Grassroots Development

Journal of the Inter-American Foundation

VOLUME 35 

2014

Focus: Perspectives Updated
2 Grassroots Development 2014 35

The Inter-American Foundation

Robert N. Kaplan, President

Board of Directors

Eduardo Arriola, Chair

Thomas Dodd, Acting Vice Chair

J. Kelly Ryan

John P. Salazar

Jack Vaughn 

Roger Wallace

Grassroots Development

Journal of the Inter-American Foundation

Managing Editor: Paula Durbin

Contributing Editor: Eduardo Rodríguez-Frías

Photo Editor: Mark Caicedo

Foreign Language Editions: João Bezzera, 

Darío Elías, Anna Maria Greenston, Aura 

Triana-Pacheco

Design and Printing: Amy Ellis, 

U.S. Government Printing Office

The Inter-American Foundation (IAF), an independent foreign assistance agency of the United States government, was created in 1969 to promote self-help 

development by awarding grants directly to organizations in Latin America 

and the Caribbean. Its operating budget consists of congressional appropriations as well as resources derived through the Social Progress Trust Fund, channeled through inter-agency agreements and contributed by external donors. 

The IAF prints Grassroots Development in English and Spanish and posts 

on www.iaf.gov English, Spanish and Portuguese versions accessible in 

pdf or html format. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the 

IAF. Original material produced by the IAF and published in Grassroots 

Development is in the public domain and may be freely reproduced. Certain 

material in this journal, however, has been provided by other sources and 

might be copyrighted. Reproduction of such material may require prior 

permission from the copyright holder. IAF requests notification of any 

reproduction and acknowledgement of the source. Grassroots Development is 

indexed in the Standard Periodical Directory, the Public Affairs Service Bulletin, 

the Hispanic American Periodical Index (HAPI) and the Agricultural Online Access

(WORLD) database. Back issues are available online. To receive the journal, 

e-mail inquiries@iaf.gov, visit www.iaf.gov or write to the following address:

Grassroots Development

Inter-American Foundation

1331 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Suite 1200 North

Washington, D.C. 20004

Cover: Afro-Ecuadorian children with Juan García, an authority on Ecuador’s 

African heritage. Opposite page: Argentine indigenous leader Rosario Quispe 

with Bolivian women. Both photos are by Patrick Breslin. This issue contains 

the final article in his series on grassroots leadership.

Printed on recycled paper using soy-based ink.

The purpose of this journal is to share grassroots experiences in development with a variety of readers. The editor encourages submissions on 

relevant topics including, but not limited to, the following: 

• how the poor in Latin America and the Caribbean organize to 

improve their lives; 

• issues and trends in the development community; 

• how institutions cooperate to further the development of the region.

Please direct query letters to Paula Durbin at the above address or 

e-mail pdurbin@iaf.gov. 
Contents

Perspectives Updated 

Leadership at the Grassroots: Lawrence Doesn’t Live Here Anymore 

Patrick Breslin .................................................................................................. 2

Disabilities and Inclusion in Paraguay

Eduardo Rodríguez-Frías ................................................................................. 14

A Diplomat for Disability Rights........................................................... 20

Audits: Beyond the Bottom Line

Michael Campbell .......................................................................................... 22

Grassroots Accountability in Colca

Eric Hirsch .............................................................................................. 28

How the Law Constrains Freedom of Association in the Americas

Jocelyn Nieva.................................................................................................. 30

Forum for Fellows’ Findings: Women and the Globalized Economy

Volunteer Tourism and Mayan Weavers: Friendship, Friction and Fair Trade 

Rebecca Nelson............................................................................................... 35

Seasons and Uncertainty: Temporeras in Chile’s Fruit Industry

Jelena Radovic Fanta ...................................................................................... 42

At the IAF

To Lake Titicaca and Back Again: Reflections on a Calling 

Kevin Healy.................................................................................................... 48

Bottom-Up Development in the Classroom

Robert Maguire ............................................................................................... 54

The Development Set

Ross Coggins ........................................................................................... 57

Putting Poverty in a Museum

Maleah Paul............................................................................................ 58

Chronic Violence and the Challenge to Grassroots Organizations

Tani Adams.................................................................................................... 60

Resource ............................................................................................................ 66

VOLUME 35 

2014

Grassroots Development

Journal of the Inter-American Foundation
Perspectives Updated

Learning and change is a recurring theme of 

this issue of Grassroots Development that traces 

its lineage to They Know How, the seminal book 

published in 1977 reflecting lessons from the IAF’s 

first five years of operations. My favorite chapter in 

that development classic stresses the importance 

of failure to the learning process. Drawing on the 

IAF’s earliest experiences, it identifies several vividly 

named “syndromes” that can undermine success. For 

example, the “Lawrence of Arabia” syndrome warns 

of initiatives that are dependent on a single charismatic individual. The IAF has taken precautions 

over the decades to minimize this risk but there is no 

denying the catalytic role of strong, capable visionaries at the helm of some of our most productive 

grantee organizations.

So Pat Breslin’s article in this issue is a welcome 

update to the caveat in They Know How. Breslin takes 

a closer look at grassroots leadership and identifies 

characteristics shared by the six individuals whom 

he has profiled in these pages over the last few years. 

His inventory is, admittedly, not exhaustive. Missing 

from the analysis, for example, is any mention of the 

willingness of these men and women to reach into 

their own pockets and to spend precious hours away 

from their families. 

This kind of personal sacrifice comes across, 

however, in the article by Eduardo Rodríguez-Frías 

on Fundación Saraki whose Paraguayan leaders not 

only subsidized the effort at the outset but have 

turned disability rights into a family pursuit. The 

IAF’s engagement with disability activism dates from 

its earliest years and is consistent with its mandate 

calling for broader participation in the development 

process. All manner of IAF-funded grassroots groups 

have worked on rehabilitation, training, enterprise 

development and public education. With the World 

Health Organization estimating that some 15 percent 

of the global population lives with some form of disability, ignoring this segment of society and failing 

to tap its skills represents a tragic waste of resources. 

Rodriguez-Frías emphasizes two lessons that have 

served disability rights activists well—that numbers 

count and legislation matters—and should help them 

as they go about showing society that full inclusion 

means employment. 

And what about leadership and financial 

accountability? As a grantmaker, the IAF relies on 

regular audits to confirm its grantees’ compliance 

with the terms of their funding and to identify problems, especially where management systems and 

controls are relatively undeveloped. Rosario Quispe, 

profiled by Breslin, makes an appearance in the 

article by Michael Campbell, who has run the IAF’s 

audit program since 2006, and provides an example 

of the audit’s potential for teachable moments. As 

with other aspects of grassroots development, however, learning runs in both directions. Auditors are 

challenged by conditions and questions that their 

university training never covered, and grantee staff 

learn and develop skills as a result of their interactions with auditors. 

Articles by Jocelyn Nieva and Tani Adams illuminate the evolving challenges to grassroots leadership 

and the IAF’s mission. Organized voluntary initiatives burgeoned despite the obstacles imposed by 

authoritarian rule when the IAF started making 

grants in the early 1970s. Those regimes have been 

replaced by democratically-elected government but 

is the environment any more encouraging to voluntary organizations? Unfortunately, Nieva documents 

a new insidious threat that takes the form of hostile 

or ambiguous laws. This is an alarming trend since 

healthy democracies depend on a robust civil society free to assemble, organize and function in the 

pursuit of common interests. While civil war is now 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 1

rare, extraordinarily high rates of homicide and other 

violent crime in many countries of the region suggest 

that a new and debilitating form of conflict may have 

taken its place. Anthropologist Tani Adams exposes 

the systemic nature of violence in multiple forms 

manifest in communities where grassroots organizations work, outlines a new approach to looking at the 

problem and reports how the IAF and its grassroots 

partners in five countries are applying her framework.

Global economic forces have always shaped 

conditions at the community level. Two IAF Fellows, 

who conducted original research related to grassroots 

development toward their doctoral degree, contributed articles that explore the local impact of distant 

markets. Jelena Radovic Fanta reports on how women 

contracted as temporary labor in the Chilean agricultural sector manage the stresses of their seasonal 

employment. Rebecca Nelson describes the tensions 

and tradeoffs associated with volunteer tourism 

from the perspective of weavers in an association of 

Guatemalan cooperatives. These articles offer excellent examples of the insight resulting from academic 

inquiry into the context of development, which is 

why the IAF supports dissertation research as an 

important backdrop for our work.

Given that grassroots development yields so 

many lessons, it seems inevitable that it would be 

classroom fare. The many IAF alumni whom academia has welcomed include Kevin Healy and Bob 

Maguire. Healy, who retired in April after 36 years 

on the job, reflects on his long IAF career that 

offered multiple opportunities to pull the threads 

of his experience into publications and courses at 

two universities. Bob Maguire, now director of the 

Latin American and Hemispheric Studies program 

at George Washington University, has been teaching Poverty Alleviation and Bottom-Up Development 

since 2011. His class draws on an array of IAF materials, including some taken from this journal, and asks 

students to think differently about development. 

On Maguire’s syllabus as required reading is the 

timeless satirical poem, “The Development Set,” written by Ross Coggins just before coming to the IAF 

in the late 1970s, and we could not resist reprinting 

it in this issue of Grassroots Development. The poem 

soon went viral even in those days before everyone 

had a computer, and there has yet to appear a more 

clever or successful challenge to the notion that it 

is possible for a self-styled development authority to 

parachute into a community and fix the problems of 

the poor. Think of “The Development Set” as a companion piece to its contemporary They Know How, 

which tells us exactly who the real experts are. 

Robert N. Kaplan

President and CEO

Inter-American Foundation
2 Grassroots Development 2014 35

By Patrick Breslin

Leadership at the Grassroots: 

Lawrence Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

F

ollow the Leader is a children’s 

game that we never stop playing. Leaders populate our history, literature, painting, sculpture and 

performing arts. David and Solomon 

in the Bible, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, 

Machiavelli’s The Prince, an endless 

stream of business books—My Years 

with General Motors, Leadership Secrets 

of Attila the Hun—offer insights into 

what makes a leader. Museum walls sag 

with their portraits, plazas and squares 

are adorned with their equestrian 

bronzes. We’ve woven legends and fictions about their deeds, good and evil, 

dating back to ancient campfires and 

running through Shakespeare’s Globe 

Theatre to the latest season of Game 

of Thrones. Yet the nature of leadership remains a mystery cloaked by the 

uniqueness of the human personality.

Photos by Patrick Breslin

Juan García
Grassroots Development 2014 35 3

Still, we all make judgments about leaders: who 

captains the football team, who gets the corner 

office, who sits on the city council, whose stock 

do we buy, whom do we elect president? The InterAmerican Foundation judges leaders as it reviews 

the 600-plus submissions that it receives each year 

in response to its call for proposals. It funds roughly 

one in ten of the ideas submitted and evaluating 

the leadership of the organizations seeking support 

is one of the criteria that winnows the list. Leaders 

who clearly articulate an organization’s goals, motivate its members and channel their energy would 

seem to strengthen a proposal’s prospects. But since 

its earliest days, the IAF has been ambivalent about 

leaders. They Know How, a book summing up the 

insights of the first five years of IAF funding, worried about the “Lawrence of Arabia syndrome” in 

which an organization could be too dependent on a 

dynamic leader, too prone to follow decisions made 

in isolation, too likely to collapse if that person left 

the scene. 

In recent issues, Grassroots Development profiled 

in-depth six grassroots leaders, out of the thousands 

who have emerged to prove themselves in the struggle against Latin America’s widespread poverty. The 

six were featured because of notable accomplishments 

and decades of grassroots experience. (Of them, only 

Elías Sánchez never received direct IAF funding. He 

never asked for it, but he encouraged IAF staff to look 

at one of the regional model farms his work inspired, 

and it was subsequently funded.) A combination of 

circumstance and character brought each of them 

to the fore at a time when Latin American society 

was changing dramatically, from the bottom up. If 

Plutarch was right in drawing lessons from lives and 

deeds, surely these six illuminate traits of effective 

leadership at the grassroots.

Origins

So where do leaders come from? In politics and 

government, it can help to be born into the right 

family. That’s the principle of monarchy, and it 

sometimes works in elections as well—ask the 

Bushes, or the Kennedys. Farther down the social 

strata, things get more haphazard. At the grassroots 

there’s really no telling. 

Rosario Quispé was the wife of an unemployed miner 

and the mother of seven children in the remote reaches of 

Jujuy, Argentina.

Javier de Nicoló grew up hungry amid the ruins of 

post-war Italy.

Afro-Ecuadorian Juan García left the wandering life 

to head for Esmeraldas and care for his dying grandfather, 

who knew a lot of stories.

Chet Thomas came off a Pennsylvania turkey farm to 

join the Peace Corps. 

As a girl, Nohra Padilla helped her parents scavenge a 

living from trash heaps in Bogotá.

Elías Sánchez started farming on a hillside to supplement his salary as a Honduran bureaucrat.

Times of upheaval can scramble the leadership 

pool. New opportunities appear, and new problems, 

sometimes demanding new types of leaders. All six 

leaders under consideration here came of age after 

World War II, in a world radically different from the 

one their grandparents had inhabited. Their parents 

had been the hinge generation, living through the 

world wars, tidal population shifts from farms to 

cities, distances diminishing under airplane wings 

and automobile wheels, radio and television riding 

electrical networks into isolated communities and 

overwriting the oral traditions that once sustained 

them. The economies of their grandparents, usually based on self-sufficient agriculture, supporting 

large families, had shattered as capitalist investment spurred growth and concentration in mining, 

manufacturing and agribusiness. The family farm 

faded, people who had worked the land became wage 

earners, often far from home. Out of the social and 

economic problems these changes generated came 

the challenges these six leaders would meet. 

Rosario’s grandfather raised sheep, cattle and alfalfa 

on hundreds of acres of Puna—the high desert where 

Argentina, Bolivia and Chile meet. All three products 

had come to the highlands with the Spanish conquistadores, but otherwise her grandfather lived much as his 

Coya ancestors had for millennia, patiently exploiting the 

Puna’s resources and trade routes. Her father’s generation 

left the Puna for jobs in industrial-scale mining and agribusiness in the lowlands. 

Javier de Nicoló’s father was wounded several times 

in the maw of the First World War, and the streets of his 

childhood were bombed into ruins during the Second.
4 Grassroots Development 2014 35

Elías Sánchez
Grassroots Development 2014 35 5

Juan García’s father was a refugee from the Spanish 

Civil War, waning from nostalgia on a strange coast half a 

world from home, but his maternal grandfather descended 

from slaves who had found freedom and carved out a 

living in the rain forests of Esmeraldas. Fishing and farming supported an extended family and Garcia’s grandfather 

was renowned for his vast store of oral folklore. 

The self-sufficient family farm in Gobbler Hollow, 

Pennsylvania, where Chet Thomas grew up, raised turkeys 

as a cash crop. It went under when poultry production 

shifted to rural factories. 

Nohra Padilla’s parents were swept from their home by 

political violence in Colombia’s countryside and into the 

desperately poor squatter settlements that ringed its cities. 

Elías Sánchez saw industrial-scale agriculture, generally foreign-financed and controlled, dispossess farmers 

and turn swaths of southern Honduras into semi-desert. 

Passion for change

Most students of leadership distinguish between 

leaders and managers. Managers keep the wheels 

turning, leaders get them going in the first place, 

or change course. Leaders aim for transformation and tap the energy of followers to push it 

through. Leaders need passion, and they need to 

involve others in their passion. At the grassroots, 

leaders emerge because they see conditions that 

threaten themselves, their communities and what 

they value—justice, equality, the natural world, the 

worth of each human being, the innocence of children. Where many regard such threats as the reality 

of life, leaders stand up to them. 

With Argentina’s financial crisis of the 1980s, jobs 

in the mines and lowlands disappeared and real poverty 

came to the Puna, along with an alarming growth in 

Nohra Padilla, right.
6 Grassroots Development 2014 35

health problems, particularly among women, from the 

toxic tailings left behind by the mines. “We had to do 

something different,” Rosario said. “If we continued the 

way we were, we would all die.”

A youth club organized by local priests took Javier 

de Nicoló off the streets of southern Italy and gave his 

life direction. Two decades later, on a different continent, 

he believed the gamines—the street kids—of Colombia 

deserved the same chance.

A simple question fueled Juan García’s passion for 

change: Why were there no monuments to African descendants in Ecuador?

After his tour with the Peace Corps, Chet Thomas 

studied and then worked various jobs in the United States. 

Sent to Honduras with a relief program undertaken by the 

World Council of Churches after a major hurricane, he 

decided to stay. Traveling in western Honduras, he came 

upon the high, isolated valley of Belén Gualcho where he 

saw the indigenous Lenca in poverty and forced to migrate 

for work. “I wanted to do something significant with my 

life,” he said, “and I thought I’d like to see the little guy 

win every once in a while.”

As a teenager, Nohra Padilla helped organize community projects in her neighborhood. When the city of 

Bogotá announced plans to close down a trash dump on 

which struggling Colombians depended for their livelihood, she moved to mass protests that eventually helped 

them win official recognition as recyclers.

Elías Sánchez saw the majority of poor farmers in 

Honduras ignored by the agricultural “Green Revolution” 

and structural adjustment programs. He decided to teach 

them how to survive on the only landscapes left them.

A vision

Wanting change is not enough. Leaders need a 

vision of where they want change to go, a picture of 

a different reality that might be possible to achieve. 

They need the mindset limned in the quotation 

that the late Ted Kennedy famously used to eulogize 

his brother, Robert, after his assassination in 1968: 

“Some men see things as they are and say why. I 

dream things that never were and say why not.”

Nohra Padilla thought sorting through trash could be 

transformed from a desperate survival strategy to a profitable business if the people involved could, as recyclers, 

control more of the reprocessing chain and if they had a 

seat at the table where decisions affecting them were made.

As a young seminarian, Javier de Nicoló volunteered 

to go to Colombia, where he worked with youths in prison. 

One day he realized he should be working on the streets 

with kids before they went to jail. 

Elías Sánchez wanted a network of “human farms” 

throughout Honduras, overseen by colleagues who had 

internalized his own pedagogic approach. “You start 

with the person, not the land. The point of training was 

to teach farmers to think, to be creative, to have a positive attitude, to stimulate their imaginations to find 

resources for development.” 

In some cases, the vision drew from the past, 

from a time before the changes that roiled the 20th

century. Unprompted, three of the six leaders interviewed described memories of a childhood in a 

protective and self-sufficient household still headed 

by a grandfather. In their minds and memories, that 

was the foundation, providing the necessities of life, 

and on it, you could build towards prosperity. 

Rosario’s grandfather “had 300 cows, 800 sheep 

and fields of alfalfa and maize. He never had a salary, 

but who says we were poor?” She rejected development 

strategies imposed by experts and dreamed of indigenous 

control of a process, based on her people’s 8,000-year history on the Puna, that would revive the society she knew 

as a child, and build on it. 

As Juan García captured on tape the rich folklore of 

Afro-Ecuadorians, starting with his grandfather’s stories, he grew to understand the complexities of culture his 

ancestors had created in the coastal lowlands. He thought 

that the lessons drawn from those cultural patterns could 

be the basis for a locally-based development strategy.

Chet Thomas saw the working farm of his boyhood 

as a path to a better life for thousands of poor farmers. 

“We like to see every farmer growing all the food he needs 

for himself, plus a cash crop for the market,” he explained.

From vision to strategy

Passion is the fuel and vision the road map, but what 

turns the motor over is a realistic strategy. For grassroots leaders, the starting point is usually faith in the 

power of people united by a common goal. Typically, 

the first concrete steps are finding collaborators, 

starting an organization, raising funds, staffing up, 

setting policies and goals. Four of the six leaders created new organizations to realize their visions. Nohra 

Padilla was a key field worker for Colombian recyclers 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 7

and rose quickly to the top executive post in both 

the Bogotá and the nation-wide association. Elías 

Sánchez simply created a model farm on a piece of 

land he called Loma Linda. All the efforts took tremendous energy and stamina and no one worked just 

nine-to-five.

Warmi Sayajsunqo (WARMI), which means 

Persevering Woman, began in 1995 when Rosario Quispe 

invited 10 other women to meet in her home. “We 

decided to work together, to come up with our own solution, not wait for someone to save us,” Quispe recalled. 

Membership grew quickly from the original 10 to some 

3,600 in more than 80 Coya communities as Rosario 

crisscrossed the Puna, often clocking 400 kilometers a 

day in a pick-up truck.

Juan García and a few like-minded associates 

founded the Centro Cultural Afro-Ecuatoriano in 

Quito in the 1970s as a place to explore their identity 

and reflect on their people’s experience. Their systematic recording of folklore in Esmeraldas and the Chota 

Valley started building the monuments to his people 

that Juan wanted, out of their own stories, songs and 

poetry. At the same time, Juan and his colleagues were 

learning about the threats, particularly to land rights, 

that loomed over Esmeraldas with the appearance of 

industrial-scale plantations of African palm trees. The 

Chet Thomas, right.
8 Grassroots Development 2014 35

experiences spun off political and social efforts that 

would eventually enshrine Afro-Ecuadorian rights in the 

Constitution for the first time.

