Update of PBRC Summer Stipend | Professor Sarah England

Assessing Educational Campaigns against Gender Violence in Guatemala

The primary objective of this project is to observe and analyze educational campaigns carried out by NGOs in Guatemala City targeted at deconstructing cultural ideologies that perpetuate gender inequality and specifically violence against women. My aim is to understand how these organizations conceptualize gender, how they present their material to the intended audience, and to what degree the audience responds to these ideas, especially men. I am also interested in understanding how the members of the organizations themselves have arrived at their own analysis of gender, gender inequality, and feminism. I am especially interested in what has led men to be involved in these campaigns and what strategies they use to get other men to rethink the fundamental premises of patriarchy.

In the summer of 2009 I traveled to Guatemala City with funding from the PBRC summer stipend and began preliminary investigations on the questions listed above. Through the collaboration of the Costa Mesa-based organization Mujeres Iniciando en las Americas (MIA), founded and run by activist Lucia Munoz, I was able to contact several different women’s organizations, observe gender equality workshops designed and carried out by MIA, and interview men and women involved in the campaign for gender equality in different capacities. From this preliminary set of observations and interviews I gained several insights into the way that Guatemalan activists think about gender and gender inequality, and also came up with some new ideas for theoretical and methodological approaches for further investigation of the topic.

The two gender equality workshops that I observed were initiated and carried out by MIA based on a manual designed by the Canadian-based White Ribbon campaign. One of the workshops took place in a primary school in Zona 18, one of the poorest neighborhoods of Guatemala City with high rates of violent crime, and the other took place with university students and activists at the University of San Carlos, the largest public university in Guatemala. During these workshops students were asked to list basic ideologies about the traditional roles of men and women and to question their reality, origins, and validity as models of social comportment. What I realized from observing these workshops is that both the primary school-age students and the university-level students were quickly able to list the stereotypical gender roles and characteristics of men and women that make up what scholars call “the patriarchal bargain” in Latin America-that is the model of gender relations in which men are the heads of household, financial providers, and sources of authority while women are responsible for domestic duties, child rearing, and sexual fidelity. The university students were also quick to recognize the sexual double standard in which men are sexual subjects with a large degree of autonomy over their sexuality and sexual behavior whereas women are meant to be the objects of men’s desire and control. However, upon further discussion it became clear that despite everyone’s ability to recite the model of patriarchal gender relations and roles, the reality of their own lives was much more complex than the model suggests. Children mentioned mothers who work, fathers who do some housework, changing ideas about the ability of girls to get an education and so forth. The university students and activists also questioned the sexual double standard and its role in controlling even women who are students and public figures. Some of the male students also questioned women’s roles in perpetuating patriarchal ideologies in raising their sons and talked about the way that gender ideologies have also limited their ability to act outside of patriarchal norms. I concluded that these workshops are excellent avenues through which to gain an understanding of the models of gender that men and women grow up with and learn through their parents, peers, school, the media, etc. but also to see how their realities are more complicated and how, through various avenues, they are learning to rethink these models. However my preliminary observations suggest that this rethinking has mainly taken place in relation to the gendered division of labor, that is questioning whether women should be able to work, men’s role in the household, and so forth. What I saw less of was questioning the way that the social construction of male and female sexuality plays a large role in limiting women’s spatial mobility and justifying gendered violence.

