The Struggle For Justice: How Te Indigenous Communities Of Peru And Guatemala Are Still Fighting For Their Right To Justice

The Struggle for Justice: How the indigenous communities of Peru and Guatemala are still fighting for their right to justice.

Throughout recent history, we have seen many cases of mass genocide from Nazi Germany s Holocaust to the Cambodian Genocide carried out by Khmer Rouge. In both of these cases, justice has been achieved through trials, tribunals and convictions, thus allowing those who were affected to gain some sense of peace and retribution. Unfortunately, when examining the cases of Peru and Guatemala, it is clear to see that the justice these countries and its people have received has had a bittersweet tinge, especially regarding their indigenous communities. Between 1992 and 2000 some 200,000 [Peruvian] women (Ferrisi 2018), mostly indigenous, were victims of ex-President Alberto Fujimori s family-planning campaign, which in fact entailed involuntary sterilisations. The end of his presidency was brought about by his own resignation and fleeing of the country, allowing him to escape justice until 2005, when he was detained and arrested in Chile. Although he was tried and convicted for human rights abuses (as well as embezzlement and fraud), he has never been tried on account of the series of forced sterilisations that plagued many indigenous women and men throughout his time in power. In fact, the campaign of forced sterilisations has frequently been denied by the former-President as well as by his daughter, politician Keiko Fujimori and other Fujimoristas. Similar to the case of Peru, and how they have treated their indigenous communities, is Guatemala. The Guatemalan Genocide, also referred to as the Mayan Genocide and the Silent Holocaust, took place between 1960 and 1996 and resulted in the deaths and disappearances of over 200,000 people, mostly civilians (Burt 2018) with the majority of victims being of Mayan descent. In 2013, General Efra n R os Montt was successfully convicted, making him the first former head of state to face genocide charges in a domestic court (IJM). To the devastation of the Guatemalan indigenous population, the ruling was overturned due to an administrative issue. When, in 2015, R os Montt was put on retrial as well as Mauricio Rodr guez S nchez, the Director of Military Intelligence under the General, the hopes of justice were shattered for the indigenous community when R os Montt died in 2018 in the midst of the retrial and Rodr guez S nchez was acquitted of all charges. In order to examine why the indigenous communities in both countries have struggled to get their rightful justice, we must assess the human rights abuses of the indigenous population committed by Fujimori and R os Montt, how both of these dictators were able to escape conviction for so long and the way in which justice they have received has affected the indigenous communities in both countries.

When examining why justice was so hard to achieve in both Peru and Guatemala, we must first consider why justice was needed for these indigenous communities. The outstanding human rights abuses in both Latin American countries were truly horrendous. Journalist Stephen Kinzer (2018) has stated that in the panoply of commanders who turned much of Central America into a killing field [...] General R os Montt was one of the most murderous. This statement is reflected in the examination of the Guatemalan dictator s campaign which included:

Bombing villages and attacking fleeing residents impaling victims burning people alive severing limbs throwing children into pits filled with bodies and killing them disembowelling civilians and slashing open the wombs of pregnant women. (McDonnell 2018)

From this, it is clear to see how severely and horrifically the people of Guatemala, and particularly the Maya Ixil population, who made up the majority of nearly all victims (Kinzer 2018), were devastated by the General s rule over the country. Allan Cooper makes note of a month in which men, women and killed were inhumanely attacked:

In March 1982, seventy women and 107 children were marched from Rio Negro to Pacoxon and then raped and killed. A few months later another 84 Rio Negro people were tortured and killed in Los Encuentros. Soon thereafter 35 orphaned children were killed in Agua Fria. The Guatemalan government officially declared these actions as counterinsurgency activities (Cooper 2009: 171).

It is clear to see that the warfare was underpinned by poverty, marginalisation and racism against Mayan indigenous people (Moffet 2018) and this was the reason for which they were so brutally targeted by R os Montt and his army, especially considering the notion that the ruling military junta viewed the highland Indians [...] as natural allies of the Marxist guerrillas fighting to overthrow it (McDonnell 2018). Another factor that shows why justice was needed for the Guatemalans, is that the then-President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, sympathised with the dictator of Guatemala, proven with the release of a truth commission [that found] that U.S. military assistance [had] a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation. (McDonnell 2018). By providing military assistance, the Guatemalan army was able to obtain equipment [...] among other items, for its counterinsurgency efforts. (McDonnell 2018). This directly led to the army being able to kill, disappear and torture many of the Mayas who were affected during R os Montt s dictatorship. Comparably, in Peru, it was found that a U.S. government agency and the U.N. Population Fund encouraged and financed a program of forced sterilizations (Ferrisi 2018), once again showing how the U.S. became involved with Latin American conflicts and thus allowing for the abuse of indigenous, with what some called a targeted genocide (Ferrisi 2018). The phrase targeted genocide has commonly been used by pro-life and pro-family groups as they believe that Fujimori s campaign literally killed the possibility of women being able to have children. The aspect of forced sterilization as genocide is something that has been debated in countries where indigenous people have also suffered similarly. Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann has stated that:

