Читать книгу Enduring Violence - Cecilia Menjívar - Страница 9

CHAPTER 2

A Framework

for Examining Violence

People say that before the fighting we had peace. But what

do you call peace? The war begins at the psychological level,

in the plantations, where every day we were dying a little

bit, every day we were consuming ourselves.

—Guatemalan peasant, quoted in Daniel Wilkinson,

Silence on the Mountain

Es que la vida de una mujer es dura, Usted. Los hijos sirven

de consuelo. A veces uno dice, “Ay Diosito, no me olvides,

por favor ten piedad!” Pero es que así es la vida de uno, no?

[A woman's life is tough. Children are the consolation.

Sometimes one says, “Oh, my little God, don't forget me,

please have mercy!” But that's our life, no?]

—Woman in San Alejo

The first epigraph above points to the usefulness of opening up the analytic lens to examine instances of violence beyond those embodied in physical pain and injury, and the second brings up reflections on everyday violence in the world of the women I came to know. Both express the enduring reality of violence that crosses multiple spaces and spheres of life, and they elucidate the two aspects of violence I wish to examine in this book: the multifaceted character of violence and its expression in the quotidian lives of ladina women that contributes to its normalization.¹ Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum's (2009: 4) conceptualization of “normalized” as “legitimized ideologically such that domination, dependency, and inequality are not only tolerated but accepted” is useful here to convey what I mean by the normalization of violence. Although a neat compartmentalization of the multiple sources of suffering is rarely found in practice, here I disaggregate them for the purpose of presenting my analytic framework. Taken individually, the structural, symbolic, or gender forms of violence can be so general as to be visible anywhere, and they can be interpreted differently (e.g., structural violence can be taken as poverty); and each can arise in any number of situations. However, taking these forms of violence as a whole, in this context and from the angle I propose, allows us to see that they are mutually constituted. Paraphrasing James Gilligan (1996), the question of whether to disentangle the different forms to see which one is more dangerous is moot, as they are all related to one another. The approach I lay out also permits me to unveil a context of violence that shapes the lives of women in gender-specific ways and in a manner that exposes deep power inequalities. This approach reveals the systematic patterns of disadvantage that are neither natural nor necessary (cf. Kent 2006); or in Gilligan's (1996: 196) words, “not acts of God.”

In establishing the links between violence at the interpersonal level with that which originates in broader structures, I seek analytic distance from individual-focused explanations or those that focus on “tradition” to elucidate the roots of violence in structures of power, away from personal circumstances.² Farmer (2003, 2004) warns against conflating poverty and cultural difference, for example; in his view, the linkage of assaults on human dignity to the cultural institutions of a particular society constitutes an abuse of cultural concepts. He (2004) then cautions that such an approach is especially insidious because cultural difference as a form of essentialism is used to explain suffering and assaults on dignity. Thus although it is important to interpret particular situations as forms of violence, it is equally significant to trace links to broader structures, lest we inflict even more harm on the vulnerable.

There are three considerations regarding my discussion of violence. First, the political economy of violence does not affect everyone in the same manner; violence weighs differently for those in dissimilar social positions. Women and men from different social classes and ethnic and racial backgrounds face dissimilar forms of violence and may experience the same violence in different ways. Thus class violence parallels sexual and ethnic violence, and these are often conflated in real life (Forster 1999: 59). Second, following the scholars on whose work I have built this framework, I argue that violence is not always an event, a palpable outcome that can be observed, reported, and measured. From the angle

I propose, violence constitutes a process, one that is embedded in the everyday lives of those who experience it. Third, as Torres-Rivas (1998: 48) observes, not all societies recognize the same things as violent, either in their origins or in their effects. Torres-Rivas's observation can be extended to researchers, for scholars often make use of different theoretical repertoires and frameworks to examine the same cases and thus do not assess them in the same manner. In Rashomonesque fashion, the same situation may be interpreted in a different light according to the lens used to examine it. In the rest of this chapter, I present one lens, one in which violence emerges as fundamental.³ I present each of the components and end with a discussion of how they intertwine to affect life in a gender-specific fashion. As Martín-Baró (1991b: 334) noted, considering forms of social violence other than the political-military helps us to “arrive at a picture that is more complex but also more distressing.” My portrayal of the lives of Guatemalan ladinas in this book, therefore, is not sanitized and should not be taken as culturally accusatory or as a careless characterization of an overly objectivized world.

STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

Torres-Rivas (1998: 49) notes that structural violence (or structural repression) “is rooted in the uncertainty of everyday life caused by the insecurity of wages or income, a chronic deficit in food, dress, housing, and health care, and uncertainty about the future which is translated into hunger and delinquency, and a barely conscious feeling of failure…. It is often referred to as structural violence because it is reproduced in the context of the market, in exploitative labor relations, when income is precarious and it is concealed as underemployment, or is the result of educational segmentation and of multiple inequalities that block access to success.” And for Farmer (2003: 40), “the term is apt because such suffering is ‘structured’ by historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces that conspire…to constrain agency.”

An important feature of structural violence, Kent (2006: 55) observes, is that “it is not visible in specific events.” Structural violence is “exerted systematically, that is, indirectly by everyone who belongs to a certain social order” (Farmer 2004: 307). Indeed, in Johan Galtung's (1969) classic work, the differentiating aspect between direct and structural violence is that in the second there is no identifiable actor who does the harming, so that “violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances” (171). For him, direct violence comes from harmful acts of individuals that leave physical scars, whereas structural violence is not observable and is the result of a process. Thus, in contrast to direct, physical violence, structural violence causes people to suffer harm indirectly, often through a slow and steady process. But it is easier to see direct violence (Kent 2006); and when violence is a by-product of our social and economic structure, and it is invisible, it is hard to care about it (Gilligan 1996). As Galtung (1990) observed, for some people, malnutrition and lack of access to goods and services do not amount to violence because they do not result in killings, but for the weakest in society, such shortfalls amount to a slow death. An examination of the ills that afflict the poor from this vantage point highlights how a political economy of inequality under neoliberal capitalism promotes social suffering. As Miguel Ángel Vite Pérez (2005) observes, when trying to understand how individuals become unemployed one must focus on how neoliberal economic regimes have led to labor instability, to the commodification of public services, and to a precarious situation that engenders poverty rather than focus just on someone's inability to keep a job.

Structural violence as expressed in unemployment, layoffs, unequal access to goods and services, and exploitation has an impact on a range of social relations in multiple forms, including those that lead to the formation of social capital, a point I developed in fieldwork among Salvadoran immigrants in San Francisco (Menjívar 2000). Kleinman (2000: 238) argues, “Through violence in social experience, as mediated by cultural representations,…the ordinary lives of individuals are also shaped, and all too often twisted, bent, even broken.” And as Bourdieu (1998: 40) noted, “The structural violence exerted by financial markets, in the form of layoffs, loss of security, etc., is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of minor and major everyday acts of violence.” The broader political economy does not cause violence directly, but one must understand the extent to which it conditions structures within which people suffer and end up inflicting harm on one another and distorting social relations (see also Bourgois 2004a).⁴

While it is crucial to acknowledge the devastating effects of neoliberal structural adjustment policies initiated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Latin America that have resulted in sharp and unprecedented levels of poverty (see Auyero 2000; Auyero and Swistun 2009), it must be noted that what the region is experiencing is the cumulative effects of disadvantage in a much longer historical process. Economic vulnerability is a part of this process rather than a condition or state, and this process is cumulative, dynamic, and relational (see Auyero 2000). Thus Guatemalans’ current living conditions are hardly the result of a few decades of neoliberal reforms.

Latin America historically has exhibited a high degree of income inequality relative to other regions; it has the most unbalanced distribution of resources of all regions in the world (Hoffman and Centeno 2003).⁵ And Guatemala has consistently ranked among the most unequal, even by Latin American standards. The richest 10 percent of Guatemalans earn 43.5 percent of the country's total income, whereas the poorest 30 percent earn 3.8 percent (World Bank 2006). In 1998 Guatemala's Gini Index was 55.8, five years later it was 58, and in 2002 it was 55.1, which indicates that inequality rates remained stable over time. As an aggregate measure of inequality, the Gini Index does not detect levels of absolute poverty. For instance, between 1990 and 2001, 16 percent of Guatemalans lived on less than $1 per day and approximately 37.4 percent on less than $2 per day (UNDP 2003), meaning that about half of Guatemalans live under $2 a day. Guatemala also holds the dubious distinction of having one of the two most exploitative and coercive rural class structures in Central America (the other one is El Salvador), with high rural poverty and inequality and high levels of unequal landownership (Brockett 1991: 62–70). Whereas 3 percent of landholdings control 65 percent of the agricultural surface, close to 90 percent of the landholdings are too small for peasant subsistence (Manz 2004: 16). Such disparities vary by ethnicity and location. Thus 58 percent of Guatemalans nationally lived in poverty in 1989, while 72 percent did so in rural areas, a proportion that dropped to 56 percent nationally in 2002 but rose to 75 percent in rural areas the same year (World Bank 2006). And although the majority of ladinos are poor and lack access to basic services, the Maya are even poorer and disproportionately disadvantaged. And in spite of development programs aimed at reducing the poverty gap, inequality has increased in Guatemala.⁶