In 1983. Chet Thomas founded Proyecto Aldea 

Global, or Project Global Village, (PAG) to turn the vision 

of a self-sufficient farm with a cash crop into reality one 

farmer at a time. PAG’s methodology involved sitting with 

each farmer to map his land on a piece of stiff paper, 

deciding where each crop would go, where to conveniently 

place kitchen herbs, which field to reserve for the cash 

crop. In the years since, Aldea Global has conceived and 

conducted some of the most ambitious regional development programs in the hemisphere. By 1992, the Honduran 

government had asked PAG to work in and protect the 

buffer zone of the country’s largest national park, the 

source of 80 percent of its electricity.

Padre Javier started with a vacant building belonging 

to his Salesian order, and worked his contacts in business and government to get resources and more spaces. 

Eventually, he founded Fundación Servicio de Orientación 

Juvenil (FSJ). Soon after, the Bogotá district government 

asked him to direct its own agency for street kids. Javier 

ran both organizations for decades, expanding a simple 

daytime recreation center offering sports and a shower 

in a rough area of downtown Bogotá into a network of 

full-time boarding schools offering primary and secondary 

education and vocational training serving up to 10,000 

boys and girls across Colombia. 

Under Nohra Padilla’s leadership, the Association of 

Recyclers established itself as an integral part of Bogotá’s 

trash collection system, operating as professionals with 

uniforms, identity cards, set routes and schedules. They 

Padre Javier de Nicoló, right.
Grassroots Development 2014 35 9

collect for recycling at least 15 percent of the trash generated each day in the city, about 100 tons of material. 

On his hillside farm a few miles from Tegucigalpa, 

Elías Sánchez employed bizarre elements, dented pots 

from trash heaps for planters, discarded auto and truck 

tires to shore up contour terraces carved into the hillside. 

Ismael Vargas, one of his disciples, delighted in weeding his seed beds with the few protruding teeth in the top 

half of a bleached cattle skull. The point was to stimulate farmers’ imagination so they would see that many of 

the resources and tools they needed were lying around for 

the taking. Before his death in 2000, Sánchez had helped 

more than 30,000 farmers switch from slash-and-burn 

agriculture to hillside terraces that stopped erosion and 

he had seen 30 model farms that he had inspired appear 

around Honduras. 

Communicators

Leadership is a relationship—if there are no followers, there are no leaders—so it is largely about 

communication. Leaders are teachers who can draw 

on the energy of their followers and channel it 

towards a purpose. Starting from the grassroots is 

not bad preparation for a grassroots leader. Unlike 

hierarchical organizations—the military, corporate 

and government bureaucracies—membership in 

grassroots and nongovernmental groups is voluntary. Instead of commanding, their leaders must 

inspire and motivate. Knowing in their bones the 

daily lives of poor people gives those at the helm 

the credibility that helps communicate their vision, 

their hope for the future. 

Jorge Amador, who was inspired by Elías Sánchez and 

worked beside him for years, has a simple message for the 

southern Honduran farmers who visit his bountiful model 

farm not far from where he grew up. “Poverty doesn’t 

exist,” he insists. “What exists is ignorance. If people are 

using their intelligence, they can do it. If I can make it 

here, so can you.”

Visiting an isolated community for the first time, 

Rosario Quispe bought all the wool its spinners offered. 

Then she startled the women with a blunt assessment 

of its quality. “I paid for it, not because I’m a fool, but 

because I want you to continue working. But next time, 

wool like this will not be accepted.” The women listened 

in stunned silence as she extracted two skeins. “Ladies, 

this is very poorly made. This one, however, is top quality. 

So, if you want to sell, this is the quality you have to produce.” Message communicated, she immediately diffused 

the tension: “It’s like husbands,” she said with a smile. 

“If they deceive you at the beginning and you let them 

get away with it, you’ll never have a good life together.” 

Answering smiles broke out around the room.

Juan García opens a meeting on the future of 

Esmeraldas with some 20 Afro-Ecuadorian activists by 

reading brief descriptions of life along the rivers recorded 

decades ago. “We put the voice of the ancestors on the 

table for political discussion. I use the past to illustrate 

that there is a fountain of thought, of philosophy, or experience, to which we can return. There were times when 

we were self-sufficient. Not that we had a lot, but that we 

didn’t need anything more. I insist that the Afro community use what we learn of the past as the starting point for 

integration today.”

Several years ago, Padre Javier turned his attention to 

older kids, often considered lost causes by age 17 or so. In 

Colombia, they’re called desechables, or throwaways. “But 

life is a carousel,” Javier insists, “that comes around again 

and again to offer opportunities. At that age, the boys 

realize life is rushing away from them, and they have no 

education, no job, no family. ‘You realize the train is leaving you behind,’ I tell them and they say that that panics 

them. It goads them into the training programs we’ve 

tailored for them.”

Nohra Padilla’s communication skills are generally 

aimed at the government agencies and officials whose policies affect her members. She meets regularly with mayors, 

ministers, donors and journalists. Around the conference 

table, when the lawyers and economists and civil engineers introduce themselves by profession, Padilla simply 

says, “Recycler” and makes her case so compellingly that 

one government representative called her “the most tenacious woman in the world.”

A key component of Chet Thomas’ work is communicating with donors and potential donors outside of 

Honduras. He built and nurtures an extensive support network of religious organizations and groups in the United 

States that provides funds and very often, used equipment 

that can solve a problem in Honduras. PAG was able to 

convert a typical donation, a hay binder off a Midwest 

farm, into a drive unit for a paddle-wheel ferryboat that 

plies the reservoir in the national park.
10 Grassroots Development 2014 35

Long-term commitment

Rosario Quispe, Juan García and Nohra Padilla are 

from the grassroots groups of which they are leaders. 

Two of the remaining three are foreigners, Javier de 

Nicoló, a priest from Italy, and Chet Thomas from the 

United States. Elías Sánchez was a university- trained 

expert but the men he recruited to run regional 

demonstration farms were from those regions. What 

all six have in common is a life-long commitment to 

grassroots work and to the communities and nations 

where they have already worked for decades. De 

Nicoló and Thomas have already lived more years in 

their adopted countries than their native ones. 

Rosario Quispe is a sought-after speaker in Argentina 

and abroad. But after every trip she takes a day to walk 

on her land among her llamas, to ground herself again in 

the reality of the Puna. “I’m the same as you,” she tells 

women in the organization. “I never got past the seventh 

grade. I raise my llamas just like you do.”

Now in his eighties, Padre Javier has battled back 

from illness and enjoyed a round of testimonials to his 

work, capped by the Ordén de Boyacá, Colombia’s highest honor, which then-president Álvaro Uribe personally 

pinned on the priest’s jacket. Not that the honors meant 

de Nicoló was retiring. “I still have a lot to accomplish 

with the poor children,” he said.

Thomas bought land in Honduras, married, raised 

five children. “I realized if I wanted to do something significant, I’d have to stay a long time,” he said.

Lawrence of Arabia

As was mentioned at the beginning of this article, one 

of the cautions IAF developed in its first five years was 

tagged the “Lawrence of Arabia Syndrome,” after the 

popular film of the 1960s. In it, T. E. Lawrence was 

portrayed as organizing the Arab tribes in a desert 

campaign against the Ottoman Empire during the 

First World War. But when Lawrence left, the story 

went, everything fell apart. Leaders like Lawrence, it 

seemed, could inspire and galvanize people, yet fail 

to let them develop their own strengths and capabilities. The lesson, it seemed to the IAF, was to avoid 

projects built around a strong figure that would be 

“subject to autocratic decision-making and paternalism” and might leave the participants abandoned and 

worse off than at the start. Perhaps the labeling of a 

“syndrome” was appropriate for a time when nongovernmental organizations in Latin America were 

cropping up like mushrooms after rain. Many turned 

out to be personal vehicles trolling for increasingly 

available foreign funding. Few survived very long. But 

ever since They Know How, IAF analysts have probed 

for signs of widespread and genuine participation 

within organizations to counter skeptical internal 

reviews about projects with strong leaders. Even 

though there is no necessary correlation between 

strong leaders and autocratic, paternalistic behavior, 

the insistence on broad participation undoubtedly led 

to better choices of projects for funding. And obviously, with 40 additional years of experience, IAF has 

learned the value of strong leaders. 

Today, Latin America is rich in grassroots 

organizations with decades of experience and 

accomplishments. Many of their leaders seem indispensable. It’s possible the Afro-Ecuadorian oral 

tradition would have disappeared without a trace if 

Juan Garcia had not returned to Esmeraldas. Or that 

an indigenous organization like WARMI would not 

have spread over the Puna without Rosario Quispe. 

But dynamic and accomplished leaders do not mean 

the organizations behind them are weak. And the 

leaders profiled here, particularly the older ones, 

have been thinking about the question of succession 

for a long time. 

Padre Javier has staffed his organization almost 

entirely with former gamines who developed leadership 

skills in its programs. 

Chet Thomas has mentored future leaders of PAG 

and found university scholarships to help groom them. 

Elías Sánchez searched out and inspired men with the 

potential to carry his ideas throughout Honduras.

Juan García observed, after four years of political 

organizing in Esmeraldas, that “Afro-Ecuadorians are 

in the Constitution now. There are centers where future 

leaders are being trained, there are palenques, AfroEcuadorian organizations, with legal status. Now,” he 

concluded, “I’m going to write.” 

This series on grassroots leaders is rooted in 

conversations with the men and women profiled 

that started as long as three decades ago. One of the 

great advantages of IAF’s approach to funding is 

the frequent opportunity its staff members have to 

spend time with remarkable Latin Americans. Rosario 

Quispe once needed a ride to the Coya community 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 11

Rosario Quispe
12 Grassroots Development 2014 35

that wanted to sell wool to WARMI. It was five hours 

away in Bolivia and the only vehicle available was my 

rental car, so I drove her and had a unique chance 

to see her in action. I’ve spent hours walking the 

streets of Quito and days floating on the wide rivers 

of Esmeraldas with Juan García, exploring themes 

of culture and identity. I’ve covered countless kilometers in central and western Honduras with Chet 

Thomas, learning about Aldea Global’s long-term and 

multi-faceted support for the communities that it has 

helped to emerge from poverty and isolation. I’ve 

raced across Bogotá with Padre Javier to the variety 

of recreational and educational facilities he’s created 

and rolled through the streets at dawn with coffee 

and breakfast buns for sleepy gamines. I was a frequent visitor to Loma Linda, and last talked to Elías 

Sánchez just a few days before he died. I met Nohra 

Padilla in Las Marías, a community literally built on 

trash in the southern rim of Bogotá, where migrants 

had filled a shallow lagoon with dirt and garbage, 

tamped it down, then erected ramshackle houses on 

the new land. Nohra was helping them join Bogotá’s 

association of recyclers. Last year, I saw her at the 

Ronald Reagan Center in Washington where she 

was the Latin American recipient of the prestigious 

Goldman Environmental Prize.

The six leaders profiled in this series for Grassroots 

Development took on some of the biggest problems 

The Lawrence of Arabia Syndrome

Five years after the Inter-American Foundation opened 

its doors, its staff took a hard look at the lessons of success as well failure and compiled their reflections in They 

Know How. The book points to the most significant element in success as the initiative that emerges when the 

people closest to the problem invest their energy in working together toward a solution. Setbacks are often due to 

the absence of authentic community support. They Know 

How looks at a dozen “syndromes” that can undermine 

grassroots development, all labeled with names from 

popular culture. Of these, none has been as memorable 

to readers as the syndrome named for T.E. Lawrence, 

excerpted here.

The Lawrence of Arabia Syndrome refers to the 

high failure potential of projects built around or sustained by a strong central figure, which are, therefore, 

subject to autocratic decisionmaking and paternalism 

rather than true participation.

• Beware of projects built around one person and 

justified on the basis of that individual’s impressive 

record. These projects are highly susceptible to the 

personal whims of the central figure, the time and 

effort he or she can make available, and his or her 

shifting personal priorities which may not necessarily reflect community needs.

• Beware of projects in which the leadership does not 

make itself accountable to the community for the 

use of funds or responsible for the appropriateness 

of project objectives.

• Beware of projects administered by progressive 

intermediary groups accountable to a conservative 

central organization or constituency. The ability of 

intermediaries to act and respond is often severely 

restricted, and project expectations should reflect 

that potential limitation.

• Beware of projects in which the community’s 

stated social philosophy and purpose are apparently in accord with operational principles but for 

which the key administrative personnel have not 

been selected at the time of the grant. One should 

also take into account the possibility that the leadership of a project may change during its formative 

stage, transforming the project’s character and 

scope to such a degree that it may even become 

counterproductive.

• Beware of projects predicated on the expectation that progressive individuals voicing visionary 

socio- economic perspectives can significantly 

influence the policy decisions of a conservative organization. These voices can be isolated, 

removed, ignored, or otherwise silenced. The grant 

thus serves to reinforce the status quo.
Grassroots Development 2014 35 13

on the international development agenda—poverty, 

exploitation, the environment, exclusion based on 

race and ethnicity, and development strategies that 

ignored many destitute and disadvantaged citizens. 

Their organizations’ accomplishments—results that 

top-down development agencies spending tens of 

millions of dollars would be proud to claim, and so 

seldom can—make the case for a responsive, grassroots approach to foreign assistance. While not 

geographically a representative sample of grassroots 

leaders in Latin America (four of the six work in only 

two countries), they do typify the leadership component of the infrastructure for bottom-up development 

that has emerged in the region. That infrastructure 

is made up of thousands of grassroots groups and 

nongovernmental organizations that wrestle with the 

same challenges that international foreign assistance 

has tried to address for more than half a century, 

but they get things done. There is no reason beyond 

bureaucratic and policy inertia not to channel a 

much greater proportion of foreign aid through such 

leaders and their organizations. 

Patrick Breslin retired from the IAF after 22 years of 

service, including as vice-president heading the Office of 

External Affairs. 

The following are examples of this syndrome 

taken from the Foundation’s funding experience. 

Grantees who share its commitment to learning as a 

means of further refining perception and decisionmaking abilities took part in the critical reflection on 

this experience. 

• IAF funded a housing project largely as a result of 

its incorrect perception that community cohesiveness and commitment already existed and would 

be strengthened by shared labor. It also incorrectly perceived that a local priest was an authentic 

spokesman for the needs and values of the community and was accountable to the project’s 

participants. In reality, the priest was autocratic 

and paternalistic and made kewy project decisions 

in isolation. Community cohesion did not exist to 

any significant degree. The shared labor of building 

houses did not contribute to community cohesiveness. On balance, the project served to strengthen 

the priest’s already disproportionate influence 

rather than assist the community in beginning to 

make its own decisions. 

• Another project had a strong central figure with 

an impressive record of accomplishments. One 

element in the IAF’s decision was the existence 

of a coordinating committee to offset potential 

problems of dominance by, or over reliance on, 

the leader. The committee was known to be balanced and willing to speak its mind rather than 

be intimidated. It subsequently challenged what 

it perceived to be the leader’s autocratic decisionmaking and lack of financial accountability. The 

members resigned in protest and were replaced 

by other individuals personally selected by the 

leader, apparently because they could not challenge his decisions. The project, although needed 

and valuable, developed serious administrative 

problems, which made its ultimate effectiveness 

highly questionable.

.... 

It would be misleading to imply that strong 

central leadership always should be regarded as a 

negative sign to be avoided in all cases. Experience 

indicates that community organizations have benefitted from the expertise, influence, energy, and the 

commitment of individual leaders and intermediaries. However, special attention should be focused on 

the leader’s ability and willingness to share decisionmaking rather than allowing the leader to become 

forever indispensable. 
14 Grassroots Development 2014 35

Disabilities and Inclusion in Paraguay

By Eduardo Rodríguez-Frías

I met Julio Fretes, a whip-smart Paraguayan 

lawyer, in 2004 when I represented the IAF at 

the United Nations during the negotiations that 

produced the Convention on the Rights of Persons 

with Disabilities. Fretes was among a dozen activists 

from Latin America whose attendance at those meetings was funded by the IAF. As the largest contingent 

from civil society in the developing world, the latinos brought a needed perspective to advocates from 

industrialized nations and to the diplomats at the 

bargaining table, which was reflected in the finalized 

treaty. Fretes, who had lost his sight as an adult, mentored me while I served as his “lazarillo,” his guide, 

in New York City. The term comes from El Lazarillo 

de Tormes, a 16th-century Spanish novella about an 

apprentice named Lazaro in service to a clever blind 

man. Our duo invited more than a few comparisons. We shared a passion for literature, which Fretes 

continued to enjoy thanks to audiobooks from the 

Argentine publisher Tiflolibros (from the Greek tyflós, 

meaning blind, Fretes said), and he taught me a lot 

about the portrayal of blind characters. 

I learned even more about two all-important 

forces that determine how people with disabilities 

live: the law, obviously, but also numbers. Fretes 

told me, for example, that Paraguay’s civil code at 

that time prohibited a blind citizen from entering 

into a contract. In practical terms, Fretes, a licensed 

Photos courtesy Fundación Saraki
Grassroots Development 2014 35 15

attorney and an expert in his field, could not legally 

arrange to have a working cell-phone. He had 

one, but the law presumed him incompetent and, 

therefore, considered his contract with the serviceprovider invalid. Regarding the numbers, Fretes was 

convinced that for the disabled, they never added up. 

“Ask for accessible public transport and you’ll be told 

that the group is too small to justify investment,” he 

explained. “Ask for disability payments for all qualifying citizens and you’ll be told there are too many 

and the government will go bankrupt.” 

Inadequate services and dilapidated facilities seemed to confirm his observation. Very few 

Paraguayans with any kind of disability attended 

school and, regardless of age, their classes usually 

amounted to little more than daycare. Access to 

public transport and buildings for this demographic 

was purely coincidental. Formal employment opportunities were practically unheard of. Residential 

institutions housed children with adults; individuals 

with intellectual disabilities lived with psychiatric 

patients, preventing rehabilitation and endangering the vulnerable. Restraints, cages and solitary 

confinement were common, along with unsanitary 

conditions. Guardianships were not easily revoked, 

even if they resulted in abuse or were unnecessary. 

In 2008, the Paraguayan government ratified 

the U.N. Convention, signaling its acceptance of the 

obligations under this binding treaty, including the 

enactment of legislation in compliance with its provisions. While such requirements often go ignored 

in ratifying countries, to date the Paraguayan government has appeared to act in good faith. Most 

strikingly, the government has invited civil society 

to take an essential place at the table. Unfortunately, 

Fretes did not live to see this; he died tragically in 

2009. But his insights endure in a disability movement 

that has flourished under the leadership of IAF grantee 

Fundación Saraki (Saraki). Thanks to Saraki, a network 

of Paraguayan grassroots organizations influences official policy with regard to disabled citizens and gives a 

voice to a neglected population that had depended on 

charity undergirded by pity, guilt and prejudice. Saraki 

did not start out with such grand ambitions. As often 

happens with grassroots organizations, its success was 

initially incremental, a reminder of the thirsty crow in 

Aesop’s fable. Unable to reach the water at the bottom 

of a pitcher, the parched bird dropped a pebble into it, 

then another, then more until the water level rose and 

it could drink. 

The first pebbles

María José Cabezudo grew up shielding her older 

brother with Down syndrome from the unkindness of strangers and from the overprotection of her 

own well-meaning parents who, she was convinced, 

underestimated their son. Her commitment to his 

well-being, and her awareness of his abilities, drove 

her to train as a teacher and to take a position in one 

of the few schools in Asunción, public or private, 

available to children with cognitive disabilities. Even 

as a beginner in the classroom, she could see the 

limitations of their curriculum, the best that the educational system had to offer. Troubling too was that 

her students seldom interacted with peers who were 

not disabled: the two groups had different arrival and 

departure times; they were segregated during lunch 

and recess. 

Cabezudo took a modest first step toward enriching the school day by choreographing a cumbia. Her 

students’ rousing rendition of the dance at the final 

assembly of the school year stunned the parents, 

teachers and other kids in the audience. That enthusiastic applause led to regular after-school classes in 

creative movement and theater three days a week. 

Recitals for proud parents escalated into the production of the young artists’ own original play, I’m 

Different Just Like You. Staged in a theater and open to 

the public, it called for them to speak out on life and 

their disabilities. 

When the school closed for lack of funds, the 

students had no place to go. So Cabezudo decided to 

open her own school, one that would emphasize the 

arts to encourage learning, thriving and becoming 

as independent as possible. She called it “Saraki,” 

Guaraní for playful or rambunctious, a reference to 

the exuberance of the classrooms. Because Cabezudo 

did not like to turn a child away, and parents often 

fell behind on tuition, she found herself struggling. Month after month, she would turn to her 

husband, Raul Montiel, and income from his ranch 

would cover the shortfall. By 2003, the couple 

decided to restructure the school as a foundation 

that could raise the funds to keep Saraki in opera-
16 Grassroots Development 2014 35

tion and focused on cognitive disabilities, while 

allowing Cabezudo to take on the greater challenge 

of helping all disabled Paraguayans. Delegating 

his responsibilities for the ranch, Montiel became 

executive director of Fundación Saraki. His appeals 

attracted contributions.

