Guatemalan Femicide: The Legacy of Repression and Injustice

Guatemalan Femicide: The Legacy of Repression and Injustice

by | Jul 14, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Male Violence, Prostitution, Rape Culture

By Cyril Mychalejko  / Toward Freedom

One generally overlooked feature of the Guatemalan government and military’s 36-year (1960-96) genocidal counterinsurgency campaign against the country’s Mayan population is the strategy of targeting women with violence.

Rape, mutilation, sexual slavery, forced abortion, and sterilizations were just some of the sadistic tools used in a systematic practice of state-sponsored terror to crush the surviving population into submission through fear and shame via the suffering of their mothers, sisters, and daughters.

In 1999, UN-backed truth commission, the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), declared that during the war, “the rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice aimed at destroying one of the most intimate and vulnerable aspects of the individual’s dignity…[and] they were killed, tortured and raped, sometimes because of their ideals and political or social participation…”

Glen Kuecker, professor of Latin American History at DePauw University, said that the gender specific violence was and continues to be part of the government’s counterinsurgency program aimed to destroy the fundamental social fabric of Mayan communities.

“The goal of counterinsurgency is to undermine the cohesion of a community that is needed for resistance,” said Kuecker. “Gender violence not only terrorizes women in the community, but it also disrupts traditional patriarchal gender relations by sending the message to men that they are not capable of protecting women.”

According to Emily Willard, Research Associate for the Evidence Project of The National Security Archive writing in Peace and Conflict Monitor this April, “The military’s strategies of targeting women reached such a large portion of the male population, normalizing rape and violence against women. The residual effect of these genocidal policies and strategies can be seen in the rate and type of violence in Guatemala today.”

In 2010, 685 women were assassinated in Guatemala, compared to 213 in 2000. And while there were more than 40,000 complaints of violence against women filed with the  Guatemalan Public Ministry, only 1 percent of those registered by the Judicial Department resulted in sentencing, according to a report published June 1 by the Nobel Women’s Initiative and the Just Associates (JASS), “Caught in the Crossfire: Women on the frontlines in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala.”

The report, co-authored by Nobel Peace Laureates Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Jody Williams, was the result of a fact-finding mission led by them in January 2012 to investigate violence against women in these three countries.

In Guatemala, the report singles out the civil war’s legacy of violence and impunity, the increased militarization resulting from the War on Drugs, land and resource conflicts, and the influence of foreign governments and businesses – specifically from the United States and Canada – as major contributing factors to the ongoing violence directed at women, and the targeting of women as a tactical and deliberate tool of political repression. The report states that the phenomenon of femicide has “reached crisis dimensions.”

Guatemala’s Civil War: No Justice, No Peace

“The crises in Guatemala are not internal crises,” Grahame Russell, co-director of Rights Action, a community development and anti-mining solidarity organization, told Toward Freedom. “They are global struggles.”

Guatemala’s Civil War serves as a perfect example. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, in an uncharacteristic moment of historical honesty, apologized to the Guatemalan people back in 1998 for the U.S.’s role in overthrowing democracy in the country and contributing political, military, and financial support to genocidal counterinsurgency programs which successive dictators carried out on the Mayan population.

“It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression…was wrong,” said Clinton.

The war left over 200,000, mostly indigenous civilians, murdered, while tens of thousands were raped, tortured, disappeared and displaced. But in the wake of the war, as many as an estimated 98 percent of those responsible for war crimes and genocide (both Guatemalan and American) remain free.

“In Guatemala, the surge in femicides demonstrates that peace is not just the cessation of war,” the JASS report states. “The lack of justice for crimes of the 1980s has left victims without redress, and culprits in power.” Amnesty International noted that in the last 10 years as many as 5,700 women have been murdered.

