Bringing Worlds Together
             Juanita Batzibal and Medarda Castro are Mayan Indigenous women working on Indigenous rights and identity with Community Aid Abroad-Oxfam's Guatemalan program. They visited Australia in July 2000 to make connections with our Indigenous Australia program in south-west Western Australia, and with Indigenous communities generally. The exchange aimed to bring Indigenous women from Guatemala and Australia together to share their experiences, learn from one another and build connections that will strengthen their respective struggles for justice and self determination. Juanita and Medarda spoke with Indigenous Australian Women at public forums in Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth.
            
             In 1992, during the Guatemalan Civil War, "agents of the state" entered Medarda Castro Ajcot's home and murdered her brother. Like Medarda, he was an outspoken activist against the genocide of Guatemala's Indigenous peoples. Juanita Batzibal avoided a similar fate by fleeing to become a political refugee. While in exile, Juanita made several visits to the UN in Geneva, lobbying for the recognition of Indigenous People's rights, and to bring an end to the war.
             The Indigenous peoples of Guatemala, the Mayas, make up over 60 percent of a population of 10 million. Yet Guatemala has one of the world's most inequitable distributions of land, with three percent of the population owning over 70 percent of the land, and ninety percent of Mayas not even having enough land to grow food for their families. Many would argue that the war was used by the powerful in Guatemala as a way to destroy Mayan culture and push Indigenous communities off their traditional lands in order to further exploit the country's rich natural resources.
             In 1999, three years after the signing of the Guatemalan Peace Accords, the UN released 'Memory of Silence', the report of its supervised truth commission in Guatemala. The report was damning in its criticism of the Guatema...