Guatemala $570,000

Strengthening National-Level Institutions and Policies

EcoLogic Development Fund: $15,000
Recommended for Trópico Verde, a new environmental NGO that will focus on influencing environmental decision-makers at the national level, mobilizing social commitment to and participation in improving environmental quality, particularly at the local level, and promoting the conservation and rational use of Guatemala’s tropical and temperate ecosystems.

Fund for Popular Education: $25,000
Recommended for Mujeres Kaq’la, a Mayan women’s rights organization, which is conducting a leadership-training program for Mayan women from the human rights and social justice movement.

Fund for Popular Education: $20,000
Recommended for Naleb’, whose activities include building respect for the country’s different cultures into Guatemala’s political organization, administration of justice, media, and legislation, and promoting intercultural mediation and conciliation.

Human Rights Watch: $10,000
For its Women’s Rights Division’s project to examine gender-related human rights abuses of women working in the maquilas and in domestic service in Guatemala.

MADRE: $30,000
To train women working in sweatshops in Central America, primarily in Guatemala, to understand their labor rights, document abuses, and build the mechanisms that they need to sustain a struggle for human rights in the workplace.

Marie Stopes International: $30,000
To provide family planning information and supplies, education and communication services to Guatemalans who have returned home from refuge in Mexico after the civil war. (This is the first installment of a two-year $60,000 grant.)

Rights Action: $25,000
To provide education, training, and financial support to human rights organizations working at the community level in the regions most affected by repression during Guatemala's civil war.

Rights Action: $7,000
For its International Accompaniment Forum, a coalition of international accompaniment organizations in Guatemala, which is coordinating a team of volunteer human rights observers in 24 communities that are bringing charges of genocide against Generals Lucas García and Ríos Montt.

Rights Action: $30,000
Recommended for the National Coordination of Campesino and Indigenous Organizations (CONIC), which works with Mayan campesinos for economic justice and to support their struggles for legal rights to their land.

The Everardo Foundation: $5,000
Recommended for the Myrna Mack Foundation, which works to bring to justice to those responsible for the murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack, through the Inter-American justice system.

Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA): $30,000
For the Guatemala component of WOLA's Central America Advocacy Training Program, which aims to strengthen the advocacy capacity of civil society organizations, especially those focusing on women's and indigenous rights, public security reform, and rural development. (This is the first installment of a two-year $60,000 grant.)

Building Capacity and Civil Society at the Local Level

Center for the Support of Native Lands: $30,000
Recommended for the Q'eqchi' Community Mapping Project in Livingston, Izabal, which seeks to protect the land rights of indigenous communities, map their territories, and support their participatory environmental and natural resource assessments.

EcoLogic Development Fund: $40,000
To assist poor communities in Guatemala to strengthen integrated natural resource management in areas of importance for biodiversity conservation. (This is the first installment of a two-year $80,000 grant.)

EcoLogic Development Fund (EDF): $28,000
For EDF’s EcoLogic Enterprise Ventures project, a green loan fund, which supports production activities that foster biodiversity conservation and grassroots-based, socially equitable economic development.

EcoLogic Development Fund: $7,000
To provide technical assistance to the Maya Itza Women's Group for the revival and conservation of Itza medicinal plants .

Guatemala Human Rights Commission, USA: $20,000
For support of Puentes de Paz (Bridges of Peace), its indigenous women's health and leadership project that strengthens the skills and leadership of local health promotors while meeting the desperate need for mental health services among indigenous women.

Project Concern International: $45,000
To improve the quality of life for Mayan women living in rural Guatemala through better access to integrated women's health care services and through personal and community-focused empowerment.

Rights Action: $28,000
Recommended for Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular, whose activities include a Training Program for the Empowerment of Women, which seeks to increase women's civic participation and expand their role in both local and regional decisionmaking and development.

Seva Foundation: $20,000
For Seva’s project to strengthen Nueva Vida, a community-based organization that organizes Mayan women in Aguacatán, Huehuetenango and provides them with training in a wide range of areas including socioeconomic development, to health promotion and citizen education.

Wildlife Conservation Society: $20,000
To support the second year of the Community-based Forest and Concession Management Project in Uaxactun, Guatemala. This project will support indigenous community management of a highly diverse and heavily forested concession in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, and will help to generate income in ways that promote environmental protection.

World Neighbors: $20,000
Recommended for Asociación Ija'tz, a community-based organization that works to strengthen agro-ecologic production and commercialization, and that seeks to increase organization among Mayan small producers in San Lucas Tolimán and around Lake Atitlán.

World Neighbors: $30,000
To promote sustainable, organic agriculture in three communities in the buffer zone of the 584,000 acre Sierra de las Minas Biosphere Reserve of Guatemala - the largest cloud forest in Central America - and to expand activities into at least two communities in the adjacent Polochic District.

Promoting Improved U.S. Policies Towards Guatemala

Center for International Policy: $25,000
Recommended for support of the Latin America Working Group, whose activities include advocacy for a U.S. foreign policy that promotes human rights in Guatemala and other countries in Latin America, and providing its 60 member organizations with technical support to develop and implement strategies to ensure such policies.

The Fund for Popular Education: $30,000
Recommended for support of The Network in Solidarity With the People of Guatemala, whose activities include education and advocacy in the U.S. to promote human rights and the peace process in Guatemala.