Portraying the absent: narratives and dispute : enforced disappearance and public memorialization in Guatemala

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Graduate School of Social Sciences

M.Sc. Social and Cultural Anthropology

Master’s Thesis

Portraying the absent: narratives and dispute.

Enforced disappearance and public memorialization in Guatemala

Picture of a wall in Guatemala City taken during fieldwork in June 2015.

Supervisor: Angelica Neiszer Lujano Dr. Enrique Gómez-‐Llata Student number: 10967710 Email: angelicaneiszer@gmail.com

Second readers: Dr. Barak Kalir

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Abstract

A number of scholars and human rights defenders have argued that enforced disappearance is a practice rooted in corrupt political systems, enabled within a weave of impunity and complicity between different levels of government. In Guatemala, three decades after the internal armed conflict, enforced disappearance still stirs social spheres, as the absence of more than 45,000 people is a reality that confronts both government and society. Based on fieldwork carried out in Guatemala over three months, the following research aims at analysing public memorialization as a resource that illustrates different understandings of the multi-edged phenomenon of enforced disappearance and its aftermath. Furthermore, by looking at public memorialization initiatives being controverted and contested in the current scenario it is aimed at delving into what ‘representing the absent’ entails in a public social dimension. Finally, this thesis adds to studies on collective memory and post-conflict societies. Whilst drawing a relation to a wider signification of the violence of the ‘recent past’, different perspectives regarding memory initiatives come to the fore as the result of public policies but also as the outcome of organization and agency capacity of local actors.

Key words: enforced disappearance, Guatemala, post-conflict societies, public memorialization, collective memory.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank, first of all, to the professors whose guidance, accurate criticism, and input were key for this work to see the light. At the University of Amsterdam professors Marieke, Tina, Mileena, Vincent, Oskar, and particularly my supervisor Enrique, whose advice and comments contributed a lot to this research work. Also, to professors Paolo Pagliai and Pablo Romo, whose academic guidance and friendship are invaluable.

To my family; my sister Ale who has always been close and cheerful, to my dad, my mom and my aunt Angelica, whose love, support and caring has been crucial during this period and throughout all my life.

To my friends in Mexico, specially Ana, Car, Natalia, Maria and Migue for their constant support and interest in whatever I do, wherever I go.

To my friends in Amsterdam, who have made this experience much more enjoyable. Thanks Pavel for your love and energy, your unconditional support in this process (and all the stories we shared).

To each and everyone who helped me one way or another during fieldwork in Guatemala: H.I.J.O.S. Guatemala, specially Paulo and Paco, the CPT, Melvin and Max Ba’tiul, Josué Coy, Grupo Gaspo particularly Otto Ical, Grupo Adici, CALDH, Impunity Watch specially Ralph Sprenkels, Dennis and Mónica, the FAFG, Alfonso Huet and Manolo Vela. Your insight and experience were enriching to say the least, it was a pleasure to have met you.

Finally and most importantly, I would like to express my gratitude to every man and woman who shared testimonios with me. Thank you for sharing your path of lucha, struggle and hope. This work is for you. Your patience and kindness were fundamental those three months, and your strength continues to inspire me. B’antiox. Gracias infinitas.

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List of Figures

FIGURE 1:MANTA KNITTED IN CASA DE LA MEMORIA,GUATEMALA CITY. ... 25

FIGURE 2:MARCHA DÍA DE LA MEMORIA.PHOTO COURTESY OF OTTO ICAL. ... 31

FIGURE 3:COLUMN WITH INSCRIPTIONS OF THE DESAPARECIDOS’ NAMES.CATHEDRAL OF

GUATEMALA CITY ... 34

FIGURE 4:MURAL PAINTED ON A WALL IN SAN CRISTÓBAL VERAPAZ. ... 38

FIGURE 5:ABELINO COY GUE, DESAPARECIDO. ... 39

FIGURE 6:SHRINE FOR THE VICTIMS OF THE ARMED CONFLICT IN THE CONVENT OF

COBÁN STILL BEING INTERVENED BY SOCIETY. ... 43

FIGURE 7:MAP OF THE REPUBLIC OF GUATEMALA ... 46

FIGURE 8:DRAWING OF THE FINDING OF HAROLDO XOL, BY OSWALDO LEM PÉREZ. .... 49

FIGURE 9:TOMBSTONES OF ROBERTO ENRIQUE CAC SUC (LEFT) AND VICTORIANO CAL

CAL (RIGHT).DIFFERENT INSCRIPTIONS SHOW…- A ZOOMED IN IMAGE IS SHOWN BELOW ... 60

FIGURE 10:DIFFERENT ENGRAVINGS IN THE TOMBSTONES SHOWN ABOVE: ... 61

FIGURE 11:VELORIO OF A MAN IN ALTA VERAPAZ, AFTER BEING FOUND BURIED IN

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List of Concepts

The following concepts are briefly interpreted in relation to the context in which they were encountered during fieldwork. Rather than translating them literally from Spanish, they were used throughout the research for the sake of accuracy, aiming at contributing to a richer interpretation of social phenomena and acknowledging the difficulties that language barriers represent when carrying out a research in multiple languages.

Desaparecido: In Spanish it is a noun that derives from the transitive verb “to disappear”. It is used to refer to the ones who are “missing”, not without appointing accountability but on the contrary, glimpsing the political nature behind the action of ‘being disappeared’ suggesting the implication of agents of the state in taking/kidnapping someone whose whereabouts remain unknown.

Marcha: The action of protesting that implies moving from one place to another, as a transitory action of denounce. It comprises symbolic elements such as visual elements and usually follows a route that starts and finishes in strategic sites.

Cotidiano Reality as perceived locally as in daily-life.

Finca A rural place where uneven labor relations between land-holders and peasants occurred. Deeply influenced by racial and class components and which functioned similarly to a feudal system.