Forced sterilizations are an aspect of genocide. Most people think of genocide as the mass, deliberate murder of large numbers of people. But when the United Nations passed the convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, it defined five ways genocide could be committed. Only one of the five means defined in the Genocide Convention is mass murder. [This is] imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group [...] forced sterilization prevents births (Howard-Hassmann 2019).

This article clearly states that forced sterilizations are in fact a form of genocide, further stressing the reason for why indigenous women and men in Peru need justice. In some cases, there have been women who have not only had their chance of carrying babies taken away from them, but also their lives. The case of Mar a Mam rita Mestanza Ch vez is one in particular that really stands out:

Mar a Mam rita Mestanza Ch vez was 33 when Peruvian health officials began threatening her with jail if she did not submit to surgical sterilization. [...] Mestanza was a low-income, illiterate indigenous woman, and when after numerous intimidating visits she finally agreed to tubal ligation, she wasn t informed of the risks, nor was she examined for potential complications. Her husband contacted doctors shortly after the surgery, concerned that his wife wasn t well, and was told it was simply the effects of the anaesthesia wearing off. Mestanza died at home nine days later. (Kovarik 2018)

This is only one paradigm out of over 200,000 women who were violated under Fujimori [and who] have been treated as, at best, an afterthought for the past two decades. (Kovarik 2018) These women, and also the more than 24,000 men [who] were forced to have vasectomies (Ferrisi 2018), were part of Fujimori s family planning program which was considered to be a way that his government would be able to reduce poverty by ensuring that families with little income and almost no education were the ones who were affected by the campaign. It has been heavily reported on since the 90s that the Peruvian government [...] set targets and quotas (Ferrisi 2018) which resulted in doctors and nurses feeling extremely pressured to reach these quotas, fearing that they may lose their positions. Other abuse that indigenous people suffered apart from the involuntary sterilizations, verifying why justice is needed, is the way in which some clinics chose to perform these procedures. Leila Miller notes how nurses would continuously badger women, like Gloria Basilio. Gloria eventually gave in to them, but when she was in the operating room, she changed her mind. The nurses proceeded to bind her arms and legs to a bed and then blindfolded her (Miller 2019). Justina Rimachi spoke to Gloria Alvitres about her own ordeal of forced sterilization, in which she believed she was going for a checkup after having recently given birth but then woke up in a `Secclla clinic [and] felt a severe pain in her womb. [...] [A] nurse assured her that the sterilization was a reversible procedure but proceeded to add, Either way, you shouldn t have more children. (Alvitres 2018). This body invasion led to further problems for her at what should have been safe places: her home and her church. Her community and her family were resentful towards her, telling Justina that a woman was only useful if she could provide children. Her husband became emotionally and physically abusive, angry at her for something she had no control over. Possibly worst of all, at the church, a place where she should have felt welcome and safe, the nuns, who acted as advisers to women in the community, were horrified at what had happened to [her]: You can t come to church anymore what you have done is a sin. (Alvitres 2018). With the suffering that indigenous people have endured in both Guatemala and Peru, the reason for why those who caused these communities such pain is obvious. These human rights abuses cannot go unquestioned or forgotten.

Another important factor in recognising the struggle that the indigenous communities of Guatemala and Peru underwent is analysing how their ruthless dictators were able to avoid facing justice for such a long period of time. In the case of Guatemala, after serving as dictator of the country for nearly two years, on August 8, 1983, R os Montt was deposed in a military coup by Gen. Oscar Humberto Mej a Victores (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2020). We would assume that after being overthrown R os Montt might have faced some form of justice however, he actually served several terms in Congress, which gave him immunity from prosecution. (Kinzer 2018) This signifies that from 1983 until 2012, nearly three decades, the ex-General was able to continue making decisions for his country, albeit in a smaller capacity, but when his last term expired in 2012, he lost that immunity. (Kinzer 2018) This demonstrates that he escaped justice for almost 30 years without having to undergo any punishment. Additionally, another way in which he was able to avoid conviction for so long is how he was seen by the population of Guatemala. Stephen Kinzer makes the point that if we:

Consider the thousands of unarmed men, women and children killed by the army while he sermonized about morality, [...] he is a monster [but] consider the hopes invested in him by many Guatemalans, including poverty-stricken Catholic peasants, and he becomes a hero of mythic proportions (Kinzer 2018).

