La Impunidad: Disposable Women and Inexcusable Crime

Art by Sofia Merino

On March 7th, 2017 the world awoke to a harrowing tale of 56 young girls burning inside an orphanage in Guatemala City, Guatemala.  A nation already inundated with the burdens of gang violence, the news that broke that day reflected another, more insidious, form of brutality. This corrosive element has lurked in the background of Latinx politics at large since at least the 90s but this overt expression in Guatemala just before Women’s Day. 

After a daring escape from their orphanage, the site of many traumatising acts, the girls were sequestered in a classroom by the police. With no permission to leave, the girls banded together to force the police to free them - they lit a mattress on fire. As the flames engulfed the room the police stood idly by allowing the brutal murder of 41 girls. This is the mark that Guatemala must bear. The blood of 41 young girls mars the hands of those officers. The burns that scar the skin of the living even moreso.

Years later no charges have been levied by the state, and many place the blame on the 15 girls that lived. The question is then begged - did their lives matter? Moreover, did their deaths?

The government made it clear that the answer is no. The weeks following the vicious act saw the government, headed by President Jimmy Morales, attempt to halt public mourning and dissent. These officers acted with impunity, an absolution from their acts granted to them by a justice system and a government entrenched in machismo. 

Impunity has long been seen as a way of legitimizing violence, and when it comes to the violence enacted on women its role is immeasurable. Violence is often baked into the collective consciousness, the violence that we revile, the ones we condone, and the ones we endorse. Whether we think about it or not, we are constantly making allowances for the violence we see everyday, but sometimes the cruelty reaches a fever pitch. 

The world stops, the people question, and the government makes a choice. In Guatemala the choice was clear, we stand with murderers not the murdered. To so boldly express a comfort with the flagrant acts of sadistic violence was a striking message for the thousands of other violent and hateful men that contribute to the nation’s atrocious femicide and gender-based violence rates. 

Day in and day out the country’s justice system fails the thousands of women who have died and the millions who fear that fate. While the nation boasts the 7th highest femicide rates in the world the conviction rate for these crimes is dismal.  

In 2008 the government actively changed the judicial process for the prosecution of crimes against women. At the time the changes were revered as a progressive way forward but just two years later it became apparent that something was amiss. The system that aimed to put women first still left over 99% of murderers unconvicted. 

The question is why are perpetrators being absolved of their crimes? 

Well, the answer is multifaceted. There are first financial barriers to accessing justice. The toll that legal fees take on the most affected communities cannot be neglected, especially in a country like Guatemala where inequality continues to skyrocket at a rate the government can’t possibly control. When women and the communities and families they belong to can’t access the justice system because of financial circumstances, it makes it impossible for justice to be carried out. 

But even in highly publicised cases where lawyers are offering pro bono representation and people are fundraising by the millions, what happens? Where is the disconnect, what is halting justice?

Surely it can’t be the system itself, was specifically designed to benefit and support these women. If not the judicial process it must be the will of the people, it must be some unresolved resentment or conviction that keeps the judges, juries, and spectators from wielding the law for, and not against, the victims. 

This culture of impunity incites crime. The violence, the fear, the impunity, it feels unstoppable because it is. Without punishment crime persists, indefinitely. Moreover, unpunished crime sends a message. These failures of the people, the government, and the system itself create a mosaic of severe injustice that perverts how the public understands crime as a whole.

Suddenly femicide is just something that happens, and again it filters into the background. All these acts we once thought too vile for cable news become movie titles and TV show plotlines.  Yet another facet of life, yet another form of violence to accept, condone - even endorse. 

At the state level this manifests in the impunity we see corroding our nations. In Latin America this results in thousands of unsolved and unmarked cases of femicide. For years, most countries failed to even have a category for these heinous crimes, even now that they do every level of the justice system continues to fail women dying at the expense of male ego and dominance. 

Gender violence is both a mental and physical act. It is about how we think and why we can allow for gender based violence and femicide. 

Mbembe first thought of necropolitics as a reaction to Focoult’s concepts of biopower. Asserting that the state not only necessitates and makes life possible, it also dictates how and who must die. Mbembe wrote about this in the context of late stage colonialism and colonial power, but necropolitics persist in every case of oppression.

In Guatemala, and more broadly with the region, it creates an air of disposability around women. When the state fails to give justice to the thousands of women who have died, it allows for their murder - encourages it even. It clearly says that women are who must die and at the hands of violent machista oppressor is how. 

