GUATEMALA — Paula Barrios: Women Transforming the World
“To know that one is not alone”
Guatemala’s legacy of violence, exclusion, and impunity has reserved some of its most horrific manifestations for women. Patriarchy and machismo are perhaps even more deep-seated than racial and class hierarchies, a fact revealed by an ongoing epidemic of gender violence: In 2012, the United Nations found that Guatemala has the second greatest rate of femicide in the world, a pattern of murders of women that shows no distinction between social or economic categories. Violence against women is met by almost complete impunity for perpetrators, with sentences in less than 3 percent of reported cases.
As mothers and widows of the disappeared and massacred, women were the founders of, and have remained central to, Guatemala’s human rights movement. However, women are also among the principal victims of the culture of silence inculcated through the combination of state terror and social stigma. While the UN’s Historical Clarification Commission collected lower rates of women’s testimony of direct human rights violations during the internal armed conflict, it found that women bore more impacts of forced displacement and that rape was a systematic component of massacres and detention of women.
Through the dedicated work of feminists and social psychologists with survivors, the full extent of sexual violence by the military during the armed conflict has begun to emerge. In 2010, the National Union of Guatemalan Women (UNAMG), the Guatemalan Community Studies and Psychosocial Action Team (ECAP), the feminist newspaper La Cuerda, and Women Transforming the World (MTM) organized a Tribunal of Conscience where women publicly related their testimonies in front of symbolic judges. This action set the stage for formal legal complaints in 2012 by fifteen Maya-Q’eqchi’ women who denounced sexual enslavement by soldiers over a period of months during 1982 at a military recreation base in Sepur Zarco, Izabal. Their testimony opens the first cases specifically seeking to hold the Guatemalan military responsible for sexual violence during the armed conflict.
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The women are monolingual; they are elderly women in general, more than sixty years old, who live in conditions of extreme poverty. Several of the women are very ill. Some have cancer, others are losing their sight. In those vulnerable conditions, they are facing a whole military structure; and in communities that are very closed about this issue as well. If we are socially bad on this issue at the level of the country as a whole, at the community level machismo is even more reinforced. We’ve been on this road now with them for approximately three years, and we have gotten this far. But the social conditions are still very poor.
The main difficulty is that fear and insecurity are still present. The country doesn’t provide the social and political conditions under which cases like this can be tried. We have a military government currently, and that’s a big obstacle: That policy of pardoning and making the issue disappear, of not getting to the truth of what happened during the war. At the community level [we have] the issue of security. Women still live with the perpetrators in their communities.
Twelve years after the peace accords were signed, there have been no major social or political advances. The peace accords are there, but they have not been translated into public policies that permit each of the agreements to advance, above all [for] indigenous peoples. However, we can’t continue to wait; we’ve been silent for too long.
But there’s fear, because sexual violence in general is a taboo subject. And if not, it’s because we provoked it, we consented to it or it’s our responsibility. The clear example was recently with the Roosevelt case [in which a group of criminals were charged with at least fourteen cases of rape, among other crimes]. What did the secretary of the interior do? Put out a communiqué that women should not be out in the streets after 8:00 p.m., alone, wearing provocative clothing. They always focus on the woman’s responsibility. Sexual violence isn’t seen as a social problem and a problem of the patriarchal system.
All the advances made in terms of women’s rights have been pushed back. Now there’s no budget, shelters are being shut down, projects being terminated, resources are all channeled through the government. This government emphasizes economic policies, production, and things like women’s cooperatives, and the problem of sexual violence gets pushed aside, and every day there are more cases of violence and deaths of women. So in that context it’s very difficult.
Building the case, fact by fact
But we have to look into the details—how it was, in each area, with each individual person. We have to answer for each one of the victims: who, how, when, where? And that’s what it means to be in the case together, because everyone was in the same place during the same period of time, suffering sexual violence, which was sexual slavery inside the base. Let’s say that those are the details of the case. There’s another case in a community in the Q’eqchi’ region. Three young women from the community were taken to a house at the back of the community and raped in a grotesque way. They put rifles in their vaginas, in their anuses, they were hung from the house beams. So the cases are being classified [according to] where the incidents happened, who was responsible in each region. For example, in Chimaltenango, there are various women with children conceived in rape, who are now adults. So in each region, this was a pattern, and [one of] the few we’ve documented because the National Compensation Program also has hundreds of cases in all provinces and they are the ones who have to present these accusations to the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The Public Prosecutor has, I think, three hundred accusations of rape already presented to the war unit.
We are just collaborating on the whole legal strategy. However, the impetus, the work, all comes from them, in addition to facing everything—a corrupt system, a corrupt judicial system in this country. Just the fact of taking on this search for justice, is an example for other cases to come, a motivation for other women to see that it’s possible to take on these cases. And we are also collaborating on recent cases seeking justice for sexual violence. It’s possible to imagine so many cases [of that] in this country. And with each one we have to break down all these barriers of impunity, in addition to confronting the patriarchal system. The law is in this patriarchal context where we say the victim has to prove she was raped, and not the other way around. From the start it’s a challenge with women who in addition aren’t socialized in this western legal system. However, we have worked hard precisely to make them agents in the process.