The numbers game

In 2007, Coordinadora Nacional por la Promoción 

de los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad 

(CONAPRODIS), another disability-rights organization, applied for an IAF grant and so did 

Fundación Saraki. I didn’t know Saraki at the time, 

but CONAPRODIS was headed by Fretes. Both 

groups seemed to agree on the problems facing 

Paraguayans with disabilities; each proposed to 

develop a network representing every type of disability and to assure that government services 

reached these citizens. 

Normally, the IAF keeps its distance from applicants, but in this case, the IAF’s representative for 

Paraguay and I suggested that CONAPRODIS and 

Saraki join forces. They agreed and their joint proposal, with Saraki as signatory, was funded in the 

amount of $250,000 to be disbursed over five years. 

When Fretes died, CONAPRODIS became inactive, 

foundering without his charisma and analytical 

skills. Saraki, however, had solidified a coalition of 

dozens of grassroots groups representing the blind, 

the deaf and people with physical, psychological and 

cognitive disabilities. As a coalition, they stepped up 

the pace with a plan to resolve the numbers problem identified by Fretes, whom Cabezudo credits 

with changing the focus of the local discourse from 

rehabilitation to rights. Not only did the numbers 

not add up, but, they had never been accurate in the 

first place. According to the data available at the time, 

only 1 percent of Paraguayans reported living with 

a disability. The World Bank estimates the average 

for countries measuring this demographic at about 

15 percent. In developing nations, the estimate is 

usually higher due to the correlation of poverty with 

disease, malnutrition, work-related injuries, limited 

access to medical care and other factors. 

Aware that a census was scheduled for 2012, 

disability activists from throughout the country approached Paraguay’s Dirección General de 

Estadísticas, Encuestas y Censos (DGEEC), which conducts the survey. At first, the census officials resisted 

but they conceded after Saraki enlisted the media to 

expose flaws in the data. Once they were on board, 

Saraki proposed training census-takers to approach 

a topic that many used to skip, wary of embarrassing the people interviewed. The activists also wanted 

to revise the section in the survey on disability and 

began by negotiating semantics. Many Paraguayans 

didn’t know the meaning of “cognitive disability” 

but readily understood “mongoloid” and “retarded,” 

terminology offensive to activists and family members. The compromise brokered combined practicality 

with sensitivity by using such words but explaining that they were pejorative. In addition to better 

trained census staff and more articulate questions, 

the collaboration between DGEEC and civil society 

yielded an educational campaign organized by Saraki 

to encourage Paraguayans with disabilities to come 

forward and be counted. The 2012 census reported 

that 11.4 percent of the population had a disability 

or more than 700,000 citizens, compared to 55,000 

previously estimated. 

“Everyone has the right to vote...Join in building a Paraguay 

that’s for everyone.”
Grassroots Development 2014 35 17

The Paraguayan government has committed to purchasing only accessible vehicles as replacements for its current bus fleet.

“Nothing about us without us”

Armed with the new census and the U.N. 

Convention, the grassroots groups chose legal reform 

as the next target. To prepare the way, Saraki invested 

significant resources from its IAF award in workshops 

directed at improving the effectiveness of 3,400 representatives of the disabled people’s organizations in 

the network. The cornerstone of the training, full citizenship, implied rejection of the “medical approach” 

that assumes that the disabled have a health problem to be “fixed” before they can be accepted as 

equals. The emphasis on rights, enshrined in the 

U.N. Convention, looks beyond an individual’s physical condition to focus on an inclusive society that 

reasonably accommodates the disabled so they participate in community life and are valued. 

Working with Saraki’s grassroots coalition, the 

Paraguayan Congress enacted statutes that include 

such advances as tax incentives for businesses that 

employ the disabled, hiring quotas for the civil service, accessibility standards for private and public 

sector and a requirement that public schools educate 

children with disabilities. For disability activists, the 

jewel in their legislative victories is the creation of the 

National Disability Secretariat (SENADIS), an executive 

agency that formulates government policy and is overseen by the National Disability Council (CONADIS), 

comprising representatives elected by members of 

disabled people’s organizations. Committees organized 

by SENADIS as working groups to mainstream its 

agenda across the government include seven cabinet 

ministers—notably of labor, transportation, education 

and health—who are charged with assuring that their 

ministries are responsive to Paraguayans with disabilities. In committee meetings, these senior officials have 

an opportunity to interact with disabled constituents 

and they hear how their ministries are performing and 

how they can improve. 

In early 2014, shortly after the enactment of 

Paraguay’s inclusive education law, Cabezudo and 

Montiel travelled to Washington, D.C., with Rocio 

Soledad Florentín Gómez, who heads SENADIS, to 

learn how the U.S. achieved near-universal education for children with disabilities and to avoid the 
18 Grassroots Development 2014 35

mistakes made along the way. Currently, Florentín 

Gómez noted, less than 3 percent of Paraguayan 

children with disabilities are enrolled in school; the 

percentage is even lower for those with cognitive disabilities and for girls. The packed agenda organized 

by the IAF included visits to the U.S. Department of 

Education, two local public schools and the disability organizations TASH, Disability Rights Education 

& Defense Fund and Easter Seals as well as meetings at Department of State and USAID, where the 

Paraguayans explained Saraki’s work. During the 

appointments, Montiel credited USAID’s support 

for the coalition’s efforts to educate the Paraguayan 

Congress on inclusion, which yielded the desired 

reforms at the top, but emphasized that grassroots 

efforts, financed with IAF support, ensure that the 

benefits reach those at the bottom. “Disabled people’s organizations must fill the spaces created by the 

new laws,” Montiel insisted. “People with disabilities 

have a better understanding of the challenges they 

face than able-bodied peers and are indispensable to 

identifying the problems to be resolved, proposing 

solutions and overseeing the government’s compliance with its obligations.” 

Into the mainstream

Saraki never misses an opportunity to insist on 

inclusion. This tenacity made a vivid impression at 

a meeting in 2010 in Paysandú, Uruguay, where representatives of IAF grantees from Uruguay, Paraguay 

and Brazil came together to share accomplishments 

related to agriculture, handicrafts and improving 

municipal services. Rather than report on its considerable achievements in advancing disability rights 

while the others listened politely but passively, 

Saraki’s representatives called for each grantee to 

actively consider how people with disabilities participate in the respective NGO. One, Federación de 

Entidades Vecinalistas del Paraguay (FEDEM), which 

trains neighborhood associations to articulate concerns to local officials, approached Saraki weeks later 

to help encouraging residents with disabilities to join 

up and making training accessible. 

Saraki’s successes earned it a second IAF award 

in 2013 to further develop its disability-rights 

network currently comprising more than 100 grassroots groups. Recent surveys of their constituencies 

revealed their most urgent priorities: affordable 

health care, reliable transportation, and education 

and training that lead to employment. Saraki is 

concentrating on developing marketable skills and 

identifying job opportunities as essential to independence and to showing how disabled Paraguayans 

can contribute to a society that includes them. While 

Saraki and Cabezudo can take well-deserved credit for 

advancing the rights of Paraguayans with all types 

of disabilities, their priority is people with cognitive 

disabilities. This means that in addition to offering 

opportunities to participate in art, music and theater, 

Saraki’s commitment now includes helping them find 

employment. “Work dignifies,” Montiel explained. “If 

Paraguayans understand what these young people are 

capable of at work, opportunities will follow.” 

This could prove Saraki’s biggest challenge. While 

training and placement might be sufficient to set, say, 

a visually-impaired individual on the path to a productive life, a worker with cognitive disabilities might 

require more. With a job comes a paycheck to manage, 

an office culture to navigate and a new position in 

the household. Saraki now has a team of counselors 

to help these new workers adjust so they understand 

goals and choices. Counseling helped a young worker 

with Down syndrome deal with departure after a 

friendly young woman left his department. He understands now that other colleagues who are nice to him 

may be reassigned as well.

I observed Saraki’s focus the last time that I was in 

Asunción. Our meeting with some of the new workers ran late and Cabezudo and I rushed to pick up her 

daughter Azul, 8, from ballet class. “Mommy, you are 

late again,” Azul said, but she understands how important her mother’s work is for Paraguayans like her 

baby brother. Five years ago, Cabezudo brought home 

Juanqui, an orphan with Down syndrome, and with 

their children’s approval, she and Montiel adopted 

him. He will soon be 6 and Cabezudo fears that 

“schools in Paraguay are not ready to receive Juanqui 

or others like him.” With a strong grassroots network 

supporting Saraki, and more activists working toward 

the same goal, Cabezudo might find the right classroom for Juanqui and pick Azul up on time. 

Eduardo Rodríguez-Frías is the IAF’s webmaster.
Grassroots Development 2014 35 19

On the job: Verónica Gaona, working the drive-thru, and Diana Fajardo, secretary, Banco VISION. Below, interviewing in sign 

language at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
20 Grassroots Development 2014 35

A Diplomat for Disability Rights

When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, he 

confirmed his commitment to disability rights, explicit 

in his campaign, by creating several top-level advisory 

positions in key government agencies. Judith Heumann 

was his choice for the Department of State. Uniquely 

qualified, Heumann began her professional career as the 

first person to teach from a wheelchair in the New York 

public school system, which had previously declared her 

a fire hazard—twice, first as a student and then as a 

job applicant. She later served in the U.S. Department of 

Education under President Clinton, at the World Bank 

and as director of Department of Disability Services of 

the District of Columbia. 

How did you become involved in disability rights?

I had polio as a toddler in 1949 and I learned 

early that people’s views of what I could do were very 

limited. The local public school denied me an education because I was in a wheelchair, even though 

I didn’t require special accommodation. Thanks to 

my parents, who organized other families to make 

schools in New York more accessible, I did go to high 

school with able-bodied students. In the 1960s, I 

started to lobby for legislation on accessibility. At university I collaborated with others to get services for 

disabled students. After I graduated, I sued New York’s 

Board of Education, which had denied me a teaching job on the basis of my disability. I helped found 

Disabled in Action, which is still active. At a time 

when most organizations focused on a single disability, it dealt with multiple types. We raised awareness 

of our problems, such as segregation into sheltered 

workshops that paid low wages and had poor conditions. We also focused on education, transportation 

and housing. As a graduate student at the University 

of California at Berkley, I worked to set up the first 

community-based, nonresidential centers for independent living, which are now all over the U.S., Asia 

and Latin America.

What is your approach?

It’s fair to say that I’m an activist. Others can 

support us but disabled people have to be our own 

spokespersons. I have always worked to amplify our 

voices and ensure that we move away from the medical model to a rights-based one. A lot of our work 

over the last decades focused on legislation but also 

on helping people with disabilities and their parents realize that human and civil rights apply to 

disabled individuals. Inspired by the civil rights and 

the women’s movement, we initially wanted to start 

organizations, develop an agenda and convince rightsbased groups to be more inclusive. It took a good 

number of years but I think we’ve been successful. 

What do you do at the Department of State?

My job is to inform the staff here about the 

violation of the rights of people with disabilities, 

to highlight the need to integrate disability into 

diplomacy and foreign policy, and to further understanding of this population. Disabilities aren’t always 

visible. Individuals with mental health issues, HIV, 

diabetes, epilepsy or learning difficulties are disabled 

and they are protected from discrimination under 

U.S. law. I help embassies reach out to them. My 

office also raises these issues with foreign governments and civil society, so they know that disability 

rights are part of the Department’s agenda.

What has your office accomplished? 

We’ve been working across the Department to 

integrate disabilities more effectively. More staff 

is now aware that when children with disabilities are denied an education, the consequence is a 

lack of employment opportunities. We send U.S. 

experts to advise legislative staff in countries that 

are developing statutes based on the Americans 

with Disabilities Act and other U.S. laws. The 

Department recently awarded a grant to Mobility 

International U.S.A. to work in Mexico, Kenya 

and Vietnam, to teach civil society organizations 

about these laws. The Department’s International 

Visitors Program brings more individuals with 

disabilities to the United States to learn about our 

laws and experience accessible transportation and 

hotels. People are learning that inclusion is not 

that difficult. The Department of State’s Office of 

Democracy, Human Rights and Labor now covers 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 21

violations of the rights of the disabled in its reporting. The Department’s report on trafficking in 

persons, which documents the sex trade, now also 

includes the role of disability. These documents 

are available on the websites of each embassy in 

English and the language of the host country. 

What is civil society doing in Latin America?

Latin America is big and diverse. Some countries have been working on these issues longer and 

are more advanced, Brazil, for example, with respect 

to mainstreaming children in school. In Paraguay, 

mainstreaming has not yet come to the forefront. 

Everywhere we see that laws aren’t strong enough 

or aren’t enforced. But where citizens can exercise 

their right to vote, disabled people, their families and 

friends are helping elect officials who support disability rights. Most countries in Latin America have 

ratified the U.N. Convention, which civil society has 

used as an anchor, to push governments to do more. 

Many organizations are learning to write shadow 

reports that support or criticize what governments 

are doing or not doing. 

What about the expense of inclusion? 

Cost is a shortsighted, knee-jerk excuse for not 

doing something. Is it cheaper to construct an accessible building than to retrofit it later? Isn’t accessibility 

important for all society, not just for people with 

physical disabilities? Many people aren’t born with 

disabilities, they acquire them later in life. Do we want 

those people out of the work force? Low-cost adaptation lets them continue to earn income, which they 

spend in the economy, rather than depend on benefits. 

Some people need and should receive benefits but we 

need to change presumption that we should only give 

them enough money to survive on the edge. 

How can U.S. foreign assistance further inclusion?

It is very important to integrate disability into all 

programs that IAF and other donors are funding. I 

believe that if grantees or prospective grantees understand that inclusion is an expectation, they will learn 

how to make their work reach people with disabilities. At the Department of State, we are moving more 

and more toward convincing our grantees that this is 

an important issue.—E.R.-F. 

Judith Heumann, center, Special Advisor for International Disability Rights, U.S. Department of State.

Courtesy Juliana Thomas/Clinton Global Initiative
22 Grassroots Development 2014 35

Audits: Beyond the Bottom Line

By Michael Campbell

S

hould grantee staff welcome a visit from an 

auditor contracted by the Inter-American 

Foundation? That wasn’t Zulima Sánchez’s 

initial impulse. As the accountant for Fundación 

Sumapaz she couldn’t sleep for several days before the 

first audit of the Colombian grantee’s 2010 IAF award. 

Sumapaz, which works with 150 grassroots groups to 

further human rights in Medellín, has received funding from various international donors but the only 

one to require an audit has been the IAF. The auditor, 

Claudia Moreno of Grant Thornton Fast, had notified 

Sumapaz that she would be on site for up to six days 

and Sánchez had been warned by colleagues to expect 

the worst. “We were really scared,” she recalled. “If 

she planned to take that long, she would go through 

everything with a fine-toothed comb.” The exercise 

lasted one very intense week, with 12-hour days fairly 

typical, a schedule that would be followed in subsequent reviews. Sumapaz emerged with a clean audit. 

Additionally, Sánchez commented, “Claudia helped us 

understand that the purpose was to see how we were 

doing, and that calmed our fears.” 

Why audit? 

The funding disbursed by the IAF to any single 

grantee is below the threshold triggering mandatory 

audits per U.S. government regulations. However, the 

IAF has a duty to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars are 

used for the intended purpose and the most reliable 

way to fulfill this obligation is via audits that apply the 

standards of the U.S. government as well as the laws 

and regulations of the country in which the grantee 

The IAF auditor corps. Edith Bermúdez
Grassroots Development 2014 35 23

resides. So the IAF contracts certified public accounting firms in Latin America to review the finances of 

virtually all organizations receiving IAF awards. The 

firms are usually located in the same country as the 

grantees whose accounts they review, but the auditors 

and the grantee staff may live worlds apart. 

“Auditors are trained only to review for-profit 

enterprises, not grassroots and nongovernmental organizations,” explained Carlos Lingán, the 

Peruvian who, with 30 years of service, is the dean of 

the IAF’s auditor corps. “There is a huge difference.” 

Nongovernmental organizations like Sumapaz often 

closely resemble a business, with the same practices 

in place and an accountant on staff. But grassroots 

groups might not even have a bank account. If they 

do, they often cannot use checks because local merchants deal only in cash. In some areas, invoices and 

receipts are unknown. Enrique Imperiali, who has 

audited grantees in Argentina, remembers consulting 

his Peruvian colleague shortly after coming on board. 

‘You are going to see things you have never imagined 

as a professional,” Lingán advised.

 “He was right,” Imperiali commented—

emphatically.

Lingán insists that the auditor is crucial to getting 

a grassroots group off to a good start. “Many groups are 

isolated from urban centers and just haven’t had the 

exposure to concepts of record-keeping to substantiate 

compliance,” Lingán explained. “Our job becomes to 

teach such principles as which documents are required 

as evidence and why.” Once grantee staff learns what is 

expected, he said, they usually do a good job.

 Practically speaking, preparation for the IAF’s 

audit begins in the orientation offered to all new 

grantees, often on site. “This meeting takes place 

before the first disbursement,” said accountant Carlos 

Álvarez Balbás, whose firm audits Mexican grantees. 

“It’s a very special aspect of the IAF’s work. No other 

donor has anything like it.”

The IAF representative attends the orientation 

along with the local auditor and contractors who 

perform liaison services or verify the programmatic 

results of the IAF’s investment. It begins with a discussion of the role of each and a meticulous review, 

section by section, of the obligations detailed in 

the grantee’s agreement with the IAF. The auditor 

explains how to track IAF and counterpart resources, 

the internal controls that must be in place, what 

type of receipts must be produced for the various 

kinds of expenditures. The goal is to demystify the 

process and build rapport. If anyone has concerns, 

adjustments can be made on the spot. “It’s a chance 

to assure that things turn out well,” Alvarez Balbás 

explained. “We let the grantee know that we are not 

the police; our attitude is always preventive. The 

important thing is that we can verify that funds were 

spent according to the grant agreement.” 

The audit 

A year after the orientation, the auditor visits the 

grantee, usually for between three and five days, to 

review the accounts and the policies that assure compliance with the grant agreement and with applicable 

local laws and U.S. government regulations. “We 

don’t show up by surprise,” Álvarez Balbás clarified. 

“We set a mutually agreeable date. When we arrive, 

the grantee gives us the information requested—bills, 

receipts, pay stubs, checks, confirmation from third 

parties as proof of how the IAF funds were used—and 

we begin the document review and our observation. 

“Many awards include funds for equipment, so 

we verify that it is there. Sometimes the grantee is a 

formal organization that gives subgrants, like a little 

IAF. We visit selected subgrantees to confirm that 

they received the money and are using it as agreed 

upon. When grants include resources for microcredit, 

we visit borrowers to confirm that they received the 

money, they agree with what the grantee claims they 

owe and the loan was used as intended. Borrowers 

might get behind because they are at the mercy of 

nature—without sufficient rain, the harvest fails and 

cattle may die. But in eight years of auditing IAFfunded microcredit programs, I have never come 

across anyone who took the loan and ran or who 

used it for other than the purpose agreed upon.” 

All IAF grantees are expected to invest their own 

resources in their IAF-funded projects or mobilize 

funds from other donors, or a combination of both, 

which is reflected in the grant agreement. In fiscal 

2013, grantees committed $16.4 million in cash and 

in kind toward their projects more than matched the 

IAF’s own investment of $12.6 million. “Success is 

supposed to result from the convergence of all these 

resources,” explained Álvarez Balbás, “and a grantee’s 
24 Grassroots Development 2014 35

failure to produce a significant portion of the counterpart pledged could be reflected in our report.” 

Tracking counterpart can prove challenging. A major 

difficulty is determining the value of contributions in 

kind: a loan of space; services offered pro bono; the 

use of tools, looms or a vehicle. Often the historical 

cost of the asset is irrelevant to its value as a donation. 

Volunteer labor might be a little easier to appraise if 

hours worked are recorded and assigned a value consistent with the market rate. What can be proved with 

more certainty is that a contribution materialized. 

“The prima facie evidence is that something got done, 

someone did it,” Álvarez Balbas explained.

Auditors also check the grantee’s systems of 

internal controls—the processes intended to reduce 

the possibility of errors and misuse of funds and 

assure that resources are adequately safeguarded and 

efficiently used, that reliable data are collected and 

reported, and that the grantee complies with laws and 

regulations. Common material weaknesses include the 

assignment of multiple administrative responsibilities 

to a single individual, the absence of a record logging 

vehicle use, and the failure to reconcile monthly bank 

statements with the organization’s books. If internal 

controls are extremely weak, an auditor will be unable 

to express an opinion on the accuracy of the financial 

statements and compliance with the grant agreement. 

Orientation of new grantees helps prevent this. 

