Journal of Genocide Research

ISSN: 1462-3528 (Print) 1469-9494 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgr20

Carrying a heavy load: Mayan women’s

understandings of reparation in the aftermath of
genocide

Alison Crosby, M. Brinton Lykes & Brisna Caxaj

To cite this article: Alison Crosby, M. Brinton Lykes & Brisna Caxaj (2016) Carrying a heavy
load: Mayan women’s understandings of reparation in the aftermath of genocide, Journal of
Genocide Research, 18:2-3, 265-283, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2016.1186952

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2016.1186952

Published online: 28 Jun 2016.

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 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH, 2016
VOL. 18, NOS. 2–3, 265–283
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2016.1186952

Carrying a heavy load: Mayan women’s understandings

of reparation in the aftermath of genocide
Alison Crosby, M. Brinton Lykes and Brisna Caxaj

ABSTRACT
Drawing on extensive testimony from Ixil women survivors of sexual
violence, the 10 May 2013 verdict in the genocide trial of former de
facto Guatemalan head of state and army general Efraín Ríos Montt
highlighted the perpetration of sexual violence as an integral
component in the attempt to destroy the Maya Ixil as an ethnic
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group and thus evidence of genocide. Acknowledging that sexual

violence was a weapon of genocide in Guatemala contributes to a
critical analysis of how the racialized violence targeted against the
country’s indigenous peoples was gendered, and enables the
women and men who are survivors of these crimes to seek
redress. However, narrating sexual harm within justice-seeking
processes is not without complication, and trials alone cannot
respond to survivors’ demands for justice and social repair. This
article examines how fifty-four Maya Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Mam and
Chuj women who are survivors of sexual violence make meaning
of the everyday struggles to rethread their lives in the aftermath
of genocide. The article uses data from a four-year participatory
action research (PAR) project conducted by the authors with this
group of Mayan women, including a series of workshops that
used creative techniques—drawing, collage, dramatization and
body sculptures—to elicit more complex and contestational
stories than those emergent from a more linear narrative
approach to understanding harm suffered and efforts for redress.
Analysis of these data confirms that these Mayan women
survivors have woven their understanding of reparation from
three main threads: their experiences of loss and harm; their
recognition of the Guatemalan state’s duplicity; and their
protagonism in justice-seeking processes. The article concludes by
arguing that women survivors’ desire for repair requires attention
to the deep-seated impoverishment that they highlight as the
heavy load of gendered violence they carry with them.

Introduction
In handing down the verdict in the genocide trial of former de facto Guatemalan head of
state and army general Efraín Ríos Montt on 10 May 2013, Judge Yassmin Barrios high-
lighted the perpetration of sexual violence against women as an integral component in
the attempt to destroy the Maya Ixil as an ethnic group and thus evidence of genocide.
The court had heard extensive testimony from Ixil women survivors of sexual violence,
and the ruling highlighted ‘the pain and suffering that is still experienced by many of

CONTACT Alison Crosby acrosby@yorku.ca

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 266 A. CROSBY ET AL.

the women’.1 In its reparations ruling a few days later, the court stipulated that the Gua-
temalan state should issue a separate apology to Maya Ixil women. The trial proceedings
are part of a gradual shift over the past decade in Guatemala from occlusion to increased
visibility of the use of sexual harm as a weapon of war and genocide during thirty-six years
of armed conflict (1960–96).2 Further evidence of that shift is the paradigmatic Sepur Zarco
case of sexual slavery as a weapon of genocide that was, at the time of writing, also before
the Guatemalan courts.3
Acknowledging the use of sexual violence as a weapon of genocide in Guatemala con-
tributes to a critical analysis of how the racialized violence targeted against the country’s
indigenous peoples was gendered, and to enabling the women and men who are survi-
vors of these crimes to seek redress. However, as the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugo-
slavia and Rwanda have shown, narrating sexual harm within justice-seeking processes is
not without complication.4 Survivors (mostly women—the experiences of men who are
survivors of sexual harm are still for the most part occluded) are often asked to retell indi-
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viduated and event-based accounts of sexualized pain in what Theidon has referred to as a
‘pornography of violence’.5 Ironically, the legitimacy of many of these trials and tribunals
may increasingly rely on these ‘prized rape scripts’ or what Marcus refers to as the ‘gen-
dered grammar of violence’, at the expense of what survivors themselves may want to
say about their many experiences and/or multiple violations.6 Sexual harm is not the
only way in which war and genocide are gendered, and its reification within the legal
domain can preclude a broader understanding of how violence is structured through
gender, in intersection with other relations of power, including race.7 Thus, the challenge
in gendering justice is also to pay attention to the more complex, intersectional and col-
lective stories of resistance, contestation and co-optation within everyday life that survi-
vors of gendered harm narrate.8 And while prosecuting perpetrators is integral to
coming to terms with genocide and its aftermath, and indeed is a fundamental
demand of survivors themselves, trials alone are an inadequate response to the desire
for justice and social repair. They are also hugely time consuming and resource-heavy,
and include only a small component of both perpetrators and survivors.9 As such, trials
are a necessary but not sufficient component of the search for redress.
The authors’ four years (2009–13) of participatory action research (PAR) with fifty-four
Maya Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Chuj and Mam women survivors of sexual violence from three
regions of Guatemala (Alta Verapaz, Chimaltenango and Huehuetenango) exemplifies
these realities.10 In 2003 these women began working together with support from the
Actoras de Cambio (Actors for Change) consortium, which was comprised of the Unión
Nacional de Mujeres Guatemaltecas (National Union of Guatemalan Women, UNAMG),
the Equipo de Estudios Comunitarios y Acción Psicosocial (Community Studies and Psy-
chosocial Action Team, ECAP) and several independent feminists.11 These women’s experi-
ences of sexual violence were multifaceted and context-specific, and many live in the
same communities as the perpetrators.12 Much of the recovery process and search for
redress has taken place outside of their local communities of origin, the sites of their viola-
tions. They received psychosocial support, formed mutual support groups and partici-
pated in a ground-breaking oral history research project documenting their experiences
of the armed conflict, which resulted in the book The weavings of the soul: memories of
Mayan women survivors of sexual violence during the armed conflict.13 This volume has
been referred to by one of Guatemala’s pre-eminent feminist activists as ‘Guatemala’s
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 267

third historical memory report’.14 Some of these fifty-four women were the first to testify in
national public space during a Tribunal of Conscience for Women Survivors of Sexual Vio-
lence during the Armed Conflict held in Guatemala City in March 2010 before an audience
of more than eight hundred people, including members of the Guatemalan judiciary,
state institutions, civil society organizations and the international community.15 The Tribu-
nal was organized by the Alianza Rompiendo el Silencio y la Impunidad (Breaking the
Silence and Impunity Alliance) and other local organizations to promote increased
social recognition and acknowledgement of the racialized gendered harm suffered
by women survivors during the armed conflict and to prepare the groundwork for
future legal cases.16 Subsequently, with support from the Alliance, fifteen Q’eqchi’
women are also participating in the aforementioned Sepur Zarco paradigmatic legal
case of sexual slavery and sexual violence, and all fifty-four women have demanded inte-
gral reparations from the Guatemalan state before the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights.17
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In seeking to avoid a reductionist focus on the experience of sexual harm as an excep-

tionalized event, this article examines these fifty-four Mayan women’s articulation of what
Das refers to as ‘the everyday work of repair’ that is necessary to rethread their lives in the
aftermath of genocide.18 The article draws on data generated from a series of workshops
the authors facilitated using creative techniques—including drawing, collage, dramatiza-
tion and body sculptures—to elicit more complex and contestational stories than those
emergent from a more linear narrative approach to understanding harm suffered and
responses to its effects characteristic of most legal processes.19 The article begins by
tracing the heightened attention since the early 1990s to sexual harm as a weapon of
war and genocide within international legal and feminist communities, emphasizing the
importance of an anti-racist anti-colonial feminist lens in understanding gendered vio-
lence. Context is provided for the reparations debate in Guatemala, and in particular
the role of the state-sponsored National Reparations Program (PNR). The data from the
aforementioned series of workshops reveal that these Mayan women survivors have
woven their understanding of reparation from three main threads: their experience of
loss and harm; their recognition of the Guatemalan state’s duplicity; and their protagonism
in justice-seeking processes.20 The article argues for greater attention to and support of
Mayan women participants’ conviction that ‘the everyday work of repair’ demands a
focus on the deep-seated impoverishment that they represent as ‘the heavy load’ of gen-
dered violence they carry within them.

