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The voice of Luz Haro Guanga (Chimborazo, 75 years old) is a powerful arrow. Each word is a symbol of the tireless fight for the rights of indigenous and rural girls and women. The Ecuadorian leader has an easy smile, but she does not hesitate to speak harshly about the inequalities that women experience in the countryside. Without access to basic services, forced to leave school and forced to marry men twice their age. She knows it because she has experienced it since she was a child. “If I hadn’t experienced inequalities and discrimination so much, I wouldn’t understand it. Because whoever does not live, she does not understand. Because one thing is to read and another thing is to live,” says Haro.
At 11 years old, she had no choice but to work caring for a newborn, at 13 she was forced to get married and at 60 she finished her studies. From a family of farmers, Luz grew up among the mountains of the rural parish of Matus, in the Andean province of Chimborazo, where six out of ten people (65.1%) live in multidimensional poverty. Luz, like other children, did not have access to health, drinking water and food. And education, especially for girls, was not the priority.
“It was not the obligation of either the State or the family that rural girls, at least, finish primary school,” she acknowledges. Luz knew the classrooms when she was seven years old. She walked alone a 40-minute walk and crossed a river to get to school. If the weather was bad, everything got complicated: the river rose and she had no choice but to ask for a lodging in the town. “Today we were talking with my son and I was telling him about the Taita Salasaca song ‘how happy he walks through the chaquiñanes – path in Quichua – without seeing the thorns’. And it is true because I walked barefoot until I was 12, when they gave me my first pair of sneakers,” she reflects.
“School was very hard,” admits Luz. She often had to combine housework with school: going to carry water for the family or helping her mother work in the fields. In the few moments that she enjoyed being a child, she would play on the stilt or do her homework. “If they sent me five sums, I would make 10. If they told me to make a copy sheet, I would make two. I never stuck to what they ordered. I always liked to do more than what was asked of me,” she says proudly. But she, like other girls her age, was forced to drop out of primary school and get married.
The scourge of child marriage
When Luz remembers that moment in her life, her smile fades, she remains silent, thinking. She was 13 years old and her mother had arranged her marriage with a 50-year-old man, close to the family: “I believed that this way I could improve my future somewhat,” Luz admits. In Ecuador, there are 5,217 boys, girls and adolescents, between 12 and 14 years old, who are married or living in a free union, according to data from the 2022 Population and Housing Census. This despite the fact that in this Andean country the unions between a greater of age and a minor are a crime. The most serious thing: it is not an isolated problem. Latin America is the only region in the world where child marriages have not decreased in the last 25 years and ranks second in the world in the number of teenage pregnancies,” according to UNICEF.
“Child marriage is a problem that until now exists in rural areas, it has not been eliminated. They see that we girls are growing and they look for a partner for us to ensure our future. Of course, they wanted me for that too,” she says sadly. A harmful and violent practice that continues to occur in many indigenous and rural communities and does not come to light. “In the end, I left home without mom and dad’s blessing because I didn’t want to get married when I was 13.” She fled, without anyone knowing, to the capital, Quito. “I didn’t want that for myself. I rebelled. That was my first cry for independence,” she says as she smiles.
Although there was another cry for freedom before: She was 11 years old and, being the oldest of nine children, she had no choice but to work to help her family. She was a girl in charge of taking care of a newborn.
— I remember when this woman was going to pay me my first salary, and she told me: ‘get on your knees.’ I said, ‘why.’
– I will pay you.
—He is paying me for my work. Why do I have to kneel? She questioned him.
“It was a creature. I resisted and I didn’t feel like getting down on my knees so he could pay me for my work,” she says as his black eyes begin to water. “That makes me do what I do,” she continues forcefully.
Doña Luz, as those who know her call her, relates her two cries for independence with simplicity and unique lucidity. She traded games for rebellion and ventured alone into a world she was not yet ready for. After running away from home when she was just a child, she dedicated herself to working in care and cleaning jobs to send money to her family. And with what was left, she tried to survive. Only ten years later was she able to continue with what she wanted: studying.
