JANE FONDA TO BRING ACTIVISTS TO GUATEMALA TO DENOUNCE KILLINGS

December 2, 2003 – (AP in The Guelph Mercury – Canada) Jane Fonda promised Monday to bring a small "army" of women to Guatemala to denounce the murders of about 700 women in the past three years in this crime-plagued Central American nation.

The 66-year-old actor was visiting Guatemala City on behalf of the nonprofit organization V-Day. The group is led by Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler and campaigns around the world to halt violence against women.

Fonda said she'd organize an "army to stand beside Guatemalan women to say to the world what is going on here." Fonda said she would return after the U.S. presidential elections in November 2004 with a group of activists, mainly from the V-Day organization, to pressure the Guatemalan government do something about the killings.

The bodies of about 700 women have been found in Guatemala since 2000. Some 270 bodies have been found so far this year, Fonda said.
Most were victims of gang violence, rapes and other crime. Guatemala has experienced spiralling crime, especially gang violence, since the end
of its 36-year civil war in 1996.

"You have even more women killed than in Ciudad Juarez," Fonda said, referring to the Mexican border city where a series of unsolved murders of women in the past decade has drawn international protests.