Accompany 200 women that live violence in Oaxaca

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”.