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Precursors to Femicide: Guatemalan Women in a Vortex of Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

David Carey Jr.  and
M. Gabriela Torres
David Carey Jr.
Affiliation:
University of Southern Maine
M. Gabriela Torres
Affiliation:
Wheaton College
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Abstract

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Today women in Guatemala are killed at nearly the same rate as they were in the early 1980s when the civil war became genocidal. Yet the current femicide epidemic is less an aberration than a reflection of the way violence against women has become normalized in Guatemala. Used to re-inscribe patriarchy and sustain both dictatorships and democracies, gender-based violence morphed into femicide when peacetime governments became too weak to control extralegal and paramilitary powers. The naturalization of gender-based violence over the course of the twentieth century maintained and promoted the systemic impunity that undergirds femicide today. By accounting for the gendered and historical dimensions of the cultural practices of violence and impunity, we offer a re-conceptualization of the social relations that perpetuate femicide as an expression of post-war violence.

Resumo

Resumo

Hoy en día las mujeres en Guatemala son asesinadas con la misma frecuencia en la cual fueron asesinadas a principios de los años 80 cuando la guerra civil se transformo en un genocidio. Sin embargo, la epidemia actual de femicidios no es algo fuera de lo común en la historia guatemalteca sino más bien una reflexión de los procesos a través de los cuales la violencia en contra de las mujeres en Guatemala se normaliza. La violencia de género que se transmuta en femicidio durante una época de paz, época en la cual los gobernantes han perdido la habilidad de manejar al poder paramilitar y extralegal que ejerce control efectivo sobre el país, fue utilizada en el pasado para reinscribir el patriarcado y sostener tanto regímenes de dictadores como de demócratas. La incorporación de prácticas de impunidad durante el siglo XX, proceso a través del cual se naturaliza la violencia de género, ahora sirve como la base primordial que hace posible el mantenimiento y la expansión del femicidio. Ofrecemos aquí un análisis de la dimensión histórica que facilita las prácticas culturales de género que sostienen tanto la violencia generalizada como la impunidad misma. Este análisis posibilita una reconceptualización las relaciones sociales que hacen posible la realización del femicido como expresión clásica de la violencia en la posguerra.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , 2010 , pp. 142 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by the Latin American Studies Association

Footnotes

The authors wish to thank Patricia Harms for organizing the panel at the 2007 Latin American Studies Association International Conference where we first presented the research that culminated in this collaboration. Comments from the audience at that session encouraged us to broaden our scope. Previous drafts of this article benefited from the constructive criticism of Cecilia Menjivar and the three anonymous LARR reviewers. The authors also thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which funded part of the research on which this article is based.

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