Accompany 200 women that live violence in Oaxaca

Walking with women who live in situations of violence makes us realize that there is still a long way to go for justice to be fair to women, girls, and adolescents. Such is the case of a user that we have been accompanying for more than a year, first for the rape of her three granddaughters by her grandfather and now for having a piece of land in her name that by succession corresponds to her as the wife of the owner of the property. In trying to access this right she has faced a series of obstacles. She is an elderly woman, with low economic resources, an indigenous woman who cannot express herself in Spanish, and also has a visual disability, so with all the limitations she continues to struggle to leave a heritage to her granddaughters who were left in the care of the grandmother and fears that when she dies her granddaughters will be left helpless. The Ejidal Commissioner, who is a macho person, refuses to grant her the certificate of possession, the lawyer who accompanies the case has tried to resolve this situation in the community, in an assembly the situation of the lady was exposed, but she did not receive support, no one spoke for her.

Like her, many women live through this type of violence, they are marginalized for the mere fact of being women, their dignity is violated and machismo and violence are still strong. In these three months that we are reporting, we have attended 63 users who have received counseling, psychological, and legal attention, providing a total of 577 services.

Your donation is important to continue accompanying more women to access justice, we appreciate your grain of sand, by donating you help a woman to leave the circle of violence.

Ana is a mixe woman that Naaxwiin is accompanying to defend her rights to her land. The machismo that predominates in many communities affects women like Ana, who lives through multiple forms of violence, including patrimonial violence, because the ejidal commissariat in her communities doesn’t want to recognize Ana’s rights to her land. Ana told us that Naawiin “has helped me much more than the commissariat, because he only tells me that he is going to have a meeting, but sometimes he tells me that I cannot keep the land, that I cannot do anything or go about my business because my husband is still the owner of the land even though he is in jail, that he does not lose his rights as ejidatario, that even for the land to be in my name, he would have to sign the document for me”. Only in the past year did our organization attend 26 patrimonial violence cases, which correspond a 5.86% of the total of violence cases that we received in Naaxwiin.

In the indigenous communities where we work, many times the ejido commissariat, who are almost always men, resolve land disputes in favor of the men and not the women, even if they haven’t the reason. If an indigenous woman doesn’t way to defend herself legally, because she doesn’t have the money to hire a lawyer, she may lose the right to her land.

Few women in the region where we work in the isthmus have land in their name or own their homes. If they experience any kind of violence from their partners, they may be left without a place to live, for example, because men often build houses on their parents' land. To this information, we must add that many of the women we serve haven’t money to hire a lawyer, experience other forms of violence, or don’t know how to read or write. This is what Ana told us: “If a woman hasn’t accompaniment or no one to help her, she cannot be alone, what if the other person has a lawyer and one who does not know how to read or write and they make you sign a paper, they take away your land, because the woman doesn’t know, just as I can hardly read or speak Spanish, well, they beat me, thank God I came here because they guide me”.