Beyond Repair?: Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm

By Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes

Winner of the 2021 Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide​
Honorable Mention, 2020 CALACS Book Prize​

Beyond Repair? explores Mayan women’s agency in the search for redress for harm suffered during the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan state in the early 1980s at the height of the thirty-six-year armed conflict. The book draws on eight years of feminist participatory action research conducted with fifty-four Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Chuj, and Mam women who are seeking truth, justice, and reparation for the violence they experienced during the war, and the women’s rights activists, lawyers, psychologists, Mayan rights activists, and researchers who have accompanied them as intermediaries for over a decade. Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes use the concept of “protagonism” to deconstruct dominant psychological discursive constructions of women as “victims,” “survivors,” “selves,” “individuals,” and/or “subjects.” They argue that at different moments Mayan women have been actively engaged as protagonists in constructivist and discursive performances through which they have narrated new, mobile meanings of “Mayan woman,” repositioning themselves at the interstices of multiple communities and in their pursuit of redress for harm suffered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9780813598987

Book preview

BEYOND REPAIR?

GENOCIDE, POLITICAL VIOLENCE, HUMAN RIGHTS SERIES

Edited by Alexander Laban Hinton, Stephen Eric Bronner, and Nela Navarro

Nanci Adler, ed., Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling

Alan W. Clarke, Rendition to Torture

Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes, Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm

Lawrence Davidson, Cultural Genocide

Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas

Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence

Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, eds., Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory

Douglas A. Kammen, Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor

Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide

Victoria Sanford, Katerina Stefatos, and Cecilia M. Salvi, eds., Gender Violence in Peace and War: States of Complicity

Irina Silber, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador

Samuel Totten and Rafiki Ubaldo, eds., We Cannot Forget: Interviews with Survivors of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda

Anton Weiss-Wendt, A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War

Ronnie Yimsut, Facing the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Journey

BEYOND REPAIR?

Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm

ALISON CROSBY AND M. BRINTON LYKES

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Crosby, Alison, author. | Lykes, M. Brinton, 1949- author.

Title: Beyond repair? : Mayan women’s protagonism in the aftermath of genocidal harm / Alison Crosby, M. Brinton Lykes.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2019] | Series: Genocide, political violence, human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018022085| ISBN 9780813598970 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813598963 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Maya women—Guatemala—Social conditions. | Women—Crimes against—Guatemala. | Guatemala—History—Civil War, 1960-1996—Social aspects. | Guatemala—History—Civil War, 1960-1996—Atrocities.

Classification: LCC F1435.3.W55 C76 2019 | DDC 305.4097281—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022085

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

The painting featured on the cover, Personajes (People), is by José Colaj (1959–2011), a Mayan artist from Comalapa, Chimaltenango. The yellows, reds, oranges, and blues capture the earth tones of rural Guatemala; embodied sketches of peasants are pictured from behind, obscuring their faces yet eliciting remembrances of the intensity of life during Guatemala’s genocidal violence. As described by his family, The work of the master artist José Colaj is always representative of the struggle, suffering and resistance of our communities, but also hopes for the revindication of our rights and worth as a people.

Copyright © 2019 by Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To the next generations of Maya who draw strength from their ancestors, and to those who walk in solidarity with them.

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1 Documenting Protagonism: I Can Fly with Large Wings

2 Recounting Protagonism: No One Can Take This Thorn from My Soul

3 Judicializing Protagonism: What Will the Law Say?

4 Repairing Protagonism: Carrying a Heavy Load

5 Accompanying Protagonism: Facing Two Directions

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

ABBREVIATIONS

BEYOND REPAIR?

INTRODUCTION

We felt happy to see that the court allowed us in, listened to us, especially us women, because we never thought that they would grant us that right or give us that space. We thank the judges who listened to us.… Then I felt calm, and at the same time I cried from the effort. I remembered those of us who were there sitting, watching, and listening. When we rejoiced the most is when the judge issued the ruling, because we fulfilled our struggle and I felt calmer because I heard how many years the culprits were sentenced to serve in jail … when we heard it or when I heard it I felt calmer knowing that they will pay for what they did to us,

—Demecia Yat, plaintiff in the Sepur Zarco trial, as cited in Impunity Watch and Alliance (2017, p. 45)

If violence, when it happens dramatically, bears some relation to what is happening repeatedly and unmelodramatically, then how does one tell this, not in a single narrative but in the form of a text that is being constantly revised, rewritten, and overlaid with commentary?

