"Nuestra Lucha Continua": Engendering Indigenous Women's Conflict and Post-Conflict Activism in Guatemala
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2014
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Haverford College. Department of Political Science
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Abstract
This thesis examines how internal conflict and its aftermath over the past half century in Guatemala have shaped the contentious political activity of indigenous women. Developing out of their experiences during the country's prolonged internal conflict that lasted from 1960 to 1996, indigenous women have organized collectively at the local, national, and international levels to demand justice for the multiple harms inflicted upon them. During the conflict, the state's genocidal counterinsurgency campaign simultaneously escalated mass violence against indigenous women and forced them into the public sphere as they organized to survive military violence and protest the slaughter and disappearance of family members, prompting them to assume more political roles in their communities and, to a lesser extent, at the national level. In the decade leading up to the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords that formally ended the conflict, Mayan women entered into national institutional politics through their participation as part of the civil society assembly (ASC) in peace negotiations. Drawing on these experiences in grassroots organizing and formal negotiation, women have engaged in a series of overlapping national and communal processes of truth-telling, petitioning for reparations, and pursuing criminal justice to claim their rights. The mixed ability of conflict, peace processes, and transitional justice mechanisms to increase women's access to gender justice, which have failed to prevent renewed state and private violence against indigenous communities together with escalating sexism within Mayan communities and emerging "femicide" throughout the country, illustrate the limitations as well as the possibilities of transitional justice in challenging the unequal gendered social, economic, political, and cultural order of the state. Despite the continued lack of political will for addressing their claims, indigenous women's efforts during and since the conflict, through cultivating the reformation of indigenous women's organizational ties and political identities, have laid the foundation for their continued and expanded mobilization and placed women at the forefront of demands for more radical transformations of the state and their communities.