In
februari 2016 wonnen Guatemalteekse vrouwen die de voortdurende
genocide tegen de Maya's overleefden, een rechtszaak tegen twee
militairen die werden beschuldigd van huishoudelijke- en
seksslavernij, dit in een historische rechtszaak genaamd de Sepur
Zarco zaak, een dorp dat onevenredig hard werd getroffen door
staatsterreur.
De
rechter verordende destijds ook een herverdeling van grond t.b.v. de
oorspronkelijke bewoners, de oorzaak voor het steeds oplaaiend geweld
tegen die bewoners. In de geschiedenis van Guatemala kregen de Maya's niet alleen te maken met het verbeurd verklaren van hun
grond eerst door de Spaanse overheersers, maar ook met een op hen uitgevoerde genocide.... (let wel met één van de 'hoogtepunten' na WOII, in begin 80er jaren van de vorige eeuw, een genocide die in feite tot de dag van vandaag voortduurt....) In de 20ste eeuw kregen de Maya's ook te maken met landonteigening t.b.v. buitenlandse investeerders, zoals de United Fruit
Company (UFC) uit de VS........
Door
verbeurd verklaring van grond die toebehoorde aan de United Fruit
Comapny, een knots van een bedrijf uit de VS, greep de CIA in en organiseerde, regisseerde in 1954 een coup* tegen de democratische gekozen regering...... De VS je weet wel, waar de opvolgende
regeringen altijd een grote bek hebben over landen waar geen
democratie bestaat, iets dat ze doen 'uiteraard' alleen doen als deze landen anti-VS zijn.....)
Hoewel
we nu 2 jaar verder zijn, is er nog niets gebeurd wat betreft de
herverdeling van land en het ziet er niet naar uit dat dit snel zal
gebeuren....... Onze opvolgende regeringen hebben al helemaal schijt
aan de ellende in Guatemala, waar mensenrechtenschendingen (vooral als het om deze rechten voor de Maya bevolking gaat) aan de orde van de dag zijn, immers de grote heer van onze politici
is nog steeds de VS en die hebben een dikke vinger in de smerige Guatemalteekse pap, ook dat zal nog jaren zo blijven vrees
ik...... Ach ja, Nederlandse regeringen hebben het altijd goed kunnen
vinden met fascisten, met een kleine uitzondering tijdens WOII,
hoewel de foute regering hier 'goede diensten' bewees aan het Duitse
nazi-regime, niet voor niets werden hier relatief gezien de meeste
joden afgevoerd naar de dodenkampen, iets waar de Palestijnen tot op de dag van vandaag voor moeten boeten........
HOW INDIGENOUS WOMEN WHO SURVIVED GUATEMALA’S CONFLICT ARE FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE
APRIL
18, 2018 FRIENDS
OF GREED 3
CIA, COLONIZATION, CONVERSATION, GENOCIDE, GUATEMALA,INDIGENOUS
WOMEN, MAYA, RAPE, SEPUR
ZARCO
Guatemala
(Conversation) – In
February 2016, Guatemalan women survivors and the alliance of
organisations supporting them successfully
prosecuted two
former members of the Guatemalan military for domestic and sexual
slavery in the groundbreaking Sepur Zarco trial. The trial
marked the first time a national court has prosecuted members of its
own military for these crimes. It was an historic
achievement in
the fight to stop violence against women and secure justice for
wartime sexual violence.
And
yet, two years later, the Guatemalan government has not carried out
most of the collective
reparations measures ordered
by the court. In large part this is because the main cause of the
violence – a dispute
over land that
historically belonged to the Maya
Q’eqchi people –
has still not been resolved, even centuries after it began.
Maya
communities were first displaced by Spanish colonisation starting in
the 16th century, and then displaced again in the mid-to-late 19th
and early 20th century. Keen to attract foreign investment, the
Guatemalan government encouraged European settlers to establish
plantations on land expropriated from Maya communities and the
Catholic Church. To this day, many Maya people do not have title to
the land they live on, much of which is dominated by plantations
growing coffee, sugar, bananas and palms
for oil.
But
they have been fighting back. I myself have been following the
struggle centred on the dusty north-eastern village of Sepur Zarco –
a case that pulls together all the threads of what has happened in
Guatemala in the last several decades.
