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María, a 41-year-old Indigenous Maya woman from Guatemala lives without access to running water.
Three times a week, she makes a two-hour round trip to collect water from a well or ravine, sometimes accompanied by her children.
“Sometimes, we each only drink one glass of water [a day]. There is no more water than that,” she says.
This lack of water affects nearly every aspect of María’s life. With so little available, she can only bathe once a week. Her home has no toilet; instead, she relies on a pit shared by seven people. Her children are often sick with diarrhea or flu-like symptoms. Food is scarce—they eat just twice a day, mainly beans or noodles. The lack of water prevents them from growing their own food.
Like María, millions of Guatemalans face a daily struggle for water and lack access to a dignified sanitation service.
Indigenous people, who have suffered exclusion and been neglected for generations in Guatemala, are disproportionally affected. Women, like María, are also particularly affected, often shouldering the responsibility of water collection for themselves and their families.
And none of this is because there isn’t enough freshwater available. The fact is, Guatemala has more freshwater per capita than the worldwide average. It is very much a structural issue.
Poor water management combined with Guatemala’s persistent poverty and inequality have made it hard to manage water properly and made it difficult to hold people to account when the human right to water is not respected.
The numbers are revealing. Forty percent of Guatemalans do not have access to running water inside their home. And for Indigenous people, access is even worse: More than 50 percent of the Indigenous population lives in households without a water connection inside the home, compared to 33 percent of the non-Indigenous population.
People like María often must take extreme measures to collect, ration, and preserve water, often from unsafe sources, compromising their human rights to health, education, income, and overall quality of life, as a new HRW research reveals.
Guatemala’s authorities should pass legislation that protects water and sanitation as human rights, including by creating a regulatory and financing system that guarantees access to water for personal and domestic use and by imposing a clear sanctions regime for those who pollute water resources.
President Bernardo Arévalo’s government can and should seize this critical opportunity to address a historic debt and drive meaningful change.
Because without water, we are nothing.
