And with very good reason: the brutal murder of women and girls is spiralling out of control. Of 500 murders in 2004, only one ended in conviction; many of the murders involve sexual abuse, torture and mutilation. Yet Guatemalan women’s rights have made great strides:
Today more Guatemalan women go out to work, they stay longer in education, and express themselves freely than ever before.
I wonder if this is what can happen when lip service is paid to the concept of women’s rights, without anything changing in the underlying attitude?
“Every day the numbers are growing, and for two reasons,” Sandra Moran, another women’s rights activist, told the BBC News website.
“Firstly, there is no respect for the body of a woman. People feel they can treat women however they want. Also, there is the idea that women are the property of someone.
There is a sense that women should not make too much noise about what is happening to them:
“She had been raped, her hands and feet tied with barbed wire, she had been strangled and put in a bag – they kept on telling me not to get so worked up”
Rosa Franco, Mother of Maria Isabel Franco, murdered in December 2001
Read the article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4074880.stm
I heard a report on this subject on Democracy Now this morning while getting ready for work. At first I thought it was about the killings in Mexico and then was stunned to hear Guatemala.
Thanks for posting.
some 15 years ago, two women were raped in the town where I resided in two separate incidents. In neither case was there ever a trial, much less a conviction. In the first case, the perpetrator was found dead two days later. He had been shot in the back of the head, having been executed in the signature style of the G-2, the Guatemalan military intelligence. The rape victim had been the wife of a friend of a friend of military officer.
In the second case, the rape victim was indigenous woman from a very poor family. Her attacker was hacked to death in front of me in a public park by a group of men with machetes.
I wonder if the reason only 1 of the 500 cases has resulted in conviction is because violence and corruption of all kinds, particularly against women, but also against just about everyone else too, continues to be a serious problem in that country?
When it doesn’t, people find their own way.
This much is clear. For an outsider, it may be very hard to know what is going on in Guatemala. I am concerned, yes, but that doesn’t mean I think I know what is going on.
I am reminded of an Indian film I saw a couple of decades ago: Women were bathing at a river, when a woman nearby was attacked. The women rushed to the victim, pushed the attacker under the water and drowned him, and then let his body float away. Just like that. It was all very matter-of-fact, and one understood implicitly that whatever one did, one would never involve the system of justice.
This was shockingly unlike anything that would appear in an American film. But it made its own kind of sense.