THE LONG HAUL
Local
indigenous people have been campaigning to settle on and get legal
title to unused land in Sepur Zarco since the early 1950s when the
social democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz passed a law to
redistribute uncultivated land from the largest landowners to
landless peasants. The land concerned included unused land held by
the United Fruit Company, a US banana company with close links to the
Eisenhower administration – the company disputed the compensation
offered to it by the Guatemalan government, and demanded a much
larger sum.
By
USAID U.S. Agency for International Development – Guatemala: Woman
Washing Corn, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
In
the end, the land reform was stymied by a CIA-sponsored
military coup in
1954. That coup in turn sparked Guatemala’s bloody civil war which
lasted until 1996. A post-war UN-led
Truth Commission Report concluded
that during the conflict, an estimated 200,000 people were killed or
disappeared, that rape was commonly used as a weapon of war, and that
the Guatemalan state bore responsibility for the majority of the
atrocities. It also concluded that agents
of the state committed acts of genocide,
since 83% of their victims were Maya and most of the conflict’s 626
documented massacres were of Maya communities.
Most
of these massacres were committed in 1982-83 under the 17-month rule
of recently deceased dictator, Efrain
Rios Montt.
Rios Montt took power in a coup, and was then removed by another. He
was eventually prosecuted by the Guatemalan Supreme Court in 2013
and found
guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.
His trial featured testimonies of rape
and sexual violence committed
against Maya Ixil women, which were included to show that sexual
violence was part of the genocide.
However,
just ten days after his verdict, the Guatemalan Constitutional
Court annulled
the trial on procedural grounds after
sustained pressure from powerful
sectors of Guatemala’s economy and society.
At
the time of his death, Rios Montt was once
again being prosecuted for genocide –
but this time the trial was taking place with special provisions made
to allow for his diagnosed
dementia.
Rios Montt was in office during the time that the crimes committed at
the Sepur Zarco base were committed, but he was not prosecuted for
those crimes in the Sepur Zarco trial.
The
violence committed against Sepur Zarco’s women and their families
seems to have been a response to their attempts to settle on and get
title to the land, particularly in the late 1970s. According to an
expert witness in the the Sepur Zarco trial, Juan
Carlos Peláez Villalobos,
the military was called in and the indigenous peasant farmers were
denounced as “subversives”.
Women
survivors also pointed to the link between the attempt to get land
titles and the violence committed against them and their husbands.
“The landowners gave them [the military commissioners] a list of
names of men to disappear,” said one of them in her
video testimony to the court.
“They said we were troublemakers.
After
kidnapping and disappearing the men and burning down their families’
huts, the military forced their wives to work on the military
detachment built in the Sepur Zarco community, in 1982. The women
were organised into shifts to cook the soldiers’ food and wash
their clothing. While at the base, all of them were systematically
raped.
Some
women fled into the mountains to escape the violence, where they
spent up to six years struggling to survive with little shelter or
food. Many of their young children perished because of these
conditions. The base remained until 1988. Local men suspected of
being “subversive” were also tortured there by the military.
NO JUSTICE WITHOUT REPARATIONS MR
In
February 2016, the Guatemalan Supreme Court ruled that
two former members of the military were guilty of forced
disappearances and crimes against humanity in the forms of domestic
and sexual slavery and the murders of one of the women enslaved on
the base, along with her two young daughters. The court also held
that the Guatemalan state had to provide collective reparations for
the benefits of the village of Sepur Zarco and the surrounding
villages.
By
YoTuT – Flickr: Photo by Steve Richards, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia
Commons
The measures would provide basic social and economic rights frequently denied to Guatemala’s indigenous and rural communities. They also include the construction of the first local high school, a health clinic and a monument to the women’s husbands – but the state will not start the building work so long as Sepur Zarco’s people don’t have legal title to the land.
The
Sepur Zarco case shows how seriously a community can be affected for
decades, even centuries, by multiple overlapping injustices – from
colonial-era crimes to more recent human rights violations.
Resolving
the resulting problems has proven hugely difficult. But after more
than 30 years, the women and supporting organisations –
the National
Union of Guatemalan Women (UNGW), Women
Transforming the Worldand
the Community
Studies and Psychosocial Action Team –
are determined to achieve the restorative justice that they have been
struggling for all this time.
This
report prepared by Juliette
Doman, PhD Candidate
in Latin American Studies, University
of Liverpool for The
Conversation.
=================================* Zie: 'CIA coup (terreur) tegen democratisch gekozen bewind Guatemala 1954........'
