Guatemalan's Work Is Grounded in Her Past

By Robyn Fieser

Lucrecia Oliva knows about the impact of immigration, the kind that severs families and tears communities apart.

At the age of 20, she and her husband were forced to leave their native Guatemala in the midst of the country's civil conflict. She spent 8 months separated from her infant daughter. It was a familiar situation. Lucrecia's father, a union organizer and factory worker, was blacklisted and fled to the United States to find work when she was just 7 years old.

Today, working in Guatemala, Lucrecia leads Catholic Relief Services in our work to address issues related to migration, human trafficking and human-rights abuses.

Lucrecia will return to the United States in February to discuss her experiences and CRS' work on the complex web of migration and human-rights issues in Guatemala. More than half of the 13 million people in Guatemala, which is Central America's most populous country, live below the national poverty line. A chronic lack of economic opportunities exacerbated by the devastating impact of natural disasters, to which the country is prone, force tens of thousands of people to leave Guatemala every year in search of work.

"Poverty, unfair distribution of land and resources, and exclusion — all of which create a situation of injustice — continue to exist in Guatemala," says Lucrecia. "Immigration is often the only choice, the only hope, for people to better their lives and feed their families.

Lucrecia will start a speakers' tour on February 4 to promote Operation Rice Bowl, CRS' annual Lenten initiative. The program raises $8 million a year to support food-security projects in 40 countries, including the United States.

Forced to Flee

Lucrecia and her husband landed in Chicago in 1980. Their home country was at war and thousands of Guatemalans were fleeing for the United States.

To make ends meet, she took odd jobs cleaning and painting houses and hanging drywall, all while studying English at night. Finally, she found her way to St. Pius V Parish in Pilsen, Chicago. As coordinator of social services, she began to work with Chicago's large Mexican community.

As she explains it, her own experience connected her to other immigrants. Some would arrive at the church directly from the train station after the long journey from Mexico, still smelling of the trip. She'd give some of them money to make it to their next stop, others she'd give a hot meal or an occasional job shoveling snow.

"I was finally feeling like I did something," she says. "I was learning their needs and their issues and for that I felt useful."

She stayed in the job for 11 years.

During her time at the church, the magnitude of the atrocities happening in Guatemala began to unfold and Lucrecia started to take on the role of activist.

Lucrecia helped form a Chicago-based organization to promote human rights and raise awareness about the situation in Guatemala. Church activists, exiles from others countries, intellectuals — both from the United States and Latin America — and others made up the grass-roots group, which organized speakers and raised funds for victims of the violence back home.

"The way we saw it, we were giving a voice to the people in Guatemala that couldn't speak for themselves," she says.

Taking up a Cause in Guatemala

Lucrecia spent 18 years in Chicago and had another daughter. But by 1998, after the peace accords in Guatemala were signed, Lucrecia wanted to return home. Today, she is back in Guatemala taking up the cause of migrants.

"I'm like the little ant that you don't really see but that's carrying things along," she says.

Her description is part modesty, but also reflects the change in her role from activist to facilitator. She's no longer working directly with immigrants. Now, she's connecting local organizations with the support they need to carry out their work.

"My job is to empower the organizations that I work with to find clear solutions to the problems they are dealing with. We provide the links, economic resources and other things to some incredible organizations that are working to ensure that the rights of migrants are protected and respected," she says.

CRS works throughout Guatemala on immigration-related issues, raising awareness as well as advocating for and providing support to groups working with immigrants on the front lines.

For the last four years, Lucrecia has coordinated efforts to help migrants and to advocate on their behalf for CRS. Recently, she worked on a groundbreaking multicountry research project documenting the increasing number of children making their away alone or with smugglers to the United States. Other human rights issues Lucrecia works on are human trafficking, CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement) monitoring, and Historic Memory, a project which documents the human-rights violations during Guatemala's civil war.

Robyn Fieser is CRS' regional information officer for Latin America and the Caribbean based in Guatemala.