—Veena Das (2007, p. 80)

On February 26, 2016, the High Risk Court A in Guatemala City found both Esteelmer Reyes Girón, the former commander of the Sepur Zarco military outpost in El Estor, Izabal in northeastern Guatemala, and Heriberto Valdéz Asij, the former military commissioner in the region, guilty of crimes against humanity in the form of sexual violence and domestic and sexual slavery perpetrated against Maya Q’eqchi’ women. This was the first time such a conviction for these particular crimes had been achieved in the country where they had been committed. The trial, its verdict, and the courage and determination of the 15 Q’eqchi’ women plaintiffs in the case were celebrated widely in Guatemala and transnationally, with hashtags such as #WeAreAllSepurZarco and #IamSepurZarco trending. Demecia Yat, one of the plaintiffs, highlighted the enormous affective impact of the verdict, as well as the trial’s toll, when she said, I cried from the effort. In a country structured by centuries of colonial violence and dispossession resulting in the exclusion and marginalization of indigenous women, she added, We never thought that they would grant us that right or give us that space.

This book traces the struggles for redress by 54 Mayan women protagonists, including the 15 Q’eqchi’ plaintiffs in the Sepur Zarco case, all of whom survived sexual harm and many other violations perpetrated against them during the height of Guatemala’s 36-year armed conflict. These protagonists argue that such harm is irreparable; no one can take this thorn from my soul,¹ one woman told the Tribunal of Conscience for Women Survivors of Sexual Violence in March 2010, a truth-telling forum organized as a precursor to the trial. Acknowledgment of a harm’s irreparability does not, however, signify the impossibility of agency, but rather underlies these protagonists’ engagement with mechanisms seeking truth, justice, and reparations, central elements of the paradigm of transitional justice (Teitel, 2000) within which many actions for redress in postgenocide Guatemala are now situated—and also contested.

We use the concept of protagonism to deconstruct dominant psychological discursive positionings of women as victims, survivors, selves, individuals, and/or subjects. We argue that at different moments across the eight years of our research (2009–2017),² Mayan women were actively engaged as protagonists in constructivist and discursive performances through which they narrated new, mobile, embodied meanings of the Mayan woman, repositioning themselves at the interstices of multiple communities and through their participation in actions seeking redress for harm suffered. Our conception of protagonism emphasizes the dialogic dimensions of knowledge construction through praxis; that is, the action-reflection processes through which a multiplicity of actors co-construct meanings and transformative possibilities. The term represents the person-in-context approach, invoking the Greek chorus within theater—that is, the dialogic rather than the individualized voice—and drawing on the call-and-response form within African American religious contexts.³ We explore how Mayan women positioned themselves vis-à-vis other survivors, Mayan communities, and others who accompanied them, whom we refer to in this volume as intermediaries (Merry, 2006), wherein mutual relationality and empathy dialogically co-constitute the former’s protagonism. Our understanding of protagonism invokes the performative (Taylor, 2003),⁴ including the creative arts and embodied practices that were central methodological resources in the research and activism discussed in this book. It also recognizes two levels of struggle identified and discussed by Kaqchikel scholar Otzoy (2008) as congruent and incongruent with the lived experiences of indigenous women today … [that is] the socially and culturally intertwined struggles for the exercise of collective rights and for the enjoyment of individual rights (p. 174). In her analysis of justice-seeking processes among the Maya, Otzoy examines the ways in which indigenous peoples’ engagement with community customary laws in situ reflects their concern with the effective functioning of the social order (p. 176), while women’s struggles for justice in the wake of sexual violence are focused more frequently on individual needs, feelings, voice and dignity (p. 178).

