Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
cannot be examined independently of the violence engendered by state terror, as Taussig (2005) has observed for the case of Colombia. Often, acts of common crime are characterized by the same brutality and professionalization with which acts associated with political violence are carried out. Torres-Rivas (1998: 49) notes that the criminogenic conditions of postwar violence can be examined in the context of power and state violence: “The bad example of the use of violence on the part of the state is then imitated by the citizens.” “Common criminals” adopt strategies similar to those used by the state (the same individuals may be engaged in both), and, as posited by examinations using brutalization frameworks (see Kil and Menjívar 2006), individuals who commit common crimes mimic the state as it metes out punishments on enemies or dissidents. The violence of common crime therefore is not dissociated from state-sponsored political violence.10 However, as Snodgrass Godoy (2006:25) notes, “The depoliticization of crime [is] among the hallmarks of neoliberal governance in our insecure world[,]…most starkly sketched in settings of extreme marginality.”
The effects of political violence, then, are seldom contained in a specific geographic area, among the members of only a targeted group, or in only one aspect of life. It is not surprising therefore that the ladinas with whom I spoke did not openly question the taken-for-granted world of violence that surrounded them, conveyed daily in newspapers, on television, and along the roads. Regular images and stories of gruesome deaths created a climate of insecurity and continuous alert (the “nervous system,” in Taussig's [1992] conceptualization) in eastern Guatemala as well, and it was “part of life.” Moving the analytic lens from the Altiplano, where political violence has been well documented and acknowledged, to eastern Guatemala, where for the most part it has not, unearths the breadth and depth of the project of state terror that engulfed, with varying degrees of force and visibility, the entire country.
Torres (2005) argues that in the process of making violence quotidian, “natural,” and “cultural,” the Guatemalan Armed Forces relied on a discourse expressed in the patterned and continuous appearance of cadaver reports and articulated through both the signs of torture left on bodies and the strategy of displaying the reports. Mutilated bodies left on the sides of roads and the unidentifiable victims of torture were meant to send a message to the living. Victims of terror “disappeared” from their normal existence, making the disappearance itself a powerful message of what awaited those who contemplated sympathizing with the opposition (Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005). The innocent bystanders who witnessed abductions or discovered a tortured body on a road got the message, one that was carefully and strategically broadcast in the media (Torres 2005). Although such sightings are associated with the Altiplano, they were not uncommon in other parts of Guatemala.
These observations are not meant to suggest that the entire country experienced state terror in the same way or to lessen the atrocities committed against the Maya in the Altiplano; on the contrary, they underscore the reach of the political violence suffered in Guatemala. As scholars have documented for the Altiplano, relatives of the disappeared who never saw their loved ones again live with the torment of not knowing if these relatives were in fact killed. Rosita, whom I interviewed in the Altiplano, would cry whenever she tried to explain what it meant to have had her husband disappear fourteen years earlier. On one occasion she told me, “I live wondering, will he come back one day? How about for our daughter's fifteen-year celebration? Every Christmas, every New Year's, every birthday, I wonder if he will come back. Sometimes I almost go crazy. Why did they [government army] not return his body to me? Why such cruelty? I think my torture will last all my life.” Filita, on the other hand, explained that her father was killed right in front of her and her siblings rather than having been disappeared and noted that this had been a consolation to the family because at least they could give him a proper burial. Only in the brutality of Guatemala's reign of terror could the killing of a father in front of his children serve as consolation. The women I interviewed in San Alejo did not have similar experiences, but this kind of violence often loomed in the background of their assessments and perspectives.
As the project of state violence reached all corners of the country in different ways, the militarization of life was evident beyond the Altiplano; it materialized in soldiers and military vehicles on roads even in areas that were supposed to be far from the “conflict” zones, such as in San Alejo. The military presence there served as an eerie reminder that violence was never far or contained in just one area, and thus everyone could be “at risk.” Military violence was not separated in a black-and-white geographic mapping because the repressive state could reach anyone, anywhere, any time, and the reminders of this were ubiquitous. One day as my assistant, our driver, and I were on the main road leading to San Alejo, we saw there was commotion, and traffic was slow in a large town we were supposed to pass through. A crowd was lined up on the sides of a semipaved road; it looked as if they were waiting for a pageant to go by, and I did not want to miss it. To my surprise, I saw a convoy of U.S. military vehicles, Humvees too wide for the narrow roads of the town. People had come out of their homes to look at how these massive vehicles almost touched the houses on both sides of the road as they maneuvered their way through town. The military presence felt as huge as those vehicles in that narrow road, and I wondered about the need to establish such a presence even in this region of Guatemala. I was told that a military presence—both Guatemalan and U.S.—was in fact routine; the reason people were watching that day was out of curiosity. I asked a small group of people what this was all about, and a man said, “It's the gringos. They are on their way to fix the roads around here.” “So they have come to help?” I ventured to ask. The man smiled, shrugged his shoulders, shook his head slightly, and simply responded, “Saber” (Who knows). As Linda Green (2004: 187) observes, civic actions mixed with counterinsurgency strategies do “not negate the essential fact that violence is intrinsic to the military's nature and logic. Coercion is the mechanism that the military uses to control citizens even in the absence of war.” The scene was troubling to me, but for the town dwellers and everyone in the region, accustomed to such sightings, it was life as usual. As Green (2004: 187) continues, in Guatemala “language and symbols are utilized to normalize a continued army presence.”
The end of the armed conflict has not resulted in an absence of violence, and in fact new modalities have emerged. Death threats, attacks, kidnappings, and acts of intimidation are a daily occurrence in “postwar” Guatemala.11 Mutilated bodies are still found on the sides of roads, kidnappings occur regularly, people live in fear, and there are guns and security forces in places where people conduct their daily lives—challenging conventional assumptions about what it means to live in “peacetime.” All this is exacerbated by the impunity that has been the hallmark of the postwar regime; many of those responsible for human rights violations have entered politics and have even been elected to public offices (Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005).
EVERYDAY VIOLENCE, INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE, AND CRIME
Everyday violence refers to the daily practices and expressions of violence on a micro-interactional level, such as interpersonal, domestic, and delinquent (Bourgois 2004a: 428). I borrow the concept from Philippe Bourgois to focus on the routine practices and expressions of interpersonal aggression that serve to normalize violence at the micro-level.12 This concept focuses attention on “the individual lived experience that normalizes petty brutalities and terror at the community level and creates a common sense or ethos of violence” (Bourgois 2004a: 426). Analytically, the concept helps to avoid explaining individual-level confrontations and expressions of violence, such as “common” crime and domestic violence, through psychological or individualistic frameworks. Instead, this prism links these acts to broader structures of inequality that promote interpersonal violence. As Alejandro Portes and Bryan Roberts (2005) note, increasing trends of inequality are very much associated with rising crime in Latin America (see also Torres 2008), even if precise causality cannot always be established. Indeed, Portes and Roberts (2005: 76) note, “from a sociological standpoint, the reaction of some of society's most vulnerable members in the form of unorthodox means to escape absolute and relative deprivation is predictable.” From this angle one can trace the violence of common crime to structural and political violence, as well as to the creation of a “culture of terror” that normalizes violence in the private and public spheres, and can begin to understand how those who experience it end up directing their brutality against themselves