Background

In 2019, the Ford Foundation, through its BUILD program, launched a new initiative focused on offering support to Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendants and Traditional Communities (IAT) in strengthening the infrastructure and resilience capacity of their organizations. . This process aims to foster a greater collective understanding of the opportunities and challenges that organizations face and how to strengthen their capacities to address them, in addition to strengthening communication between IAT organizations and donors.

The beginning was a meeting in Mexico City at the end of November 2019, where more than 60 participants from 38 different organizations, most of them leaders of IAT organizations from the Global South, met to lay the foundations of this dialogue process. and collaboration, but the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 profoundly altered the plans and activities agreed in Mexico City.

One of the main activities of the 2021 work plan is to carry out three learning exchanges. The first among IAT organizations in Mesoamerica, the second among Afro-descendant organizations and movements, and the third among women leaders of IAT organizations.

Mesoamerican learning exchange between indigenous and community organizations

In order to continue advancing, the Caribbean and Central American Research Council (CARCC), in October and November 2020, facilitated a series of talks between leaders of COMUNDICH, Mesa de Tierras Comunales, Ut'z Ché ´, COPAE and ACOFOP / AMPB on the implications of the pandemic in indigenous and community organizations related to the Build program in Guatemala. From the reflections among the leaders of the five organizations, it is concluded that the impact of COVID-19 is generated in a longer-lasting historical context that underlies deep climate, social, economic, cultural and political crises. Indigenous communities and peoples, who in previous pandemics and epidemics, were held to be guilty, due to their cultures, organization and ways of life, now resurface full of initiatives, strengths and resilience, as individual and community actors that, despite 500 years of extermination, denial and exclusion, successfully face the COVID-19 Pandemic and the exclusionary, racist and opportunist public policies of the Guatemalan State.

What is relevant about the Guatemalan experience is that indigenous and community organizations face the pandemic, crisis and opportunism of the State, resorting precisely to the accumulated knowledge of their elders, to their sustainable management of water and forests and the use of family gardens to guarantee the food safety. They also combine traditional medicine, such as Temazcal and their knowledge of ethnobotany and traditional herbal medicine with official medicine to prevent and treat covid-19. In productive aspects, they establish control of their local markets and access routes to avoid the speculation and guarantee supply. Simultaneously, they have creatively used the national legal system to continue their struggle for land and information and communication technologies (ICT) to guarantee their connection with their bases, while continuing with the great challenge of expanding spaces for participation and representation. inclusive of women and youth.

Faced with the ineffectiveness of the State, indigenous peoples and rural communities have had to face this situation on their own, using their long accumulated experience of ancestral knowledge, organization and governance of their territories and natural resources. Without a doubt, there are still great challenges to be tackled. Similar experiences are found throughout the Mesoamerican region, where indigenous peoples emerge as positive actors in the safeguarding and recovery of vital territories and resources; guardians of the Common House, which is why this exchange has been proposed to learn how indigenous peoples and local communities face the current and future crisis, while strengthening their networks and alliances for the benefit of the Mesoamerican region.