By Ruth Degolia
December 1, 2006
Recent civil unrest and a turn to the left among Latin America’s electorate should be drawing international attention to a long-simmering issue—the failure of globalization to adequately meet the needs of Latin America’s poor.
As a college student at Yale, I witnessed this failure first-hand through my work and thesis research in Guatemala’s Western Highlands. I spent my summers working on and researching economic development projects with an association of rural indigenous communities in the highlands region. Many of the communities we worked with were returned refugees from Guatemala’s civil war period, and other communities had lost their entire male population during that period’s massacres.
While the communities I worked with faced a complex array of challenges, I came to believe that many of those challenges were related to a single, core issue: a lack of access to decent income in the regions where they lived. After spending two years raising funds for local scholarship programs, I realized that helping communities earn a decent living was the most sustainable way to ensure families could send their children to school.
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