Sexual violence as weapon of war and instrument of genocide

The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s brought about an
increased recognition within feminist and legal thought that sexual violence is instrumen-
tal to war and genocide rather than an isolated or individuated event or by-product.21 As
the result of sustained organizing and pressure by international feminist activists, rape and
sexual violence were prosecuted as genocide and crimes against humanity in the ad hoc
tribunals for both these countries, and these violations were subsequently incorporated
into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).22 Today reports on the
atrocities of sexual violence perpetrated in ongoing and emerging conflicts are pervasive
within international media and the focus of human rights campaigns.23
 268 A. CROSBY ET AL.

While ‘breaking the silence’ on this issue within the international legal domain has been
recognized as a significant advance in combatting gendered violence, the feminist litera-
ture has also posed critical questions about the impact of this increased visibility on the
struggles by survivors themselves for justice and reparation. For example, the transcripts
of testimonies by women survivors of sexual violence before the International Criminal Tri-
bunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda reveal that legal forms of justice are not
necessarily reparatory for women, and indeed present the very real possibility of revictimi-
zation, stigmatization and ostracism.24 As Henry points out, the law, not the survivor,
shapes the testimony, which is fragmented to suit the demands of the legal process. As
such, it is not ‘her’ story, but rather the court’s.25 And the story women are repeatedly
asked to tell is one of sexual harm and degradation, in contrast to the perpetrators,
who are not asked to tell the horrific details of their crimes. As Henry argues, within the
legal context, ‘rape is an identity-producing practice. Subjectivity is often contingent on
narratives of injury and victimization’.26 The ‘raped woman’ is thus often a product of
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these processes.27
In seeking to elucidate the meaning and significance of the increasing recognition of
the issue of sexual harm within international rights regimes, Jaleel traces the protagonist
role played by US and transnational feminists, arguing that it ‘retreads and reconfigures
the heated 1980s US Sex Wars debates on workings of gender, sex, race and power’.28
In the international domain we can see the influence of the second-wave feminist position
that universalizes ‘both “woman-as-a-category” and “rape-as-act”’, the effect of which ‘is to
place these terms on a theoretically pristine plane untouched by socio-historical context,
or competing, interrelated iterations of violence’.29 What is occluded is an understanding
of the historical, material and racialized specificities ‘through which gender and race gain
cultural meaning’.30 As intersectional feminist theory has taught us, the meaning of gen-
dered violence itself is inherently racialized, as well as classed and sexualized.31 Women
are not all the same, and do not experience violence in the same ways.32
The underlying assumption ‘of women as a group united through shared sexual vulner-
ability’33 also serves to erase histories of colonization, imperialism and white privilege that
continue to this day. For example, Andrea Smith points to a statement made by Catharine
MacKinnon (a key actor in shaping international jurisprudence on rape as a weapon of war
and genocide) in reference to the war in Bosnia, that is, that ‘the world has never seen sex
used this consciously, this cynically, this elaborately, this openly, this systematically, as a
means of destroying a whole people’ (emphasis added by Smith).34 Smith notes that
such statements not only erase the pervasive and systemic perpetration of sexual violence
against indigenous women in, for example, the Guatemalan armed conflict, and in
Chiapas, Mexico, but also within MacKinnon’s own country, the United States of
America, where ‘millions of Native people were raped, sexually mutilated, and murdered’
during colonization, with the traces of this violence continuing into the present.35
An anti-racist anti-colonial feminist lens enables us to unpack the assumed universalism
of the ‘violence against women’ paradigm and to centre indigenous women’s experiences
of colonial oppression. In the Guatemalan context, it allows us to understand how gen-
dered violence is deeply racialized within centuries of colonization intent on the elimin-
ation of indigeneity itself. Sexual violence during the thirty-six-year armed conflict
targeted indigenous women’s bodies and the destruction of the indigenous community
as a whole. Velásquez Nimatuj highlights the courage of indigenous women survivors
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 269

of sexual violence who are seeking justice within a deeply racist Guatemalan legal system
‘that does not recognize their maternal languages, that racializes them as culturally
inferior, and as beings who do not feel, do not suffer, do not dream’.36 She discusses
the systematic and pervasive forms of gendered racist exclusion and othering that indi-
genous women experience in their everyday lives at the hands of state institutions who
should be defending and protecting their interests. As she argues, ‘not taking into con-
sideration the culture of the women who lived these crimes means generalizing the
causes and impacts of sexual violence within a cultural vacuum and thus reproducing
the structural racism that has characterized the Guatemalan state’.37
An anti-racist anti-colonial feminist lens also draws our attention to the circulations of
power within transnational narratives of sexual harm, and the desire of western audiences,
feminists included, to hear stories of abjection from racialized gendered subjects.38 Some
have argued that this act of witnessing on the part of those in the West is at least in part
about deeply imbued colonial fantasies of rescue and the continuous remaking of white
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selfhood as rescuer.39 As such, testimonies of pain and loss involve a dialogic between
speaker and listener that is fractured and fraught by historical relations of power, and
tenuous at best. Susan Sontag once said, ‘No “we” should be taken for granted when
the subject is looking at other people’s pain’.40 As white North Americans (Crosby and
Lykes) and a mestiza Guatemalan (Caxaj), the authors are deeply implicated within such
dynamics, which can reshape the stories that protagonists want to tell. They have
sought to engage in a constant interrogation of their positioning as researchers and to for-
mulate a design and select methodologies that facilitate the displacement of their narra-
tive privilege to enable Mayan women’s stories to be told and heard. During the initial
phase of this research, Mayan women protagonists made clear that they were not inter-
ested in retelling their stories of sexual harm, but rather in working together, and with
the authors, to rethread a better future for themselves and their children. Participatory pro-
cesses through which Mayan protagonists shared their conceptions of reparation were
designed to facilitate multiple levels of collaborative reflection and action among
authors, Mayan protagonists and local intermediaries and co-researchers.41 Before pro-
ceeding to an examination of Mayan women’s conceptions of reparation as facilitated
through the use of the creative arts, the following section details the particular context
in Guatemala for women survivors’ reparations struggles.

