The Ugly Poetics of Violence in Post-Accord Guatemala (original) (raw)
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The Naturalization of Peace and War: The Hegemonic Discourses on the Political Violence in Guatemala
The Struggle for Memory in Latin America, 2015
The political violence in Guatemala c. 1978-1990 obtained different interpretations which two, in our view, are the hegemonic: the theory of dual violence and the idea of genocide in the context of the internal armed conflict. While there are differences regarding the role of civilian casualties, are based on a narrative structure based on two armed groups, guerrillas and the army. This article seeks to denature these interpretations showing the historical process in which these were anchored, political and social actors who were behind these, and the silences these entail.
Guatemala’s ‘Peace Trap’: A Bottom-Up Qualitative Study of Violence After Post- Conflict From Galtung’s Conceptual Framework, 2020
This dissertation discusses to what extent Guatemala can be considered at peace 25 years after the signing of the peace accords. My research question departs from the contrast between the official ‘at peace’ status and the reality on the ground with epidemic levels of violence and continuously forced displacement. The lack of attention from Conflict Studies to Guatemala’s violence after the post-conflict has been parallel to an intellectual takeover by ‘citizen security’ experts who have diagnosed this issue as mostly criminal. This paper takes an alternative approach and challenges the criminalisation narrative based on two factors: the continuities of violence from the war era which partly explain current violence; and the counter-productive legacies of the liberal peacebuilding model that deepened the socio-economic root causes of the problem. My thesis is that Guatemala’s ‘at peace’ status has become a trap by scholars and policy-makers because it has eclipsed a pending debate on why violence after post-conflict has endured for so long. I approach this question from a bottom-up qualitative research design based on 8 focus groups with women and young adults from a hotspot neighbourhood near Guatemala City in which participants discussed their everyday experiences with violence and expectations of peace. There were three main findings: one, the nuances of community-level violence with blurred lines between perpetrators and victims; second, the call for structural reforms such as gender equality and climate change rather than anti-crime solutions to solve local violence; and thirdly, the importance of sexism and cult to firearms as a symbolic enabler of brutality. I analysed the findings using Johan Galtung’s violence triangle of direct, indirect, and cultural violence. This paper argues that more bottom-up, multi-disciplinary studies which take a peace-based rather than a crime-based approach are needed to find new ways out to the country’s chronic violence problem.
An ethnographic account of the putative shift away from state-sponsored violence and the emergence of new patterns of violence in postwar Guatemala challenges liberal political and moral models that narrowly interpret violence in terms of individual suffering and/or culpability. Such models converge with a resurgence of right-wing political activity. The origins and outcomes of violence are more usefully and accurately conceived in terms of structural and societal conditions. Guatemala’s new violence (e.g., crime, gang activity, and vigilantism) is not the chaos of media accounts but a manifestation of enduring legacies of state violence and the social and economic insecurities brought on by structural adjustment policies.
Violence in peace: forms and causes of postwar violence in Guatemala
2006
The poor performance of civil society in the security sphere 5. Conclusion 93 At the beginning of 2006 there were 21,000 posts for police officers, but holidays, shift duties and sick leave mean that only 14,000 officers are on duty at any one time. 94 Just over 50% of these officers are stationed in Guatemala City. The presence of the police across the country is therefore unsatisfactory. However, Leonardo Martínez, Director of FORPOL, points out that more policemen do not necessarily mean less crime. It is more important that the police should actually be present in the places where they are needed. It is still the case, Martínez explains, that police officers go for a walk rather than patrolling, and that their presence is a matter of aimless "wandering about". 95 But a light police presence does not necessarily lead to high levels of violence, as can be seen from the fact that, with the exception of Jutiapas, the regions of Guatemala where violence is at its most intense have a relatively heavy police presence. 96 In addition, there are complaints about the Interior Ministry takes over again because it is responsible for the penal system. In between, the other three institutions of the security sector are responsible. 91 There is no ministry of justice in Guatemala. The (deputy) minister of justice is subordinated to the minister of the interior, which is a problem for the independence of the judicial system.
The Hidden Story—Violence and the Law in Guatemala
Law and History Review, 2006
Like all good historical research, “Gloria's story” raises more questions than it can answer. My reaction to the article, which I initially shared with the author as an anonymous reviewer forLaw and History Review, assumes that this incompleteness is a welcome aspect of the historian's trade, rather than a gap that we should cover with theorization or redundant evidence. Yet the narrative structure of case studies like this makes it necessary to probe what is left outside the story, however unpleasant it might be. In these comments I will try to do that by inserting this fascinating case into a historical reflection about the relationship between violence and the law, an aspect of Guatemalan history that “Gloria's Story” reluctantly illustrates.