When those police officers made the active choice to sit idly by and allow those girls to burn to death they were empowered by decades of ignorance and allowances. The government had shown them, long before this moment, that it was comfortable with letting these acts slide. They were, in essence, perfect victims.

Young girls, with no family ties, and no clear futures. Nothing tethering them to the duties and responsibilities that crowd Latin femininity. Even if they had embodied that perfect image of "Una Buena Mujer", their deaths would be simply mourned by the state but not for the right reasons. 

Art by Sofia Merino

All across Latin America, all across the world even, feminity is encumbered by notions of service and labour. At the same time in which labour is becoming increasingly decentralised, deregulated, and disposable. The free market has come to liberate us from basic understandings of human life. This liberation is coming at the cost of the bodies we see piling up in Guatemala and abroad.

Women are coming of age, and girls are coming into existence at a time where their lives have never meant less in the face of the cold unfeeling capitalist patriarchy. The question is not whether they will continue to die, it is whether their deaths will ever mean more than a headline. 

The women on frontlines of this weaponization of machista culture are indigenous women. Existing on the intersection of such oppressed identities makes these women uniquely vulnerable to the boom and bust cycle that modern womanhood entails. 

They are uniquely disposable because Guatemala has built a system that keeps them from participating in political and public life. After the tragic civil war that occured in the early 1960s to mid 1990s, that saw a (US backed) government cease the nation through a coup d’etat many indigenous peoples lost the necessary documents required for political participation. The then government specifically targeted leftist guerillas, indigenous, and rural communities to quell dissent against the neoliberal capitalist system they sought to impose. 

With no way to run for office, vote, or truly be known as “Guatemalan” many indigenous women have fallen between the cracks. Just another way the state signals who must die, the erasure of these people from the Guatemalan identity pushes them out of the scope of community, of protection. That means more than just the formal protections of the state, the police, or the justice system, it extends into the social. The casual ways we attempt to protect and defend those we feel kinship with. It is clear that while the formal war is over, the fight for the extermination of indigenous peoples continues in the hearts of the bands of murderers forming misshapen guerrillas at night. 

The marginalization of these women is necropolitics at work. The death tolls we are seeing climb, even in this time of great isolation, is evidence of its success. 

Disposability is vital to understanding what anti-femicide activism is all about. Whether they are conscious of it or not the women who continue to pour into the streets, petition the government, and violently express their discontent are refuting a falsehood that has travelled the world long before they got here. Refusing any notion or understanding of their humanity that is rooted in temporary service and fleeting male pleasures. They are asserting their personhood in every way they can. 

Indigenous feminists are at the forefront of this movement. An affront to the government, who under president Morales has called the feminist movement a public enemy. An affront to a society that would rather keep quiet. An affront to a culture that would see them dead before they see them as human.  A fierce and formidable declaration that the nation can no longer hope to silence them. That they cannot hold back a wave of budding young feminists from standing up for themselves. Reflecting back to a machista society the very same foreboding assertiveness it has used against them. 

As Pia Flores, a prominent Guatemalan journalist and feminist organizer, said in conversation with ReMezcla “Each of us resists in any way we can, every time we leave our homes”. That resistance is what keeps the state from winning.

Countless feminists movements have made their way to Guatemala, with each one women get one step closer to their future liberation. That oasis on the far side of the desert, what we all hope we will arrive at sooner rather than later. From #MeToo to “El Violador en Tu Camino” the power of global feminist organizing is perhaps best encapsulated by the fight in Guatemala. A mishmash of feminist movements that push the nation the precipice of freedom.

Impunity persists, but so does the resistance. A constant reminder that this fight won’t end until there is justice. Justice for those 41 girls that died and the over 2,500 that came after them. This nation can’t heal without resolution - with reckoning. This is what feminism in Guatemala has to be about, a constant search for reconciliation - an end to the violence.

---

Hayley is an emerging writer and journalist who works hard to create work that is fiercely feminist, anti racist and anti oppression on a whole. You can check out more of her work and content on her instagram @hayley.headley

Las Pandillas: Women on the Run

In 2018, as an abnormally large number of migrants marched to the US border, they couldn’t have known the hell that would soon befall them. Now, in 2020, the issue has fallen to the background of US politics and out of the public consciousness. Though the so-called “crisis” on the border remains a major challenge to women’s rights on both sides of the line. 