Mantas A piece of fabric with illustrations or words that represent concepts linked to social protests.

Pintas Grafitti painting in public spaces, with a political component.

Masacrados People who were murdered with premeditation and advantage. Usually emphasizes the cruelty with which the act was committed and conventionally it suggests the number of the victims is higher than three.

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Torturado The act of making someone who has been captured suffering, inflicting a large amount of pain, cruel or inhuman treatment by implementing different techniques, usually pursuing specific goals.

Resistencia Different acts that constitute opposing to a dominant political discourse. Colectivo Group of people with political, artistic or intellectual affinity -which constitute a collective actor.

Testimonio The narrative of a specific event as it is witnessed by someone, deeply intermingled with a person’s own life history.

Velorio The communitarian act of waking a dead person. Usually done recently after a person has deceased, it is a rite of passage with different cultural components in which social interaction and religious symbols constitute a prelude of a burial ceremony. Dignificación A contested and complex word that derives from the concept ‘dignity’ which is understood as an inherent component of every human being, with syncretic elements that allow different interpretations. In the context of post-conflict societies, dignity is understood as something that could be ‘taken away’ due to cruel or inhuman treatment, and ‘given back’ to someone by different rites, which would constitute dignifying acts.

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1. Introduction

Researching enforced disappearance in a contested scenario is challenging in many ways. A practice that is still in use in many places in Latin America -an example of which is the recent desaparición of the 43 students of the Escuela Normal Rural de

Ayotzinapa in my home country, Mexico- reveals the structural violence and the high

level of impunity rooted in the different levels of government, which is not an isolated case in the region. The first trouble I encountered when presenting my research topic to peers and professors was finding an accurate meaning for desaparecido1_{and along}

with it, a suitable explanation of what the concept entails. In Spanish desaparecido is a noun that derives from the transitive verb “to disappear” as it is explained by Burchianti (2004). It is used to refer to the ones who are “missing”, not without appointing accountability but on the contrary, glimpsing the political nature behind the action of ‘being disappeared’ suggesting the implication of agents of the state in taking someone whose whereabouts remain unknown. It is a concept that emphasizes the absence but includes traces of hope at times, whilst hinting the cruelty that surrounds the uncertainty. The regular usage of this noun derives from the large social impact that this practice has had as a recurrent resource employed in the region. Although the subject has been largely researched and documented by scholars as well as human rights defenders and activists from different nationalities and backgrounds, I realized that I’d taken for granted the existence of a ‘general notion’ of what constitutes a

desaparecido. That made me reflect on the familiarity with which I refer to the

concept, and whether it shows the extent to which we, Latin Americans have normalized violence. This thesis is among other things, an attempt at countering that thought. I am confident that state violence does not come without questioning, contesting and resisting it in various ways. I recognize a bias derived from my positioning, in that sense. Delving into what ‘depicting the absent’ entails, in a context where “the past has become so deeply politicized that merely through researching and writing about it one enters the fray” (Hale, 1997: 1) it was both confronting and moving, since it is a subject related to people’s public and private life and thus exposes and unfolds sensitive fibres. There are many things at stake when bringing about

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disappeared people indistinctly, acknowledging that gender perspective is a transcendental axis to approach state violence and crimes such as enforced disappearance because there is usually a differential treatment based on gender distinctions. However, for the sake of facilitating the reading I will stick to them as they were the most used expressions I found in the field, which perhaps underpins gender distinction in enforced disappearance as another possible research topic.

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discussions that involve emotional, moral and ethical dimensions that might also cross with legal repercussions. During fieldwork in Guatemala casual conversations and formal interviews suggested that compromising ‘peace’ over ‘justice’ goes beyond being the “eternal question” in a post-conflict society. In this dichotomist distinction the two categories are polarized and portrayed as opposing each other. Furthermore, choosing one over the other represents an unclosed dilemma that in daily life can represent jeopardizing personal integrity in different accounts, symbolically or physically, ‘in the name of’ justice or for the sake of peace. Shedding light on enforced disappearance today in Guatemala as part of a larger problematic of impunity and corruption in Latin America purports to put into question the way in which transitional justice has been understood and its guidelines put to practice in the region, pondering its advancements and infirmities, analysed from the standpoint of local realities. Enforced disappearance still stirs different social spheres and unveils the blurred line between the personal and the political. By looking at public memorialization as the result of public policies but also the result of the organization and agency capacity of local actors who are involved in the search for justice and for the desaparecidos, different perspectives regarding memory initiatives come to the fore.

Outline of the Study

In this first section a brief self-reflection is provided in order to give an insight into my personal interest for delving into enforced disappearance, which is followed by the limitations of the research, the thesis’ scope and the question under study. Chapter 2 contains the general legal aspects of enforced disappearance, the state of affairs regarding it in the region and the historical background. In chapter 3 the theoretical framework is detailed and the main concepts are delved into. Chapter 4 comprises the methodology, the specific research areas are introduced and the qualitative techniques methods used during the fieldwork presented. This precedes two mostly ethnographic chapters in which the discussions addressed in chapter 2 are illustrated and further analysed: in chapter 5 institutional commemoration acts regarding the transition from being disappeared to being found are presented and analysed, considering aspects such as government involvement and its relation to the subject of memory politics, as well as uses and abuses of memory. Respectively, in chapter 6 the struggle over public memorialization amongst different stakeholders is shown, whilst its relation to a larger social and political context is drawn.

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The thesis concludes by reflecting on the current context. Recommendations for further research are suggested.