Structural violence also comes in the form of a sweatshop economy that exacerbates gendered vulnerabilities. In a careful examination of the effects of sweatshop (maquila) employment in Guatemala, María José Paz Antolín and Amaia Pérez Orozco (2001) discuss the psychological violence that takes place in the maquila, with serious consequences for the workers, including loss of self-esteem. According to the authors, this situation creates a belief among the women that it is their fault that they do not have more education, and thus they blame themselves for their precarious situation. Indeed, the women with whom I spoke in San Alejo were well aware of the benefits that education can bring, but due to the need for their labor in their families many had been forced to abandon school early or not to attend at all. However, they pointed to themselves or their families as culpable for their lack of education and diminished potential for success in life. The average years of schooling for adults in Guatemala is three and a half years, even though the duration of compulsory education is eleven years, and the literacy rate for men in 2002 was 75 percent and for women 63 percent (World Bank 2006). Education and level of poverty are related; by the Guatemalan government's own estimates, more than 95 percent of the poor have had no secondary education, and 44 percent have never attended school at all (Manz 2004: 16–17).⁷

Nine of the thirty women I interviewed in San Alejo had never attended school. Some had learned how to sign their names or to read simple words, a couple had attended adult literacy classes, and another nine had only attended elementary school. They cited their parents, other relatives, or themselves as the reason they had not acquired more schooling. It is only by tracing the links to the profoundly unequal access to education and resources that one can turn attention to the root of this lack of opportunities. Hortencia, the mother of five whom I mentioned in chapter 1, explained why she never attended school:

Because my papa was a mujeriego [womanizer] and a drunk and my mama suffered a lot with him so they never sent me to school. I had to help her. I learned in the alfabetización [literacy classes] how to read and write, and now I have even written letters to the United States for other people who don't know how to write [she smiles and her eyes light up]! The other day my compadre [lit., “co-father”; co-parent] came by so I could help him calculate how old he is because he needed to go get his cédula [ID card]. Ay, the shame of having to learn how to read and write as an adult…one feels bad, ashamed. I was very embarrassed, but in time I learned.

While Hortencia saw her father as responsible for her illiteracy, one must recognize that access to education in rural Guatemala when she was growing up was a privilege, not a right, especially for poor women. Not everyone could attend school, and since the town had only a primary school, many who did attend stopped at the sixth grade; only the few with more means traveled to the city to continue beyond the sixth grade. Thus blocked educational opportunities and illiteracy are expressions of the structural violence that assaults the lives of the poor. However, some women of more means noted that the poor (or the children of the poor) do not attend school because they are “lured” to work, not forced to work, as women from poor backgrounds explained. Lucía, a teacher, said:

The children work too much. People cultivate tomatoes in this area, and the kids go to harvest them and then don't go to school. Instead they go to a literacy course in the afternoons. You see lots of patojos, young ones, congregated outside those centers [for literacy classes]. Instead of wanting an education, they want to earn money. Oh yes, they are poor and need money, but they don't want the education. No, really, believe me, they just don't want to be educated, otherwise they would go to school, don't you think? As a teacher, it pains me to see how kids go for money and not their future. But it's all the parents’ fault.

Other women were more elaborate in their assessments, but most explanations ended up blaming the poor for their predicament, adding insult to injury. Ofelia, a receptionist, explained, “You see, they [the poor] have many children, so their money is never enough. You know why? Because there is no family planning. Well, there is, but the gente humilde [lit. “humble people,” meaning the poor] don't accept it, and they prefer to have as many children as God sends them. So it's because of their beliefs that they end up worsening their own situation, right?”

The majority of the women with whom I spoke in San Alejo mentioned situations they faced in their daily lives that highlight structural violence and the normalization of inequality. Several women talked about the effects of the unequal land distribution system, couching their reflections in a framework of the ordinary, explaining multiple forms of exploitation as the way things were. In San Alejo women do not work the land directly (they can participate in the harvest), but the men do, and they do so through an exploitative land tenure system. Many are landless and rent land from landowners through a contract called medianía, which implies “half and half” but is hardly that. As it was explained to me, the landowner provides the land and the renter tills it and supplies everything else—seeds, fertilizer, and workers to harvest the crop. Then the landowner and the renter supposedly share the crop. Such a system lends itself to multiple forms of abuse, and it is risky for the renter but not for the landowner. This system exemplifies what Galtung (1990) conceptualizes as the archetypal structure of violence.

Many women brought up the injurious consequences inherent in the system. Sometimes their partners were hired to work the land but were cheated and not paid after the harvest, losing money that was earmarked for other purposes, including medicine and food. Mirna, twenty-eight years old and the mother of five, complained that the landowner with whom her husband worked would deduct money for everything needed to work the land, leaving them with Q.100 (about $15 in 1997) per month in profits. She had to use some of this money to feed the twelve laborers who helped her husband, even when she was eight months’ pregnant. In the case of Leticia, when her partner fell ill from HIV/AIDS they had to sell half of a tiny plot of land so that he could afford his checkups in the capital. After he died, she found out she also was infected, and she sold the other half of the plot to pay for her own checkups. In her last year of life she was tormented about being unable to leave any land, or even a small adobe structure, to her young daughters. When she was already ill, one of the few ways she could make a living was picking tomatoes in the fields, but even this became difficult toward the end because others in town knew of her illness and some potential employers did not want any contact with her. As the women recounted these stories, they presented them as the way things were, normalizing the relationship between those who own the land and those who till it, only occasionally insinuating how exploitative this “natural order of things” was.⁸ Not surprisingly, when I spoke with the women whose families owned the land, their stories conveyed the other half of the picture, naturalizing the narratives of exploitation I heard from poor women.

POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND STATE TERROR

For thirty-six years, from 1960 to 1996, political violence and state terror were the order of the day in Guatemalan society. During this time politically motivated violence became an integral part of the functioning, governance, and maintenance of the state (Falla 1994; Jonas 2000; Nelson 1999). Violence and terror, epitomized in public assassinations, ruthless massacres, and unsolved disappearances, became the favored political tools for Guatemala's military and political elites (McCleary 1999, cited in Torres 2005). Politically motivated violence was so successful during Guatemala's reign of terror that it came to be known as a “cultural fact,” as somehow “natural” and “cultural” (Nordstrom 1997; Sluka 2000; Torres 2005). The Guatemalan anthropologist M. Gabriela Torres (2005: 143–44) notes that “the naturalization of political violence into a cultural fact was produced, in part, through the creation and promotion of a language or pattern of political violence that—while it generated terror—at the same time obfuscated the political economy of its own production.”

Until 1980 the targets of state terror were primarily ladinos—students, peasants, union organizers, politicians, and revolutionaries—and in the 1960s and 1970s the state-sponsored violence had an urban character (Godoy-Paiz 2008). But in 1981 the army launched its scorched earth campaign against Maya communities.⁹ Throughout this period ladinos continued to be killed, but the atrocities committed against the Maya, described as ethnocide or genocide, targeted “Indians as Indians” (Grandin 2000: 16). The widespread and systematic nature of this slaughter arguably reached the threshold of crimes against humanity. As an intricate aspect of a regional political structure in which U.S. political interests have weighed heavily (Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005), in 1954 the U.S. government orchestrated the overthrow of democratically elected Jacob Arbenz Guzmán and installed a military regime that would govern the country, in various guises, for the next several decades. Successive U.S. administrations supported this regime as it engaged in widespread human rights violations, providing training and support for the Guatemalan army's counterinsurgency operations (Manz 2004; Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005). According to the 1999 report of the U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission, formally known as the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH; Historical Clarification Commission), the state responded to both the insurgency and the civil movements with unimaginable repression, repression that climaxed in 1981–82 with a bloodbath in which the army committed over six hundred massacres (Sanford 2008: 19). It tortured, murdered, and was responsible for the disappearance of more than 200,000 Guatemalans (mostly Mayas); it destroyed 626 villages, and hundreds of thousands were displaced internally and internationally (Parenti and Muñoz 2007; Sanford 2008).

Although ladino communities were not targeted in the scorched earth campaigns, there are ways in which the general political violence led to the normalization of violence, distorting social relations and affecting life in ladino communities as well. The breadth and depth of state-sponsored terror reached all Guatemalans in one way or another, for one of the most destructive aspects of state terror in Guatemala was the widespread reliance on civilians to kill other civilians (Ball, Kobrak, and Spirer 1999), as well as the strategic dissemination of gruesome killings in the media. Thus the political violence that claimed many lives and destroyed communities in the Altiplano was so pervasive that it engulfed the entire country. Writing about the insidious effects of the militarization of life in El Salvador, Martín-Baró (1991c: 311–12) stated, “The militarization of daily life in the main parts of the social world contributes to the omnipresence of overpowering control and repressive threats…. This is how an atmosphere of insecurity is fostered, unpredictable in its consequences, and demanding of people a complete submission to the dictates of power.” He referred to this phenomenon as the “militarization of the human mind” (1991b: 341). In such contexts, to paraphrase Cynthia Enloe (2000), lives become militarized not only through direct means and exposure but also when militarized products, views, and attitudes are taken as natural and unproblematic (see also Green 1999). Even if concrete expressions of political violence differ in degree, tactics, and expression, the broad effects cannot be contained or isolated in one geographic area when the state iself is the chief perpetrator. As Galtung (1990: 294) observed, “A violent structure leaves marks not only on the human body but also on the mind and the spirit.” It was this kind of political violence, created and spread through state structures, that reached, in one way or another, everyone in Guatemala.