Gender and reparation in Guatemala

Transitional justice refers to the mechanisms associated with attempts by societies emer-
ging from periods of state repression, armed conflict, genocidal violence and mass viola-
tions of human rights to come to terms with the past and ensure non-repetition.42 Such
mechanisms typically include war crimes tribunals and prosecutions, truth commissions
and reparations programmes. Reparations have increasingly come to the fore within tran-
sitional justice discourse because they are perceived to be more ‘victim-centred’ than
forms of retributive justice such as prosecutions, although the two of course are integrally
linked.43 Hamber defines the concept of reparation as ‘the psychological state in which
victims feel that adequate amends have been made for a wrong committed’.44 And repara-
tions are ‘the acts or objects associated with attempts to make amends’.45 Reparations are
thus the means through which reparation is sought. As Hamber states, ‘from an individual
 270 A. CROSBY ET AL.

psychological perspective, it is helpful to think about the aim of reparations … as being

able to make reparation’.46 However, there is acknowledgement within the transitional
justice literature that in situations of massive violations of human rights such as the gen-
ocidal armed conflict in Guatemala, it is not possible to adequately compensate for what
has been lost, that is, we cannot ‘repair the irreparable’.47 Thus, it has been argued that
reparations in such contexts are largely symbolic, even when material compensation is
provided.48 Miller makes the important point that this framing of the reparations
debate can set survivors up for frustration and disappointment, a sense of being duped,
because the recognition that it is not possible to ‘repair the irreparable’ leads to the
sense ‘simultaneously that reparation is necessary as a progressive gesture and that its
objectives are inherently unreachable if they include the fantasy of actual repair’.49
Thus, reparation is always inherently qualified or indeed fantastical but brings cruel
hope to survivors of the possibility of something better, hence their deep-seated bitter-
ness towards the state-sponsored reparations programme, as will be discussed below in
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the case of Guatemala, and which has also been seen in Peru and South Africa, to
name some recent examples.50
The United Nations-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) report
released in 1999 in the aftermath of the peace accords signed in 1996 included a series
of recommendations to the Guatemalan state, including reparations to the victims of
the massive violations of human rights committed during the war.51 The Guatemalan gov-
ernment finally approved a National Reparations Program (PNR) in 2003, with a thirteen-
year mandate.52 Sexual violence was included in the list of crimes meriting reparation
accepted by the PNR, as well as forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, torture,
forced displacement and forced recruitment of minors. The PNR’s original policy docu-
ment included a range of reparations measures to be provided to qualified beneficiaries,
including material restitution, economic indemnification, psychosocial reparation and
rehabilitation, dignification of victims and cultural reparations.53 At the time of writing,
the only components that had been implemented were economic indemnification, with
the handing out of cheques to some victims after a verification process, and material res-
titution through a partial and incomplete housing programme.54 The authors’ research
emerged in part to understand how women survivors of sexual violence engaged with
this process, including what it meant to them to receive—or be denied—monetary com-
pensation for sexual harm.55 Most of the fifty-four Mayan women in this study had
received compensation from the PNR, some were still waiting and a few had had their
applications partially or fully denied.

Experiences and discourses of repair

Whatever the intention, receiving money from the state for sexual harm is fraught. On the
one hand it is a concrete acknowledgement by the state of harm suffered, and therefore
part of the dignification process.56 On the other hand, some women survivors described
feeling like they had been ‘bought off’ or ‘treated like prostitutes’. They were routinely mis-
treated by PNR staff, who often disbelieved their testimony of sexual harm.57 In one inter-
view the authors conducted with PNR staff, they seemed to be suggesting that community
members manipulated indigenous women to invent stories of sexual harm in order to
receive reparations. Receiving reparations for sexual harm has generated conflict with
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 271

family and community members. A majority of the women in this research project had not
formally ‘told’ their family members they were survivors of sexual violence, and receiving a
cheque for this crime ‘outed’ them as such, often leading to stigmatization and ostra-
cism.58 Sometimes family members have confiscated the funds. Other women have
used the money to pay for health care for the long-term illnesses and bodily harm that
had resulted from the original violation suffered. The provision of health care to survivors
of sexual violence was one of the PNR’s commitments that for the most part had not been
implemented.59
In Guatemala, there are two Spanish terms used to talk about reparation/s. Resarci-
miento is used to refer to economic indemnification in particular, and is associated with
the PNR. In contrast, as Viaene points out, the term reparación refers more broadly to
‘the conjunction of the search for justice, truth-seeking efforts (such as the exhumation
of clandestine graves of forcibly disappeared people) and initiatives to recover historical
memory’.60 As such, it refers to the broader notion of reparation/s within the transitional
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justice literature discussed above. In our research protagonists also referred to this as
reparación integral, that is, integral or holistic reparation/s.61
There is no direct translation of reparación or resarcimiento in the Mayan linguistic
groups participating in this project. In a group interview the authors conducted in 2010
with the Mayan women interpreters who participated in the project, they indicated that
in Q’eqchi’, they use Xii’ti’n, which means ‘to repair what is broken’.62 In Kaqchikel,
Q’ojoj is used, which means ‘to sew something that is ripped or to patch something
back together’, while emphasizing that it cannot be fully repaired, ‘it’s not the same [as
before]’. In one of the workshops, one Mayan woman protagonist noted that resarcimiento
is translated in Kaqchikel as ‘a little bit of help’ because ‘it is not the price of a loved one nor
the cost of being raped’. The Q’eqchi’-speaking interpreters emphasized the importance of
context in translation and interpretation: ‘We tried to find translations through dictionaries
but translations aren’t always exact, [they] aren’t the same [as] interpretation. We haven’t
ever made a literal translation; it’s always situated in their lived experience.’ Within these
linguistic limitations and using the creative arts to facilitate communication among diverse
actors, this research project sought to document what integral reparations mean to a par-
ticular group of Mayan women survivors of sexual violence. Some of the findings are sum-
marized below.

The demand for integral reparations

In July 2012 and June 2013, the authors facilitated a series of participatory workshops with
Mayan women protagonists exploring their conceptions of reparation/s. Creative tech-
niques—including dramatization, collage, drawing and image theatre—were used to
elicit the complexities of protagonists’ own stories and emotional responses to the
issues under discussion. These creative resources facilitated women’s embodied engage-
ment with the issues, enabling all to interact across linguistic and literacy barriers while
sharing experiences through the arts. Despite these resources, as discussed earlier, the dia-
logical processes described herein were constrained by inequities of power and linguistic
challenges that limited protagonists’ direct engagement with one another, let alone with
the authors. The epistemology that informs this work recognizes that there is no unme-
diated voice in any such process, but at the same time, it is important to avoid the
 272 A. CROSBY ET AL.

conclusion that processes such as these are always over-determined. Mayan women pro-
tagonists have something to say that they wish others to hear; this was a primary motiv-
ation for initiating this collaborative process. And in turn, such a speech act demands
response.63
In the workshop in July 2012, participants worked within their particular ethno-Mayan
linguistic groups—Kaqchikel, Chuj, Mam and Q’eqchi’—to create a collage from newspa-
per clippings that they selected to convey their understanding(s) of reparation. This
activity was preceded by a brainstorming session with the group as a whole that gener-
ated a set of free associations to the two Spanish terms for reparation/s, resarcimiento
and reparación integral. The women drew from this list and from ideas generated in
their linguistic group conversations to select images and organize them in a group
collage that was then presented to all workshop participants and collectively analysed,
first by the group as whole, in terms of what they saw in the collages, and then by the
collage creators.
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In the workshop held in June 2013 with many of the same women, the first set of par-
ticipatory activities focused on a review and re-analysis of the collages produced in 2012,
as well as a set of collages made by intermediaries, including members of the Breaking the
Silence and Impunity Alliance, Mayan women interpreters and the authors as researchers,
during a workshop in 2010. A second set of activities used several image theatre tech-
niques from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed,64 wherein each of the four
Mayan groups as well as UNAMG staff developed and then performed a body sculpture
that represented their embodied understanding of reparation/s, based on their interpret-
ation of the collages. The workshop participants then collectively analysed these perform-
ances, with the larger group first recounting what they had seen, followed by the
performers providing their explanation.65
A multi-level approach was used to analyse the data generated throughout this process.
As described above, participants themselves generated a first level of analysis. They com-
mented on their own and their peers’ creative outputs, processes that were documented
through tape recordings, photographs, notes on newsprint and research assistants’
detailed field notes. The first two authors then engaged in a collaborative analysis of
data from these creative workshops, following the first two thematic coding levels of con-
structivist grounded theory.66 Three main thematic areas related to protagonists’ con-
ception of reparation were identified through this coding process: firstly, as an
articulation of loss and harm; secondly, as a relationship to the state; and thirdly, as a
refraction of their emerging sense of protagonism. The analyses by Mayan women of
these thematic areas, which are discussed below, are drawn from a systematic thematic
analysis of these multiple iterations of data, which have been recorded and transcribed.
The quotes are drawn from these recorded and transcribed discussions, translated from
the Mayan languages by the interpreters and from Spanish by the authors.

