Good in a Crisis: Reflecting on One Year with PBI in Guatemala
Leonie Malin Höher reflects on her time in Guatemala as a volunteer with PBI in Guatemala, during a turbulent time for Indigenous peoples rights and the wider human rights movement.
Written by Leonie Malin Höher, former volunteer with PBI in Guatemala
Image courtesy of Leonie Malin Höher
Freedom of movement, the transport of goods, and the familiar bustle of life in Guatemala were frozen when I arrived in the country in October of 2023 to start my commitment as a field volunteer with Peace Brigades International (PBI). Ancestral authorities and community collectives, notably 48 cantons of Totonicapán, were leading the charge to demand the resignation of Attorney General Consuelo Porras and defend democratic participation in their territories through peaceful national protest. Within this complex context, just three months before surprise winner Bernardo Arévalo was to assume the Presidency, I joined PBI’s team of volunteers in Guatemala and started learning the ways of PBI’s challenging work providing protective accompaniment to human rights defenders and grassroots organisations.
From the very first day, the power struggles, inequalities, resistance movements, political obstacles, and historical weight of conflict were palpable. Every day with PBI in Guatemala, I learned more about the country context, repetitive cycles of poverty, impacts of political violence, and barriers human rights defenders face in their work. Many resistance groups and collectives call their work a “fight for life” or a “commitment to life”, because they are quite literally exposed to life-threatening structures of violence on a daily basis. From lack of access to water, health facilities, and good nutrition to direct death threats, acts of intimidation, and forced displacement, the organisations PBI’s team in Guatemala supports have been forced to confront it all. The team in Guatemala is the longest-standing in the wider PBI organisation’s history, supporting human rights defenders through presence on the ground and through maintaining an international support network since 1983. For more than 40 years, PBI has evolved to raise the profile of human rights defense work and attract greater international attention to engrained structures of violence in Guatemala.
The structures of violence and the voices of resistance in the territories of present-day Guatemala combine to tell a long, complicated history of conflict. At the centre of this history is social strife due to issues caused by the distribution of land. Decades (even more accurately: centuries) before PBI was founded, communities had been resisting land appropriation and dispossession. According to the Gregorian calendar, 1524 marks the year the Spanish colonised the lands and peoples they encountered. According to the Mayan calendar, 11.15.3.16.16 1 k’ib’ 4 Ch’en designates that point in time. Then, power over land equated to the oppression of Maya and Xinka Indigenous communities and the enrichment of colonising countries. Now, in 2025 or 13.0.12.3.14 4 Ix 17 K’ank’in, power over land continues to equate with violence and oppression in the territories of communities previously colonised.
Image courtesy of Leonie Malin Höher
Today, PBI accompanies two organisations in Guatemala, UVOC and CCDA, that work to support communities historically affected by land dispossession and currently threatened with forced displacement. Before joining the team of volunteers and directly supporting these organisations, I did not know how many Indigenous leaders and community collectives reclaim their right to land and life, not only through direct action, but also by reintroducing ancestral terminology into the common vocabulary. Guatemala was not always “Guatemala”. Many people living within the borders currently designating the land as Guatemala refer to the territories they live in now just as their ancestors lived in them before, as “Ixim Ulew”, land of corn. In this way, communities address the long-standing agrarian conflict and aim to heal injustices of the past by reclaiming ancestral terms and practices.
What inspired me most deeply to apply to join PBI’s team of volunteers in Guatemala was the opportunity to learn about the wisdom of ancestral knowledge, the strategies used in non-violent direct political action, and the sustenance needed to keep resistance movements alive. I found information linked on PBI Guatemala’s website about Indigenous women’s leadership in the conceptualisation and practice of territorial communitarian feminism. Using healing as a cosmic-political pathway towards liberation and as a tool of resistance, Tzk’at, la Red de Sanadoras Ancestrales del Feminismo Comunitario Territorial desde Iximulew-Guatemala brings communities together through workshops and ceremony. They consciously recover ancestral practices in territories historically exploited by external colonial forces and internal political oligarchies. They practice a form of feminism that all feminists around the world could stand to learn something from.
Image courtesy of Leonie Malin Höher
On a personal level, being part of PBI’s team in Guatemala shifted my perspective. Not only in terms of my global outlook (i.e. inequalities, European-Latin American relations, non-violent action, feminism, human rights), but also in terms of my evolution as an individual. Most ex-volunteers will confirm that committing to a year of volunteering with PBI generally equates to committing to a year of practicing self-reflection and growing your self-awareness. I feel I have changed profoundly as an individual after accompanying human rights defenders and after living and working within PBI’s unique NGO model. The consensus-based decision-making model (combined with the feature of living in the same house as the team you work with) is like a pressure cooker for developing better interpersonal communication, emotional intelligence, and trust-building skills. The PBI structure is designed to respond to crisis and respond to crisis it does. As a person, I now feel better equipped to understand and respond to crisis, whether internal or external. It was a pivotal experience for me: to work and live for 12 months alongside the members of my team, to form connections with and learn from human rights defenders directly, to be allowed to understand a whole other side of what territory means for those inhabiting Ixim Ulew today.
Now that it has been over one year since President Arévalo’s inauguration, local civil society organisations and social justice movements continue to push for change, on all fronts. PBI’s team in Guatemala continues to accompany local defenders and recruit individuals from the international community interested in participating. Consuelo Porras has not resigned, and the same old structures of corruption and narratives underpinning oppression persist in local municipalities and departmental jurisdictions. As they say, Rome was not built in a day. System change is slow and most often arduous. Looking back on the 12 months I spent with PBI in Guatemala fills me with contradictory emotions: joy and inspiration, anxiety and frustration. That is what the fight for life is all about, learning to draw on the wisdom present in the emotions and experiences of every single one of our local and global communities. Bringing it all together is what will motivate us to keep putting one foot in front of the other so we can make sure everyone, everywhere can access just and peaceful human experiences.
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