Grantee staff receive a draft of the auditor’s 

report and can respond to the findings. “Some people 

think that a successful audit results in multiple qualifications,” Álvarez Balbás said, referring to issues 

identified for correction. I think that if the audit is 

well planned, well understood, it should result in 

no qualifications. We give the grantee an opportunity to explain any, which might make us aware of 

something we didn’t know. There is a space in the 

finalized report where the grantee can comment. 

Then the report is sent to the IAF. In a subsequent 

audit, the first thing we do is verify whether the 

grantee complied with the recommendations to 

resolve any qualification. In some areas of Mexico, 

for example, grassroots groups that operate according 

to usos y costumbres [traditional indigenous practices] 

Víctor Hernández, of Despacho Alvarez Balbás, fourth from the left, conducted audits of former grantee K’inal Antsetik in 

Chiapas, Mexico, whose financial reports and records confirmed the members’ professionalism.

Courtesy Carlos Alvarez Balbás
Grassroots Development 2014 35 25

might not have enrolled employees in the Mexican 

social security system. We would indicate in the subsequent report how that matter was resolved.” 

A balancing act

Auditing firms apply to work with the IAF via an 

open solicitation. The resulting contracts assure that 

the IAF has the services it requires for five years and 

that the successful bidders have a defined income 

stream. Auditors assigned to IAF grantees have undergraduate degrees in accounting and often an M.A. or 

Ph.D. Many have studied economics, finance, marketing, management, statistics and law. Often they 

have acquired extensive experience in development 

via contracts with the Inter-American Development 

Bank, the World Bank, the United Nations and the 

European Union. The senior auditor assigned to IAF 

grantees has had at least two years of experience. All 

firms contracted have employees in their hierarchy 

who review the senior auditor’s work. 

Auditors are required to maintain independence, 

in fact and in appearance, from the entity audited 

and failure to do so can land accounting firms in hot 

water. Maintaining independence can be a tight balancing act. Assistance with a financial report might 

be acceptable as is provision of some training. But 

involvement in the organization’s management or 

decision-making would be out of bounds. The international standard is how an objective third party 

with knowledge of the relevant facts would view 

the relationship. Conforming to this standard can 

result in misunderstandings. An IAF grantee located 

in a remote village once prepared an elaborate meal 

for the auditor, who rejected the food. This led to 

the impression that the auditor had interpreted the 

offering as a bribe when he was really just following 

his firm’s prohibition on accepting gifts in any form 

while conducting an audit. 

“The auditor must not compromise,” Imperiali 

advised. “But independence does not mean distance. 

The auditor must understand and be sensitive to the 

context.” Lingán became acutely aware of context 

when his first audit for the IAF took him to a group 

of alpaca herders in a remote area of southern Peru. “I 

was with a big-time auditing firm and I did the best 

that I could, but everything I knew seemed useless,” 

he recalled. “I had many questions and I felt I had to 

avoid offending the grantee.” Lingán finally consulted an anthropologist, a friend from his university 

days. “He taught me the nuances that I would need to 

master and that aren’t in any book.”

When problems arise

During the audit, the grantee organization must be 

prepared to address what an auditor might deem 

questionable expenditures and practices. Some differences can be resolved while the auditor is on site, or 

shortly thereafter, and those are not reported to the 

IAF. “Usually the problems are due to errors, not to 

bad faith,” explained Lilia Téllez Magaña, who works 

with Álvarez Balbás’ firm. 

Sensitivity is definitely called for at this stage. “It’s 

normal when we audit a business and have a question, 

to tell the accountant what we need and the accountant 

knows exactly where the information is kept,” Lingán 

said. “We can’t be as direct with a grassroots group that 

doesn’t have a background in accounting. We have to 

be careful not to sound accusatory or make the problem 

appear worse than it is. Grassroots groups sometimes 

keep records differently, in a way that might seems like 

‘orderly disorder,’ but more often than not they have 

the information we need filed away in a corner.”

Unreconciled discrepancies must be noted in 

the auditor’s report and can lead to a qualification 

of the opinion on the organization’s substantial 

compliance with the grant agreement. The IAF follows up on issues identified, material or not. “For 

other donors a problem identified during an audit 

will probably lead to termination of the grant,” 

said Jenny Petrow, whose portfolio includes Haiti, 

Dominican Republic and the English-speaking 

Caribbean. “At the IAF, a problem could represent 

an interim step at which point we work with the 

grantee to remedy the weakness identified.” The 

representative or the IAF’s local liaison might, for 

example, visit the grantee to help reconcile accounts 

or prepare financial statements. If, say, $5,000 in 

funds has not been used per the agreement, the representative could direct the grantee to reimburse the 

bank account and submit proof of the deposit. 

Among examples of major noncompliance are 

inadequate accounting records and the unauthorized use of funds, which can include overspending on 

line items or working outside the geographic area or 
demographic group identified in the grant agreement. 

Malfeasance is rare—Álvarez Balbás reported a single 

case of what he termed “bad intentions” in the eight 

years his firm has audited the IAF’s substantial Mexico 

portfolio. A finding of malfeasance will trigger a freeze 

on the grantee’s ability to spend grant funds as well 

as an investigation. The IAF’s oversight committee 

decides whether termination is merited. The organization terminated may have to return unspent funds 

and surrender assets purchased with IAF resources—

vehicles, computers, other office equipment. Refusal 

to reimburse the IAF is extremely rare and is referred 

to the Office of Inspector General of the United States 

Agency for International Development, as is evidence 

of fraud or gross negligence, also highly unusual. 

The exceptionally low rate of noncompliance 

with grant agreements validates the IAF’s selection 

and monitoring processes. Only 2 percent of audited 

IAF grantees have been the subject of first and 

second reports identifying significant issues. Often 

related to internal controls, these issues are usually resolved by the third audit. The result is often a 

better-managed organization. 

Value added

A clean audit confirms to the IAF representatives 

that the group is living up to expectations. For the 

grantee, interaction with the auditor has become 

a value added to the IAF grant that often yields 

returns beyond accountability for the use of IAF 

funds—returns that flow long after the final disbursement. “We have seen the audit exercise develop the 

administrative skills that permit a grassroots group 

to manage its own resources later or resources from 

another donor or resources of a larger organization,” 

said Álvarez Balbás. “Individuals develop as well. I 

have witnessed this in the people responsible for the 

accounts. They may start with no experience, but 

with the explanations offered during the orientation 

and their own efforts, within a month they can use 

the computer to turn out a financial report.” 

“The audit is indispensable, although it can be 

very difficult for grassroots groups to understand 

at first,” commented Laura Saravide, the director of 

former IAF grantee Fundación Malinalco in Mexico 

City.” Saravide’s community foundation used its 

IAF award to fund grassroots subgrantees and she 

confirmed the transformation that Álvarez Balbás 

described. “Members learned to put things in order, to 

provide receipts, to reconcile accounts,” she continued. 

“The audit forced them to professionalize their work, 

to go from paper to computerized records. I saw them 

work late to produce impeccable documentation. We 

never approached the audit with fear. Instead we con26 Grassroots Development 2014 35

Carlos Lingán in 1987 with grassroots grantees audited at 5,000 meters above sea level in the Peruvian Andes. (Lingán, center, 

left photo; seated in white shirt and cap, right photo.)

Courtesy Carlos Lingán 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 27

sidered the audit a chance to pause and see where we 

were and we thought it was great that outsiders would 

look at what we had accomplished.”

For some organizations, the IAF award represents the largest infusion of resources ever received, 

which could be a destabilizing factor. The audit 

provides assurance that the funds are properly managed. According to Porfirio Ortiz, vice president of 

Las Marías 93, a coffee cooperative in Chinameca, 

San Miguel, El Salvador, five clean audits confirmed 

to the co-op’s 63 members that the award was well 

spent. Will Aguilar, director of Grupo Juvenil Dion 

(GJD), which offers vocational education to young 

Hondurans, said the annual audit not only communicates the transparency of GJD operations to members 

but to the community served and foreign donors.

Lessons from the grassroots

When Carlos Lingán cites the IAF’s emphasis on 

learning as a goal of its support, he clairifies that 

the lessons flow in two directions. “Sometimes the 

formulas we were taught in university just don’t 

work and we learn best in the field,” he said. Insights 

gleaned can refine an auditor’s perspective on his or 

her work. “It has made me aware that I have to apply 

the norms of the profession but must also understand 

the context,” Imperiali reiterated to preface a story 

he considers illustrative. The professional service 

rendered was the final audit of a project undertaken 

by WARMI, a grassroots organization of indigenous 

Argentine women. (See page 2.) The context was a 

community 3,000 meters above sea level, two hours 

from Abrapampa, the nearest town, and more than 

1,500 kilometers from Buenos Aires. 

“By evening of the second day, most of the information had been produced but I still had questions 

about missing documentation,” Imperiali recalled. 

“Specifically, the financial records, really a notebook 

with all of the transactions, included a reference 

to wool that the organization collected from various herders and organized for a better marketing 

position. I asked Rosario Quispe about the lack of 

supporting invoices from the herders dating from the 

delivery of the wool. 

“She must have wondered who this nitwit from 

Buenos Aires was. Gesturing to a mountain soaring 

some 3,500 meters, she explained very patiently but 

firmly, ‘One of the herders lives up there. He comes 

here on foot once a month, weather permitting. The 

walk takes him a full day. If you think we should, the 

next time he comes we will ask him to issue invoices.’ 

I understood immediately that my requirement was 

unnecessary, that I could do my work perfectly well 

using the records available. I also understood the 

extraordinary effort required of WARMI to see the 

project through.” 

Carlos Lingán insists he did not really get to know 

Peru until he traveled to the far-flung locations where 

IAF grantees work. “Going into the field, you really experience how people live, their folk ways, their wisdom that 

dates back centuries, their natural medicines, how they 

tend their crops and animals,” he said. “Those are some 

of the things I have learned about. You get to know your 

country and love it more, appreciate it more.”

 “We meet people who are very committed to this 

country, whom we would not otherwise get to know,” 

said Álvarez Balbás. “I have learned about their ability to organize, their solidarity, their honesty. Their 

organizations develop because their projects are 

not imposed but are rooted in an idea generated by 

the communities themselves. As a firm we do very 

impersonal work so it’s gratifying to see a direct relationship between our audits and the development 

of our country.” Accountant Victor Hernández, who 

works with Álvarez Balbás, summarized the experience: “It’s feedback that feeds us.”

Next steps

Beginning in fiscal 2014, all grantees will be 

audited after their first year of IAF funding and 

the frequency of subsequent audits will depend on 

those results and on recommendations of the IAF 

representative, the amount of the award and other 

criteria. The IAF’s auditors will continue to provide 

grantees cost-effective oversight and access to expert 

advice for the duration of their funding. The IAF’s 

audit program works because auditors successfully 

balance independence with the guidance that helps 

grantees master important skills as they comply 

with the grant agreement. 

Michael Campbell has coordinated audits for IAF’s Office 

of Evaluation since 2006.
28 Grassroots Development 2014 35

Grassroots Accountability in Colca

Desco’s auditors with entrepreneur Rogelio Taco Visa, center. Opposite page, Eric Hirsch. 

The audit is a ubiquitous exercise in Peru’s Colca 

Valley, conducted across a range of grassroots initiatives. Reviewing the books is the point of departure 

for monitoring how interventions are working, sometimes offering teachable moments as individuals and 

organizations account for donor funds. As an IAF 

Fellow, I observed audits on site visits to the Southern 

Sierra Project, undertaken by the Peruvian Ministry 

of Agriculture; during the donor’s inspection of a 

children’s shelter and kindergarten; and with Centro 

de Estudios y Promoción del Desarrollo (Desco), my 

affiliate during my IAF-sponsored research. (For the 

record, none of the organizations I visited had ever 

received IAF funding.) Colca’s economy owes much 

of its current bustle to the presence of Desco, which 

was among the first grassroots groups in the region 

to organize 30 years ago, when communities were far 

more isolated by the treacherous highlands separating them from Arequipa, one of southern Peru’s 

economic hubs. Today Desco sets Colca’s development agenda, a potent force in a vibrant tangle of 

donor investment, microcredit institutions and 

heightened appreciation for the natural and cultural 

resources at hand as vital assets.

Desco staff expends significant time and energy 

on auditing and being audited, an activity that 

anchors everyday operations. For several months, I 

worked on Desco’s initiative to extend seed capital 

to 20 young indigenous entrepreneurs and technical assistance to 30 others, all selected via a contest 

for the most promising business plans. The awards 

channeled through Desco were funded by a Peruvian 

government agency focused on job creation. In anticipation of the audits that would track the donor’s 

investment, Desco staff gave each participant a notebook for recording expenses, earnings and profits. 

This notebook, around which Desco’s staff organized 

visits, is the same tool that the government donor 

uses to audit Desco itself. Many of the participating 

entrepreneurs, especially those whose businesses were 

somewhat established by the time they began receiving Desco’s support, already had a system in place 

Courtesy Eric Hirsch
Grassroots Development 2014 35 29

for tracking their cash flow. But the new notebooks 

created uniformity, said Fabiola Dapino, Desco’s management expert, and realigned the diverse practices to 

comply with the government donor’s strict requirements. They also served to combine training in the 

relationship between investment and profit with a 

legible record of progress or needs. 

For some participants, filling out the notebook 

was not intuitive; for others, the audit became a tool 

for putting both business plan and attitude on track. 

Rogelio Taco Visa, who raises cuy, the guinea pigs that 

are a staple of the Andean diet, was labeled the least 

promising of the young entrepreneurs, an assessment he admits that he himself shared. It was Desco’s 

relentless insistence on reviewing his notebook, in 

anticipation of the March visit from the government 

donor’s auditor, that made Taco Visa take his business 

seriously. He began to take the notebook seriously, 

too, as the columns for income and salary filled with 

increasingly larger numbers. Overcoming his late 

start, he built a massive pen and developed into one 

of Colca’s most productive cui farmers. When the 

auditor arrived, Taco Visa thanked him and Desco 

and, as Fabiola Dapino broke open a bottle of rum 

hanging from the lintel of the brand new barn, 

declared his new enterprise open for business.

Another enterprise, originally planned as an 

outlet for dairy products, appeared to be fizzling in 

early 2014. Its proprietors, two brothers, had used a 

loan and some of Desco’s seed capital intended for 

the dairy business to launch an Internet café that 

rapidly cornered the market in their village. Local 

officials relied on the café to communicate via email, 

children flocked to its videogames and services soon 

expanded to include the installation of cable satellites and telephone as well as Internet connections 

in homes throughout the community. The brothers 

still worked on the dairy business, but the café and 

its ancillary services consumed most of their energy 

as they struggled to keep up with the brisk demand. 

Their success was impressive and Desco was supportive but also made clear that the dairy enterprise, not 

the café, would be the subject of the government 

donor’s audit. This raised some interesting questions: 

Should the audit be about technical conformity with 

the approved business plan that was not yielding 

a return on the government’s investment or about 

the brothers’ resourcefulness in coming up with a 

new idea that was? Could an audit weigh the specific terms and conditions of the award against the 

Peruvian government’s general goal of job creation? 

Desco preferred to stay focused on the target of economic development, but reprogramming the donor’s 

funds had never been an option. When the government auditor appeared, he expressed admiration for the 

electronics business and appreciation for the complexities that arise when innovative entrepreneurs plug into 

ideas. Because of time constraints, he postponed auditing the dairy enterprise, which gave the brothers time 

to try to make it a going concern. The auditor, Desco’s 

staff and the brothers agreed: the use of the donor’s 

funds had to be rigorously documented but a purpose 

of the audit was to learn what works in grassroots development, what doesn’t and why.

Many in government and in nongovernmental organizations lament what Marilyn Strathern 

describes in Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies 

in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy (London: 

2000). An “audit culture,” Strathern explains, 

requires an institution to gear all of its energy toward 

the ritual rather than allow the use of the audit as 

a simple tool for aiding transparency and reflection 

and for ensuring that an institution’s accounts are 

settled. Like anything else cultural, audits are processes whose complexity depends on context. In 

Colca, people involved in all phases of grassroots 

development have come to see the audit strike a balance between intervention on a donor’s terms and 

allowing communities to thrive on their own.—Eric 

Hirsch, Ph.D. candidate in anthropology, University of 

Chicago; IAF Grassroots Development Fellow, 2013-2014
30 Grassroots Development 2014 35

How Laws Constrain Freedom of 

Association in the Americas

By Jocelyn Nieva

Everyone has the right to associate freely for ideological, religious, political, 

economic, labor, social, cultural, sports, or other purposes.

The American Convention on Human Rights, Article 16

Across the Americas, people come together in civil 

society organizations (CSOs) to address problems of 

all kinds—working to meet basic needs like clean 

water or healthcare, demanding respect for human 

rights, advocating for transparency in government, 

among others. Article 16 of the American Convention 

on Human Rights, cited above, recognizes the freedom to associate in these ways, “subject only to such 

restrictions established by law as may be necessary 

in a democratic society, in the interest of national 

security, public safety or public order, or to protect 

public health or morals or the rights and freedoms of 

others.” Article 22 of the International Covenant on 

Civil and Political Rights contains a virtually identical provision, as do other multilateral agreements. 

Some people choose to collaborate informally, 

for example, in a neighborhood association. Others 

seek formal recognition, which typically requires 

initial disclosure of extensive information about 

the organization along with regular reporting, but 

offers advantages such as tax-exempt status and 

access to government funding. The Convention 

and the Covenant, which have been ratified by the 

vast majority of nations in the Americas, require 

governments to enact legislation that facilitates the 

formation and operation of CSOs. As these treaties have been interpreted by the United Nations 

Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur for 

Freedoms of Peaceful Assembly and Association and 

the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 

such laws must ensure, for example, that CSOs can 

be recognized quickly and inexpensively, function 

with minimal intrusion from government officials 

and raise funds from any legal source. Unfortunately, 

in Latin American countries with governments of all 

ideological orientations, these statutes may be hard 

to locate, ambiguously written and enforced through 

arbitrary or discriminatory practices. 

Since 2007, I have worked with the International 

Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), which collaborates with partners in more than 100 countries to 

protect free association, encourage civic participation and facilitate philanthropy. ICNL is a leading 

authority on international law and practice regulating non-profits, and www.icnl.org is a comprehensive 

source for statutes, analysis and reference materials, 

including, for example, Guidelines for Laws Affecting 

Civic Organizations.1 As the ICNL’s senior legal advisor for Latin America, I know from experience that, 

with regard to freedom of association, governments 

throughout Latin America often fail to meet their 

obligations under the Convention and the Covenant. 

I frequently hear stories of how this inhibits the work 

of civil society:

• A Nicaraguan colleague noted that women’s selfhelp groups that she supports struggle to keep up 

with legal requirements that change frequently 

because, after nearly 20 years on the books, the law 

on CSOs has no accompanying body of regulations 

and each new director of the agency providing oversight interprets the law differently. Afraid of fines for 

unintentional noncompliance, some groups reduce 

their activities to stay under the radar. 

• An HIV/AIDS activist claimed that Honduran officials occupied his organization’s office for months 

while they conducted an open-ended audit that 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 31

drained staff time and resources, reducing the 

organization’s ability to serve a vulnerable population. He believes that his CSO was targeted for this 

unusual investigation because of the stigma associated with its mission. 

• Leaders of Mexican community foundations are 

frustrated that, because their organizations receive 

tax-deductible contributions, they are prohibited 

from making grants to informally constituted 

grassroots groups. To preserve their own favorable 

tax treatment Mexican community foundations 

can only donate in kind to such groups, which 

deprives them of the experience in management 

that grants of cash would bring. 

• An Ecuadorian lawyer whose organization is 

dedicated to freedom of the press told me that the 

government relied on a new law to reassign oversight of his organization to a ministry that has 

repeatedly condemned it in the media. The law 

requires all existing civil society organizations to 

re-register, forcing his organization to request legal 

recognition from the same ministry that routinely 

denounces it as illegitimate. Under this new law, an 

environmental organization was forced to disband, 

and the activist fears that the ministry will soon 

dissolve his organization as well. 

These are not isolated incidents; they reflect 

trends in legislation and enforcement that broadly 

and negatively impact all classes of CSOs. In an unfavorable or hostile legal environment, CSOs struggle 

to form, operate and deliver services to the public. 

A recent study of the legal environment in Panama 

revealed an extreme example of vaguely written 

laws inconsistently applied.2 According to the study, 

Panamanians who want to work together as a formally recognized group would need to sort through 

as many as 15 different laws, regulations and executive orders just to learn the rules for becoming legally 

constituted and maintaining that status. Even if the 

group wanted to try to navigate such a complicated 

web of laws on its own, the authorities will only consider and respond to applications submitted by an 

attorney to the designated office in the capital city. 

The expenses of legal advice and travel are just the 

beginning of a process that can take a year or longer. 

An official interviewed for the study estimated that 

he rejects 99 percent of all applications as technically 

insufficient upon their initial submission. To progress 

any further toward approval, those applications must 

then be corrected and refiled. While the group is in 

legal limbo, it may be unable to enter into contracts, 

receive grants or even open a bank account, jeopardizing the public interest.

