Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
As a teacher, it pains me to see how kids go for money and not their future. But it's all the parents’ fault.
Other women were more elaborate in their assessments, but most explanations ended up blaming the poor for their predicament, adding insult to injury. Ofelia, a receptionist, explained, “You see, they [the poor] have many children, so their money is never enough. You know why? Because there is no family planning. Well, there is, but the gente humilde [lit. “humble people,” meaning the poor] don't accept it, and they prefer to have as many children as God sends them. So it's because of their beliefs that they end up worsening their own situation, right?”
The majority of the women with whom I spoke in San Alejo mentioned situations they faced in their daily lives that highlight structural violence and the normalization of inequality. Several women talked about the effects of the unequal land distribution system, couching their reflections in a framework of the ordinary, explaining multiple forms of exploitation as the way things were. In San Alejo women do not work the land directly (they can participate in the harvest), but the men do, and they do so through an exploitative land tenure system. Many are landless and rent land from landowners through a contract called medianía, which implies “half and half” but is hardly that. As it was explained to me, the landowner provides the land and the renter tills it and supplies everything else—seeds, fertilizer, and workers to harvest the crop. Then the landowner and the renter supposedly share the crop. Such a system lends itself to multiple forms of abuse, and it is risky for the renter but not for the landowner. This system exemplifies what Galtung (1990) conceptualizes as the archetypal structure of violence.
Many women brought up the injurious consequences inherent in the system. Sometimes their partners were hired to work the land but were cheated and not paid after the harvest, losing money that was earmarked for other purposes, including medicine and food. Mirna, twenty-eight years old and the mother of five, complained that the landowner with whom her husband worked would deduct money for everything needed to work the land, leaving them with Q.100 (about $15 in 1997) per month in profits. She had to use some of this money to feed the twelve laborers who helped her husband, even when she was eight months’ pregnant. In the case of Leticia, when her partner fell ill from HIV/AIDS they had to sell half of a tiny plot of land so that he could afford his checkups in the capital. After he died, she found out she also was infected, and she sold the other half of the plot to pay for her own checkups. In her last year of life she was tormented about being unable to leave any land, or even a small adobe structure, to her young daughters. When she was already ill, one of the few ways she could make a living was picking tomatoes in the fields, but even this became difficult toward the end because others in town knew of her illness and some potential employers did not want any contact with her. As the women recounted these stories, they presented them as the way things were, normalizing the relationship between those who own the land and those who till it, only occasionally insinuating how exploitative this “natural order of things” was.8 Not surprisingly, when I spoke with the women whose families owned the land, their stories conveyed the other half of the picture, naturalizing the narratives of exploitation I heard from poor women.
POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND STATE TERROR
For thirty-six years, from 1960 to 1996, political violence and state terror were the order of the day in Guatemalan society. During this time politically motivated violence became an integral part of the functioning, governance, and maintenance of the state (Falla 1994; Jonas 2000; Nelson 1999). Violence and terror, epitomized in public assassinations, ruthless massacres, and unsolved disappearances, became the favored political tools for Guatemala's military and political elites (McCleary 1999, cited in Torres 2005). Politically motivated violence was so successful during Guatemala's reign of terror that it came to be known as a “cultural fact,” as somehow “natural” and “cultural” (Nordstrom 1997; Sluka 2000; Torres 2005). The Guatemalan anthropologist M. Gabriela Torres (2005: 143–44) notes that “the naturalization of political violence into a cultural fact was produced, in part, through the creation and promotion of a language or pattern of political violence that—while it generated terror—at the same time obfuscated the political economy of its own production.”
Until 1980 the targets of state terror were primarily ladinos—students, peasants, union organizers, politicians, and revolutionaries—and in the 1960s and 1970s the state-sponsored violence had an urban character (Godoy-Paiz 2008). But in 1981 the army launched its scorched earth campaign against Maya communities.9 Throughout this period ladinos continued to be killed, but the atrocities committed against the Maya, described as ethnocide or genocide, targeted “Indians as Indians” (Grandin 2000: 16). The widespread and systematic nature of this slaughter arguably reached the threshold of crimes against humanity. As an intricate aspect of a regional political structure in which U.S. political interests have weighed heavily (Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005), in 1954 the U.S. government orchestrated the overthrow of democratically elected Jacob Arbenz Guzmán and installed a military regime that would govern the country, in various guises, for the next several decades. Successive U.S. administrations supported this regime as it engaged in widespread human rights violations, providing training and support for the Guatemalan army's counterinsurgency operations (Manz 2004; Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005). According to the 1999 report of the U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission, formally known as the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH; Historical Clarification Commission), the state responded to both the insurgency and the civil movements with unimaginable repression, repression that climaxed in 1981–82 with a bloodbath in which the army committed over six hundred massacres (Sanford 2008: 19). It tortured, murdered, and was responsible for the disappearance of more than 200,000 Guatemalans (mostly Mayas); it destroyed 626 villages, and hundreds of thousands were displaced internally and internationally (Parenti and Muñoz 2007; Sanford 2008).
Although ladino communities were not targeted in the scorched earth campaigns, there are ways in which the general political violence led to the normalization of violence, distorting social relations and affecting life in ladino communities as well. The breadth and depth of state-sponsored terror reached all Guatemalans in one way or another, for one of the most destructive aspects of state terror in Guatemala was the widespread reliance on civilians to kill other civilians (Ball, Kobrak, and Spirer 1999), as well as the strategic dissemination of gruesome killings in the media. Thus the political violence that claimed many lives and destroyed communities in the Altiplano was so pervasive that it engulfed the entire country. Writing about the insidious effects of the militarization of life in El Salvador, Martín-Baró (1991c: 311–12) stated, “The militarization of daily life in the main parts of the social world contributes to the omnipresence of overpowering control and repressive threats…. This is how an atmosphere of insecurity is fostered, unpredictable in its consequences, and demanding of people a complete submission to the dictates of power.” He referred to this phenomenon as the “militarization of the human mind” (1991b: 341). In such contexts, to paraphrase Cynthia Enloe (2000), lives become militarized not only through direct means and exposure but also when militarized products, views, and attitudes are taken as natural and unproblematic (see also Green 1999). Even if concrete expressions of political violence differ in degree, tactics, and expression, the broad effects cannot be contained or isolated in one geographic area when the state iself is the chief perpetrator. As Galtung (1990: 294) observed, “A violent structure leaves marks not only on the human body but also on the mind and the spirit.” It was this kind of political violence, created and spread through state structures, that reached, in one way or another, everyone in Guatemala.
Political violence is linked to other forms of violence, including interpersonal violence in the home (itself linked to symbolic violence) and what is referred to as “common crime.” Douglas Hay (1992) notes the reciprocal relationship between violence from the state and violence in private spheres. And referring to a chain of political violence, Jennifer Turpin and Lester Kurtz (1997) note the interrelated causes of violence at the micro- and macrolevels, such that the violence that occurs in intimate relations is connected to the violence that occurs between ethnic groups, which in turn is linked to global patterns of interstate wars, because the same mechanisms sustain them. Understanding the links between the different manifestations of violence, they argue, is a key step toward addressing the causes.
Thus the cruelty with which certain