Celia Candiotti works as a security guard at the main municipal office of Huamanga, the capital of Ayacucho province in Peru. She’s tall and thin, and has a narrow face and severe eyes. She’s pleasant, but professional, as you would expect from a uniformed officer who commands respect.
Several years ago she was at work when she saw a 12-foot-high wall of water, mud, boulders, and cars flooding down one of the main streets in the city.
Cadiotti ran straight into the maelstrom to rescue people.
“You can’t fight your destiny,” Candiotti says, citing her training as a nurse and a firefighter. “I didn’t even think, I just responded -- I waded right in.” She rescued several injured people before she found a young girl, perhaps seven years old, trapped in a car. “She said to me, ‘I’m gonna die.’ I said ‘no’. But the water was coming in the window fast.”
That day the landslide killed about a dozen people, but thanks to Candiotti, that one young girl survived. The Ministry of Women gave Candiotti an award for heroism.
Candiotti noticed something then: people lined the street, horrified by the disaster, but did not help. She remembered this later when she went to a training session for the staff at the municipal office. The topic was how to understand and reduce racism and discrimination at their work, so they could ensure equal access to the services citizens need from the local government.
When it came to the pervasive racism in Ayacucho, Candiotti was much like the bystanders she saw on the street that day: concerned, but not sure what to do.
The training session was organized by APRODEH, a human rights group Oxfam has been funding to work on ways to reduce racism and discrimination in Peru. The organization led efforts to help local governments pass new laws – ordinances – that require equal access to services, equal treatment by officials, for everyone, whatever their gender or ethnicity, whatever language they speak, however they dress, and whatever their age or appearance.
Addressing the racism and discrimination directed toward indigenous people, women, and handicapped people is an important component of Oxfam’s work to reduce barriers that keep people in poverty. And training for municipal workers, who play an essential role in helping citizens gain access to crucial services from local government, is one way APRODEH and Oxfam are working to changing the way people think about each other—and themselves--in Ayacucho.
For Candiotti, a woman who grew up on the coast in a family of Italian immigrants, understanding and confronting the racism and discrimination she could see in Ayacucho since she moved here eight years ago is a tremendous blessing. She says APRODEH’s training helped her and others understand that all people have basic rights. “People from the highlands are not any less than me, and we all have to learn to relate to each other. I could see the changes in the staff here,” she says, standing in her uniform near the front of the municipal hall. “We left the training calm and happy, a joy has taken over us.”
Now, Candiotti says the staff of the municipality behaves completely differently. Whereas before the indigenous staff would be reluctant to even speak Quechua, the local indigenous language, they are now happy to help indigenous people who come to the office no matter what language they can speak. “When people come and inquire in Quechua,” she says, “we all speak Quechua now, our attitude has really changed. We used to make fun of an elderly señora dressed in traditional clothes, but not anymore.”
When she’s at work, Candiotti wears a uniform slightly too large for her slim, athletic frame, with a cap pulled low over her forehead. She’s got a serious look about her, but when she describes the changes in the staff attitudes her eyes get a little wet.
Near the front entrance, she meets with some indigenous, Quechua speaking women under an arch leading in to the massive, Spanish colonial courtyard. Her warmth comes through as she answers questions, gives direction, and laughs at a joke.
Candiotti acknowledges that perhaps some destinies can change: “There’s always been discrimination,” she says near her post at the front entrance. “But little by little, this is changing.”
]]>There’s a poster in the office of APRODEH in Ayacucho that depicts a group of highland indigenous people riding on a bus. Each passenger is regarding the others with suspicion: “I don’t like the look of that one,” one is thinking. Another thought bubble over the head of a fellow passenger says, “that cholo might rob me,” using a derogatory term for an indigenous person.
It’s a realistic scene, says Wilfredo Ardito, a 45-year-old attorney who APRODEH’s work on racism and discrimination in Ayacucho. He says Peru is an extremely ethnically diverse country, but years of racist attitudes towards the native people have resulted in the indigenous people themselves rejecting their own identity, refusing to speak their own languages, and turning their backs on their own culture. “They even use derogatory words against people like themselves,” Ardito says. “People lack self esteem, they respect white people more than themselves.” This is one of the key aspects of APRODEH’s training: helping people accept who they are, and to be proud of themselves. “Part of the process of eliminating racism is accepting your own face,” Ardito says.
APRODEH teaches staff at municipal government about discrimination and racism as a means to raise awareness and encouraging local communities to pass local ordinances to promote equality as part of a comprehensive effort to fight poverty in Ayacucho “We know it is more effective to have a local law,” Ardito says. “Most people don’t know about the national laws, not the police, not the judges.” One strategy that has proven effective is to work directly with elected regidoros, sort of like county commissioners, who represent specific constituencies in municipal affairs.
Socorro Arce, 45, is a regidora in Huamanga who helped organize a training session for all the female elected politicians in the department of Ayacucho – about 113 of them. This led to a network that is helping to promote women leaders, a space where Arce says “we can exchange ideas, and talk about human rights and gender, and we support new ideas like the ordinances, so we can reduce discrimination against people who speak Quechua, have a different religion, or women who are pregnant.”
