The following excerpt is from a Fall, 2006 article published by Roselyn Costantino. To view the article in its entirety, please click here.
Violence against women in Guatemala is not a new story; the staggering increase in the number of crimes and level of violence against women, however, is shocking. Since 2000, the Guatemala National Civil Police records document 2,170 murders of women; in 2005, the average was forty-eight deaths per month (Trujillo 2006). These killings manifest a systemic denial of women’s most basic human rights and a culturally embedded misogyny that expresses itself in the brutalization of women. This violence inflicts a generalized sense of fear and intimidation on a society still not healed from the atrocities of the thirty-six-year internal conflict (1960–1996) marked by genocide of civilians, mostly indigenous, by military and clandestine security forces. Despite the efforts of the 1996 Peace Accords, Guatemala’s institutional structures and traditional communal systems are proving incapable of protecting women. They fail to act upon the network of forces that function within strategies for power that target women who live in relative obscurity and extreme insecurity in this mostly rural country, which is 25 percent smaller than the state of Illinois, with a population of about 13 million, a high percentage of whom are indigenous. In spite of national and international efforts to stabilize Guatemala, it remains one of the world’s poorest and most insecure nations.
The new level of brutality against women exposes a strained, complex web of social, political, and economic relations; the tensions are borne on women’s bodies at a moment when women have begun to conceptualize and construct a social agency and identity that were rare a few decades ago…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles about women’s rights in Guatemala.
Comments are closed.