Reasoning my standpoint

There are two main aspects I would highlight as crucial and intertwined in critically considering my role in the field: my personal involvement and stake regarding the study of social and political issues in Latin America and furthermore, what the mere understanding of ‘Latin America’ as ‘one’ region comprises in this work. Reflecting upon the latter, the decision of doing my research in Guatemala when being Mexican myself is perhaps related to the notion of Latin America as a region which multicultural and diverse as it is, holds strong traces of a shared history. In the case of Mexico and Guatemala, regarding both neighbouring countries with a cautious distance, enforced disappearance, as it will be further analysed in the forthcoming section, is one element that unveils the use of similar mechanisms, which reveals on the one hand that the use of force against civilians by the military is not an ‘exclusive resource’ of recognized military regimes, and on the other hand the relation between practices of state violence and the involvement in asymmetrical power relationships with the economic ‘giant’ of the continent, the United States. As a way of analogy, I see it as looking through a window in which one can look at the other, outside, while looking at traces of her/himself reflected on the glass at the same time. Looking closely at Mexico, at the way in which the investigation and clarification processes regarding recent enforced disappearances occur, while paying special attention to -and conducting a research in Guatemala, about enforced disappearances that were perpetrated over 3 decades ago- gave me an interesting standpoint, in which I’ve found room for reflection: the pertinence of thinking of Mexico as a de facto dictatorship, the similarity in the mechanisms used to combat “the internal enemy” and the role of the military in perpetrating human rights violations. In the same way, it allowed me to ponder marked differences such as the recent creation of organisms such as the CICIG (International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, for its acronym in Spanish) which stands out as a success in Guatemala, whilst underlining the lack of similar institutions in Mexico, despite of the great index of corruption. However, by acknowledging structural differences between both countries and the existence of nuances and shades regarding enforced disappearances perpetrated in Mexico and Guatemala in the framework of Latin American history, some aspects about the

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struggle over memory reveal a unique component in each of the local scenarios that shouldn’t be left unnoticed. One of the recent outcomes resulted from civil society’s and local as well as international organizations’ pressure for military to be tried by a civil court for crimes committed during the armed conflict, is the Sepur Zarco case, in which military members are being tried. Another example is the breakthrough in the case of the enforced disappearance of Marco Antonio Molina Theissen.

Concerning my own interest in the subject, I suggest that to a lesser or larger extent, subjects have been affected by the predominant violence in the region; therefore the perspective of pretending to be an ‘observer’ who remains outside of the violence wave is as unrealistic as it would be to present myself as ‘unbiased’ and unrelated to the region’s problematic. Although I do not belong to any of the organizations mentioned I do acknowledge affinity with the idea of substantial change being much needed, which has led me to get involved in larger events, to be acquainted to individuals that take part in some of these movements and to participate in actions which aim at addressing social issues and denouncing state crimes. Regarding such events, which are usually

marchas and demonstrations, it is important to consider the peak of social mobilization

in contemporary Latin America as an important component of political life, as it represents an alternative of exercising citizenship as well as other individual and collective rights such as freedom of expression, without having to be affiliated to any of the existent political parties.

1.1 Approaching Enforced Disappearance

As previously mentioned, ‘Enforced disappearance in Latin America’ has been a subject researched from a number of disciplines, in an attempt of comprehending what it entails as a generalized practice as well as in particular contexts. According to the Office of High Commissioner of the United Nations:

“[T]he systematic practice of disappearance is of the nature of a crime against humanity and constitutes a violation of the right to recognition as a person before the law, the right to liberty and security of the person, and the right not to be subjected to torture (…) States are under an obligation to take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent and terminate acts of enforced disappearance, in particular to make them continuing offences under criminal law” (OHCHR 2009 5).

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In 1978, in its resolution, The United Nations General Assembly expressed concern over reports from various parts of the world relating to enforced or involuntary disappearances of persons (Ibid.). Although the notion of enforced disappearance acquired strength and became visible in the public debates once it was defined from an international legal perspective -that is within the context of organisms such as the United Nations and the Inter-American commission- its meaning has been broadened and deepened with contributions from other fields such as Psychology, Political science and History among others. These contributions typically focus on the social and cultural specificities of the different scenarios in which it occurs whilst trying to define what enforced disappearance constitutes. Thus, it can be perceived that a juridical standpoint has not been enough to approach enforced disappearance as a practice. Understanding the problematic that surrounds enforced disappearance as being beyond the scope of the law and further portraying the complexity of this multi-dimensional crime is pursued along this work. Nevertheless since enforced disappearance has been said to constitute a criminal offence, which means an action or omission considered a felony and therefore punishable by law2 within international bodies, and that way the problematic -at least partially- has been made visible, enabling the issue to be addressed on different levels, for the sake of minding the scope that ‘enforced disappearance’ purports as a concept and also as a start point from where to approach the subject, general definitions that comprise what has been stated by international legal bodies will be briefly presented in the section Legal Aspects of

Enforced Disappearances.

1.2 Limits and scope

The main concern of this thesis is the struggle over collective memory regarding forcibly disappeared persons. It centres on the analysis of public memorialization, understanding it in this work as the act of remembrance that does not take place as a private practice but that is mainly collective and public, carried out in areas which are open and accessible to the general public. By approaching the subject through an ethnographic study it is intended to delve into some of the elements that illustrate a phenomenon with multiple edges in the local, micro-contexts. Public memorialization

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in the region takes myriad forms, such as remembrance and commemoration acts which comprise the placing of memorials, pictures and monuments. In the same way, other forms of public memorialization centre on justice such as the collective demands to the government for presentation of the desaparecidos. Examples of them will be shown in this thesis, without attempting to present ‘an understanding’ of enforced disappearance but rather as a means to shed light on the plurality of voices that approach this phenomenon publicly, as they represent it and contest it in the cotidiano, the daily-life.

The subject is approached by incorporating a discussion on ‘collective memory’ and ‘memorialization in public spheres’ in order to focus on the problematic nature of the depiction of the desaparecidos as it is a subject that

a) Transcends the private sphere and

b) It is still contested in societies that experienced violent and traumatic events.

