Chapter 15: Gender and Violence

Most of the protagonists in Guatemala’s armed conflict were men: from the decision-makers responsible for the counterinsurgency, to the troops that carried out much of the terror, to the villagers forced to serve the government cause in the all-male civil patrols. Although the guerrilla movement recruited women into its ranks as armed combatants and in their support populations, the revolutionary movement was also largely male-dominated.

Similarly, most of the victims of state violence were men. But as the terror turned massive and indiscriminate during the government assault on rural communities, women became a greater proportion of the dead and disappeared.

Figure 15.1 shows that just as the violence peaked in 1982, killings of women also peaked. In 1981 and 1982, a period of the counterinsurgency characterized by rural mass killings, the proportion of women among all named victims reached 21 percent, its highest point since the expansion of the conflict in the 1960s. For the entire armed conflict, women represent 15 percent of the named dead in the CIIDH database.

Figure 15.1. Number of killings and disappearances by year, by sex of victim, 1960-1995

Figure 15.2 presents this relation in a different way, giving the percent of women killed for different years after 1966.22 The main trend in Figure 15.2 is that women become a larger share of the state’s victims throughout the escalation of the social conflict from the mid-1970s on, peaking during the early 1980s years of the army’s scorched earth campaigns, and falling slowly as the pattern of state violence again becomes more selective. When and where the counterinsurgency was least discriminate, more women died.

Figure 15.2. Percent female of victims of killing and disappearance, by year, 1966-1995

In peasant communities, the State appears to have considered male residents primarily responsible for local political activity, including support for the guerrillas. Government forces typically searched out male victims first. As villagers in the highlands began to understand the logic of repression, men, especially younger men, would often flee the village at the first sign of army approach or would sleep in the fields or forests to avoid a pre-dawn army attack. In the absence of men, the military attacked any villagers they could capture, including women, children, and the elderly.

In May 1982, for example, the Guatemalan army under Ríos Montt laid siege to the village of Saquillá II, in Chichicastenango, El Quiché. Though few men remained in the village, the army killed who they could. On May 8, 23 children, 15 women and 6 men died in an army raid. Ten days later the army’s elite Kaibiles returned to Saquillá II, conducting a house-to-house search and killing 25 children, 15 women (three of them pregnant) and 3 men (Situación de los derechos humanos en Guatemala 1983: 206-7; Amnesty International 1982).

An even more notorious example of this pattern took place earlier during the Lucas García government in the village of Río Negro, Rabinal. On February 14, 1982, civil patrollers from the nearby community of Xococ summoned the men of Río Negro to their village, where they murdered most of them. The few that survived stayed away from their homes. But that did not stop security forces from attacking Río Negro again, killing 70 women and 107 children on March 13 (Equipo de Antropología Forense de Guatemala 1995; testimonies provided by CALDH).

Many other women died when army troops destroyed whole villages, killing residents without even a minimal level of selectivity.

Figure 15.3 confirms that women tended to die in mass killings. Female victims make up 26 percent of the those killed in groups of ten or more and 29 percent of those killed in smaller groups. Only 14 percent of individual assassinations or disappearances involved women victims.

Figure 15.3. Percent male and female of victims of killings, by group size, 1959-1995

Though more of the direct targets of political murder have been men, many of the effects and after-effects of state terror have fallen disproportionately on female survivors, both in the long term and immediately following massacres.

For example, Guatemalan security forces have treated women’s bodies as one of the spoils of victory. Security forces often raped survivors in communities where they killed widely (and also raped women before killing them). In the breakdown of moral order, soldiers and civil patrollers abused female survivors because they could, due to these women’s extreme vulnerability, and because there was nothing to stop them. Rape also served a counterinsurgency function: humiliating, emotionally injuring and breaking the resolve of survivors to discourage further collaboration with the rebel movement.23

Widows, as surviving heads of affected families, have disproportionately had to cope with the economic and emotional aftermath of violence. Many rural victims lived close to subsistence levels even before the coming of the armed conflict. With their husbands absent, many survivors experienced a sharp decline in their fortunes, not to mention the psychological difficulties of coping with the loss of loved ones. Their problems were often compounded by ostracism in their communities after government forces targeted their family members.