At its essence this book is about the relationship between Mayan women protagonists and those who have accompanied them in their struggles for more than a decade and who co-construct their protagonism. These intermediaries include Mayan, ladinx,⁵ and transnational activists, interpreters, feminists, lawyers, psychologists, and researchers, ourselves included. Merry (2006) defines intermediaries as the people in the middle … who translate the discourses and practices from the arena of international law and legal institutions to specific situations of suffering and violation and work at various levels to negotiate between local, regional, national and global systems of meaning (p. 39). She and her coauthors (Goodale & Merry, 2007; Levitt & Merry, 2009; Merry & Levitt, 2017) have written extensively about how people, most particularly women, often appropriate the human rights discourse and practices in innovative ways, translating them into praxis that moves their local agendas forward. Drawing on their multiple years of ethnographic research with two urban women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in each of four countries—China, India, Peru, and the United States—Merry and Levitt (2017) argue that forms of translation differed depending on differences in funding and support, choice of issues, and local attitudes toward human rights (pp. 225–226). We draw on this research and theorization to think through how intermediaries translate or vernacularize (Merry, 2006, 2009; Merry & Levitt, 2017) knowledge generated from national and international feminist and human rights domains in their work with protagonists; we also examine how such knowledge is transformed in that journey and, most importantly, the extent to which knowledge generated from below by protagonists travels up into and informs these transnational discourses and regimes of power (Grewal & Kaplan, 2000). The 54 Mam, Chuj, Poptí, Q’eqchi’, and Kaqchikel protagonists came from three regions of the country—Huehuetenango, Alta Verapaz/Izabal,⁶ and Chimaltenango—and their experiences of racialized gendered violence,⁷ as well as of resistance and struggle, have been diverse, multifaceted, and context specific. The book traces how intermediaries accompanied Mayan protagonists in performing a community of women outside of their local geographically based community, creating a space within which to enact actions for redress within Western transitional justice mechanisms, and the implications for indigenous and place-based struggles.

CONTEXTUALIZING RACIALIZED GENDERED VIOLENCE

Mayan women were the targets of racialized gendered harm, including sexual harm, in the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan state against its indigenous peoples during the 36-year armed conflict from 1960 to 1996 (CEH, 1999; Fulchiron, Paz, & López, 2009; Velásquez Nimatuj, 2012). At the roots of the armed conflict were deeply skewed inequities of economic and political power resulting from a colonial system that led to the dispossession of indigenous lands and the exclusion of the indigenous population from sociopolitical and economic life, which continued after Guatemala gained formal independence from Spain in 1821. In its final report, the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico [Commission for Historical Clarification] (CEH) (1999) estimated that, during the armed conflict, more than 200,000 people were murdered or disappeared (vol. 5, p. 21) and between 500,000 and 1.5 million people were displaced within the country or beyond its borders (vol. 3, pp. 37–38). The report documented massacres that destroyed 626 villages (vol. 3, p. 252) and concluded that, at the height of the armed conflict in the early 1980s, acts of genocide were committed against particular Mayan communities (vol. 3, p. 358).⁸

In the early 1990s, as international conditions and resources that had supported the armed conflict—including the direct and indirect intervention of the United States (Grandin, 2004; Grandin, Levenson, & Oglesby, 2011)—shifted, and the overt violence receded, the Guatemalan government and the umbrella guerrilla organization, the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca [Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity] (URNG), began negotiations to bring the war to a close, concluding with the signing of the final Peace Accords in 1996 (Jonas, 2000). The 1995 Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples included the recognition of the identity of indigenous peoples; respect for and the exercise of their political, cultural, economic, and spiritual rights; and proposals for changes in the Guatemalan constitution that would guarantee these rights. The rights of indigenous women were singled out in the Agreement, and both sides also agreed to work toward promoting and implementing the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (1979). However, constitutional reforms to recognize indigenous customary law were rejected in a national referendum in May 1999, and these agreements have for the most part not been implemented in the postwar period.

The Catholic Church’s Human Rights Office’s Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica [Recovery of Historical Memory] (REMHI) project (see ODHAG, 1998) began its truth-telling process in 1995, and the UN-sponsored CEH started work in 1997. These initiatives collected individual and group testimonies from survivors about what had transpired, and scholars and human rights experts contributed chapters to each final report that documented the structural and systemic nature of the armed conflict, its historical and racialized underpinnings, and the gendered dimensions of these gross violations of human rights. The CEH report (1999) cited 1,465 cases of sexual violence (considered to be a fraction of the actual number of incidents), of whom 88.7% of the victims were Mayan women (vol. 3, p. 23). Fifty-two percent of women who testified to the CEH chose to focus on what happened to others in their community (Nolin & Shankar, 2000, p. 268), while 48% talked about their own experiences of violence, although not necessarily sexual violations (CEH, 1999, vol. 3, p. 28).

