Guatemala – Revictimising the Victim

As a member of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission’s 2007 delegation, I spent a week interviewing parents, leaders of women’s groups, and government officials about the killing of young women in Guatemala. We wanted to know why the number of murdered women in Guatemala has more than doubled since 2000.

We also wanted to know why less than 20 of the more than 3,000 cases of murdered women have been resolved by the justice system.

Shortly after college, I moved to Guatemala City and worked there as a teacher for two years, from 2004 to 2006. I learned to teach drama, learned to dance salsa, and also learned, fairly quickly, that most of the friends I would have in Guatemala would be males. I rarely saw women my age out at night, and many of the young female teachers at my school were prohibited by their families from leaving home after dark. I bemoaned what I attributed to a macho culture and conservative family values and made friends instead with women from outside Guatemala and with Guatemalan men. Only this summer did I begin to fully understand why women in Guatemala do not come out at night.

Women – mostly between the ages of 13 and 30 – are being raped, tortured, mutilated, murdered, and left often in very public places. These brutal murders, and the failure of the state to address even one percent of them in meaningful ways, have left women rightfully terrified, wary of making themselves vulnerable by leaving home at night.

As a delegation of nine Americans from all over the United States, we extended solidarity to parents of victims and to groups working for women’s rights in Guatemala. In our meetings, we also asked why the murders of women have increased so dramatically in recent years, why the government has done so little to address the problem, and what role we might play in changing the tide of violence. Because so few of the murders have been investigated, very little specific information exists about why women are killed and who is responsible for their suffering and deaths. There were no simple answers to our questions. But by speaking with people whose daily lives are deeply affected by violence against women in Guatemala, we were able to better understand the broad causes of femicide and we found ways to contribute to the work of effecting positive change.

The Rise of Feminism in a Macho Culture

“This is a country where patriarchy dominates on an institutional and familial level.” – Dora Bagley of the Presidential Secretariat on Women (SEPREM) [1]

As more and more Guatemalan women seek to attend school and enter the workforce, they risk confrontations with a male-dominated society that often employs violence to force women back into limited roles within the home. The emergence of feminism has been made both painful and slow by machismo, an ancient force whose heavy boots we heard marching through stories of both domestic and political violence against women.

At the Coordinating Group of Traditional Midwives of the State of Quetzaltenango (CODECOT), a midwives’ association in Quetzaltenango, Maria Cecilia Escobar explained that many women face resistance from their husbands even to enter into the traditional field of midwifery.[2] According to Escobar, wives are beaten for attempting to leave the home to attend the workshops given by CODECOT. As Sandi Mendoza of the Association for Community Development of Panabaj (ADECCAP), a Mayan association in Panabaj, said, “The majority of men won’t let their wives participate in workshops where they would learn about their rights. They’re afraid that their wives will learn how to support themselves and won’t need their men anymore.”[3]

Women who speak out against this deeply entrenched sexism face even greater threats to their security. Many of the women’s groups we met with reported that they have been followed, threatened, or even attacked. Sandra Moran, director of Sector de Mujeres (Women’s Sector) in Guatemala City, recounted several recent attacks on her organization’s office. She said the intruders broke in, ransacked the office, stole files, and left behind threatening notes and a trail of blood. She called the break-ins “very symbolic” of the fierce resistance to women’s empowerment and said she thought her group was being targeted because “We have been very present denouncing femicide in the streets. But we’re going to continue with this work because it’s so important.”

Norma Cruz, director of Fundación Sobrevivientes [Foundation Survivors], a center for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, recounted a recent trip to the department of Chiquimula to investigate the brutal rape, burning, and murder of an eight year old girl with Downs Syndrome. Knowing they could be targeted because of their mission to investigate and denounce the violence, she and her colleagues armed themselves with firearms. “We know this is a contradiction,” said Cruz. “We do not support violence. But we’re not going to allow one more woman to die.”

Most women, however, are not able to protect themselves in the way Cruz has from politically motivated and gender-based violence. Maria Cristina Gómez, a women’s rights activist with the organization Ixqik Women’s Association, worked to stop violence against women and increase women’s political participation in the department of Petén in northern Guatemala. On June 3, Gómez, her son, and her daughter, also a women’s rights activist, were gunned down in Petén. Gómez and her son were killed in the attack, and her daughter was seriously injured. Not long afterward, other members of the staff of Ixqik received phonecalls threatening that they would meet the same fate if they continued the work of defending and promoting women’s rights in the area.[4]

The violent clash between rising “feminismo” and ancient “machismo” has only been heightened by a recent period of increased poverty. As in the United States, increased poverty in Guatemala is tied to increased violence, and according to official statistics, extreme poverty in Guatemala rose from 16% in 2000 to 21% in 2004. As times get tougher, men must get tougher too. Lacking employment, young men seek security in the violent brotherhood of gangs or in the lucrative world of narco-trafficking. Admittance into these clubs, however, is typically dependent on a man’s ability to prove that he is macho, and the fierce machismo of organized crime sustains itself in part through violence against women. Vengeance is enacted or territory is marked by murdering the women (girlfriends, sisters, mothers) associated with rivals. Exacerbating the gang violence is a Washington policy (begun in 1996) to immediately deport gang members in the US to their country of origin. Young men who fled Guatemala’s civil war during the eighties are now being repatriated in growing numbers. They return to their homeland as violent criminals, often without any remaining family ties in Guatemala and without much possibility of gaining legal employment.

