¡No fue el fuego, fue el estado!

The popular chant “Not the fire; It was the state” was heard multiple times on March 7 and 8, 2024, in Guatemala City and around Central America, criticizing the state for evading responsibility for the murder of forty-one girls on March 8, 2017. The slogan has become an anthem among feminist groups. The chant reminds us that seven years ago, fifty-six Guatemalan girls were abused by the state for speaking out against the state-operated shelter, Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción, where they were raped, given rotten food, and abused by the shelter’s authorities. Locked into a small room where a fire broke out, the authorities left the screaming girls inside for nine minutes. At the hands of the state, forty-one girls, ages twelve to seventeen died, and fifteen survived with physical and emotional trauma.

International Women’s Day

As history has shown, the story of the fifty-six girls is not an isolated case. On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City burned, killing 146 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable—most of the victims died because of neglected safety features and locked doors within the factory building. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire came to indelibly shape the commemoration and significance of International Women’s Day. Over a century later, on International Women’s Day, fifty-six girls—also resisting brutal conditions uncannily similar to those women in New York— became victims and martyrs of the capitalist and patriarchal systems.                 

Since 2018 my role has been to accompany the continual struggles of GuateMaya feminist groups, both in Guatemala and in the diaspora, to forge a memory against the state’s hegemonic remembrance of the Thirty-Six-Year-War (1960–1996) and contemporary feminicide cases.¹Instead of Civil War I refer to Guatemala’s armed conflict as the thirty-six-year (1960-1996) war. Civil war limits our understanding of geopolitical U.S. sponsored armed conflict. Other scholars refer it to proxy wars or the third invasion. Giovanni Batz, “Military Factionalism and the Consolidation of Power in 1960s Guatemala” in Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow: New Histories of Latin America’s Cold War, ed. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Lawrence, and Julio Moreno (University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 51–75. GuateMaya is a popular concept used by activists in the diaspora to critique the homogenization of Guatemalan people and center the Maya population. GuateMaya is a capacious, fluid concept, and I use it to resist state-imposed categorizations like Hispanic or Latino/a/x that exclude Indigenous populations. One of the groups, 8 Tijax,  is a collective of the families of the girls and concerned citizens that formed after the terror of March 8, 2017. Since then, they support the families by spreading awareness of the case through art, protests, poetry, and the legal process. The groups identify with feminism’s critique of patriarchy and gender-based violence. However, the groups align with decolonial Indigenous feminism, also known as a feminism from below, which centers on the body, autonomy, and feminist solidarity away from hegemonic feminism After seven years, the state finally approached the mothers and publicly apologized. However, feminist collectives clearly stated that “we do not want an apology. We want justice!”

For the families and survivors of this massacre, justice will prevail if the former Guatemalan president, Jimmy Morales, is imprisoned for his wrongdoing. The postpeace era (from 1996 to the present) in Guatemala has been full of contradictions. The Guatemalan government and the UNRG signed peace accords in 1996. However, signing a peace accord and ending the armed conflict have proven far different from achieving a stable semblance of peace.²Beatriz Manz, “The Continuum of Violence in Post-War Guatemala,” Social Analysis 52, no.2 (2008):151-164. While the state of Guatemala apologizes to the families, it continues its geopolitical relationships with its allies in counterinsurgency, Israel and the United States. 

For example, Guatemala has moved its embassy to Jerusalem. Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales (who is responsible for the murder of forty-one girls at Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción) was the recipient of a Friends of Zion Award on January 18, 2018. Dr. Mike Evans, founder of the Friends of Zion Museum, granted him the award in Jerusalem. Morales is also an earlier recipient of an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. According to Sussan Garcia (2024), Israel, in partnership with and in proxy with the United States, supported, armed, and trained fascist dictators in Central America for decades.³Sussan Garcia, “Central American and Palestinian Liberation Struggles are Intertwined,” Contra Corriente, March 15, 2024, https://contracorriente.red/en/2024/03/15/central-american-and-palestinian-liberation-struggles-are-intertwined/. In Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt, a military general who orchestrated a coup in 1982 to become president, recognized the instrumental role of Israeli training for its success; his chief of staff observed that the “the Israeli soldier is the model for our soldiers.” Israel continues to export their “combat-tested” technologies to Central America through military and intelligence partnerships and arms exports.

