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The article discusses the political upheaval in Central America over the past fifteen years, focusing on El Salvador and Guatemala. It explores the transition to democracy in the 1990s after years of civil wars and U.S.-backed military regimes. The text highlights the challenges faced by these countries in addressing fundamental material inequalities and the impact of neoliberal policies on their political and economic landscapes. The article also delves into recent political events in El Salvador and Guatemala, including the rise of President Nayib Bukele and President Bernardo Arévalo, shedding light on the democratic crises each nation currently faces. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the codification of international crimes in domestic law, the prosecution of international crimes committed during Guatemala's Internal Armed Conflict, and the challenges in implementing the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (ICC). It underscores the essential role of civil society in the fight against impunity through strategic litigation and memory initiatives, thus contributing to advances in justice. It exposes the impact of Inter-American Court of Human Rights' rulings demanding reparations for victims of international crimes as a catalyst for domestic prosecution efforts. Furthermore, the establishment of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) with the support of the UN represented a significant advance in justice. However, the abrupt end by the Guatemalan government of the CICIG was a significant setback. Ongoing challenges involve maintaining progress within Guatemala's criminal justice system, as many justice operators who had worked alongside CICIG faced criminalization and were forced into exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judgment of sexual violences against Mayan women during the Armed Conflict in Guatemala remains neglected. Justice processes have yearned harassment of victims and judges, sentences overruled, and epistemological barriers distancing the Western judiciary system from Mayan women’s experiences of sexual violence. Judiciary expert reports suppose a dialogue opportunity between epistemic margins and Western hegemony, as they play the role of objectifying the experiences of victims via scientific research methods. Here, I show how using decolonial and communitarian feminism theoretical-methodological approaches builds epistemic bridges. I discuss that sexual offences targeted a subject whose existence supposes a threat to the State’s patriarch-colonialist, and misogynist-racist interests: Mayan women or Ixoq. I argue that sexual violence targeted against Mayan women must be understood as genocide, for it aims at Ixoq’s annihilation in the context of the Ladino Nation Project in 1980s Guatemala. This novel cartographic approach helps building epistemic bridges to ensure hermeneutic justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifteen Maya Ixil and K'iche' women of Chajul, Guatemala, were interviewed 17 years after publishing their feminist participatory action photovoice research. Their book documents gross violations of human rights during nearly 36 years of armed conflict and their memories of survivance and persistence. A constructivist grounded theory analysis of in-depth interviews with these Maya Ixil and K'iche' women contributed to the authors' "bottom up" meaning making of the women's narratives – stories that reflect memories of participatory, community-based workshops and community actions in the wake of genocidal violence. The latter included performances of: presence despite absences; profound losses amidst ongoing suffering; renewed and transformative engagement with traditional beliefs and practices; women's protagonism evidenced through enhanced skills; new capacities performed in multiple contexts within and beyond their community's borders. We analyze these narratives of protagonism and persistence to elucidate some of the multiple contributions of long-term feminist community-based accompaniment and participatory processes as resources for rethreading life and wellbeing in the wake of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Their experiences and perspectives are explored in this book as well as the long-term consequences of the armed conflict and genocide they have survived. I Child Survivors of Genocide i offers ethnographic insights into the life experiences of now-grown Guatemalan child survivors of genocide who are approaching middle adulthood. [Extracted from the article]

Testimonio: Canadian Mining and the Aftermaths of Genocide in Guatemala. Testimonio is proof that by reclaiming the community as a socio-environmental nexus, the anti-mining movement is asking for a redistribution of political power, mainly in relation to ethnic and class inequalities that have organized Guatemalan society for decades ([5]; Velásquez Nimatuj, 2019). [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Memorias is the property of Fundacion Universidad del Norte and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Mortality crises are relatively common demographic events, but we know little about how they affect local populations beyond excess mortality. I argue that using a kinship per spective to study mortality crises provides valuable insights into (1) how excess mortality affects the exposure to kin loss and (2) how family bereavement may contribute to the reproduction of historical memory in the long term. I explore these two processes using a unique gene a logical data base that records the complete demographic history of