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GUATEMALA:
Brutal Killings
of Women Recall
Counterinsurgency Techniques
Adrián Reyes
MEXICO CITY, (IPS) -
”Death to the bitches, I'm back”
read a sign found next to the
body of one of the nearly 1,700
Guatemalan women who have been
murdered in the past five years.
The worst waves of brutal,
unsolved murders of women in
Latin America have been seen in
Ciudad Juárez, on Mexico's
northern border, where close to
400 killings have been reported
since 1993, and Guatemala, where
527 women were killed last year
alone.
Congresswoman Alba Maldonado
told IPS that it is especially
alarming that the methods used
in the murders in Guatemala, an
impoverished Central American
country of 13 million, are
reminiscent of those employed
against the guerrillas and the
residents of rural indigenous
villages during the 1960-1996
civil war.
The lawmaker, who belongs to the
former insurgent Guatemalan
National Revolutionary Unity (URNG)
party, also noted that
one-quarter of the nearly
200,000 people killed during the
armed conflict - mainly by the
security forces - were women.
Although peace agreements were
signed in 1996, Guatemalan
society seems to have lost its
sensibility and to have suffered
a grave deterioration of values,
which stands in the way of
combating the violence against
women, said Maldonado, who
underscored not only the large
numbers of victims, but also the
cruelty with which they are
murdered.
The 527 victims of what women's
rights groups call ”femicide”
accounted for 12 percent of the
total number of people killed in
Guatemala in 2004.
In the view of Guatemalan
Ambassador to Mexico Arturo
Soto, the murders of women are
the result of an explosive
cocktail in which soaring crime
rates, drug trafficking and the
proliferation of youth gangs
known in Central America as
”maras” combine with cultural
aspects like a male-dominated
society and domestic violence.
In addition, women have begun to
play a greater role in the
commission of violent crimes,
and are also the victims of the
settling of scores between rival
gangs, Soto told IPS.
What is needed to check the
violence, he said, are policies
focusing on education and
prevention, as well as
stepped-up judicial cooperation
with Mexico and the rest of the
countries of Central America, in
order to prevent criminals from
escaping punishment by moving
freely across the region's
porous borders.
Soto said he does not believe
the origins of the killings that
have been denounced by local and
international human rights
groups can be traced back to the
civil war.
But Maldonado argued that the
demobilisation of thousands of
former members of the security
forces without any programme for
their reinsertion into society
and readaptation to civilian
life, along with the fact that
an estimated two million
firearms are in the hands of the
civilian population, are factors
that play a significant role in
the wave of brutal murders of
women.
After the peace agreements were
signed, thousands of former
members of the security forces
joined the police or were hired
by private security companies,
said Maldonado, who pointed out
that many of those who took part
in the counterinsurgency
campaign were trained in
sadistic methods of utterly
destroying the enemy.
Several former combatants who
joined the national police have,
in fact, committed attacks on
women using their old
counterinsurgency tactics, said
the congresswoman.
”As a society, we have yet to
acknowledge what happened during
the war, and we must seek a way
to heal the wounds, in order to
combat this culture of
violence,” added Maldonado, a
lawyer.
To illustrate the atrocities
committed during the
counterinsurgency war, she
recalled that soldiers often cut
open the wombs of pregnant women
and hung the fetuses up in trees
or smashed them against rocks.
During the counterinsurgency
campaign, which largely targeted
indigenous villages, thousands
of women were the victims of
mutilations and sexual violence
similar to what some of the more
recent murder victims have been
subjected to.
Non-governmental organisations
like the Network for
Non-Violence Against Women have
documented cases of girls and
women killed in recent years
whose bodies have shown signs of
gender violence: hands tied
together with barbed wire,
fingernails torn off,
decapitation, rape, and messages
tattooed or written on their
bodies, like ”vengeance”, ”one
less bitch”, or ”you have paid,
bitch”.
Hilda Morales, an activist with
the Network, told IPS that
Guatemala ”is caught up in a
culture of violence, which the
state has been unable to curb.
There is terror, mainly among
families who live in slums and
poor neighbourhoods, where the
highest murder rates are found.”
”The calls for help from the
mothers and the demand for an
end to the murders seem to have
no effect on the government,”
which ”disregards the work of
civil society organisations, and
merely tells us that there are
no funds for so many groups, as
if we were simply asking for a
job,” said the activist.
Morales said the victims'
families often keep silent out
of fear or the conviction that
nothing will be done, because
the public prosecutors office
tends to place little importance
on the murders and often ignores
new evidence that crops up,
while failing to carry out
in-depth investigations or
follow up on cases.
In addition, she said, it
expresses views that would seem
to ”justify” the crimes if the
victim was a sex worker or if
she was killed by gang members
or drug traffickers.
A report released earlier this
month by the London-based human
rights watchdog Amnesty
International, ”No protection,
no justice: Killings of women in
Guatemala”, urged the government
of Oscar Berger to investigate
the murders with a ”gender
focus”, create mechanisms to
search for missing women and
girls, bring the culprits to
justice, adopt prevention
programmes and bring Guatemalan
legislation into line with
international conventions on
violence against women.
A year ago, the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights, an
Organisation of American States
(OAS) body, criticised the scant
resources that the Guatemalan
government has dedicated to the
prevention and punishment of
these murders.
Legislators from Guatemala,
Mexico and Spain will meet at
the end of the month in
Guatemala to make progress
towards the creation of an
interparliamentary network
against ”femicide”.
”We have a long way to go. We
have begun to work but it seems
that our call for an end to
these murders is falling on deaf
ears. But all of this should
awaken sensibility in a society
that has not yet reacted with
indignation to the cruelty of
these killings,” said Maldonado.
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