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National war crimes tribunal in Guatemala says:
Women’s bodies are not battlefields
by Catalina Ruiz-Navarro
The word muxuk refers to a woman who has been ‘desecrated,’ a woman
whose ‘social and spiritual world was destroyed and broken in all of the
areas of her life.’ In the Q’eqchi’ language, there are four ways to
refer to sexual violence, yet muxuk is the term Guatemalan women of the
Sepur Zarco community have chosen to use when talking about the war
crimes perpetrated against them.
Neither Spanish nor English have the words to describe precisely the
horrors these women experienced in 1982, during the Guatemalan armed
conflict.
After decades of impunity, two former soldiers – base commander
Esteelmer Reyes Girón and paramilitary Heriberto Valdez Asij – have
been found guilty of crimes against humanity. On February 28, the
high-risk court in Guatemala City sentenced them to a total of 360 years
in prison for their crimes, including the sexual enslavement of women.
The Sepur Zarco trial was groundbreaking for three reasons. Unlike other
trials involving sexual violence during armed conflicts – such as
the cases in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia – the proceedings were
conducted entirely by a national court.
Local inquiry
The verdict has set a precedent for treating domestic and sexual
slavery as war crimes – something that is crucial for the advancement of
transitional justice in many Latin American countries.
And it seeks to build a standard of proof based on the testimony of
survivors – important because, in a case like this, where the events
occurred more than 30 years ago, little physical evidence is available.
Like many conflicts in Latin America, what happened in Sepur Zarco
was a battle over the ownership of territory – both land and women’s
bodies. On 25 August 1982, during the Santa Rosa de Lima festival,
soldiers captured the Q’eqchi men who had dared to request their land
rights at the Instituto Nacional de Transformación Agraria (National
Institute for Agrarian Transformation). After the men were taken,
soldiers returned to rape the women. They were made to undertake forced
labour at the military base and were routinely abused.
Forced sterilization
The Asociación de Mujeres Transformando el Mundo (Association of
Women Transforming the World), Unión Nacional de Mujeres Guatemaltecas
(National Union of Guatemalan Women) and the collective Jalok U – an
organization formed by Q’eqchi survivors – have fought for years to get
justice, and they are finally getting their chance.
Elsewhere in Latin America, other legal proceedings are putting
sexual violence against women at the centre of the prosecution of crimes
committed in the context of internal conflicts. Last year, Peru created
a registration platform for victims of forced sterilization during the
government of Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s and opened a criminal
investigation. In Colombia, while peace dialogues take place in Havana,
female survivors of sexual violence have organized to demand justice.
Colombian prosecutors are investigating former Farc guerrilla Albeidis
Arboleda, known as El enfermero (The Nurse), for allegedly conducting
hundreds of forced abortions.
Although it has not been easy, women’s groups in Latin American
countries have been working in their respective peace processes to
ensure people understand conflict and its consequences from a gender
perspective. Their work is paying off. Women from the Americas are used
to seeing their bodies as an extension of war scenarios. History is
plagued with painful examples. Sexual slavery of indigenous women is not
an invention of Sepur Zarco. It has been used as a weapon of war since
the European conquest and was a key strategy for colonial oppression.
Our countries were founded on an immense gap of inequality
and racism. This enables perpetrators to deny the dignity of their
victims, making it ‘easy’ to commit crimes against humanity. Sadly, the
Sepur Zarco crimes are a clear example of the immense class and race
division within Latin American societies. But the favourable ruling
means that authorities in Guatemala must now ensure all victims of
sexual violence, mass torture, killings and disappearances during the
country’s brutal civil war obtain justice.
The Q’eqchi survivors’ victory is a clear message for the whole
region and the world: women’s bodies are not battlefields.
-The Guardian
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