In the first half of this year, seven girls aged between 10 and 14 gave birth in Guatemala every single day.

Guatemalan law states that these 1,298 girls are the victims of sexual violence. Medical professionals say their pregnancies pose a high risk to their physical and mental health. But the Asociación la Familia Importa (AFI), Guatemala’s most influential anti-abortion organisation, has focused on preventing such girls from having abortions at any cost – and it is succeeding.

Since its inception in 2013, the AFI, a non-profit whose name translates as the Family Matters Association, has quickly grown into a well-resourced organisation with an outsized, but stealthy, impact on most Guatemalans’ lives, health and rights. Its influence has spread through the country’s Congress, the government and the wider human rights movement across the Americas.

Over the past decade, the AFI has made its presence felt in debates around a cluster of issues important to the Catholic and most Christian churches: LGBTIQ rights, reproductive rights including abortion, sex education for children, euthanasia, gay marriage, the list goes on.

Much of its success is down to the organisation’s strategy of presenting itself as an independent advocacy group focused on defending ‘unborn children’ and the family – tropes often used by those opposing reproductive autonomy and LGBTQ rights.

Now, a joint investigation by openDemocracy and Guatemalan independent media platform Guatemala Leaks has established that the AFI is closely linked to a wider, well-funded network of anti-gender groups. These include Opus Dei, a secretive and powerful organisation within the Catholic church, a US-based anti-abortion Catholic organisation, and members of the Guatemalan elite.

Our reporters spoke to politicians, public servants and academics to sketch a granular picture that reveals the scale and networked nature of the global backlash against gender rights. A flood of money from conservative groups in Europe and the US has spawned dozens of small but well-connected groups, each with their own innocuous-sounding acronymic names, that serve up a beguiling cocktail of bona fide charitable work mixed with dangerous anti-rights work that puts the lives of women and LGTBIQ people at risk.

As recently as last month, AFI executive director Ligia Briz travelled to Washington to meet with members of the ADF, a legal group that was instrumental in the move to reverse the right to abortion in the US; the Family Research Council, which has been involved in funding and promoting harmful conversion therapies against LGBTIQ people; and the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative think tank that authored Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s second term that would undermine democracy.

The AFI is far from the only such organisation active in Latin America. openDemocracy has previously reported on similar organisations such as Mexico’s VIFAC and the globally dispersed World Youth Alliance, which even managed to secure EU funding to spread anti-abortion falsehoods.

But in Guatemala – a country where half the population lives in poverty, abortion is practically illegal, the LGBTIQ community is routinely discriminated against, and sex education is almost non-existent – the AFI’s rapid growth serves as a useful case study to understand the toolkit of the global anti-rights movement.

Building a political lobby

An anti-abortion movement has existed in Guatemala for decades. The country’s constitution “guarantees and protects human life from conception”, meaning abortion is banned in all circumstances, except when the life of the pregnant person is in danger.

As a country, Guatemala is almost 90% Christian with Catholics accounting for nearly 45% of the population and other sects accounting for another 42%.

But back in 2013, it seemed like Christian conservatism’s stranglehold on Guatemalan society was at risk. Public schools had recently begun to introduce comprehensive sexuality education (CSE), which has been shown to promote healthy relationships and prevent sexual violence, risky sexual activity and unwanted pregnancies. Such education is rejected by socially conservative groups, which claim that it sexualises young children because it covers teachings about gender stereotypes, reproductive rights and sexual diversity.

A year previously in 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found Costa Rica’s ban on in vitro fertilisation (IVF) violated the American Convention on Human Rights. Its landmark ruling recognised reproductive rights as human rights and established that an embryo is not a person and the protection of the right to life is not absolute, but gradual, incremental and relative to other rights involved.

This ruling worried Central America’s anti-abortion movement, particularly in countries that at the time had total or almost total abortion bans: Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

It was against this backdrop that the AFI was founded in Guatemala in 2013. Since then, the group’s legal team has successfully lobbied Congress for or against legislation and engaged with politicians in discussions. It mobilises conservatives and different religious denominations to oppose any initiative that it believes could open the door to abortion rights, euthanasia or comprehensive sexuality education.

One of the AFI’s earliest victories made its influence clear and visible: In 2017, the group campaigned to stop a bill in the Guatemalan Congress that would have granted abortion rights and other compensation to underage victims of sexual violence. In response, AFI members organised marches to oppose the bill, met with officials and toured TV shows to argue the bill would only further traumatise girls, and even tried to prevent the initiative from being debated in Congress.