Rio Negro, a geno cide-affected population in Guatemala, between 1982 and 2015. The analysis shows that deaths from the 1982 genocide were balanced by age, sex, and socio economic status. One third of the population were killed, but two thirds were left bereaved (the top 10% most affected individuals lost 30% of their nuclear family relatives and 23% of their extended family relatives). Notably, the proportion of the population related to a victim did not change between 1983 and 2015. The persistence of family bereavement can be interpreted as a prolongation of grief or as a driver of historical memory. These demographic dynamics have implications for the study of historical events beyond mortality crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we set out to understand the issue of enforced or involuntary disappearance in two seemingly different situations: the missing persons produced by armed conflict and the missing migrants resulting from increasingly rigid migration policies focused on deterrence. Empirical examples from the Guatemalan and Bosnian genocides and from contemporary illegalised migration flows from Guatemala to North America and across the Mediterranean are provided. Special attention is given to differences and continuities in who the affected people and communities are, the politics behind their disappearances, and the use of biometric technologies across the cases presented. Contrary to criticism often voiced in relation to the use of biometric technologies for migration control purposes, forensic techniques are embraced almost unanimously by people searching for relatives who have disappeared in both conflict and migration situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international transitional justice movement – while making great strides in achieving justice and uncovering the truth of what happened during the decades-long internal armed conflict – ultimately constructs a narrow understanding of the conflict and postconflict in Guatemala. Domestic and international human rights trials and truth commission reports focus, sometimes necessarily, on stories of suffering and the costs of war, and often leave out stories of resilience and triumph. Drawing on Indigenous scholarship about concepts of desire-centered work, refusal, survivance and thrivance, I argue for the need to shift fundamental assumptions and move beyond traditional approaches to transitional justice, identifying important lessons learned. A collaborative research project with a small Maya Mam Indigenous town in western Guatemala brings to the fore voices often missing from mainstream narratives about conflict by centering the community's grassroots development, and self-governance projects through which genocide survivors are building new, vibrant futures for themselves and their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the embodied transformative memory of GuateMaya feminist group, GuateMaya Mujeres Resistiendo-Los Angeles (GMR-LA). Through a decolonial feminist perspective and feminist ethnographic approach, I built an intimate relationship with the grassroot group in Los Angeles. GMR-LA comprises Guatemala's 36-year (1960–1996) war survivors and women in the diaspora who continue to amplify the cultural memory of the disappeared. The article will delve into the concept of healing cartographies and the ethnographic work I employed in Los Angeles from 2019 to 2023. A particular method I used was body mapping to examine the embodied transformative memory of the groups and women who seek justice. Body mapping has been used with HIV-positive patients and migrant children. Latin American feminist decolonial geographers (Cabnal, 2010; Zaragocin and Caretta 2020; GeoBrujas, 2021b) are using the method of body mapping as a decolonial, counter-cartographic perspective that highlights Indigenous peoples' lived experiences. I use the method to explore the relationships between the body, memory, and healing from intergenerational trauma. Informed by decolonial feminists, I aim to center the oral and embodied testimonios of the GuateMaya feminist group and be guided by a body-mind-spirit perspective to amplify the concerns, visions, and futures of GuateMaya feminist groups across the hemisphere. • GuateMaya feminist group in the diaspora. • Guatemalan women survivors of genocide. • Body mapping a feminist popular education method. • Embodied transformative memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the midst of civil war, Guatemalan writer Mario Payeras became a revolutionary, helping to found the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) in 1972. However, by the mid-1980s, Payeras had grown disillusioned with the EGP's leadership, strategy, and position on the role of indigenous people in the revolutionary movement. In exile in Mexico City, he split from the EGP and created a new movement, Octubre Revolucionario (OR). Revising his earlier ideas about the relationship between racial discrimination and class exploitation, Payeras began to call for indigenous autonomy and a future Guatemala that celebrated cultural difference and recognized ethnicity as independent from a class condition. This article uses the concept of utopia to analyze this shift in Payeras' philosophies and study how this change influenced the Guatemalan Left in the period after the genocide of the 1980s. Though OR disbanded in the mid-1990s, the organization's members drafted policies and proposals that had important ramifications and that revised the idea of utopia from a universal, predetermined destination to a more fluid concept. This article shows that as OR members grappled with the horrors of war and ongoing marginalization and exploitation of indigenous people, they began to understand utopia as a future that was historically contingent and one to be negotiated and defined through careful collaboration. By analyzing the different utopian visions for the future that the EGP and OR employed, we can better comprehend the historical ruptures and how those mapped onto competing ideas about ethnicity and class in late 20th century Guatemala. