“What Guarantees Do We Have?” Legal Tolls and Persistent Impunity for Feminicide in Guatemala

Walsh, Shannon; Menjívar, Cecilia

doi:10.1111/laps.12001

Cited by 26 publications

(33 citation statements)

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“…In Guatemala, the justice system itself often poses obstacles to achieving justice [3]. In this milieu, as can be expected, the normalization of violence against women has impeded the implementation of laws designed to protect them.…”

Section: Socio-legal Context: Multisided Violence and Lack Of Implemementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, Guatemalan women live in a context of generalized violence and insecurity, as well as violence that is directly targeted against them [6]. High rates of domestic violence in many instances have led to feminicide, but even in the most egregious cases, these are seldom prosecuted [3]. As Figure 3 demonstrates, Guatemala has generally had the highest rate of killings of women in Central America from 2002-2011. on homicides in 2012, Guatemala's rate was 39.9 homicides per 100,000, nearly converging with El Salvador, which generally has higher homicide rates than Guatemala.…”

Section: Country Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The U.S. Department of State reported the 2012 conviction rates in Guatemala for domestic or intrafamilial violence at a mere 2% (with 18,194 cases and 376 convictions). 3 Although we do not explore the effects of women's different social markers on experiences of violence in depth in this article, we would like to mention that key social cleavages intersect to create heterogeneity in their experiences of violence (see [8]). For instance, a critical social position in Guatemala is ethnicity, which exacerbates the situation for women, since the indigenous Maya, who make up more than half of the country's population, have been found at a disadvantage in every social indicator.…”

Section: Country Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, one of its most insidious aspects was the government's reliance on civilians to kill civilians [14], which contributed to the normalization of violence in interpersonal relations, but also deeply affected the constitution of the self, people's cognitive frames and, as such, profoundly transformed social relations [2]. The political violence 3 The Department of State cited these data from the Public Ministry in Guatemala.…”

Section: Multisided Violence: the Broader Social Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, this is the tip of the iceberg, as many crimes against women go unreported. If women do report them, quite often, they are not investigated [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Subverting Justice: Socio-Legal Determinants of Impunity for Violence against Women in Guatemala

Menjívar

Walsh

2016

Laws

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High levels of violence against women and impunity in Guatemala have reached crisis proportions and have received increased international attention in recent years. The phenomenon of feminicide (e.g., killings of women in the context of state impunity), is widespread in Latin America and particularly acute in Guatemala. Many (if not the majority) are rooted in violence that becomes concentrated in the family. In this paper, we propose that both the structure and application of the laws in Guatemala contribute to widespread impunity. Police and judges use laws other than those created to address violence against women in order to justify lack of enforcement. For example, judges resist issuing restraining orders, and police refuse to apply them because this can violate perpetrators' property rights. Judges also refuse to apply domestic violence laws because this violates the principle of equality under the law. Women refuse to use the legal system to seek justice because alimony laws will not be enforced and women are economically dependent. The discriminatory fashion in which these laws are applied leads to widespread impunity. Even though laws on the books could be applied otherwise, those who implement them privilege laws that conflict with violence against women laws. While much scholarship focuses on individual-level motives for violence, we instead analyze the socio-legal environment and existing legal codes that enable continued failure to respond adequately to violence against women. The legal framework and the legal code itself are deeply shaped by the context in which they are written-the structural, gender, symbolic, everyday and long arm of political violence that permeate all aspects of life in Guatemala and exacerbate women's vulnerability, especially the poor. We argue that this broader legal context endangers the lives of women in Guatemala. We also extend the socio-legal scholarship to highlight failures for victim's families and the disempowerment of women as they enter relationships.

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Section: Socio-legal Context: Multisided Violence and Lack Of Implemementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Country Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Country Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Multisided Violence: the Broader Social Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, this is the tip of the iceberg, as many crimes against women go unreported. If women do report them, quite often, they are not investigated [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Subverting Justice: Socio-Legal Determinants of Impunity for Violence against Women in Guatemala

Menjívar

Walsh

2016

Laws

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Central American Asylum Seekers' Caravans as a Political Act

Menjívar¹

2022

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements

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In the run‐up to the 2018 midterm elections news media were saturated with images of Central American immigrants traveling north in “caravans,” accompanied by images and metaphors of an “invasion of illegal aliens,” a commonly used xenophobic trope with a long history in the United States. Using a range of triggering terminology to instill fear in the population, President Trump and officials from his administration also warned the public that there were gang members, criminals, Middle Easterners, and possibly even terrorists among these asylum seekers. According to these officials, the Democrats or perhaps Venezuela might be behind these “caravans.” These tropes, broadcast nonstop in the news media, were meant to instill a sense of threat and insecurity among Americans. Amid the panic created, the Department of Homeland Security even issued an alarmist factsheet about the caravan, which included a list of the suspected nationalities in the caravan (from Somalia, India, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh among others), and the assertion that there were 270 individuals with criminal histories along the caravan route. The president regularly sent messages (via interviews with the media or his Twitter account), to a public already primed to fear immigrants, that crime and criminals were filtering through the southern border and that the invaders needed to be contained (statements he made throughout his term in office). Accordingly, the administration's response was “Operation Faithful Patriot,” which included the deployment of up to 15,000 active‐duty military troops to Texas, Arizona, and California. And even though the broadcasting of such alarmist declarations decreased dramatically immediately after the midterms, the commander‐in‐chief did order 5600 American troops to be deployed to the border, where they remained for months waiting for the “caravan” to arrive. The media spectacle might have been part of the election strategy because the secretary of Homeland Security dropped the name “Operation Faithful Patriot” on election day in 2018. Regardless, border authorities have used tear gas on the migrants who have tried to set foot on US soil to seek asylum.

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Transnational Governance, Local Politics, and Gender Violence Law in Nicaragua

Neumann

2018

Lat Am Polit Soc

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Many Latin American countries have passed laws intended to address femicide and other forms of violence against women. Yet the implementation of these laws has been inconsistent at best. This article analyzes the case of Nicaragua, which passed a comprehensive law on gender-based violence (Law 779) in 2012. While celebrated by local women’s organizations, Law 779 was subsequently weakened through a series of legislative reforms and executive decrees. This article seeks to explain why state actors in Nicaragua initially supported Law 779 and later sought to undermine it. It argues that in contexts characterized by a high concentration of political power like Nicaragua, transnational governance structures are insufficient to ensure the success of gender violence legislation. Through an analysis of Law 779, this article contributes to broader debates about the nature of state legitimacy and the potential of legal advocacy to address violence against women.

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“What Guarantees Do We Have?” Legal Tolls and Persistent Impunity for Feminicide in Guatemala

Cited by 26 publications

References 32 publications

Subverting Justice: Socio-Legal Determinants of Impunity for Violence against Women in Guatemala

Subverting Justice: Socio-Legal Determinants of Impunity for Violence against Women in Guatemala

Central American Asylum Seekers' Caravans as a Political Act

Transnational Governance, Local Politics, and Gender Violence Law in Nicaragua

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