The second method, interviews with activists, was also very fruitful in beginning to understand the various processes that have led certain men and women to rethink standard patriarchal models of gender and the barriers that they have faced in trying to act outside of those norms. Though the men’s pathways to becoming conscious of gender inequality were various (participation in the revolutionary movement of the 1970s/80s, being raised by single mothers, living with abusive fathers, having to take over domestic duties in the home), one commonality was that all feel that there are still enormous social pressures to enact machismo such that it is very difficult for men to promote and enact a feminist ideology, even within the activist community. This is a topic that I would like to explore in much more depth in future research. What are the models of masculinity that they have been exposed to? How did they develop an “alternative masculinity” and what have been the barriers they have faced in trying to enact that masculinity? Though all of the interviwees clearly articulated a belief that gender inequality is a complex set of social structures and beliefs that disempowers women and make them vulnerable to violence (structural, physical, and symbolic), a few also recognized that gender inequality not only structures power relations between men and women but also between men. Rather than seeing patriarchy as a privilege that attaches to all men, they expressed the idea that patriarchy (in the local form of machismo) not only harms women, but also harms men in that it encourages violence, power struggles between men, abusive relationships, and so forth. This is also an avenue that I would like to explore further as it aligns with much of the recent scholarship on masculinity that questions the degree to which it is a privilege or a liability both for men as individuals and of course for society as a whole.

Based on the insights I have gained from this preliminary research I plan to apply for the Wenner-Gren Post PhD Research Grant, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships, and the Latin American Studies Association “Other Americas Project.” I plan to continue with the two primary methods of observing gender equality workshops and interviewing activists. My primary focus will be on extending feminist theory and methodology to the study of masculinity in Guatemala by 1) recognizing the social construction of gender and sexuality and the ways that these are linked to but not completely congruent with sex (in other words both men and women can be discriminated against for enacting what is perceived to be feminine behavior– being a biological male does not guarantee male privilege) 2) recognizing the way that gender ideologies are always linked to power 3) recognize multiple masculinities, cross-cut by race, class, and generation 4) separating out the models of gender and their actual enactment in people’s lives and 5) trying to understand all of this from the point of view of the subjects themselves, that is from the emic point of view of men and women who both live these ideologies and social structures and are trying to deconstruct them to form a more equal and peaceful society.

—

In August 2009, Professor Sarah England of Soka University worked with MIA on “Guatemalan Masculinity and Feminism: A Happy Marriage? Assessing Educational Campaigns against Gender Violence in Guatemala” funded by Soka University’s Pacific Basin Research Center. The idea behind this project was inspired by MIA’s work with the White Ribbon Campaign in Guatemala City which seeks to talk directly to men about issues of gender inequality and gendered violence.

Through my research on these issues in Latin America I have realized that the majority of work being done in this area, both among activists and among academics, seems to still frame gendered violence as primarily a woman’s issue that is discussed among women about how women can cope with it. However, since men are the main perpetrator’s of gendered violence it is very important that they be a part of the conversation about how to resolve the problem alongside women. But in order to do this it is important to understand how men think about the issue, how they conceptualize gender and gender inequality, the role that their own sense of masculinity plays in the construction of gender, and how they think that educational programs can be designed that will get men to think critically about these ideas of gender.

For this project I attended several workshops designed by MIA in collaboration with local Guatemalan NGOs and educators and interviewing facilitators and participants in order to gain insight into the questions posed above.

MIA is a wonderful example of an organization that has this as its explicit goal and has been very active in creating gender equality workshops among different sectors of the population. I first came to know about MIA in 2008 when Lucia Munoz visited the Soka University campus as part of a mini-conference on violence against women in Latin America. I then traveled with her on the summer 2008 delegation to Guatemala and was overwhelmed by the wealth of information, personal stories, and contact with activists that the delegations provide. It was truly an amazing experience both intellectually and emotionally to meet so many people dedicated to improving women’s lives and hearing the personal stories of suffering but also strength. I immediately recognized that the work of MIA aligned perfectly with the goals and missions of Soka University to create engaged, global citizens and asked Lucia to help me organize a Learning Cluster (4 week intensive course) with students from Soka to travel to Guatemala for two weeks to study more intensively the question of gender violence in the country.

The trip was very successful and the comments from the students were extremely positive, stating that the trip had been a life changing experience, opening up their eyes not only to the Guatemalan reality as a whole, but also cementing their resolve to become politically engaged in issues such as gender equality. I hope that this research project will foster continued collaboration between Soka University and MIA specifically, and between academia and activists more generally to tackle such a pressing social issue as gender violence.