Political violence is linked to other forms of violence, including interpersonal violence in the home (itself linked to symbolic violence) and what is referred to as “common crime.” Douglas Hay (1992) notes the reciprocal relationship between violence from the state and violence in private spheres. And referring to a chain of political violence, Jennifer Turpin and Lester Kurtz (1997) note the interrelated causes of violence at the micro- and macrolevels, such that the violence that occurs in intimate relations is connected to the violence that occurs between ethnic groups, which in turn is linked to global patterns of interstate wars, because the same mechanisms sustain them. Understanding the links between the different manifestations of violence, they argue, is a key step toward addressing the causes.

Thus the cruelty with which certain assaults such as robberies and burglaries are sometimes committed in the context of common crime cannot be examined independently of the violence engendered by state terror, as Taussig (2005) has observed for the case of Colombia. Often, acts of common crime are characterized by the same brutality and professionalization with which acts associated with political violence are carried out. Torres-Rivas (1998: 49) notes that the criminogenic conditions of postwar violence can be examined in the context of power and state violence: “The bad example of the use of violence on the part of the state is then imitated by the citizens.” “Common criminals” adopt strategies similar to those used by the state (the same individuals may be engaged in both), and, as posited by examinations using brutalization frameworks (see Kil and Menjívar 2006), individuals who commit common crimes mimic the state as it metes out punishments on enemies or dissidents. The violence of common crime therefore is not dissociated from state-sponsored political violence.¹⁰ However, as Snodgrass Godoy (2006:25) notes, “The depoliticization of crime [is] among the hallmarks of neoliberal governance in our insecure world[,]…most starkly sketched in settings of extreme marginality.”

The effects of political violence, then, are seldom contained in a specific geographic area, among the members of only a targeted group, or in only one aspect of life. It is not surprising therefore that the ladinas with whom I spoke did not openly question the taken-for-granted world of violence that surrounded them, conveyed daily in newspapers, on television, and along the roads. Regular images and stories of gruesome deaths created a climate of insecurity and continuous alert (the “nervous system,” in Taussig's [1992] conceptualization) in eastern Guatemala as well, and it was “part of life.” Moving the analytic lens from the Altiplano, where political violence has been well documented and acknowledged, to eastern Guatemala, where for the most part it has not, unearths the breadth and depth of the project of state terror that engulfed, with varying degrees of force and visibility, the entire country.

Torres (2005) argues that in the process of making violence quotidian, “natural,” and “cultural,” the Guatemalan Armed Forces relied on a discourse expressed in the patterned and continuous appearance of cadaver reports and articulated through both the signs of torture left on bodies and the strategy of displaying the reports. Mutilated bodies left on the sides of roads and the unidentifiable victims of torture were meant to send a message to the living. Victims of terror “disappeared” from their normal existence, making the disappearance itself a powerful message of what awaited those who contemplated sympathizing with the opposition (Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005). The innocent bystanders who witnessed abductions or discovered a tortured body on a road got the message, one that was carefully and strategically broadcast in the media (Torres 2005). Although such sightings are associated with the Altiplano, they were not uncommon in other parts of Guatemala.

These observations are not meant to suggest that the entire country experienced state terror in the same way or to lessen the atrocities committed against the Maya in the Altiplano; on the contrary, they underscore the reach of the political violence suffered in Guatemala. As scholars have documented for the Altiplano, relatives of the disappeared who never saw their loved ones again live with the torment of not knowing if these relatives were in fact killed. Rosita, whom I interviewed in the Altiplano, would cry whenever she tried to explain what it meant to have had her husband disappear fourteen years earlier. On one occasion she told me, “I live wondering, will he come back one day? How about for our daughter's fifteen-year celebration? Every Christmas, every New Year's, every birthday, I wonder if he will come back. Sometimes I almost go crazy. Why did they [government army] not return his body to me? Why such cruelty? I think my torture will last all my life.” Filita, on the other hand, explained that her father was killed right in front of her and her siblings rather than having been disappeared and noted that this had been a consolation to the family because at least they could give him a proper burial. Only in the brutality of Guatemala's reign of terror could the killing of a father in front of his children serve as consolation. The women I interviewed in San Alejo did not have similar experiences, but this kind of violence often loomed in the background of their assessments and perspectives.

As the project of state violence reached all corners of the country in different ways, the militarization of life was evident beyond the Altiplano; it materialized in soldiers and military vehicles on roads even in areas that were supposed to be far from the “conflict” zones, such as in San Alejo. The military presence there served as an eerie reminder that violence was never far or contained in just one area, and thus everyone could be “at risk.” Military violence was not separated in a black-and-white geographic mapping because the repressive state could reach anyone, anywhere, any time, and the reminders of this were ubiquitous. One day as my assistant, our driver, and I were on the main road leading to San Alejo, we saw there was commotion, and traffic was slow in a large town we were supposed to pass through. A crowd was lined up on the sides of a semipaved road; it looked as if they were waiting for a pageant to go by, and I did not want to miss it. To my surprise, I saw a convoy of U.S. military vehicles, Humvees too wide for the narrow roads of the town. People had come out of their homes to look at how these massive vehicles almost touched the houses on both sides of the road as they maneuvered their way through town. The military presence felt as huge as those vehicles in that narrow road, and I wondered about the need to establish such a presence even in this region of Guatemala. I was told that a military presence—both Guatemalan and U.S.—was in fact routine; the reason people were watching that day was out of curiosity. I asked a small group of people what this was all about, and a man said, “It's the gringos. They are on their way to fix the roads around here.” “So they have come to help?” I ventured to ask. The man smiled, shrugged his shoulders, shook his head slightly, and simply responded, “Saber” (Who knows). As Linda Green (2004: 187) observes, civic actions mixed with counterinsurgency strategies do “not negate the essential fact that violence is intrinsic to the military's nature and logic. Coercion is the mechanism that the military uses to control citizens even in the absence of war.” The scene was troubling to me, but for the town dwellers and everyone in the region, accustomed to such sightings, it was life as usual. As Green (2004: 187) continues, in Guatemala “language and symbols are utilized to normalize a continued army presence.”

The end of the armed conflict has not resulted in an absence of violence, and in fact new modalities have emerged. Death threats, attacks, kidnappings, and acts of intimidation are a daily occurrence in “postwar” Guatemala.¹¹ Mutilated bodies are still found on the sides of roads, kidnappings occur regularly, people live in fear, and there are guns and security forces in places where people conduct their daily lives—challenging conventional assumptions about what it means to live in “peacetime.” All this is exacerbated by the impunity that has been the hallmark of the postwar regime; many of those responsible for human rights violations have entered politics and have even been elected to public offices (Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005).

EVERYDAY VIOLENCE, INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE, AND CRIME

Everyday violence refers to the daily practices and expressions of violence on a micro-interactional level, such as interpersonal, domestic, and delinquent (Bourgois 2004a: 428). I borrow the concept from Philippe Bourgois to focus on the routine practices and expressions of interpersonal aggression that serve to normalize violence at the micro-level.¹² This concept focuses attention on “the individual lived experience that normalizes petty brutalities and terror at the community level and creates a common sense or ethos of violence” (Bourgois 2004a: 426). Analytically, the concept helps to avoid explaining individual-level confrontations and expressions of violence, such as “common” crime and domestic violence, through psychological or individualistic frameworks. Instead, this prism links these acts to broader structures of inequality that promote interpersonal violence. As Alejandro Portes and Bryan Roberts (2005) note, increasing trends of inequality are very much associated with rising crime in Latin America (see also Torres 2008), even if precise causality cannot always be established. Indeed, Portes and Roberts (2005: 76) note, “from a sociological standpoint, the reaction of some of society's most vulnerable members in the form of unorthodox means to escape absolute and relative deprivation is predictable.” From this angle one can trace the violence of common crime to structural and political violence, as well as to the creation of a “culture of terror” that normalizes violence in the private and public spheres, and can begin to understand how those who experience it end up directing their brutality against themselves rather than against the structures that oppress them (see Bourgois 2004a, 2004b).

