The primary reason that I sent in the link is I just think it's an excellent piece of writing. It covers a fairly grim topic in a way that is compelling and interesting without minimizing the atrocities.
I know that might not sound like a recommendation, but really it's a good read.
So juuuuuuust to be scrupulously accurate, the second half of the forensic anthropology article discusses the dramatic shift in the acceptability of violence against women in Guatemala, towards ubiquity.
The Guatemalans clearly weren't serious about the investigation. The autopsy was riddled with obvious errors. Two years after Velásquez's death, her mobile phone was still in use, but investigators made no effort to determine its whereabouts. In Guatemala, 98 per cent of feminicide cases are never solved.
During the war, those who were forcibly disappeared were always said to be 'involved in something' - maybe they were subversives, in which case they had it coming. Guatemalan police employ a similar logic in relation to feminicides: the women have it coming. There is always a reason not to investigate. A belly-button ring. The late hour at which the murder took place. Although the police knew Claudina Isabel Velásquez's name, her case was filed under 'XX' - the equivalent of 'NN', ningún nombre ('no name'), which is the way complicit forensic specialists used to file the cases of the disappeared in Argentina.
Feminist activists, and women who just want to go about unmolested, are up against it. The forenses are an underfunded private foundation, and still work mostly on the disappearances during the war rather than the newer wave of murders of women. The official 'forensics experts' - often experts in name only - are part of the police force. If women want a rape kit, they must literally go to the morgue to get it. Sanford tells us what sort of person they might encounter there:
While working on a feminicide case, one investigator told me that he had commented to a director at the Guatemala City morgue: 'Isn't it terrible, all these young women being killed?' The director, responsible for overseeing all autopsies of feminicide victims, snorted back: 'What do they expect? Taking on the roles of men, they have it coming.'
However, this is an actually uplifting story -- and yes, it is the "Style" section:
Vanessa Martínez, 17, and Javier Martínez (no relation), 18, two students in Guatemala City, Guatemala, stayed up talking one night in April of last year about their love of film. They had just worked together on a short film Vanessa wrote about two lesbian teens falling in love and dealing with the weight of their religious trauma, which had gotten the friends thinking about how to bring together collaborators in an inclusive space to create more art on these subjects.
Together with a mutual friend, Sebastián Aldana, 18, they founded Desobediencia Perfecta, whose mission is to explore the stories of queer and lower-middle-class Guatemalans . . . Desobediencia Perfecta's name, which translates to "Perfect Disobedience," is a play on the principles of perfect obedience put forth by St. Ignatius of Loyola.
So juuuuuuust to be scrupulously accurate . . .
Yes, I thought that was a powerful (and disturbing) section of the article, but didn't highlight it. To whom is the note about scrupulous accuracy directed? Are you saying I should have mentioned that in advance, that my framing was inappropriate given that subject, or something about the article itself?
2: Where does it say in the article that it got worse over time? I agree it seems very bad.
Meanwhile criminal forensic science, in the US at least, is another travesty.
I feel like in the lifetime of this blog, economic policy has markedly improved - we have regained our appetite for aggressive stimulus and even, while this might be a more mixed development, industrial policy - while immigration policy has gotten worse, Democrats barely even proposing comprehensive reform.
As far as I'm aware, women weren't getting murdered by the hundreds annually in Guatemala in, say, the 1960s, but I don't know for sure. I think the feminicide epidemics in Mexico and Guatemala are a relatively new development related in a complex way to organized crime and post-1970s hemispheric policies, which is not to suggest that the rate was ever zero. I may be wrong. Nick, don't feel attacked! (Here, have a jarring exclamation point for extra soothing.) I was just struck by the irony of your friend's statement vs. the part of the article you highlighted vs. the finale. And I'm not easily rattled by reading about atrocities for the most part, but the "Taking on the roles of men..." line actually does rattle me.
I was just struck by the irony of your friend's statement vs. the part of the article you highlighted vs. the finale.
That makes sense. I wasn't sure how to frame the article. I made that comparison because the weight of the article put me in mind of things that do change, but on a generational timeframe. But, yes, I can see how that comparison would feel undermined by the article itself.
And I'm not easily rattled by reading about atrocities for the most part, but the "Taking on the roles of men..." line actually does rattle me.
Yes, that makes sense.
Also, since you mention the "finale" of the piece, I was struck by the final paragraph highlighting the paths not taken for the people who have spent their lives doing the remarkable but grueling work described.
'Once,' Hagerty writes, 'at dinner with friends and colleagues from the Argentine and Guatemalan teams, Snow had too much to drink and "got a little weepy".' The others were surprised. He turned to Peccerelli, started crying, and apologised for getting him started in forensics. If it hadn't been for him, he said, Fredy would be mayor of New York by now. Mercedes 'Mimi' Doretti, one of his first students, would be Argentina's most prominent writer. When Mimi was in her mid-twenties, and the EAAF had only been digging for a couple of years, she told the New York Times that the exhumations were important, but 'we all have other ambitions, ideas more connected to life.' Thirty-five years later, Hagerty writes, Mimi is investigating forced disappearances and mass graves in Mexico.