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Études Caribéennes is the property of Etudes Caribeennes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article takes an ethnographically engaged, discourse‐centered approach to questions of representation and cultural difference in democratic process in postwar Guatemala. When José Efraín Ríos Montt became the first former head of state convicted of genocide within his own country, in 2013, Ixil Maya witnesses who testified against him became international human rights icons. However, the trial was marked by difficulties in communication between Ixil witnesses and non‐Ixil lawyers, judges, and observers. "Miscommunications" resulted from diverging forms of speech that are deeply connected to different identities and ways of experiencing and understanding history. Discursive expectations within the courtroom limited recognition of Ixil ways of speaking and, consequently, of Ixil subjects. These expectations also obscured Ixil contestations to systems of power both inside and outside the courtroom. This analysis calls attention to the central role of language in processes of justice and political activism in solidarity with marginalized populations. [discourse‐centered approach, genocide trial, Ixil, Maya, Guatemala] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar (RUHM) is the property of Centro de Estudios de la Guerra and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The truth commission of Guatemala stated that a genocide was committed against Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala. The truth commission of Canada concluded that a cultural genocide was committed against Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. The article questions the contribution of the truth commissions of Guatemala and Canada to the recognition of a genocide. Their contribution is analyzed in two areas. The article argues that the work of the two truth commissions shows that the context of a country and the perception of the crime influence the findings on genocide. It also states that the work of the two truth commissions on genocide is part of a movement towards an evolution of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Guatemalan genocide against Maya populations (1981-1983), domestic and international human rights groups have organized truth commissions, forensic exhumations, and legal cases. These efforts to secure justice have achieved minimal success, prompting a reconsideration of the relationship among narrative testimony, visual testimony, and institutional standards of truth. Engaging the ideas of visual studies scholar, Nicholas Mirzoeff, I argue for the political importance of testimony that is critical of such standards, including those enforced by human rights' legal paradigm. Following Mirzoeff's understandings of "visuality" and "countervisuality," I analyze "visual testimony" as that which acknowledges the dynamic interplay between word and image, as well as various power relations. More specifically, I explore how genocide survivor Rigoberta Menchú and performance artist Regina José Galindo employ this type of testimony to express rage, which I associate with witnesses' right to testify on their own terms, beyond institutional processes and imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the perpetrators of acts of genocide, and seeks to understand the construction of a willingness to kill. Based on interviews and archival research, it explores the historical context of the Guatemalan army high command as it planned and launched a series of operations that transformed counterinsurgency into acts of genocide. The research supports the chain of command arguments that were important in the verdict against General Ríos Montt, but also explores military policy and procedures that, from the mid 1970s, laid the groundwork for that transformation. How were young and mostly indigenous and illiterate soldiers, with a low level of indoctrination, transformed into genocidal perpetrators, committing massacres against indigenous peoples and other non-indigenous communities? I argue that the decisive factors were group dynamics, particularly specialization and a complex relationship between incentives and personal ambitions for a career inside the armed forces. There were also other factors, constant for all troops, which contributed to defining the adversary and constructing the willingness to kill, including racism, indoctrination, division of labour and the development of the guerrilla war. The article examines a complex set of interactions running in both directions along the chain of command, but focuses most intensely on the last step in that chain, on those actually involved in the massacres committed in the rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the inter-relationship of developments in international justice and the prosecution of Efraín Ríos Montt for the crime of genocide in Guatemala. International justice processes, particularly concerning the application of ‘universal jurisdiction’, contributed to the advancement of the case against Ríos Montt, in Spain and Guatemala. In turn, the prosecution of Ríos Montt influenced the interpretation and application of universal jurisdiction, with ramifications beyond the Guatemalan case itself. The article traces the prosecution for genocide of Efraín Ríos Montt in the Spanish National Court, and situates this particular case within broader currents and networks associated with prosecuting grave violations of human rights. The prosecution of Ríos Montt demonstrates that, rather than a simple case of global norms trickling ‘down’ to the (lower) local level, mutually constituted activities of the global and the local continually shape each other. The interconnections of national and transnational processes were key to the prosecution of genocide in Guatemala. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article describes the impunity embedded in the Guatemalan peace process after the genocide that shapes how Ixiles approach the debts (incurred by complicity, death and kinship) of war, as illustrated by their response to the 2013 trial of Efraín Ríos Montt. The trial preceded a precipitous 2015 political crisis over corruption within the government of Otto Pérez Molina, a former army general and intelligence chief for Ríos Montt. The question that haunts the trial and these more recent marches for justice, in a country where citizens have long been subject to a life of democratic dictatorship, is how men like Pérez Molina and Ríos Montt maintain and grow their power even while their names are synonymous with murder, torture and clandestine graves. By examining the assumptions made by those in authority as they determine forgiveness, punishment, amnesty and reparations, I show how wartime debts act through generations. In the mixed reaction, popularly calledpensamientos divididos, ‘divided thoughts’ oraq’olaj iyol yansa’m, of young Ixiles to the Ríos Montt trial, I illustrate a disjuncture that occurs when radically different forms of care intersect in the area most impacted by the genocide. Through fifteen years of ethnographic engagement, I trace the story of one Ixil family and their reactions to the trial to show how humanitarian efforts to confront war crimes are not simply restorative. While the trial opens the possibility for a collective remembering of violence and the (re)ordering of social ethos, in the Ixil area it also produces a moral economy of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Guatemala’s reconciliation debate is as much about the present and the future as it is about history. In order to highlight its political dimension, I propose to read this controversy through the lens of hegemony theory. It is precisely because of the entwinement of specific political economic interests, centuries-old ethnic conflict and structural racism in Guatemala that charging genocide constitutes a key moment in a fight over power—a fight in which controversies about the politics of history are also expressions of struggle over economic resources and political hegemony. In this light, reconciliation does not appear to be a solution but a trap, set by those who defend their interests against the changes that the Peace Accords and the recommendations of the Historical Clarification Commission demanded. In the first section, I show that one crucial motive for these elites to deny the Guatemalan genocide, besides obvious reasons of historical shame and responsibility, is economic issues, among them the century-old land question. In the following sections I present two seemingly contrary arguments from the political and academic left. One takes apart, from a poststructural perspective, simplifying binary logics of class and ethnic conflict and thus delegitimizes the indigenous and peasant struggle for economic reform in the process. The other proposes a form of universal guilt that also ends up depoliticizing the history of the civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a short opinion piece published in late 2013, anthropologist David Stoll claimed that genocide did not occur in Guatemala under the military dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–83), that the charges against the former general and his subsequent conviction were unsubstantiated, and that human rights conditions for the country’s Indigenous peoples, including the Ixil population of northern Quiché department, actually improved under his government. By looking at the definition of protected groups under the United Nations Genocide Convention, and such basic notions as perpetrator motives and intent in international humanitarian law, this article will address Stoll’s latest contribution to a ‘counter-narrative by Guatemalans who perceive that their side of the story [was] left out’ of the 2013 genocide trial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on extensive testimony from Ixil women survivors of sexual violence, the 10 May 2013 verdict in the genocide trial of formerde factoGuatemalan head of state and army general Efraín Ríos Montt highlighted the perpetration of sexual violence as an integral component in the attempt to destroy the Maya Ixil as an ethnic group and thus evidence of genocide. Acknowledging that sexual violence was a weapon of genocide in Guatemala contributes to a critical analysis of how the racialized violence targeted against the country’s indigenous peoples was gendered, and enables the women and men who are survivors of these crimes to seek redress. However, narrating sexual harm within justice-seeking processes is not without complication, and trials alone cannot respond to survivors’ demands for justice and social repair. This article examines how fifty-four Maya Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Mam and Chuj women who are