"Guatemala is a good place to commit a murder, because you will almost certainly get away with it."--Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings
The 1996 peace accords marked the end of what was considered a traditional internal armed conflict--a war that was made over with UN mediation, long talks, and short signatures. But a war is still on in Guatemala; the part that has changed (and changed only marginally) is the target.
Two women are killed every day in Guatemala. That's 10 times the rate in Britain. What's more, in the past 3 years, the number of women killed has quadrupled. These are alarming rates which, along with the calculation and brutality with which the murders are carried out, mean that the name of Guatemala's new war is femicide.
The term femicide refers to the systematic killing of women because they're women. Depending on the context, it takes on different specific forms including honor killing in the Middle East and selective abortion in Asia. In Guatemala, it's skyrocketing rates of murder preceded by violent sexual assault and torture against women aged 15-25 . The case that probably most readily comes to mind associated with the term is Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Here, femicide of a character similar to Guatemala's garnered high press levels and ardent international and national activism. Guatemala's situation has been considerably less-reported, which is interesting because the numbers here are in a totally different ballpark than in Juarez: in Guatemala, between 2001 and 2005, 1,780 women were killed (mostly in and around the capital). In Juarez, 400 were killed over the past 15 years. One victim is too many--no question. But these numbers should be not be overlooked. Under-reportage generally begets inaction, and it's fair to say Guatemala is no exception to that trend.
Mention of inaction brings us to why the BBC calls Guatemala a "Killer's Paradise" in a recent documentary it produced on femicide. The lack of response by authorities that surrounds the phenomenon in Guatemala is acute--out of those 1,780 cases of women killed, there hasn't been a single conviction. The vast majority of cases don't even enjoy preliminary police investigations.
Something to keep in mind: like genocide, femicide is not only about the number dead. As a colleague said to me once, "The fact that 250,000 people died in Guatemala over the past 40 years is not alarming. What's alarming is how they died." Femicide is more than murder. These women are being sexually assaulted, tortured, and dismembered. The perpetrators leave marks of hatred and power in order to terrorize and intimidate victims' families and peers in order to exert and grow that power. Numerous news reports and human rights NGOs have pointed out chilling parallels between the nature of the crimes associated with femicide and those committed during the war. And independent analysts are beginning to speculate that responsibility is attributable, to some degree, to state agents.
Following the war thread further--the target has changed, but only slightly. While women were victimized during the genocide because of their ethnicity and political associations, they were targeted simply for their gender as well. Women were able to "breed insurgents" and carry on the ethnic traditions, and therefore eliminated when possible.
So what does this mean for daily life in Guatemala? It means that many women feel confined to their homes out of fear of going out. It means that 2 families a day get calls in the middle of the night to come identify the body of their little girl. It means that fathers show up day after day to the chief prosecutor's office to demand that investigations are conducted and lead to trials, only to be lied to and brushed aside. I recently met one of these fathers. His 19-year-old daughter Claudina was killed a year and a half ago, a case that was, like all the others, virtually ignored by state authorities. He has not given up the fight for justice--he repeatedly meets with officials who continue to respond with indifference, he's made trips to the US to make pleas to the authorities there, and he's won the attention of Amnesty International, which now has an Urgent Action out about Claudina's case.
Femicide is a quiet war that rages in the infancy of Guatemala's peace. It's a remnant of the conflict--brutal tactics and power-coveting, shrouded in impunity--with a new urban setting and a new principal target.
For more info, Amnesty produced a great report in 2005 that's worth checking out. Numerous articles and press releases have also been written, making comparisons across borders to shed light on patterns. See the BBC documentary, Killer's Paradise, and go here to bring some pressure to bear on the Guatemalan government to take responsibility for stopping the crisis.