The position of recently elected president Otto Perez Molina that there was no genocide in the country is a perfect illustration of how impunity persists. However, Perez Molina, a former general and CIA asset who was trained at the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, is taking a position that is self-serving, not just racist and revisionist. He led a military battalion in the early 1980s in the country’s northwestern highlands where some of the bloodiest massacres occurred. In addition, as Annie Bird, journalist and co-director of Rights Action pointed out in a profile of the president this year, Perez Molina ran a “secret torture center” for political prisoners while serving as head of the country’s military intelligence in 1994. One of Perez Molina’s past bosses, former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, unleashed a scorched earth campaign against the country’s Mayan population between 1982-83, wiping out entire villages in the process. Thirty years later Rios Montt, who was a very close ally of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, is just now standing trial, and is accused of being responsible for “1,771 deaths, 1,400 human rights violations and the displacement of 29,000 indigenous Guatemalans.”

Sandra Moran, a Guatemalan feminist, lesbian, artist and activist working on women’s rights and human rights in Guatemala City, is a member and co-founder of Colectivo Artesana and Alianza Politica Sector de Mujeres. She lived in exile in Canada for 14 years after participating in the country’s student movement in the early 1980s. After working tirelessly abroad to build transnational solidarity, Moran returned to Guatemala to participate in the Peace Process and to help rebuild a more peaceful, just and humane country.

“During the war it was State Policy to target the bodies of women as part of the government’s ‘Counterinsurgency Plan’. Although the war ended, this violence against women has continued,” Moran told Toward Freedom. Her office has been targeted and broken into in the past, with spilt blood left, and she has received numerous death threats as a result of her work. “The way some murdered and mutilated bodies have appeared [in recent years] are the same way they appeared during the war,” added Moran.

Amnesty International submitted a briefing on Guatemala to the UN’s Human Rights Committee in March, voicing concern how “female victims often suffer exceptional brutality before being killed, including rape, mutilation and dismemberment.”

Moran added that these misogynistic forms of violence and torture are social problems that have been taught at both institutional and individual levels. Many of the teachers of this violence are working with the government, military and police, and are often those same people who committed these types of crimes during the war. Moran also singled out the heads of private security industry, which according to the JASS report, has ballooned to an estimated 28,000 legal and 50,000 unregistered private security agents in the country.

In 2007 Amnesty International issued a report noting the presence of “clandestine groups” in the country, comprised of the “the business sector, private security companies, common criminals, gang members and possibly ex and current members of the armed forces,” who were then, and continue to target human rights activists in order to maintain impunity and an unjust and patriarchal social order.

“Guatemala’s peace-making process never moved into a necessary peace-building process that could assure strong institutions and practices,” the JASS report states. “The government typically fails to conduct investigations or prosecute the perpetrators of women’s murders.”

The Guatemalan government’s embrace of  ex-war criminals and current criminals, combined with the support of international political and business actors, sustains what Rights Action’s Russell calls, “an unjust, racist, and violent social order” and  “maintaining business as usual and politics as usual.”

Business as Usual

In 1954 the CIA, at the behest of United Fruit Company, coordinated the coup which overthrew democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Reasons behind this act include the fact that he rewrote the country’s labor code and initiated land reforms, acts deemed unacceptable by United Fruit Company and Washington. The idea of Guatemala being solely a source of cheap labor and a place to extract resources with low costs and even lower oversight has been a continuum in the country’s history. The lack of justice and weak governance appears to be seen as a comparative advantage for the country. For example, Amnesty International, in its briefing to the UN this past March, also pointed out how “[t]he failings of the state continue to be relied on by companies, in particular mining companies, who prefer the lower national standard to international human rights standards.”

One example the JASS report points out is Perez Molina’s refusal to respect the 55 community consultations held throughout the country in indigenous communities, which overwhelmingly rejected so-called development projects involving mining, oil and hydroelectric dams. According to ILO Convention 169, the international law which Guatemala is a signatory of, indigenous communities must provide free, prior, and informed consent to any projects that would impact their land and communities. Other “failings of the state” include the refusal to investigate and prosecute those responsible for violence against activists who challenge the status quo by demanding that their human rights, such as those enshrined under ILO 169, are recognized and honored.