Thus the most immediate threat in postwar Guatemala in the eyes of Guatemalan women and men is common crime, and today there is gang-related crime everywhere, from the capital to the countryside (see Manz 2004). Guatemala's homicide rate is one of the highest in the hemisphere, and it has escalated annually. In 2001 there were 3,230 homicides; in 2005, 5,338 (Procuraduría de Derechos Humanos [PDH], in Sanford 2008: 24). If the rate continues to increase, Sanford (2008) notes, there will be more deaths in the first twenty-five “postwar” years than in all the thirty-six years of “wartime.” In an unsettling situation (also observed in other postconflict societies), street youth in Guatemala, the criminalized young women and men often referred to as maras (gangs) because their origins have been traced to a gang bearing that name, are often blamed for the high levels of crime. Public officials and the media offer these gangs as “explanations” for interpersonal violence and crime and make it seem necessary to “eliminate the maras,” as a man in San Alejo once told me. Guatemala is not alone in this predicament. In his examination of the “limpieza” (cleansing) in Colombia, Michael Taussig (2005) notes the ease with which the seemingly random violence in postconflict societies is attributed to delinquent youth. My point here is that blaming poor young women and men for the postwar violence isolates the issue, a strategy that depoliticizes it (see Godoy-Paiz 2008) and muddles attempts to explain and understand it.

On a return visit three years after I first went to the Altiplano, I happened to see an extraordinary image: two girls, in their traditional traje, writing graffiti on a wall and then walking into a local arcade to play video games with their friends. In my conversations with people in town, I mentioned what I saw, and the talk quickly turned to crime. I was told that all the crime committed these days was the work of the maras, integrated by teenage boys and girls whose “parents don't know what the kids are doing.” People were concerned because they used to hear about these activities in the capital but not in their town. Perhaps because of the military attacks this town suffered during the years of the violence, some of the town's residents were quick to link the militarization of life to the emergence of the maras. For example, Lita, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of three, observed, “Thanks to God, my husband didn't want to stay in the army any longer. Maybe he could have had a higher rank by now. But he wouldn't have been content with that and would have become a thief, because the more you have, the more you want. And the longer you stay in the army, the worse a person becomes. You learn how to pressure people to do what you want.”

Paralleling Lita's assessment, the emergence of the maras in Guatemala, as well as in the rest of Central America, has been linked to the militarization of life during the years of political violence.¹³ However, even if poverty and a recent political conflict are mentioned as factors behind the emergence and expansion of gangs in Central America (and of the violence we see today), it is interesting that it is the countries with a recent history of state violence (not just political conflict) that targeted their own people, such as Guatemala, El Salvador, and, to some degree, Honduras, where this seems to be the case. On the other hand, in Nicaragua, where there are similar conditions of poverty and recent political conflict but where the state was not involved in terrorizing its own citizens (in that conflict, the “Contra War,” the government fought external aggression), youth gangs have not proliferated, and those that exist do not seem to be as violent as those in the other Central American countries.

Though I did not ask directly about violence in their lives, San Alejo women brought it up in our conversations, often in its direct, physical form, even when we were talking about aspects of their lives that seemed remote from the topic of violence. Sometimes they would mention instances of common crime that their friends and families had experienced; sometimes they would talk about how “easy it is to die” in their town. Yet at other times they would talk about additional sources of fear and suffering. It was surprising to me how easily and often this issue came up. In fact, the topic of direct violence made such an impression on me that in a field note entry in 1995 I wrote, “Almost everyone in this town seems to have had a relative killed. Everyone seems to own and use guns. Is it supposed to be this way here [in San Alejo]?” What I was trying to reconcile was that this was the region of Guatemala considered relatively peaceful, far from the Altiplano, where overt, direct forms of political violence were more likely to take place. Isabel mentioned that her brother had been shot and was recuperating. The incident reminded her of the time, two years earlier, when her uncle was shot and killed not far from where her brother had just been shot. She also mentioned a series of robberies and assaults on people close to her. She attributed such acts, like others did, to drunkenness, jealousy, and revenge. Similarly, when Teresa and I were talking about her family, she said, “These days my uncle is recuperating from a gunshot wound. Oh, he had a few drinks, you know how it is, then got his gun and shot himself in the leg.” And Estrella, with a shrug of the shoulders, said, “There are always people being killed around here. Sometimes you walk around and see a crowd of people, and most of the time it's going to be someone killed in the street. Normally it's a bolo [drunk].” Isabel seemed a bit relieved when she said, “These days, it's only my brother”; no one else in her family had been assaulted recently. And Mirna was worried about a brother-in-law who drank too much; in the end, she said, anyone could be killed: “No one is safe. Such is life, one is here today and gone tomorrow, right?” Perhaps what seemed more startling to me was the element of ordinariness in the women's accounts. As Scheper-Hughes (1997: 483) notes, “The routinization of everyday violence against the poor leads them to accept their own violent deaths and those of their children as predictable, natural, cruel, but all too usual.”

The topic of direct physical violence came up even when speaking with Lucrecia about the town's fiesta. We were having a lively conversation in the living room of her house about the music, the queens, the three days of festivities, the bailes (dances), when suddenly she said:

Oh yes, for the fiestas siempre hay muertos [there are always dead people]. People drink too much. Oh God, there is always a matazón [widespread killings] during the fiestas. They kill each other. Well, this time, I don't know, I think there were only three or four dead. Not too many this year. In other years there are more, sometimes eight or nine. There will be at least some dead people during the fiestas. It's what happens during a fiesta, right?

During my last visits to San Alejo in 1999 and 2000, I heard gunshots almost every night. One evening a man brandishing a gun, chasing another man, ran past our street, and I was told to stay inside. I was left shaken, but my reaction made everyone laugh and tease me because I had made a big deal out of a guy running around with a gun. This experience and others corroborated the women's normalized descriptions of direct violence in their town. Again, this was postwar, “non-conflict,” eastern Guatemala.

SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND THE INTERNALIZATION OF INEQUALITY

Symbolic violence, according to Bourdieu (2004), refers to the internalized humiliations and legitimations of inequality and hierarchy that range from sexism and racism to intimate expressions of class power. As Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant (2004: 273) put it, “It is the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity.” And, according to Bourgois (2004b), this violence is exercised through cognition and misrecognition, with the unwitting consent of the dominated. In this conceptualization, “the dominated apply categories constructed from the point of view of the dominant to the relations of domination, thus making it appear as natural. This can lead to systematic self-depreciation, even self-denigration” (Bourdieu 2004: 339). A key point in Bourdieu's conceptualization that captures a fundamental aspect of the case I examine here is that the everyday, normalized familiarity with violence renders it invisible, power structures are misrecognized, and the mechanisms through which it is exerted do not lie in conscious knowing.¹⁴ According to Bourdieu:

Symbolic violence is exercised only through an act of knowledge and practical recognition which takes place below the level of consciousness and will and which gives all its manifestations—injunctions, suggestions, seduction, threats, reproaches, orders, or calls to order—their “hypnotic power.” But a relation of domination that functions only through the complicity of dispositions depends profoundly, for its perpetuation or transformation, on the perpetuation or transformation of the structures of which those dispositions are the product. (2004: 342; original emphasis)

Significantly, symbolic violence in the form of feelings of inadequacy, mutual recrimination, and exploitation of fellow victims diverts attention away from those responsible (e.g., the state and classes in power) for the conditions of violence in the first place (see Bourgois 2004a, 2004b). This theoretical angle allows us to capture how multiple inequalities, power structures, and denigrating social relations become internalized dispositions (Bourdieu's “habitus” [1984]) that organize practices and are unquestioned, misrecognized, accepted, and ultimately reproduced in everyday life. Bourdieu's key conceptualizatization, as it focuses on gender violence, constitutes my main framework for examining the different aspects of life of the women in San Alejo.

Symbolic violence is exerted in multiple forms of stratification, social exclusion, and oppression in Guatemala; as such, it is constitutive of other forms. I began to reflect on the insidiousness of structural violence and its links to the hidden injuries of symbolic violence when a female street vendor outside the city hall in San Alejo shooed away a barefoot blond boy (his blond hair was the result of extreme malnutrition) wearing a tattered Harvard Alumni T-shirt of undescribable color, because she thought he was bothering me when he asked me for food. He took a couple of steps back and looked afraid. The expression on my face led the woman to explain her actions and she assured me that it was okay to shoo him away, saying, “Ay, estos patojos son peor que animales, son como moscas, Usted” (Ah, these kids are worse than animals; they are like flies). At first I wondered why this woman, who did not look much better off than the patojo in question and had probably experienced hunger herself, could not feel compassion for him. As I thought about the incident I realized that it had more to do with the context of multifaceted violence in which both she and the boy lived than with the woman's lack of compassion. I had mistakingly interpreted this act. In a fashion similar to the initial reaction of Scheper-Hughes (1992) to the seeming indifference of the mothers to their infants’ deaths and life chances in Bom Jesus do Alto, I was not initially aware of the inadequacy of my reading. To link this moment to the ravages of violence in the lives of this woman and this child required shifting from a focus on the individual interaction to the structures that give rise to and facilitate these forms of violent relations, and it parallels other examinations of dehumanization and objectification, such as Douglas Massey's (2007) discussion of the dehumanization of undocumented immigrants in the United States that opens up the way for inhumane treatment.

The women I met in the Altiplano had countless stories, many dealing with racism, about their experiences of symbolic violence in its overt forms. For instance, Lita's teenage daughter spoke about her life as a worker in Guatemala City, where ladinos often stare at her, scold her (regañan), and speak roughly to her, calling her india, just because she is a “natural” (the term Maya often use to refer to themselves).