survivors of sexual violence make meaning of the everyday struggles to rethread their lives in the aftermath of genocide. The article uses data from a four-year participatory action research (PAR) project conducted by the authors with this group of Mayan women, including a series of workshops that used creative techniques—drawing, collage, dramatization and body sculptures—to elicit more complex and contestational stories than those emergent from a more linear narrative approach to understanding harm suffered and efforts for redress. Analysis of these data confirms that these Mayan women survivors have woven their understanding of reparation from three main threads: their experiences of loss and harm; their recognition of the Guatemalan state’s duplicity; and their protagonism in justice-seeking processes. The article concludes by arguing that women survivors' desire for repair requires attention to the deep-seated impoverishment that they highlight as the heavy load of gendered violence they carry with them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the legal trial against Generals Efraín Ríos Montt and José Mauricio Rodriguez Sánchez for genocide and crimes against humanity has evidenced the interplay between the complex factors shaping post-conflict reconstruction and social reconciliation in post-genocide Guatemala, and, ultimately, the disjunctive impact of the country’s peace process. The ‘genocide trial’ then is more than a legal process in that it represents a thermometer for Guatemala’s peace process and, ultimately, for testing the nature and stability of the post-genocide/post-conflict conjuncture. Interiorization of human rights frameworks and justice mechanisms by indigenous and human rights activists, including of the Genocide Convention, has consolidated a partial rights culture. However, the trial and the overturning of its verdict have simultaneously evidenced the instability, fragility and disjunctive nature of post-conflict peace and the continuing impact of the profound legacy of the genocide and of social authoritarianism. The article argues that while the trial has wielded broad impact within both state institutions and society, consolidating indigenous political actors, it has simultaneously fortified spoilers and evidenced indigenous collective memory as a fragmented and contested sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After the abrogation of the guilty verdict against Efrain Ríos Montt, young people from the group Sons and Daughters of the Disappeared (H.I.J.O.S.) issued the following statement: ‘More than a failure, this can breathe life into our ongoing fight for justice’. While this affirmation seems at first eccentric, or incidental, this article demonstrates how H.I.J.O.S.’s claim situates the Ríos Montt verdict within a longer history of justice and genocide in Guatemala. First, I trace the history of the meaning of justice and genocide among urban ladino university students from the 1940s to the 1990s. Next, I discuss youth politics and culture in the postwar period and locate H.I.J.O.S. within this context. Finally, I demonstrate how H.I.J.O.S.’s ongoing fight compels us to rethink the meanings of justice. Against apparently objective sums of the dead and disappeared that might be calculated and have their debts settled, a call emerges for ‘justice-ongoing’ after the annulment of the Ríos Montt verdict, one that insists upon incalculability and the imperative to remember and to remain provoked. For H.I.J.O.S.’s justice-ongoing, the past is not merely passed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Latin America leads the world in efforts to prosecute perpetrators of gross violations of human rights in domestic courts. Domestic justice offers a number of advantages to international and hybrid tribunals: proceedings take place in close proximity to the site of the atrocities, facilitating victim participation; they are directed by domestic prosecutors and judges, thus contributing to local buy-in; and they can strengthen rule of law and legitimize fragile transitional democracies. The case of Guatemala appears to contradict such arguments, however, given the overturning of the landmark conviction of former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity and the ongoing impasse of the proceedings. Drawing on the author’s work as an international observer to the genocide trial, interviews with those directly involved in the case, and comparative research on human rights trials in Latin America, this article suggests an alternative reading. By situating the genocide trial in relation to the broader transitional justice process in Guatemala and in the region more broadly, it argues that current setbacks should be viewed as a backlash to initial transitional justice success that is neither unexpected nor fatal to the accountability process. Second, the article argues that the genocide case is illustrative of a victim-centred approach to human rights prosecutions that hold important lessons for transitional justice theory and practice, and examines the way in which victims of sexual violence were incorporated into prosecutorial strategies and helped to prove that a genocide had taken place in Guatemala. Finally, the article argues that despite the undoing of the genocide verdict, the very fact that the trial took place is historically and politically significant, both for survivors and for the construction of collective memory in Guatemala and Latin America as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents introduction to the topics within the issue which includes genocide, racism and counterinsurgency in Guatemala.

