Lorena Cabnal
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Lorena Cabnal | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1973 (age 52–53) Guatemala |
| Occupation | Activist |
Lorena Cabnal (Guatemala, 1973) is co-founder of the community-territorial feminist movement in Guatemala and of the Red de Sanadoras Ancestrales del Feminismo Comunitario (Network of Ancestral Healers of Community Feminism).[1]
Lorena grew up on the outskirts of the Guatemalan capital during the Guatemalan Civil War. Her family had to flee their Q'eqchí Maya territory in Alta Verapaz after being expelled by landowners, as did thousands of indigenous people who were forcibly displaced during the military government of Efráin Ríos Montt.[2]
She grew up in a context of violence that she considered part of everyday life. After talking to a friend about her father's sexual abuse against her,[3] Lorena stopped naturalizing violence and ran away from home at the age of 15.[4]
The activist wanted to study medicine, but her economic situation did not allow it. However, thanks to her mother, who was a herbalist and who also worked as a cook in private homes, giving her the opportunity to have contacts and allowing her daughter to study transfusion medicine. There she met important women for her path: the doctor Gladys Murga, who was her mentor in the medical field and the philosopher María Rosa Padilla, who marked her life because with her she began to listen to other academic interpretations from a social and anthropological perspective of the indigenous villages.[5]
And at the age of 25, she decided to move away from her community and arrived in the mountains in Santa María Xalapán, Guatemala, where she began to work against sexual violence and where she also met Victoria Serrano, who would be one of her spiritual grandmothers until her death.
My intention was to talk to the girls and boys, because I wanted to contribute so that there was no more sexual violence against them based on my story.[2]
Activism
Lorena, in addition to being a feminist, is a healer and daughter of Xinca Mayan cosmology, and together with her mountain companions, she began her activism defending the territory, fighting against transgenics, free trade agreements, against the dispossessions of landowners in the ancestral territory and then against mining,[6][4] and it was the sexist actions of her daily life, such as that the government of her community was made up of 357 men and no women and that there were only male spiritual guides, which prompted her to question life within her community and together with a group of women who shared the same concerns gave way to territorial community feminism.[2][7]
As soon as she became a feminist, she began to suffer violence from her fellow men in the community, who accused her of having been contaminated by foreign white feminists, stigmatized her and forced her to leave the community despite her active role in the defense of Xinka territory against numerous mining projects. They even demanded that she get pregnant again.
Children are life and the guarantee of existentia of our peoples. And a daughter is nothing. If you want to work with women again, you have to get pregnant again.
After refusing to accept what she calls indigenous fundamentalisms, or the unchangeable original patriarchal customs, she decided to leave the community together with her daughter. However, she has no regrets as she has no intention of remaining silent again against misogyny, sexual violence and femicide.
In this sense, her militancy has cost her more than a decade of years, being accompanied by Peace Brigades International, an organization that protects human rights defenders.[8]
