Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
and a social worker, working in the public and private sectors who, in one way or another, dealt with instances of domestic violence. They were asked about their views of men and women, and overwhelmingly all agreed that “women are weaker,” that “women are dependent on men,” that “women must obey men,” that “men are the ones who hold authority,” and that “women are loving and caring.” When they were asked under what conditions a man is justified in assaulting a woman, five of the professionals pointed to jealousy, alcoholism, or infidelity on the part of the woman. When they were asked if violence against women affected society in general, they responded negatively, indicating that these are isolated cases that do not have a wider effect. Some of the professionals did say that violent acts against women can have a broad effect when the children imitate the actions of the fathers and become aggressors themselves, when families disintegrate, when women become a public charge if they are left physically unable to work, and when society in general becomes more violent (UNICEF-UNIFEM-OPS/OMS-FNUAP 1993). Therefore, institutions such as the criminal justice system reinforce and formalize violent structures, causing more injury and suffering (often though not solely through neglect).
Gender and gendered violence in Guatemala emerge in quotidian events, and it is precisely these everyday forms, sometimes expressed in seemingly innocuous acts, that contribute to their normalization. Gender idologies create spheres of social action that contribute not only to normalizing expressions of violence but also to justifying “punishments” for deviations from normative gender role expectations. This is manifested in imposed demarcations of public and private spaces and in the resulting restriction of women's movement in public, as well as in practices that are more directly physically violent, such as abductions of women before they marry (robadas), a point to which I return in chapter 4.
Often the women I spoke with found their self-perceptions corroborated by their partners’ threats, assaults, reproaches, and orders, but in some cases it was other women who did the reproaching or contributed to the assault. For instance, Delfina told me that her husband insulted her in front of friends and family, threw food at her when it was not prepared to his taste, and often threatened to leave her for a younger woman. This treatment was routine, though in a moment of reflection that epitomized the normalization of gender violence and gendered violence in San Alejo she somehow considered herself a bit fortunate. In her words, “He's never touched me. Can you believe he's never hit me? Yes, I'm serious. It's true. You'd think, with his character, it could be awful. But he's not like others who hit their wives.” Delfina's reflection about physical violence in the lives of women and its absence in her life casts it as normalized for others. Nonetheless, Delfina mentioned that she felt depressed, tense, and unloved; the perverse effects of her husband's behavior also led her to accept her situation as ordinary. So many other women she knew suffered similar (or worse) assaults routinely that she did not find her own condition “that bad.” I am not recounting these comments in an accusatory manner; rather, I want to call attention to the connection between extrapersonal, macrostructures of inequality and the microlevel, everyday world, as it is here that gender-based symbolic violence, the violence found in the social order, is instantiated.
To be sure, gender violence and gendered violence, and their normalization, are not new in Guatemala. In an examination of gender and justice in rural Guatemala, Cindy Forster (1999) notes that between 1936 and 1956 there were several recorded cases involving harmful acts against women (one had been killed) that failed to generate criminal proceedings. Authorities noted “nothing strange” in criminal acts against women; the “business as usual” attitude was especially noticeable in cases in which the women were poor and/or Maya. A justice system that carries inconsequential punishments for crimes against women, Carey and Torres (forthcoming) note, offers no legal sanction against gender-based violence. Carey and Torres, as well as Forster, link all these forms of violence against women. Forster writes:
In Guatemala as elsewhere, dominant ideologies that justify coercion have shared a common purpose in the routinization of human inequality. Closely linked behaviors and social philosophies have legitimized the extraction of labor and obedience from masses of people across culture, class, or sex divides, sometimes through the use of terror. Abstractions that separate the political from the personal and gender from race or class, often damage the real-life permeability of these various oppressions…. Like violence against women, violence against the poor and nonwhite exists as a persistent threat…. In Guatemala…these oppressions were not necessarily parallel or dual systems. Rather, each was intimately bound up with the others, resting on the same scaffolding of structural inferiority and manifested in daily violence that enforced domination and submission. (1999: 57–58)
Gender violence and gendered violence in Guatemala today have roots in gender ideologies and in the country's history of political violence. Though only one quarter of the 200,000 disappeared and those executed extrajudicially during Guatemala's internal armed conflict were women (CEH 1999; REHMI 1998), Torres (2005: 163) notes that “when women were killed, their cadavers showed evidence of overkill and rape.” This point, Torres (2005) argues, suggests that women more often than men were punished for divergence from expected behavioral norms. Indeed, in her meticulous analysis of published records, Torres finds that the victim's gender played a crucial role in determining the type of torture, the way bodies were disposed of, and the extent and type of reporting made on violated cadavers. Thus, Torres (2005) argues, the gender-specific necrographic maps and the significance of their signs point to the role of women in the restructuring of the Guatemalan nation through violence.
As in other politically conflictive societies, therefore, women in Guatemala have been murdered, disappeared, terrorized, and stripped of their dignity, and rape and sexual violence against them have been an integral part of the counterinsurgency strategy (Amnesty International 2005). Susan Blackburn (1999) and Cynthia Enloe (2000) have argued that such treatment can be linked to more obvious forms of state violence against women, as strategies of state terror and as part of a process of intimidation of dissidents or minority groups.16 In this generalized context of gendered violence, indigenous women were singularly violated (Torres 2005), for this violence was directed at them because they were women and because they were Mayas. As Nelson (1999:326) notes, the disdain for indigenous life, in particular, indigenous female life, was temporarily extended by the counterinsurgency, which treated all “probable insurgents” “like Indians—expendable, worthless, bereft of civil and human rights.” But the real magnitude of the violence women suffered during Guatemala's civil conflict will never be known, in part because many cases were not documented, but also because many women, out of guilt or shame, remained too traumatized to come forward, and afraid of rejection by their communities (Amnesty International 2005).17 The U.N. Truth Commission report states that rape, especially in indigenous areas, resulted in “breaking marriage and social ties[,] generating social isolation and communal shame[,] and provok[ing] abortions [and] infanticide and obstruct[ing] births and marriages within these groups, thus facilitating the destruction of indigenous groups” (CEH 1999: 14).
Thus Guatemala's regime and militarization of life has made possible multiple acts of gendered violence, reflected in direct political violence against Maya women but also by the encouragement of abduction, torture, rape, and murder of female workers as a lesson to other women who might think of asserting their rights. Direct and indirect forms of violence have coalesced so that Guatemalan women have lived “in a chronic state of emergency,” Carey and Torres (forthcoming) note, which has been a precursor to the violence we see today. Direct physical violence against women has increased in postwar Guatemala in absolute and relative numbers. Police records indicate that in 2002 women accounted for 4.5 percent of all killings, in 2003 for 11.5 percent, and in 2004 for 12.1 percent; figures compiled by the Policía Nacional Civil (PNC) (cited in Amnesty International 2005) note that the number of women murdered rose from 163 in 2002 to 383 in 2003 to more than 527 in 2004, and according to Oxfam (Oxfam Novib n.d.), in the first half of 2005 there were 239 women killed, including 33 girls under the age of fifteen. The Guatemalan lawyer Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey (quoted in Preston 2009) noted that over 4,000 women had been killed violently in Guatemala in the previous decade, with only 2 percent of the cases solved. In fact, Torres (2008: 6) argues that impunity in Guatemala demonstrates tolerance to multiple forms of violence