The JASS delegation led by Menchu and Williams listened to testimony from women who shared stories about the violence during the war and the violence associated with what might be described now as low intensity conflicts surrounding land and resources. Their report stated, “They described that today’s intent is subtler: to force communities out of areas where mineral and other types of resources are coveted. But the methods are very similar: rape, murder, imprisonment, division and harassment…Women presented testimonies and evidence of many cases where army and private security presence is associated with putting down local protests against mining operations and other development projects that displace and disrupt communities to exploit natural resources.”

Less than two weeks after the report was released, Yolanda Oqueli Veliz, a community leader from the municipalities of San Jose del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc working against the widely unpopular Canadian gold mining project owned by Radius Gold, was shot by assassins and is now in the hospital in critical condition.

 

While criticism of the Guatemalan State is necessary and warranted, the Canadian government deserves the same treatment. Lawmakers in Ottawa have consistently aided and abetted such behavior by their industry due to what at best could be considered indifference, but is more likely a deliberate disregard for the human rights and environmental rights of communities affected by Canadian mining companies.

 

A perfect illustration of this was the failure to pass Bill C-300,  a modest, if not flawed piece of legislation, which would have empowered the Canadian government to investigate human rights complaints and strip guilty companies from taxpayer subsidies through the Canadian Pension Plan and Export Development Canada. Apparently murder and gang-rapes linked to Canadian mining projects in Guatemala (not to mention similar acts throughout the hemisphere and around the globe) are not enough to encourage lawmakers in Canada to pass legislation that would hold their country’s companies accountable for these crimes and human rights abuses.

While women are being targeted for their social justice leadership roles in these conflicts, it is modest progress in the realm of rights and empowerment that has allowed women to assume such roles.

“Since the war ended women’s leadership in their communities and with community struggles have increased. More and more women have realized that they have rights and that they must defend their rights.  And this is part of the reason why violence against women has increased,” said Moran. “An act of violence against a woman is not just an act against the individual, but against all women. It is a message that if you leave your house, if you continue to organize or raise your voice, that this can happen to you.”

Read more from Upside Down World: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3755-guatemalan-femicide-the-legacy-of-repression-and-injustice-

Murders, child slavery, and deforestation rampant in Amazonia as gold rush devastates region

by | May 15, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Mining & Drilling, Prostitution, Toxification, Worker Exploitation

By Paulina Abramovich / Agence France-Presse

A new gold rush is sweeping through Latin America with devastating consequences, ravaging tropical forests and dumping toxic chemicals as illegal miners fight against big international projects.

With international market prices for metals high, informal “wildcat” mining has been on the rise in recent years in countries like Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, itself one of the largest producers of silver, copper and gold.

Mining investments in those countries are expected to reach some $300 billion in 2020, according to the Inter-American Mining Society.

But over 160 mining conflicts have erupted across the region amid growing opposition from locals against projects they consider a threat to the environment, the Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Latin America says.

During the past decade, the price of gold went from $270 to between $1,600-1,800 per ounce, as people rushed to convert their cash into the precious metal seen as a safe investment during the global economic crisis.

And the price of copper is at an all-time high thanks to China’s insatiable appetite for it.

Unlicensed mining, especially for gold, has already killed hundreds of people and devastated thousands of hectares (acres) in the Amazon forest, where miners have set up camps that destroy everything in their path.

To extract each ounce of gold, it takes two or three ounces of mercury, which fouls waterways after being poured into rivers from the mining sites. In their search for water, the miners raze tropical forestsusing bulldozers.

The phenomenon has also sown disaster among the local population, with thousands of men, women and children exploited and living in squalid camps with no schools or health centers.

In Peru, an estimated 110,000 to 150,000 people work in illegal mines, while a thousand children are sexually exploited in brothels known locally as “prostibars” in the southeastern province of Madre de Dios, according to Save The Children.

The practice is particularly widespread in the improvised mining camps, where fortune-hunter try to make a living from the illegal exploitation of precious metals.