Despite these truth-telling processes that began soon after the cessation of armed conflict, for many women, particularly rural Mayan women, the traumatic effects of their racialized gendered experiences of the genocidal violence have persisted. They still live in limit situations in which the tensions and stressors occurring in the wake of war, including ongoing violence, poverty, and impunity, constitute a normal abnormality (Martín-Baró, 1994) of their everyday lives that is carried in their bodies (Hollander & Gill, 2014). Many women widowed in the armed conflict have lost access to land and community structures and supports (Green, 1999; Zur, 1998). Survivors often live in close proximity to perpetrators, generating conditions of insecurity and the ever-present possibility of revictimization. Many of those who were sexually abused have been ostracized by their own communities, accused of being military women (Fulchiron et al., 2009). The violence of everyday life in Guatemala—in particular the violence of indigenous women’s extreme impoverishment—is a structural reality that has been exacerbated by decades of militarized violence (CEH, 1999).

Our emphasis in this volume on protagonism does not negate Mayan women’s experiences of suffering. Indeed, they suffered deeply, and their pain and loss are not only individual but also interpersonal and structural: what Kleinman, Das, and Lock (1997) refer to as social suffering. As they argue, social suffering can be thought of as an assemblage of human problems that have their origins and consequences in the devastating injuries that social forces can inflict on human experience (p. ix); its causes can be found in what political, economic, and institutional power does to people and, reciprocally … how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems (p. ix). Unlike many psychological theories on the effects of war and state violence that locate the problem within the individual (see, e.g., the vast literature on post-traumatic stress disorder), social suffering shifts what we define as ‘problems’ off the backs of individuals and onto systems, structures, and policies, here focusing on the geopolitical-structures of state sanctioned surveillances and violence (Stoudt et al., 2016, p. 4; see Lykes & Mersky, 2006). As such, in this volume we are concerned with the ways in which responses—in particular, those of human rights regimes—to protagonists’ claims for acknowledgment of their pain and suffering can often in fact reinforce and contribute further to this suffering, pathologizing trauma as an individuated rather than a social phenomenon that is embodied in particular ways by each one marked by it (Martín-Baró, 1994). As Kleinman et al. (1997) argue, such responses often transform the local idiom of victims into universal professional languages of complaint and restitution—thereby remak[ing] both representations and experiences of suffering and are inattentive to how the transformations they induce contribute to the suffering they seek to remedy (p. x). The Sepur Zarco case, which we examine in detail in chapter 3, shows how Q’eqchi’ women’s experiences of violence are produced, mediated, and transformed by their engagement with the legal domain and the transnational human rights regime, whereby the imperative to prove the harm that was suffered—a key component of acknowledgment in the legal domain—affects the women’s subjectivity. Das and Kleinman (2000) have explored how subjectivity—the felt interior experience of the person that includes his or her position in a field of relational power (p. 1)—is shaped both by the experience of violence and the transnational networks of people and power that become entangled with local logics in identity formation (p. 1). The micro- and macro-politics of these entanglements and how they inform protagonists’ attempts to move beyond the experience of violence are of particular interest to us in this volume.

Thinking critically about the influence of rights discourses and the legal realm on Mayan protagonism neither negates nor precludes the agency and resilience of protagonists who engage with these domains and use them to their benefit. They are not objects who have been acted on in these processes; instead, they continuously resist and subvert the expectations laid on them to inhabit the category of victim in rigid and homogenizing ways. In thinking about the relationship of protagonism to agency, we adopt Carey’s (2013) framing of the protagonism of Mayan and poor women as the ways an individual’s subjectivity both bounded and sustained their agency (p. 8). One of the Q’eqchi’ plaintiffs in the Sepur Zarco trial succinctly articulates how the survival of the self is a remarkable feat of agency, given what it has taken to live with the poisonous knowledge (Das, 2007, p. 54) of violence suffered when so many others denied it: I am a miracle because I survived. The individual I is always bound to the social we, the living to the dead, and the absence to the presence, which is all the more profound when the dead are disappeared, as was so often the case in Guatemala (Beristain, Paez, & González, 2000; Kistler, 2010; Otzoy, 2008; see also Rojas-Perez, 2017, for a discussion of this issue in the Peruvian context, and Esteva & Parkash, 1998/2014, for similar discussions in the Mexican and Indian contexts).

