Enduring Violence. Cecilia Menjívar
and agency itself is engendered.
—Arthur Kleinman, “The Violences of Everyday Life”
Much has been written about violence in Guatemala, a country that has come to be known for the contrast between its spectacular beauty and its unspeakable suffering. This book, however, is not about the direct, political violence in the highlands (Altiplano) targeting the Maya, a form of violence for which Guatemala has long been known. It is about the everyday violence in the lives of ladinas in Oriente, eastern Guatemala, where few outsiders, either scholars or tourists, venture to visit. It is about violence not directly attributable to individual actions intended to cause harm but embedded in institutions and in quotidian aspects of life—the familiar, the routine; violence so commonplace and so much a part of life that it is often not recognized as such. In contrast to many other works about Guatemala, this book is about the violence that becomes visible only when its consequences, in the form of suffering, are talked about. It is about the violence that women habitually experience, which is intertwined with the other forms of violence that have held sway in Guatemala for a long time.1
Guatemala is a society dealing with the aftermath of nearly four decades of state terror (Grandin 2000; Manz 2004) and undergoing “civic insecurity,” with high levels of violence, persistent impunity, and an inability to address the postconflict instability (Torres 2008: 2). Although it has been more than a decade since the Peace Accords were signed in 1996, Guatemalans are still experiencing the consequences of an internal armed conflict that was, in some respects, the most brutal in the region during the past century. The United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission (CEH 1999) estimated that as many as 200,000 people were killed—a majority at the hands of government forces—during the thirty-six-year war that ended in 1996. The victims were mostly unarmed civilians, and the government's methods were often extraordinarily cruel. According to the U.N. commission, the methods employed by the state could be said to constitute “acts of genocide.” The armed conflict left the country awash in weapons, with webs of people trained to use them and a civil society accustomed to the horrors of violence. The conflict not only left widows, orphans, and whole communities traumatized; it also left a population distrustful of the authorities.
Therefore, recent accounts of violence (Benson, Fischer, and Thomas 2008; Snodgrass Godoy 2006; Steenkamp 2009) in postwar, “peacetime” Guatemala reveal some of the highest homicide rates in the hemisphere, daily kidnappings, extortion, robberies, lynchings, and feminicide, the new wave of killings in which women, regardless of their ethnicity, are the targets. Guatemalans now face multiple forms of violence, often at higher rates than during “wartime.” Angelina Snodgrass Godoy (2005) notes that in Guatemala the boundaries between “common” and “political” crime have become blurred; thus familiar distinctions between the two no longer stand up to empirical scrutiny. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of these as “peacetime” conditions.
Guatemala also has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the hemisphere, which means that structural violence shapes many aspects of life and has manifold expressions, such as multiple forms of exploitation, extreme forms of poverty, and deeply unequal access to society's benefits. But in describing Guatemala's state of affairs today, one must bear in mind that such conditions do not have roots in the recent past. They are the culmination of a long history of abuse, exploitation, and repression brought about by the legacy of Spanish colonialism, U.S. foreign policy, and recent neoliberal economic reforms, intersections that scholars of Guatemala have amply documented (Cojtí Cuxil 1997; Hale 2006; Lovell 2010; Manz 2004; Smith 1990). Thus some of the violence Guatemala has experienced is directly related to the militarization of life during the political conflict, whereas other forms are tied to long-standing structural inequalities that have assaulted the lives of the majority of Guatemalans for centuries. These sources of violence are linked: it is not a matter of tracing root causes to one or another factor but of recognizing that multiple forms of violence act on one another and are experienced all at once. As Paul Farmer (2004) notes, the systematic violation of human rights as a product of capitalism is not unrelated and indeed is made possible through the use of state-sponsored violence (see also Binford 2004). Accordingly, links among vulnerability, inequality, human rights violations, and neoliberal restructuring are key to understanding the root causes of multiple forms of violence, as evinced in the work of Benson, Fischer, and Thomas (2008) and Benson and Fischer (2009) on Guatemala, Moodie (2006) on El Salvador, and Gill (2007) on Colombia, as well as Burkhart's (2002) quantitative analysis of the relation between capitalism and human rights violations. As Benson and Fischer (2009: 153) observe in their work on Guatemala, “By implicating neoliberal ideologies and policies in the production of the new violence, we complicate simple assessments of the Peace Accords’ successes and failures and challenge the guiding premise that unfettered market forces are necessary for achieving peace and security.”
An examination of the multiple forms of violence in the lives of ladinas in eastern Guatemala, who live away from the zones where direct political terror was “a way of life” (see Green 1999), exposes the deep, broad, and often indirect consequences of living in a society in which the population has been brutalized and life has become fragile and cheap, depicting the “long arm of violence.” In pointing to the violence in women's lives, I do not pathologize them. In fact, it would be easier to fall back on frames that focus on pathologizing individuals than to attempt to dissect the multiple systems of oppression and exclusion that generate suffering in the manner I do here. The ladinas’ lives are much more complex, and a close-up look reveals those extrapersonal forces that produce suffering for them. I have strived to convey this complexity fully. And whereas women turn to others when in need, it is often those others—friends, family, husbands, and neighbors—whose actions instantiate the violence in the context in which the women live. It is for this reason that in my discussions I intersperse instances of comfort with narratives of suffering, as they intertwine in complex ways. However, my goal is to focus the analytical gaze on violence and suffering so as to retrieve them from the recesses of normality and in this way to propose alternative ways of thinking about violence,2 perhaps, in the words of Kleinman (2000: 231), a critique “of the normal as well as of the normative social order.”
MAIN OBJECTIVE OF THE BOOK
My main objective is to unearth the misrecognized violence that women routinely experience in familiar, commonplace spaces. I seek to unveil the violence that is difficult to see and to measure (and therefore often to define as violence) because it is not confined to individual acts or horrific crimes that can be reported or tabulated. I focus on, as Kleinman (2000: 226) puts it, “the effect of the social violence that social orders—local, national, global—bring to bear on people [original emphasis].” I bring attention to the veiled violence in forms of social control of women that result in devaluation, humiliation, a lowered gaze, the kind of violence that does not shock the observer because it is part of the everyday but that is deeply connected to the more noticeable acts that inflict physical injury because both kinds of violence arise from the same structures. Thus the forms of violence that I examine here are related to and make possible (though perhaps not cause), through the devaluation of women's lives, the more gruesome expressions that come in the form of feminicides in Guatemala, a discussion to which I return in the conclusion. The links to which I draw attention here are evident in other contexts as well, such as the cases that the journalists Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (2009) have written about from a human rights stance, based on their work in Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Congo, Ethiopia, among other countries, in which they chronicle the manifold and mutating forms of oppression and violence against women that arise from multiple structural inequalities.
In the process I aim to develop an approach to examining structures of violence grounded in women's experiences. This approach captures the suffering in the women's lives that comes from deep inequalities in access to resources based on socioeconomic position, superimposed on the humiliations and fear originating in orthodox gender ideologies that constrain women's lives, all occurring in a background of fear and insecurity. Malnourishment, lack of opportunities to secure dignified work, and unequal access to education and health care are all expressions of the forms of violence I explore. However, I also include the physical forms of interpersonal violence that are more strongly associated with the phenomenon of violence, because in