‘Un nudo en la garganta’ [the lump in my throat]: articulations of loss and harm
In discussing their understanding of reparation, participants highlighted experiences of
loss and harm in both their material and symbolic dimensions, as well as the continuities
of violence from the past to the present. Thus, the irreparable nature of the harm suffered
was front and centre; many noted that what was lost cannot be replaced. The material
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 273

dimensions of loss and harm emphasized the all-encompassing destruction of lives and
livelihoods: ‘the armed conflict destroyed all that we had’. Homes were burned to the
ground, crops were destroyed and animals were killed, lands and all belongings and pos-
sessions were lost. ‘We became refugees and left everything, we left naked’, and on return,
‘we found we had no land’. The husbands of all the Q’eqchi’ women participants were
killed by the military over a land dispute with wealthy plantation owners, and many of
the Chuj, Mam and Kaqchikel women were also widowed. For some, the loss of their hus-
bands led to loss of land and livelihoods and therefore a deepening impoverishment.67
Given the overwhelming nature of loss and harm, the material compensation that was
provided by the PNR was recognized as being inherently inadequate: ‘By paying money,
they didn’t make up for it’. Another woman said, ‘It can never be recovered, they killed my
father, they never gave me anything, even if they gave me Q20,000 [US$2,600], it wouldn’t
make up for his life’. The transformative nature of loss was also highlighted in terms of
culture and way of life: ‘We left our lives but also our culture, we no longer live as we
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did before’.
The experience of sexual violence left a permanent embodied mark that was ever
present, thirty years later: ‘Soldiers raped us and it affected our health’. A sense of isolation
and rejection was engendered therein, and the long-term effects on health were a
repeated refrain: ‘Women remain ill over a long period of time but no one gives them
any attention’. The affective dimensions of loss and harm were a constant thread.
Women referred to their fear and sadness, their isolation, their shame and their shyness,
particularly before they started working together: ‘This is how we were found. We did
not look at each other, we did not understand what was happening’, and ‘We couldn’t
talk … nobody listened to us’. But some also emphasized their desire for change: ‘We
wanted to talk, we wanted to relieve our suffering; it was the lump in our throat’.
Protagonists’ stories of loss and harm as central to their understanding of reparation
emphasized continuities between the past and the present in terms of experiences of vio-
lence and impoverishment: ‘Today is similar, we are shut in, closed in on fincas [planta-
tions], cornered into the worst land’; ‘They left us in poverty, we live in poverty’. The
psychosocial effects of the war are ongoing: ‘What happened during the war was
present in our heads, what happened in the 80s is present now’. Some participants or
their families and community members are facing violent evictions over land disputes
with transnational corporations, particularly in the Polochic Valley, which they connect
to their experience of violence during the war and the loss of their husbands due to dis-
putes over land. They also emphasized the gendered nature of their continuous experi-
ence of loss and harm: ‘Women continue to be mistreated and discriminated against’.
One striking image in the collages was a photograph of a woman carrying a heavy load,
representing women’s daily labour. The creators of this collage described the image as
‘violence against women’. This representation of the weight or burden women bear was
but one example of a persistent insistence by protagonists in locating violence within
its structural and economic dimensions, in emphasizing the impoverishment the war
caused, and in drawing attention to the continuing presence of violence in their everyday
lives. Mayan women survivors’ resignification of the meaning of gendered violence has
resonance with Miller’s critique of what she refers to as the ‘constructed invisibility of
economic questions’68 within the transitional justice paradigm, and the tendency when
 274 A. CROSBY ET AL.

addressing violence to ‘background structural factors in favour of more obvious concerns

about physical violence’.69

‘Nos engañaron’ [we were duped]: relationship to the Guatemalan state

Protagonists were very clear that the Guatemalan state was responsible for the atrocities
committed against them and for their continuing deep-seated impoverishment. It was
thus the state’s responsibility to provide reparations. The relationship to the state was articu-
lated in a number of ways: the responsibility of the state for both past and present violence;
their demand of the state for integral reparation; and an overwhelming sense that the state
had lied to them and discriminated against them as indigenous women. Nos engañaron—
we were duped—was a constant refrain throughout multiple workshop discussions.70
The responsibility of the state for the violence perpetrated during the armed conflict was
in part centred around Ríos Montt, a recurring figure in the reparations collages (the work-
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shops were conducted during and post trial): ‘Ríos Montt caused us much harm in the years
’82 and ’83’; ‘It was Ríos Montt’s fault that we suffered; yes, there was genocide’. There were
many references to the army’s role in the violence: ‘Soldiers raped us’; ‘During the violence
they burned everything’; ‘They destroyed the coffee and harvested our crops’. The women
also connected the violence in the past to the violence and impoverishment they suffer
today, and to the continued power of economic elites and the military: ‘Ríos Montt has econ-
omic power, that is why he was freed’. The role of corporations in the violence of today was a
constant theme, in particular in reference to aforementioned violent land evictions in the
Polochic Valley: ‘Campesinos [peasants] occupy the land and the rich send guards and sol-
diers to defend themselves; they use violence not dialogue’.
Mayan women’s demand that the state provide reparations had its material and sym-
bolic dimensions. In discussing the images used in the collages, the women emphasized
that state-sponsored reparations should include land, as well as capital, including seed
money for projects such as coffee plants, and access to jobs. They also highlighted the
need for houses and furniture, crops and animals, health care and education, in particular
scholarships for their children. The dignification of victims by the state was also important,
that is, that the state recognize and promote broader societal awareness of the suffering of
women survivors during the armed conflict and de-stigmatize survivors by acknowledging
that this violence was not their fault.
The most visceral aspect of protagonists’ discussion of their relationship to the Guate-
malan state was the sense that the state had failed them when it came to fulfilling the
initial promise of the PNR to provide integral reparation, not just monetary compensation.
There was a palpable feeling of bitterness towards the PNR. As one woman commented:
‘When it started, it was to recognize/acknowledge victims, now the government considers
it past; they no longer want to talk about it, it’s no longer in fashion’. Another said, ‘It’s just
to distract; treating you like a child so you don’t complain’. One woman noted: ‘It’s to shut
you up, cover your mouth’. Someone else stated: ‘It’s not right, not valid’. The overly
bureaucratic PNR demanded ‘requirements we don’t have’, and lands were not returned.
There were several references to the PNR’s incomplete housing programme, with half-built
homes, and the expectation that victims provide their own building materials. And in
regards to the education commitments, as one woman commented about one of the
collages:
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 275

[It] reflects children studying but it makes us sad because campesino communities don’t have
this chance to learn how to read and write, which the PNR has in its scholarship programmes.
But this is not given to the victims. We think it is only the rich who have this possibility.

All of the inadequacies and unfulfilled promises of the PNR process have led to a sense of
having been duped and lied to: ‘This government lies’; ‘While the government lives
happily, we live in poverty’. They understood that they were discriminated against
because they were indigenous women: ‘As indigenous women they continue to use us
through deception’.