Copyright of URVIO - Revista Latinoamericana de Seguridad Ciudadana is the property of FLACSO - Ecuador (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the social conditions of indigenous peoples in Guatemala. Topics discussed include the number of indigenous population in the country, the lack of public policies which specifically tackle the needs of indigenous people, and notes the impact on the revocation of Monsanto Law to the indigenous community. Also highlighted are the various abuses to indigenous people in Guatemala such as genocide and repression.

On 10 May 2013, a Guatemalan trial court rendered a historic judgment, convicting former President Jose Effain Rios Montt to an 80-year prison sentence for genocide and war crimes. On 20 May 2013, in a 3-2 majority decision, Guatemala's Constitutional Court annulled the trial judgment on procedural grounds. The Constitutional Court's annulment decision, decried by international observers as a defeat of justice, seems to reaffirm the impossibility of successful domestic prosecution of powerful leaders for international crimes and reinforce the need for international prosecutions. However, such a conclusion does not do justice to the profound meaning the genocide trial against Rios Montt has had for Guatemalan society. This article aims to give a more complete picture. It discusses how the trial could come about, in spite of the apparent inability and unwillingness of the Guatemalan state to prosecute the serious crimes of the civil war era. It looks at the role that the international community and international law played in the trial. Finally, it assesses the trial's significance, in the face of the Constitutional Court's annulment decision, for both Guatemalan society and the international community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the history, purpose and significance of the formation of collective memory with respect to application of the transitional justice in human rights and genocide trials. IT discusses case study of criminal trial of the former President of Guatemala José Efraín Ríos Montt regarding genocide and crimes against humanity.

Guatemala was under the microscope. The charges were genocide and crimes against humanity. The events took place between March 23, 1982 and August 8, 1983, the death toll was in the thousands and other victims in the hundreds of thousands. The country had made its way into history. This was the first time that a former head of state was put on trial for genocide before a national tribunal. This Note provides a historical account of the country as well as a brief overview of the conflict that gave rise to the charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. More importantly, it gives an observer's perspective of the trial and the circumstances, both social and political, surrounding the trial. It will finally lead us to lessons learned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 19 March 2013, the former President of Guatemala, General José Efraín Ríos Montt, and his military intelligence chief, General José Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, went on trial before a national court in Guatemala City for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Guatemala in 1982 and 1983. On 10 May, General Ríos was convicted on all counts and General Rodriguez acquitted. This is the first conviction of a former head of state for genocide in credible national proceedings. The judgment offers innovative approaches to psychological operations, sexual violence and forced displacement as constituent acts of genocide, and to attacks on culture as an indicator of specific intent. Its findings on individual criminal responsibility relate to the essential contribution of the accused and his control over the crime. The case also highlights the post-conflict struggle for judicial independence in Guatemala and offers lessons for accountability initiatives elsewhere. The status of the judgment is currently unclear following a controversial decision of the Constitutional Court ordering that the final stages of the trial be repeated. At the time of writing, General Ríos is under house arrest and General Rodriguez at liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the socio-economic conditions of indigenous peoples (IPs) in Guatemala as of January 2014. Topics include the prosecution of José Efraín Ríios Montt for genocide, the challenges facing IPs, Guatemala's political history. Also discussed are the punishment for genocide and crimes against humanity and other important events related to IPs including the criminalisation of the struggle for indigenous rights.

The article offers information on the unprecedented ruling delivered by the three-judge panel in Guatemala, on May 10, 2013, in which judges convicted and sentenced former dictator president of Guatemala Efrain Rios Montt (Montt) for guilty of both genocide as well as crimes against humanity. Topics discussed the Guatemalan civil war, human rights violations in civil war, and Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Inter-American Court).

The article discusses the nature of genocide and state terrorism in Guatemala between 1954-1996. The author beings by explaining the relationships between violence and power and violence and law, and goes on to explore the largely rural character of Guatemala's counter-insurgency. The the roles played by extrajudicial execution and forced disappearance in counter-insurgency are also addressed.