Their efforts worked. The bill was shelved in September 2018 after being rejected by Congress’s Women’s Commission, which was led by legislator Aníbal Rojas, who later joined an anti-abortion caucus of parliamentarians supported by the AFI.

But the AFI didn’t stop there. Whenever rights for women, children, youth and LGBTIQ people have been discussed in Guatemala in recent years, the group has been present – and its views have often prevailed.

But even as the AFI grew in stature and influence, its members were careful to adopt a nonpartisan facade in public.

The elite and the Work of God

openDemocracy and Guatemala Leaks analysis of the AFI’s incorporation documents reveals that six of its ten founders are linked to private colleges and schools associated with Opus Dei. The organisation – which was dramatised in Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code – has been described as one of the most controversial and powerful in the Catholic Church.

Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, a priest who wanted to encourage Catholics to pursue religion in their everyday lives, particularly at work. The group, whose name means Work of God in Latin, was granted the status of personal prelature – a Catholic structure made up of clergy and laity who work to carry out specific pastoral activities – by Pope John Paul II in 1982.

Today, Opus Dei has around 95,000 members in more than 60 countries across the world. Its members embrace an extreme version of Catholic doctrine, including chastity, the refusal to use contraceptives and even self-mortification. They also see abortion as murder and marriage as a devine plan.

Opus Dei has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. The group has been accused of being an international “hotbed” of right-wing and economic neoliberalism and two recent books describe it as a cult-like organisation whose goals are to gather economic and political power in order to impose its ultra-conservative Christian agenda. The group has denied the allegations as “false”, “outright lies” and “conspiracy theories”.

In 2021, 42 women submitted a complaint to the Vatican, accusing an Opus Dei branch in Argentina of having recruited them when they were poor children and teenagers to serve as an unpaid workforce for wealthy members of the order. The women say they were forced away from their families and into vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. Earlier this year, an investigation by the Financial Times uncovered similar allegations about Opus Dei branches in the US and Europe.

Argentina’s prosecutor’s office opened a criminal investigation against former senior leaders of the group on charges of labour exploitation and trafficking in September. Responding to the news in a statement, Opus Dei said it “categorically denies the accusation of human trafficking and deems a judicial investigation is necessary to clarify the situation definitively”.

In Guatemala, four of the AFI’s founders worked at the University of the Isthmus (UNIS), a private higher education institute in Guatemala that has a “spiritual care agreement” with Opus Dei. Typically, Opus Dei institutions are owned by nonprofit or cultural associations run by Opus members as private persons. In this way, the order itself has neither ownership nor legal responsibilities over them and limits its involvement to offering them spiritual guidance.

The four founders are Humberto Grazioso, UNIS’s former dean of law and a former Supreme Court judge; Mayra Figueroa de Poggio, the head of studies at the same faculty; Mirna Cardona de González, the university’s dean of education; and Elvira Estradé, who has taught courses at UNIS and is married to the rector of the Centro Universitario Ciudad Vieja, a private residence that serves as the primary accommodation for Opus Dei students in Guatemala.

Two other AFI founders have links to the Association for Educational Development (APDE), a network of schools whose programs are “inspired by the thought and work of” Escrivá, Opus Dei’s founder. They are Carlos Melgar, the APDE’s executive director, and marriage counsellor Manola Escaler de Pieters, an activist at Alive, a marriage promotion organisation founded by several APDE school principals.

The remaining four founders are not linked to Opus Dei but have similar conservative Catholic backgrounds and strong connections to the worlds of politics and business. Alexandra Sol, who chaired AFI between 2013 and 2019, has a long history as an anti-abortion activist and is married to Alfredo Skinner Klee, one of the partners at the Arenales & Skinner Klee law firm, whose clients have included diplomats, politicians and bankers. Another founder, César Brañas Castillo, is president of the Guatemalan chapter of Human Life International, a US Catholic anti-abortion organisation that encourages its affiliated groups to apply the tactics of so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centres’, which have been accused of misinforming pregnant people to dissuade them from having abortions.

Opus Dei responded to openDemocracy and Guatemala Leaks’s interview requests with a written statement: “The prelature does not have any formal relationship with Asociación La Familia Importa (AFI). A key principle of our institution is respect for the freedom of its members in professional, political, social and economic matters.”

It continued: “Any participation of the prelature’s faithful in professional, social or trade organisations, or even in a neighbourhood committee, is always done in a personal capacity, with full autonomy to adopt the positions they consider most appropriate on incidental issues, just like any citizen in a free and democratic society.