This shows the duality of his personality and how differently numerous communities of the country viewed R os Montt. In fact, he was seen as a saviour to those who believed his beans and bullets policy had helped keep Guatemala from falling under the power of Marxist-led guerrillas. (Kinzer 2018) The reason for which people saw him as a hero is maybe because of the fact that the killing of so many Mayans badly damaged their transmission of oral history. (Moffet 2018). With the death of so many indigenous people, ninety-three percent of atrocities [which] were the responsibility of the Guatemalan military (Burt 2018), this could mean that Mayans were afraid or unwilling to speak out in case they became direct victims of the genocide and those who could have spread word of how they had suffered were the Mayans who were tortured and killed. In Peru, Alberto Fujimori was able to escape conviction for his family-planning campaign for sever reasons. First of all, although he was convicted of human rights abuses, it did not include the forced sterilizations of more than 272,000 women and 22,000 men (Miller 2019). Shockingly, during the 90s, Fujimori was actually seen as a man who championed women s rights and who wanted to eradicate poverty in his country. He gained international support and USAID funding for the sterilization by presenting them at the UN Beijing Conference on Women in 1995 as part of a progressive reproductive rights program (Kovarik 2018). This is, of course, the conference in which Hillary Clinton gave a forceful defence of women s rights, where she declared that human rights are women s rights, and women s rights are human rights (Healy 2007). Therefore, it is very upsetting to realise that while many powerful women at this conference were making extraordinary and memorable speeches, Fujimori also managed to give those who attended it the impression that he was a feminist who wanted women s rights yet he was actually, systematically taking away rights from women who couldn t truly speak up or defend themselves. Secondly, we must consider that the forced sterilizations weren t included in the Comisi n de la Verdad y Reconciliaci n (CVR). Jacquelyn Kobarik has stated that:

Not one mention of forced sterilizations is to be found in the commission s public report. The CVR s broad mandate allowed it to cover two decades, three presidents, two Maoist terrorist groups, and several distinct instances of state-backed violence [...] but the commissioners decided to leave the sterilizations out, claiming they were tangential to the period of violence, even while including other tangential crimes with higher stakes for Peruvian elites such as Fujimori s embezzlement scandal. [...] While individual cases have been opened and re-opened by various investigations, the Peruvian government has repeatedly denied the existence of systematic forced sterilizations (Kovarik 2018).

This truth commission followed those of Chile and Argentina, thus allowing for then President Toledo s government to learn from those commissions and make the CVR as developed as possible and include as much detail as they could. Nonetheless, they instead chose to emit the sterilizations to which indigenous Peruvians were victims and have continuously decided not to recognise their struggles by denying that these human rights abuses even happened. This shows how Alberto Fujimori has been able to escape any form of justice in reference to the forced sterilizations. Thirdly, even though there have been people who have chosen to speak their truth, such as through the interactive Quipu project [...] enabling women to call in and share their stories via telephone (Kovarik 2018) which was started in 2013, there are still many people who support Fujimori, often called Fujimoristas. His own daughter Keiko, who was a politician and ran for the presidency before being convicted of fraud and embezzlement and sent to prison, was asked about allegations [of forced sterilizations of which] she blamed individual rogue medical practitioners. (Lima 2015). Even former presidents of Peru, such as President Alan Garc a have frames attempts to resurface the atrocities of the Fujimori regime as pointlessly dwelling on sins of the past (Kovarik 2018). This shows how people in power have continually chosen to ignore the plight of indigenous people denying the human rights of hundreds of thousands of people in their own country, and thus allowing for dictator Alberto Fujimori to get away with the attacks of forced sterilization.