The vast majority of migrants on the border are women and minors coming up from the Northern Triangle, a notoriously fraught region. The NTCA refers to the three most tumultuous and low-income countries south of Mexico - El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Two of the most significant challenges to progress and development in these three nations are economic inequality and gang violence. These are harshest on the women in the region. Domestic violence is endemic, and recent years have seen gangs deliberately targeting women and children to extort further the communities they torment. 

Artwork by Lucia Torres

To get a better picture of the current violence that is so widespread in the region, we need to understand a bit of history. The area has been rife with political, socioeconomic, and colonial conflicts for centuries. Military coups and a series of US interventions have kept the region unstable for decades. Long before the gangs, social and economic inequality manifested in all-out civil wars as the poor attempted to usurp their elitist oppressors. The tale of violent conflict within the region is a long and complex one, but the critical event that most informs the turmoil we are seeing today began in the late 1970s in the streets of El Salvador.

Socioeconomic divides that began brewing long before the nation’s independence spilled over into the 1900s and manifested in an attempted coup in 1930. The failure left the poor and wounded under the toe of a brutal military force controlled by the elite they sought to overthrow. Tensions continued to rise, and a string of attempted coups and assassinations came to a head in 1979 when a leftist military junta seized control of the country. After they failed to fulfill their promises to the working class, the five largest guerillas rose up to fight off their new oppressor. Under the National Liberation Front banner, these guerillas began a conflict that soon plunged the nation into civil war.  

The war dragged on until 1992, and by then, the country had been decimated. The blood of 75,000 Salvadorans marred the empty streets as El Salvador attempted to rebuild with a crippled population, no government, and no clear way forward. Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled during the 12-year long war, many of them leaving their children and seeking out better lives elsewhere. They most commonly arrived on the US border; many of them crossed illegally after failing to claim asylum. 

The US had played a significant role in the war itself, providing arms and funds for the authoritarian regime who they chose to legitimize. It was with US sponsored arms and training that the regime would go on to commit 85% of the atrocities against their own people in the war. Though they fueled the most severe human rights violations they felt they owed nothing to the Salvadorans at the border. Their ignorance and ineptitude in dealing with the thousands of people flowing into the country left these refugees destitute. Forced into poor neighborhoods with no papers and no ability to get them, they fended for themselves in inner cities riddled with the kind of organized gang violence that plagues El Salvador today. 

These Los Angeles neighborhoods were the birthplace of Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio Deciocho, gangs that now sprawl across the NTCA. They had innocent beginnings. They were a way for the Salvadoran community to defend themselves from the surrounding gangs that frequently harassed them. However, they soon became full-fledged drug trafficking operations, and while they continued to protect their community, the lucrative business was attractive for all these fresh and jobless refugees. 

In the early 90s, the Clinton administration pushed for tighter restrictions on refugees arriving to and currently living in the US. This came with a wave of negative attention that soon saw many gang members deported back to a home with no infrastructure. Deportations began in 1993, with just dozens of gang members, but only two years later, the Clinton administration had forcibly removed 780 members from the country. 

They arrived to an El Salvador with no ability or will to monitor and control them. Their operations flourished. The wave of migrant parents fleeing and leaving their children behind had created thousands of orphans, and with little else to occupy their time and no family that was fit to provide, the gangs became their refuge. The country was littered with weaponry that soon fell into the hands of the warring gangs that began to carve up the country. In lieu of a formal policing force and a well-established government, with thousands of lost children and abandoned artillery in their midst, Barrio 18 and MS-13 soon became the most notorious gangs in the region, spreading across borders and becoming a powerful economic and societal force.

El Salvador was brought to the brink of disaster in 2015 as its murder rate spiked to 104 per 100,000. That was a wake-up call for the government. After a series of trial and error policies, attempts to control and quell the swell of gang violence are finally yielding success. But as the war on the gangs in the NTCA continues to rage on, and even if the government wins, the seeds of future class struggle have already been sown. Like the nations surrounding it, the country is burdened with the lasting impact of colonial and imperialist oppression.

Economic inequality across the world is rising, but it poses even greater stress on women and girls in the global south. Burdened with all that femininity carries everywhere; caring for children, being economically viable partners, and being good homemakers. The weight of womanhood is extra heavy on women who are attempting to make lives in impoverished neighbourhoods plagued by violent crime. 