By Michael Parenti and Lucia Muñoz

First Publish July 14, 2007

On the outskirts of Guatemala City the body of an 18-year-old woman of indigenous ethnicity was recently discovered by her frantic parents who had been searching long and hard. Forensic evidence showed that she had been repeatedly raped and tortured and that her head had been severed from her body with a blunt knife while she was still alive.

This killing was more than just a passing aberration. Nightmarish crimes against women have been occurring with horrifying frequency in Guatemala. In the last seven years, over 3,200 Guatemalan women have been abducted and murdered, with many of them raped, tortured, and mutilated in the doing. The number of victims has shown a striking increase in the last few years with some six hundred murdered in 2006 alone.

The victims often are from low-income families deracinated from their rural homesteads during the civil war and forced to crowd into Guatemala City and other urban areas in search of work.

We might recall Guatemala’s horrid history of violence. From 1962 to 1996, a popular insurgency was defeated by that deranged murder machine known as the Guatemalan Army, trained, advised, financed, and equipped by the United States. A United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission in 1999 characterized much of the counterinsurgency as a genocide against the Mayan people, a holocaust that left 626 villages destroyed, approximately 200,000 people dead or disappeared, including many labor union leaders, student leaders, journalists, and clergy. Hundreds of thousands more were either displaced internally or forced to flee the country.

Those years of untrammeled massacres provide some context for the current wave of femicide sweeping the country. The 1996 peace accords officially declared an end to the butchery but the war against women continues albeit in more piecemeal fashion. Guatemalan women are enduring the whiplash of decades of dehumanizing violence—boosted by the same kind of deep-seated sexism and gender-specific crimes (rape) that are perpetrated in many societies around the world.

Independent investigators charge that the vast majority of present-day atrocities against women have been committed by current or former members of the Guatemalan intelligence services. Having escaped prosecution for human rights violations during the internal war, these trained killers are now members of private security forces or police and paramilitary units that have been strongly implicated in the crimes of the last seven years.

For the most part, authorities show little inclination to bring the perpetrators to justice. Some officials blame the victims for their own deaths, implying that the women bring it on themselves because of their supposed involvement in gang activities or drugs, or because in some way or another they refuse to lead properly conforming lives within the safe confines of a traditional family and community

Some of the victims indeed may have been entangled in shady operations. But many more have been working women, including those of indigenous stock, trapped in poverty. They are the prime victims of a broader “social cleansing” that reactionary hoodlums are conducting against a variety of groups including street children, teenagers, gays, and homeless indigents, a campaign that has claimed thousands of additional victims.

Guatemala is known as the country of “eternal spring.” Some analysts have called it the land of “eternal impunity,” given how right-wing thugs continue to get away with rape, torture, and murder. Statistics reveal that hardly one percent of the perpetrators are ever tried and convicted and the sentences are outrageously light.

Even those rare cases that make it all the way to a prosecutor’s desk have little chance of resulting in a conviction due to the lack of reliable evidence. Recent reports reveal the continuing failure of investigators to collect and preserve essential evidence from crime scenes. More than ordinary incompetence is operative here. Guatemalan authorities manifest little interest in training skilled cadres who might unearth really damaging information about who is behind the crimes.

Anonymous death threats have been sent to the volunteer exhumation teams that locate and examine the bodies of the murdered women and who try to publicize the evidence they discover. In May 2007 the leader of one such team was informed that his sister would be “raped and dismembered into pieces” if he continued to investigate the crimes.

While these murders may seem like little more than random thrill killings to some observers, in fact they serve a function of social control much as would any form of state terrorism. The violence perpetrated against individuals creates a pervasive climate of fear and horror within the victimized families and communities, thereby discouraging social protest and popular resistance. Instead of organizing around any number of crucial politico-economic issues, many of the demoralized and traumatized families cower in stunned silence.

In time people grow numb to the violence. Feeling helpless they almost routinely check the news each day to see how many additional victims have been reported. The effects on children can be especially telling. Growing up in a climate of fear, they learn that their parents and community cannot keep them safe and that homicidal fury might strike anyone at any time.