Das (2007) addresses the challenge of reconciling the living and the dead when she speaks about the complex relationship between speaking and hearing, between building a world that the living can inhabit with their loss and building a world in which the dead can find a home (p. 58). These border zones that the living and the dead inhabit are framed in particular ways by the Mayan cosmovision or worldview, and they facilitate and constrain gendered and racialized social subjectivities. García Ixmatá et al. (1993/2017) suggest further that the Mayan languages encircle this cosmovision, or philosophy of life, that can neither be expressed nor translated exactly in another language (p. 137).⁹ As such, the challenges for local and international intermediaries accompanying these Mayan women protagonists are complex.

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE AND SEXUAL HARM

The Sepur Zarco trial exemplifies the increasingly transnational turn taken over the past few decades by what has come to be known as transitional justice in its effort to address the harms of the past and ensure they will not be repeated in societies emerging from periods of state repression, armed conflict, genocidal violence, and mass violations of human rights (Hayner, 2011; Kritz, 1995; Minow, 1998; Teitel, 2000; Wilson, 2001). The assumption underlying the transitional justice paradigm is that the transition in question is to Western liberal democracy. This paradigm was solidified in the 1990s with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the formation of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Transitional justice mechanisms typically include prosecutions, truth commissions, and reparations programs—forms of which have all been undertaken in postgenocide Guatemala (including the aforementioned CEH and REMHI truth-telling processes)—as well as international war crimes tribunals. The issue of protagonism is a central preoccupation within transitional justice endeavors, provoking questions such as the following: Who gets to decide how these processes are shaped and how they will unfold? What is the relationship between protagonists and those who accompany them within these processes? What does it mean to tell stories of harm, including sexualized harm, to audiences who as bystanders may not have suffered such racialized gendered violence? When the state is the perpetrator of violence, as in Guatemala, what effect does this have on national transitional justice processes aimed at redressing said violence? How do women and men differentially experience racialized gendered violence and what does it mean to redress such harms? Despite the many experiences of transitional justice processes over the past two decades and the transnational circulation of lessons learned and best practices, the answers to these questions remain contested, revealing the continuation of fraught relationships among survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries, and the state itself (see Kesselring, 2017; Ross, 2003; Theidon, 2012, among many others).

As such, despite their acknowledged ground-breaking and necessary attempts to confront the wrongs of the past—the Sepur Zarco trial did produce a guilty verdict against the two defendants—transitional justice mechanisms have been critiqued by many scholars as being overly prescriptive, failing to adapt to historical, gendered, and cultural particularities and to take local actors, particularly survivors themselves, seriously as protagonists (Bell, 2009; Lambourne, 2009; Lykes & Mersky, 2006; McEvoy & McGregor, 2008; Ní Aoláin & Rooney, 2007; Shaw, Waldorf, & Hazan, 2010). They rarely build on local practices and indigenous knowledge and resources; all too frequently these mechanisms are mediated—and controlled—by transnational actors who shape the human rights discourses deployed, couching them in the liberal language of individual rights. When these mechanisms do include women’s experiences, they often position local protagonists as victims whose voices are included through testimonies of harm, such as rape, torture, and/or disappearance: these mechanisms hypervisibilize them as victims, embedding them in deep colonial histories that continue to construct the racialized gendered other (Henry, 2009; Kapur, 2002). The victim becomes an absent presence required to bring into being such spectacles of suffering (Clarke, 2009, p. 13; see Hesford, 2011). These spectacles, rooted in histories of oppression of the racialized other, can often reinforce the subjectivity of those who are witness to another’s pain. In her analysis of slavery and self-making in the United States in the 19th century, Hartman (1997) points to the precariousness of empathy, arguing that only more obscene than the brutality unleashed at the whipping post is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and the terrible. She asks, How does one give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle or contend with the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other or the prurience that is too often the response to such displays (p. 7)?

