In the past two decades the emergence of integrated justice mechanisms has occurred in areas of past armed conflict. These groups, including advocates, activists, and leaders, primarily seek to facilitate processes through which "victims and survivors seek truth, justice, and reparations for gross violations of human rights, including massacres, torture, and sexual violence against women."

Women's organizations began to mobilize in the 1980s. The most significant groups emerged at the end of the armed conflict in Guatemala and created space for women to support one another in the form of a viable community. The Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (Mutual Support Group, GAM) and the Coordinadora Nacional de Viudas de Guatemala (National Coordinating Council of Guatemalan Widows, CONAVIGUA) are both examples of these organizations. The National Guatemalan Women’s Union is highly prominent today, working with victims of the armed conflict. The stigmatization surrounding crimes of sexual assault and other similar injuries prevents many victims from speaking out, and in this way these groups positively guide the conversations required for healing processes to transpire.

Mayan women intermediaries are especially important today, as they assume a range of responsibilities purposed to ensure the survivor community has legal representation for the wrongs committed by the government and can properly cope with the decades of emotional trauma that was inflicted. In an effort to accurately understand the victim's experiences, interpreters must have linguistic and cultural knowledge that is specific to the region of the victim. Intermediaries have specific trouble getting victims of sexual violence to talk about the incident event and express their emotions toward it, as it is not yet socially acceptable to speak so freely about the topic.

"Survivors expressed fear of how their families would react if and when they told them about these viola - tions, noting that only very few had disclosed to their spouses or other family members."

"Mayan intermediaries underscored how difficult it had been to work with these topics due to longstanding prohibitions against discussing sexuality and family violence within Guatemalan and Mayan communities. Intermediaries also described accompaniment work as having been circumscribed in large part because it most frequently occurred outside of survivors’ local communities and/or community organizations."

Memory and Art as Tools of Resistance

Graffiti

In post-conflict Guatemala, street artists are public historians. Through graffiti, buildings and public spaces become sites of conversation on the genocide that claimed the lives of over 200,000 people, the military and state’s perpetration of the genocide, and the 45,000 forcibly disappeared; the “desaparecidos”. The public historians are primarily young people, disillusioned with the ideals of democracy and human rights in the wake of the violence. In the 2009 International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS), compared to their peers in Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Paraguay, Guatemalan youth reported significantly lower trust in political parties, police, the national government and people in general. This crisis of trust is rooted in the violence itself; over 90% of the human rights violations were committed by the military, but also in the impunity and organized forgetting that has preceded the genocide. Today, state institutions routinely criminalize social movements, turning graffiti into one of the few spaces were civilians can fight back against the deliberate attempt to reconcile the past through shielding the perpetrators and forgetting the victims. Guatemala’s street art includes anonymous works as well as pieces signed by members of Children for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence (HIJOS). Inspired by Argentina, the Guatemalan chapter of HIJOS formed in 1998, soon demonstrating annually on Army Day. From 1999 until 2008, when the government decided to end the Army Day parade, HIJOS organized to educate the public and fought to try to restore the capacity of collective organizing. Members of HIJOS and anonymous street artists are creating spaces for public history to unfold and historical memory to grow with every work of political graffiti. HIJOS’ graffiti is direct, often stating that the military committed genocide, a reality that has not been widely recognized in Guatemala. Guatemalan street artists respond not only to the past, but to the present day echos. “Desalojos” or evictions, continue the genocide as the economic interests of elites continue to dispossess and harm peasants and indigenous communities. As true during the genocide, violence favors large landowners. Graffiti, an art form usually used for gang communication, has been reclaimed by Guatemalans to respond to a state and a society lacking in dialogue of and engagement with the truth.

OS mural, AHPN. (Photo by Rachel Hatcher, March 17, 2012)

“Desalojos continue the genocide” (Photo by Rachel Hatcher, January 6, 2012)

Photography

In addition to graffiti, photography is a powerful marker of memory used to combat institutionalized forgetting in Guatemala. Photographs give memory a material basis and can provide evidence of reality or a means through which to interpret it. In a society where remembrance of atrocities occurs in public spaces, photographs constitute historical memory as well as a social activity. Daniel Hernández-Salazar grew up in Guatemala City and is an important memory worker in Guatemala. While visiting the offices of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) in 1997, Hernández-Salazar saw the shoulder blades of an exhumed individual who FAFG was laboring to bring justice for. He positioned the bones, which he symbolically feels resemble angel wings, behind a young man to create four images. The first three images are inspired by the see no, hear no, speak no evil maxim, and in the fourth image, the angel is shouting. After producing these images, Hernández-Salazar was approached by Bishop Juan Gerardi who at the time was the head of the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) Project. Bishop Gerardi asked for permission to use Hernández-Salazar’s images for the covers of the four final reports of the project, which presented a detailed documentation of the atrocities committed during the civil war. On April 26, 1998, just two days after presenting the report, Bishop Gerardi was assassinated. On April 28th, thousands of people took to the streets, many carrying Hernández-Salazar’s four-part work, in what would be called “The March of Silence”. The following year, on the first anniversary of the Bishop’s death, Hernández-Salazar installed his images in urban spaces of Guatemala, many of the sites being military facilities. The installations were collectively called Street Angel, and are described by the artist as a form of “guerilla art”. Hernández-Salazar’s art utilizes place; the geographic specificity of the installations calling on the viewer to link the perpetrators with the victims through the bones that form the wings. He has brought his fourth image, “So That All May Know”, to other places that have experienced genocide and mass tragedy, including Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

March of Silence. Guatemala City, 1998. Photo by Daniel Hernández-Salazar