Some widows were forced to abandon their homes and property. Local counterinsurgency leaders used their husbands’ or families’ alleged collaboration with the guerrillas to justify banishing these women from militarized, pro-army communities, as continues to occur in San Martín Jilotepeque, in Chimaltenango (GAM testimonies).

In extreme cases, rape victims have had to deal with unwanted pregnancies and raise alone the children of their rapists. In communities where civil patrol authority took an especially gruesome form, some widows spent the years following the height of counterinsurgency terror serving patrol leaders in a form of long-term sexual slavery.

Yet it would be a mistake to view women simply as victims. State terror and the experience of survival pushed women to take up non-traditional roles beyond the household domain and have helped make women leaders in the reconstruction of Guatemalan society. For example, women have taken a leading role in the development of the human rights movement and in the resistance to military rule.

Activist survivors include Nobel Prize winner and former CUC leader Rigoberta Menchú Tum, who suffered the loss of both her parents and a brother to state violence, and two widowed congressional leaders: Nineth Montenegro de García of GAM, and Rosalina Tuyuc of CONAVIGUA, the National Widows’ Coordinating Committee. Indeed, women have dominated the leadership and the political base of GAM, not to mention the Mamá Maquín women’s refugee group and CONAVIGUA. CONAVIGUA’s activism has extended beyond widows’ immediate concerns. It includes their successful fight against forced army conscription, and for the exhumation of various clandestine cemeteries (CONAVIGUA 1992; CONAVIGUA 1994).

Women activists, like men, have often paid for their politics with their lives: for example, Adelina Caal (Mamá Maquín), in 1978 leader of the ill-fated Panzós demonstration, killed by government soldiers along with over a hundred other protesters; Irma Flaquer, journalist and founder of the National Human Rights Commission in the late-1970s, disappeared in 1980 as her son was shot dead; GAM leader Rosario Godoy, tortured and left murdered together with her brother and infant son in a body dump outside Guatemala City; CONAVIGUA member María Mejía, an outspoken opponent of the civil patrols in Parraxtut, Sacapulas, El Quiché, shot dead in 1990 in her home by local patrol enthusiasts; and anthropologist Myrna Mack, critic of the government’s policy towards the displaced populations, knifed to death on a city street by an army presidential guard (Pacheco and Salazar 1985; Americas Watch 1985c: 41; Americas Watch 1989: 44; Americas Watch and Physicians for Human Rights 1991: 36-50).

Women have also taken a principal role in bearing witness to government atrocities. In the 1980s, Rigoberta Menchú used speaking tours and her book (Menchú 1985) to alert the world to events in Guatemala. Within Guatemala in recent years, Maya women have provided key testimony in court cases against members of security forces.24 In the CIIDH database, though women represent 15 percent of the victims of state violence, they are over 40 percent of those who gave testimony.

23 It is difficult to establish the prevalence of rape as a practice of political violence. REMHI notes in its discussion of rape that, relative to other types of violence, this act is seldom denounced, due to survivors’ sense of guilt and shame for having been so intimately violated (REMHI 1998 I: 210). Similarly, the CIIDH database contains few denunciations of rape.

24 The Guatemalan justice system has a long history of systematic discrimination against Maya Indians giving testimony (Brintnall 1979). Even today, the testimony of Indian women is discounted by judges acting favorably to defendants, as in the case of Cándido Noriega Estrada, a former military commissioner and army intelligence agent accused of orchestrating various massacres in Tuluché, Chiché, El Quiché. Noriega was acquitted in 1997 despite the testimony of 30 eyewitnesses, mostly K’iche’-speaking widows of dead and disappeared villagers.