In agreeing to participate in our research, Mayan protagonists made clear that they were not interested in retelling their stories of the ghastly and the terrible; indeed they made a condition of their participation that they not be required to provide spectacles of suffering, and this was reflected in the informed consent process that we initiated. Yet their engagement with the legal domain, with truth-telling projects, and the state-sponsored Programa Nacional de Resarcimiento [National Reparations Program] (PNR) continuously required them to do precisely that. This book is, at least partially, an exploration of how protagonists participated in, yet resisted and subverted, the demands and expectations of their interlocutors, including their intermediaries, through their engagements in these and other actions. Their decision, for example, to conceal their identities in the Tribunal of Conscience that we discuss in chapter 2, as well as in the Sepur Zarco trial that we analyze in chapter 3, was made not only because of security concerns. It also undermined what Hesford (2011, p. 29) terms the ocular epistemology (i.e., seeing-is-believing) that lies at the heart of human rights spectacles. As we explore in chapter 2, the spectators’ inability to see the other and confirm her identity caused great discomfort among many of them, disrupting their authorial privilege to consume the other’s pain and their discursive construction of the good victim.

The spectacularization of harm through the abjection of the victim is particularly prevalent in attempts to address sexual harm within transnational rights regimes, in what Marcus refers to as the gendered grammar of violence (as cited in Buss, 2009, p. 155), which is inherently racialized (Grewal, 2005; Kapur, 2002). The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s led to an increased recognition within international feminist, human rights, and legal discourse that sexual violence is instrumental to war and genocide, rather than an isolated or individuated event or byproduct (Copelon, 2003; Halley, 2005; MacKinnon, 2006). As the result of sustained organizing and pressure by international feminist activists, rape and sexual violence were prosecuted as genocide and crimes against humanity in the ad hoc tribunals for both these countries, and these violations were subsequently incorporated into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) that came into effect in 2002. Today, reports on the atrocities of sexual violence perpetrated in ongoing and emerging conflicts are pervasive within international media and human rights campaigns.¹⁰ And the opening of this transnational space to address sexual harm has led to in-country prosecutions such as the Sepur Zarco case and the Manta y Vilca case in Peru involving soldiers from an army base in a Quechua community in Huancavelica (Bueno-Hansen, 2016).

While breaking the silence about sexual harm as an integral component of war and genocide is recognized as a significant advance in combating the causes and consequences of gendered violence, the feminist literature has raised many questions about the impact of this increased visibility on the women protagonists themselves as they search for justice and redress within the international rights regime (Buss, 2009; Engle, 2005; Henry, 2009; Jaleel, 2013). As we discuss in this volume, narrating sexual harm within transitional justice processes, from truth commissions to tribunals, court cases, and reparations programs, can be problematic. Survivors are often asked to retell individuated and event-based accounts of sexualized pain in what Theidon (2007) refers to as a pornography of violence, a narrative burden that perpetrators are not asked to carry (p. 455; see also Al-Kassim, 2008). As Henry (2009) argues, within the legal domain, rape is an identity-producing practice. Subjectivity is often contingent on narratives of injury and victimization (p. 131). The raped woman is thus often a product of these processes (p. 131). And despite the consensus that women need and are increasingly receiving psychological support in these processes, Nowrojee (2005), among others, has documented not only the many ways in which current international procedures provide insufficient support to women who have experienced rape but also the multiple threats, stigmatization, and ostracism that many women experience on return to the spaces in which the violations occurred. The legitimacy of many transitional justice processes (i.e., their being seen to be inclusive of women) may increasingly rely on women delivering these prized rape scripts (Buss, 2009, p. 115), at the expense of what protagonists themselves may want to say and do about their many experiences and/or multiple violations.

In seeking to elucidate the meaning and significance of the increasing recognition of the issue of sexual harm within the international legal regime, Jaleel (2013) traces the leadership role played by U.S. and transnational feminists, arguing that the gendered discourse they use retreads and reconfigures the heated 1980s U.S. Sex Wars debates on workings of gender, sex, race and power (p. 115). In the international domain we can see the influence of the second-wave feminist position that universalizes both ‘woman-as-a-category’ and ‘rape-as-act,’ as revealed in declarative statements such as the one by Brownmiller that rape "is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear (as cited in Smith, 2005, p. 7; emphasis added). The effect of such categorizations, Jaleel (2013) argues, is to place these terms on a theoretically pristine plane untouched by socio-historical context, or competing, interrelated iterations of violence (p. 115; see Grewal, 2005; Mohanty, 2003). What is occluded is an understanding of the historical and material specificities through which gender and race gain cultural meaning" (Jaleel, 2013, p. 115). As such, it is important to pay attention to the transnational circulations of power both in the constitution and promulgation of discourses of gendered harm and in human rights activists’ efforts to address such harm; it is also important to note how discourses and actions are vernacularized or contested (Clarke, 2009) by protagonists within localized contexts.

