Please enjoy: Woman (Oh Mama) - Joy Williams (see original video)
March 8 is International Women’s Day. It is sad for me when some people laugh at the idea that there is a day in recognition of women. Therefore, I will pose a reminder: International Women's Day is a international day all about celebration, reflection, advocacy, and action - whatever that looks like globally and at a local level; reflecting on the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. It is a collective day of celebration and a call for gender equality. No one government, NGO, charity, corporation, academic institution, women's network or media hub is solely responsible for International Women's Day. "The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights," says world-renowned feminist, journalist and social and political activist Gloria Steinem.
Many organizations declare an annual IWD theme that supports their specific agenda or cause, and some of these are adopted more widely with relevance than others. International women’s day is both a reminder and a call to action; gender equality is still not a reality and there are many issues affecting women all over the world.
This International Women’s Day I will dedicate my time and efforts by attending multiple panels on Gender Equality, and will also raise attention to the thousands of men and women affected by rape and murder committed through the case of Sepur Zarco. Sepur Zarco was one of military bases where by the Guatemalan military committed mass killings and rape against the local populous beginning in 1981 through 1988. I have a personal connection to this case, I learned of it while I was working in Guatemala and had the opportunity to interview individuals who were directly affected, many I spoke with had lost their loved ones and continue to suffer to trauma.
After more than 30 years of shame, the women had received a form of justice when the court declared: “We believe you … it wasn’t your fault … the army terrorised you in order to destroy your community.”
"This is historic, it is a great step for women and above all for the victims," said Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, who attended the hearing.
On February 26, 2016, after the last 20 days of traumatic testimony, Francisco Reyes Giron and Heriberto Valdez Asij were found guilty of crimes against humanity in a precedent setting case for sexual slavery. Francisco Reyes Giron, who was the commander of the Sepur Zarco military base, was found guilty of holding 15 women in sexual and domestic slavery and for killing 20-year old Dominga Cuc Cocand and her two daughters. Heriberto Valdez Asij, a paramilitary who carried out commissions for the army, was convicted for the same, as well as the forced disappearance of seven men. The victims have been demanding accountability for the crimes at Sepur Zarco for decades. Like so many other areas of the world, Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, rape was widely used as a weapon, according to human rights groups. But last week’s ruling marked the first time, anyone had faced justice for sexual violence during the conflict – and the first time anywhere in the world that sexual slavery perpetrated during an armed conflict had been prosecuted in the country where the crimes took place.
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| Former army officer Esteelmer Francisco Giron |
The post-war Commission for Historical Clarification documented 1,465 such cases, and almost 90% of the victims were indigenous women. But as for anything in seeking legal action, evidence and witness’ accounts are crucial. Finally giving a voice to the victims is so important as they were the ones silenced. According to the prosecution, the military set up camp in the village of Sepur Zarco at the end of 1981 where the armed forces repeatedly attacked the village of Sepur Zarco and killed or took away Mayan leaders who had been applying for land titles on which their families had lived and farmed for centuries. The men were accused of being associated with left-wing guerrillas.
Agustin Chen, one of the men who survived said the soldiers took him to a cell and beat him every day.The court heard how military commanders considered the women to be "available" without their men and had then taken them into sexual and domestic slavery. They were required to report every third day to the base for "shifts" during which they were raped, sexually abused, and forced to cook and clean for the soldiers. In a report to the court, anthropologist Irma Alicia Velasquez Nimatuj said military outposts were installed in the region "to give security to the landowner's farms and to take possession of the lands". For some of the victims, their ordeal lasted as long as six years until the base was closed in 1988.
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| Former paramilitary fighter Heriberto Valdez Asij |
Throughout the trial, the 14 surviving victims aged between 52 and 75, sat very still in court with their heads covered in traditional embroidered shawls, just a few metres away from the accused.
The court heard from Petrona Choc Cuc who said, her husband, and their four children fled to the mountains in 1982 as soldiers rounded up their neighbours. “At night we wrapped ourselves up in nylon sheets. We got rained on. There were many insects … This is not the product of my imagination; I lived this. We suffered a great deal.”
The family was eventually found by soldiers and Choc Cuc’s husband was killed, but the children managed to flee deeper into the mountains until they could no longer endure the dire conditions. “We went to the military base and got on our knees and begged them to forgive us, to not kill us,” she said in her recorded testimony. “Many times I was raped. One of my daughters was raped too … Every day I suffer because of what they did to me.”
A number of women testified that they were forcibly given contraceptives by military medical staff. Demecia Yat de Xol explained how she was raped at home and then forced to live on the camp for months as punishment for searching for her disappeared husband. “They put us [women] in a room and began raping us. I was pregnant at the time and suffered a miscarriage.”