Until recently, Bolivia presented a different challenge. Constitutional reform eliminated the law that 

regulated CSOs operating in more than one geographic department, and the legislature took close to 

three years to enact a replacement. In the interim, 

applications for legal recognition of new organizations were paralyzed, preventing Bolivians from 

formally coming together to address shared problems. 

In 2012, representatives of Panamanian and Bolivian 

CSOs together with counterparts from Ecuador, Peru 

and Nicaragua brought these and other legal barriers 

to free association to the attention of the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) 

in the first regional hearing on the subject. The 

Rapporteurship for Human Rights Defenders, a body 

within the IACHR appointed to further the rights of 

civil society, acknowledged the importance of the testimony at this regional hearing, and it continues to 

focus on threats to freedom of association.

 Consolidating the requirements for formal recognition and for the operational cycle of a CSO into a 

single enabling law could help resolve some of these 

problems, but recent trends grant government officials 

tremendous leeway to interpret the rules. Bolivia’s 

Law and Regulations on Awarding Legal Personalities, 

passed in 2013, for example, subject new organizations 

to ambiguously drafted and costly procedures for registering and require the submission of an exceptionally 

long list of documents. The new law applies equally 

to organizations that became legally constituted before 

its enactment; they must re-register in compliance 

with the same new requirements, even though their 

documentation may be old, missing or inconsistent 

with the new standards. An organization that fails to 

comply with any provision of the new law, no matter 

how minor, can be shut down. 

Ecuador’s Presidential Decree No. 16, also issued 

in 2013, echoes many of the provisions in the Bolivian 

laws, including the requirement to re-register and the 

exceedingly broad grounds for denying an applica-
32 Grassroots Development 2014 35

tion or withdrawing an organization’s status as legally 

constituted. Decree No. 16 includes unusual restrictions, as well, for example, the requirement to accept as 

members any person or persons claiming a “legitimate 

interest” in the work of the organization. So if officials 

of a mining company asserted a “legitimate interest,” 

an organization whose purpose is to protect the environment around the mines would have no choice but 

to admit them as members. Concern with the implications of Decree No. 16 is not hypothetical: On Dec. 4, 

2013, the Pachamama Foundation, an organization that 

had been effective in furthering environmental protection in indigenous territories, was summarily dissolved 

for alleged violations of Decree No. 16. The official 

justification appropriated the language of the American 

Convention to accuse the organization of “interference 

in public policies that undermines internal or external 

State security [and] that might affect public peace.”

Laws like those just described that determine the 

rules under which CSOs form and operate, as well as 

other specialized statutes, including applicable provisions of the tax code, can have a significant impact on 

financial survival. Access to international donors in 

particular is threatened by ambiguous laws that may 

impose a government filter on essential funding. This 

type of constraint represents another trend. Legislation 

has been proposed in Haiti that could, for example, 

prevent informally constituted grassroots groups from 

receiving foreign assistance and preclude legally registered CSOs from receiving foreign funds for activities 

that do not match the thematic and geographic priorities of the government’s development plan. Certainly 

governments have a responsibility to oversee and direct 

development carried out with state participation, but 

government officials cannot know every need in every 

corner of the country. Under such a law, worthy ideas 

for resolving desperate needs with self-help and creativity could be starved of international support. Such 

sweeping restrictions are difficult to reconcile with 

international standards for free association.3

Venezuela’s Law on Political Sovereignty and 

National Self-determination (“Political Sovereignty 

Law”) of December 2010 takes a different approach 

to regulating international cooperation. That law 

imposes restrictions on foreign funding to “organizations whose purpose is to promote, divulge, inform or 

defend citizens’ full exercise of their political rights” 

(emphasis added)—without ever defining “political 

rights.” Because the Political Sovereignty Law has not 

yet been enforced, it is not clear how its terms will be 

interpreted. Venezuela’s official denunciation of the 

Convention in 2013, suggests, however, that the government may not enforce the Political Sovereignty 

Law in a manner consistent with inter-American 

standards on the right to free association. 

The Political Sovereignty Law and similar legislation proposed or enacted in countries throughout 

the region have had a chilling effect on organizations 

devoted to legitimate activities such as observing 

elections, monitoring corruption and furthering 

human rights, as well as on foreign donors, many 

of whom have chosen to lower their profiles, often 

by redirecting efforts and funding or pulling out of 

a country altogether, to the detriment of the public 

interest. Minister Søren Pind, who heads the Danish 

International Cooperation, commented on his government’s decision to withhold $18 million in aid 

that had been committed to Nicaraguan civil society 

rather than accept conditions on that aid: “This is the 

decision the Nicaraguan government has made,” he 

said, according to an article published in La Prensa of 

Feb. 18, 2011. “It will damage other partners, something that truly aggrieves me. For Denmark, it is 

indispensable that we are able to support civil society. 

But this is no longer possible.”4

In most countries in Latin America, CSOs that 

serve the public good are tax-exempt and donors can 

deduct contributions to them from taxable income. 

(For information on the tax laws for CSOs and donors 

in many Latin American countries, see http://www.

cof.org/global-grantmaking/country-notes.) Tax laws 

are frequently just as difficult to decipher as the laws 

described above and impose such stringent requirements that the organizations intended to benefit 

from them may be unable to take advantage of the 

preferential treatment. Mexican CSOs, for example, 

can lose their eligibility to receive tax-deductible 

donations if they spend more than 5 percent of their 

donations on administrative expenses, which may 

include personnel, rent, utilities and other routine 

costs that are vital to their operations. As a practical 

matter, CSOs may limit their investment in institutional development in order to comply with the 

extraordinarily low ceiling of 5 percent. Particularly 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 33

at a time of declining international funding for the 

sector, reduced incentives for charitable giving, and 

restrictions on the organizations that benefit from 

tax relief, erode sustainability. 

In light of these challenges, what can be done to 

encourage reforms so that the legal environment better 

enables CSOs to contribute to their communities? Here 

are a few approaches that have proved helpful:

• Enactment of laws consistent with international standards on freedom of association. In this connection, 

President Dilma Rousseff has championed legal 

reform in Brazil through a national dialogue involving representatives of government, civil society, 

business, academia and other interested sectors. This 

inclusive approach could be a model for the region. 

• Proper enforcement of enabling legislation. Three 

years after the Honduran Congress enacted the 

Special Promotion Law for Nongovernmental 

Development Organizations, its provisions have not 

been enforced. Honduran CSOs are still subject to 

outdated, arbitrary requirements that increase the 

cost of filing applications and reports and prolong 

delays. An umbrella organization, the Federation 

of Development Organizations of Honduras 

(FOPRIDEH), is working to ensure that the sector 

will soon benefit by teaching staff from CSOs about 

their organizations’ rights and obligations under the 

new law and helping train government officials in 

effective practices from other countries so that they 

might improve oversight of the sector. 

• Access to professional advice from lawyers and accountants sufficiently trained to help CSOs comply with 

their legal obligations. Across the Americas, law 

schools are beginning to offer training in CSO 

law. At the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico 

City, students supervised by licensed attorneys 

master the complex tax laws governing CSOs and 

then prepare tax filings for CSOs at no cost. The 

students graduate with a greater understanding 

of their clients’ work as well as the skills to provide specialized legal services to other tax-exempt 

organizations. This model as well as several other 

approaches are detailed in ICNL’s 2013 publication Promoviendo la Enseñanza del Derecho de las 

Organizaciones de Sociedad Civil en América Latina: 

Aportes de Expertos Regionales.5

• Greater understanding of the rights and protections applicable to CSOs and the development of effective advocacy.

Constitutions throughout Latin America recognize 

freedom of association as a fundamental right, but 

government officials in many countries condemn 

CSOs as illegitimate—particularly when they advocate for public policies different from those of the 

administration in office. CSOs must acquire the skills 

necessary to defend the sector. The ability to explain 

its rights and contributions, and provide accurate 

data on restrictions on the right to free association will enable CSOs to enlist the private sector, 

churches, academics and other groups as allies. 

International donors—particularly those that 

fund grassroots organizations, like the Inter-American 

Foundation—should be aware that the impact of 

laws inhibiting civil society is far-reaching. Laws can 

silence independent voices, cloud the vision of those 

monitoring government programs and otherwise 

interfere with the ability of ordinary people to organize to improve their communities. Clear laws that 

conform to international standards on the right to 

free association and are applied consistently and fairly 

would benefit all civil society organizations, their supporters and, especially, those whom they serve.

Before joining ICNL, Jocelyn Nieva served as the IAF’s assistant general counsel from 2003 to early 2007. She can 

be reached at jnieva@icnl.org. 

1 www.icnl.org/research/resources/assessment 

guidelines_en.pdf.

2 www.icnl.org/programs/lac/Entorno%20Legal%20

Panama%20ACPJ.pdf.

3 For standards on the right to receive funding from international donors, see the Inter-American Commission on Human 

Rights’ Second Report on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders 

in the Americas, paragraph 183, (2011) at www.oas.org/en/iachr/

defenders/docs/pdf/defenders2011.pdf, and the report published April 24, 2013, by the United Nations Special Rapporteur 

for Freedoms of Peaceful Assembly and Association, www.

ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/

Session23/A.HRC.23.39_EN.pdf. 

4 http://m.laprensa.com.ni/politica/52506).

5 www.icnl.org/programs/lac/derecho/teaching-cso-law.html.
At the IAF Fellows’ Forum

34 Grassroots Development 2014 35

Forum for Fellows’ Findings:

Women and the Globalized Economy

The IAF complements its grants furthering bottom-up, self-help 

development with a Fellowship Program funding academic research into the context and trends that affect the efforts of the 

organized poor and the groups that support them in Latin America and 

the Caribbean. This commitment to scholarship at the grassroots dates 

almost as far back as launch of the IAF’s grant program in the early 

1970s. To date, IAF Fellowships have reached 1,134 Ph.D. and master’s 

candidates as well as social entrepreneurs pursing independent study. 

Since 2007, the IAF has offered support for doctoral dissertation research by students from throughout the hemisphere who are enrolled 

in universities in the United States. 

For the past four years, the IAF has issued an annual invitation to all 

alumni of recent Fellowship cycles to submit manuscripts for publication pending a rigorous review by an anonymous subcommittee of the 

scholars who scrutinize application for the IAF’s Grassroots Development Fellowships. This year’s jury selected two manuscripts for publication in this issue. Coincidentally, the successful writers, Jelena Radovic 

Fanta and Rebecca Nelson, both wrote on women at the grassroots who 

work in the vast and complex globalized economy and must reconcile 

the benefits and burdens of their involvement. 

We remain excited about this feature of our publications. Most obviously, it brings some of the benefit of the Fellowship Program to a 

broader audience and it represents another credential for the authors 

whose work appears here. But the competition has value even for those 

whose manuscripts were not selected because of the thoughtful feedback that the reviewers communicate, through the IAF, to each contestant. Grassroots Development thanks everyone who contributed to the 

success of this competition. For more information on the IAF’s Fellowships, visit www.iie.org/iaf.— P.D.
Grassroots Development 2014 35 35

Volunteer Tourism and Mayan Weavers:

Friendship, Friction and Fair Trade 

By Rebecca Nelson

Tourism ranks just behind coffee as Guatemala’s leading industry. In 2012, nearly 2 million international 

visitors entered the country and spent $1.42 billion 

(Castañeda 2013). Increasingly, Western travelers 

want a closer connection to community life, which 

has prompted some to volunteer in Guatemalan 

clinics or cooperatives. To date, the literature on 

volunteer tourism, or “voluntourism,” has focused 

on the volunteers’ motivations and how the experience affects them (e.g., Wearing 2001; Simpson 2004; 

Palacios 2010; Baillie Smith and Laurie 2011). This 

scholarly attention—which mirrors voluntourism’s 

emphasis on the visitors’ expectations and professional goals (McGehee et al. 2009)—tends to obscure 

how host communities understand their involvement. Wearing and Neil (2003:291) suggest that 

Dianne Lake
At the IAF Fellows’ Forum

36 Grassroots Development 2014 35

research on voluntourism should explore the “microsocial dynamic exchanges” among the tourists, their 

host organizations and the surrounding community. 

My work in Guatemala concentrated on such 

exchanges between members of a federation of weaving cooperatives and voluntourists as they negotiated 

the commodification of “Mayan culture” for the 

purpose of generating income for Mayan households. 

I argue that competition in the limited market catering to “ethical” consumers has led the voluntourists 

and the management of TelaMaya (a pseudonym) 

to push weavers to share intimate aspects of their 

lives and cultural heritage by submitting to intrusive visits, photography and interviews. TelaMaya 

comprises 17 cooperatives whose membership totals 

400 weavers from five states in Guatemala’s Western 

Highlands: Sololá, Huehuetenango, Sacatepéquez, 

Quetzaltenango and Quiché. The Western Highlands, 

where up to 81 percent of the population falls below 

the general poverty line (INE 2011), has the lowest 

levels of education and literacy, wealth, housing, 

access to services, job satisfaction and health in the 

country (INE 2011). In this context, weaving presents a rare opportunity for women who otherwise 

work uncompensated in family gardens and milpas, 

or corn plots. Scholars consider weaving one of the 

most important “material bases of [indigenous] 

ethnic identity” in Guatemala (Smith 1988:230). 

Guatemalan textiles operate as symbolic “text,” communicating, in addition to ethnicity, the wearer’s 

geographic origin, gender, marital status, age and 

socioeconomic level (Schevil et al. 1991). Working 

with TelaMaya, women earn income for their families 

while affirming their indigenous identity. 

TelaMaya helps the weavers market their textiles 

by operating a shop in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s 

second largest city, as well as exporting to retailers in 

the United States and Europe. Like many handicrafts 

enterprises, TelaMaya is not certified by an international fair-trade organization, but it participates in 

fair-trade markets catering to consumers willing to 

pay more for a product in exchange for some assurance that workers are compensated decently and 

treated well. Sales of textiles net TelaMaya some 

US$31,250 in annual income. The amount an individual weaver receives depends on the success of her 

products. Whether her share turns out to be as little 

as US$6 or as much as US$600, it represents a welcome infusion of cash that might pay for children’s 

shoes or a small luxury, such as instant coffee. 

Founded in 1988 with aid from the Dutch government, TelaMaya became self-governing and financially 

independent in 1995. Today an elected board of 

Mayan directors manages daily operations. Five indigenous languages are represented in TelaMaya and many 

weavers do not speak Spanish. While the federation 

is nominally democratic, communication is relayed 

through Spanish-speakers from the various language 

groups, which might inhibit the weavers’ expression 

of concerns to the leadership and restrict their input 

into policy. In spite of this and other problems limiting feedback on practices that might cause discomfort, 

TelaMaya is the preferred outlet for most weavers in 

the member cooperatives, who also sell textiles to 

intermediaries in greater volume but at lower prices. 

Given their precarious finances and dependency 

on TelaMaya, weavers invest some of their time 

attending to voluntourists in hope of improving 

the federation’s competitive edge. TelaMaya attracts 

approximately 50 international voluntourists a year, 

typically female university students from North 

America and Europe, who want to connect with 

people from another culture and gain professional 

experience in international development. Volunteers 

commonly spend one month at TelaMaya. Its officers, elected by the board of directors, want to host 

as many volunteers as possible and will ask those 

who are bilingual to interpret for those who do not 

speak Spanish. Voluntourists, who often come from 

the same communities as TelaMaya’s clients, bring 

linguistic and cultural knowledge that is unavailable locally, and they donate technical skills that 

the federation could not otherwise afford. They 

fill important roles, managing TelaMaya’s website, 

email and online sales; working with international 

wholesale clients; setting long-term goals for the 

organization; and determining how to represent it in 

advertising materials. Under the leadership of a designated coordinator, groups of voluntourists generate 

suggestions for new designs, outlets, contacts or fundraising, subject to approval by the officers. 

Cooperative members, voluntourists and clients 

differ in their approaches to business and cultural 

patrimony, or what voluntourists might term intellec-
Grassroots Development 2014 35 37

tual property. Anna Tsing (2005) uses “friction” as a 

metaphor to describe encounters between individuals 

from different cultures, disrupting more simplistic notions of globalization as unimpeded flows of 

people, products and ideas. Conceptualizing globalization this way helps resist easy characterization of 

the weaver-voluntourist interaction as “global hegemony” versus “local resistance,” because both parties 

impose and contest the terms of the exchange. Values 

and expectations might diverge, when, for example, 

voluntourists introduce short-lived new systems 

based on their own notions of good business practices that are not embraced by the officers. But the 

tenor of the relationships in the volunteer program is 

caring: bonds of affection and mutual trust develop 

between cooperative members and voluntourists over 

the short time that they work together. Weavers often 

view foreign voluntourists as more altruistic than 

local volunteers or employees, and they welcome 

their assistance toward the success of the cooperative. 

To achieve that success, TelaMaya’s voluntourists 

believe their mission is to market the weavers’ stories along with their textiles in the fair-trade market, 

which deals in images as well as commodities. As 

Juan Carlos “Jukar” Cardona

Weavers, Rebecca Nelson and the huipil she completed.
38 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF Fellows’ Forum

ethical consumers themselves, they know what information has appeal. Many authors (e.g., Hudson and 

Hudson 2003) claim that the ethical-consumption 

movement, including fair trade and alternative tourism, is working to “de-fetishize” or make transparent 

the conditions of production and commodification, 

to highlight that the process of consuming creates 

a relationship between producers and consumers. However, some authors (Cook and Crang 1996; 

Castree 2001; Goodman 2004; Lyon 2006) suggest 

that by using identity to sell products and tourist 

experiences, ethical organizations are not so much 

revealing the conditions of production as exoticizing 

and “re-fetishizing” foreign locales. They claim that 

ethical consumption encourages consumers to locate 

themselves within a moral geography that emphasizes 

cultural distance, separating them from producers, in 

spite of the intention to bring the two groups together. 

The effort to link products with images and 

stories of the specific women who made them is a 

Weavers’ shop in Quetzaltenango.

Marisa Pettit
Grassroots Development 2014 35 39

major source of friction between weavers and wellmeaning voluntourists. During my ethnographic 

fieldwork, a U.S. volunteer who had worked at Whole 

Foods suggested a product tag with photographs, 

first names and a brief statement from each artist. 

“I think people would be a lot more interested in 

buying if they could see where it’s from and who’s 

making it,” a Canadian woman echoed. The weavers resisted. Later, they explained to me that many 

felt that their images could be used to exert power 

over them. “Even if it results in money for them, they 

do not want to [participate],” commented TelaMaya 

president Maria, who described the resistance in light 

of traditional beliefs. Some women keep the hair they 

lose in the walls of their adobe houses, she said, so 

that they always know where it is. “It is something 

that the ancestors left them,” she explained, adding 

that women report feeling a tugging on their heads 

when hair goes down the drain. While TelaMaya’s 

officers claimed to be “more civilized” and rejected 

the notion that hair or photographs pose a metaphysical danger, they respected such concerns. The 

officers were also wary that foreigners would sell 

pictures of the women without sharing the proceeds. 

“They are making money on the backs of the people,” 

vice-president Roxana said. 

The online catalog compiled by voluntourists is 

another source of friction. Entries typically include 

the group who made the item, the village where it 

was made, the location of the village and the Mayan 

language spoken as well as the significance of symbols represented or traditional uses of the product. 

However, these entries sometimes contain errors. 

Voluntourists and clients frequently confuse the 

names of villages, but the idea that each design originated in a specific place seems to matter more than 

absolute accuracy of attribution. The mere association between a product and “a village in Guatemala” 

adds value. One wholesaler from Tennessee told me 

that, in the current global market, people want their 

products anchored to a place. TelaMaya’s clients often 

nostalgically contrast the specificity of Guatemalan 

weaving styles with the anonymity of mass-produced 

goods. While this is de-fetishizing in the sense that 

the geographic origin of a product is a reminder that 

another person’s labor created it, it makes the village a proxy for that unknown person. This further 

highlights the unequal bargaining positions in the 

fair-trade market, which ultimately rests on the good 

will of the consumer (Bryant and Goodman 2004). 

Volunteers have discovered that review by 

TelaMaya’s officers does not necessarily result in correction of the mistakes. In fact, the officers consider 

the exact location of the cooperatives proprietary 

information. TelaMaya does not charge dues; textiles 

are its main source of revenue. Having invested in 

making connections with international wholesale 

clients, the officers are concerned that the clients 

could work directly with the weavers if they could 

contact them personally. They also worry that other 

organizations might try to “poach” TelaMaya’s 

member cooperatives, as apparently happened when 

half the cooperative from the town of Chirijox 

defected to a competitor.