Family members of murdered women report that authorities show hostility towards them when they request government intervention.

Guatemala’s legal system is rife with provisions that minimize the seriousness of violence against women, a system codified and enforced by men who have seldom displayed any concern for the safety of women. The Guatemalan Penal Code long reflected this bias, treating domestic abuse as a minor offence and generally offering scant protection from gender-based violence.

Guatemalan president Oscar Berger voices a commitment to confronting the crisis but has done next to nothing. Rather than devoting the necessary resources to investigation and enforcement, Berger appeared on national television in 2005 to announce that, for their own safety, women would do best to stay at home.

In 2005 Guatemala appointed its first female Supreme Court President, Beatriz De Leon, and two years later a female police chief. But there is little indication that high-placed female officeholders are going to buck the Old Boys network. Until the government makes some significant efforts towards implementing the recommendations outlined by human rights organizations (such as Guatemala Peace and Development Network, MIA, NISGUA, GHRC-USA, Rights Action, and Center for Gender Studies), the lives of Guatemala’s women will hang in the balance.

There are some encouraging signs. The Human Rights Committee of the Guatemalan Congress is giving serious consideration to a bill that purports to guarantee life, liberty, dignity, and equality for women along with stiffer penalties for those who physically and mentally abuse women and otherwise violate their rights.

Meanwhile a growing number of Guatemalan women are moving into nontraditional careers. In the upcoming election, at least one hundred women will be running for Congress. Some parties have designed campaign strategies intended to promote electoral victories for more women. At present of a total of 158 seats in the Guatemalan Congress only fourteen are occupied by women.

There also are efforts by human rights organizations to create a central, unified database of femicide victims, as well as an emergency response system for missing girls and women that would include utilization of state-of-the-art internet capabilities, DNA testing, and the like.

Awareness of the atrocities has been reaching other countries and gaining international attention. There is a growing demand from abroad that Guatemalan law enforcement agencies get serious about responding to the gender-based atrocities. The U.S. Congress is being pressured to get into the act. A House resolution condemns the murders and expresses condolences and support to the families of victims. The resolution urges the government of Guatemala to recognize domestic violence as a crime, and to investigate the killings and prosecute those responsible.

The U.S. Senate passed a resolution calling on the Guatemalan Congress to approve the actions of the U.N.-sponsored International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala. The commission intends to investigate the clandestine groups that use violence to advance their illicit political and financial interests.

Meanwhile innocent and unoffending women continue to suffer nightmarish fates at the hands of misogynistic maniacs who, some years ago, developed a taste for inflicting rape, torture, and death “in service to their country.”

— Michael Parenti is a noted author and social commentator. His recent books include Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights); The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories); Democracy for the Few 8th ed. (Wadsworth/Thomson) and The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press). See www.michaelparenti.org

— Lucia Muñoz is founder and executive director of MIA, Mujeres Iniciando en las Américas, and founder member of Guatemala Peace and Development Network. She has lectured across the United States and Guatemala on the struggles facing Guatemalan women.

By Samantha Serrano

On average, two women are killed every day in Guatemala. At least 4,000 women have been murdered in the Central American country since 1999. (1) More than 500 women have been slain in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico since 1993. (2) This city is often referred to as the City of Lost Girls. Many activists believe the statistics the Mexican government admits are very conservative and the number of women killed is more likely in the range of 4,000 to 6,000. (3)

What is just as staggering as the volume of murders in the two regions is the manner in which many of the women are killed. Women’s corpses in both areas of Latin America are found mutilated, strangled, burned, decapitated, raped, and abused. Bodies have been found with skulls crushed in, fingernails pulled backwards, wrapped in barbed wire, or with the word venganza (Spanish for vengeance) carved into the body with a knife. (4)

The term used to define such high numbers of violent homicides of women is femicide. According to Diana Russell, the author of Femicide in Global Perspective, femicide is not simply the murder of females, but rather “the killing of females by males because they are female.” (5) I believe that the presence of machismo and impunity in both Ciudad Juárez and Guatemala, paired with independent historical and contemporary tensions within each region, have fueled the two epidemics of femicide. This situation has instigated a cry for both women’s rights and human rights.