Therefore, by focusing on the public memorialization of the desaparecidos it is attempted to grasp what ‘representing the absent’ entails in a social public dimension, as it holds a relation with a wider signification of the violence and the “recent past” of contemporary societies in Guatemala City, Cobán and San Cristóbal. Acknowledging the value of approaching enforced disappearance as it is experienced both in private and public spheres, I recognize a potential weakness in not considering the role of kinship and family dynamics with sufficient depth in my thesis. However, as the understanding of all its complexity as a phenomenon represents a more extensive research, the scope of this work is limited to the following aspects:

1. The state’s performance as a gatekeeper, facilitating processes of remembering and forgetting through institutional memorialization and memory politics

2. The discussions that arise amongst different collective actors regarding the

desaparecidos’ public memorialization, and its role in the current context.

1.3 Research question and sub-‐questions

“Death has always been publicly memorialized” (Santino, 2004: 364). Departing from the idea that the desaparecidos are not deemed deceased, but fall into a permanent state of liminality, as some authors have referred to (Jelin 2012, Karl 2014) posing questions regarding the logic that follow public memorialization initiatives in the frame of post-conflict societies is needed, on the one hand, to grasp in ‘memorialization’ as a

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particular pillar of one of transitional justice’s core elements, ‘reparation’; on the other hand, to approach public memorialization initiatives that are out of the scope of state programmes. Furthermore, thinking about the multi-layered functions attributed to public memorialization in a still contested scenario, the question to answer along this thesis is: what is in dispute when different forms of public memorialization regarding forcibly disappeared people are displayed and mutually controversial? In the same vein, the sub-questions to be addressed along this work are: what does the public memorialization of forcibly disappeared people entail? Does public memorialization of the desaparecidos currently aim at or facilitate processes of justice and reconciliation in Guatemala?

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2. The Absence and the State

2.1 Legal aspects of Enforced Disappearance

State violence is a control mechanism expressed by different means amongst which corporality plays a role in its exertion and its discernment. As Allen Feldman quoted in Karl (2014) stresses “the body becomes a spatial unit of power, and the distribution of these units in space constructs sites of domination.” (Karl 2014: 729 on Feldman 1991: 8). In order to understand the multiple elements that enforced disappearance comprises, it is important to regard aspects that have been considered for its definition as a crime. It is considered one form of State violence; it was recently stated by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in the International day of the victims of enforced disappearance, that it “is a complex type of human rights violation, and its conceptualization and ensuing obligations have been broadly defined over the last three decades” (IACHR, 2015). Nowadays, desaparecidos according to the United Nations in the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, are the persons who “are arrested, detained or abducted against their will or otherwise deprived of their liberty by officials of different branches or levels of government, or by organized groups or private individuals acting on behalf of, or with the support, direct or indirect, consent or acquiescence of the government, followed by a refusal to disclose the fate or whereabouts of the persons concerned or a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of their liberty, which places such persons outside the protection of the law” (General Assembly, 1992).

It has been stressed that “the (en)forced disappearance of persons violates numerous non-derogable and essential human rights enshrined in the American Convention on Human Rights” (Inter-American Convention on The Forced Disappearance of Persons, 1994). This is related to the multi-dimensional scope that constitutes the crime, which has been crucial to understand in order to define it.

First of all, a determinant factor when distinguishing enforced disappearance from kidnapping, according to Ariel Dulitsky, member of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances of the UN, is regarding the perpetrator for it represents an immense difference if it is committed by an agent of the state whose role is protecting citizens and enforcing the law (Dulitzky 2015) than if it is committed by civilians. Although there are debates regarding enforced disappearance perpetrated

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through organized crime on a larger scale, Dulitzky emphasises the use of the force -of the state- as a condition for the crime to qualify as ‘enforced’ disappearance, that is to say, for agents of the state to be held accountable for the act of abducting a person – even if it is in cahoots- and furthermore using the state’s structures advantageously to fulfill a command that surges within the state itself. This also means that the action being committed by members of the army, of the police and other state forces ought to be considered as such.

For being a particularly cruel crime, in 1992 it was typified as a crime against humanity3 by the General Assembly, responding to repeated requests from relatives' organizations and NGOs, this means it is one of the three crimes to be tried by the International Criminal Court, together with War Crimes and Genocide (Rome Statue, 1998). It’s definition and typification didn’t come without struggle, and it was determined after a long process. Eventually in the organ that concerns only the American States it was recognized as well when “two Honduran disappearance cases, Velasquez Rodríguez and Godinez Cruz, became the first contested cases to reach the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Court cited these General Assembly resolutions in describing the horrible nature of the crime” (Brody and Gonzales, 1997: 369).

Because of its purposes and effects it is regarded as a crime that does not only impact the person who is disappeared but also considers the broader repercussions in the person’s wider spheres, in which terror and a prolonged feeling of anguish are spread; “a singularity of the crime of enforced disappearance is that it entails an 'extension' of the phase of mourning and grief” (Tahir, 2012: 827). This particular characteristic refers to aspects that are related to ‘others’, collective entities such as families and communities, and not only to the disappeared person her/himself. This illustrates the important symbolic load implicit in this practice, in which a wide scope is affected. For instance, the denial of revealing the location of the whereabouts is seemed as a part of the larger impact given that it comprises the denial of social rituals such as mourning processes that amongst other violations, has a collective impact, for instance, a psychological repercussion for the relatives and a significant change in the community’s configuration. This intersects with other human rights violations, like the

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ones related to Economic, Social and Cultural Rights stated in the International Convention by the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Another of its constitutive characteristics is its consideration as a ‘continued action’, which means one can never establish the end of the disappearance; the crime continues to be perpetrated until the disappeared person is found or her/his whereabouts determined. It has also been said that it cannot be situated in the past, as its duration cannot be determined, since the disappearance of a person is a present action. This places the desaparecido in a category of a permanent liminality where s/he is not deemed dead but her/his whereabouts remain unknown, sometimes for decades. “Liminality is experienced as the permanent presence of the absent disappeared” (Karl, 2014:736). In the realm of law, however, there is no legal status a disappeared person can be categorized in, as a person can only be ‘either alive or dead’ for the law, so liminality is only perceived in the loopholes.