Extreme poverty also forces women onto dangerous paths. While competition for scarce resources can drive men into violent illegal organizations, extreme poverty in rural areas compels many young women to migrate to Guatemala City in search of jobs. Women as young as fourteen or fifteen arrive in the city with plans to earn the money they will need to survive on their own and help support relatives at home. Severed from a protective network of families and small communities, young women are made vulnerable in an increasingly violent urban setting.

A History of Violence and Impunity

“Historically, since the conquest, women have been attacked and abused. What has prevailed is impunity in the violation of the human rights of women.”
– Giovana Lemus of the Guatemalan Women’s Group (GGM) [5]

While the rise of extreme poverty, gang violence, and feminism do put women at significantly greater risk, these recent factors, also at work in neighboring countries, do not explain the unparalleled surge of femicide that is unique to Guatemala. In addition to entrenched and violently enforced sexism, Guatemalans live with a culture of violence born out of a 36 year long civil war. It is this long history of violence and impunity that distinguishes Guatemala as the most dangerous place for women in Latin America.

After Guatemala’s civil war claimed an estimated 300,000 lives, most Guatemalans were ready to embrace the peace promised by the 1996 Peace Accords. Although military activity was initially curtailed, however, the Guatemalan people have experienced little respite from the constant violence. “We are culturally conditioned to violence,” said Juan Pablo Arce Gordillo, Human Rights Advisor for the Ministry of the Interior.

Maggie, a lawyer with Nuevos Horizontes [New Horizons], a women’s shelter in Quetzaltenango, explained that this cultural conditioning affects women in violent households: “The problem is that most women are victims of violence and don’t recognize it. We tell them, ‘Listen, you’re in a situation of violence.’ And they say, ‘No, I’m not. This is normal.’”

Not only was Guatemala’s civil war one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin America, but it was also a particularly ruthless war for unarmed female civilians. Although women made up only a very small part of armed forces on either the government or the guerilla’s side, an estimated 25 percent of the deaths were women. Many of these killings took place when entire communities were systematically massacred in a state-sanctioned campaign aimed at undermining the rural base of guerilla forces. During these attacks, the rape and torture of unarmed women by the military was not uncommon.

Now, more than ten years after the signing of the Peace Accords, the pattern of killings is disturbingly similar. In a gruesome show of power, the murderers consistently sexually assault, torture, disfigure, and dismember female victims before abandoning them in ditches, trash cans, or garbage bags. These women suffer distinctly more brutal and sadistic ends than the many men who are murdered in Guatemala every day. Rosa Franco, whose 15-year old daughter, María Isabel, was raped, beaten, tortured, bound with barbed wire, and killed, said, “What’s happening today is the same as what happened during the war.”

The similarities between the killings during the war and more recent murders of women have led many women’s groups to suspect that the perpetrators may be the same as well. And their suspicions are made more plausible by another common factor: impunity. Ninety-eight percent of human rights abuses committed during the war remain unprosecuted, and 99 percent of femicide cases since 2000 remain unprosecuted. Many of the men responsible for atrocities during the war have integrated themselves into high levels of the government, and many of the men trained to kill unarmed civilians are now leading narcotrafficking cartels, clandestine “security” groups, or police forces.

According to Congresswoman Nineth Montenegro, “Organized crime has grown like never before, and it’s permitted in the Public Prosecutor’s Office and in the police. The police themselves are involved [in the killings of women].” And because these powerful criminal groups have strong links to the government, bribes or threats buy easy access to “a weak justice system that doesn’t care about the deaths of women.”

Edda Gaviola, executive director of the Center for Legal Action in Human Rights (CALDH), a renowned human rights legal group, also linked impunity in Guatemala with powerful forces of organized crime.[6] She pointed to the continued existence of illegal clandestine “security” groups that are tied both to the state and to narcotraffickers. According to Gaviola, these clandestine groups, reportedly headed by former military officers, are implicated in the extrajudicial killings of poor urban youth – both men and women – assumed to delinquents, as well as killings related to narcotrafficking and organized crime.

Gaviola also confirmed that corruption and organized crime extend into the police and could be a major contributor to the deaths of women in Guatemala. CALDH’s research shows that areas with high levels of femicide correspond with areas with high levels of police corruption and crime.

The cycle of violence and impunity is perpetuated even at the highest levels of government. Nowhere is this more glaringly apparent than in the discourse surrounding the September 9 elections in Guatemala. The propaganda of over twenty political parties plasters walls, dangles from trees, and competes for space on roadside rocks. And because the biggest concern of most Guatemalans is the escalating violence, the central promise of nearly every candidate is increased security. For one leading presidential candidate, Otto Perez Molina, this means implementing a policy called “mano dura” (tough hand) which can include anything from the militarization of the police to social cleansing in urban areas. However, Molina himself is a known killer. As a former general, present in Quiché during the massacres of the eighties, he is an embodiment of Guatemala’s continuing impunity. Nevertheless, many Guatemalans prefer the strong arm tactics of a dictator to the unpredictable violence of the streets. For this reason, some human rights groups suspect that the candidates themselves are behind a sharp increase in violence in the months leading up to the election.