8: Oh yes, I get it. I was generalizing too much, to domestic violence etc.
the dramatic shift in the acceptability of violence against women in Guatemala, towards ubiquity.
The data doesn't go back very far on Our World In Data (only to 2004), but it looks like female homicide rates in Guatemala peaked in 2009 and have now fallen by 40% to around 6 per 100,000 per year.https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-homicide-rate?tab=chart&country=Oceania+%28UN%29~OWID_WRL~Asia+%28UN%29~Europe+%28UN%29~Americas+%28UN%29~GTM~MEX~USA~BRA
(To put it another way, a woman in Guatemala at the peak of the epidemic of femicide faced roughly the same risk of murder as a man in the US in 2021.)
The overall homicide rates go back to 1990, and the pattern looks very similar to the female-only rate, but what's noticeable is that the drop in overall homicides has taken it down to twenty per 100,000 per year from a 2009 peak of 45. Female homicides represent therefore about 15% of the total. At the peak in 2009, they were 11% of the total.
What that suggests is that for the last 14 years violence against women has been becoming steadily less acceptable in Guatemala, as indeed has violence in general at a very similar rate, which implies that it's mostly something to do with murder generally rather than murder of women in particular.
As far as I'm aware, women weren't getting murdered by the hundreds annually in Guatemala in, say, the 1960s, but I don't know for sure.
Trying to find an answer for that lead me to this report (pdf) which says that there has historically been a "statistical silence" on the issue but that better data is now being collected (which goes along with the article in the OP). It doesn't have historical numbers, but some of the cross-country comparisons are interesting. The report does not offer much encouragement but does conclude with this (following a series of recommendations)
Important progress has been achieved with regard to public policy, the creation of institutional frameworks dedicated to combating violence and the allocation of funding to finance these advances because States have included the demands and proposals of feminist and women's movements in the region. For that reason, public responses should consider these diverse views and guarantee robust and autonomous women's and feminist movements to enable them to continue on the path towards the transformations required in these changing times.
There are a bunch of different directions in which to take this conversation now, and I have very little appetite for any of them, as usual. I'm not performing some grandiose ethical position by saying this -- it's just the truth. I could spend more hours today broadening my inquiries and researching statistics and qualitative reports, I could come at the question of gendered violence and trends from a variety of angles, I could (technically) get into a big ideological pissing match, etc. Or I could get back to my own work. I have never been mentally cut out for sparring. I can do research, reasonably well, but not fast. I like to build towards consensus. Sorry to be frustrated and frustrating, and thanks for sharing data & context -- it's all pretty interesting.
However, one thing requires almost no effort: Google preview of the book under review.
From looking at things like Amnesty reports it seems that there was a big push on reducing female homicide by the Guatemalan government in about 2010, which seems from the data like it had a really rapid and positive effect.
Spoiler: effort is required to make it past page 1, particularly if you are a parent of a daughter under 10 or so. Merciless prose.
When I was in the Guatemala highlands in 2003, talking to survivors and community leaders, I was surprised to find out how much forensic work was still going on. I didn't know anything and assumed that a decade would have been enough for all the investigation and reckoning and historical accounting to be settled. They corrected me: no, no, las exhumaciones siguen. Es una lucha. Later they took me on a motorboat over a reservoir to point out hillsides where massacres had taken place and concluded, nos hicieron un gran daño, which was... quite the understatement, given the details they'd just gone into. But they were used to giving summary explanations to people like me.
The Short History on Prevalence of Homicide in Guatemala is that it would have gotten apocalyptically worse nationwide in the early 1980s as the civil war entered its most awful phase, kept a slower burn into the 1990s toward the signing of the 1996 accords, then ticked back up in the 2000s toward the peak in ajay's link for reasons parallel to narco-terror in Mexico and there just being hordes of people with killing experience from the war who found they could operate with a relatively free hand. Whatever happened since 2009 has halved the reported rate but it's still one of the worst in the world and only looks good if you compare it to El Salvador. I'm sure there are no good statistical records from the sixties or seventies, but before the period of organized massacres it was a very different society.
"I didn't know anything and assumed that a decade would have been enough for all the investigation and reckoning and historical accounting to be settled."
I had a similar experience in BiH. Almost twenty years after Dayton they were still discovering mass graves. The Serbs in particular put tremendous effort into hiding what they'd done (backed by Russia, of course) and the UXO didn't help, but still this was a project with I assume a lot more resources behind it, and it was still taking decades.
Bosnia is now a world centre of excellence in identifying the victims of mass killings (through ICMP) which is really one of those accolades you don't want, like Chicago being the experts in treating gunshot wounds or Belfast in reconstructive joint surgery.
First, I wanted to apologize if my posting this link make lk's day worse. I still think it's very well written, but perhaps not good blog-fodder.
From looking at things like Amnesty reports it seems that there was a big push on reducing female homicide by the Guatemalan government in about 2010, which seems from the data like it had a really rapid and positive effect.
That's good to hear. I think there's clearly more work to be done, and that the broad statistics don't tell the whole story, but that seems clearly good.