The representation of the violence’s aftermath concerns larger social and political implications in the present as it has been stated by different scholars (Jelin 2007, Tahir 2012, Karl 2014). Therefore it could be said it is a particular crime that transcends peace-and-nation-building mechanisms such as Peace and Reconciliation agreements. In the Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance from the United Nations and the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearances of Persons, the crime is typified as non-prescriptive which means if a disappearance took place before the signing and ratification of these conventions, they can still be typified and thus tried as such.

In a context where impunity remains as the status quo the mere appearance and posterior difussion of the term in Spanish desaparecido could be a research topic on its own. What could be seen as a cruel euphemism, resulting from the normalization of a rather common practice amongst Latin American governments over the past century, also means the emergence of a category that aims to name the unsayable, and appoints to refer to ‘the absent’ with an imminent political connotation.

A Systematic Practice

After presenting a broad legal understanding of it, enforced disappearance has to be placed in each context. It has frequently been used as a strategy to spread terror within society as “the feeling of insecurity generated by this practice is not limited to the close relatives of the disappeared, but also affects their communities and society as a whole”

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(OHCHR 2009: 2) as it was above mentioned. As a systematic practice it can be traced back to the French troops in Algeria and the Nazi policy ‘Nacht und Nebel’. This means, as some authors have remarked (Huet 2005, Suazo 2006, Calveiro 2008) that enforced disappearance cannot be understood in isolation, but rather as part of a larger structure in which political and economic motives are usually intertwined. The fact that there is a scheme within its planning and execution, and that it has been used as a resource repeatedly provides with enough evidence to consider it ‘systematic’, as it is not only methodically established but is also rooted in a government system.

Regarding the necessity of locating the crime in a specific background in order to approach its complexity, although the scenarios in which enforced disappearance has been systematically practiced are diverse, political struggle usually underlays the contexts. Political struggle is understood here as a struggle over power in a nation, and armed confrontation with an important ideological component that complements it. Polarizing society presenting it as clearly divided in right vs. left wings is also part of the political struggle, which is necessary to appoint to understand the construction of a dichotomist distinction, although there are more edges in the equation. In Latin America, another important component of political struggle, which was evident in both urban and rural contexts but particularly in the latter, has been historically related to agrarian and agricultural reforms. As human right defenders in the region have stressed, relating the conflicts about land and resources and control over territory of the last centuries to State violence -which has been one of the largely documented issues in Latin America- is a way of understanding the structure behind mechanisms such as enforced disappearance. “Guatemala was the country with the highest inequality rate as well as the one with the highest disparity, regarding the disproportion between larger state in all Latin America (…) it doesn’t surprise that violence is linked by research participants to the inequality in land distribution and the fincas system in which people were obliged to live” (Huet, 2008:31). Within political struggle, violence is a resource that is used in different ways. It may be enacted as harassment and threats to specific individuals later on develops into other manifestations of violence. For instance, the refusal of communities to fulfil requests to leave their lands, as well as the initiatives of forming associations such as unions and cooperatives for mutual economic growth and development are patterns that relatives and people acquainted with forcibly disappeared people observed before the assassination or the disappearance of community members. “In the process of reconstructing the facts, we have been able to

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elucidate how the economic interest underlays massacres, enforced disappearance and even genocide, when there has been complicity between private corporations and the local government” (fragment of the interview with Javier Gurriarán). In rural and

urban contexts communities and gremial organizations have been perceived as ‘subversive’, for they are transgressing the hierarchical order in which decisions are taken and upheld, in a highly militarized country, where power concentrates in small elites. This is rooted in the construction of an ‘enemy’ which was intimately related to the depiction of men and women prior and after their disappearance; they were presented as ‘threatening national interests’, a monolithic construction built to purport its dismantlement as part of ‘national security’ strategies (Guest 1990, Brody and Gonzales 1997). In the same way, “the military and mass media, which presented adversaries as powerful enemies that threatened to destroy order and social peace” (Impunity Watch, 2012: 45) played a role in its later diffusion. As mentioned previously, such a process is also related to the scenario in which it takes place, and it cannot be dissociated from authoritarianism and its mechanisms, in its many shades. In a context where instead of dialogue, negotiation and the recognition of the ‘other’ as well as of the acknowledgment of social inequality and the marginalization of certain sectors of society, the different governments with an important component of racial and class distinctions in Latin America have responded to peoples’ demands with persecution and repression of the social actors and movements. Furthermore, within the many forms of repression, enforced disappearance is considered a multi-faceted crime, and it is characterized by invisibility, secrecy and impunity (Calveiro 2010).

In the frame of a generalized counterinsurgency policy, which will be further addressed in the following section, enforced disappearance has been documented as one of the recurrent practices in the region that were carried out with the aim of disintegrating social movements and political groups who were perceived as opposing the states’ interests. Therefore, it can also be argued that it intends the disappearance of the subject in the broader sense of the word, which means not only individual but also collective actors. In Argentina, for instance, “the Mothers [of Plaza de Mayo] like others, have stated that the military dictatorship disappeared people in order to secure a compliant population that would accept its conservative political and economic agenda” (Burchianti, 2004:144). In the same way regarding Mexico, “the violence

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overseen by the PRI4 regime against political opposition groups was common” (Karl 2014: 723); opposition which was organized to a larger or lesser extent and who, by different means, intended to attack structures that enabled the existence of a disproportionally powerful political power concentrated in the Mexican elite. Emphasising the collective repercussion of the crime allows relating the disappearance with the desaparecidos’ collective identities, stressing a cause-consequence relation and shedding light on the structure that enabled their disappearances. In fact, some of the relatives’ aggrupation takes the political identity of their disappeared family members and stand for a re-vindication of the political dimension of their lives as one of the pillars of their counter-memory movements5.