A life dedicated to raising your voice
“I spent studying until I was almost 70 years old. For me the most important thing was to learn,” she says. At 22 years old, she finished adult primary school. Afterwards, she went to night school to continue her studies. “My husband told me: ‘You’re old, why are you going to study?’ I told her: ‘Excuse me, but I want to become old, less stupid.’ In one hand the cane and in the other the title”, she laughs. At 44 years old, with three children in h
er care, she graduated from high school with honors.
And since Luz is not one to settle, she pointed out her university studies. She did it remotely, and at the age of 62 she graduated in Educational Sciences from the Equinoctial Technology University. Later, she obtained her diploma in Technologies and Development from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flacso). She did it without internet at home: her routine consisted of visits to the Internet, printing huge sheets of paper and studying until dawn.
She has dedicated her entire life to defending the rights of girls and women who live in the countryside. Her first approach as an activist began with the founding of the Fatima Women’s Association, in the rural parish of the same name, in the Amazonian province of Pastaza. It was made up of women from all corners: indigenous, mestizo, heads of households, single mothers.
Luz wanted to educate other women on issues of equality, community entrepreneurship, and self-esteem. She promoted the Training School for Rural Women. The first generation was aimed at female leaders in the Amazon. It was not easy to call them: she had to look for them in the communities, house by house, and convince them: “The women did not want to participate in the training school because they said: ‘We are not professionals, we don’t know how to read or write.’ Better that my son or my husband go.’ She heard this so many times that Luz, energetic, responded: “They are leaders. They have talent, they have ears, they have eyes, mouths and hearts. Come, participate.” In that first meeting, many did not have education, but Luz always reminded them that no one is more or less: “Those who have knowledge have to support those who do not and those who are from below have wonderful things to share.” In that first training school, 150 women graduated.
Five years later, she led the first Women’s Congress in Pastaza and the first celebration of March 8: “In Pastaza they had never commemorated it, women only did it between walls.” Luz proudly remembers her first demonstration on International Women’s Day accompanied by a hundred of her colleagues walking the streets near government institutions. “There weren’t many professionals, there was just one doctor and a few graduates. Many of our colleagues were rural and illiterate women,” she says.
Reach a space of power “to make a difference”
She was soon appointed leader of the Amazon in Pastaza and, shortly after, national leader of rural women. She was also National Electoral Advisor of Ecuador. And since 2017 she has been Executive Secretary of Network of Rural Women of Latin America and the Caribbean (RedLAC) and Principal Member of the Board of Directors of the Ibero-American Network of Municipalities for Gender Equality. “Having taken the leap to reach a space of power was to make a difference. I was emerging like the Phoenix, from below, burning my eyelashes.”
After a life as an advocate, she is clear about two things: her convictions and ideals are inalienable and she wants justice for women and girls who, like her, had to postpone their childhood and dreams. “In rural areas there is the same poverty and limitation that I experienced in my childhood.” She laments. In these environments she has found girls with stolen childhoods and condemned to live in circles of violence with their aggressors and without opportunities.
“In the countryside, they exchange the girls for a bottle of drink. What happens is infamous and no one talks about it,” she gets angry. She relates that after a visit to an Amazonian community, one of the young women she met called her and told what happened to her: “My sister traded me for five pounds of rice when I was 10 years old,” she remembers her telling him. . “The young woman wanted to commit suicide because she couldn’t bear to continue living with the man she had bought from him in exchange for rice.”
Luz and other leaders have fought to ensure that these situations never happen again and that the decade for the rights of rural women, girls and adolescents be declared as a measure of “compensation for the years of exclusion and forgetfulness that they have experienced.” Their efforts crystallized in July of last year, when the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) approved the Declaration for the Rights of Women, Adolescents, and Girls in Rural Environments of the Americas. An initiative that seeks to repair that historical debt. For Luz, the first step to achieve justice is to invest in the talent of rural girls: “Talking about girls is also giving them hope of being professionals, that they have opportunities to prepare so that they do not age like us, many times, without knowledge ”.
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