Equally important to note is how such expressions of violence are internalized by the dominated and how the self is wounded under these conditions. Ivette, a thirty-year-old ladina in San Alejo, was married to a Maya man from the town in the Altiplano where I did research. Ivette wore fashionable clothes, always had her nails manicured, and had dyed her hair blond. We were talking about what life was like for her, as a ladina, in the Altiplano, and she said:

Well, I live well here. Everyone speaks Kaqchikel around here and all the women wear traje. But my husband says that that's why he married me; he didn't want a woman with traje. In fact, he never had a girlfriend who wore traje. Yes, on purpose, he didn't want una de traje [a woman who wore traje, meaning a Maya]. And he doesn't want me to dress our daughter with traje. My sisters-in-law tell him to, but my husband doesn't like it; he thinks it's not in good taste.

The stories I heard in the Altiplano were disturbing and provided me with a small window onto how racism in Guatemala is experienced. In the Oriente I heard stories that show the other side of racism and support those I heard in the Altiplano. Comments in San Alejo usually came in the form of an outright racist statement about the Maya, or in the form of a joke (see Nelson 1999), or in a naturalized, normalized assertion (I return to this in chapter 7). On one occasion I was chatting with a couple of women in San Alejo on the steps of one of their homes, and the life and accomplishments of Rigoberta Menchú came up. With surprise, one of them explained what she thought about the Nobel Prize winner: “Right, she is not dumb. Because, you know, one thinks that the Indians are dumb, well, that's what one believes, right? But you'd be surprised. Many are not. Look at La Rigo [Rigoberta], que chispuda salió [how smart she turned out].”

However, in San Alejo I was stunned by stories of another form of symbolic violence that is also naturalized and misrecognized. I often heard the ladinas talk about their perceived inadequacies, their understanding of being “naturally” unequal to men, and how “as women” they knew “their place.” Such expressions were so common that one hardly noticed them. These powerful and insidious forms of symbolic violence encapsulate Bourdieu and Wacquant's (2004: 272) conceptualization that, “being born in a social world, we accept a whole range of postulates, axioms, which go without saying and require no inculcating…. Of all the forms of ‘hidden persuasion,’ the most implacable is the one exerted, quite simply, by the order of things” (original emphasis). I discuss this form of violence under gender violence below, because for Bourdieu and Wacquant (2004) gender domination is the paradigmatic form of symbolic violence.

GENDER AND GENDERED VIOLENCE

I examine the different forms of gender violence that assault women's lives in San Alejo by borrowing from Lawrence Hammar (1999), from a Guatemalan team of social scientists who conducted a thorough study of gender and gendered violence in Guatemala (UNICEF-UNIFEM-OPS/OMS-FNUAP 1993), and from Bourdieu's work on gender violence. According to Hammar's (1999: 91) conceptualization, gender differences in a gender-imbalanced political economy that disadvantage women represent gender violence, whereas acts of violence, including physical, psychological, and linguistic violence, constitute gendered violence. The Guatemalan team differentiates public from domestic violence and notes that the two cannot be isolated from each another; they define violence as “intentional maltreatment of a physical, sexual, or emotional nature, which leads to an environment of fear, miscommunication and silence” (UNICEF-UNIFEM-OPS/OMS-FNUAP 1993: 22). The team notes that all forms of violence are the product of unequal power relations; among these the greatest inequality is that between men and women. And, according to Bourdieu and Wacquant (2004: 273), “the male order is so deeply grounded as to need no justification[,]…leading to [a] construct [of relations] from the standpoint of the dominant, i.e., as natural.” They argue further: “The case of gender domination shows better than any other that symbolic violence accomplishes itself through an act of cognition and of misrecognition that lies beyond—or beneath—the controls of consciousness and will, in the obscurities of the schemata of habitus that are at once gendered and gendering” (original emphasis). Similarly, as Laurel Bossen (1983) observed in her research on Guatemala, an added dimension of systems of gender stratification is the development of ideologies that reinforce and rationalize sexual differentiation and inequality.¹⁵

Gender and gendered violence and public and domestic violence work in conjunction, and the interlocking of gender violence and gendered violence increasingly hurts women, as new arenas in which gender is a significant axis of stratification multiply. Guatemala's Gender Development Index is 0.63, which places it 119th of 175 ranked countries, below the 0.71 overall rate for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNDP 2003). Education at different levels is unequal by gender, and access to land is equally lopsided. Already 40 percent of rural families do not have access to land, and within this hierarchy women have a much lower rate of direct ownership. A survey found that only 28 percent of 99,000 female agriculturalists in Guatemala had permanent salaried employment; the rest were employed temporarily (Escoto et al. 1993). Disparities by ethnicity further exacerbate gender inequality, as indigenous Maya women fare far worse than ladinas in human development indicators.

The study by the Guatemalan team mentioned above presents a number of insights that show the institutionalization of gender hierarchies and violence, as authorities in the medical and judicial fields frame their actions and decisions in the same “social order of things” that shapes gender and gendered violence. The team interviewed sixteen professionals, including physicians, nurses, policemen, lawyers, gynecologists, a journalist, and a social worker, working in the public and private sectors who, in one way or another, dealt with instances of domestic violence. They were asked about their views of men and women, and overwhelmingly all agreed that “women are weaker,” that “women are dependent on men,” that “women must obey men,” that “men are the ones who hold authority,” and that “women are loving and caring.” When they were asked under what conditions a man is justified in assaulting a woman, five of the professionals pointed to jealousy, alcoholism, or infidelity on the part of the woman. When they were asked if violence against women affected society in general, they responded negatively, indicating that these are isolated cases that do not have a wider effect. Some of the professionals did say that violent acts against women can have a broad effect when the children imitate the actions of the fathers and become aggressors themselves, when families disintegrate, when women become a public charge if they are left physically unable to work, and when society in general becomes more violent (UNICEF-UNIFEM-OPS/OMS-FNUAP 1993). Therefore, institutions such as the criminal justice system reinforce and formalize violent structures, causing more injury and suffering (often though not solely through neglect).

Gender and gendered violence in Guatemala emerge in quotidian events, and it is precisely these everyday forms, sometimes expressed in seemingly innocuous acts, that contribute to their normalization. Gender idologies create spheres of social action that contribute not only to normalizing expressions of violence but also to justifying “punishments” for deviations from normative gender role expectations. This is manifested in imposed demarcations of public and private spaces and in the resulting restriction of women's movement in public, as well as in practices that are more directly physically violent, such as abductions of women before they marry (robadas), a point to which I return in chapter 4.

Often the women I spoke with found their self-perceptions corroborated by their partners’ threats, assaults, reproaches, and orders, but in some cases it was other women who did the reproaching or contributed to the assault. For instance, Delfina told me that her husband insulted her in front of friends and family, threw food at her when it was not prepared to his taste, and often threatened to leave her for a younger woman. This treatment was routine, though in a moment of reflection that epitomized the normalization of gender violence and gendered violence in San Alejo she somehow considered herself a bit fortunate. In her words, “He's never touched me. Can you believe he's never hit me? Yes, I'm serious. It's true. You'd think, with his character, it could be awful. But he's not like others who hit their wives.” Delfina's reflection about physical violence in the lives of women and its absence in her life casts it as normalized for others. Nonetheless, Delfina mentioned that she felt depressed, tense, and unloved; the perverse effects of her husband's behavior also led her to accept her situation as ordinary. So many other women she knew suffered similar (or worse) assaults routinely that she did not find her own condition “that bad.” I am not recounting these comments in an accusatory manner; rather, I want to call attention to the connection between extrapersonal, macrostructures of inequality and the microlevel, everyday world, as it is here that gender-based symbolic violence, the violence found in the social order, is instantiated.

To be sure, gender violence and gendered violence, and their normalization, are not new in Guatemala. In an examination of gender and justice in rural Guatemala, Cindy Forster (1999) notes that between 1936 and 1956 there were several recorded cases involving harmful acts against women (one had been killed) that failed to generate criminal proceedings. Authorities noted “nothing strange” in criminal acts against women; the “business as usual” attitude was especially noticeable in cases in which the women were poor and/or Maya. A justice system that carries inconsequential punishments for crimes against women, Carey and Torres (forthcoming) note, offers no legal sanction against gender-based violence. Carey and Torres, as well as Forster, link all these forms of violence against women. Forster writes:

In Guatemala as elsewhere, dominant ideologies that justify coercion have shared a common purpose in the routinization of human inequality. Closely linked behaviors and social philosophies have legitimized the extraction of labor and obedience from masses of people across culture, class, or sex divides, sometimes through the use of terror. Abstractions that separate the political from the personal and gender from race or class, often damage the real-life permeability of these various oppressions…. Like violence against women, violence against the poor and nonwhite exists as a persistent threat…. In Guatemala…these oppressions were not necessarily parallel or dual systems. Rather, each was intimately bound up with the others, resting on the same scaffolding of structural inferiority and manifested in daily violence that enforced domination and submission. (1999: 57–58)

Gender violence and gendered violence in Guatemala today have roots in gender ideologies and in the country's history of political violence. Though only one quarter of the 200,000 disappeared and those executed extrajudicially during Guatemala's internal armed conflict were women (CEH 1999; REHMI 1998), Torres (2005: 163) notes that “when women were killed, their cadavers showed evidence of overkill and rape.” This point, Torres (2005) argues, suggests that women more often than men were punished for divergence from expected behavioral norms. Indeed, in her meticulous analysis of published records, Torres finds that the victim's gender played a crucial role in determining the type of torture, the way bodies were disposed of, and the extent and type of reporting made on violated cadavers. Thus, Torres (2005) argues, the gender-specific necrographic maps and the significance of their signs point to the role of women in the restructuring of the Guatemalan nation through violence.

