“Violence against women is part of everyday life here; it is normal, and no one is surprised when a new femicide comes to light,” said Quintela. “Even as young girls, women are just objects that are sexually abused by their uncles, grandfathers or brothers. The result is thousands of teenage pregnancies every year.” Luz Maria was the latest high-profile victim in a country where just being a woman is a risk factor. The number of women murdered in Guatemala has been hitting record levels amid the restrictions on movement imposed during the coronavirus pandemic.
However, feminist organizations have highlighted that there is still no law qualifying harassment as a crime. As a result, in recent years many women have chosen to denounce the harassment they have suffered online and sometimes photographs of the those accused of committing it have been published. The most recent example was when a group of students at the private Rafael Landívar University accused two professors of sexual harassment, leading to their temporary suspension while an investigation was conducted by the Jesuit-run institution. In 2019, the Public University of Guatemala released a report, with the support of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, that revealed 30% of all sexual harassment cases were carried out by faculty members. In 2015, the Observatory Against Street Harassment was set up, which drew up a map of the places where women were most regularly subjected to harassment.
The Community Advocates program is a leadership development initiative in which WJI trains local indigenous women to serve as leaders, rights educators, and mentors to women and girls in their communities. WJI improves the lives of indigenous women and girls through education, access to legal services, and gender-based violence prevention. This “was the first case of conflict-related sexual violence challenged under Guatemala’s penal code.” It is especially profound since Guatemala is a country where sexual violence is normalized.
Guatemala has the third highest femicide rate in the world – between 2007 and 2012 there were 9.1 murders for every 100,000 women according to the National Guatemalan Police. And last year 846 women were killed in a population of little more than 15 million, says the State Prosecutors Office. Women placed flowers and wrote the names of victims of violence on a fence set at the presidential palace in Mexico City. Pakistani women rallied around the country’s major cities in defiance of Islamist hardliners, who had attacked the march with stones last year. Dancing, chanting and marching, protesters demanded reform in the healthcare system, highlighting how the pandemic struck women the most.
The experts also said the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the discrimination and inequality women and girls already face. The business community and state institutions in the five highland provinces of Huehuetenango, San Marcos, Quetzaltenango, Quiché and Totonicapán are interested in tapping new markets. Everyone concerned realizes that the only way to develop the regional economy is to connect it up to other parts of the country. So state agencies are integrating the farmers’ new initiatives into their development planning.
Back at the city morgue, forensic doctors labour among the dead with little assistance from modern technology. The morgue has access to a laboratory, but no DNA testing facilities exist in Guatemala. Critics charge that forensic investigations are often sloppy, and the official cause of death is frequently inaccurate and misleading. In most cases, the victims’ clothing, which is often the most valuable and only source of evidence, is either burned or handed back to the family. Too often, local authorities attribute the cause of death to gunshot wounds, while evidence of torture goes undocumented. In a number of instances, the police or pathologist have even ascribed the wrong gender to murder victims. According to the statistics, San Agustín Acasaguastlán, El Progreso, is the third municipality in the country with the highest rate of cases of violence against women, i.e. 454 per 100,000.
The government has the obligation to protect life and strengthen the judiciary so that violent deaths of women do not go unpunished, according to the feminist, who said impunity sends a “bad message to the aggressors.” Nearly 10,000 women have been murdered in Guatemala since 2000 and 90 percent of those crimes have gone unpunished, she said, citing figures from the non-governmental organization Observatorio del Grupo de Mujeres. Grassroots organisations like Mujerave, who are mission bound to operate through a gender-specific lens, also play a role in dismantling the patriarchy in Guatemala Guatemalan women and beyond. Mujerave’s workshops explore the imbalance of access to resources for women in Guatemala and bring seldom discussed topics like sexism and interfamilial violence into the open. Indigenous women are less likely to finish school, like Maria Francisa Gonzalez, who left after three years of primary school and lives in Tecpan, in Guatemala’s highlands. “We are discriminated against one, because we are poor, second, because we are indigenous and because we are women,” Victoria Cumes Jochola, coordinator of Nuestra Voz, or Our Voice rights group, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Freshta Kohistani, a 29-year-old women’s rights and democracy activist, was assassinated by unknown gunmen near her home in Kapsia province on December 24, 2020. Kohistani regularly organized events advocating for women’s rights in Afghanistan and used social media as a platform for her messaging. Malalai Maiwand, a reporter at Enikas Radio and TV, was shot and killed, along with her driver, by a gunman on December 10, 2020, in an attack on her vehicle in Jalalabad. Five years earlier, her mother, an activist, was also killed by unknown gunmen.
As a result of the cohesion and work of the women parliamentarians, one of them was elected President to the PARLACEN in 2014. Guatemala has not passed any laws or other affirmative measures regarding the political participation of women. The Constitutional Court passed a favorable opinion on the Reform to the Electoral and Political Parties Law, the final approval to this initiative is pending.
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