Feminicide and the Struggle to Fight Impunity in Guatemala

Summary

The mortality rate of women in peacetime Guatemala has reached the level documented at the height of the genocidal war that took 200,000 lives. These female victims tend to be between 16 and 30 years-old with most of these brutal killings occurring within or near Guatemala City. To paraphrase UN Rapporteur Philip Alston, female homicides are only the beginning of the cost because a society that lives in fear of killing is unable to combat impunity and cannot get on with life and the business of creating a just society.

Indeed, impunity is an invitation to commit crime and promote lawlessness. In order to document Guatemalan feminicide and impunity, Drs. Sanford and Walsh-Haney observed system-wide failings over the last 8 years that included poor or absent documentation of physical evidence as well as the lack of judicial will to process feminicide cases. As a case on point, these anthropologists accompanied the family of a feminicide victim to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Spring 2015. This presentation discusses the frontier landscapes of a family seeking justice and a court attempting to dismantle political structures that support impunity and devalue female lives.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• The Bioarchaeology of Frontier and Borderlands

Keywords

Spatial Coverage