Abstract: As the pandemic reveals how multiple intersecting inequalities affect public health, the work of rural activists defending their communities’ rights to health, land, and gender, ethnic and environmental justice demonstrate how intersectional analysis can be put into practice. In the interviews that follow, Guatemalan Maya Tz’utujil activists Paulina Culum and Benilda Batzin describe how ‘health rights defenders’ seek justice for rural indigenous communities – work that the pandemic makes more critical than ever. Their strategies and insights have implications for addressing rural health rights around the world.
To cite this article: Julia Fischer-Mackey, Benilda Batzin, Paulina Culum & Jonathan Fox (2020): Rural public health systems and accountability politics: insights from grassroots health rights defenders in Guatemala, The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2020.1768075
Grassroots Voices Forum: “Pandemic and Critical Agrarian Studies”
The Journal of Peasant Studies is launching a rolling forum with experiences from the frontlines of the current crisis: ‘Grassroots Voices: pandemics and critical agrarian studies’ – in collaboration with the Transnational Institute (TNI – www.tni.org). As the pandemic unfolds, many of the fatal flaws of capitalism are being laid bare. It is a moment when new alliances are being formed and new militant organizing is springing up, as are new forms of authoritarianism and repression. This is a moment of potentially great rupture – but in what direction and for who is up for grabs. The Grassroots Voices section seeks to document what is happening from the grassroots perspective. Migrant workers, domestic laborers, peasant farmers, small-scale fishers, informal food vendors, and rural-urban migrants all have had their lives upended. We expect this conjuncture to affect potentially radical changes in long-term trends towards authoritarian governance, industry consolidation, marginalization of migrant workers, land grabs and financialization, as well as creating a surge of left organizing, food worker strikes, mutual aid networks, and new grassroots alliances. What is the experience on the ground? These experiences, of course, are conditioned by the historical changes that came before, by rising populism, and the history of movement organizing. We hope to put these new experiences in historical context, track them longitudinally, and highlight emerging strategies.
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Juan Liu
Dr Juan Liu is an associate professor of political ecology and agrarian studies at the College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University (COHD-CAU) and a researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB). Her research interests include energy transitions, migration and the left-behind population, land politics, and political economy/ecology of agriculture, food and environment, etc.