Confronting Violence in Postwar Guatemala: An Introduction
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2010
A Strange Yet Familiar Violence in Postwar Guatemala ON 10 MAY 2009, RODRIGO ROSENBERG, a prominent attorney in Guatemala City, was shot in the head and killed while riding his bike. Days before his murder, Rosenberg videotaped an 18-minute message, subsequently circulated widely in Guatemala and internationally, in which he stated that should he be killed in the near future, the intellectual authors of the crime would be standing president Alvaro Colom and his wife, Sandra Torres. Their motive would be retribution, specifically for Rosen-berg's representation of another recently murdered member of the Guatemala City elite, the businessman Khalil Musa. In the videotape, Rosenberg states that Musa was murdered because of the information he was about to release, which clearly showed the president's links to organized crime and drug trafficking. Rosenberg said he made the recording because he feared that Colom and his associates would not stop at killing Khalil Musa. The killing never stops in Guatemala. More than a decade after the 1996 Peace Accords were signed, which ended 36 years of civil war, homicide rates rival those during the war years. Progress on all fronts seems minimal at best; economic and social gaps between the wealthy and the poor are among the world's worst.
Violence and Women’s Lives in Eastern Guatemala: A Conceptual Framework
Latin American Research Review, 2008
In this paper I outline a framework to examine women's lives in eastern Guatemala, how multiple forms of violence coalesce in their everyday lives, and how these become internalized and normalized so as to become invisible and "natural." Women in western Guatemala, mostly indigenous, have received the attention of scholars (and with good reason) who are interested in unearthing the brutality of state terror and its gendered expressions in Guatemala. This discussion builds on previous research conducted among indigenous groups in Guatemala and renders a depiction of the broad reach of violence, including those forms of violence that are so commonplace as to become invisible. I argue that an examination of multiple forms of violence in the lives of women in eastern Guatemala, mostly non-indigenous, exposes the deep and broad manifestations of living in a society engulfed in violence, depicting the "long arm of violence."
VIGILANTE: Violence and Security in Postwar Guatemala
2014
Professor Sherry B. Ortner, Chair This monograph documents the rise and fall of a vigilante justice movement in order to understand the conditions that enable and hinder collective action in postwar Guatemala. Collective efforts to create a more equitable Guatemala were brutally repressed during its 36 year-long civil war (1960-1996). In the aftermath of this genocidal conflict, most Guatemalans seek better futures through individual projects such as education and migration. Security represents one domain where efforts at collective organizing remain strong. Guatemala City boasts one of the highest homicide rates in the region and less than 5% of crimes are prosecuted. Communities throughout the country have responded to this security crisis by organizing extralegal security patrols. These organizations resemble the civil patrols that Maya men were forced to join during the civil war. Adult men take turns patrolling the streets, apprehending wrongdoers, holding court and meting out punishment. Unlike their wartime incarnation, control is now entirely in local hands and "gangsters" have replaced "communists" as the targets of iii disciplinary action. This study is based on a total of two years of participant observation and interviewing in Todos Santos Cuchumatán, a predominantly Mam-Maya community in rural Huehuetenango. While the influence of wartime paramilitarism is profoundly felt, I argue that efforts to make and contest security involve the creative recombination of a wide range of discourses, including human rights, capitalist commonsense, zero-tolerance policing, Marxism, and Maya conceptions of personhood. Delineating and historicizing these multiple strands is essential for understanding the proliferation of violence in postwar Guatemala. Chapter one looks at what makes lynching possible. Chapter two explores vigilante leaders' justifications for their actions. Chapter three recounts the experiences of accused gangsters. Chapter four uses the exile of one "gangster" to explore how exclusion creates community. Chapter five focuses on debates over the legality of alcohol to understand the ambiguous legal position of the rights of indigenous people. While Guatemala represents an extreme case, many of the trends on display here, including the privatization of security, the economic obsolescence of young men, the forging of communal identities through violent exclusions, and moral panics about mind-altering substances, reverberate elsewhere. iv The dissertation of Ellen Jane Sharp is approved.
Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 2010
ON 10 MAY 2009, RODRIGO ROSENBERG, a prominent attorney in Guatemala City, was shot in the head and killed while riding his bike. Days before his murder, Rosenberg videotaped an 18-minute message, subsequently circulated widely in Guatemala and internationally, in which he stated that should he be killed in the near future, the intellectual authors of the crime would be standing president Alvaro Col om and his wife, Sandra Torres. Their motive would be retribution, specifically for Rosenberg's representation of another recently murdered member of the Guatemala City elite, the businessman Khalil Musa. In the videotape, Rosenberg states that Musa was murdered because of the information he was about to release, which clearly showed the president's links to organized crime and drug trafficking. Rosenberg said he made the recording because he feared that Colom and his associates would not stop at killing Khalil Musa.