Israel, with US support, has been waging genocide in Palestine, murdering and displacing thousands, as if history repeats itself for the gains of a settler colonial state. The war on women’s bodies in Palestine and Guatemala is synonymous with the illegal occupation of Indigenous land. Therefore, to understand the intricate connections between bodies, memory, and healing, I employ the emancipatory framework of cuerpo-territorio. Cuerpo-Territorio is a decolonial Indigenous feminist position and concept that declares the body as our first territory and advocates for a communal subject agency. Inspired by Xinca feminist Lorena Cabnal, this theory asserts that: 1) Our bodies are systematically affected by oppression (extractive industries, domestic violence, poverty, sexism) and are a product of it; and 2) body and territory are spaces of vital energy that must work in reciprocity collectively with other oppressed bodies. Therefore, oppressed bodies can become autonomous through a collective healing process. While, the war in Guatemala has produced intergenerational trauma among the population, using frameworks like cuerpo-territorio allows us to center on our bodies and initiate a healing process by using Maya cosmological technologies like spiritual altars, collective ceremonies, and embodied emotional practices. 

Gender-Based Violence as a Weapon of War

During the war in Guatemala, the army systematically deployed sexual violence as a counterinsurgency weapon to instill fear among villages. Rape was perpetrated against Indigenous women during colonization and the Thirty-Six-Year War (1960–1996) in Guatemala. Indeed, Native scholar Sarah Deer stated, “the damage to self and spirit that rapists cause has some of the same features that colonial governments perpetrated against entire nations.”⁴Sarah Deer,  The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), xvii. Decolonial Xinca feminist Lorena Cabnal analyzed how colonial violence against Indigenous land connects to the violence against Indigenous women’s bodies and spirits.⁵Lorena Cabnal, “Acercamiento a la construccion de la propuesta de pensamiento epistemico de las mujeres indigenas feministas comunitarias de Abya Yala” in Feminismos diversos: el feminismo comunitario (ACSUR-Las Segovias Catalunya, 2012), 1–33. Additionally, “gender violence was used en masse against Indigenous Maya women who were seen by the Guatemalan army as the progenitors of future guerrillas and future rebel Indians.”⁶Alicia LeDuc “Strategic alliance as an impact litigation model,” Willamette Journal of International Law and Dispute Resolution 25 no. 2 (2018): 163; Victoria Sanford, Sofia Álvarez-Arenas, and Kathleen Dill, “Sexual Violence as a Weapon during the Guatemalan Genocide” in Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators, ed. Elissa Bemporad and Joyce W. Warren (Indiana University Press, 2018), 207–24.

In a 2009 report, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women reported that studies of wartime rape “conclusively demonstrate that sexual violence is not an outcome of the war, but that women’s bodies are an important site of war, which makes sexual violence an integral part of wartime strategy.”⁷Sanford et al, “Sexual Violence as a Weapon,” 209. A report by Consorcio Actoras de Cambio: La lucha de las mujeres por la justicia explained that sexual violence was directed mainly against Indigenous women during the war years (1960–1996). Thus, 88.7% of the victims of sexual violation identified by the CEH (Historical Clarification Commission) were Maya, 10.3% were mestizo, and 1% belonged to other groups. The most affected ethnic groups were the K’iche’, Q’anjoba’l, Mam, Q’eqchi,’ Ixils, Chuj, and K’aqchikeles.⁸Historical Clarification Commision (CEH), Guatemala: Memory of Silence (Guatemala City, 1999), https://hrdag.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/CEHreport-english.pdf, 39. The Guatemalan military raped, abused, tortured, and left women naked with sexual mutilation and hemorrhage; others were executed and disappeared. Many girls and boys were transferred to other towns, lost in the mountains, or given up for adoption illegally. The military also exterminated babies outside and inside the mother’s womb.⁹CEH, Guatemala: Memory of Silence, 34. Therefore, the torture and abuse experienced by the fifty-six girls is not new, as it has manifested throughout Guatemala’s nation formation, leading to an extreme number of feminicide rates. 

Femicide refers to the murder of women by men because they are women and points to the state’s responsibility for these murders, whether through the commission of the actual killing, toleration of the perpetrators’ acts of violence, or omission of State responsibility to ensure the safety of its female citizens.¹⁰Victoria Sanford,  Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velasquez and her Father’s Quest for Justice (University of California Press, 2023), 14. A whole set of violent misogynists constitutes acts against women that involve a violation of their human rights, represent an attack on their safety, and endanger their lives.