Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a similar pattern of killings has drawn international attention and condemnation. Aside from reports by Amnesty International and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, however, the Guatemalan women's deaths have started to receive international attention only in recent years.
As with the killings during the years of overt political conflict, those in Guatemala today are reported in gruesome detail in the national media, sending a similar message of uncertainty and fear. Only this time the message is directed at women, at all women regardless of ethnic background but especially at those from poor backgrounds who work outside the home. And as Godoy-Paiz (2008) notes, not all women in Guatemala experience life and violence in the same ways; social position shapes how women live and how they die. The women in both San Alejo and the Altiplano pay attention to the news; the images and descriptions refresh memories of the insecurity of life, and they often make decisions about travel, study, and work based on this information. For instance, several women in San Alejo mentioned that it was dangerous for women to travel by bus to work or to study, or to walk at certain times, even during the daytime, along roads that were not frequently used. Linking the violence of the past and the dangers of the present, Rosita, in the Altiplano, said that when her daughter informed her that she wanted to go to Guatemala City to study to be a secretary Rosita just about died thinking of the many dangers her daughter might face: “I couldn't sleep that night, just thinking and thinking. How could I live without her by my side? And memories of all the ugly things come to my mind. My hands shake just to think what can happen to her. One hears so much—well, I have seen horrible things. My sister-in-law tells me not to put this fear into the girl's head, to let her do what she wants, go to school, but this is terrible [Rosita is in tears]. Tell me, what if I see her photo in the newspaper [meaning as the victim of a gruesome death]?”
In two instances during my last visits to Guatemala, I had the opportunity to glimpse the feelings of insecurity and fear that women in both San Alejo and the Altiplano experienced every day, though I would not equate my limited experiences with what the women go through. In May 1999, during a conversation with Hortencia in San Alejo, she told me that two women had been found killed, their bodies badly tortured, on a road not far from her house. Then she added a sentence that sent chills down my spine: “Right away, I thought about you two [my assistant and I], since you two walk around town and work, and the two women found were workers. I thought, could it be Cecilia and her friend?” I responded with a nervous laugh that no, thank God, it was not us. In December the same year, during a visit to the Altiplano, the husband of one of the women I was visiting told me he had heard that a young woman was kidnapped and found dead about 30 kilometers away. “She was an anthropologist,” he said, “doing the same thing you're doing here.” In an instant reaction, not thinking clearly and perhaps seeking distance from the woman found dead, I responded, “But I am not an anthropologist,” as if disciplinary training would have mattered. In a fitting comment to my ridiculous response, he added with a shrug of his shoulder and a chuckle, “Oh, maybe she wasn't an anthropologist either, but in any case, she was asking a lot of questions of women just like you do, and she was found dead.” Hortencia's and this man's words were unsettling to me and left me thinking not only about my own safety but also, especially, about what it must be like for many of the women I had met to live every day with the constant threat of a horrific death.
The presence of naked or partially naked bodies in public places, on roadsides and city streets, continues to be an everyday sight in postwar Guatemala. One of the most gruesome recent sightings was four human heads and two decapitated bodies found in separate public points of Guatemala City in June 2010 (El Periódico 2010). And to be sure, men also have been affected by the violence; in fact, many more men than women have been killed. But the brutality and evidence of sexual violence (in most cases amounting to torture) creates a different context for the deaths of women. Amnesty International (2005) reported that although the murders may be attributed to different motives and may have been committed in different areas of the country, the violence today is overwhelmingly gender based. The murders of students, housewives, professionals, domestic employees, unskilled workers, members or former members of street youth gangs, and sex workers in both urban and rural areas, the overwhelming majority of them uninvestigated, are often attributed to “common” or “organized” crime, drug and arms trafficking, maras, or a jealous boyfriend or husband.18 In response to increasing demands for action, in 2008 the Guatemalan government enacted a law stipulating special sanctions for these crimes against women (Preston 2009), but only a tiny percentage of cases have been prosecuted.19
Many of the women who have been killed in recent years come from poor backgrounds, which signals discrimation on the basis of both class and gender. Whereas the majority of women who were victims of violence during Guatemala's overt civil conflict were indigenous Mayas living in rural areas, the reported murder victims today are both Mayas and ladinas living in urban or semiurban areas. This new violence against women is all-encompassing. However, the brutality of the killings and the signs of sexual violence on women's mutilated bodies today bear many of the hallmarks of the atrocities committed during the political conflict, making the differences between “wartime” and “peacetime” Guatemala imperceptible.
MULTISIDED VIOLENCE IN THE LIVES OF WOMEN IN SAN ALEJO
Two examples from San Alejo demonstrate how multiple forms of violence can coalesce in a normalized fashion. They do not deal with direct physical violence and do not represent the kind of violence that attracts attention in the media or from activist groups. On close inspection, however, links and expressions of the different forms of violence outlined above begin to emerge in these examples. The first example involves men's emigration from San Alejo to the United States, and the second has to do with moneylending; often the two are related. Neither example is “abnormal” or extraordinary in this context, though both can perpetuate and exacerbate existing forms of suffering and even create new forms.
I cannot provide an extensive account of Guatemalan migration to the United States here, but suffice it to say that migration within and from Guatemala has a long history, linked to structural and political forms of violence. Since at least a century ago, indigenous Guatemalans have been participating in several patterns of labor migration, both to plantations in Guatemala's lowlands and to the Soconusco, in southern Mexico. As the political conflict intensified, thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Mayas from the Altiplano, fled their homes to refugee camps in southern Mexico and to the United States. Today migration has become a central aspect of life in San Alejo (as well as in most of the country); it is a normalized strategy to endure the consequences of deep socioeconomic inequalities exacerbated by neoliberal economic reforms and direct forms of violence. But far from addressing economic stagnation and inequality, migration can actually perpetuate them (see Portes 2009).20
At the beginning of my fieldwork in 1995, some women in San Alejo talked about their husbands, partners, brothers, or other (mostly) male relatives who were working in the United States. With every visit to the town, signs of migration became more visible and omnipresent. There were more cars with U.S. license plates circulating in the town and more conversations about life in the two U.S. towns to which the majority of men from San Alejo migrated. When I first met Nena, we sat in the living room adjacent to the small bookstore/school supply store that she owned and operated from her home. She always spoke with pride about how she stocked her business with the best products and was careful to select the merchandise she sold. Five years later the store was no longer there. The “Librería El Recuerdo” sign had been replaced by one advertising a travel agency. Surprised, I asked Nena what that was, and she explained that it was not a travel agency, “the way you and I understand what a travel agency is” but a travel agency “for everyone in town,” that is, for organized groups of people traveling to the United States together by land. “Traveling…without a visa?” I inquired. “Yes, of course,” Nena replied, “mojados” (a pejorative term imported from the United States). She explained that the owner of the “agency” had a booming business because he served the town and the surrounding villages and had asked her if he could rent her store due to its central location in town. During the time I was there in 2000, he took groups of about one hundred individuals approximately twice a month, Nena explained. And the local branch of a money transfer business had a long list of names of recipients, almost