need to know how to defend ourselves.
The pandemic made it clear how dependent we are on the land and nature. For us, the land is life, not a commodity, and we must defend it. Women, and Mother Land, must be recognised as subjects of rights. In this sense, training is essential, not only on land issues, but on various topics in order to continue strengthening our knowledge, to have a place in decision-making and to be able to present our proposals.
That is why we have the Women's Network ‘Weaving the Good Life’, which promotes the process to achieve the Plurinational State to ensure that we all have access to basic services, enjoy a healthy environment and healthy territories, eat healthy food, breathe clean air. We cannot live without the land.