The weavers resist sharing information on 

designs, patterns or weaving techniques, out of 

apprehension that the tradition that is the basis of 

their livelihoods and identity could be appropriated 

by clients or voluntourists better positioned to take 

advantage of foreign markets. Like many indigenous 

Guatemalans, TelaMaya members have seen how 

the government has used their culture to promote 

tourism and nationalism while failing to provide 

them basic services, mitigate widespread discrimination or address the structural violence that keeps 

native peoples subordinated. Weavers in TelaMaya 

are concerned that voluntourists will similarly exploit 

Mayan designs and techniques for their own financial gain. A leader of a weaving group might refer to 

volunteers as the “pillar” of her organization, and, in 

the same breath, accuse them of taking knowledge of 

Mayan backstrap weaving home to sell.

Weavers want to sell in fair-trade markets and 

they take pride in their prestigious international clients who, they say, “value our Mayan culture.” They 

also want to protect their proprietary knowledge 

as both heritage and resource. Voluntourists bring 

TelaMaya technical skills, cross-cultural competency and an awareness of trends. The international 

network of former volunteers provides business contacts, donations in kind and support for fundraising 

campaigns. However, to extract the full benefit from 

this assistance, the weavers may have to share something that they do not want to give up. For them, 
40 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF Fellows’ Forum

Merchandise display, Quetzaltenango.

Paul Chee
Grassroots Development 2014 35 41

fair-trade marketing becomes more intrusive than 

marketing that lets producers remain invisible, just 

as alternative tourism can have a greater economic, 

cultural and environmental impact on communities than commercial tourism (Butler 2004; Macleod 

2004), because it creates more intimate and longerterm relationships between the visitors and visited. 

The process of revealing and concealing information 

plays out daily as voluntourists help package ethnic 

identity along with products. 

As voluntourists become increasingly essential 

to grassroots organizations such as TelaMaya, their 

interactions with their hosts can cause discomfort 

that highlights the complexities of humanitarian 

entrepreneurship. Dependence on foreign volunteers 

for desperately needed skills should be a significant 

concern for the leaders of TelaMaya, who, to date, have 

used interpersonal skills to maintain control of the 

voluntourists they have come to consider a renewable 

resource. They will need to strengthen their federation and improve communication with the weavers if 

they want to take advantage of volunteer expertise and 

accommodate volunteer expectations without losing 

sight of their members’ needs. 

Rebecca Nelson is a candidate for the Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Connecticut and was in the 2011-

2012 cycle of IAF Fellows.

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Bryant, Raymond L. and Michael K. Goodman. 2004. 

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Butcher, Jim. 2003. The Moralisation of Tourism: Sun, Sand... and 

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Butler, Richard. 2004. “Alternative Tourism: The Thin End 

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Sciences, edited by Stephen Williams, 310–318. Vol. 4. London: 

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Castañeda, Brenda. 2013. “Tourism Sector in Guatemala.” 

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Dwyer, eds. 1991. Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the 

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42 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF Fellows’ Forum

Seasons and Uncertainty:

Temporeras in Chile’s Fruit Industry

By Jelena Radovic Fanta

Vineyard in the Aconcagua Valley, central Chile.

“The country grows with exports, but the temporera

stays the same,” Javiera said as we conversed one late 

afternoon in June 2009 in San Felipe, Chile. As a 

temporera, or seasonal worker, she is one of roughly 

400,000 women employed during the austral summer 

to harvest or pack fruit destined for markets around 

the world. Research for my dissertation during 2009 

and 2010 took me to the Aconcagua Valley of central 

Chile where I examined how temporeras negotiate a 

precarious labor regime. Between January and early 

April of 2009, I worked in vineyards and packing 

plants, engaging in observation during the day and 

conducting open-ended interviews in fields, plants 

and homes after hours. Drawing upon workers’ narratives, I explored the effects of neoliberal policies on 

everyday life. By “neoliberal,” I am referring to “political economic practices that propose that human 

well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms” (Harvey 2005: 2).

A workforce is born 

Chile’s internationally lauded fruit-export industry 

developed in the late 1970s, propelled by the neoliberal policies adopted under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, 

Photos courtesy Jelena Radovic Fanta
Grassroots Development 2014 35 43

whose regime endured from 1973 to 1990 (Caro and 

de la Cruz 2004, Falabella 1991, Tinsman 2004). Table 

grapes grown during the Chilean counter-season 

found their way into the niche left open in northern markets during the winter. They were followed 

by avocados, kiwis, citrus fruits and cherries harvested from April to October, which extended the 

export cycle. “By 1987 Chile’s international fruit sales 

amounted to almost half a billion dollars and the 

Wall Street Journal hailed the fruit industry as proof of 

Chile’s economic miracle” (Winn 2000: 262). With 

the boom a seasonal workforce was born, 75 percent 

of it comprised of rural women. Initially drawn by 

the opportunity to “help out” at home, they became 

wage earners for the first time in their lives. Today 

the industry is their steadiest source of income 

(Tinsman 2004, Valdés 1998). 

Research reveals how household relations 

shifted as a result of women’s seasonal employment (Barrientos et al 1999, Caro and de la Cruz 

2004, Falabella 1991, Tinsman 2004, Valdés 2007). 

The expansion of the fruit industry coincided with 

a nationwide recession that caused men’s employment to plummet, and Chilean women increasingly 

left the domestic sphere to provide for their families. 

Instead of asking their husbands for money, temporeras allocated their own income to food, clothes, 

medicine and household items as well as cosmetics, 

toiletries and leisure with friends (Tinsman 2004: 

271). Consumption became a vehicle for challenging 

patriarchy and creating community among women 

who shared stories about children, shopping and sex 

(Tinsman 2006). Men frequently felt that their wives 

were “abandoning” family obligations and them. 

“Women fruit workers did spend more time with 

one another and enjoyed it,” but working 12 to 14 

hours a day during the summer also meant sacrifice 

(Tinsman 2004: 273). “You leave aside the household, 

the children,” Isidora said of the cost. 

The Chilean fruit boom came to rely on the rural 

women absorbed every summer into the work force. 

The conditions in which the temporeras have toiled—

including workweeks that frequently exceed the legal 

limit of 45 hours, inadequate protective equipment 

and exposure to pesticides—have been the downside 

of their employment and of the industry’s success. 

While fruit has been a driver of robust economic 

growth, Chile’s glaring disparity in income distribution is the highest of the 34 nations that are members 

of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and 

Development (Collins and Lear 1995, OECD 2010, 

Winn 2004). Chileans in the top tenth percentile 

with respect to income earn 27 times as much as 

those in the lowest tenth, where most temporeras fall, 

their earnings from the grape harvest often offset by 

under- and unemployment during the remainder of 

the year (CASEN 2011).

Uncertainty in the workplace

Unemployment spikes during the winter, exactly 

when heating and cold-weather ailments elevate the 

cost of living. The luckier temporeras find work in 

plants that operate year round processing grapes and 

then lesser quantities of avocados, kiwis, citrus and 

cherries. Others bounce from job to job as domestic 

workers, street vendors, cashiers or waitresses. 

Even in summer, uncertainty permeates their 

employment. In packing plants, work can end 

between midnight and 4:00 am. “We know what 

time we start but never what time we will finish,” 

Carmen said. Temporeras are paid per box of fruit 

picked, packed or processed, which growers argue 

boosts productivity. Speed is the most important 

variable in take-home pay, with each woman working as fast as she can. The fastest can earn up to twice 

the minimum wage. The pace is hard on the body, 

but aches and pains go ignored until the end of the 

summer, so that no workday is lost. 

Temporeras often cannot identify their employer. 

“You don’t know for whom you’re working,” Marina 

observed late one night as we packed freshly picked 

grapes into cardboard boxes. Her cap was embroidered with “Doña Luisa,” the plant preparing the 

grapes for export; the crates in which they had 

arrived were stamped “Corpex,” the name of the 

grower; the trucks in the driveway belonged to 

Aconcagua Export. Increasingly the industry has 

relied on subcontractors to hire temporeras, which 

has given rise to abuse. This includes the failure 

to deposit payroll deductions into governmentsponsored health insurance or pension funds, often 

discovered after the subcontractors have disappeared, 

along with the money. Legislation enacted in 2006 

requires subcontractors to register and makes the 
44 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF Fellows’ Forum

contractor responsible for a subcontractor’s delinquencies. But subcontractors can evade the registry 

and, while temporeras have learned to monitor deductions, many are still unaware of the contractor’s 

liability and their right to recourse. 

Flexibility in the industry 

A legacy of the Pinochet era in contemporary Chile 

is the concept of “labor flexibility,” really a complex 

of laws and practices that enable corporations to 

adjust rapidly to fluctuations in production and the 

market by allowing them to “subcontract, hire, or lay 

off workers, [and] carry out changes in the personnel 

whenever convenient,” (Arteaga 2000: 45). The consequences for the worker are “lower wages, increasing 

job insecurity, and loss of job benefits and of job protections,” all of which contribute to deepen inequality 

(Harvey 2005: 75-76, Amuedo-Dorantes 2005). 

Chilean labor contracts are consistent with 

laws regulating wages and hours, grounds for dismissal, compensation for work-related injuries and 

participation in government-funded benefits, including health insurance. During Chile’s transition to 

democracy in the early 1990s, when less than a third 

of temporeras had formalized the terms and conditions of their employment with any kind of written 

agreement (personal communication with Pamela 

Caro, September 2009), many organized to demand 

contracts. By 2000, according to the Encuesta de 

Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional [The National 

Socioeconomic Characterization Survey], 48.6 percent of temporeras were employed for the summer 

under a contract (Caro 2003). Increasingly, however, 

while the terms and conditions adhere to the letter of 

the law, they also reflect the push for labor flexibility.

Today, the contracts that temporeras sign usually limit their employment to the few weeks it takes 

to process a single variety of a specific fruit. Grapes, 

for example, include Thompson Seedless, Flame, Red 

Globe, Crimson and Autumn Royal, whose harvests are staggered throughout the summer: Flame, 

in January; Crimson in February; Autumn Royal in 

March, for example. Between January and mid-April, 

temporeras who pick, clean and pack table grapes 

might enter into five contracts with the same company. Sometimes a temporera is hired under a new 

contract the day after the previous contract ended. She 

can also be jobless pending the arrival of the next variety to be processed. “I’m telling you quite honestly, I 

feel unprotected,” Julieta described the arrangement. 

I asked a general manager why his company preferred multiple short contracts to a single contract for 

the entire grape season. “Let’s say I hire 50 women 

to process grapes,” he explained. “Two turn out to be 

lazy or conflictive. Instead of being stuck with them 

for three months, I lay them off when the variety 

ends. If they go to the Work Inspection to report the 

company for wrongful termination, I have the contract that they signed, and we are not fined.” The 

Work Inspection is a branch of the Chilean Ministry 

of Labor that oversees compliance with labor laws, 

and it is frequently understaffed and underfunded. Its 

inspectors visit workplaces in response to complaints. 

Managers are usually on notice and can prepare by 

bringing safety measures, tools, time and attendance 

records, and bathrooms into compliance. In my experience, this never extended beyond the inspection. 

Working under contract to larger companies 

does offer advantages. Agribusinesses that hire many 

employees are subject to closer scrutiny. They tend 

to maintain contracts in order and keep up with the 

payroll deductions that Chilean workers contribute 

to AFP Capital, which provides retirement benefits, 

and to the Fondo Nacional de Salud (FONASA), which 

provides health insurance. Temporeras whose payroll 

deductions have been properly channeled can qualify 

for an eventual pension and for Afiliación Extendida, 

a program that extends health insurance through 

the entire year—if they can document four months 

of work as contract labor or 60 days as day labor. 

Either period can be cobbled together from multiple 

summer contracts and proof of odd jobs during the 

winter. For the nearly 52 percent of temporeras who 

do not work under contract, documenting employment is more difficult, if not impossible. 

Safety and the worker

Flexibility transfers to temporeras the burden of 

keeping the workplace safe. In July 2009, a commotion erupted in a major packing plant when Karla, a 

temporera, caught her hand in the conveyor belt that 

sorted avocados. By the time the machine was turned 

off, Karla had to be taken to a nearby clinic. “The 

[management] treated her very badly, blaming her 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 45

for, almost insinuating that she did it on purpose,” 

said Viviana, a co-worker who witnessed the event. 

“In the end, the worker is responsible for prevention. 

Everything that happens is our fault. If our hand gets 

caught, we weren’t paying attention.”

Chile’s national health insurance covers treatment 

of contract workers injured on the job. Workers who 

are not under contract are not on the insurance rolls 

and are ineligible for government-funded treatment 

and compensation for work-related injuries. An uninsured worker injured on the job goes to the closest 

emergency room and avoids implicating the company, 

hoping to keep open the option of returning to work. 

I encountered temporeras, mainly in smaller plants that 

are less likely to be inspected, who had opted to take 

their chances and refused a contract in an effort to 

avoid deductions for benefits that reduce take-home 

pay. Like delaying a visit to the doctor until the harvest is over, this choice is rooted in the uncertainty as 

to how they will earn their living once summer ends 

(Nguyen and Peschard 2003). Not surprisingly, some 

women regret the decision. 

In compliance with labor regulations, most packing plants exhibit posters advising employees to use 

tools correctly and wear appropriate clothing, including masks and gloves. Employers are required by law 

to purchase and distribute protective equipment, but 

actual practice varies. If accidents occur often enough 

on site, businesses are subject to fines and mandatory inspections. They might also be ordered to halt 

production for a few hours while employees attend 

workshops. These often convey the “individual moral 

responsibilities” that employees must assume to avoid 

accidents (Clarke et al 2010) even though they have no 

control over conditions in the workplace. Temporeras

do what they can, checking the floor for stray fruit 

that could cause a slip-and-fall incident, holding their 

breath while they fumigate boxes of grapes with the 

gas that prolongs shelf life and otherwise attempting 

to fill the gap between laws aimed at risk reduction 

and their actual enforcement (Rose 1999).

Organizing

Chilean trade unions were completely dismantled 

under Pinochet’s rule. With the exception of the 

above-referenced push for contracts during the 1990s, 

temporeras have very low levels of organizing (Arteaga 

2000, Caro and de la Cruz 2004, Falabella 1991, 
46 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF Fellows’ Forum

Tinsman 2004, Valdés 1998). Legally, seasonal laborers in the fruit industry can form a union but they 

are prohibited from engaging in collective bargaining, a primary purpose of organizing (Caro and de 

la Cruz 2004). Furthermore, the structure of their 

employment impedes cohesion. Temporeras usually 

work together no more than four months out of the 

year; the hours are long and intense; women go home 

to family obligations, including childcare. 

An important deterrent to organizing is fear of 

losing one’s job. “We know exactly what’s going on,” 

Soledad told me over lunch, “but we just can’t afford 

not to take money home” Tatiana described what 

happened when a group of workers struck for higher 

pay. “‘You don’t like it? Whoever wants to can leave 

right now,’” the owners said. “The bus is outside. 

There are dozens of people waiting for your job.’” 

When an employer yields to the demand for better 

pay, the triumph lasts through the season. The next 

year, however, the employer can revert to the earlier 

rate or pay even less, as happened in 2009, allegedly 

because of “the crisis,” the global recession of 2008. 

What remains?

If today temporeras are not mobilizing, they are 

clearly aware of how their work conditions affect 

their lives. I argue that the most vulnerable employees are subsidizing the fruit industry by working long 

hours, neglecting family and sacrificing well-being 

as they incur gaps in government-sponsored benefits. 

Are the rewards of their labor limited to consumer 

items purchased with meager earnings—a washing 

machine, a microwave, new bedding?

Most temporeras that I interviewed recognize that 

their investment in future generations provides emotional fulfillment and creates possibility. “What I do 

now is for my children, so they don’t have to be temporeras,” is a frequent refrain. This only reinforces 

the fact that their welfare depends on themselves, 

not the interest of the public and private sectors in 

improving conditions. In an era when labor rights 

have become weakened and employers aggressively 

advocate for flexibility, it is imperative to examine 

the effect on the citizens struggling in the shadow 

of “development.” While the fruit sector has been 

hailed in Chile and abroad as “modern” (personal 

communications with owners Ribenetti and Schuetz) 

due to its export niche, the investment it attracts 

and its highly technical infrastructure, its invisibilized labor force navigates insecurity and unrealistic 

expectations (Collins and Lear 1995, Winn 2000), 

reconfiguring notions of what it means to be a worker 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 47

and head of household in a seasonal cycle. Temporeras

supporting families are often dignified by their status 

as the primary provider. Everyday working conditions, however, inhibit long-term planning and the 

next harvest becomes the only certainty.

Jelena Radovic Fanta was in the 2010-2011 cycle of IAF 

Fellows. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the 

University of California, Riverside, and is currently a lecturer at Santa Clara University. 

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At the IAF

48 Grassroots Development 2014 35

To Lake Titicaca and Back Again:

Reflections on a Calling 

By Kevin Healy

With 36 years of service logged when he retired in April, Kevin Healy holds the 

record as the longest-serving employee of the Inter-American Foundation. The following is excerpted from Healy’s remarks during the IAF’s celebration of his long 

and productive career just before his departure.

My commitment to Latin America began with a service project staffed by undergraduate volunteers and 

organized on the Peruvian shores of Lake Titicaca by 

the University of Notre Dame. A year later, I returned 

to the world’s highest navigable lake as a Peace Corps 

volunteer and discovered Taquile Island, the only community on the shore whose residents still weave and 

wear traditional dress. I was able to help them introduce their superb Andean textiles, the finest on the 

lake at that time, to the tourist market. As a new IAF 

representative, I funded a grant that helped taquileños 

purchase motors, adapted from trucks, that enabled 

them to ferry tourists in their boats and to develop 

an economy based on home-stays and their cultural 

patrimony. Taquile has since evolved from one of the 

poorest communities in the lake area to one of the 

better-off and a world-class visitor attraction.

My first IAF sighting was in l971, when I visited the office of the United States Agency for 

International Development in Asunción. Light bulbs 

flashed as I read a document detailing a brand-new 

U.S. foreign-assistance agency that seemed a mirror 

opposite of the disappointing face of official aid—an 

approach that was channeling U.S. taxpayer dollars 

into the coffers of a corrupt regime. That military 

dictatorship, which became the longest-ruling in the 

Patrick Breslin
Grassroots Development 2014 35 49

hemisphere, had little interest in the conditions of 

the impoverished majority of Paraguayans, and its 

iron fist was pummeling pro-democracy activists in 

the Catholic University where I was on the team from 

Georgetown University providing Jesuit-to-Jesuit 

support for programs in the social sciences. In that 

dreadful scenario of government-to-government aid, 

the IAF concept sparked hope that civil society could 

be the conduit for more productive assistance. 

Three years later, as a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell 

University, I received an IAF Fellowship funding field 

work for my dissertation in rural Paraguay. At the 

time, the IAF required its Fellows be sponsored by 

an IAF grantee and the few in Paraguay were unwilling to be my sponsor. I thought that my relationship 

with the IAF would end on that note. But Jim Obrien, 

a former Maryknoll missionary and proactive IAF 

leader, recognized that my research could be conducted in Bolivia. He approached the late Claudio 

Pou, a Spanish Jesuit with an American Ph.D., who 

was assisting a regional network of IAF grantees. 

Padre Claudio readily grasped how well my research 

suited conditions in southern Chuquisaca department, where an IAF grantee agreed to sponsor me.

While I was writing my dissertation in Ithaca, 

Obrien invited me to share my research with IAF 

staff, which led to my successful application to 

fill the position for Bolivia. I reported for work in 

January 1978. The IAF’s congressional mandate was 

driven by its first president, the charismatic and 

visionary Bill Dyal, a former Baptist missionary who 

had roomed in the seminary with fellow Texan Bill 

Moyers and came to the IAF via the Peace Corps. 

Dyal would lead the agency for nine years, setting 

a record in the position. Something of a maverick 

among senior federal officials, he reported to work 

in jeans long before anyone had heard of casual 

Friday and he was the first head of a U.S. government foreign assistance agency to elevate a woman 

to the rank of vice president. Whether in congressional hearings or in Andean potato fields, Dyal 

inspired confidence when he spoke about change 

from the grassroots. The staff he recruited counted 

former missionaries; community organizers, U.S. 

Peace Corps volunteer Healy in 1969 with taquileños.

Courtesy Kevin Healy
50 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF

and foreign; Peace Corps alumni; and other freshlyminted Ph.Ds. in the social sciences. 

It was a heady environment and, for me, those 

were golden days. The IAF stood tall amidst terrible 

repression, often perpetrated by military dictatorships. 

Obrien developed a remarkable strategy for funding the 

heroic human-rights community in Chile, led during 

those dark times by the Catholic Church. The regime 

of General Augusto Pinochet reacted by trying to derail 

the resources that the IAF receives from the Social 

Progress Trust Fund (SPTF), consisting of repayments on 

loans extended to Latin American governments under 

the Alliance for Progress. Working pro-bono behind the 

scenes, Tom Scanlon, of Benchmarks, Inc., and Father 

Ted Hesburgh, then-president of Notre Dame, our alma 

mater, foiled that attempt to cut off SPTF funding for 

the IAF’s program in Chile and also secured future IAF 

grants throughout the hemisphere. 

I began funding organizations in Bolivia just as 

the rule of Hugo Banzer, the country’s most durable military dictator, was beginning to crumble. 