In many people’s minds, machismo walks hand-in-hand with Latin American culture. Machismo is an overemphasized masculinity centered on the domination of women. (6) This is typical in patriarchal societies where violence against women has become a cultural norm and an accepted custom for centuries. Machismo is present in both Guatemala and Ciudad Juárez and has been established since the time of the Spanish conquest.

When the Spanish settled in Central and South America, they brought every aspect of their culture with them, including how they treated women. Spain, although it is rapidly changing, has historically been a patriarchal society in which men controlled women. In patriarchal societies, women serve as bearers of children and housewives while remaining financially dependent upon men. In patriarchal societies men dominate both politics and households. (7)

The societal belief that women are inferior to men promotes violence against women, just because they are women. Psychologically it becomes a man’s right in a patriarchal society to invade a women’s body through rape, other forms of violation, or murder. Machismo promotes a need to exterminate or dominate uncontrollable women to maintain patriarchal systems. The result of the need for male dominance that causes some men to murder women is femicide.

For many men in Ciudad Juárez and Guatemala, machismo is a cultural norm and for some men being macho is a good thing. Macho is often understood as being a term used to describe an honorable man or a good provider for one’s family.

Sociologist David T. Abalos believes that many Latino men have internalized the deception that Spaniards, other Europeans, and white Americans are inherently better than Mestizos. Abalos says that the Mestizo men of places like Mexico and Guatemala internalize this notion and continue to comply with how society expects them to behave. The inherited idea of male dominance, which culturally appears to be the only place Latino male’s power remains, translates into a manifestation of violence towards women in order to maintain control. If a woman attempts to become more independent and this dominance fractures, feelings of insecurity and inferiority arise and a man is more likely to become violent toward the women in order to regain power. (8)

Machismo also continues to be a norm in contemporary Latin American society due to the fact that the majority of police officers and officials running the justice system are men. Often times in both Ciudad Juárez and Guatemala when women file complaints that their husbands have abused or raped them, the police officers do not get involved and tell the woman that the dispute should be left between her and her husband.

Machismo within the justice system is one of the factors that cause impunity for crimes against women. Considering the lack of laws for women’s protection from violence, the unwillingness or ignorance of a majority of the people involved in the justice system, and the lack of training and supplies for crime investigators and prosecutors, impunity for men who commit femicide seems almost positive.

Of the 1,500 women that were assassinated between 2003 and 2007 in Guatemala, only 14 cases ended in a prison sentence. (9) Only one percent of the cases involving femicide in Ciudad Juárez have resulted in prosecution and sentencing. (10) Low rates of prosecution and sentencing found in both Ciudad Juárez and Guatemala send a clear message to potential assassins that they can and will get away with murder.

In both Guatemala and Ciudad Juárez authorities are quick to blame gang violence and prostitution for unsolved murders involving both men and women. (11) The former President of Guatemala, Oscar Berger, said in June 2004 that in a majority of cases involving femicide, “the women had links with juvenile gangs and … organized crime,” although he did not site any evidence to support that.

In 1995, the Chihuahua State Assistant Attorney General blamed women of Ciudad Juárez who worked all day and then went out dancing and drinking all night for the femicide. He said they invited rape and murder and the large number of assassinations was their fault for going out alone and not holding to the societal expectations of women. Government officials placed ads throughout the city that said, “Do you know where your daughter is?” That same year, fifty-two women were murdered in the city, which was the highest number up until then. (12)

Most police and crime scene investigators in both Guatemala and Ciudad Juárez lack proper training to solve cases. In Ciudad Juárez evidence is often mishandled. Police investigators have misidentified bodies and have given some victims’ families remains of the wrong victims. Some crime scene investigators do not use gloves to handle evidence and do not use bags to place and transport evidence.

