Last year, for example, 15 Q\u2019eqchi\u2019 Maya women from Sepur Zarco, Izabal, went to court and convinced the Guatemalan government to do something that no other modern nation had ever done: convict its own former military officers of using sexual slavery as a weapon of war. These women who suffered rape and physical, social and psychological abuse at the hands of the army for six years in the 1980s gave the world a legal precedent after a long, painful trial. Their voices resound around the world.<\/p>\n
The UN\u2019s Commission for Historical Clarification, formed after Guatemala\u2019s 36-year civil war came to an end in 1996, has reported 1,465 incidents of sexual violence related to the war. 88.7% of the victims have been identified as Maya and 35% as children. Not all of the victims have been identified, as many remain silent and others have never been found.<\/p>\n
The women from Sepur Zarco are not the only ones to have sought justice for crimes against women. The voice of Myrna Mack, the Guatemalan activist and anthropologist, was silenced by the military for doing just that. Considered an \u201cenemy of the state\u201d for her field work in rural communities displaced by war, in 1990 she was murdered, shot 27 times. Myrna\u2019s voice was taken up by her sister Helen Mack, who founded the Myrna Mack Foundation Myrna\u2019s memory. In addition to its activism and social work, the Foundation relentlessly sought a criminal sentence for Juan Osorio, the intellectual author of Myrna\u2019s assassination, and was granted it in 2002. Helen Mack\u2019s scream was heard 12 years after that crime.<\/p>\n
Mayar\u00ed de Le\u00f3n Gonz\u00e1les, in a workshop about historical memory, described forced disappearance and other hideous features of war that create fear, silence and resentment. These emotions stretch through generations, but Mayar\u00ed de Le\u00f3n Gonz\u00e1les has decided to break the chain. \u201cWhen they killed my father, all they did was trim back a tree,\u201d she says. \u201cWe carried on with the Luis de Li\u00f3n School and Museum, and we continue to support artists. Over 36 years we lost a great deal, including the value of talking, we lost the ability to communicate amongst ourselves. It\u2019s important to speak about memory to weave a new, more communicative and conscious societal fabric, so that we don\u2019t repeat the same horrors.\u201d<\/p>\n Luis de Li\u00f3n, Mayar\u00ed\u2019s father, was a Guatemalan poet, professor and writer. In 1984 he was kidnapped and assassinated by the intelligence services of the Guatemalan army.<\/p>\n Mayar\u00ed was a teenager during the war in Guatemala. In shock and in pain, she led a long struggle against the state, which she accused of murdering her father. In 2005 she won her case, and the state had to recognize the crime. Further, the government of President Oscar Berger issued a pardon and compensation to her family, although the latter was never delivered in full. As a woman Mayar\u00ed knows that the war represented endless pain and struggle, but no longer does it represent silence. Today she runs the Luis de Li\u00f3n School\u2019s marimba band, gives tours in the museum, and facilitates workshops as often as she can. And she continues to use her voice to advocate for justice.<\/p>\n Many lives were broken during Guatemala\u2019s 36 years of war. It\u2019s impossible to measure or label the suffering caused by such a dark conflict; pain is unmeasurable. But in this pain women\u2019s struggles have sown seeds of hope. Today many women give their time, experience and knowledge to the peace process, and to restorative justice. Women continue to fight the war every day. As women, we fight a constant battle, discussing and re-contextualizing our society, advocating for a horizontal social structure, and respecting and accepting our beautiful diversity, so that we never go backward toward the darkness, and so that we might finally today halt the ripples of war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Keren Escobar It’s said that when war breaks out you hear a child\u2019s crying and when it ends you hear a woman\u2019s scream. This scream subsides and inflicts a silence \u2014 until that silence can no longer be hidden. Hundreds of women have begun to scream and their voices are resonating across borders. Last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3178,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[453,424,1,422],"tags":[601,65,560,855,850,575,857,856,846,853,854],"class_list":["post-3181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-frontpage-en","category-politics","category-uncategorized","category-women","tag-activism","tag-guatemala","tag-guatemala-en","tag-legal-activism","tag-luis-de-lion","tag-mujer-en","tag-myrna-mack","tag-restorative-justice","tag-sepur-zarco","tag-trial","tag-war-crimes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3181"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3186,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3181\/revisions\/3186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.entremundos.org\/revista\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/la-guerra-en-cinco-letras.jpg\")
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