This paper explores the often-undervalued role of gender in transitional justice mechanisms and the importance of women's struggles and agency in that regard. We focus on the efforts of the women's movement in Guatemala to address questions of justice and healing for survivors of gendered violence during Guatemala's 36-year internal armed conflict. We discuss how the initial transitional justice measures of documenting gendered war crimes in the context of a genocide were subsequently taken up by the women's movement and how their endeavors to further expose sexual violence have resulted in notable interventions. Interviews with key organizational activists as well as testimonies given by victims of sexual violence during the conflict suggest that transitional justice mechanisms, extended by women's movements' efforts, are creating conditions for the emergence of new practices and spaces that support the fragile cultivation of new subjectivities. Sujetas de cambio (subjects of change) are premised not on victimhood but survivorhood. The emergence of these new subjectivities and new claims, including greater personal security and freedom from everyday violence, must be approached with caution, however, as they are not born automatically out of the deeply emotional struggles that play out around historical memory. Still, their emergence suggests new ways for women to cope not only with the sexual violence of the past but also to work against the normative violence that is part of their present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the indictment of retired Guatemalan army general Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity on January 26, 2012. According to the author, Rúos Montt presided over the most intense and bloody of state repression in Guatemala's modern history and is facing the real possibility of a criminal trial.

This study considers how Guatemalan genocide survivors mediate their identities through property relations on a former development pole, or strategic hamlet built on the ashes of a scorched earth massacre. It traces the historical trajectory of a lowlands Q'eqchi' community's land tenure, from a land conflict with a plantation owner that sparked a military massacre to their resettlement under army auspices. I conclude that the community did not choose to privatize their land titles because they joined up with a neoliberal project. Rather, they used individualized titles as a strategy to ward off violent dispossession. Further, the study argues that spiritual leaders explained their decision to leave sacred sites unmarked on the grid of private titles as a means of protection. Today, the community as a collective renews their spiritual relationship with the hill-valley spirit and seeks permission to plant on private property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses selected cases of mass killings and genocide during the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s and the way in which the truth commissions in both countries reframed locally grounded narratives to fit the state-centred language of human rights. Redefining wrongdoings as human rights violations produces stories that communicate poorly with local worldviews because the 'truths' that human rights language proposes disregard local realities and transform local conflicts into a type of 'modern', nationwide struggles. Thus, while the concept of genocide might capture well the horrendous nature of a mass killing, it will also ethnify the conflict. Comparisons between local readings and human rights-based reinterpretations reveal a 'modernizing' or 'Westernizing' bias of international law; the article argues for more awareness about such effects in analysis as well as in policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1Truth seeking in postwar Guatemala is a political battleground in which perpetrators intent on guarding against accountability confront victims’ associations equally intent on exposing abuses endured during the country's 36-year armed conflict. Having stage-managed the peace negotiations that established the restrictive parameters of Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), army officers and guerilla leaders ceded control of truth seeking to Commission staff and their civil society partners, even as the latter mobilized to push the CEH to its investigative limits. The CEH final report's finding that the army had committed genocide galvanized both sides. Victims’ associations insist on more truth alongside justice and reparations, while army perpetrators reject incriminating Commission findings. The Guatemalan case reveals how truth initiatives are at once politicized and polarizing and how politics interfere with a truth commission's effort to produce a consensus history, end violence or afford reconciliation. While it confirms that confronting the past risks undermining the labor of transition architects, it also suggests that these may be necessary evils that could eventually contribute to transforming and strengthening democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Working from multiple meanings of reckoning (to count, to settle rewards or penalties, to pay a bill, to measure possibilities for the future), this essay explores the post-war in Guatemala and the work of, and struggles over, number in making different people and experiences count. The peace treaty signed in 1996 instituted a truth commission and efforts to bring justice to the victims. The commission's quantifications of 250,000 dead, 93 percent at the hands of the state, mix in complex ways with the qualitative judgment that those deaths constitute genocide, leading to further quandaries in quantifying forms of repair. The state has begun paying reparations to survivors, but is also compensating civilians who were drafted into para-militaries that carried out massacres. How these para-victimizers count in relation to the aggregate of victims is, in turn, hard to calculate, and I look at some ways Guatemalans are working to make it all add up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]