Today women in Guatemala are killed at nearly the same rate as they were in the early 1980s when the civil war became genocidal. Yet the current femicide epidemic is less an aberration than a reflection of the way violence against women has become normalized in Guatemala.

  • The Presidential Secretariat for Women is the advisory and coordinating entity for public policies to promote the comprehensive development of Guatemalan women.
  • The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification found that sexual violence was prevalent during the three decades of the conflict.
  • The increase in the number of women being targeted is as much a brutal legacy of the past as it is a reaction to the subtle progress being made for women’s rights and roles in society.
  • Border Patrol assistance requested to SUV crash where 25 more people who crossed the border where identified.
  • Access to justice will increase and impunity reduced if judges are better trained and a system is set up to supervise the outcomes of the implementation of the specialized courts.

This has led to extensive open cast mining which is doubly damaging to the climate, despite the opposition of the Khadia tribe. Archana is determined to document, preserve and promote traditional indigenous knowledge, and galvanise awareness and action that mobilises indigenous world views to help all of humanity find ways to tackle the urgent global climate crisis.

Sololá, whose population is primarily indigenous, is one of the poorest areas of Guatemala. About 52 percent of the department’s poor live in rural areas, according to 2011 data from the National Institute of Statistics.

“During the war it was State Policy to target the bodies of women as part of the government’s ‘Counterinsurgency Plan’. Although the war ended, this violence against women has continued,” Moran told Toward Freedom. Her office has been targeted and broken into in the past, with spilt blood left, and she has received numerous death threats as a result of her work. “The way some murdered and mutilated bodies have appeared are the same way they appeared during the war,” added Moran. Minority Rights Group and Ogiek Peoples’ Development Programme are working together to demand secure land rights for the Ogiek through litigation at the African Court of Human and Peoples Rights in Arusha, Tanzania. We are also advocating for equity in access to education and health by supporting OPDP to ensure that budgets for services are allocated fairly and are used well. MRG is working with our partners in Pakistan to support many brave Afghans who have escaped Afghanistan because of their humanitarian or human rights work or their faith.

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Those women who attended more sessions had higher wellbeing (0.007), self-care and infant-care self-efficacy (0.014 and 0.043, respectively), and early infant stimulation (0.019) scores. Moran added that these misogynistic forms of violence and torture are social problems that have been taught at both institutional and individual levels. Many of the teachers of this violence are working with the government, military and police, and are often those same people who committed these types of crimes during the war. Moran also singled out the heads of private security industry, which according to the JASS report, has ballooned to an estimated 28,000 legal and 50,000 unregistered private security agents in the country. During the civil war, many indigenous women were forced into sexual slavery by the military.

This culture allows women to be treated as objects rather than humans; equality and basic rights granted to men are not even in question for women. Rape culture and victim blaming are the tactics that go along with machismo, and both men and women largely agree with the misogynistic tendencies that have survived for so long. According to a 2012 report by the Small Arms Survey, Guatemala has the third highest rate of femicide in the world, behind Guatemalan women only El Salvador and Jamaica. According to official figures, 560 women were murdered in the country in 2012, 631 in 2011 and 695 in 2010, though the exact number is not known. Guatemala is a country of approximately 15 million people, situated in Central America, bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, Honduras to the east and El Salvador to the southeast.

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Other results of the 2011 elections were that only 18 women (14.1%) won seats in Congress . The number of indigenous candidates, men and women, was 22 with only three women (1.9%). These figures show the gaps and asymmetries in gender and ethnicity that are a characteristic of the National Congress, a sign of exclusion and racism that are part of the Guatemalan society and political system.

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They were doing outstanding work, educating minority community members about their rights, collecting evidence of discrimination and human rights abuses, and carrying out advocacy. Despite this worrying global situation, we reaffirm our commitment to safeguarding the rights of minority and indigenous communities and implementing indivisible human rights for all. In just under four weeks I navigated my way across eight departments of Guatemala, via local ‘chicken buses’ winding their way over the country’s hair-raising roads. I was interested to find out what motivates Mayan women to create and occupy spaces for activism, as well as explore the obstacles they face in mobilising in such spaces. With the help of MRG andPeace Brigades International, I interviewed several Mayan women working in rights-based grassroots organizations .

The report, co-authored by Nobel Peace Laureates Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Jody Williams, was the result of a fact-finding mission led by them in January 2012 to investigate violence against women in these three countries. Glen Kuecker, professor of Latin American History at DePauw University, said that the gender specific violence was and continues to be part of the government’s counterinsurgency program aimed to destroy the fundamental social fabric of Mayan communities. One generally overlooked feature of the Guatemalan government and military’s 36-year ( ) genocidal counterinsurgency campaign against the country’s Mayan population is the strategy of targeting women with violence. Women are often murdered or subjected to violence by family members such as fathers, brothers, stepfathers and husbands, but when they try to report a crime that was done by family members, the women themselves are often treated as criminals for complaining. Discrimination in the justice system is one of the many problems women face in Guatemala. The justice system discriminates against others’ race, class, sex, and ethnicity. Discrimination is worst for women who are poor, migrant, young, lesbian, and those that demand justice.

“Nobel Peace Laureates call for concerted action to protect frontlines human rights defenders”. Citizen and foreign women and girls have been victims of sex trafficking in Guatemala. They are raped and experience physical and psychological trauma in brothels, homes, and other locations. The illegal transporting and sexual assault of migrants from Latin America to the United States is a problem.

By accounting for the gendered and historical dimensions of the cultural practices of violence and impunity, we offer a re-conceptualization of the social relations that perpetuate femicide as an expression of post-war violence. A Guatemalan woman and her daughter-in-law who had both endured extreme violence and oppression fled Guatemala and entered the United States with their four minor children. Through the referral of a local pro-bono immigration organization, Jones Day took on their representation in their claims for asylum.