The underlying assumption of women as a group united through shared sexual vulnerability (Jaleel, 2013, p. 115) serves to erase structures and practices of colonization, imperialism, and white supremacy that continue to this day. For example, Smith (2005) points to a statement made by MacKinnon (a key player in shaping international jurisprudence on rape as a weapon of war and genocide) in reference to the war in Bosnia: "the world has never seen sex used this consciously, this cynically, this elaborately, this openly, this systematically, as a means of destroying a whole people (as cited in Smith, 2005, p. 28; emphasis added by Smith). Smith (2005) notes that such statements not only erase the pervasive and systemic perpetration of sexual violence against indigenous women in, for example, the Guatemalan armed conflict and in Chiapas, Mexico, but also within MacKinnon’s own country, the United States, where millions of Native people were raped, sexually mutilated, and murdered" (p. 28) during colonization, with this violence reproducing itself into the present (Arvin, Tuck, & Morrill, 2013).

Sexual harm is, of course, not the only way in which war and genocide are gendered, even for those who have experienced sexual harm, as was the case with the Mayan protagonists in our research; in addition, its reification within human rights, legal, and feminist discourses can preclude a broader understanding of how violence is structured through gender in an intersection with other relations of power, including race (Sieder, 2017; Theidon, 2012; Velásquez Nimatuj, 2012, 2016). The positioning of women as victims erases longer histories of agency that preceded and followed experiences of harm. It is also important to continue to challenge the notion that gender equals woman and instead explore the complex relationships of masculinities to militarization from positions of victim and perpetrator, with the two subjectivities often intertwined for some men within war and colonial violence (Eichler, 2014; Mama, 2013). In Guatemala, indigenous men were forced to patrol their own communities as part of Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil [Civilian Self-Defense Patrols] (PACs) implemented as a counterinsurgency tactic that created the enemy within, and young indigenous boys were often forcibly conscripted into the army (CEH, 1999; Nelson, 2009; Remijnse, 2002). In many places the PACs were identified as the direct perpetrators of war crimes, although local participants were often forced to commit such crimes under threat of death from the army. The binaries of gender in relation to constructions of victims and perpetrators remain disturbingly intact within feminist understandings of war and violence, and in our work with Mayan women protagonists we have been challenged to subvert, not replicate, them.

Within contexts of colonial dispossession, it is crucial to center indigenous ways of knowing and conceptions of justice, which may in fact be incommensurate with the individual, rights-based underpinnings of Western feminist and human rights discourses (Esteva & Prakash, 1998/2014). In Guatemala, Mayan women activists and theorists emphasize the importance of collectivity, autonomy, and self-determination in their experiences of family and community (Chirix García, 2003); suffering, loss, and healing (Álvarez Medrano, 2016; AVANCSO, 2017; CALDH, 2014); and in their struggles for justice (Ajxup Pelicó, 2000; Álvarez Medrano, 2006; AVANCSO, 2016; CALDH, 2014; Curruchich, 2000; Hernández Castillo, 2016; Jocón, 2005; Velásquez Nimatuj, 2012). They note that gender oppression cannot be separated from colonial oppression, and they have sought to find a decolonized language or their own language to talk about rights, dignity and moral and ethical behavior, and gender relations (Sieder & Macleod, 2009, p. 55). Yet, as Otzoy (2008) suggests, while the complex ‘I’ of indigenous women struggling for our rights carries differential angles to the cultural values of nonindigenous women, a complex ‘us’ is relevant in collective efforts such as in feminist struggles or in the struggles of indigenous people (p. 183). Or, as Hernández Castillo (2016) confirms, based on her activist scholarship in Mexico, indigenous women’s analysis "conceive[s] their experiences of violence not as individual but as part of a collective history that has been characterized by a continuum of violence against indigenous peoples (pp. 52–53; emphasis in the original); these women’s demand for compensation before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR), among other actions, reflects the cultural construction of a sense of personhood that is constituted mutually by the individual and the collective" (p. 53; see also Sieder, 2017). Our eight-year feminist participatory action research (PAR) documents some of the complex movements of a small group of Mayan protagonists accompanied by Mayan, ladinx, and North American intermediaries, who engaged in praxis at the interstices of decolonial feminisms, Mayan customary beliefs, and transitional justice mechanisms, through which they came together, moved away from