2.2 In the light of the Dirty War

For the purpose of this research, enforced disappearance as a practice is framed in the context of Latin America in the last three decades of the Twentieth Century, as it is considered to have been “the main instrument of repression used by the Military forces” (Tahir, 2012: 826) during of the ‘Dirty War’. This concept has been deemed problematic mainly because it is said to nourish the idea of ‘egalitarian forces’ fighting each other, suggesting there was a proportional force relation between the army and ‘its opponents’. For many scholars and social actors, it patronizes the discourse of “the two demons” (which refers to the army and ‘the guerrilla’ as being opposite forces but playing a similar role in regards of the detriment of society). However, in this work it is merely employed with the purpose of referring to a particular period in Latin America, where many of the political and social struggles held a strong relation to other relevant events that were impacting and influencing on a large part of the Globe. During this particular period that is intertwined with the development of the Cold War, the two-block division played a major role influencing international relations and national politics. The dichotomist geo-economic division of the world in ‘communist or capitalist’ ideology is a key factor in the national security policies implementation, together with a generalized counterinsurgency strategy in the region, with the support and resources of the United States; for instance the National Security Doctrine and the creation of the School of the Americas, specifically aimed to suppress political

4_{A
mexican
political
party
who
has
been
in
power
for

over
70
years,
“legitimized”
by
anti-‐democratic
and
a}

disproportionate use of force against civilians.

5_{An
example
of
which
is
H.I.J.O.S,
an
organization
that
re-‐vindicates

the
political
identity
and
the
militancy/activism
of}

(21)

opponents that interfered with US’ economic interests (Gill 2005, Klein 2010). In countries of South America like Argentina, Chile and also in Central America, for instance in Guatemala “the military forces began to become a hard, homogeneous core of the system, with the capacity to represent itself and to negotiate with the different decisive sectors about their access to the government”6_{(Calveiro, 2008: 8). During}

this period the “fight against communism” was the premise for countries being intervened and their democratically elected governments being overthrown. In most cases, this was achieved through a coup d’état orchestrated by a military élite, which in many cases implied a minority exerting political and economic control openly supported by the army under a new legal framework which ‘temporarily’ suspended constitutions as the country was declared to be in estado de excepción. In the struggle of imposing and contesting a new socio-economic and political system, societies were usually fragmented due to internal and external processes. Although there were various layers of rooted class and racial divisions ever since the colonization, these were accentuated in the violent transition to a military regime. The range of different political views was rather diverse and the political scenario was complex. However, it could be broadly said that in the vast majority of Latin American countries there was a division between those who supported a democratically elected government and those who opposed it, in a large scale of shades. This is to be said in order to remark the disparity of the forces and power relations, which ought not be overlooked, particularly when it comes to analysing the context in a local level. The legitimate use of the force and thus, control over weapons and military resources was mostly in the hands of those supporting the installation of a military regime.

Internal armed conflict in Guatemala or the disappearance of the enemy

The “Conflicto armado interno” Internal Armed conflict or non-international armed conflict, is another contested terminology to refer to the period in which violence escalated in Guatemala until it reached its peak in the seventies and eighties. In 1954 “the CIA supported the coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz which had begun to implement a programme of land reform” (CONAVIGUA, 2010:22). The state, to whom 93% of the deaths, disappearances, torture and other crimes are accountable, took myriad forms. Perpetrators at times

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could be recognized in the Guatemala national army, with heavily armed uniformed soldiers, but other times it was the G27 and the Anti-Communist Secret Army (ESA, for its acronym in Spanish) a paramilitary commando formed by civilians, police and military, businessmen, landowners and ranchers8_{. “Amilcar Farfán, Aura Elena’s}

brother was captured by the G29_{and the DIT}10_{” (CALDH, 2012: p.117). Although}

there is awareness about the perpetrator’s link to the state, in certain cases the intended blurriness about the happenings, makes it difficult to appoint one specific person accountable for it. Attributing disappearances to the Guerrillas has been another way of aiming to blur states’ responsibility. “If it would have been the guerrilla he wouldn’t

have been found in Creompaz [Military Zone 21]” (Fragment of the interview with

Doña Consuelo Cac).

The Historical Clarification Comission (CEH) some decades later confirmed that “during the sixties the army’s structures imposed over the executive power” (CEH, 1999:103). Nowadays “it is estimated that in classrooms and training centres of the School of the Americas more than 60,000 Latin Americans were trained in repressive techniques that advised and tolerated the use of torture, blackmail and infiltration of social organizations, with no differentiation between the opposition actors” (Impunity Watch, 2012: 30). On the one hand, the opposition against the military regime started being repressed, in the same way, the construction of particular groups such as the aforementioned unions and cooperatives as “subversive actors” began. Some groups and individuals started being clandestine, and different forms of organizations, amongst them guerrillas, emerged. The first documented guerrilla, the Fuerzas

Armadas Rebeldes emerged in 1962 and was formed and supported mainly by an urban

middle class (CONAVIGUA, 2010:23). However, other groups emerged almost simultaneously, not all of them encouraging armed confrontation but also ideologically nourishing ideas against the regime, related to ‘social justice’, and the need for egalitarian societies and self-organized communities. The Catholic Church, in concrete the branch adhering to the Teología de la liberación (Liberation Theology) played an important role in this sense. The Teología de la liberación “burst in with a series of basic and fundamental questions regarding society and religious structures in a clearly

7_{Secret
death-‐squad
“funded
by
the
CIA,
and
run
by
CIA-‐paid
Guatemalan
military
and
police
trained
at
the
SOA”
(Boggs,}