“Opus Dei has exclusively spiritual aims: to help to find Christ in work, family life and other ordinary activities. In professional, social, political or economic matters, its members act with freedom and personal responsibility”.

The AFI, meanwhile, rejected openDemocracy and Guatemala Leaks’s request for an interview and released a statement on its social media accounts saying it was “aware that a ‘reportage’ is being prepared to be published [... and is] being financed by the activist website openDemocracy”.

It added: “This platform is funded by individual donors and organisations, such as George Soros' Open Foundation, which promotes feminism and gender ideology (abortion, hormonisation of minors, promotion of contraception for children, among other things).

“In view of this, we wish to express our categorical rejection of any information published in such material, as we consider that its purpose is to distort the truth, generate scandal and discredit us as Asociación La Familia Importa (AFI), leader of the pro-life and pro-family cause in Guatemala and the region, as well as its members, founders and team.”

Permeating institutions

In the decade since it was established, the AFI has spawned a network of more than 40 allied organisations and is part of a regional phenomenon, explained sociologist Ana Lucía Ramazzini, who has studied Guatemala’s anti-abortion and anti-LGBTIQ movement.

In past decades, these groups were small grassroots religious organisations, whose work was carried out on an ad hoc, reactionary basis. Now, Ramazzini explained, they seek to be part of the public realm and have a long-term plan to push their ideas. “It is not a backlash,” she said, “it is not a reaction, it’s a quest for institutionalisation of their agenda.”

The AFI’s legal team lobbies Congress and politicians, participates in congressional discussions and supports a ‘pro-life’ caucus.

But the AFI’s priorities “are not aligned with the national reality, nor do they have a rights perspective,” said Mirna Montenegro, a physician and director of OSAR, a non-profit organisation whose name translates as Observatory on Sexual and Reproductive Health in English and which works on monitoring the care of girls victims of sexual violence and on preventing child pregnancy.

For instance, in the past two presidential elections in Guatemala, the AFI urged candidates to pledge that they would not recognise abortion rights or equal marriage, that they were committed to Guatemala remaining in the Geneva Consensus Declaration (a global anti-abortion initiative launched by Donald Trump’s administration in 2020), and that they would place people sympathetic to this agenda in key government positions.

Incumbent progressive president Bernardo Arévalo and his Semilla party, which won the 2023 election, were among the few who refused to sign the AFI’s pledges. Former president Alejandro Giammattei of the conservative Vamos party agreed to the pledges at the 2019 election, which he won. During Giammattei’s tenure, one of the AFI’s founders, lawyer Sandy Recinos, took over the Office against Sexual Violence, Exploitation and Trafficking.

It has been years since Congress passed legislation to advance the regulation of issues on gender or reproduction. Sandra Morán, a former left-wing congresswoman who authored the 2017 bill to fight sexual violence against girls and adolescents, explained that these issues are essentially “blocked” as there are more deputies in Congress belonging to conservative parties than progressive ones.

Meanwhile, the AFI has occasionally found common cause with progressive civil society organisations. The organisation also supported a reform to the Penal Code that introduced cybercrimes against minors and tried to promote initiatives in favour of breastfeeding and child protection.

In 2020, the AFI successfully lobbied the Guatemalan government to stop Planned Parenthood, a US organisation that promotes sexual and reproductive rights, from opening a branch in the country. Former president Giammattei overturned a decision by his interior minister to grant Planned Parenthood the required authorisation, leading the minister to resign.

Polarising politics

Former legislator Roberto Alejos told openDemocracy and Guatemala Leaks that the AFI has contributed to polarising Congress.

Alejos explained that for many politicians who don’t identify with the left, it is easier to position themselves with the hard conservatism of AFI than to hold a more moderate position. Doing so means conservative lobby groups such as AFI, which are particularly vocal in Guatemalan politics, will turn a blind eye to any future criticism. These politicians “act out of convenience and because they don't fit on the progressive side, they go to the other side. There is no middle ground,” he said.

The AFI also attacks public servants who promote equal rights. Lawyer Jordán Rodas, who was the human rights ombudsman between 2017 and 2022, described the AFI as “a group that represents the most conservative interests and is aligned with the oligarchy”.

Speaking to openDemocracy and Guatemala Leaks, Rodas explained how the group worked to stop him from carrying out his duties and openly attacked him for speaking out in favour of LGBTIQ rights.

“The most difficult moments of my term were when dealing with issues of sexual and reproductive rights and sexual diversity, which are very sensitive for this group,” he said. “They threatened my office, but I had the political skill and social backing to make it to the end of the mandate.”