Gangs are a symbol of fear for every member of society, but women have been uniquely made targets of their brutal acts. Gender-based violence has become just another weapon in the toolbox, and the victimization of women has become imperative to territorial control and power. 

Women have been forced into hiding. They barricade themselves in their homes, avoid public life, and are still expected to provide for their children. The obstacles are continuing to mount. Femicide rates in the NTCA, particularly in Honduras and El Salvador, are the worst in the world. In 2018, 6.8 of 100,00 women in El Salvador died - the highest femicide rate in the world at the time. In that same year, Honduras topped out at 5.1, while Guatemala saw 2 per 100,000 women die because of their gender. These crimes are ruthless. The thousands of women who were found to be victims of femicide were mutilated and often found to have experienced some form of sexual violence before their death.

Artwork by Lucia Torres

The UN has made many reports that cite gang violence as a key factor in these crimes. Yet, a culture of machismo that glorifies the oppression of women prevents the police and the government from addressing these issues in earnest. As these governments wrestle with gang violence, women’s causes routinely fall between the cracks. Their policies fail to intervene in the places women need community and government support. 

Femicide is just the tip of the iceberg. The gangs have taken up a policy of  forcibly “recruiting” women by making them “novias de la pandilla (girlfriends of the gang).” These relationships have been referred to as modern slavery, marked by sexual and physical violence. Las pandillas in the NTCA have been known to extort families by threatening to take their daughters. They often kidnap these girls with or without the money, making these young girls bargaining chips in this sick game of chance. In this unique context, women have become more than products; they are a currency that ensures community submission to gang rule. 

The options are simple - flee or pay and hope for the best. As the economic situation worsens in the region, and governments remain incapable of containing, punishing, or even rehabilitating gang members, the second is no longer feasible.

Again, all eyes turn to the United States. A country whose increasingly limited and nationalistic rhetoric continues to shut the door in their faces. Migrants coming up from the NTCA know this. They are well aware of the politics at play in the US and the many challenges on their long journey. They are conscious that this path is laced with violence and their success (or lack thereof) is up to fate. Still, they leave not out of any genuinely independent will but out of necessity. Economic hardship, widespread gang violence, and the overwhelming sense that change will never have spurred them into action.

The journey northward is long and arduous. Migrants are guided by “coyotes,” people who have made it their life's work to smuggle hundreds of migrants each year from their nations to the US’s southern border. They charge thousands of USD to make you a part of their group and often raise the price at will. Many families save for years for the chance to send just one person to safety. 

Millions of migrants make the trek each year from the NTCA to the US’s southern border. In 2019 it was projected that 1% of the population of Guatemala and Honduras would attempt to make it to the US border. Less than half of them will actually get asylum. The US government will repatriate the rest, but commonly migrants don’t get far enough to stake their claim.

Today, women and children are occupying the lion’s share of migrants showing up at the border. This is indicative of the violence they are facing at home and the many challenges they are facing to obtaining legal status in the US. 

Under the Trump administration, both Mexico and the US have tightened their border security. As the US becomes more isolationist in its policies, it places increased pressure on its allies to do the same. The crackdowns on the Mexican border with Guatemala have forced refugees into even more perilous routes. In these areas, they face extortion from regional gangs, victimization by human traffickers that kidnap these women and girls for sexual and domestic servitude. 

There isn’t enough being done to protect these women, and this isn’t work they can push for alone. This unique trap has been constructed around them for decades, and escaping won’t be easy. Both international and national efforts to protect these women have to be focused on them - not on the gangs, not on money, or immigration. It has to center on the women who are dying and being enslaved because it is only through giving them justice; we can show them that there is hope. 

The situation in the NTCA is getting better, but the gangs are also getting smarter, and unlike the general public, they are watching every move the government makes. Whether it be more lax immigration policies or harsher anti-gang patrols - they are preparing for it. And that preparation only puts more stress on these women and their families.

What a woman has to be is constantly changing, but in the NTCA, it is unclear if womanhood will ever not be tied to victimhood. There is so much more to being a woman in a society primed and accepting of the violence it enacts against you. It requires a fortification of self, a bravery that is unfathomable to most. These women’s stories may never be told in full, but their experiences represent what most of us can see so clearly - there is no justice without care for women’s rights. 

---

Hayley is an emerging writer and journalist who works hard to create work that is fiercely feminist, anti racist and anti oppression on a whole. You can check out more of her work and content on her instagram @hayley.headley