2003: 218)

8_{According
to
the
Impunity
Watch
Report
“El
camino
de
la
búsqueda”} 9_{Conuterinsurgency
intelligence
section
of
the
Guatemalan
army}

10_{Technical
Investigations
Department
for
its
acronym
in
Spanish.
A
cell
of
the
National
Police,
also
known
as
‘the
secret}

(23)

defined period responding to its context” (Romo, 2006: 5). A Bible’s historical approach allowed a people’s interpretation of the gospel, the evangelio, from their own standpoint; this aimed, in a general way, to address power structures and asymmetry in power relations between the population with an indigenous majority and the small elite that constituted the state through a unique interpretation of the Bible, particularly of the New Testament, with Jesus as a main figure who predicated equity and fought injustice, and who was on prosecuted for ‘speaking the truth’. Thus, not only guerrilla groups became the first targets of the army when the violence started to escalate, but also catechists and unionists, who may not have directly collaborated with guerrilla even though there were different forms of collaboration which did not involved armed clashes necessarily. However, since several organizational forms emerged in both a rural and an urban context, it is not possible to identify a single type of disappearance target; many of those being targeted which varied from unionists, Mayan peasants, schoolteachers, students, progressive priests, to social democratic politicians and others (Weld, 2014:10). Adding to the complexity of the scenario studies on forced enrolment to the army and forced participation of civilians in the back then recently established PAC (Civilian Self-defense Patrols, for its acronym in Spanish) have been developed, as part of the government’s policies those years, which aimed at the civilian mass incorporation of civilians into its counter-insurgency strategies (Sieder 2005, Huet 2005, Vela 2014,).

Although the state’s accountability in enforced disappearance crimes is an undeniable fact, considering the aforementioned challenges a dichotomist conception of ‘the good

vs. the bad’ ‘the killers and the victims’ and rather encourages debates on human

agency, structure and the limits and difficulties within transitional justice as it has been appointed by Karl (2014) and others. This complexity is partially reflected upon the still stirred scenario, in which memories overlap and contest each other. The depiction of the ones who have been disappeared by the state, particularly those that occurred in the last three decades of the twentieth Century in Latin America are related to the narratives that emerged as a consequence and as a response to the disappearance but also as a way of engaging with the discourses and ideology attributed to the

desaparecidos. Both, narratives and depictions are multiple and conformed by different

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3. Portraying the absent

According to a number of social actors and scholars, the signing of the Peace treaties did not have the expected outcome. It did not lead the ending of the violence, which took different forms other than ‘vanishing’. However, trials and other juridical processes started being considered by human rights and grassroots organizations. “State terror was so brutal, so successful in destroying political opposition, that it shattered the conceit that future social solidarity could be constructed from a description of past human rights transgressions or the supposed collective healing that comes from telling one's story to an official body” (Grandin, 2005: 51). Different voices that opposed the hegemonic discourse that sought to deny the crimes committed during the last decades and to denounce those that were still being perpetrated, emerged. Violence and horror started being documented systematically.

“Bishop Gerardi told me, -I’ve arranged a scholarship for you in the US, you have to go a couple of years because they will try to kill you-. -No, I honestly do not believe that- I said. That was at 5pm on Sunday. At 10pm they were killing him. The whole plan of giving the communities their memories back went down… when the head of the project is killed, it was something so strong that everyone fell in a horrible depression. Never in the 36 years of war the army dared killing a bishop” (Extract from the

interview with Edgar Gutiérrez).

One day after “Guatemala nunca mas” (the outcome of the Catholic Church’s social memory project) was released, the leader of the project, Bishop Juan Gerardi was brutally murdered. The dispute over the narratives, over memory, seems undeniable. “Memory represented a threat to those accountable by the crimes, and therefore

upheld a link with a possible punishment, whether social or legal” (Extract from the

interview with Edgar Gutierrez). Socially embedded collective memories began to be expressed in different ways. The small and newly formed groups of relatives of disappeared people, began to resort to the use of pictures, drawings and other material elements for the search of the desaparecidos, demanding the truth and the clarification of the happenings. They started using different elements for visibility as their fight gained strength and expanded throughout the country. Their narratives about the happenings could be found in knitted mantas, in shrines, altars and pintas and later on in books. Following public depiction with a pragmatic purpose of visibility, public memorialization became a practice used for expressing narratives and perceptions of

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the armed conflict. As years passed, public memorialization initiatives launched by the state, driven by state programs and post-conflict memory politics emerged too, constituting an important source of public memorialization in Guatemala.

Figure 1: Manta knitted in Casa de la Memoria, Guatemala City.

The names of the persons who suffered human rights violations and abuses are written next to the date and the place where it occurred. A distinction between the crimes is usually stated. The place where they are storage now “La Casa de la memoria (The house of memory) is an interactive museum that focuses on the ‘other’ history, the one that is not shown in the books, the one of people’s fights and resistance”

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All equal and all differentiated

In different memorials, the distinction amongst ‘victims’ in which people was categorized according to the crime committed against each of them was made. However, the broad, fuzzy concept of ‘victim’ gave room for people’s own interpretation of it, particularly in contexts where Spanish was learnt in order to communicate testimonies, search for people and seek justice11_{. “It is common to hear}

people adopting words and concepts from Spanish in their discourse, when talking about the conflict” (Interview with Alejandra Castillo). The relatively new human

rights jargon allowed an unusual flexibility in the way concepts were employed. Beyond delving into the semiotic relation between signifier and concept, the vagueness of concepts such as ‘victim’ allowed different uses and interpretations of it, depending on the speaker and the context in which it was used. ‘Victims’ is one of the most contested concepts as it rank of meanings is rather wide, and it can either suggest a lack of agency or contrarily, a re-appropriation of one’s own history, as well as the acknowledgment of having the right for proper compensation. According to data obtained in different interviews, ‘victim’ can comprise “everyone who suffered”, “the ones who survived”, “the ones who were killed”, “the family members of those killed”, among others. The concept ‘victim’ also allows the existence of groups and sub-groups within it. In Guatemala, a distinction between ‘victims’ who were masacrado/a

