The precarious foundations and futures of Guatemala’s ‘judicial spring’

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Survivors of Guatemala’s genocidal violence and the numerous local activists and transnational intermediaries who have accompanied them through what some have called a Guatemalan ‘judicial spring’ have celebrated the precedent-setting guilty verdicts of, for example, the Ríos Montt, Sepur Zarco, and Molina Theissen trials. Despite these historic judgments against individual perpetrators, contemporary Guatemalan civil society and social movements are challenged to support those who testify and seek redress for harm suffered during the armed conflict, while also protesting the ongoing occupation of Mayan communities’ lands and multinational corporations’ extraction of minerals and natural resources for points beyond village borders and international profit. Human rights activists document ongoing sexual assaults of women protestors while Mayan leaders and human rights defenders are disappeared or assassinated, their bodies violated in ways reminiscent of the armed conflict. This panel will explore some of the complex continuities and discontinuities of gendered and racialized structural violence, ongoing threats to local activists, and struggles for justice and land in the wake of Guatemala’s 36-year armed conflict. Drawing on ethnographic and activist scholarship in multiple sites in Guatemala, panelists will examine multiple forms of resistance across time and space, including indigenous, community-based and civil society organizing, social movement building, and transitional justice processes. The contributions and limitations of transnational intermediaries’ activist scholarship, pragmatic solidarity, and social accompaniment are situated and critically analyzed alongside longstanding local forms of organizing and resistance.

Sub Track

• Civil Society and Social Movements

Session Organizer

• M.Brinton Lykes, Boston College

Chair

• Alison D Crosby, York University

Discussant

• M.Brinton Lykes, Boston College

Individual Presentations

• Activists in resistance: Responses to persistent and escalating human rights violations in Guatemala - Claudia V Samayoa

• Justice-in-translation: Redressing racialized gendered harm in postgenocide Guatemala - Alison D Crosby, York University; M.Brinton Lykes, Boston College

• Guatemala's Genocide Trials and Spaces of Justice - Amy Ross, University of Georgia; Elizabeth A Oglesby, University of Arizona

• Fire and Water - Diane M Nelson, Duke University