Edina Community Lutheran Church

Carrie Stengel, daughter of ECLC member Sandy Heidemann, sent these letters from Guatemala to explain her work

While national scandals exposing corrupt police and politicians continue to rattle Guatemala in this election year, one particular case of police abuse has less publicly shaken the lives of all those connected to it. Over the months that my co-workers and I have accompanied this case, it has affected each and every one of us in profound ways.

The first time I met Juana Méndez, she had just come out of a psychological evaluation with the Public Prosecutor's Office ( Ministerio Público ). There in a hospital room, she had once again recounted the story of her rape in a Nebaj jail, while the prosecutor voiced doubts that Doña Juana's interpreter was translating accurately and objectively. I sat next to Doña Juana as we accompanied her home. We didn't say much. I just quietly offered her some of my peanuts as the smallest attempt at empathy.

Doña Juana, a 42-year-old Maya Quiché woman, the mother of 11, and a grandmother, was originally arrested in December of 2004 because her house is close to a marijuana field. On January 17, 2005, she was transferred to the detention center in Nebaj, where police officers raped her at gunpoint repeatedly through the night and then forced her to bathe. At her hearing the following day, standing before the judge in this small highland town, she publicly denounced her abusers.

In the case of her own arrest, Doña Juana's crime was reduced to a cover-up and she was released. The case of her rape, on the other hand, is still slowly making its way through the court system. Only one of the accused is in custody , even though the police's own disciplinary tribunal found two of the officers involved guilty of torture. Since September of 2006, the Institute for Comparative Studies in Criminal Sciences in Guatemala (ICCPG) has been providing legal assistance as part of efforts to push the case forward.

In May, the public prosecutor in charge of the case decided to officially file charges against the officer in custody, making this the first time in Guatemalan history that a police officer could be tried for the rape of a prisoner.

The precedent is concerning considering the possibly high rate of abuse in detention centers. In a recent study, the ICCPG found that 72% of women in one pre-trial detention center were victims of violence at the hands of the authorities. Last year when I met the then Vice Minister of the Interior, someone in our group asked him if this statistic could be accurate for all female prisoners. The frankness of his answer caught us off guard: “It wouldn't surprise me,” he told us.

Impunity for violence against women committed by state agents is, unfortunately, nothing new in Guatemala . During the civil war, sexual violence was systematically used by some members of the military and civil patrols. Sexual assault was so common in certain highland areas that one official later said that it would be difficult to find a Maya girl aged 11- 15 in his region that had not been raped. No one has ever been held accountable for the vast majority of these crimes.

Confronting this legacy of impunity has not been easy and the precedent set by Doña Juana's case has come at a high price for those involved. Potential witnesses, human rights workers supporting the case, and Doña Juana herself have all been threatened.

Over the past six months, ICCPG staff members have been the victims of increasingly serious acts of intimidation, including surveillance, wiretapping, and direct threats. In February of this year, a staff member's house was broken into; on her daughter's bed, she found a doll with tape over its mouth. In April, a member of the technical support staff was temporarily abducted. Before releasing him, his abductors told him that, if he and his colleagues continued, they would “start cutting off heads.” We started accompanying the ICCPG and Doña Juana in late April, about the same time that another staff member's car was pulled over by armed men who told her, “This was the last warning.”

Not long after this incident, I accompanied the ICCPG and Doña Juana to the Public Prosecutor's Office. I tried to imagine the psychological impact of walking into a building full of police officers, surrounded by police cars with guards at every entrance. “For a long time, her whole body would tense up every time she saw a police officer in uniform,” a woman from the ICCPG told me of Doña Juana. I wondered how it felt for Doña Juana to give her testimony yet again that day, only to have the prosecutor hesitate to press charges for lack of evidence at the time.

Less than one week later, she would identify her perpetrator in a lineup, providing evidence the prosecutor could not ignore. Immediately afterward, she described the incident in the jail where it took place, while her perpetrator watched from his cell. As a woman from the ICCPG pointed out to me, the system here re-victimizes the victim over and over again.

Watching Doña Juana, I can understand how indigenous women living in rural areas have become one of the sectors of the population with the least access to Guatemala 's legal system. Before her arrest, Doña Juana had never left her community. Although now separated from her family and her home, she continues to struggle for justice within the very system that is responsible for her victimization. “I am not afraid,” she has insisted, “I want justice because I want to heal.” I agree full-heartedly with the woman from the ICCPG who told me, "We have learned so much from her."

Next week will be my last as an accompanier this time around. In this full moment, I thank all those who have shown me hope and determination: the women like Doña Juana, the communities resisting the dam, the soldiers speaking out against war, my relatives battling illness back home, the migrants denouncing raids, the parents raising bad ass kids, the artists and musicians, and everyone in my life who reminds me to keep laughing and loving.

Dear friends and family,

As many of you know, I came back to Guatemala in January after a year and a half in the US. I came back hoping to reconnect and to continue the work I started three years ago when I accompanied witnesses participating in the national genocide cases.

Since coming back in January, I have been working on the team that provides short-term accompaniment as a response to incidents as they occur. In the last two months, I have accompanied farmworkers involved in labor disputes, the genocide case legal team, mental health workers supporting exhumations of mass graves, and campesinos demanding justice for their leader’s disappearance. All of the people I accompany continue to work under threat. I have listened to horrifying stories and, with each day, I learn more about human resilience and resistance.