torturado/a and desaparecido/a is constantly found in shrines, monuments and other

forms of public memorialization. There are different aspects intertwined that cut across personal narratives and collective approaches to the happenings. However, the classification within public memorialization of some of the crimes committed reflects a particular way of understanding the crimes as differentiated, as well as the different harms suffered, and even a differentiation amongst people ‘who suffered’ it. The fact that not all of the ‘victims’ fall into one category as a way of fighting the depersonalization, contextualization of the happenings or accumulation of additional information makes that approaching public memorialization of armed conflict grows in complexity. In the same way, looking at the public portrayal of forcibly disappeared people is a way of finding out that there is not one desaparecidos’ concept but several, which overlap and contest each other at times.

11_{It
has
been
largely
documented
that
people
from
indigenous
backgrounds
who
spoke
a
different
language
other
than
the}

only ‘official’ one in Guatemala (Spanish) was limited in their access to justice. The language centralization was linked to other discriminatory practices in which indegenous peoples demands were not considered if they weren’t made in Spanish, first of all. For more information see Akkutan http://www.akkutan.info/index.html

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The understandings of the way in which enforced disappearance has been carried out vary. Some scholars whose research has centred on Guatemala during and after the conflict (Stoll 1993, Falla 1994, Hale 1997) have framed enforced disappearances broadly in two different categories. Depending on the aim and the context, they have classified it as being ‘selective’ or ‘multitudinous’. The former refers to the planning and execution of the disappearance of an individual whilst the latter appoints to the simultaneous disappearance of a group. This has fuelled discussions as the different interpretations hold a relation to a particular understanding of the political circumstances that surrounded the development of the armed conflict12.

In the multiple Guatemalan contexts, starting with the two most notorious divisions when understanding the different scenarios in which disappearances were carried out, ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’, the portraying of the conflict and the desaparecidos depiction has not been unproblematic. Regarding the rural –and mostly indigenous- context, on the one hand, there are scholars who question the desaparecidos and their communities’ level of involvement with guerrilla movements, and have depicted them as either passive, ‘victims’ of the circumstances or “between two armies”.13 This has put into question whether enforced disappearance had an intrinsic political nature (eliminating political opposition) or if it rather aimed for massive extermination. Regardless of the answer, by not seeing traces of the political in the racial when examining the ‘disappearance’ of individuals, collectivity/ies or culture, the question of what is understood by ‘political’ is then relevant. In Guatemala’s last decades of the millennium, the aim of disappearing resistance, attempting to vanish opposition as a state policy for economic purposes, unveils the political nature of any crime committed by the state. On the other hand, romantically portraying the indigenous desaparecidos as a homogenous rebellious entity, can also be viewed as a stereotypical approach which polarizes the role of the Guatemalan indigenous population. It is important to remark that the level of involvement in opposition movements cannot merely be paired with a specific ethnicity. However, the vulnerable population in Guatemala has been historically comprised mainly of indigenous groups –although not only. Nevertheless, understanding ‘heterogeneity’ in indigenous communities has been a topic in which

12_{Which
is
categorized
as
a
non-‐international
armed
conflict
(NIAC)
according
to
the
accepted
definitions
by
the
Geneva}

Conventions, given that the armed confrontation involved only one State. However this has been highly contested given the recorded intervention in Guatemala during this time by other countires (The U.S’ economical support and training of the Guatemalan army), which enabled the conflict to escalate.

13_{David
Stoll’s
book’s
title,
in
which
along
the
narrative
indigenous
communities
in
Baja
Verapaz
are
depicted
as
being
in}

(28)

discussions regarding the involvement with guerrillas have centred (Stoll 1993, Hale 1997, Huet 2008). In the same way, urban desaparecidos are linked to union and guerrilla movements. Their public memorialization is also controversial as it highlights, diminishes or ignores the relationship of their ‘disappearance’ with the context, in particular with state violence.

Considering the different forms of expressing disagreement and contestation when commemorating someone by his or her condition of desaparecido/a a link between collective narratives and the aspects of their identity that are extoled in public memorialization is established. Furthermore, it allows to ponder if and how public memorialization is related to justice or reconciliation processes.

Historian Wanda Wechsler reflects on the Argentinian experience: “To account for the forms and effects of representation in Argentina implies linking them to memory processes, which leads us to consider if they are an extension of terror or whether they are a contribution to developing the trauma without this meaning leaving it in the past” (Wechsler, 2015:3). The relevance of addressing public memorialization is related to the understanding of enforced disappearance as a multidimensional phenomenon. In order to approach the problematic nature of the depiction of the desaparecidos in Guatemala, particularly in Guatemala City, Cobán and San Cristóbal, delving into ‘collective memory’ and ‘public spheres’ as key concepts can help in delimiting public memorialization in the frame of this work and in light of what enforced disappearance entails.

3.1 Disappearance and Public memorialization

“We didn’t know who did it nor why… he was a good person, never messed with anyone, he was caring and loving. We didn’t see him again, we still don’t know what happened exactly” (Extract of the interview with Doña Esperanza, mother of

disappeared Valeriano Ical, in Cobán, Alta Verapaz).

As mentioned previously, enforced disappearance is grounded in a series of components that aim at the suppression of the subjects in the most extreme way.

The refusal of disclosing the whereabouts of individuals, is part of the secrecy and silence that surround disappearances, constituting core elements of this practice. Argentinian scholar Pilar Calveiro suggests a ‘totalitarian logic’ behind the silence, as part of the strategy in which “secrecy, that which is hidden, that which is underground