Guatemala: Alicia Amalia Rodríguez Illescas

Fight for earning rights.

— Alicia Amalia Rodríguez Illescas

Alicia Amalia Rodríguez Illescas (57): mother, diplomat, Doctor in Political Science, professor, feminist, promoter of laws, and defender of the human rights of women. She has built her life on wisdom, uprightness and devotion. She dedicates her life to engineering a better future. Along with other women, she rebels, makes proposals and takes decisions.

The fundamental goal of her work is to concretize the institutionalization of women's rights in Guatemala. “If we manage to incorporate them into the State and society's thinking, we will have done the most complicated job, the one of longest duration.” She is a woman with soaring ambitions for change. She dreams of “the creation of human beings who are capable of teaching, of investigating, of developing, with a different scientific focus. We have to change the patriarchal view of things in all sectors. The challenge is to make the structure permeable, to change history, science and academic thought.” Alicia Amalia Rodríguez Illescas, diplomat, professor, investigator, promoter of laws, feminist, transforms whatever she touches with her alchemy. She lost her father when she was two years old. With her mother, she learned to fight, not to surrender herself. Rigorous and multifaceted, for her, peace is a state of internal and external harmony. “It can be reached with justice, with access to and equality of opportunities for all humankind to grow up and develop.” Bold and reflective, she thinks that “development, peace and justice are synonyms.” She introduced an area for women's and young people's studies in the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flasco), and she is also the coordinator of the Beijing Committee in Guatemala. She has been fighting, with all her strength, for the last 30 years, for a more equal order. Aware of the stumbling blocks in her way, she does not delay and looks forward. “A peaceful woman is a woman who develops, gives her opinion, participates, deliberates, leads. She is capable of evolving along with the social whole, with the country and with peace in world.”

Beijing Committee