As in other politically conflictive societies, therefore, women in Guatemala have been murdered, disappeared, terrorized, and stripped of their dignity, and rape and sexual violence against them have been an integral part of the counterinsurgency strategy (Amnesty International 2005). Susan Blackburn (1999) and Cynthia Enloe (2000) have argued that such treatment can be linked to more obvious forms of state violence against women, as strategies of state terror and as part of a process of intimidation of dissidents or minority groups.¹⁶ In this generalized context of gendered violence, indigenous women were singularly violated (Torres 2005), for this violence was directed at them because they were women and because they were Mayas. As Nelson (1999:326) notes, the disdain for indigenous life, in particular, indigenous female life, was temporarily extended by the counterinsurgency, which treated all “probable insurgents” “like Indians—expendable, worthless, bereft of civil and human rights.” But the real magnitude of the violence women suffered during Guatemala's civil conflict will never be known, in part because many cases were not documented, but also because many women, out of guilt or shame, remained too traumatized to come forward, and afraid of rejection by their communities (Amnesty International 2005).¹⁷ The U.N. Truth Commission report states that rape, especially in indigenous areas, resulted in “breaking marriage and social ties[,] generating social isolation and communal shame[,] and provok[ing] abortions [and] infanticide and obstruct[ing] births and marriages within these groups, thus facilitating the destruction of indigenous groups” (CEH 1999: 14).

Thus Guatemala's regime and militarization of life has made possible multiple acts of gendered violence, reflected in direct political violence against Maya women but also by the encouragement of abduction, torture, rape, and murder of female workers as a lesson to other women who might think of asserting their rights. Direct and indirect forms of violence have coalesced so that Guatemalan women have lived “in a chronic state of emergency,” Carey and Torres (forthcoming) note, which has been a precursor to the violence we see today. Direct physical violence against women has increased in postwar Guatemala in absolute and relative numbers. Police records indicate that in 2002 women accounted for 4.5 percent of all killings, in 2003 for 11.5 percent, and in 2004 for 12.1 percent; figures compiled by the Policía Nacional Civil (PNC) (cited in Amnesty International 2005) note that the number of women murdered rose from 163 in 2002 to 383 in 2003 to more than 527 in 2004, and according to Oxfam (Oxfam Novib n.d.), in the first half of 2005 there were 239 women killed, including 33 girls under the age of fifteen. The Guatemalan lawyer Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey (quoted in Preston 2009) noted that over 4,000 women had been killed violently in Guatemala in the previous decade, with only 2 percent of the cases solved. In fact, Torres (2008: 6) argues that impunity in Guatemala demonstrates tolerance to multiple forms of violence but also “the extent to which violence has become naturalized in Guatemalan society.” In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a similar pattern of killings has drawn international attention and condemnation. Aside from reports by Amnesty International and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, however, the Guatemalan women's deaths have started to receive international attention only in recent years.

As with the killings during the years of overt political conflict, those in Guatemala today are reported in gruesome detail in the national media, sending a similar message of uncertainty and fear. Only this time the message is directed at women, at all women regardless of ethnic background but especially at those from poor backgrounds who work outside the home. And as Godoy-Paiz (2008) notes, not all women in Guatemala experience life and violence in the same ways; social position shapes how women live and how they die. The women in both San Alejo and the Altiplano pay attention to the news; the images and descriptions refresh memories of the insecurity of life, and they often make decisions about travel, study, and work based on this information. For instance, several women in San Alejo mentioned that it was dangerous for women to travel by bus to work or to study, or to walk at certain times, even during the daytime, along roads that were not frequently used. Linking the violence of the past and the dangers of the present, Rosita, in the Altiplano, said that when her daughter informed her that she wanted to go to Guatemala City to study to be a secretary Rosita just about died thinking of the many dangers her daughter might face: “I couldn't sleep that night, just thinking and thinking. How could I live without her by my side? And memories of all the ugly things come to my mind. My hands shake just to think what can happen to her. One hears so much—well, I have seen horrible things. My sister-in-law tells me not to put this fear into the girl's head, to let her do what she wants, go to school, but this is terrible [Rosita is in tears]. Tell me, what if I see her photo in the newspaper [meaning as the victim of a gruesome death]?”

In two instances during my last visits to Guatemala, I had the opportunity to glimpse the feelings of insecurity and fear that women in both San Alejo and the Altiplano experienced every day, though I would not equate my limited experiences with what the women go through. In May 1999, during a conversation with Hortencia in San Alejo, she told me that two women had been found killed, their bodies badly tortured, on a road not far from her house. Then she added a sentence that sent chills down my spine: “Right away, I thought about you two [my assistant and I], since you two walk around town and work, and the two women found were workers. I thought, could it be Cecilia and her friend?” I responded with a nervous laugh that no, thank God, it was not us. In December the same year, during a visit to the Altiplano, the husband of one of the women I was visiting told me he had heard that a young woman was kidnapped and found dead about 30 kilometers away. “She was an anthropologist,” he said, “doing the same thing you're doing here.” In an instant reaction, not thinking clearly and perhaps seeking distance from the woman found dead, I responded, “But I am not an anthropologist,” as if disciplinary training would have mattered. In a fitting comment to my ridiculous response, he added with a shrug of his shoulder and a chuckle, “Oh, maybe she wasn't an anthropologist either, but in any case, she was asking a lot of questions of women just like you do, and she was found dead.” Hortencia's and this man's words were unsettling to me and left me thinking not only about my own safety but also, especially, about what it must be like for many of the women I had met to live every day with the constant threat of a horrific death.

The presence of naked or partially naked bodies in public places, on roadsides and city streets, continues to be an everyday sight in postwar Guatemala. One of the most gruesome recent sightings was four human heads and two decapitated bodies found in separate public points of Guatemala City in June 2010 (El Periódico 2010). And to be sure, men also have been affected by the violence; in fact, many more men than women have been killed. But the brutality and evidence of sexual violence (in most cases amounting to torture) creates a different context for the deaths of women. Amnesty International (2005) reported that although the murders may be attributed to different motives and may have been committed in different areas of the country, the violence today is overwhelmingly gender based. The murders of students, housewives, professionals, domestic employees, unskilled workers, members or former members of street youth gangs, and sex workers in both urban and rural areas, the overwhelming majority of them uninvestigated, are often attributed to “common” or “organized” crime, drug and arms trafficking, maras, or a jealous boyfriend or husband.¹⁸ In response to increasing demands for action, in 2008 the Guatemalan government enacted a law stipulating special sanctions for these crimes against women (Preston 2009), but only a tiny percentage of cases have been prosecuted.¹⁹

Many of the women who have been killed in recent years come from poor backgrounds, which signals discrimation on the basis of both class and gender. Whereas the majority of women who were victims of violence during Guatemala's overt civil conflict were indigenous Mayas living in rural areas, the reported murder victims today are both Mayas and ladinas living in urban or semiurban areas. This new violence against women is all-encompassing. However, the brutality of the killings and the signs of sexual violence on women's mutilated bodies today bear many of the hallmarks of the atrocities committed during the political conflict, making the differences between “wartime” and “peacetime” Guatemala imperceptible.

MULTISIDED VIOLENCE IN THE LIVES OF WOMEN IN SAN ALEJO

Two examples from San Alejo demonstrate how multiple forms of violence can coalesce in a normalized fashion. They do not deal with direct physical violence and do not represent the kind of violence that attracts attention in the media or from activist groups. On close inspection, however, links and expressions of the different forms of violence outlined above begin to emerge in these examples. The first example involves men's emigration from San Alejo to the United States, and the second has to do with moneylending; often the two are related. Neither example is “abnormal” or extraordinary in this context, though both can perpetuate and exacerbate existing forms of suffering and even create new forms.