Pressured by a massive grassroots hunger strike and 

the human rights policies of President Jimmy Carter, 

Banzer himself called for elections. With civil society energized, proposals poured into my office. My 

credibility got a boost in 1981 with the publication 

of my dissertation in Bolivia as Caciques y Patrones, 

Una Experiericia de Desarrollo Rural en el Sur de Bolivia. 

Later I acquired the portfolios for Ecuador, Peru, 

Panama, Honduras and Colombia, sometimes in 

tandem with the Bolivia program, but for the last 

three years I concentrated almost exclusively on 

Bolivia. My approach aimed to engage multiple 

sectors and organizations, further cultural and 

ecological diversity, consider contextual changes 

and give the IAF a presence in every Bolivian 

region. Whether funding involved recovering traditional Andean crops and livestock, agro-forestry 

in the Amazon, water conservation, or revitalizing 

music and dance, textile production and bilingual 

Healy with Guillermo Flores from Candelaria in Chuquisaca, Bolivia.

Patrick Breslin
Grassroots Development 2014 35 51

education, the goal was always socio-economic 

development in low-income communities. Some 

grantees became game-changers, pioneering initiatives that were replicated or expanded.

Bill Dyal’s emphasis on “learning and dissemination” led many to share our IAF experience. My 

bent for writing is genetic, traceable to my father, a 

professional journalist in Washington. Under Peter 

Bell, Dyal’s immediate successor, “learning and dissemination” became an ambitious undertaking. As 

head of the Ford Foundation in Brazil and Chile, 

Bell had led its support for social science research 

that elucidated development issues, and he hit the 

ground running at the IAF. The committee that 

selected Ph.D. and M.A candidates as well as social 

entrepreneurs for IAF Fellowships was a veritable 

Who’s Who drawn from U.S. and Latin American 

academia. Bell hired editors Sheldon Anis and Ron 

Weber to transform a modest in-house publication 

into a journal conforming to the highest standards 

for professional writing and photography. With a 

more sophisticated format, Grassroots Development

attracted new writers and more readers to their case 

studies of grassroots processes as they unfolded and 

profiles of dynamic social entrepreneurship.

Bell enlisted economist Albert Hirschman to 

compile his observations of the IAF and its grantees 

into a report that became the book Getting Ahead 

Collectively, a seal of approval carrying important 

legitimacy. Although not assigned to work with 

Hirschman, I benefitted from the next best thing: an 

opportunity to work with his favorite student, Judith 

Tendler, a rising star at the Massachusetts Institute of 

Technology. At the request of Peter Hakim, Bell’s able 

vice-president, also from the Ford Foundation, I identified a research project for her in Bolivia. Tendler’s 

resulting study of rural cooperatives became a development classic with a long shelf life. Her thoughts on 

development and the role of foreign aid made waves, 

including with me. 

Controversy and media coverage swirled when 

Peter Bell left abruptly, followed later by Hakim. 

Excellent years followed, however, when Deborah 

Szekely took the helm, wisely guiding the IAF out 

of the crisis with the able assistance of IAF veterans Charlie Reilly and Steve Vetter, who became 

her vice presidents. Meanwhile Hakim became 

president of the Inter-American Dialogue and 

Bell chaired its board. During the 1980s, in fact, 

the IAF seemed like an incubator for talented 

visionaries who ascended to leadership across 

the universe of international development and 

philanthropy—Bell, chair of the board and then 

president of Care International; Hakim, president 

of the Inter-American Dialogue; Michael Shifter, 

Hakim’s successor at the Dialogue; Ray Offenheiser, 

president of Oxfam America; Josh Reichert, vice 

president of the Pew Charitable Trust; Carol 

Michaels, vice president of Winrock International; 

Brad Smith, vice-president at Ford and president of 

two other foundations; Steve Vetter, president of 

Partners of the Americas. Doug and Steve Hellinger 

rocked the international development policy boat 

in Washington for many years via the Development 

Gap that they founded and led. 

“Learning and dissemination” led me beyond 

the IAF, including to the Andean Seminar at George 

Washington University, a lively forum for debating policy and for sharing observations; and to the 

Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) for 

outside-the-box perspectives on U.S. policy. The 

multilateral banks also offered opportunities to 

share my take on grassroots development, notably 

with Sheldon Davis, the activist-anthropologist who 

became a kind of conscience at the World Bank, providing ideas and critiques of entrenched policies and 

infusing new staff to correct them. At the Foreign 

Service Institute, which prepares U.S. diplomats for 

overseas assignments, I frequently lecture on critical issues based on my experience with civil society, 

and on perspectives from the grassroots not wellknown inside the Beltway. Speaking engagements 

took me to Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Duke, 

Michigan State, Arizona and other campuses and, 

frequently, to the Congress of the Latin American 

Studies Association. Most memorably, as one of 

three guests each speaking on a different continent 

at the annual dinner of the Society for International 

Development (SID) in the 1990s, I chronicled stepby-step the historic and successful 34-day march 

by Amazonian Bolivians to secure their homelands 

from external threats. 

I am especially pleased to have played a role 

in the IAF’s support for the colorful traditions 
52 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF

on display here in Washington. “Culture and 

Development,” a program that I co-curated with 

Olivia Cadaval of the Smithsonian at the National 

Festival of American Folklife in 1994, brought 100 

representatives from 16 organizations to the National 

Mall to share their heritage and grassroots initiatives, 

including via an exhibit of Andean weaving at the 

Sackler Museum nearby. As part of the 2013 Festival, 

Bolivian musicians from the Centro Cultural Masis, 

whose school had benefited from IAF support in the 

1980s, performed to a packed house at the Kennedy 

Center and for crowds at the Smithsonian. In 2004, 

the National Museum of the American Indian 

(NMAI) welcomed representatives of Bolivian and 

Peruvian IAF grantees to its inaugural extravaganza. 

Later, visitors to the NMAI celebrated Valentine’s Day 

with Kuna craftswomen from Panama and farmers 

from former grantee El Ceibo, Bolivia’s largest chocolate enterprise, owned and operated by the cacao 

growers. No doubt the IAF’s finest moment at NMAI 

was in 2010 when the year-long commemoration of 

our 40th anniversary ended with a spectacular showcase of 2,000 crafts by artists representing the diverse 

ethnicities and traditions of the Santa Cruz region 

in Bolivia’s tropical lowlands. The event attracted 

huge crowds and earned more than $80,000 for 

Artecampo exhibit, National Museum of the American Indian.

Mark Caicedo
Grassroots Development 2014 35 53

Artecampo, a federation of 1,300 indigenous embroiders, potters, weavers and sculptors that partners 

with IAF grantee Centro de Investigación, Diseño y 

Comercialización Comunitaria (CIDAC). 

I cannot leave out of this story on “learning 

and dissemination” my involvement in the early 

1990s with public television affiliate WGBH, whose 

award-winning, three-hour documentary “Local 

Heroes, Global Change,” included a 15-minute segment on the former IAF Bolivian grantee CCIMCA 

on behalf of women in altiplano communities. In 

my book Llamas Weaving and Organic Chocolate, 

Multicultural Grassroots Development in the Andes 

and Amazon of Bolivia (Notre Dame: 2001), compiling my experiences in Bolivia, I tried to capture 

social processes and share the stories, struggles and 

lessons of the grassroots movers and shakers who 

made a difference in their communities and the 

world. Institutions in the U.S. and Europe using the 

book include the School of International Training 

in Vermont, which, for more than a decade, has 

assigned it to students spending their semester 

abroad in Bolivia. A Spanish version is expected by 

the end of 2014. The manuscript not only absorbed 

me for years but led me to develop a graduate course 

on indigenous social movements in Latin America, 

which launched my teaching career at George 

Washington and at Georgetown University. For 14 

years, the office-classroom balance act was a challenge involving countless working weekends. I hope 

my students benefited from the exposure to the 

IAF’s approach, my knowledge of Latin America and 

my passion for my work.

I am biased and this has been said before: The 

U.S. government receives a good return per dollar 

invested in the IAF. I awarded my final IAF grant to 

a professional group working near Lake Titicaca to 

help entrepreneurial Aymara women offer products 

and services to tourists who overlook their communities en route to better-known destinations—recalling 

the efforts of the taquileños who captured a clientele 

that had once bypassed them. Without planning to 

end my career where it began, I came full circle, once 

again treading those sacred waters high in the Andes. 

I am honored to have worked with everyone who has 

been part of my IAF experience and thank you for 

teaching me so much. Together we made a difference. 

Healy and representatives of his final grantee, Centro de Investigaciones de Energía y Población (CIEP), in Batallas, Bolivia, where 

residents will develop services for visitors to Lake Titicaca.

Courtesy Kevin Healy
54 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF

Bottom-Up Development

in the Classroom

By Robert Maguire

“From William Easterly (The Tyranny of Experts) to 

Dambisa Moyo (Dead Aid), and from Jeffrey Sachs (The 

End of Poverty) to Paul Collier (The Bottom Billion), 

development thinkers have expressed frustration with 

policies, programs, strategies, outcomes and institutions 

charged with alleviating poverty. Some have alluded to the 

need to focus additional resources on or reformed actions 

toward populations at the ‘bottom.’ This graduate seminar takes these analyses, frustrations and unsatisfactory 

results as a starting point to delve into prospects for more 

effective poverty alleviation through the application of 

‘bottom-up’ approaches.” 

The Syllabus

That quote is from the syllabus introducing the course 

Poverty Alleviation and Bottom-Up Development, 

which I teach at the Elliott School of International 

Affairs of George Washington University as part of 

the two-year program, created in 1992, leading to a 

master’s degree in International Development Studies. 

Similar programs have emerged around the United 

States over the past 10 years or so, but development 

studies remains largely a subset of international affairs 

or economics departments, where courses tend to 

focus on approaches to development espoused by large 

multilateral and bilateral institutions. A bottom-up 

focus remains an underdeveloped element.

First offered at GW in 2011, “Pov Alev & BUD” is 

now taught there twice a year to packed classrooms. 

Before it zooms in on “bottom-up” solutions, the 

course considers approaches that actually exacerbated poverty, at least for those living it, and “silver 

bullets” that direct the benefits of donor funding to 

those other than the poor. Most students entering 

my class have had some exposure to development 

and are looking to parlay their studies into a deeper 

involvement. Some have had a grassroots experience overseas, usually as a volunteer with the Peace 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 55

Corps or with a community-based or nongovernmental organization. Others want to complement 

their study of more traditional, top-down aid. Many 

are relatively new to development, having worked 

as an intern or held an entry-level position in an 

international financial institution, nongovernmental 

organization or for-profit development company such 

as, respectively, the World Bank, the Pan American 

Development Foundation or Chemonics, and are 

already expressing frustration similar to that of the 

seasoned writers cited above. 

The IAF in the classroom

As one might suspect from a professor who cut his 

development teeth as an Inter-American Foundation 

representative, the IAF experience figures prominently in the configuration of “Pov Alev & BUD” 

and its lessons filter into the classroom. The first 

class begins with a reading of “The Development 

Set,” a poem written in 1978 by Ross Coggins, an 

IAF regional director. Subsequent discussions center 

on articles published by IAF staff in Grassroots 

Development that underscore how the grassroots 

approach is frequently overlooked: “What Big 

Development Thinkers Ignore” by David Bray 

(2009: Vol. 30/1); “What Sachs Lacks” by Patrick 

Breslin (2007: Vol. 28/1); and “A Grassroots View of 

Development Assistance” by Ramón Daubón (2002: 

Vol. 23/1). Chapters from Breslin’s book Development 

and Dignity: Grassroots Development and the InterAmerican Foundation (1987) introduce the IAF.

Sprinkled across the syllabus are excerpts from 

publications inspired by the work of the IAF, including Direct to the Poor, Grassroots Development in Latin

America (1988: Lynne Rienner) by Sheldon Annis 

and Peter Hakim, also of IAF’s staff, and from 

Getting Ahead Collectively (1984: Pergamon Press) 

that renowned economist Albert Hirschman based 

on his fieldwork among IAF grantees. Hirschman’s 

treatise on the “mutation of social energy” always 

merits special consideration. Time to Listen: Hearing 

People on the Receiving End of International Aid (2012: 

CDA Collaborative Learning Projects), a book in 

which former IAF representative Chuck Kleymeyer 

was instrumental, is incorporated into the seminar. 

Exposure to the IAF’s work is not limited to readings. 

Doug Hellinger, a former IAF intern and founding 

member of the Development Group for Alternative 

Policies (GAP), explains his organization’s efforts to 

encourage bilateral and multilateral organizations, 

particularly the World Bank, to listen and respond to 

the voices of the organized poor. 

Current IAF representatives Seth Jesse and 

Jenny Petrow have shared wisdom from their experience on the ground with the portfolios for El 

Salvador and Haiti. Their elaboration of the IAF’s 

use of the Grassroots Development Framework 

to evaluate the returns on its investment quells 

some students’ concern that a bottom-up approach 

yields results that are difficult to measure. Interest 

in this issue is related to the growing emphasis 

on quantifiable data as indicative of effectiveness. 

The demand for metrics has yielded a host of job 

possibilities in monitoring and evaluation for students looking to get a foothold in the development 

profession. Seth and Jenny also lead a simulated 

review of proposals for funding submitted by grassroots groups that teaches how bottom-up support 

“works.” It also gets students ready for a major 

assignment analyzing a proposal in preparation for 

a hypothetical site visit. The materials used represent localized approaches to some of the solutions, 
56 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF

already explored in class, that often improve the 

prospects of the organized poor: microfinancing for 

women’s enterprises; credit toward more productive 

farms; and a start-up cash transfer program similar 

to Brazil’s Bolsa Familia.

The Final Exam

According to the final class reading assignment, 

“Towards the End of Poverty,” taken from The 

Economist of June 1, 2013, “the world has lately been 

making extraordinary progress in lifting people out 

of extreme poverty” in view of the decrease in the 

ranks of the extremely poor in developing countries 

by almost 1 billion individuals between 1990 and 

2010. The authors envisioned a further dramatic 

reduction by 2030 to “as near to zero as is realistically 

possible.” The Economist’s analysis of the future will 

come about, I posit, only through the effective application of the bottom-up approaches studied in “Pov 

Alev & BUD,” throughout the semester.

At the end of the fall 2013 iteration of “Pov Alev 

& BUD,” I asked my students to think about the article 

and incorporate the course content over the semester 

into an op-ed piece: “Putting Poverty in a Museum: 

Bottom-Up Perspectives.” The title is drawn from the 

closing chapter of Creating a World without Poverty by 

Muhammad Yunus (Public Affairs: New York, 2007), 

founder of the Grameen Bank and a 2006 Nobel laureate. In it, he proposes that each nation choose a target 

date for building a museum dedicated to poverty that 

displays “its horrors to future generations” who will 

“wonder why poverty continued so long in human 

society—how a few people could live in luxury while 

billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair” 

(223). Challenging his own proposal, Yunus asks, “Can 

we really have poverty in... museums?” and answers, 

“Why not? We have the technology. We have the 

resources. All we need is the will to do it and to put 

the necessary institutions and policies in place.... Let’s 

dedicate ourselves to bringing an end to it at the earliest possible date, and putting poverty in the museums 

once and for all” (233).

In view of Yunus’ aspirations and the assertions 

in The Economist, perhaps the current name of my 

course is too modest. Maybe I should change it to 

“Poverty Elimination and Bottom-Up Development.” 

Allow me a slight diversion at this point. Yunus 

Ross Coggins (1928-2011) worked at the IAF in the late 1970s 

as regional director for Central America and special assistant to 

the president. His satirical poem became an instant hit and a 

development legend, thanks to this widely distributed poster. 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 57

The Development Set

By Ross Coggins

Excuse me, friends, I must catch my jet—

I’m off to join the development set;

My bags are packed, and I’ve had all my shots,

I have traveler’s checks and pills for the trots.

The development set is bright and noble,

Our thoughts are deep and our vision global.

Although we move with the better classes,

Our thoughts are always with the masses.

In Sheraton hotels in scattered nations

We damn multinational corporations.

Injustice seems easy to protest

In such seething hotbeds of social rest.

We discuss malnutrition over steaks

And plan hunger talks during coffee breaks.

Whether Asian floods or African drought,

We face each issue with an open mouth.

We bring in consultants whose circumlocution

Raises difficulties for every solution—

Thus guaranteeing continued good eating

By showing the need for another meeting!

Though it’s said that consultants believe it 

now crime

To borrow your watch to tell you the time,

Their expenses are more than justified

When one thinks of the jobs they might later 

provide.

The language of the Development Set

Stretches the English alphabet.

We use swell words like “epigenetic,”

“Micro,” “macro” and “logarithmetic.”

It pleasures us to be so esoteric—

It’s so intellectually atmospheric!

And though establishments may be unmoved,

Our vocabularies are much improved.

When the talk gets deep and you’re feeling 

dumb

You can keep your shame to a minimum:

To show that you, too, are intelligent

Smugly ask, “Is it really development?”

Or say, “That’s fine in practice, but don’t you 

see:

It doesn’t work out in theory!”

A few may find this incomprehensible,

But most will admire you as deep and sensible.

Development Set homes are extremely chic

Full of carvings, curios and draped with batik.

Eye-level photographs subtly assure

That you host is at home with the great and 

the poor.

Enough of these verses—on with the mission!

Our task is as broad as the human condition!

Just pray God the biblical promise is true:

The poor ye shall always have with you.

“The Development Set” is reprinted here with the kind 

permission of Ross Coggins’ family.
58 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF

Putting Poverty in a Museum

By Meleah Paull

Muhammad Yunus may 

not be a household word 

or as recognizable as a 

rock star, but he has created a name for himself 

that is unparalleled in 

development. His work 

at the Grameen Bank 

has been widely studied, 

replicated, praised and 

criticized. His popularization of the idea that small loans to poor people 

could unleash a tidal wave of entrepreneurial potential spoke to those hungry for solutions to poverty, 

preferably simple ones that could be brought to scale 

quickly. Yunus himself and the broader concept of 

microfinance embody a hopefulness that many find 

comforting. In this context, he issued his call to eliminate poverty and put it in a museum. As detailed in 

The Economist, the number of people living in poverty has dropped from 43 percent to 21 percent in 

the past two decades and although the same drastic 

reduction will be more difficult to achieve in the next 

20 years, it may be attainable.

Yunus is certainly not the first to propose such 

a revolution. In fact, since the first stirrings of what 

became known as “development” in the latter half 

of the 20th century, theorists and practitioners have 

puzzled over how to make this happen. Some used 

defines his poverty benchmark as “an income equivalent to one dollar a day or less” (19). For the authors 

of the reading from The Economist, “extreme poverty” 

is benchmarked at $1.25 a day or less and the lives of 

people below that line are “nasty, brutish and short” 

(p. 11). I leave to another day a debate as to whether 

reaching the threshold of $1.26 would transform 

their lives into something that much better. So perhaps the title of my course is safe, at least for now. 

The op-eds turned in by these budding development professionals at end of the seminar reflected 

how their initial curiosity had evolved into an 

understanding of the bottom-up approach. I found 

the pieces a joy to read and testament to the applicarandomized controlled trials to seek the magic elixir 

that would produce the desired result. Others followed their gut or relied on anecdotal evidence. Was 

education the great engine of growth? Better health? 

Employment? Some of these, none of these? All of 

these at once? Programs that yielded robust empirical results, such as cash transfers, were scrutinized for 

political viability and their impact on accountability. 

It seemed an intractable maze.

During all of this pondering and hand-wringing, 

the intended beneficiaries were almost never asked 

to comment or participate. The dominant mode of 

operation began with a plan formulated by experts 

that emanated in a straight line from top to bottom. 

After repeatedly failing to demonstrate measurable 

success, and even causing harm in some cases, this 

paradigm began to give way at the margins. Books 

like Portfolios of the Poor documented that poor people 

constantly manage their money and are not frivolous 

or unsophisticated in their spending as some had 

feared. Organizations like The Development GAP agitated within the multilateral system for incremental 

change toward economic justice. The Inter-American 

Foundation proved that critically reflecting on the 

role of the funder, as well as listening to communities 

in need, could yield proposals that suited the context 

and produced consistently better outcomes. Aside 

from a purely technical or numbers-based concern 

for growth, these approaches also suggested a funda-
Grassroots Development 2014 35 59

tion of an analysis that confirms the importance of 

listening and responding to grassroots voices. The 

piece written by Meleah Paull reinforces the importance of embracing a bottom-up perspective toward 

poverty alleviation as well as the value of bringing 

to the graduate classroom the lessons from the Inter 

American Foundation’s grassroots approach.

Robert Maguire served as IAF representative for Haiti and 

the Caribbean from 1979 to 1999. Among his publications 

is Bottom-Up Development in Haiti (Inter-American 

Foundation: 1981). 

mental shift in the relationships. Rather than donors 

and recipients, they envisioned partners who treated 

each other with respect. Yet these alternatives remain 

exceptions to the rule. 

