MataHari: Eye of the Day http://eyeoftheday.org Ending Exploitation. Building Solidarity. Creating Community Solutions. Sun, 06 May 2012 17:58:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Protecting and empowering women a major angle in the Anibal Lucas story http://eyeoftheday.org/blog/2012/01/protecting-and-empowering-women-a-major-angle-in-the-anibal-lucas-story/ http://eyeoftheday.org/blog/2012/01/protecting-and-empowering-women-a-major-angle-in-the-anibal-lucas-story/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:59:50 +0000 eyeofthedayorg http://eyeoftheday.org/?p=165 By BRIAN FRAGA | Published: DECEMBER 3, 2010 |

Lisa Maya Knauer, a UMass Dartmouth associate professor of anthropology, volunteered with Organizacion Maya K’iche during her research of the local Central American immigrant community.

She had a front-row perspective to when sex assault allegations arose last summer against Anibal Lucas, the organization’s director who was asked by Adrian Ventura, the president of Maya K’iche’s board of directors, to step down while the investigation was conducted. Instead, Ventura was voted out of his position. Lucas kept his job. Knauer cut her ties to the organization.

“I decided I couldn’t continue to work with the organization because I didn’t feel they handled it in the appropriate manner,” Knauer said.

Anibal Lucas
As to what happens with Maya K’iche in the wake of Lucas’ sex assault conviction and 6-month jail sentence remains to be seen. I was able today to only get a general comment from one of the organization’s members who said Maya K’iche will stay open. The member said there will be a meeting in the future among Maya K’iche’s members to discuss this week’s developments.

“That organization had a tremendous amount of potential. I don’ t know what can be salvaged from the organization,” said Knauer, who praised the courage of the two women – both undocumented immigrants from Guatemala – for coming forward and telling police their story.

Knauer added that the problem of violence against women transcends race and nationality while also commenting that the violence in war-torn Guatemala has often spilled over into all realms of the people’s lives.

“Rape and sexual assault were one of the weapons of war in Guatemala’s conflict,” Knauer said. “Almost every Mayan family has, somewhere from the recent past, a woman in the family who was subjected to or at least threatened with sexual assault of some kind.”

Echoing the culture of femicide and murder notoriously seen in Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, Knauer said: “What we’ve seen in Guatemala is a huge spike within the last decade of crimes of violence against women, in particular murder.”

The women I interviewed this week said Lucas had intimidated them and their families.

“I really hope the community can see what kind of leader Anibal really is,” said one of the women, who added that Lucas had defamed her in an article printed in a local Spanish newspaper.

Both women said it was difficult, but that they believe they “did the right thing” and that they hope to be an example to other Guatemalan women that they do not have to tolerate the harassment and exploitation, which in their cases can be aggravated since they are often undocumented migrants.

“I think they were extremely brave given their extremely precarious situation in this country,” Knauer said.

Ventura testified against Lucas because he said he did not want women to be harmed again.

“A lot of our women have been harassed, intimidated and exploited,” Ventura said. “This case was an example of what can happen when men do this.”

http://blogs.southcoasttoday.com/new-bedford-crime/2010/12/03/protecting-and-empowering-women-a-major-angle-in-the-anibal-lucas-story/

]]> http://eyeoftheday.org/blog/2012/01/protecting-and-empowering-women-a-major-angle-in-the-anibal-lucas-story/feed/ 0 Woman (Poem) By Andrea Townsend http://eyeoftheday.org/blog/2012/01/woman-poem/ http://eyeoftheday.org/blog/2012/01/woman-poem/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:12:29 +0000 eyeofthedayorg http://eyeoftheday.org/?p=131 Woman
By Andrea Townsend
In this world a woman is not a woman
She is hands
She is a short breath of stale air
She is lungs raked by flyaway fibers
And a raw nose and eyes dripping from glue fumes
A woman is not a woman in a world like this
She is numbers on clothing, 50% cotton, 50% polyester…
A word in someone else’s language
rvisors overstep their boundari
A woman cannot be a woman
It’s against regulations
Only when the late night supervisors overstep their boundaries
Then she is a woman for a moment, in his eyes
Beneath his rough hands
Never under her own
These hands bleed,
So that people can love their children in the “American” way
Curl them up with a plush toy in a warm home
While her children curl up with the night
A
f
w in a windst
hour, day—s
sound,
M
A woman is not a woman
She is hours of labor
Hours of sitting,
Her back bent like a willow in a windstorm
/
In every second, minute, hour, day—she becomes the whir of
machinery
Years go by and she is a sound,
A breath,
A thrumming pattern
A needle charging across fabric, a suspended heartbeat
Th „ t
H , i; V ”
Then, all at once and slowly
A whisper rises through the state air, the dim light,
Cuts through the ceaseless mechanical droning
And a hand slows its perpetual motion,
Stretches slowly across the space between the machine and the
woman
Down the rows of workbenches,
One by one, these hands close over one another
Become clenched fists
Remind themselves that they are not just hands.
They are women.
Andrea Townsend was an 11
th
grade student at Franklin High School in
Portland, Oregon when she wrote this poem.

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