In Guatemala femicide victims’ families have reported that victims’ clothes are often returned to them rather than kept as evidence, and DNA testing is not done. Despite the existence of an anti-kidnapping squad in Guatemala, police customarily stall searches until three days after a person is reported missing.

One of the reasons officers are so poorly trained is their low wages. Both the Mexican and Guatemalan government fail to allocate enough money to pay officers adequate salaries. To make up for their low wages, police and government officials in both regions often take bribes as well. Bribes to traffic officers are as customary as highway tolls. Officers and other officials can be bribed to tamper with evidence or ignore a crime. (13)

The laws in both Mexico and Guatemala have done little to protect women from domestic abuse and rape. Both domestic abuse and rape have been linked to female homicides. Until late 2006 in Guatemala, a rapist could legally escape charges if the father permitted him to marry his victim and she was at least 12 years old. (14) Domestic violence cannot be prosecuted unless signs of injury are still apparent 10 days later and marital rape is not a criminal offense. A law empowering men to prohibit their wives from working outside the home was revoked only in 1999. (15)

Women in Mexico cannot file domestic abuse charges if their injuries take less than fifteen days to heal. If a rape victim is twelve years of age or older and a proven prostitute, there can be no charges filed against the perpetrator because authorities consider the victim an active participant. If it is believed that a rape victim led the attacker on and then refused to have sex, the perpetrator will only have to serve one to six years in prison. Forced penetration by anything other than a penis is not considered an act of rape in Mexico. (16)

Although femicide in both Guatemala and Ciudad Juárez can be credited largely to machismo and impunity, both regions have independent factors and histories that have helped catalyze the two separate epidemics. Guatemalans took in a thirty-six year civil war that included the largest per-capita genocide ever experienced in independent Latin American history. The people of Ciudad Juárez have experienced a radical change in the labor force from male domination to female due to the development of maquiladoras.

Mass murders, rape, and torture are not new to Guatemala. An American-organized rightist military coup violently overthrew the government of the elected president, Juan Jacobo Arbenz, when he tried to initiate land reform in 1954. The coup led to more than three decades of civil war between the army and left-wing guerrillas. Before it ended in 1996, more than 200,000 were killed. A large percentage of the victims in Guatemala were indigenous people slain by the army in a government-mandated genocide. A United Nations-sponsored truth commission calculates that the army is responsible for more than 90 percent of the killings during the civil war. (17)

During the civil war, women were seen as spoils of the battles that soldiers could use however they wished. Women made up about a quarter of those killed during the war, although they almost never participated in fighting or politics. Rape was often used as a scare tactic and a display of power by the military. Soldiers or paramilitaries would often cut fetuses from the wombs of victims because they claimed the unborn babies were potential rebels. Violence against women today seems to be a continuum of the violence committed during the war. Many of the people considered responsible for the random murders, rapes, and genocide during the war have taken on positions of power in post-war Guatemala. Some of their jobs include politicians, police officers, and high-ranking officials in the military. Former dictator Efrain Rios Montt ruled during perhaps the most violent time of the civil war and perpetuated the genocide of the indigenous people between 1982 and 1983. Rios Montt became a member of congress both during the war and after the peace accords were signed between 1990 and 2004. After instigating riots in the streets of Guatemala City in 2003, he was able to run for President. Thankfully, he lost by a landslide. (18)

Even though Rios Montt is currently on trial in Spain for human rights violations during the war, his lasting effect on Guatemala’s post- peace accord government exemplifies how the violence of the war is engrained in present-day Guatemala. According to Guatemalan-American artist and radio producer Ana Ruth Castillo, “A lot of violence was taught, indoctrinated, and institutionalized (during the civil war), and I think that our generations now are still victims of that and have not been able to heal from that.” (19)