An emerging sense of protagonism

The reparations collages and image theatre performances exemplified the protagonism
engendered by participants’ engagement in these collective struggles for truth, justice
and reparation. They described processes through which they organize themselves, par-
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ticipate in demonstrations and commemorative activities to demand that their rights

are respected, and actively engage at the community level. They have told their stories
to outsiders, to be documented and passed down to their children and grandchildren.
Some are also testifying before the courts to have those responsible for violations
against them brought to justice. ‘We are mobilizing to get the government to comply
[with our demands].’ Survivors’ protagonism is dialogically constructed in relationship to
and with the organizations that have accompanied them over the past decade: UNAMG
and ECAP, and more recently MTM. They represented the organizations and the authors
in their drawings. They talked about how these organizations ‘helped us overcome our
fear’; ‘Now with the organizations we can participate—which was also medicine for us’.
The affective component of protagonism is clear when the women talk about feelings
of happiness in participating in these processes: ‘Now we feel happy. Before we were
ashamed to give opinions and talk but not now’. Women noted that a major driving
force for them was to ensure that the violations they experienced would never happen
to their daughters and granddaughters.
Protagonists expressed a strong desire to keep this ‘community of women’ that they
had formed together in this work and beyond the borders of their local community.
They described its reparative effects, noting that it bridged their often fractured and frac-
tious local indigenous communities. However, they also increasingly recognized the need
to build local organizational structures within their communities of origin: ‘We are demon-
strating and creating women’s committees in our community’. They talked about the
relationships of trust that have been built among the women at the community level: ‘It
is necessary to give support to other women, I am not going to stay with my arms
crossed if I see another woman’s suffering’; ‘How are we going to accomplish reparations
for women who have not received them?’

Concluding reflections: foregrounding structural violence and ‘the

everyday work of repair’
As discussed in this article, there has been, and rightly so, an increasing focus within
international rights regimes, including the feminist and legal communities, on making
 276 A. CROSBY ET AL.

visible or ‘breaking the silence’ about the systematic perpetration of sexual harm
against women within war (the widespread use of sexual violence against men is a
silence still waiting to be broken71). Increasingly, as in the Ríos Montt and Sepur
Zarco trials in Guatemala, sexual violence against women is revealed to be an integral
component of genocide whose perpetrators must be prosecuted. This article has
sought to clarify ways in which the legal domain, albeit a crucial component of
justice, is not the only one. The ‘exceptional moments’ of these trials—and their unpre-
dictable outcomes—need to be situated within a broader politics of ‘everyday repair’ to
which Das refers. In the aftermath of the violence of Partition, Das describes how ‘life
was recovered not through some grand gestures in the realm of the transcendent but
through a descent into the ordinary’.72
Transitional justice mechanisms thus have a tendency to submerge the everyday as
well as the structural. As Miller points out, structures of violence and histories of colo-
nization and dispossession are reduced to ‘the context’, rather than being foregrounded
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as violations in and of themselves.73 As an example, she talks about South Africa follow-
ing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process, where apartheid ‘can become a
story about racism or about specific, individual rights violations rather than about long-
term, systemic abuse born of a colonial project with economic objectives’.74 What is
occluded is the question of redistribution of resources, and in particular of land.
While Miller does not attend to the gendered dimensions of these issues, her critique
resonates with the findings of this research. Protagonists’ use of a photograph of a
woman carrying a heavy load to illustrate their understanding of gendered violence
is emblematic of a constant thread running through the four years of this research,
that is, the burden of extreme impoverishment that Mayan women carry with them,
which is rooted not only within the thirty-six years of genocidal violence, but also
within centuries of colonial dispossession of Guatemala’s indigenous peoples. As
such, what must be repaired is not only the harm to women’s individual bodies but
also the structural harm and loss experienced by the collective body, that is, Mayan
women and the indigenous communities in which they live. Their understandings of
harm and the demand for integral reparation do not negate their experiences of indi-
viduated bodily harm but rather seek to situate that demand within legacies of gen-
dered racialized violence, that is, as social suffering.75
Transitional justice discourse all too frequently spectacularizes and exceptionalizes
sexual harm. The authors sought through the participatory workshops discussed in this
article to generate alternative spaces for a form of storytelling that illuminated this
group of women survivors’ protagonism and facilitated their performative narrations of
multifaceted understandings of sexual violence and what reparation of this irreparable
harm means to them. Many of the stories they have told and/or represented through
embodied images and performances are of everyday structural violence, of ‘women carry-
ing a heavy load’. As such, they are demanding from the Guatemalan state access to land,
housing, capital and health care, as well as a guarantee of non-repetition of the violence,
so that their daughters and granddaughters and sons and grandsons will never experience
the violations whose legacies they embody. They are moving beyond suffering and claim-
ing their protagonism to build relationships and communities—both indigenous and of
women—that will help them and other Mayan women meet the needs of their families
from one day to the next.
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 277

Notes
1. Open Society Justice Initiative, Judging a dictator: the trial of Guatemala’s Ríos Montt, p. 14,
available at: http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/judging-dicatator-
trial-guatemala-rios-montt-11072013.pdf (accessed 24 June 2015).
2. While the truth-telling reports issued by the Catholic Church’s Recovery of Historical Memory
(REMHI) and the United Nations-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) in the
aftermath of the peace accords signed in 1996 did highlight the perpetration of sexual vio-
lence by armed actors, these violations were considered to be under-reported, with data col-
lected mainly through third-party testimony. The voices of women survivors themselves were
for the most part absent. CEH, Guatemala: memoria del silencio (Tz’inil Na’tab’al) (Guatemala,
1999); REMHI, Nunca más: informe del proyecto interdiocesano de recuperación de la memoria
histórica (Guatemala: Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala [hereafter:
ODHAG], 1998). For a gendered analysis of these reports, see Yolanda Aguilar and Amandine
Fulchiron, ‘El carácter sexual de la cultura de violencia contra las mujeres’, in La violencia en
Guatemala: algunas perspectivas (Guatemala City: Faculdad Latinoamericana de Ciencias
Sociales [hereafter: FLACSO]/United Nations Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization
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[hereafter: UNESCO], 2005), pp. 149–245; Catherine Nolin Hanlon and Finola Shankar, ‘Gen-
dered spaces of terror and assault: the testimonio of REMHI and the Commission for Historical
Clarification in Guatemala’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, Vol. 7,
No. 3, 2000, pp. 265–286; Rebecca Patterson-Markowitz, Elizabeth Oglesby and Sallie Marston,
‘“Subjects of change”: feminist geopolitics and gendered truth-telling in Guatemala’, Journal of
International Women’s Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4, 2012, pp. 82–99.
3. In September 2011, a criminal complaint was filed by fifteen Maya Q’eqchi’ women in the local
courts in Puerto Barrios. The complaint specified genocide and crimes against humanity based
on the women’s sexual and domestic enslavement in the Sepur Zarco base in El Estor, Izabal
for extended periods between 1982 and 1986. In September 2012 the women gave testimony
in the preliminary hearing, which was held in the national courts in Guatemala City due to
security concerns, given that the perpetrators, who live in the same communities as the plain-
tiffs, had not yet been arrested. In June 2012, arrest warrants were issued for two perpetrators,
Lieutenant Colonel Esteelmer Reyes Girón, the former commander of the Sepur Zarco military
base, and Heriberto Valdéz Asij, the former military commissioner in the region. On 14 October
2014, the Court for High Risk Crimes in Guatemala City ruled that there was sufficient evidence
to begin criminal proceedings against them for crimes against humanity. Reyes was charged
with sexual violence and sexual slavery, domestic slavery and the assassination of Dominga
Coc and her two daughters, and Valdéz was charged with sexual violence and forced disap-
pearances. On 22 June 2015, the investigative judge accepted most of the evidence, and
arranged for its transfer to a three-judge high-risk court that oversees complex cases, with
a trial date expected to be set shortly thereafter. For more information about the Sepur
Zarco case, see Maya Alvarado, Susana Navarro, Ana Lucía Morán and Paula Barrios (eds.),
Nuestra mirada está en la justicia: caso Sepur Zarco (Guatemala City: Alianza Rompiendo el
Silencio y la Impunidad, 2013), and the website www.alianzarompiendoelsilencio.com
(accessed 24 June 2015). This article was completed prior to the Sepur Zarco trial, which
took place in February 2016. Reyes and Valdez were found guilty of the charges, and sen-
tenced to 120 and 240 years in prison respectively. http://www.ijmonitor.org/2016/02/
guatemala-court-finds-both-sepur-zarco-defendants-guilty/.
4. Julie Mertus, ‘Shouting from the bottom of the well: the impact of international trials for
wartime rape on women’s agency’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 6, No. 1,
2004, pp. 110–128; Binaifer Nowrojee, ‘“Your justice is too slow”: will the ICTR fail Rwanda’s
rape victims?’, Occasional Paper 10 (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social
Development [hereafter: UNRISD], 2005).
5. Kimberly Theidon, ‘Gender in transition: common sense, women and war’, Journal of Human
Rights, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2007, p. 455.
 278 A. CROSBY ET AL.