Yat de Xol also testified that her cousin Dominga Cuc was locked in a small house at the base and raped by soldiers until she was “practically lifeless”. “I don’t know who gave the order but we could hear them shooting, then we heard that she had been killed,” she said.
Cuc’s elderly mother Julia Cuc Choc told the court how years later when the bodies were exhumed, “They found hair, clothes, and my daughter’s bones. But they only found the undergarments of my granddaughters. Their bones had turned to dust.”
Another witness, Rosa Tiul, described how she was forced to cook for the soldiers for six months during which time she was taken to different rooms and raped by up to six men at a time. The terror continued even after she was allowed to return home.
“The [soldiers] told me if I didn’t let them [rape me] they would kill me,” she said. “Sometimes they tied me down and put a rifle on my chest … They knew which ones of us [women] were alone … They treated us like animals.”
One of the most stirring moments of the trial came in the second week when the court was presented with 38 boxes containing the remains of 51 victims recovered by forensic anthropologists from Sepur Zarco and another nearby base. The bones were so badly decomposed that only two of the victims, including Rosa Tiul’s husband, have been successfully identified. In fact, towards the end of my stay in Guatemala, a couple of the EFI-IFIFT members were contacted by the court and asked to come back to testify about the mass graves of women the forensic anthropologists had discovered. They told the courts told that a mass grave had been uncovered right outside the army barracks and that the victims had been disposed of like trash. The EFI-IFIFT members lacked faith in the system, as they had testified about these findings 6 years before, and still the case was being dragged out, with no sign of a resolution. The people Guatemala lacked faith in system as well due to the “Guatemalan legislature’s continued refusal to ‘recognize crimes against women despite the 2008 passing of Ley Contra Femicidio y Otras Formas de Violencia Contra la Mujer (Law Against Femicide and Other Forms of Violence Against Women), which called for longer penalties.
At one point, Reyes’s defence lawyer Moisés Galindo – who previously defended the former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt at his 2013 trial for genocide – caused uproar when he accused the victims of being prostitutes, and dismissed the experts and protected witnesses as liars. In his own defence, Reyes repeatedly denied working at Sepur Zarco, even though there are records of his placement there.
“Prostitutes” or not, confining someone and forcing them against their will to be raped over and over again is rape, no matter who it is or what their occupation. This accusation is only used to dismiss the victims claims and justify the violence committed against them and should be disregarded by the courts.
The Guatemala City supreme court has technically sentenced the two former members of the military to 360 years in jail for the murder, rape and sexual enslavement of the Q’eqchi women. But we must not forget that the perpetrators rarely serve their full sentence. Rather, we need to refrain from a sigh of relief like the problem is solved because it is not. Far too often a case becomes no more than a public stunt to appease those short-term. The women were “awarded” ( much of the article uses this term but it is improper to “award” compensation to people whose rights and lives were violated in the first place) compensation for the long-term physical, psychological and economic harm suffered. But can there really be justice when those accountable do not accept punishment or guilt? What about all the other hundreds in the country who experienced the same. This case only recognizes only a small portion of victims who suffered. Still, this is a major step forward in victims receiving the justice they deserve. Catalina Ruiz Navarro exclaims “ Guatemala sexual slavery verdict shows women’s bodies are not battlefields.”
Lastly, I cannot stress enough that this is not something in a far distant place. Assault and rape is all around us. Many of us do not hold uphold gender equality, or the dignity we all deserve. Rape and indiscriminate violence are legacies of colonialism. Similar to Spanish conquest, Chris Hedges in the book I am reading, Days of Destruction Days of Revolt, accounts on the rape and disrespect of others in the American indigenous history. He writes, ‘Soldiers on the western frontier who passed captive squaws from tent to tent joked that “Indian women rape easy”, as accounted by Ben Clark, General Custer’s chief of scouts about Custer’s 1868 Washita raid’. From then on after, families after families continue the cycle of violence on their children or neighbors. Moreover, one of the EFI-IFIFT Cristian Silva’s thesis, Importance on Gender-Based Violence in Guatemala, 97 percent of the atrocities committed towards women, girls and senior women (60 and above) were committed by the armed forces to ensure that the “effects of sexual assault” maintained a patriarchal legacy of “long-lasting shame, fear, and self-degradation”, and entire communities were left facing “silence and denial”. Impunity is entrenched in Guatemalan social life. The perpetrators of femicide continue to do so without fear of consequence.
So then what about the thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada? We continue to perpetuate with name calling and ostracizing, even if you say it is “just a joke” (Dear daddy video). Like the 97 year old Petronilia who we interviewed or the hundreds of contemporary cases of gender-based violence post Peace Accord, they will never get to see their daughters again. It takes two. Together, man and woman we are the ones to make a difference.
...One to sign off to: Rise Up -Andra Day