“There are dozens of prostibars, filled with hundreds of girls who were told they would make a lot of money,” said Teresa Carpio, director of Save the Children in Peru.

“It’s total exploitation of a human being. Living conditions are appalling and all human values are perverted.”

Indigenous and black communities have long used child workers for gold mining. And an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 children currently work in small-scale mining in Colombia, according to Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) data.

In Madre de Dios, one of the poorest regions of Peru, about 18 tonnes of gold are produced per year, while some 20,000 hectares (49,400 acres) of tropical forest are destroyed.

Thousands of people in Colombia have started exploiting abandoned mines in the northwestern department of Antioquia and Choco. In Bolivia, about 10,000 people make a living off the illegal mining of gold in extreme conditions, ARM says.

The growing thirst for mineral resources makes Latin America one of the most attractive regions for investment, set to dominate world production of precious metals by 2020.

Today, Latin America accounts for 45 percent of global copper production, 50 percent of silver and 20 percent of gold.

Read more from Mother Nature Network:

Gloria Steinem: Body Invasion is De-humanising

by | Apr 11, 2012 | Prostitution

By Gloria Steinem

When I’m meeting with women and girls in prostitution in my own country as well as some countries of Europe, Africa and here in India, I’ve always asked what they would like for their daughter. So far, the answers have not included prostitution.

That’s especially striking given the profound differences in their lives, from Manhattan call girls to women in the brothel line-ups of Sonagachi; from women in the counties around Las Vegas, the only places in the US where prostitution is legal, to bar girls from the villages of Ghana and the scheduled castes in Bihar where women are consigned to prostitution by birth. Indeed, the same seems to be true of prostituted males who serve male clients.

The truth seems to be that the invasion of the human body by another person – whether empowered by money or violence or authority — is de-humanising in itself. Yes, there are many other jobs in which people are exploited, but prostitution is the only one that by definition crosses boundary of our skin and invades our most central sense of self. I know this is a subject that needs much more exploring, but I want to indicate it in shorthand because I think it’s the source of the misunderstanding in these two letters in response to a lecture I gave at Jawaharlal Nehru University on April 2.

I did not say — nor do I think, as Shohini Ghosh supposes — that sex trafficking and prostitution are “synonymous.” Though both are created by the same customers who want unequal sex, they represent crucial differences in a woman’s ability to escape or control her own life. However, I would not equate prostitution with domestic work, as she does. That ignores the damage and trauma of the body invasion that is intrinsic to the former and should never be part of the latter. Also I don’t think “consenting adults” is practical answer to structural inequality. Even sexual harassment law requires that sexual attention be “welcome,” not just “consensual.” It recognizes that consent can be coerced.

In addition, Kumkum Roy criticizes me for not using the term “sex worker.” I know this term is common in AIDS policy and academia, but it turned out to be dangerous in real life. For instance, in places as disparate as Germany and Nevada in the US, government used the idea that prostitution is “a job like any other” to withhold welfare and unemployment benefits from women who failed to try it. Only protests by women’s movements ended this form of procurement. As a popular term, I notice that prostituted girls and women say “survival sex,” as more descriptive as well as a breach of human rights.

Finally, I devoutly wish that unions had improved conditions in brothels, kept children out of prostitution and lessened disease and violence, as they promised to do, but in fact, there has been a huge increase in trafficking, girls in prostitution have become younger and younger, and there is no independent evidence of lowering rates of AIDS. What the idea of unions has done is to enhance the ability of the sex industry to attract millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation for the distribution on condoms, despite the fact that customers often pay more for sex without condoms, and it has created a big new source of income for brothel owners, pimps and traffickers who are called “peer educators,” I understand that that the traffic of women and girls into Sonagachi has greatly increased.

But there is good news. The old polarization into legalization and criminalization is giving way to a more practical, woman-centered and successful Third Way: De-criminalize the prostituted persons, offer them meaningful choices, prosecute traffickers, pimps and all who sell the bodies of others, and also penalize the customers who create the market while educating them about its tragic human consequences.