Visualizing the case
These women are illiterate, and they only speak their native language, Q’eqchi’. So we said fine, we’ll use drawings that represent [the parties] in some way. The owl, for example, who listens and sees. So we said, fine, the owl is the judge. Sometimes there’s one judge, sometimes there’s three judges, depending on the stage of the trial. Butterflies, well, in feminism, since forever butterflies have been identified with the women’s struggle, a symbol of November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in honor of the assassination of the Mirabal sisters in the Dominican Republic. So we printed out some butterflies on the computer, and each woman painted her own butterfly. That represented her in the trial. And we are the bees, being somewhat like the butterflies. So the bees, and then came the public prosecutor, so we had to look for that. They are the ones who ask questions, interrogate, interview, so they talk a lot. So we represented them with parrots.
The lion is a big, strong animal we were confronting, that represented the perpetrators. And we have a banner that represents the road. We have two roads. One to reparations, and one to justice. So each step we take, we go further down the road. And at the stage we’re working at, who intervenes? And so we keep placing the figures: Where will the owl be, where will the parrot be? We place ourselves, the bees, and the women who have been recording this whole process during the hearings, who are represented by the dove—the women themselves chose that—and the hummingbirds are the psychologists, who have also worked with them. And so we keep moving the figures around, depending on who intervenes [when]. But we are also really learning by doing.
We have proposed almost a mission impossible: to break all these barriers of impunity that are rooted in this system. It seemed almost impossible to bring one of these cases to justice, but today we can see it clearly. The case is so clear. All that took a huge amount of work, several years’ work. Three years’ work to collect the testimonies, the ideas, work with the victims. But it’s a case that first off is creating precedents. Internally, in the national justice system, it’s the first case, and we want to break down [the] barrier of impunity that is rooted in the justice system.
The biggest challenge was to succeed in getting and ordering the facts in a logical, coherent way. But we hope for a conviction. There’s a long way still to go to get there. There’s a whole chain of command—there are material perpetrators, there are intellectual perpetrators, and depending a little on how the case moves forward, any one of the convictions will not just be one alone but various convictions. That’s what we hope. That is the example for other legal proceedings, other women who want to take this route.
It’s not easy. But we didn’t think it was possible to bring suit, and now we have. We didn’t think it was possible to get testimonies and now they’ve been given. Little by little. Step by step. It’s a collective effort of many organizations and an interdisciplinary team too. But in this same effort, every step the women take is a step closer to justice.
If it wasn’t for this process, for this accusation by these women, we would never have been able to carry out the exhumation in the Tinajas plantation. The fifty mass graves would never have been exhumed. And that is what we talk about with women. They are the protagonists of those efforts, of achieving that. In the region everybody talks about the plantation where the community leaders, the husbands of the women who were asking for land were massacred, were disappeared. The exhumation was carried out and we succeeded—in this first step, because another remains to be made. And there are others in this area. It’s an area that was hard hit by the war.
And conditions haven’t changed in thirty years. We could practically say no time has passed. They are still enslaved, now by the transnationals, [working] monocrops in conditions of slavery, because there there are no other resources. To be able to go study, get a degree, you have to go to El Estor; to do that you have to cross two rivers, take several pickups, transport vehicles. This costs about 100 quetzales a day, maybe more. There’s no access to anything there. There’s no health care, no education. So what’s left? Work for the plantation.
Now it’s African palm, more all the time. [They are] pushing people to the edges, to live in the mountains, without light, without water, but working on the plantation. Social security? None. So to work for justice living under these conditions is a challenge. But the impetus of the women is their own. [It’s] their petition, their voice. We just join in with that effort. It’s their case, and that’s what makes the case legitimate. If it weren’t for them, there’d be no legal proceedings.
And it’s a group process. That’s a very important part, to identify that the process is a group effort. Also to know that one is not alone. And that’s what they’ve seen with the exhumations, others have come forward who are victims and want to tell their story and support these cases. They realize there are other women in other parts of the world. They’ve exchanged letters with women from Japan, in translation of course. But there was even one meeting on Skype with Japanese women. They’ve shared with women of other countries also seeking justice, in Peru, Rwanda. So it’s been very important, symbolic from the beginning, to be able to show the world, to share with other women, to know they’re not crazy, this isn’t craziness, a whim, or foolishness. It’s what happens all over the world, and keeps happening.
Barillas: Women from Santa Cruz de Barillas, Huehuetenango, protesting the state of siege imposed by the Guatemalan president and Congress in May 2012. The government sent hundreds of state forces to carry out arrests and search homes in Barillas following local resistance to a hydroelectric dam project owned by a Spanish company, Hidro Santa Cruz. Photo from Consejo de Pueblos del Occidente (Western People’s Council).
Interview by Coordination of International Accompaniment in Guatemala (ACOGUATE), November 2012. Translation by Christy Rodgers.
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Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein, two journalists, explore new social movements spearhead by indigenous people, students, landless peasants, slum dwellers, LGBT activists, and the unemployed in Latin America. Ross and Rein are the authors of Until the Rulers Obey: Voices of from Latin American Social Movements, edited by Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein (Oakland: PM Press, 2014). El BeiSMan publishes this excerpt with the authorization of the authors.
Contact Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein, untiltherulersobey@gmail.com. Visit their website at www.latinamericansocialmovements.org.
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