I cannot provide an extensive account of Guatemalan migration to the United States here, but suffice it to say that migration within and from Guatemala has a long history, linked to structural and political forms of violence. Since at least a century ago, indigenous Guatemalans have been participating in several patterns of labor migration, both to plantations in Guatemala's lowlands and to the Soconusco, in southern Mexico. As the political conflict intensified, thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Mayas from the Altiplano, fled their homes to refugee camps in southern Mexico and to the United States. Today migration has become a central aspect of life in San Alejo (as well as in most of the country); it is a normalized strategy to endure the consequences of deep socioeconomic inequalities exacerbated by neoliberal economic reforms and direct forms of violence. But far from addressing economic stagnation and inequality, migration can actually perpetuate them (see Portes 2009).²⁰

At the beginning of my fieldwork in 1995, some women in San Alejo talked about their husbands, partners, brothers, or other (mostly) male relatives who were working in the United States. With every visit to the town, signs of migration became more visible and omnipresent. There were more cars with U.S. license plates circulating in the town and more conversations about life in the two U.S. towns to which the majority of men from San Alejo migrated. When I first met Nena, we sat in the living room adjacent to the small bookstore/school supply store that she owned and operated from her home. She always spoke with pride about how she stocked her business with the best products and was careful to select the merchandise she sold. Five years later the store was no longer there. The “Librería El Recuerdo” sign had been replaced by one advertising a travel agency. Surprised, I asked Nena what that was, and she explained that it was not a travel agency, “the way you and I understand what a travel agency is” but a travel agency “for everyone in town,” that is, for organized groups of people traveling to the United States together by land. “Traveling…without a visa?” I inquired. “Yes, of course,” Nena replied, “mojados” (a pejorative term imported from the United States). She explained that the owner of the “agency” had a booming business because he served the town and the surrounding villages and had asked her if he could rent her store due to its central location in town. During the time I was there in 2000, he took groups of about one hundred individuals approximately twice a month, Nena explained. And the local branch of a money transfer business had a long list of names of recipients, almost double what it had been just a few years earlier. By then, it appeared, the mechanisms by which people migrated seemed commonplace and “part of life.”

I also noticed the increasing centrality of U.S.-bound migration in the Altiplano as a way to deal with everyday challenges. At the beginning of fieldwork there I came across only two families with relatives in the United States (confirmed later by the owner of a new branch of a money transfer business), but with each ensuing visit more people pointed out to me the houses that migrants’ dollars had contributed to building, and in 2000, for the first time, I saw a “travel agency” similar to the one operating out of Nena's old store in San Alejo. Toñita explained why her husband had migrated and her views of the process: “He used to work here as a driver, but because we have so many children [ten], and they are all in school, we need money, so he left for the United States two years ago…. He's in Florida, Miami, I think. No, I don't know what he does. I think he works at a packing plant. Yes, he sends us money, but it's not enough. I have to invest it wisely, in daily expenses, the children's school, and for the corn that we have to plant.”

Like Toñita, many of the women in San Alejo spoke of men from their town migrating to the United States. Lila explained that when she and her husband married, they had nothing, not even dishes in the house, so after their twins were born he had no other way to provide for the babies’ medicines, food, and clothing than to migrate. Also in San Alejo, Mercedes, all but two of whose eight children lived in Chicago, said that most people migrate from San Alejo because there is “no employment.” Estrella explained how scarcity and the worsening economic situation had created conditions for people to migrate: “If you don't work in this place, you don't eat. And you know what I do? I save my cents, so that when I am in need, I have my own money. The rest, they have their children in the States, they send them money, and that's how they live. So anyone you see here living more or less well, it's because they have a son or a daughter working over there.” In the eyes of the women, migration was a “cure” for their afflictions. Ofelia, who worked at the health post, noted, “Why deny it? I think that [migration] has been a great help for Guatemala, here [San Alejo] and for the entire country. Before migration people didn't have houses, food, clothing. Now they do. It's the only way to improve your situation.”

Financial difficulties (and direct political violence, especially in the highlands) were not the only problems that migration helped to solve; there were other kinds of personal worries, linked to gender-specific violence, for which the women thought migration was a solution. Lucrecia, a twenty-seven-year-old single mother in San Alejo, had never been married. People in town considered her “loose,” and she intimated that she did not think she had a “good reputation.” She thought the best way to resolve this situation would be to migrate. Lost in her thoughts, Lucrecia looked out the window and reflected, “I don't know, but I want to go to the United States. Yes, one dreams and dreams. I want to go there, but alone. I want to go there to work. I don't want to think about tomorrow, I won't have a husband here. Who's going to marry me? What man will want something serious with me? So I would like to go. It's better over there for women, well, for someone like me, without a husband, just alone with my kids.”

As these brief examples demonstrate, migration from Guatemala is intertwined with the context of violence I have discussed, both in how this context creates conditions for people to seek options for a better life elsewhere but also in the consequences migration has for women. Despite the general praise for migration as a panacea for all problems, most of the women also spoke of its painful consequences. This is similar to the views of immigrants in the United States whom I interviewed (Menjívar 2006a, 2006b); many of them mentioned the pain and emotional and personal costs of living separated from their families and the lengths they went to to remain connected.

The women in San Alejo would say, “Me resigno” (I resign myself) or “¿Y uno qué puede hacer?” (And what can one do?) when asked about what they thought of their partners’ migration. Indeed, even the phone calls that have come to symbolize migrants’ efforts to remain connected with loved ones back home were painful for the women. If their partners called (and it was the men who initiated a phone call, as phone cards are cheaper and more readily available in the United States) and the women noticed just a minor change in the tone of their voices, or if the men forgot to ask about something the women considered important, the women would be left worrying about possible affairs the men could be having in the United States and thus about potential abandonment. And if the men did not call it was worse (see Menjívar and Agadjanian 2007). Vera referred to these phone calls as painful; she explained that every time she received a call from her husband in the United States she was left crying. “Of course, it's nice to get a phone call and hear his voice, but that reminds me that he's not here, that he's not seeing his daughter grow up. And who knows? He's alone over there, and men are men; they sometimes fall to temptation when they are alone.”

Mercedes spoke in general terms about how people (mostly men) initially send money and remember their families, but over time “homes disintegrate.”²¹ And for Gracia María, whose five brothers were in the United States, her brothers’ absence was quite difficult because she felt “alone,” even though her parents lived in town: “With them here I feel their support as men, you know? I feel protected, I don't know, like stronger, with more backing. It's different when I'm here alone. As a woman, it's different not to have your brothers by your side. But I'm happy they left because life here is too difficult and I know that they'll improve their lives there [her eyes become watery].” As Gracia María's words indicate, it is not only the absence of the men but also what it means in this context for the nonmigrant women that is worth noting and linking to structures of violence. Thus Lucía spoke of what the absence of a male member in the family means for a woman in San Alejo. Her husband had been migrating seasonally to the United States, and she missed him very much.

Yes, sometimes I get melancholic. Why lie to you? I get sad, and wonder why my life has to be this way. Why me, I wonder? And I ask God, Diosito, why me? And it's very hard when he's gone for a long time. It's not only the sex [she laughs], no, there are many other things. When he's here he can deal with a lot of things better. Having a husband around is helpful; when one has their support one feels more secure. It's how life is here.

Emilia added a historical angle:

I miss my husband. My consolation is that at least I have the children with me. But I do feel lonely. You know, it wasn't like this before. People didn't leave town like they do now. Those people who had relatives in the States were so few that everyone knew them. Now it's the contrary. Those who don't have relatives there are the rare ones.

And Elvira, a nurse whose family has been migrating and has experienced the pain of these separations, explained how it felt:

Let me give you an example. Once I read that Sergio Ramírez [the Nicaraguan writer] asked Julio Cortázar [the Argentine writer] what it feels like to have lost his wife, and Cortázar responds, “Like always having a grain of sand in one's eye; the pain, seemingly small and insignificant is huge, constant, it doesn't go away.” I feel that this is how it feels to be separated from your parents, your husband, or your children, especially when you don't know how they are over there. This uncertainty is the part that's insoportable [unbearable].

However painful for the nonmigrants, it is not only the act of migration and the physical separations that matter here. Migration also interrupts celebrations, rituals, and the rhythm of life. Often I heard of baptisms and marriages being postponed. For instance, Mirna worried that only two of her five children had been baptized because her cousin, who was in Connecticut, wanted to be the godfather of the other three and could not travel back to Guatemala easily: “Well, the problem is that he left as a mojado, you know, without a visa, so he cannot come back for just a baptism. I worry because it's not good not to have your children baptized. What if something happens to the children, God forbid, and they are not baptized? And who knows when he'll be able to come for their baptisms; people say that it has become very difficult to travel.” And Vera's daughter was supposed to have been baptized on the day she turned one year old, but both the girl's father and the chosen godparents could not make it back for the baptism. Vera searched for words to explain that she did not know when they would return. In the end, she only said, “I am not sure, really not sure. Our lives are pending, one can say.”

Migration, given its context, characteristics, and historical moment, results in significant pain for those involved and increased power inequality in couples. Although the physical separation was a source of the women's insecurities and worries, the indefinite and uncertain nature of these separations presented a serious burden in their lives. And one must note that the nature of these separations is itself related to multiple forms of exclusion and violence that immigrants, especially those without documents or with uncertain legal statuses, face in the United States. With the militarization of the southern U.S. border and stiffer immigration laws, seasonal visits and regular physical encounters have become elusive, creating and exacerbating conditions of distress for the migrants and their nonmigrant relatives (Menjívar 2006a, 2006b).