6. Sharon Marcus, ’Fighting bodies, fighting words: a theory and politics of rape prevention’, in
Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (eds.), Feminists theorize the political (New York: Routledge,
1992), p.392, as cited in Doris E. Buss, ‘Rethinking “rape as a weapon of war”’, Feminist Legal
Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2009, p. 155.
7. Kimberly Theidon, Intimate enemies: violence and reconciliation in Peru (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
8. Fiona Ross, Bearing witness: women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa
(London: Pluto Press, 2003); Theidon, ‘Gender in transition’.
9. Carlota McAllister and Diane M. Nelson (eds.), War by other means: aftermath in post-genocide
Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
10. This research project was a collaborative endeavour between York University, Boston College
and the Unión Nacional de Mujeres Guatemaltecas (National Union of Guatemalan Women,
UNAMG). In addition to the data reported here, the authors interviewed a series of state
and civil society stakeholders during these four years, including National Reparations
Program (PNR) staff, and facilitated a number of other workshops with women survivors
both from this project and in the area of Chajul, Quiché. They also had access to the forty-
eight transcripts of women’s individual testimonies collected by the group of feminist
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lawyers Mujeres Transformando el Mundo (Women Transforming the World, MTM) in prep-
aration for a reparations case presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
11. For another example of work with survivors on the issue of sexual violence in Guatemala, see
ODHAG, Silenciaron nuestra historia … ahora queremos justicia: las violaciones a los derechos
humanos cometidos contra las mujeres durante el Conflicto Armado Interno en la región
Q’eqchi’ (Guatemala: ODHAG and Centro de Análisis Forense y Ciencias Aplicadas [hereafter:
CAFCA], 2014).
12. These women were targets of sexual violence by armed actors during the counterinsurgency
campaigns conducted by the Guatemalan state in the 1980s, including the period between
1981 and 1983 during which the CEH report concluded that genocide was committed
against four Mayan groups (Q’anjob’al, Chuj, Ixil and K’iche’) in the north and north-western
parts of the country (El Quiché, Huehuetenango and Baja Verapaz). This period encompasses
the seventeen months that Ríos Montt was in power, between 1982 and 1983. Some of these
women were held for months at a time as sex slaves in the Sepur Zarco military camp between
1982 and 1986 (see endnote 3), others were raped by soldiers in public in front of their entire
communities, or within their homes, sometimes on an ongoing basis, while others were raped
by civil patrol members from their own or neighbouring communities. And a few of the fifty-
four women were raped by the guerrillas. These varied experiences of sexual violence, and
differing relationships to perpetrators, some of whom were known, others not, have influ-
enced how survivors have come to terms with and made meaning of this violence. For
further discussion of these particular contexts and specificities of sexual violence against
these Mayan women during the armed conflict, see Amandine Fulchiron, Olga Alicia Paz y
Paz Bailey and Angélica López, Tejidos que lleva el alma: memoria de las mujeres mayas sobre-
vivientes de violación sexual durante el conflicto armado (Guatemala City: ECAP, UNAMG and
F&G Editores, 2009).
13. Fulchiron et al., Tejidos que lleva el alma.
14. Yolanda Aguilar, ‘Presentación: Salir del dolor para transitar hacia modelos de relación soli-
daria, humana y justa’, in Fulchiron et al., Tejidos que lleva el alma, p. 2.
15. Irantzu Mendia Azkue and Gloria Gúzman Orellana (eds.), Ni olvido, ni silencio: tribunal de con-
ciencia contra la violencia sexual hacia las mujeres durante el conflicto armado en Guatemala
(Bilbao, Spain: Universidad de Pais Vasco, Hegoa and UNAMG, 2012); Alison Crosby and
M. Brinton Lykes, ‘Mayan women survivors speak: the gendered relations of truth-telling in
postwar Guatemala’, The International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 10, 2011, pp. 1–21.
16. The Alliance is comprised of UNAMG, ECAP and MTM. The widows’ organization Coordinadora
Nacional de Viudas de Guatemala (CONAVIGUA) and the feminist newspaper collective La
Cuerda also participated in the organization of the Tribunal of Conscience.
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 279

17. One of the Q’eqchi’ women who was a plaintiff in the Sepur Zarco case, and also a member of
the broader group of fifty-four, passed away in 2013. She was able to give testimony in 2012
before she died and remains a plaintiff in the Sepur Zarco case.
18. Veena Das, Life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007), p. 62. On the exceptionalization and spectacularization of violence,
see, for example, Deborah A. Thomas, Exceptional violence: embodied citizenship in transna-
tional Jamaica (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011).
19. For a more detailed discussion of the role of creativity in this research, see M. Brinton Lykes
and Alison Crosby, ‘Creative methodologies as a resource for Mayan women’s protagonism’,
in Brandon Hamber and Elizabeth Gallagher (eds.), Psychosocial perspectives on peacebuilding
(Switzerland: Springer International Publications, 2015), pp. 147–186.
20. In this article and in the research more broadly, the concept of a protagonist is used ‘to decon-
struct dominant psychological discourses of women as “victims,” “survivors,” “selves,” “individ-
uals,” and/or “subjects.” Mayan women are actively engaged in constructivist and discursive
performances through which they are narrating new, mobile meanings of “Mayan woman,”
repositioning themselves at the interstices of multiple communities. The term represents
person-in-context, invoking the Greek chorus within theatre or the “call-response” within
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African American church contexts’ (Lykes and Crosby, ‘Creative methodologies’, p. 147). As
such, protagonism is a dialogical construct, and in the processes described in this article,
Mayan women are situated in relation to one another, as well as to those who accompany
them, the authors as researchers included.
21. Buss, ‘Rethinking “rape as a weapon of war”’, p. 145; Karen Engle, ‘Feminism and its (dis)con-
tents: criminalizing wartime rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, American Journal of International
Law, Vol. 99, No. 4, 2005, pp. 778–817; Nicola Henry, ‘Witness to rape: the limits and potential
of international war crimes trials for victims of wartime sexual violence’, International Journal of
Transitional Justice, Vol. 3, 2009, pp. 114–134; Rana Jaleel, ‘Weapons of sex, weapons of war’,
Cultural Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2013, pp. 115–135.
22. Rhonda Copelon, ‘International human rights dimensions of intimate violence: another strand
in the dialectic of feminist lawmaking’, American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy and
Law, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2002, pp. 865–877; Catharine MacKinnon, ‘Defining rape internationally: a
comment on Akayesu’, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2006, pp. 940–
958.
23. For example, the Global Summit to End Violence in Conflict, which took place in June 2014,
brought together representatives from 117 countries, as well as UN and aid agencies, non-
governmental organizations, survivors and around two thousand delegates. See Harriet Sher-
wood, ‘International protocol launched to deal with sexual violence in conflict’, The Guardian,
11 June 2014, available at: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/jun/11/
protocol-launched-sexual-violence-in-conflict (accessed 24 June 2015); and a follow-up
article one year later that critically assesses the Summit’s achievements: Mark Townsend,
‘Revealed: how the world turned its back on rape victims of Congo’, The Guardian, 13 June
2015, available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/13/rape-victims-congo-
world-turned-away (accessed 24 June 2015).
24. Kirsten Campbell, ‘The trauma of justice: sexual violence, crimes against humanity and the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’, Social and Legal Studies, Vol. 13,
No. 3, 2004, pp. 329–350; Henry, ‘Witness to rape’; Mertus, ‘Shouting from the bottom of
the well’.
25. Henry, ‘Witness to rape’, p. 125.
26. Henry, ‘Witness to rape’, p. 131.
27. Henry, ‘Witness to rape’, p. 131.
28. Jaleel, ‘Weapons of sex’, p. 115.
29. Jaleel, ‘Weapons of sex’, p. 115. See also Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without borders:
decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), for an
earlier and foundational critique of such an approach.
30. Jaleel, ‘Weapons of sex’, p. 115.
 280 A. CROSBY ET AL.

31. Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence
against women of color’, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6, 1991, pp. 1241–1299.
32. Mohanty, Feminism without borders.
33. Jaleel, ‘Weapons of sex’, p. 115.
34. Andrea Smith, Conquest: sexual violence and American Indian genocide (Cambridge, MA: South
End Press, 2005), p. 28.
35. Smith, Conquest, p. 28.
36. Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj, ‘Peritaje cultural’, in Mendia Azkue and Gúzman Orellana, Ni
olvido, ni silencio, p. 119, translation from Spanish by the authors.
37. Velázquez Nimatuj, ‘Peritaje cultural’, p. 120.
38. Ratna Kapur, ‘The tragedy of victimization rhetoric: resurrecting the “native” subject in inter-
national/post-colonial feminist legal politics’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Vol. 15, No. 1,
2002, pp. 1–37; Alice Miller, ‘Sexuality, violence against women and human rights: women
make demands, ladies get protection’, Health and Human Rights, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2004, pp. 16–47.
39. Sarah Ahmed, Strange encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of subjection: terror, slavery, and self-making in nine-
teenth-century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Sherene Razack, ‘Stealing the
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pain of others: reflections on Canadian humanitarian responses’, Review of Education, Peda-

gogy and Cultural Studies, Vol. 29, No. 4, 2007, pp. 375–394.
40. Susan Sontag, Regarding the pain of others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 115.
41. Our definition of intermediaries builds on Merry’s understanding of them as ‘the people in the
middle’ (Sally Engle Merry, ‘Transnational human rights and local activism: mapping the
middle’, American Anthropologist, Vol. 108, No. 1, 2006, p. 39). They are ‘those who translate
the discourses and practices from the arena of international law and legal institutions to
specific situations of suffering and violation … . work[ing] at various levels to negotiate
between local, regional, national and global systems of meaning’ (p. 39). Intermediaries
accompanying this group of fifty-four women have included Guatemalan ladina/mestiza
and Mayan women activists, psychologists, lawyers, Mayan interpreters and international
researchers, including graduate students.
42. Ruti Teitel, Transitional justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
43. Pablo de Greiff (ed.), The handbook of reparations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Ruth
Rubio-Marín (ed.), The gender of reparations: unsettling sexual hierarchies while redressing
human rights violations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
44. Brandon Hamber, Transforming societies after political violence (Zürich: Springer International
Publishing, 2009), p. 97.
45. Hamber, Transforming societies, p. 97.
46. Hamber, Transforming societies, p. 97.
47. Brandon Hamber, ‘Narrowing the micro and macro: a psychological perspective on reparations
in societies in transition’, in de Greiff, The handbook of reparations, pp. 560–588. See also M.
Brinton Lykes and Marcie Mersky, ‘Reparations and mental health: psychosocial interventions
towards healing, human agency, and rethreading social realities’, in de Greiff, The handbook of
reparations, pp. 589–622; and Martha Minow, Between vengeance and forgiveness: facing history
after genocide and mass violence (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998).
48. Hamber, ‘Narrowing the micro and macro’; Lykes and Mersky, ‘Reparations and mental health’.
49. Zinaida Miller, ‘Effects of invisibility: in search of the “economic” in transitional justice’, Inter-
national Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2008, p. 280.
50. Beth Goldblatt, ‘Evaluating the gender content of reparations: lessons from South Africa’, in
Ruth Rubio-Marín (ed.), What happened to the women? Gender and reparations for human
rights violations (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2006), pp. 48–91; Colleen
Duggan, Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey and Julie Guillerot, ‘Reparations for sexual and reproductive
violence: prospects for achieving gender justice in Guatemala and Peru’, International Journal
of Transitional Justice, Vol. 2, 2008, pp. 192–213; Lisa J. Laplante and Kimberly Theidon, ‘Truth
with consequences: justice and reparations in post-truth commission Peru’, Human Rights
Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2007, pp. 228–250; Ross, Bearing witness; Mijke de Waardt, ‘Are
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 281

Peruvian victims being mocked? Politicization of victimhood and victims’ motivations for
reparations’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 4, 2013, pp. 830–849.
51. CEH, Guatemala.
52. For analyses of the various twists and turns in the institutional life of the PNR, see Consejería en
proyectos (hereafter: PCS), Cuento la verdad: voces sobre reparación en Guatemala (Guatemala
City: PCS, 2010); Impunity Watch, Policy brief: Derecho a la reparación en Guatemala: por la
senda de la negación (Impunity Watch Guatemala, 2013), available at: http://www.
impunitywatch.org/docs/14960_IMPUNITY_WATCH_folleto_(2).pdf (accessed 24 June 2015);
Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey, ‘Guatemala: gender and reparations for human rights violations’,
in Rubio-Marín, What happened to the women?, pp. 92–135; Lieselotte Viaene, ‘Life is priceless:
Maya Q’eqchi’ voices on the Guatemalan National Reparations Program’, International Journal
of Transitional Justice, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2010, pp. 4–15; Sanne Weber, Glenda García and Tania Mon-
tenegro, Reparación con perspectiva de género: una apuesta para contribuir al cambio de las
estructuras de desigualdad y discriminación en Guatemala (Guatemala: Impunity Watch, 2014).
53. PNR, El libro azul: política pública de resarcimiento (Guatemala: PNR, 2003).
54. Brisna Caxaj, ‘Avances y retos en las luchas y demandas de memoria histórica, justicia y repar-
aciones de mujeres sobrevivientes de violencia sexual en Guatemala’, paper presented at
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Democracy & Memory, XXXII International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association
(Chicago, May 2014); PCS, Cuento la verdad; Viaene, ‘Life is priceless’; ODHAG, Silenciaron
nuestra historia.
55. Successful beneficiaries have received Q20,000 (US$2,600) for sexual violence, while some have
received Q34,000 (US$4,460) for sexual violence and loss of a loved one. However, many were
denied claims for more than one violation (Caxaj, ‘Avances y retos’). Victims of torture have
received Q20,000, while those who lost family members have received Q24,000 (US$3,148).
The majority of PNR beneficiaries have been elderly women. For example, in 2012, of the 868
beneficiaries, sixty-five per cent were women. In the period between 2012 and 2013, of the
2,193 cases of successful granting of reparations, thirty-five per cent were for extrajudicial
executions, twenty-eight per cent for forced disappearance and six per cent for sexual violence
(Weber, forthcoming, as cited in Caxaj, ‘Avances y retos’, p. 13).
56. Fulchiron et al., Tejidos que lleva el alma.
57. Fulchiron et al., Tejidos que lleva el alma.
58. Crosby and Lykes, ‘Mayan women survivors speak’; Fulchiron et al., Tejidos que lleva el alma;
Paz y Paz Bailey, ‘Guatemala: gender and reparations’.
59. Caxaj, ‘Avances y retos’.
60. Viaene, ‘Life is priceless’, p. 8.
61. See also PCS, Cuento la verdad.
62. See Viaene, ‘Life is priceless’ for a discussion of Q’eqchi’ conceptions of reparation in Alta
Verapaz and the linguistic complexities inherent to the PNR’s efforts to translate the concept.
63. Theidon, ‘Gender in transition’.
64. Image theatre is a technique through which participants position co-participants to embody a
theme either identified by the group or assigned by a facilitator. Roles are rotated, giving each
participant the opportunity to ‘position’ and ‘be positioned’ and the embodied scenes are
then ‘read’ by the audience and subsequently by the co-participants. Emotions emergent
from performers and audience are shared, deepening and sharing multiple understandings
of and meanings made about the chosen theme. See Augusto Boal, Jan Cohen-Cruz and
Mady Schurtzman, ‘Theatre of the Oppressed workshops with women: an interview with
Augusto Boal’, The Drama Review, Vol. 34, No. 3, 1990, pp. 66–76.
65. M. Brinton Lykes and Alison Crosby, ‘Feminist practice of action and community research’, in
Sharlene Hesse-Biber (ed.), Feminist research practice: a primer, 2nd edn. (Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE, 2014), pp. 145–181.
66. Kathy Charmaz, Constructing grounded theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2006).
67. For an in-depth account of the experience of widowhood and the psychological dimensions of
genocide in the Quiché, see Judith Zur, Violent memories: Mayan war widows in Guatemala
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).
 282 A. CROSBY ET AL.

