Field Placement: Centro Las Libres de Información en Salud Sexual
Location: Guanajuato, MÈxico
Preceptor: Veronica Cruz Sanchez
Student Name: Lissette Flores
Year: 2004

For 10 weeks during the summer of 2004, I worked with Centro Las Libres de Información en Salud Sexual in Guanajuato, México. Founded in 2000, Centro Las Libres is a non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to promoting and defending women’s sexual and reproductive rights through advocacy efforts, youth promoter trainings, and ongoing educational activities for providers in the medical, legal, and public health sectors.

Centro Las Libres is a member of Milenio Feminista, a national network of over 80 NGOs working at the grassroots level to advance the sexual and reproductive rights of women.

During my internship I worked on the Centro Las Libres’ Legal Abortion Project. In the year 2000, the Guanajuato state Legislature passed a bill that made it a crime for rape survivors to terminate a pregnancy resulting from the assault. Centro Las Libres and other women’s groups organized a statewide protest against the bill; the governor ultimately vetoed the bill. Despite this victory, the state continues to provide inadequate medical and legal services to rape survivors. Government institutions lack official procedures for assuring timely and quality services to survivors of rape seeking a legal abortion. Consequently, the rights of girls and women are consistently violated. When Guanajuato’s governor vetoed the bill national polls indicated that the majority of Mexican citizens were in support of the initiative.

In collaboration with Ipas, Centro Las Libres was in the process of conducting interviews with public and private institutions in several states to learn about what services were available to survivors of sexual violence. This project was part of a larger effort to monitor and analyze the procedures by which government and private agencies specializing in sexual crimes handle rape cases. I was responsible for interviewing social workers, psychologists, doctors and persons in charge of setting policy within private and public hospitals and other government entities. The interview contained questions about the services each of the institutions offered, the protocols set in place to deal with rape survivors, the person’s role within the institution as well as the person’s views about Emergency Contraception (EC) and abortion. Once completed, information from States across Mexico would be compiled in order to identify key issues on which NGOs should focus their attention.

Centro Las Libres is also working on building a statewide network of youth health promoters so that they can monitor the quality of reproductive and sexual health services in their local community health centers and advocate for quality medical care. I was involved in these trainings as a facilitator. Trainings focus on topics such as family planning, violence, sexual and reproductive rights and advocacy skills.

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