The AFI also went to the Supreme Court to obtain a legal order to prevent Rodas from distributing a manual on care in early pregnancy – which had been drafted by his predecessor – that described abortion as a right. The group then called for his dismissal and prosecution when he allegedly did not withdraw the manual from circulation quickly enough.

“They wanted to file an impeachment against me because they said I had failed to comply with the order,” he said. “In addition to the legal action, they made them heard by conservative media.”

The former ombudsman called into question the AFI’s idea of family. “Family matters, yes, but what family? For me, a single mother is a family, a couple of sexual diversity is a family. The traditional family is one kind, but there are other kinds.”

Influencing government and penetrating schools

The AFI and its allied groups, which it calls ‘the AFI Network’, have in recent years focused a lot of their work on the teaching of sex education in schools.

One of the organisations in its network, Enlace, in 2018 signed an agreement with Guatemala’s Ministry of Education to provide scholarships and diploma courses for public school teachers until 2021, according to a copy of the agreement we obtained through a public information request.

Enlace’s training promotes chastity, denies sexual diversity and reproductive autonomy, and demonises divorce and contraceptives – including condoms, which not only prevent pregnancy but sexually transmitted diseases – as evils imposed by gender ideology.

The government’s response to our information request revealed Enlace trained 1,300 teachers in 120 schools in 2019 alone.

openDemocracy’s analysis shows the AFI spreads similar messages about CSE and argues that the responsibility for sex education lies with parents, not the government. Montenegro, the director of OSAR, expressed concerns about this argument, asking: “Who is going to provide comprehensive sexual education? 14-year-old mothers who have been victims of violence? Fathers who have raped their daughters?”

In September, the AFI launched a social media campaign supporting a new bill to drastically cut any comprehensive sex education (CSE) effort, give parents veto power over the curriculum, and ban the “promotion of gender ideology, gender reassignment, abortive methods and early promotion of sexuality”. This bill could pass if it wins support from enough of the Conservative parties.

The new bill comes two years after legislator Andrea Villagrán, a member of the governing Semilla party, introduced a bill seeking to make CSE compulsory. Two years on, that bill remains frozen – lacking the votes in Congress to pass.

A global fight

In 2019, conservative lawyer Stuardo Ralón was elected to one of the seven seats on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. A source who witnessed the negotiations leading up to the vote told openDemocracy and Guatemala Leaks that the AFI had pushed forcefully for Ralón’s election – making his victory one of the AFI’s significant wins to date.

“If he was chosen, it was because AFI lobbied quite hard,” said the source, who did not want to be named.

Unsurprisingly, the AFI celebrated Ralón’s election and re-election in 2024. Before joining the IACHR, he had been involved in several AFI activities, including its legal appeal to stop the dissemination of the manual on care for teenage pregnancies and a campaign against legalising abortion in cases of rape. He was also a speaker at several events organised by the group.

Ralón did not agree to an interview for this article. He simply replied in writing: “I have no legal ties with AFI.”

He added: “I am the first Guatemalan to be re-elected to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, being in this second election in the assembly the second most voted candidate from all the member states, states whose governance is plural and with different visions on various issues.”

One case on which Ralón championed the AFI’s view is that of a young Salvadoran woman known as ‘Beatriz’. In 2013, as the AFI was being established in Guatemala, Beatriz, who had been diagnosed with lupus, a serious chronic illness, was pregnant with a foetus that had anencephaly and would not survive outside her womb. Because abortion is illegal in all cases in El Salvador – and is often charged as aggravated homicide, which is punishable by a minimum jail sentence of 30 years – Beatriz was forced to appeal to the country’s Supreme Court for a termination. Her request was denied.

Supported by feminist groups, Beatriz took the case to the IACHR. Months later, when her life was at risk, she underwent a caesarean section, and the baby died hours later. Although Beatriz died in 2017 of pneumonia caused by lupus and her weakened health, her case is still pending. It is the first time the Inter-American Court on Human Rights will rule on an abortion ban and its judgement could have an impact across the region.

But Ralón has already made clear he backs the AFI’s position. “There is no global consensus that there is a right to abortion in the corpus of international human rights law,” the IACHR commissioner wrote in a dissenting opinion submitted to the court.

The AFI is also campaigning against the case and has spread misinformation, falsely claiming campaigners want to legalise abortion to kill children with disabilities. For Montenegro, the AFI is interested only in avoiding an abortion, regardless of whether the baby and mother live or die. “You can’t care only about a baby being born, but about what happens to that baby afterwards.”

Illustration by James Battershill for openDemocracy