68. Miller, ‘Effects of invisibility’, p. 266. For a more recent turn to ‘the economic’ within the transi-
tional justice literature, see Thomas Bunschuh, ‘Enabling transitional justice, restoring capabili-
ties: the imperatives of participation and normative integrity’, International Journal of
Transitional Justice, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2015, pp. 10–32; Paul Gready and Simon Robins, ‘From transi-
tional to transformative justice: a new agenda for practice’, International Journal of Transitional
Justice, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2014, pp. 339–361; Diana Sankey, ‘Towards recognition of subsistence
harms: reassessing approaches to socioeconomic forms of violence in transitional justice’,
International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2014, pp. 339–361.
69. Miller, ‘Effects of invisibility’, p. 267.
70. Nos engañaron/‘We were duped’ was also the prevailing sentiment towards the PNR in
research conducted with Q’eqchi’ women in six communities in Alta Verapaz in 2013 and
2014 (ODHAG, Silenciaron nuestra historia, p. 55). According to the committee of women
victims of the armed conflict from the community of Cambayal: ‘The PNR only makes promises
and almost always benefits people who are members of the political party [in power] and
many times these people are trying to divide the communities … to date there has been
little progress in our [reparations] processes’ (back cover). And testimonies collected by the
CAFCA in 2010 with women in the same region reflected the same perspective: ‘Despite
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having told our story and fulfilled the requirements, the state is not concerned with our situ-
ation, they just make promises that in the end they don’t keep, we women we are tired of all
the hoops we have to jump through and we don’t get a positive result’ (ODHAG, Silenciaron
nuestra historia, p. 79). See Diane Nelson, Reckoning: the ends of war in Guatemala (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2009) for a detailed discussion of this notion of duping or ‘the dialectics
of deception’ (p. xii) as integral to the relationship between the Guatemalan state and its citi-
zenry, as instigated by the Guatemalan state’s genocidal counterinsurgency campaigns.
71. Despite the reporting and prosecution of perpetrators of sexual violence against men in
armed conflict in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the Tribu-
nal for Rwanda, its incidence and prevalence is not regularly documented or reported (Wynne
Russell, ‘Sexual violence against men and boys’, Forced Migration Review, Vol. 27, January 2007,
pp. 22–23, available at: http://www.fmreview.org/en/FMRpdfs/FMR27/full.pdf [accessed 10
July 2015]; Sandesh Sivakumaran, ‘Sexual violence against men in armed conflict’, European
Journal of International Law, Vol. 18, No. 2, 2007, pp. 253–276). Although Chilean human
rights activist psychologists reported on their clinical interventions with male survivors of
torture during the dictatorship there, their analysis and much of the other reporting on
men as victims of torture focuses on the human rights violation rather than critically interro-
gating its gendered and sexualized meanings (see, for example, Ana Julia Cienfuegos and Cris-
tina Monelli, ‘The testimony of political repression as a therapeutic instrument’, American
Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Vol. 53, No. 1, 1983, pp. 43–51; see also Renata Ćuk, ‘Sexual violence
against men in armed conflicts’, Mirovna Aka [Peace Academy] Newsletter, available at: http://
mirovna-akademija.org/rma/en/essays/english/47-gender/255-sexualviolence [accessed 13
July 2015]).
72. Das, Life and words, p. 7.
73. Miller, ‘Effects of invisibility’.
74. Miller, ‘Effects of invisibility’, p. 280.
75. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret M. Lock (eds.), Social suffering (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997).

Acknowledgements
The authors thank first and foremost the fifty-four Mayan women protagonists who have
accompanied them throughout this research project and so generously shared with them their
courageous struggles for truth, justice and reparation. They also thank the staff of UNAMG, and
Maya Alvarado in particular, as well as MTM and ECAP and all the Mayan interpreters for their invalu-
able support and participation. Research assistants Fabienne Doiron, Emily Rosser and Rocío Sánchez
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 283

Ares were instrumental in the organization, facilitation and documentation of the workshops dis-
cussed in this article. The authors also acknowledge general support from the CHRIJ at Boston
College and the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University,
Toronto. Finally, they thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable contributions.

Funding information
The authors acknowledge funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada (SSHRC) [grant number 410-2009-1552] and the International Development Research
Centre (IDRC) [grant number 106616-00020799-003], as well as the financial support of an anonymous
foundation to the Center for Human Rights and International Justice (CHRIJ) at Boston College.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors
Alison Crosby, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies
and director of the Centre for Feminist Research at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research
and publications use an anti-racist anti-colonial feminist lens to explore survivors’ multifaceted
struggles for agency and subjectivity in the aftermath of violence. She is currently completing a
book manuscript with Dr M. Brinton Lykes on gender and reparation in Guatemala, based on four
years of feminist participatory action research with Mayan women survivors of violence during
the armed conflict in Guatemala, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada (SSHRC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). With Dr Malathi de
Alwis, she is exploring memorialization as a site of contestation in Guatemala and Sri Lanka in a
project entitled ‘The inhabitance of loss: a transnational feminist project on memorialization’,
funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant.
M. Brinton Lykes, PhD is professor of community-cultural psychology and associate director of the
Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College. She accompanies communities
affected by war, gross violations of human rights and unnatural disasters, drawing on the creative
arts, indigenous resources, and feminist participatory and action research methodologies to
analyse causes and document effects of racialized gender violence. Currently she is accompanying
Mayan transnational mixed-status families (in New England and Guatemala) whose narratives of the
continuities and discontinuities of historical and contemporary violence inform community-based
educational and legal resources and actions towards redressing ongoing racialized violence. She
has co-authored and co-edited several books and published widely in peer-reviewed journals,
edited volumes, research handbooks and organizational newsletters. Brinton is a co-founder and
participant in the Boston Women’s Fund and the Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund for Mental Health and
Human Rights. Her website is www2.bc.edu/~lykes.
Brisna Caxaj is a feminist sociologist. She is a research and advocacy officer with the Gender
Program at Impunity Watch Guatemala. She has been a member of the Unión Nacional de
Mujeres Guatemaltecas (National Union of Guatemalan Women, UNAMG) since 1998, where she
has occupied various positions on the board of directors and advisory council. From 2009 to
2012, she coordinated the research team, and in 2013 coordinated the Memory, Truth, Justice
and Reparations Area, from which feminist participatory action research with Mayan women survi-
vors of violence during the armed conflict in Guatemala was undertaken in coordination with
York University and Boston College. She is currently the president of the advisory council at
UNAMG. Her work has focused on various issues regarding women’s rights, conditions and struggles,
including sexual violence during the internal armed conflict and in the present, racism, political lea-
dership and participation, reparations and state budgets.