Those are turning out to be goals on which many people work together.

From The Hindu: The Hindu

UN reports 2.4 million people are victims of trafficking; 80% being exploited as sexual slaves

by | Apr 4, 2012 | Prostitution, Worker Exploitation

By Edith M. Lederer / Associated Press

The U.N. crime-fighting office said Tuesday that 2.4 million people across the globe are victims of human trafficking at any one time, and 80 percent of them are being exploited as sexual slaves.

Yuri Fedotov, the head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, told a daylong General Assembly meeting on trafficking that 17 percent are trafficked to perform forced labor, including in homes and sweat shops.

He said $32 billion is being earned every year by unscrupulous criminals running human trafficking networks, and two out of every three victims are women.

Fighting these criminals “is a challenge of extraordinary proportions,” Fedotov said.

“At any one time, 2.4 million people suffer the misery of this humiliating and degrading crime,” he said.

According to Fedotov’s Vienna-based office, only one out of 100 victims of trafficking is ever rescued.

Fedotov called for coordinated local, regional and international responses that balance “progressive and proactive law enforcement” with actions that combat “the market forces driving human trafficking in many destination countries.”

Michelle Bachelet, who heads the new U.N. agency promoting women’s rights and gender equality called UN Women, said “it’s difficult to think of a crime more hideous and shocking than human trafficking. Yet, it is one of the fastest growing and lucrative crimes.”

Actress Mira Sorvino, the U.N. goodwill ambassador against human trafficking, told the meeting that “modern day slavery is bested only by the illegal drug trade for profitability,” but very little money and political will is being spent to combat trafficking.

“Transnational organized crime groups are adding humans to their product lists,” she said. “Satellites reveal the same routes moving them as arms and drugs.”

Sorvino said there is a lack of strong legislation and police training to combat trafficking. Even in the United States “only 10 percent of police stations have any protocol to deal with trafficking,” she said.

M. Cherif Bassiouni, an emeritus law professor at DePaul University in Chicago, said to applause that “there is no human rights subject on which governments have said so much but done so little.”

Laws in most of the world criminalize prostitutes and other victims of trafficking but almost never criminalize the perpetrators “without whom that crime could not be performed,” he said.

Bassiouni said the figure of 2.4 million people trafficked at any time is not reflective of the overall problem because “at the end of 10 years you will have a significantly larger number who have gone through the experience.”

He urged a global reassessment of “who is a victim and who is a criminal” and called for criminalizing not only those on the demand side using trafficked women, children and men, but all those in the chain of supplying trafficking victims.

From The Washington Post:

Brazil’s Supreme Court accepts “sex work” defense for man who raped three 12-year-old girls

by | Apr 2, 2012 | Prostitution, Rape Culture

By Amnesty International

The acquittal by Brazil’s Supreme Court of a man accused of raping three 12-year-old girls on the basis that they were allegedly “sex-workers” is an outrageous affront to the most basic human rights and it has no place in Brazil today, said Amnesty International.

The decision confirmed earlier rulings by state-level courts in Sao Paulo, where the original report was filed. The defence claimed the three girls were “sex workers” and therefore had consented.

Under Brazil’s 2009 Penal Code, sexual intercourse with an individual under 14 years of age is criminalised under any circumstance.

“Rape is never the fault of the victim. This shocking ruling effectively gives a green light to rapists and if it prevails could dissuade other survivors of sexual abuse from reporting these crimes,” said Atila Roque, Executive Director at Amnesty International in Brazil.

“It is of extreme concern that the protections provided by Brazil’s legislation in cases such as these have not been implemented.

“Amnesty International welcomes the news that the government is calling for the case to be appealed. Brazilian justice must ensure the full protection of victims of this heinous crime and that those responsible are brought to justice. Rape is a grave human rights violation in all circumstances.”

From Amnesty International: http://amnesty.org/en/news/brazil-outrageous-supreme-court-ruling-gives-green-light-rapists-2012-04-02