Arce started fighting against injustice while in a religious high school, which she says was run poorly and discriminated against the darker skinned, poorer girls. “That’s why I became a leader -- the girls were really submissive, and I started to change that mentality,” she says. Arce was expelled twice, once for leading a strike against the school by students objecting to corporal punishment. “They would make us stand facing a wall with our hands on our heads for hours, it was like torture. I told them, ‘If you keep punishing us like this, we won’t go to class’,” she says she announced one day. “I was about 14 or 15 then.”
When APRODEH was looking for an ally to promote local ordinances, program officer Arturo Lopez decided to approach Arce because “she’s really accessible, I called her and she said ‘come on over,’ and she helped negotiate with the other women leaders.” He called the right person, it seems. Starting in her high school days, Arce says struggling against injustice was always high on her agenda. “In all the positions I have held as a leader, I have always spoken out against discrimination.”
Lopez and Arce are an unlikely pair. He is soft spoken, she is an aggressive talker, an avid networker. “I really like Arturo,” Arce says over a glass of fruit juice overlooking the central plaza in Huamanga. “He’s really calm. I’m more like an earthquake.”
Together they convened the women leaders, held a training session, and these women then went out and helped their communities pass four new ordinances in Ayacucho APRODEH says are fighting back against racism and discrimination at the local level.
]]>To Wilfredo Ardito, the links between poverty and racism in Peru are obvious.
“The differences between life in the highlands, and in the jungles, and life in Lima are extreme,” he says in APRODEH’s office in Ayacucho. “Life expectancy in Lima is 80, and in the highlands it is 50. The campesinos [rural people] are poor, illiterate, malnourished, and people think this can’t change. So when budgets are approved, there is money for a [football] stadium in Lima instead of for reducing maternal mortality in the mountains…there is an attitude that campesinos can suffer, they can exist in this state of poverty, it is all right.”
After 10 years of economic growth in Peru, Ardito says wealth is concentrated in very few hands in the country, and the situation of the poorest people has not changed much.
APRODEH’s strategy is to encourage local leaders to promulgate local ordinances to address problems of racism and discrimination, and then train local municipal staff and officials to implement and enforce the new laws. The training sessions, Ardito says, are particularly effective. “People are skeptical at first, or they think we are going to talk about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement...then they realize it is about their experience, and that they share with others experiences of racism.” This goes for indigenous people, as well as for mestizo (mixed race) and white people who may have been brought up to behave in certain ways towards others who are different. The realization of this can be profound, and life changing.
Oxfam America supports efforts to reduce racism and discrimination against indigenous people and women in Peru because these are the most impoverished people in the country. Helping indigenous people gain more respect for their basic rights will help them gain their fair share of quality education and health care. Eliminating discrimination will also help women gain access to better jobs and other services, and generally improve the situation for the country’s poorest people.
Building respect for indigenous people will also help communities value their own indigenous culture. This is essential because many indigenous groups have developed efficient, sustainable ways of living and working the land in some environmentally sensitive areas. The indigenous ways of using natural resources are being forgotten as people feel they must reject their indigenous identity in order to take advantage of all that modernity and western culture can offer. This is part of the reason why APRODEH and others are encouraging indigenous youth to speak their native languages and be proud of who they are—so they can live a decent life, take advantage of all that their government and society can offer them, without forcing them to assimilate into western culture and forget their past.
These municipal ordinances are helping Peru pull these problems out of the shadows,” Says Santiago Alfaro, Oxfam America’s program officer for indigenous rights in Peru. “Government employees can now see the negative effects of racism and discrimination on the quality of life in the country. APRODEH’s work in Ayacucho is echoing across the country, and there are now more and better legal tools available to help indigenous people remove barriers to public services.”
]]>Also in this issue, working together to save the family farm, the power of reading empowers women in The Gambia, and updates on Oxfam's work in Bolivia and in eastern and southern Africa.
]]>Amid cheers from a throng of enthusiastic supporters and international media, Make Trade Fair won the day.
Oxfam's trade campaign was launched.
Within hours of the Hong Kong debut, events were held in 25 cities including Brussels, Dublin, Geneva, Mexico City, San Salvador, and Washington, D.C. These events ranged from press conferences and symposiums to a rock concert in London’s Trafalgar Square.
Oxfam's trade campaign seeks to unite concerned citizens around the world in calling for fair trade policies that will help move millions of people out of poverty.
Nobel Prize Professor Amartya Sen, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and musician and social activist Bono were among those who endorsed the campaign. "Oxfam has got it right," said Bono. "It wouldn't cost much to change the rules of trade so that poor countries can work their way out of poverty. But the world's leaders won't act unless they hear enough people telling them."
Also in this issue of EXCHANGE, writers Frances and Anna Lappé discuss their book Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, and we bring you updates on Oxfam's work with water and sanitation, drought in Ethiopia, and indigenous women in the highlands of Peru who are speaking out after decades of violence.
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