I have spent the most time in a small Maya Q’eqchi’ community in the Ixcán region. At first glance the community seems a paradise: organized, unified, and stunningly beautiful. Three hours from the nearest road, the community sits atop a leveled mountain in a tropical area. Hibiscus and orchid trees line the long central strip where the men hold community meetings at sunset while the women meet in the church.

Each day of our visit, my co-worker and I follow a group of boys down to the river. During the dry season, the current slows enough so that even the smaller boys can escape the brutal Ixcán heat in the water. “Look at me! Watch this,” the smaller ones shout, trying to impress us by skipping rocks, catching tadpoles, and catapulting dramatically into the rapids. The older boys brave the current and swim upstream to where others are harpooning fish.

This same spot, where the Chixoy and Copón rivers meet, is also the proposed site of the Xalala dam. If built, the dam would be the second largest hydroelectric dam in Guatemala, to be built at a cost of approximately US$300-500 million. Originally dreamt up during the energy crisis of the 1970s, the Xalala dam has resurfaced as a means to meet drastically increasing demand with alternative energy sources. By the year 2030, energy demand in Latin America is expected to increase by seventy-five percent.

The Ixcán has become a hot spot in the debate over natural resources, as the government and transnational companies seek to take advantage of the region’s petroleum reserves, hydroelectric dams, African palms, and sugar cane. The region is also conveniently located for large-scale infrastructure projects designed to facilitate free trade and regional integration as part of Plan Puebla Panama.

This definition of development comes into direct conflict with the perspective of many rural indigenous communities that view the land as sacred, as well as the principal means of survival. Critics say the Xalala dam will displace thousands of Maya Q’eqchi’ farmers while causing irreparable environmental damage. Others suspect that the energy generated by the dam will be exported and used by large factories, instead of benefiting communities in the Ixcán, where eighty-eight percent of the population lives in poverty.

To date, the government has not revealed any plans to compensate or relocate those directly affected by the dam. In fact, the government has provided very little information of any kind about the dam or its projected effects on the environment and surrounding communities. The last time my co-worker and I visited the area, community members had just heard a rumor that the government might provide reparations of some sort. Community members remained skeptical in spite of the news. “It’s all lies,” they told us, “We’ll never find land this good somewhere else.”

The community’s lack of trust is largely founded on experience. People remember that, during the war, 444 people were massacred and many more displaced in communities opposed to the construction of the Chixoy dam. More than twenty years later, survivors are still waiting for the full implementation of the negotiated reparations package.

The trauma of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war quickly resurfaces when people talk to us about the possibility of being displaced by the Xalala dam. The Ixcán region was one of the hardest hit during the war and massacres and displacement were common experiences in the region. “We don’t want another war,” a community leader named Juan tells us, “We just want to be left alone.” In the 1960s, Juan’s grandfather was part of a wave of farmers that flocked to the Ixcán searching for better opportunities, painstakingly carving fields out of pure jungle. Only two decades after Juan’s grandfather arrived, the entire community was displaced by the war. Some people fled to neighboring villages, others crossed into exile in Mexico, and still others hid out in the mountains.

While promoting the Xalala dam project, Guatemalan president Oscar Berger has claimed that the area is sparsely populated and, thus, well-suited for a large-scale dam. The community we visit, however, is one of eighteen communities that would be directly affected by the dam. Because of its proximity to the site, at least some, if not all, of Juan’s community would be submerged in water.

In spite of the potential risks, the dam will likely gain financial support from international institutions. The day my co-worker and I hiked out of community after our most recent visit, the Board of Governors of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) opened their annual meeting in Antigua, Guatemala. During this year’s meeting, the IDB launched a new initiative to reduce poverty in the region, vowing to reach the most marginalized communities. Among other projects to this end, the bank announced the approval of US$400,000 in financing from its Infrastructure Fund for feasibility studies “to support the development of small and mid-sized hydroelectric power plants in Guatemala.”

As I read about the IDB’s projects, I thought about our conversations with Juan and his neighbors. During one community meeting we attended, a woman turned to us and said through a translator, “You should tell our president we don’t want the dam.” Like many indigenous communities, this one has struggled to gain much-needed access to education, the justice system, and health services, not to mention to government officials and international institutions like the IDB.

On April 20, however, over 170 communities in the Ixcán will have the chance voice their concerns by participating in a popular consultation on petroleum extraction and large-scale hydroelectric dams in the region. The Ixcán consultation is one of many that have been organized throughout the country on mining, hydroelectric dams, and petroleum extraction as a means of empowering marginalized, often indigenous, communities. My co-worker and I have seen the affects of the organizing and trainings held in preparation for the day. Later in that same community meeting we attended another woman commented on her neighbor’s request. “We thank you for being here,” she said, “but we are the ones that must move forward in this struggle.”

I hope all of you are doing well and are able to find hope, even in the most unexpected places. I will keep you posted on the outcome of the consultations later this month. As always I would love to hear from each of you if you have the chance to drop me a line.

Take care,
Carrie

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