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- Convenor:
-
Silvia Posocco
(Birkbeck, University of London)
- Location:
- Malet 253
- Start time:
- 4 April, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel invites analyses of the meanings and implications of the Ríos Montt trial and other multiple and varied aporias of justice in Guatemala.
Long Abstract:
On 10 May 2013, following a long judicial process, a Guatemalan Court found ex-Army General and de facto Head of State Efraín Ríos Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. The crimes were committed against the Maya Ixil population between 1982 and 1983 and included 1,771 murders, the forced displacement of 29,000 people and numerous cases of torture and sexual violence. The ruling condemned Ríos Montt to 80 years in prison, with immediate effect, and acquitted General Rodríguez Sánchez, the Director of Military Intelligence, or 'G 2', between 1982 and 1983, of both charges. On 21 May 2013, however, the Guatemalan Supreme Court overturned the verdict, ordering the release of Ríos Montt, invalidating all court proceedings after 19 April 2013.
In Specters of Marx, Derrida argues that '[n]o justice - let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws - seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist or other kinds of extermination, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism' (Derrida 1993: xvii).
This panel invites analyses of the meanings and implications of the Ríos Montt trial and other multiple and varied aporias of justice in Guatemala.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on an ethnographic analysis of an 'aporia of justice' in Guatemala, namely, the Sepur Zarco hearings in the prominent case of sexual violence and sexual and labour slavery committed by the Guatemalan Army during the Guatemalan conflict (1960-1996).
Paper long abstract:
In September 2012, fifteen Maya Q'echi' women and three men appeared as witnesses in the Tribunal de Mayor Riesgo (High Risk Court) in Guatemala City. The hearings related to events that took place in a military base near the village of Sepur Zarco, Izabal, between 1982 and 1986, and were framed as the first major case of sexual violence committed by the Army during the Guatemalan conflict (1960-1996) to reach the courts, as well as the first case of sexual and labour slavery in armed conflict ever to be heard in a national court. Drawing on ethnographic research at selected hearings, in this paper, I examine how the figures of a woman, Dominga Coc, and her two daughters, Anita and Hermelinda, emerge in the court proceedings. Focusing on the partial scene of the court hearings, I ask what processes of subjectification and desubjectificaton - with their differential affective registers and logics of evidence - may be at stake in the declarations of the witnesses, the mediations of the translators, the occasional interventions of the psychologists, the lines of questioning deployed by the legal teams of the Ministerio Público (Public Prosecution) and Alianza Rompiendo el Silencio (Alliance Breaking the Silence) for the prosecution, and those of the defense. Further, I consider what processes of bodying forth may be at stake in the declarations of the different parties, siting Dominga on the riverbank - washing Army uniforms under duress, or as the body of the forensic exhumation - precariously positioned between remembrance and oblivion, but gradually being spoken into presence.
Lorena Fuentes (Birkbeck, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper critically explores fluctuating articulations of impunity and (inequality of access to) justice that the paradigmatic cases of the Ríos Montt genocide trial and Roberto Barreda femicide trial brought to the fore in October 2013 through renewed contestations around impunity and injustice.
Paper long abstract:
On November 8, 2013, Guatemalan authorities captured Roberto Barreda in the state of Yucatan. Barreda had fled Guatemala with his two children after the disappearance (and presumed murder) of his wife, Cristina Siekavizza. The impact of Barreda's capture on the variable articulations of (in)justice within the national body politic of Guatemala—in mainstream newspapers, politicians' discourses, and civil society organisations—was extraordinary. Initial celebrations were swiftly reoriented by women's, indigenous and human rights organisations on the peripheries of Guatemala's power base. These latter articulations were grounded in questions of inequality of access to justice, the 'elite' nature of cases garnering media attention (understandably seen to fall along class and racial lines), and the near absolute impunity that surrounds 98% of femicide cases. Beyond the disparity of how the Siekavizza disappearance was treated compared to thousands of other femicide cases lay the insidious context in which the Montt trial (now awaiting consideration for amnesty) was left earlier in that very same week. This paper critically explores fluctuating articulations of (in)justice arising from these cases. Renewed contestations around historical impunity spill over into contemporary discourses of a violent post-war Guatemala. While impossible to discount the inadequacies of Guatemala's legal system, tracing the intersections of these emblematic cases provides opportunities to consider how potential 'failures' within this system— like Montt's annulled conviction, or the restricted focus on the disappearance of a light-skinned, middle-class woman— may provide openings for articulating past and ongoing injustices for both genocidal crimes and 'new' forms of femicidal violence.
Maria Angelica DeGaetano (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
Continued impunity? Plateau in justice? The meaning and implications of the Rios Montt trial on judicial independence and sexual violence as war crime and the reverberations of this case for justice in Guatemala and the region.
Paper long abstract:
"You were able to see our impunity live in action," a human rights worker told me as I exited the Constitutional Court in Guatemala after a hearing in post-trial proceedings of the Rios Montt case in September 2013. This cynicism comes from a long history of impunity in the region. No one believed that with an impunity index for current and past crimes measured at 98% in 2009 by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR), Guatemala would be the first country to prosecute in their own courts a former head of state for the crime of genocide. With the recent movements in the case--the overturning of a guilty verdict, the delay of the re-trial for 2015, and the presentation of the case before the IACHR-- the impact of the case has raised new questions. Is this case another example of continued impunity in Guatemala? What are the takeaways from the trial and its aftermath? Using a theoretical and empirical framework, this paper explores the influence of this case on neighboring regions and cases with regards to judicial independence and gender issues. In El Salvador, practitioners refer to this case as a positive model to learn from. In the Ixil region of Guatemala, the reverberations of the acknowledgement during the trial of sexual violence as a war crime can be seen. Even though the case is recent and not finalized, there are significant conclusion that can already be made as well as a few projected implications.