The violent society that the people became accustomed to living in during the war is still thriving today. In spite of the 1996 peace accords, Guatemala has one of the worst homicide rates in the world. The fact that victims of femicide are often killed in the same ways they were killed during the war is proof of the lasting impression the violence of the war has left. As women attempt to gain more rights and change society in post-war Guatemala, they not only face machismo, but they also battle for rights against politicians and officers who formerly instigated genocide and used rape as a weapon. To several of these men, women’s rights are not an option. Women who seem to challenge traditional gender roles by working, wearing sandals, drinking alcohol, or having a belly button ring are often victims of femicide. (20) Castillo explained, “Because violence is so cyclical between families and partners it has gone past the civil war and it is still very present.” (21)

The women of Ciudad Juárez live in distinctly different conditions from those of the women in Guatemala. Ciudad Juárez is the Mexican city across the border from El Paso, Texas. Since the U.S./ Mexican border was established, there has been great economic disparity between the two cities. Ciudad Juárez has inherited violence due to the ongoing battle to bring illegal drugs into the United States across the border. The drug wars in 2008 put death tolls at record highs. One aspect of border towns that many people overlook, however, is the maquiladora.

Maquiladoras are factories set up by foreign companies (mostly American) in Mexican border towns. Maquiladoras were rare until the Mexican government launched the Border Industrialization Program (BIP) in 1965 to bring business and employment back to the border cities after World War II. (22) The BIP granted licenses to foreign companies (mostly from the United States) for the tariff-free importation of machinery, parts, and raw materials. The surge of foreign factories marshaled in the maquiladoras. The businesses that came to Mexico, however, did not desire male workers. They desired female workers because they were more docile, submissive, and cheaper than male workers. When the Mexican government passed the BIP they unintentionally converted Mexican border towns into manufacturing sectors. Migrant workers from rural areas rushed to the border towns seeking employment at the maquiladoras. The flow of discouraged migrants seeking employment, as well as transient workers hoping to hop the border to the U.S., resulted in over-crowding of the city and a high crime rate.

Skyrocketing female employment and plummeting male employment changed the makeup of the workforce in Ciudad Juárez. Female maquiladora workers became the main wage earners in the home. Although women seemed to achieve greater financial independence, husbands, fathers, and brothers did not normally allow women to play a significant role in household decisions. In actuality, the switch to women becoming the main breadwinners in the home caused most men to tighten their control over women. The typical male usually refused to resign from his position as head of the household and would not help with housework or cooking. Female maquiladora workers had to take on the responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children in addition to a ten-hour workday. (23)

In 1993, the corpses of young females started appearing in the deserts on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez. Before 1993 most murders in Ciudad Juárez were drug and gang-related. However, the majority of the victims found at this point had no relation to either gangs or drugs. (24)

As the bodies began emerging, tensions concerning male domination and employment were gaining momentum due to the upcoming passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which would further empower the maquiladoras and augment female employment.

The passage of NAFTA in 1994, which allows for an economic open trade policy between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, caused a renewed surge of maquiladoras in Juárez, as predicted. More than 400 maquiladoras now operate in Ciudad Juárez and continue to produce billions of dollars in exports. Young women from other parts of Mexico migrate to the already overpopulated Ciudad Juárez hoping to find economic security in Juárez’s maquiladora job market. (25)

Thousands of young women in Ciudad Juárez commute to maquiladora jobs every day before sunrise to work ten to twelve hour shifts where they will be lucky to make $5 a day. The women often have to walk in dangerous areas with little outdoor lighting in the shantytowns outside of Ciudad Juárez to arrive at the nearest bus stop to get to work. A 20-year-old woman named Claudia Ivette once arrived three minutes late for her shift at a maquiladora and was turned away into the dark night. Her body was later found in a ditch alongside the corpses of eight other women. (26)

With increased employment tensions and women forced into unsafe situations to keep employment at the maquiladoras, femicide in Ciudad Juárez has escalated. Last year saw the highest number of victims of femicide, with eighty-six women’s bodies found. (27) More than fifty percent of femicide victims are maquiladora workers.

