Confronting Violence in Postwar Guatemala: An Introduction (original) (raw)
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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.
Smith Offit JLACA 2010 Violence in Guatemala
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 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.
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.
Guatemala – “Only Political Killings”
Ending War Crimes, Chasing the War Criminals
This chapter looks at the character of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who ran the concentration camps. It is an intriguing story of his fleeing to Brazil at war's end, living incognito for many years and then being ousted by his son's half-Jewish girlfriend. He was kidnapped and spirited out of Argentina by Israeli agents, tried and executed. Chapter 2: Himmler was Hitler's deputy. This is the story of his boyhood, his growing up and his emergence in adulthood as a top Nazi who personally ordered the killing of millions of Jews. It asks the question how could a gentle and respectful boy and young man coming from a sober middle class, Catholic family, so change his personality in such a short time. Chapter 3: Modern day war crimes punishment began with the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War 2 when senior Nazis were put on trial. Today, after a long gestation period, there is now the International War Crimes Court where alleged war criminals can be tried and sentenced to imprisonment. Chapter 4: This chapter examines the role played by some of Africa's major war criminals and how they came to trial-latterly in the International Criminal Court (ICC). Chapter 5: The Western world has its alleged war criminals too. The chapter begins with Robert McNamara who was President Kennedy's secretary of defence and a key player in the war in Vietnam. Later in life he accused himself publicly of having committed war crimes. Then follows portraits of Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush and Tony Blair who many believe are war criminals that should be arrested and sent for trial. Chapter 6: Ariel Sharon was once Israel's most important general scourge of the Arab armies and, later, prime minister. He had no compunction about admitting the atrocities he had committed and defended himself vigorously. Chapter 7: Guatemala, said the secretary-general of Amnesty International, was a country with "no political prisoners only political killings". The author was the journalist responsible for proving that the president of Guatemala was personally directing the death squads which decimated many Indian villages and opposition figures. Over 30 years the author has continued to visit Guatemala and monitor the slow, incremental, improvement in human rights. It has often been one step forward and two steps back but now the courts appear to be taking a firm and courageous stand, convicting many war criminals including a former president.
The Ugly Poetics of Violence in Post-Accord Guatemala
2009
With the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996 Guatemala's credentials of democratic governance were re-established, but as media reports and the international community have observed the killing and crimes of the civil war have continued. With thought of the apparent contradictions of continued violence in a time of peace, this article aims to characterise and identify the causes of this violence. The article proposes that whilst carrying some validity, current academic, media and political explanations largely fail to capture the extent and signifi cance of the violence in Guatemala because of their general tendency to disarticulate certain forms of violence from each other and their failure to collectively place these acts of violence in a wider socio-political context that stretches beyond Guatemala and between historical periods of peace and war. In underlining the importance of an interpretative approach to violence strong identifi cation is made in this article with anthropological ideas of a 'poetics of violence'. It is argued that study of the 'poetics' of violence -that is, its generative character -unravels existing statistics and highlights that its origins and solutions are to be found beyond the largely static limitations of dominant combative policies. Ultimately, explanations for the persisting violence in Guatemala do not lie with the presence of gangs and organised crime, or a pathological 'culture of violence' marked by war and by poverty, but in its support and sanction by the continued systemic violence of elites and contradictions of international intervention.
CURRENT HISTORY-NEW YORK THEN …, 2000
Guatemalans elected a new president late last year for the first time since the signing of the December 1996 peace accords that ended more than three decades of war. But in a vote that also filled municipal and congressional seats, the majority of candidates selected in these seminal ...
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.
Battling for Peace in Guatemala
Latin American Perspectives, 2001
Book Review of: Susanne Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S. Power. Boulder: Westview Press, 1991. 288 pp. Susanne Jonas, Of Centaurs and Doves: Guatemala’s Peace Process. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999. 299 pp.
Guatemala after the Peace Agreements: External Pressures and Internal Challenges
2002
The Guatemalan Government and the guerrillas of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) signed the peace agreements on December 29, 1996, after five years of difficult negotiations. The agreements followed more than 36 years of armed conflict that resulted in 200,000 people dead or “disappeared,” 650 massacres, 440 destroyed villages and over 400,000 internally displaced or exiled people. In total, the parties signed 13 separate agreements (on human and indigenous rights, socio-economic issues, democratization, etc.) comprising more that 400 concrete projects to be implemented over the course of 4 years.
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.