Lastly, we must question the justice to which Efra n R os Montt and Alberto Fujimori were subjected, and how it has in turn affected indigenous people, both positively and negatively. In terms of the indigenous people of Guatemala, their justice has been somewhat bittersweet. The trial was historic [...], marking the first time in Guatemala that a former head of state was put on trial for serious human rights violations (Burt 2018). Efra n R os Montt was put under house arrest in 2012 when he was formally indicted on charges of war crimes and genocide. Although he was finally convicted of human rights abuses and genocide, it was unfortunately overturned due to a small administrative mistake, and Rodr guez Sanchez was exonerated of all charges. (Burt 2018). It took a few years for the retrial to happened with lawyers finding new ways to try and obstruct the charges. Unfortunately, in 2018, R os Montt died in the midst of the retrial, leading to human rights activists creating the term geriatric impunity to talk about perpetrators who escape punishment because they die at an advanced age of natural causes, before a verdict is rendered (Burt 2018). Although, R os Montt frustratingly escaped justice, it is Rodr guez Sanchez whom the Maya Ixil people would also like to see face punishment. One victim has said that she and her fellow victims are still waiting for justice: The government has done nothing to ease our suffering. (Moffet 2018). Additionally, the court that ruled unanimously that the Guatemalan army committed genocide and crimes against humanity [...] also ruled that Rodr guez S nchez had no criminal responsibility in the commission of these atrocities. This is unacceptable, as it does not allow for true responsibility, either for him, or for any other top officials in the military to be responsible for the atrocious crimes committed. Furthermore, the victims are still searching for justice in terms of:

[...] seeking reparations from S nchez and the Guatemalan government to ease their suffering. Such reparations may include financial compensation, but also need to entail land restitution and measure to restore lost culture and heritage. Some of the victims [...] wanted Mayan history and knowledge to be taught to their children in schools in Mayan languages, and for a Mayan museum to be established in the western municipality of Nebaj to educate the community and future generations about what happened (Moffet 2018).

This shows what Indigenous communities want, in terms of justice, such as the need for history to be correctly recounted and for there to be forms of reparation paid to them. Although, the justice for the Maya Ixil people was not perfect, it at least allowed for some peace of mind. Perhaps, in that R os Montt was at least convicted at some point and proving that the Guatemalan army committed genocide against the Maya Ixil, something the country s power elite have long denied (Burt 2018). Alberto Fujimori had been able to avoid charges of forced sterilizations up until recently, when doctors began to speak out on how they abused their Hippocratic Oath to help people, not harm them. According to one doctor his team was told to sterilise at least 250 women over four days in July 1997 [and] said he had no doubt that the sterilisations were a state policy. (Lima 2015). So, even though there has been some turnaround regarding people coming forward to tell their truths, it was until 2018 that there has been:

The decision of Peru s senior prosecutor to order the indictment of former president Alberto Fujimori [for] alleged responsibility for crimes committed against women [...] forcibly sterilized as part of a public policy applied during his term. [...] This is the first time that the Peruvian state has ordered the indictment of high-ranking officials for these crimes and recognized that they are crimes under international law. Now the state must move forward by guaranteeing without further delay the rights to truth, justice and reparation of the thousands of victims of forced sterilization. (Amnesty International 2018)

Finally, this means that Quechua and other indigenous people of Peru will get their justice and not have to suffer the indignity of their pain and suffering being denied by the government.

Indigenous communities have been severely abused throughout the course of history, from the Aborigines of Australia to the Native Americans of Canada and the United States, and, sadly, many are still waiting for their stories to be heard and for justice to be served. In the countries of Guatemala and Peru, however, there has been a great step forward in recognising the human rights abuses and war crimes that the indigenous communities suffered.

For Guatemala, it broke ground that [senior officials] are no longer untouchable [...] The R os Montt trial was [an] example of Latin America leading the way in showing that it is possible to bring war criminals to trial and to bring some measure of reparation to the victims, and to rewrite the historical record so that it s a more accurate reflection of what happened and who was responsible. (Kinzer 2018)

Guatemala proved that it was possible to try and convict even former Presidents and other high-ranking officials, that those who caused pain and misery would eventually face retribution. In Peru, on the other hand, whilst there have been more and more women and men coming forward to reveal what happened to them during Fujimori s rule, we must consider the consequences of political amnesia [ones] Fujimori and his political party have profited from time and time again [this] collective misremembering of 90s-era crimes [allowing] for Fujimorismo [...] to grow (Kovarik 2018). This political amnesia has meant that it has been difficult to charge Fujimori with crimes of forced sterilizations, however it seems as though the tide is turning, and the Fujimori may soon be charged with these human rights crimes. Although the indigenous people in these two countries have suffered under dictatorships and have struggled to fight for their deserved justice, it seems as though they will finally be able to see their abusers get what they deserve.

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