Maquiladoras also illustrate the cultural idea of female disposability. (28) This disposability refers to the excessive turnover rate of employees in the maquiladoras. Another reason maquiladora managers prefer to hire women is because they are less likely to strike. Women in maquiladoras can be fired for any reason. If a woman does not meet the company’s weekly goals of production or if a woman gets pregnant it is automatic grounds for termination. Women’s activist Esther Chávez claims that the attitudes of maquiladora managers toward female workers with regards to their disposability have permeated the minds of the men of Ciudad Juárez. They take on the belief that the bodies and lives of women are also disposable. (29)

Maquiladoras promote segregation and competition between men and women in the work place as well. Maquiladora managers separate the sexes in the workplace. When male workers do not meet the maquiladora’s standards or are disobedient, they are forced to sit with the female workers as a penalty.

The tactics used by the maquiladora manager give the male workers a feeling of superiority. When they are “punished” by having to sit with the women, they feel their masculinity is threatened. This could result is a violent reaction towards the women they are forced to be in the company of.

Perpetrators of femicide also have an advantage in that many of the maquiladora workers are transients from other parts of Mexico. (30) It is not likely that victims with few or no ties in the area will be searched for. Several women’s remains are found in the deserts on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez that are never claimed or identified. If there is no one battling for a murder case to be solved in Ciudad Juárez, officials do not bother with an investigation. (31)

The exact causes or motives in each case of femicide in Guatemala and Ciudad Juárez will never be known. One would have to question the murderers of the more than 3,000 woman in Guatemala and 500 women in Ciudad Juarez. However, one can be sure that the presence of impunity for the perpetrators of femicide as well as the cultural acceptance of male domination over females, or Machismo, has played a role in or contributed to the killers’ willingness and desire to take the lives of innocent women. The scars of civil war and genocide in Guatemala, as well as indoctrinated violence, have contributed immensely to the contemporary epidemic of femicide. The defensive reaction to the change in employment in Ciudad Juárez due to the maquiladoras, as well as the anonymity and disposability of such a large portion of the female population, has contributed to the motives behind femicide in the border town.

As more and more bodies turn up in both regions, more and more men and women join the fight against femicide. There is an ongoing battle by Nongovernmental organizations, concerned citizens, and victims’ families and friends against the acceptance of femicide and the murderers. (32) They claim that although more men are murdered than women in both Ciudad Juárez and Guatemala, people must take into account the way these women are killed. While men are normally just shot or stabbed, women are raped and then seriously mutilated. The manners in which the women are murdered exhibit hatred towards the female sex that is also apparent in how women are treated while they are alive. The fight against femicide is a fight for the rights of all women, dead or alive.

As Guatemalan sociologist Ana Silvia Monzón said, “We have to recuperate the feeling of living, of living well…. We are not able to continue in this dynamic of poverty, of discrimination, of racism, and of machismo that only brings us destruction.” (33)

— Sam Serrano is currently earning her M.A. in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Sam graduated from California State University of Fullerton in May 2009 with a double major in Spanish and Latin American Studies and a minor in Journalism. She plans to continue her work for human rights in Guatemala throughout the rest of her career.

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(5) Russsell, 2001

(25, 30, 31) Osborn, 2004

(27) Washington Valdez, 2009

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Russell, Diana (2001). The Politics of Femicide. New York: Teachers College Columbia University Press.

Panther, Natalie (2007). Violence against women and femicide in Mexico: The case of Ciudad Juarez. The Humanities and Social Sciences Collection, Retrieved April 18, 2009, from http://www.proquest.com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu

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(2006, November 18). Impunity Rules. Economist, 40-42.

Aznarez, Juan Jesus (2008, February, 13). The killing fields of Guatemala. El Pais , Retrieved April 21, 2009, from http://global.factiva.com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/ga/default.aspx

Washington Valdez, Diana (2009, January, 26). U.N. official to visit slain women’s families in Juárez. El Paso Times, Retrieved April 16, 2009, from http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_11559343

Osborn, Corie (2004, March, 1). Femicidio, hecho en Mexico. Off Our Backs, 24, Retrieved April 22, 2009, from http://global.factiva.com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/ga/default.aspx