Growing out of the Peace Accords ending 36 years of
civil war, these laws were designed to drive community
development from the grassroots. They present
an unprecedented opportunity for communities to
collectively determine their needs by planning infrastructure,
health, safety, education, environmental and
other projects, and to work with their municipalities
to fund and audit their implementation.

Unfortunately most of the people the laws were designed to
empower, if even aware of them, do not know how to
use them. A dearth of knowledge, coupled with a
culture of authoritarianism and violence towards
indigenous, campesino and other dispossessed
people, hampers their use.
Because community councils are the essential building
blocks for participatory democracy in post-war
Guatemala, their flowering across the Guatemalan
landscape is imperative for maintaining Guatemala’s
fragile peace.

This is the fundamental work of Asociación Nahual –
to stimulate the formation of highly functioning
community development councils. Nahual maintains
a training/community center in Antigua,
Sacatepéquez, to teach community members how to
form community development councils and to use
them effectively to drive community-determined
projects. It presents its “live” training series, certified
by IGER, the Guatemalan Institute of Radio
Education, every week in Antigua, and elsewhere in
Guatemala, during the year.

Image kindly supplied by La Ruta Maya

Nahual also provides advice and accompaniment to
community members forming community development
councils, and works with a variety of organizations
and government institutions to communicate the
importance of effective functioning of the community
council system.

Through its committees on
a wide range of community development issues,
Nahual stimulates, guides, and implements demonstration
projects that provide hands-on illustrations of
what people can do in their own villages with the
planning, funding and auditing provisions of the
community council development laws.

Asociación Nahual puts special emphasis on empowering
the indigenous population of Guatemala, which
suffered unthinkable devastation during the civil war,
and which is desperate for the kind of training and
guidance offered by Asociación Nahual. Nahual’s goal
is to insure that fully-functioning and highly effective
community development councils exist in every village
across Guatemala.