Sexual Violence as Genocide. Memory of Mayan Women Who Survived Sexual Violation During the Armed Conflict in Guatemala

Abstract

This paper is the outcome of a research/participatory action carried out from 2005 to 2009 in the context of the political and social process driven by “Women Agents of Change”, along with 54 Mayan women from four different ethnic groups -Q'eqchi', Mam, Chuj, and Kaqchikel-, who survived sexual violation during the internal armed conflict in Guatemala (1960-1996). We survey the systematic and widespread use of rape against Mayan women within the framework of the Guatemalan counterinsurgency policy, labeling and denouncing it as feminicide and genocide. We demonstrate how rape was used by the State to annihilate the biological, social and cultural continuity of the Mayan people by way of the female body. In addition, we establish the political intention of using sexual violation to subdue and massacring women. The work was structured according to a feminist epistemology articulated with that of the Mayan worldview. Thus, the voices and experiences that had been silenced by an androcentric and racist stance were placed here as the focal point of the research. In addition, it required a collective will to expose how the different systems of oppression are interweaved and synthesized in the body of racialized women. This research accounts for a concrete and collective experience of memory and healing among Mayan, Mestizo and European women, which has made possible to inhabit again the body, the life, and the community after the genocidal sexual violation from a new dignified, just and free stance.