Furthermore, in contrast to most of the literature examining the effects of male migration on the lives of women who stay, the women with whom I spoke in San Alejo did not seem to have “gained” much in terms of equality, power, or their roles. Often their movements were more closely monitored, and they did not appear to have expanded their areas of control (see chapter 3). The women still lived in a context in which orthodox patriarchal norms and few opportunities for paid employment existed, and men found themselves in contexts in which they had relatively more access to resources. As such, geographic location intensified gendered power asymmetries; men's position as breadwinners and primary decision makers was amplified and women's subordinate position exacerbated (see Menjívar and Agadjanian 2007). Thus structural violence curtailed the ability of many to find well-paid jobs, and political violence, bound up with structural violence, was the motivation for the emigration of many others. Symbolic and gender violence coalesced to create conditions in which migration emerged as a “natural” response that normalized women's pain and sacrifices and power inequalities. In turn, the consequences of migration exacerbated and created new forms of suffering that often left those involved ambivalent and wondering about the benefits that migration was supposed to bring.

My second example, moneylending, further demonstrates how multiple forms of violence come together in women's lives. Often I heard the women (and the men) complain about the poverty in San Alejo, about their inability to make ends meet, causing the women to borrow money to cover a variety of household expenses, most of them associated with their children. Given my general interest in reciprocal exchanges in different structural contexts, I asked women if under such difficult economic conditions others were likely to lend a hand, if friends, family, and neighbors would assist those in need. Similar to what I observed in the United States (see Menjívar 2000), this was not the case in Guatemala. As in the United States, I would hear of people not having enough to help others in need, as in the case of Gracia María. “No, how can people help one another if we don't even have for themselves?” she noted with a chuckle. “Imagine, people come to borrow money from me! Look at my situation! I tell them I can help with other things but not with things that involve money because I don't have any. I think many people in this town, even if they appear to have something, are in my situation.” The amounts women borrowed were very small, usually around Q.50 (about U.S.$10 in the late 1990s). Also, the life of the loans was often very short—one week, one month—highlighting the urgency of the situation. So, I asked the women, do people lend money to one another as a form of help? Gracia María laughed and said, “Oh no, not to help others, but to help themselves! Cecilia, look, the only way to borrow money is to go through someone who does that for a living. You don't believe me [she laughs]! You'll be even more surprised when you find out who they are, who lends money for a living. You'll realize that it's unscrupulous people lending at high rates and taking advantage of those in need. Around here, it's the great majority who are in need, so those people take advantage.” As I learned more about moneylending, it seemed that the interest rate varied in direct relation to the urgency of need. Although Estrella recognized that the interest rates were a function of how desperate people were, in contrast to Gracia María's view, she did not view moneylending as exploitation. “Well, it is a form of help, no?” she said. “Even if it's with a high interest, it's help. Well, that's how I see it.”

As I began to pay attention to the issue of moneylending, I noticed that indeed there was quite a bit of it going on, but one had to dig a little deeper. An entry in my field notes reads, “Moneylending. Note it. It's very common here. High interests in moneylending are common.” However, as Gracia María indicates, what needs to be noted is not just the moneylending but the high interest rates and the exploitative nature of the enterprise in which the vulnerable hurt one another, for that is what encapsulates the multiple forms of violence. Gracia María continued: “Those people that you've been talking to, yes, those. They seem so nice and kind, right? You should see, they lend money at such high rates, they're like leeches. Yes, the polite ones, those. They live off desperate people who need to take a kid to the clinic, or who need to pay rent; people feel like they're suffocating so they turn to moneylenders. Sure, they go to mass and church, you have seen them, and they beat their chests and all that, but behind all that they are the worst sinners because they are merciless.” Like migration, moneylending too generated and exacerbated different forms of suffering; both practices were normalized responses to the conditions women (and men) faced. And both were nonphysical forms of violence.

I decided to pay a visit to the women in town who were known for lending money at high interest rates to hear their perspective. I was surprised to find that these women were not members of the well-off families in town and that in fact they were not much better off than those to whom they were lending. When I inquired about this, a nurse and a physician in San Alejo mentioned that the better-off families were less likely to lend money because renting their land remained more profitable (though equally exploitative). When I brought up the topic of moneylending with the women known for engaging in this business, they limited themselves to commenting that they had heard that some people in town “alquilan dinero” (rent money). But I had heard enough from others, including those who had borrowed money, about how it worked. One of the lenders, Isabel, owned a small store in the living room of her house, which was near the center of town and was not as well appointed as those of her relatives. Her husband worked in the United States and sent remittances regularly. Isabel would put the money to work by lending it to others in small amounts, sometimes at an interest rate of 25 percent. One of the women who had “hired money” from Isabel commented that it made more sense for Isabel to lend the remitted money than to put it to other uses, because “the profits are higher when people do business at the expense of those who are desperate.” Two other women echoed this view in a slightly different fashion. Mirna said that it seemed “natural” that the poorer people would fare worse in these monetary transactions, for they would “normally be taken advantage of.” “If you look poor, humble, then it's worse. Sometimes you really need money because a child is sick and you need to buy medicine, and because men are not there to help, you need to borrow money. But the poor are unlucky, the unluckiest people on earth, I tell you. ‘Al perro más flaco se le pegan las pulgas’ [The skinniest dog gets all the fleas].”

Like some of the other women, Hortencia added a specific gendered angle: “Well, for one, as a woman, the disadvantage is worse because if you borrow from men, then they expect you to pay back through other means, you know, like doing things with them. Respect is lost, so it's better not to have any money dealings with some men.” Moneylending can be, as in Estrella's view, a form of help, but often it turns into outright exploitation and thus reflects the structural and symbolic violence in which the vulnerable exploit one another. I heard similar stories in the

Altiplano. Some women there said that the only help from others came in the form of loans, which, as in San Alejo, were for small amounts and for short periods. For instance, Lita lamented how difficult it was for her to survive, and she described the kind of help she sought from those close to her. When two of her children were sick and she had not received any money from her husband who was working in Guatemala City, she turned to her brother for help.

He said that if I gave him the small plot of land that my father left me [as an inheritance] he could help me, he could give me Q.100 [about $20] a month, but he only gave me Q.100 once, and then nothing. Ah, the land? When the boy got out of the hospital I told him that I would give him back his Q.100. I told him that I would even give him the interest. But he said no, that I had already transferred the land to him, and he didn't accept the Q.100 back, and he didn't want to give me the land back. So I lost the land, and all I got was the Q.100. Yes, this is my own brother!

Amelia added that borrowing money had made matters worse and, demonstrating the internalized symbolic violence she had experienced, placed some of the blame on those in need:

There are people who lend money at a high interest, but if we are in need, we pay the interest, right? Sometimes we just make enough money to pay for the interest because the lady [lender] comes by the house and she wants her money. So we work only to pay our debt, to pay the interest because we pay Q.60 a month. We ask her to wait a day or two, but she wants her money right there and then. My husband gives his merchandise on credit, so we get money to pay for the interest. But you know what? It's our fault because we are the ones who borrow this money; the lady doesn't come to our house to offer it to us. So it's no one's fault but our own.

Although the reasons for borrowing money, the consequences, and the self-blaming seemed similar in San Alejo and in the Altiplano, in the Altiplano I heard an additional angle on moneylending. Julia said that when she needs money she asks people whom she trusts, someone “de confianza.” Once she needed money to pay the men who were helping her with the harvest, for her husband was disappeared during the years of violence, and as an only daughter she did not have any men in her family to turn to for help with working the land. She said:

Remember that man that you met at Doña Diana's house? [She is referring to the teacher who used to take his meals in the house in which I lived.] The one who used to work at the city hall? Well, I borrowed from him because he was someone I could trust. He is a man of integrity, trustworthy. Interest? No, he didn't charge me interest for the loan. He said that that's because I am a widow of the violence and a single mother, so this is why he didn't charge me any interest. I used to ask him, how much do you want for the favor, and he would always say, “God says that we need to help the widows,” so he would never charge me.

This does not mean that all widows of the violence were treated with deference; it only highlights some differences, related to the political violence in the Altiplano, between the two contexts.

CONCLUSION

I have laid out a conceptual framework that includes structural, political, symbolic, everyday, and gender and gendered violence to examine the lives of the women I came to know in Guatemala. Three points need to be kept in mind. First, the multiple forms of violence I have presented never occur in isolation, though sometimes one form appears to be more salient. Thus in the chapters that follow they appear intertwined in different spheres of the women's lives. Second, violence is normalized in the women's everyday lives. Only when discussed or pointed to do routine practices (sometimes attributed to tradition) become obvious and disturb the normalized gaze. Indeed, it is the insidiousness of this routinized violence in regions that are perceived as “calm” or “peaceful,” or in practices that are taken as “part of tradition,” to which I call attention. It is through this normalization and misrecognition that dehumanization becomes possible and suffering becomes a part of life. Once violence is unleashed, whether in the form of state violence, domestic abuse, or exploitation, it emerges in different forms and shapes the lives and minds of individuals. In the chapters that follow I examine the women's “private terrors” that encapsulate the multilayered violence I have presented here.