Also, this thread reminded me of, and gives me a different context for, the story about the Canadian designer who was hired to help rebrand Guatemala
Serving as a blueprint for ¡GuateAmala! is a multi-year communications strategy that seeks to generate a strong collective interest across the population in this movement. Bruce Mau Design Studio has also worked with the Fundación to develop events that continue the discourse and action in different regions of Guatemala, to introduce projects to the world and link Guatemala to international expertise, highlighting the network for change emerging in Guatemala.
Though I think skepticism is warranted.
Some of the major projects that Mau has been involved with -- whether it's redesigning Mecca, as to avoid people being trampled to death on their way to make pilgrimage or rebranding the entire country of Guatemala -- are incredibly large-scale. The Mecca redesign was conceived to last a thousand years, but things don't always work out exactly as planned.
Guatemala is a case in point. Contacted initially by the country's education minister, Mau was offered the opportunity to reframe the entire concept of the nation, more than 36 years of violent and bloody civil war had wiped out the peoples' ability to dream and destroyed their faith in the future. In an effort to reawaken a sense of possibility, a name change was proposed.
As the Mau explains in the film, the word Guate was originally used by the local Indigenous people, but when the Spanish colonizers arrived, they decided to call it Guatemala, mala meaning bad. As Mau quips, "How would you like to wake up every day in the United States of Bad Place?"
In order to change this, the designer stuck an "a" right in the centre, changing it to a Guate Amala, meaning love of place. Even if the actual origins of the name Guatemala aren't quite that simple, it makes for a charming anecdote, as well as a demonstration that the smallest and most simple change in design can have massive repercussions.
This is a frequent pattern in the film, glossing over the more complex aspects of projects that Mau has been involved with, presenting them largely uncritically. While some major commissions came to fruition, others never reached the level of hype with which they were launched. In all fairness, this is more a fault of co-directors Benji and Jono Bergmann than the film's subject, who seems to have a healthy relationship with failure. Mau has more than a few things to say about the subject.
18: Yeah, not just resourcing, but another difference (I assume?) from BiH is that in Guatemala so many people associated with the perpetrators have remained in power, in particular through the hierarchies of the armed forces, so all the work has gone on against a continual background of obstruction and intimidation.
19: Guatemala is so amply branded. They have beautiful currency with indigenous symbology on it and are really good at showing foreign visitors a great time as long as those visitors restrict themselves to the proper market towns and volcanos and eco-parks. Yet somehow.
Belize has t-shirts that say "You better Belize it". That's hard to beat.
Anyway IMO that's why the discussion of femicide in the article is of a piece and not a tendentious side issue or whatever; I think it really is a structural continuation of the period of massacres.
In order to change this, the designer stuck an "a" right in the centre, changing it to a Guate Amala, meaning love of place. Even if the actual origins of the name Guatemala aren't quite that simple, it makes for a charming anecdote, as well as a demonstration that the smallest and most simple change in design can have massive repercussions.
This reminds me of my suggestion for fixing Haiti's problems -- change the name of the country to Lovey. I offered my suggestion for free.
19: No no, nothing is wrong on my end -- I'm glad I read it and glad you shared it more widely. The discussion was also useful for me. The email from RAICES about families being separated at the border again made my day worse. There's a lot of competition on that front.
But... this guy actually tried to rename Guatemala "Guate Love It," más o menos? Did he also replace the M with the McDonald's logo? Violence from the north will never end.
They should just rename the country "Guacamole." Positive associations for everyone!
I always pronounce "Guatemala" with an America 'g' even though I can pronounce it right. I don't want to be seen as trying too hard.
"another difference (I assume?) from BiH is that in Guatemala so many people associated with the perpetrators have remained in power, in particular through the hierarchies of the armed forces, so all the work has gone on against a continual background of obstruction and intimidation."
This is alas less true, but still true, in Bosnia. The lads managed to round up most of the worst PIFWCs in the late 90s but their sympathisers remain, and, especially since IFOR wound down, there's still a fair amount of obstruction and just general government incompetence.
27: what's the right way? The locals seem to use pretty much the same G I use.
The G is de-emphasized to the point of barely being there. First syllable much closer to "wah" than "gwah."
Yeah. I'm not sure I can do it without sounding like I'm trying too hard to make sure people know that though.
Like, I wouldn't say "Loce AHN-heh-less" unless I were in a Spanish class.
That's pronounced "blintz."
I agree there's no way to say Guatemala the Spanish way in the middle of an English sentence without sounding like a douche and I don't try either. Even the truly bilingual people I know will say the word differently depending what language they're using.
The mini-trend in Europe (Belgium, BiH, Kosovo) of trying to give different identity clusters their own regional or overlay governments seems perhaps conducive to peace agreements, but not to much national governance.
Similar rules apply for güisquil, the IMO rather disgusting kind of squash they eat there.
37: see also Lebanon except it didn't really even work for peace agreements.
Northern Ireland too for that matter.
Oh yes, Northern Ireland definitely counts as one of that number. I wonder how much of it is influence from Belgians saying "It worked for us! Sort of. Don't poke at it."
34 Please.
Rhymes with keys.
A couple of which one might carry into Los Angeles.
I chuckled at 44/45, but thank you. I appreciate hearing that.