Muhammad Yunus argues that poverty “is not 

natural to human beings—it is artificially imposed 

on them.” I agree that poverty is a social construct, 

but that does not make it artificial. The process of 

creating poverty is purposeful, relational and interconnected. Despite the benefits of asking those closest to 

the problem to help identify solutions, development 

continues to function largely as an industry jealous of 

its competitors. Notwithstanding the moral imperative 

to treat poor people as experts in their own right, the 

belief persists that “we know best.” Protest from the 

Global South and criticism from academia are muffled 

by official policy or globalized commercial interests. 

Blaming the poor for their poverty is treated as a kind 

of tautology that releases the “haves” of the world 

from real responsibility. 

Let’s imagine for a moment what a museum 

of poverty would look like—the haggard faces and 

primitive houses enclosed behind glass, the glossy 

pamphlets that inform concisely, the numbers 

shocking with their size then fading from memory. 

In some ways, the museum wouldn’t be too far from 

the perspective in many wealthy countries, that 

poverty is something that happens to other people 

in other places where even practitioners who live 

with it intimately are free to leave and most have 

the means to do so.

 The “less fortunate” will never cease to exist. 

What then is the way forward for a development 

practitioner? There are still opportunities to make 

progress toward healthier lives, stronger communities and more equitable access. As Yunus pointed 

out, we have the technology and the resources, it’s a 

matter of will. This doesn’t necessarily require more 

money but it does require the acknowledgement that 

the poor know best and the insistence that nothing about them should be done without them. We 

need to ask questions of and involve those whose 

thorough personal knowledge of poverty stems from 

living it every day. We must make a commitment to 

real collaboration, a commitment to working from 

the bottom up toward a fairer and more prosperous 

global landscape. 

Meleah Paull received her M.A. in May and is working for 

World Learning.
60 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF

Chronic Violence and the Challenge

to Grassroots Organizations

By Tani Adams

What happens to us when high levels of violence 

become normal? To our development as human 

beings, our relationships with others, our attitudes and 

actions as citizens and to the practice of democracy?   

I began to ask myself these questions in 2005, 

while living in Guatemala. It had been almost 10 years 

since the Peace Accords had ended 30 years of internal armed conflict. However, despite all the efforts to 

rebuild society, a new kind of fear and uncertainty 

had entered our lives. Kidnappings, homicides and 

extortions flared again, but they no longer obeyed the 

relentless but clear logic of wartime. A young man in 

the organization that I directed was killed—for his cell 

phone. A friend was kidnapped and held at gunpoint 

for a day so that the robbers could empty his meager 

bank account and steal his car. 

A drug dealer opened a bar next door to our 

house, using prostitutes and loud ranchera music to 

move drugs in the local tourist economy. The neighborhood committee that had for years taken such 

good care of our corner of town stopped functioning. Neighbors averted their eyes when passing on 

the street. Government officials said the problem was 

beyond their control. The press never mentioned it. 

Finally, after being followed at odd times of day, we 

saw no alternative to posting a “for sale” sign on our 

house to signal that we were backing off. Throughout 

all this, what struck me most, even about myself, was 

the paralysis and the silence.

In 2011, when I decided to look more deeply, I 

discovered that our experience in Guatemala was 

consistent with a global phenomenon. According 

to a report issued by the World Bank in 2011, today 

“one in four people on the planet, more than 1.5 

billion, live in fragile and conflict-affected states or 

in countries with very high levels of criminal violence.” Through an extensive review of literature 

that included contributions from social psychology, 

neurological science, anthropology, political science, economics and environmental science, I built 

a framework that sets forth how chronic violence 

affects human, social and civic development. In this 

context, it turns out, social relations become more 

restricted and conflictive; our civic participation and 

sense of responsibility toward the community suffer 

as do the very prospects for democracy. 

A colleague at the Inter-American Foundation 

invited me to speak to the staff, many of whom were 

increasingly concerned about the challenge of violence 

and unsure of how to respond. My description of the 

structural drivers and the perverse behavioral patterns that violence can provoke resonated with them. 

The IAF then asked me for a preliminary assessment 

of the impact of violence on its work, and we learned 

that violence affected almost 30 percent of the active 

portfolio. The IAF proposed that I coordinate a collective learning process involving staff and grantee 

partners in five countries to explore how to factor this 

reality into development. This article summarizes my 

findings and their implications and describes the IAF’s 

Chronic Violence Learning Project. 

A new lens on a global challenge

The World Health Organization defines violence 

as “the intentional use of physical force or power, 

threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, 

or against a group or community that either results 

in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, 

death, psychological harm, mal-development or 

deprivation” (2002). Threats can be as powerful as 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 61

Detail of a mural in Guatemala depicting “indigenous women against violence.”

Photos by Megan Fletcher
62 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF

physical acts, and violence directed at oneself is as 

important as forms directed externally. Suicides, for 

example, constitute 49 percent of all violent deaths 

worldwide; domestic abuse is pervasive, but often 

invisible. Poverty can be as destructive as physical 

aggression. “Material deprivation reduces people to 

mere survival; insecurity causes families to break up; 

exploitation robs people of their potential; humiliation, exclusion and contempt reach a point at which 

people living in extreme poverty are not recognized 

as human beings....” (International Movement, 2013). 

Chronic violence, a term developed by J. V. Pearce 

in 2007, is violence that occurs and is measured 

“across three dimensions of intensity, space and time: 

• where rates of violent death are at least twice the 

average for the country income category established by the World Bank; 

• where these levels are sustained for five years or 

more; and 

• where acts of violence not necessarily resulting 

in death are recorded at high levels across several 

socialization spaces, such as the household, the 

neighborhood, and the school, contributing to further reproduction of violence over time” 

It occurs where people have few prospects for 

changing these conditions in the short or medium 

term. The long-term fragility or relative absence 

of the state is a significant contributing factor. 

Although chronic violence is most associated with 

urban and extra-urban slums, rural residents in 

today’s fluid and unstable economic and social environment are often just as vulnerable, as are migrant, 

refugee, internally displaced, stateless and other 

transient populations and systematically marginalized groups. While the legacy of conflict, inequality 

and repression is important, today’s violence is colored by rapidly evolving information technologies, 

climate change, intensified processes of globalization and other contemporary dynamics. 

The Chronic Violence Framework 

The Chronic Violence Framework points to a selfperpetuating system driven by both macro- level 

processes as well as by individual, social and civic 

behaviors, values and cultures. The framework has 

six propositions. 

• Chronic violence is generated by multiple macro-level 

processes. These include extreme poverty and growing perceptions of social inequality; historical 

legacies of conflict; migration and displacement; 

the persistent weaknesses of many new democracies and the failure of security-oriented political 

reforms; organized crime and illicit trade; the 

socially destructive impact of classic urbanization policies and certain kinds of economic 

development.

• Chronic violence undermines healthy human development. Vulnerability to chronic violence weakens 

the maternal-infant bond, undermining children’s primary development. Empathy can become 

obstructed by the neurological effects of constant 

stress. Gender and family relations can become 

polarized and weakened, and domestic abuse intensified. Childhood trauma can contribute to lasting 

measurable physical and mental health problems 

and destructive behaviors. 

• Exposure to chronic violence undermines constructive social relations. Relentless fear and uncertainty 

leads to the short-term decision-making necessary 

for survival, preempting more nuanced strategic 

thinking. People tend to isolate themselves, resorting to “social silence” and seeking protection in 

cliques that view outsiders as dangerous “others.” 

Scapegoating and xenophobic attitudes can cause 

people to project blame for violent acts onto others 

and fuel vigilante justice. With few alternatives 

to transcend these conditions, vulnerable groups 

perceive themselves as having no value—as being 

“invisible” or “social zeroes.” Without prospects for 

steady work that lets them transition into adulthood and form families, young men suffer what 

one anthropologist termed “social death,” fueling 

shame, humiliation and rage often associated with 

a search for respect. Young women can establish 

their adulthood by bearing children, but this generates its own destructive consequences. 

• Chronic violence endangers the ability to assume civic 

responsibilities in a community or a nation and weakens 

support for democracy. The search for safety behind 

walls, barriers, security gates and guards increasingly separates and alienates upper-, middle- and 

lower-income people from each other. Criminals 

assume para-state power, filling the vacuum left 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 63

by weak or absent authorities. Public support for 

violence and illicit activity grows, as do suspicion of 

due process and human rights and distrust of government. Less studied is the tendency of vulnerable 

citizens to perceive themselves as passive victims.

• Chronic violence is a systemic process that affects every 

aspect of human development and is reproduced via the 

interaction of macro-level processes and individual, social 

and civic behaviors, practices, and attitudes described 

above. Licit and illicit values, practices and institutions overlap and become confused, creating a “grey 

zone” in which the distinction between moral and 

immoral, right and wrong, legal and illegal become 

blurred. Chronic and repeated exposure to violence can lead to chronic traumatization and further 

destructive behaviors.

• Chronic violence constitutes a new perverse normality that must be addressed in ways that contemplate 

its systematic, self-perpetuating and lasting nature.

Because they are multi-faceted and persistent, the 

social and political trends associated with chronic 

violence become naturalized. 

The Chronic Violence Framework enables us to 

perceive the interlinked nature of a challenge currently seen as a collection of disparate problems labeled 

Item on exhibit at Instituto Internacional de Aprendizaje para la Reconciliación Social, Guatemala City.
64 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF

domestic, youth, gang, school, criminal or political, 

each with its own solution. Is the problem the violence 

caused by the young men who joined the gang? Is it the 

parents who abused or neglected them as children? The 

school system that didn’t serve them well? The media 

that portray gang members as monsters? The local 

economy that offered no alternative to pushing drugs? 

Or the culture that values men who show their power 

by displaying guns, money, expensive cars and brutality 

toward women? This framework shifts our perspective 

to a notion of violence as a systemic phenomenon with 

multiple causes and effects. 

Instead of focusing on specific kinds of violence 

in certain populations, the primary focus becomes 

the integral experience of violence from the perspectives of those who live it. 

Thematically and institutionally isolated—

siloed—approaches give way to more holistic 

approaches that are intersectorial, interdisciplinary, intergenerational and relational. All these 

related aspects of a challenge need to be understood 

no matter where one begins to act. Finally, this 

framework shifts the major long-term objective of 

traditional programs attempting to reduce or eliminate specific kinds of quantifiable violence toward 

the goal of “enabling” groups vulnerable to multiple 

forms of violence to “thrive.” The Chronic Violence 

Framework challenges us to develop system-based 

approaches, to support research and create platforms 

that let us “learn to see the elephant from every side.” 

What is the IAF doing? 

Community-based action takes on particular importance in contexts of chronic violence, which tends 

to undermine constructive and inclusive social 

action. The framework shows how critical the 

dynamic is to the IAF’s efforts to help communities build agency, and our initial assessment showed 

how extensively the IAF—its partners, projects and 

staff—are affected by violence. How are grantee 

partners responding to chronic violence? What 

happens to the communities the IAF supports when 

they live with chronic violence? What responses 

may they already have developed? What others 

could emerge? How can the IAF support and encourage them? How does addressing this issue ensure 

that IAF-funded organizations have a larger impact?, 

The IAF’s Chronic Violence Learning Project, launched 

in late 2012 to probe these questions, began as a 

year-long process of reflection that engaged grantee 

partners affected by violence in Colombia, Ecuador, 

El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico:

• Corporación Taller Prodesal, which works with 

displaced Colombians who have organized in the 

community of Galilea; 

• Asociación Afroecuatoriana de Mujeres 

Progresistas, a grassroots organization of 200 

Afro-Ecuadoran women who have joined forces 

to improve livelihoods in a marginal urban settlement in Guayaquil;

• Fundación para el Desarrollo Juvenil (FDJ), serving 

at-risk youths, including former gang members in 

San Salvador; 

• Sa Qa Chol Nimla k’aleb’aal (SANK) comprising 

indigenous K’ek’chí Guatemalans who have organized around communal land rights in Chisec; and, 

• K’inal Ansetik, a weaving cooperative for indigenous Mexican women in Chiapas. 

Collaborators included Marcy Kelley and Juanita 

Roca of the IAF and Philip Thomas, who has many 

years of experience designing and leading collective processes of learning and reflection. Together 

we came up with a step-by-step methodology for 

exploring what chronic violence is and what it 

means for participants and their communities. An 

initial test in Guatemala enabled us to fine tune 

the approach. Then, during June and July of 2013, 

Juanita Roca and Marcy Kelley, along with their 

colleagues Seth Jesse, Gabriela Boyer, José Toasa, 

Amanda Fagerblom and Megan Fletcher, facilitated 

three-day workshops to confirm the utility of the 

concept. We also tried to grasp the vulnerability and 

resilience of their communities.

The learning process started with a discussion of 

personal experiences with violence, an experience 

in itself novel for many. Participants deconstructed 

their stories based on culture, relationships, feelings and external influences. This exercise helped 

them perceive how violence affects every aspect of 

their lives and demonstrated the consistent patterns in responses. “Even if we could fix [one kind 

of violence], it still doesn’t take violence away,” said 

one participant. Through images from magazines, 
Grassroots Development 2014 35 65

and, in one instance, pictures of the local community, participants were introduced to the six 

propositions of the framework. Some resonated powerfully. Participants quickly understood the need 

to approach domestic, youth, drug and political 

violence as different facets of a single system. The 

old slogan that “violence begets violence” assumed 

fresh meaning. As one participant said, “When one 

is immersed in violence, it is contagious, it becomes 

an everyday occurrence and isn’t limited to a specific type.” Another expressed frustration. “I’ve been 

a victim of violence, first from my father, then from 

my first husband. I participated in domestic violence workshops that kept talking about how we are 

victims but didn’t analyze that violence is of many 

types and it affects us all.”

Adult participants, deeply aware of the challenges 

facing their children and grandchildren, were moved 

by the tragic consequences when young men cannot 

find legitimate work and opportunities. The idea 

that violence can be transmitted intergenerationally 

through trauma was particularly strong. Protecting 

children from violence was the arena that participants felt that they could most influence, but the 

powerful reality of domestic abuse was difficult for 

many to acknowledge and discuss openly. This paradox speaks to a phenomenon that Primo Levi called 

the “grey zone,” based on his observations of how 

prisoners coped with fear and brutality in Auschwitz, 

where the differences between wrong and right, 

moral and immoral, licit and illicit, victim and perpetrator, become blurred. 

While it is very easy for most of us to describe 

how we are “victimized” by violence, it is much more 

difficult to recognize how we may perpetrate it. A 

participant observed, “We are tired, abandoned and 

fed up with not getting support from the institutions [that should protect us], so we burn tires, we 

close roads. Palm producers kill wildlife, burn all the 

animals and steal our land. What is right, should we 

keep waiting?” It was also hard to reflect on the tendency for people who live in constant fear to blame 

others. Some participants who identified as of indigenous or African descent had difficulty recognizing 

their own xenophobia or scapegoating.

As part of the group process, participants volunteered to be Martians and look at the situations 

they described from an outsider’s point of view. “I’d 

be scared to walk into this community,” many said. 

The concept became key for the rest of the workshop. 

Participants mapped on a timeline events in the history of their respective organization or community, 

to understand the effect and evolution of violence 

as well as to identify strategies used to transcend difficulties. “We’ve learned to see not only the negative 

but also the positive,” one said. Many commented 

that this workshop represented their first opportunity 

to reflect on an issue that has become part of everyday life. “Those things that happen are now not only 

about each of us alone but affect us all.” 

At the end of the year-long exercise, the IAF 

brought together representatives from each organization to think about next steps. Over three days, a 

consensus emerged to move forward and

• continue to fine tune the Chronic Violence 

Framework and develop a range of tools to enable 

interested groups to work with it; 

• refine the methodology for collective learning and 

explore means to equip others to use it; 

• identify collaborators in each country with similar 

interest in the challenges of violence and in community-based responses, as the first step toward 

creating a network of allies;

• develop a methodology for the original organizations to use in recording case studies that explore 

how chronic violence affects the community and 

organization, and mechanisms to address it; and 

• build support for the vulnerable, including for 

themselves. 

“The Inter-American Foundation hopes to enable 

both itself and its partners to deepen understanding,” concluded Juanita Roca, IAF representative for 

Colombia. “As we advance with this learning process, we may be able to replicate it in other countries, 

incorporate the lens into our grantmaking and 

discover with our partners ways to mobilize social 

capital toward successfully addressing the challenges 

that communities face.”

Tani Adams is an anthropologist and practitioner. Her 

most recent research will be published in late 2014 by the 

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. 
66 Grassroots Development 2014 35

At the IAF Resource

Goodbye, Brazil: Émigrés from the Land of Soccer 

and Samba

By Maxine L. Margolis

Minneapolis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

This year Brazil will hold its eighth presidential election since its return to democracy in 1985. Much has 

changed over three decades. Brazil is hailed as a rising 

regional power and an apparently prosperous one. So 

it’s easy to lose sight of the multiple economic crises 

that characterized the transition from dictatorship to 

democracy and easier still to miss a less-well known 

phenomenon launched during those years. Financial 

pressure made Brazilians look for opportunities abroad, 

reversing a migratory trend in a country formerly on 

the receiving end. Migration to Brazil, particularly 

from surrounding countries, continues today, but far 

more people leave the country than enter. 

Maxine L. Margolis is an American anthropologist who has researched Brazilian culture and 

emigration since the 1980s. Since her first book, Little 

Brazil: An Ethnography of Brazilian Immigrants in New 

York City, appeared in 1994, she has extended her 

investigation into other U.S. cities as well as Europe 

and Japan. This most recent work explores the migration pattern more broadly—the reasons, the diaspora 

and the links to home. Less than 2 percent of Brazil’s 

200 million citizens live abroad and their remittances 

amount to “a drop in the bucket,” Margolis says, 

given the size of the Brazilian economy. Nonetheless, 

she insists, this diaspora has had a notable impact.

Why has migration occurred? Who are the émigrés? Why do they choose their destinations? How 

do they fare? The first Brazilians to leave were predominately middle-class males from Minas Gerais, 

specifically the city of Governador Valadares. They 

saw the move as an opportunity, not a necessity. 

Gradually this profile changed to include blue-collar 

workers, including women, who took more expensive and more dangerous routes to destinations that 

reflected their class, finances, education, community of origin, even ancestry—a basis for a legitimate 

claim to citizenship in Japan and Italy that did not 

and does not neutralize discrimination. 

Diaspora enclaves often replicate the social hierarchy that migrants thought they had left behind. A 

commonality that many 

share is what Margolis 

calls a “fall from grace” 

as they accept jobs that 

that pay decently but 

would rank as low-status in Brazil: childcare, 

construction, prostitution. Margolis notes that 

especially in the United 

States, Brazilian identity 

hinges on distinguishing the “otherness” of 

Hispanics/Latino and emphasizing uniqueness, which 

does not make for cohesion. “[T]heir common ethnicity does not bind them in organized cooperative 

associations,” Margolis writes. “[O]bservers of Brazilian 

communities have remarked upon their apparent disunity and lack of ethnic-based organizations.” Many 

Brazilians see themselves as “sojourners,” not settlers, 

and hold onto a desire to return home. But will they? 

Margolis leaves us with that question. 

Margolis’ global perspective incorporates data 

collected from her own extensive ethnographic 

work and synthesizes other studies as well as media 

reports. Given the illegal nature of some migration 

flows, citing an accurate figure on Brazilian emigrants 

is difficult; Margolis uses figures from the American 

Community Survey undertaken by the U.S. Census 

Bureau and from the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign 

Affairs. She also digs into the tension between migration and development. In Brazil, remittances improve 

conditions for families and are not invested in community development and children left behind “see 

no reason to work hard in school or pursue a career” 

because they too expect to leave. Migration has 

given rise to a complex of travel agents, smugglers 

and recruiters in service to the business of sending 

Brazilians abroad on an industrial scale. However, 

some push factors are missing from the discussion, 

which could have benefited from a more robust 

analysis of the role of race relations, class structure 

and the education gap. Nonetheless Margolis’ book 

is a splendid introduction to migration from this 

fascinating country.—Alejandra Argueta, former IAF 

program staff assistant
Grassroots Development 2014 35 3

www.iaf.gov
Contents

Perspectives Updated

Leadership at the Grassroots: 

Lawrence Doesn’t Live Here Anymore 

Patrick Breslin

Disabilities and Inclusion in Paraguay

Eduardo Rodríguez-Frías

Audits: Beyond the Bottom Line

Michael Campbell

How the Law Constrains Freedom 

of Association in the Americas

Jocelyn Nieva

Forum for Fellows’ Findings:

Women and the Globalized Economy

Volunteer Tourism and Mayan Weavers: 

Friendship, Friction and Fair Trade 

Rebecca Nelson

Seasons and Uncertainty: 

Temporeras in Chile’s Fruit Industry

Jelena Radovic Fanta

At the IAF

To Lake Titicaca and Back Again: 

Reflections on a Calling 

Kevin Healy

Bottom-Up Development in the Classroom

Robert Maguire

Chronic Violence and the Challenge to 

Grassroots Organizations

Tani Adams

Resource