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Guatemala Verges On
Status Of A Failed State
By Martin Barillas
In 2009, some 847 women were murdered in
the Central American republic of
Guatemala. Over the last 10 years, some
5000 have been similarly killed. So far
in 2010, the death toll for women now
stands at 160 and shows no signs of
abating. These are not cases of domestic
violence: the victims are women who were
tortured and killed in public places. In
nearly all these cases of
ultra-violence, no perpetrators have
been identified.
Since 2008, Guatemala has had
“feminicide” on its law books: the
murder of women simply because of their
sex or out of hatred for their sex.
According to Walda Barrios-Klee, a
Guatemalan activist, “We consider
feminicides to be impersonal crimes.
Those who kill a woman have not
relationship to her. It is an anonymous
crime. The one who kills does not know
the victim and kills her because of the
fact that she is a woman. This is what
is new about the phenomenon,” said
Barrios-Klee.
Another distinction of these murders is
in the brutality employed before and
after the death of the victims. “There
is not only a killing; there is a ritual
to the murder: torture, mutilation, and
rape. There is always rape, accompanied
by overwhelming sadism,” said the
activist. Bodies are frequently
dismembered; fingernails are torn out
and faces disfigured.
Barrios-Klee lamented that following the
enactment of the feminicide law, the
number of murdered women has actually
increased. The law, according to
Barrios-Klee, “has served to increase
the number of reports since women are
beginning to fear less,” even while the
prosecution of the crimes has not
increased. For Barrios-Klee, Guatemala’s
law enforcement and justice system is at
fault. The feminicide law “is a
contribution towards cultural change.
However, if the system of justice does
not work well, even if there is a law,
things will not change very much,” said
the activist.
The three adjacent Central American
republics - El Salvador, Guatemala, and
Honduras- form a violent triangle, as
noted by a description supplied by the
United Nations. This violent troika has
the highest murder rate of women in the
region, something that has its
antecedents in the violent decades of
Central America’s recent past. The
conflict between the military of these
countries and both democratic and
Marxist opponents was frequently marked
by rape as a weapon of war.
In recent years, Guatemala took the lead
in the number of murdered women.
Currently, Honduras takes the lead,
followed by El Salvador, and now
Guatemala. Barrios-Klee notes that the
actual rate of murders of women has not
decreased in Guatemala: the rate of
murders has increased in Honduras so
that it now occupies first place. She
noted that the past civil conflicts in
Guatemala and El Salvador make these two
countries similar. Honduras did not have
such a conflict. What makes them similar
is the role of the government and the
weakening of government structures, an
issue that is shared by the rest of
Latin America said Barrios-Klee.
In Guatemala, the apparatus of the
military and secret services identified
any opposition – whether armed or
non-violent – as an “internal enemy”
said Barrios-Klee. “We had 36 years of
armed conflict in which the apparatus of
the state was used for repression. The
entire structure of the state was in the
hands of people who had the mentality of
the internal enemy, which is what they
termed the people who wanted a different
Guatemala. This was not dismantled with
the signing of the peace treaty. The
structure of the state remained the
same, with the same people from the war.
It is because of this that they do not
think about justice.”
In such a climate of impunity, women are
now identified as the internal enemy
said Barrios-Klee, because “we are now
going out into the streets, working,
being independent, with our own income,
to take back public spaces and a portion
in power. In as much as there is more
political participation and more women
seeking public office, there are more
murders. The social message appears to
be that a woman who goes out of her home
runs a greater risk than the one who
stays home, even while this is a myth.
Even the husbands who beat you and
strike you at home don’t kill you like
they kill in the street. It is a form of
terrorism.”
At a conference marking the publication
of “Guatemala: las Violencias
Desbordadas” (Guatemala: Violence out of
control), the social scientists who
authored the report noted that violence
is generalized in the country that has
seen a remarkable increase in all forms
of violent crime, including: abduction,
rape, murder, hold-ups, and the like.
The infamous Central American criminal
organizations called “maras” – such as
Mara Salvatrucha – are in league with
Colombia narcotics cartels to provide
security and transportation for
narcotics through the Central American
isthmus, thereby also increasing the
level of violence.
The lack of an effective state, said one
of the authors, means that narco-traffickers
and private security forces hold sway in
most of the country. Indeed, Carlos
Castresana, who leads the Commission
against Impunity in Guatemala, noted
that with a current level of 100,000
individuals, the number of private
security forces in Guatemala outnumbers
the level of troops the United States
now has deployed in Iraq. This number is
5 times the level of uniformed police
officers now working in Guatemala, which
has a population of some 13 million
people.
Not only violence, but issues such as
the burgeoning growth of cities such as
Guatemala City, Quetzaltenango, and
Escuintla, desertification, official
corruption, and pollution, are trying
the mettle of local politicians such as
President Alvaro Colom and foreign
nonprofits and international
organizations such as the U.N., which
has an investigator in place to aid in
bringing perpetrators to book.
Martin Barillas is a former US
diplomat, who also worked as a democracy
advocate and election observer in Latin
America. |
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