By Ana Baez |
Madrid (EFE) in the prevention and attention to the victims of gender violence.
May Canul recently collected for CADIN in Madrid the Bartolomé de las Casas Prize, which is awarded by the Spanish Secretary of State for International Cooperation and Casa de América to those who work for understanding and harmony with the indigenous peoples of America.
The civil organization, founded in 1997, is currently working on a project in eight Yucatan municipalities aimed at informing and training women about their rights and how to defend them.
Since 2016, she has been part of the Red de Promotoras Mayas de Justicia project, whose objective is to improve access to community justice for women who experience violence in that state of Mexico.
“The most visible problem is access to Justice, there are many Mayan women who experience violence and the majority decide not to denounce it,” explains the Mexican in an interview with EFE.
The lack of interpreters, an obstacle for the Mayans
May Canul details the main obstacles in the judicial process: economic dependence on the partner, not knowing how to read or write and the lack of certification of interpreters are the reasons that discourage the victim from issuing a complaint.
“There are women who do file complaints,” she points out, but acknowledges that “the prosecutors think a lot about them, because they wait for many hours and face the obstacle of not having an interpreter and translator in the Mayan language.”
May Canul came to CADIN 14 years ago looking for a job, but also to “fill that void” that she had had since she abandoned her studies due to “economic and violent situations.”
“We look for meetings with national and international authorities, we channel cases of violence, we join efforts to publicize the laws, the rights of women, but we also learn this to know how to change things that do not work”, she adds.
The activist obtained her certificate as an interpreter at the National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI), but the Yucatan prosecutors prohibit her from practicing her profession and only let her go as an escort.
“I have been an interpreter in the health area, because they won’t let you in the Justice area,” he points out and explains that in CADIN there are three other interpreters who are told in justice institutions that their documents “are not valid.”
The “discrimination” of the authorities
The Yucatecan denounces the “discriminatory” behavior of the authorities and their lack of response, not only in terms of language, but also in the face of many other obstacles they encounter on the way.
“We cannot stay with these refusals,” says May Canul, and that is why CADIN has achieved “alliances” with the Mexican Congress, the region’s universities and the feminist organization Equis Justicia for women.
In addition to external collaborations, the leader points out that “she learns all the time from her colleagues at the center”, because working as a woman on the issue of violence in indigenous communities “is not easy”.
“They classify you as the woman who separates families, they think that you are only wasting time or that if you work at CADIN you should not experience violence and, if so, it is a shame to experience it, when no one is exempt from it,” she adds.
Despite the difficulties, May Canul affirms that “what she does fulfills her,” because there are women in her community who do not report complaints, but “they already know their rights and know how to set limits to violence.”