Guatemala: Rios Montt trial hears testimony on conflict-era sexual violence
鈥� A version of this post ran on the author's blog, centralamericanpolitics.blogspot.com. The views expressed are the author's own.
[Yesterday], on the eighth day of the genocide and crimes against humanity trial of Efra铆n Rios Montt and Jose Mauricio Rodriguez S谩nchez, the court heard several stories of the sexual violence perpetrated against Ixil women during the scorched earth campaign of the early 1980s.
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The prosecution asked for a closed courtroom so that the women could give their testimony. However the judges denied their request. Instead, they asked that the media and others in the courtroom not identify the women in photos or by name.
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The women spoke about the abuse that they and others suffered at the hands of the military and the paramilitaries as well as the individual (physical, emotional, and psychological) and communal trauma of the violence.
Very powerful testimony.
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As I mentioned on :
Violence varied from year to year and from department to department which gets obscured when we give an estimated number of deaths over a thirty-six year conflict at the national level. Doing so also obscures many of the other ways in which the people of Guatemala suffered (sexual violence, torture, forced displacement, generalized terror, etc). It also obscures the ways in which individuals and communities听still live with the suffering thirty years later.听An estimated 100,000 women of all ages were sexually assaulted during the conflict.
See , at the Associated Press, the , and the coverage.鈥� Mike Allison is an associate professor in the听and a member of the听at the in Pennsylvania. 听You can follow his Central American Politics .
