Forty years after surviving state violence, Maya Achi women return to court to demand justice, challenging a long legacy of impunity for crimes against humanity.
Jo-Marie Burt, Paulo Estrada and Keily Colíndres write in NACLA Report about the long struggle that Indigenous women have to endure to find justice within a judicial system that cares little for them, especially with regard to confronting powerful men. These women are an inspiration.
Paulina Ixtapá Alvarado, a Maya Achi woman, was 19 years old when she was detained just outside the market in Rabinal, in northeastern Guatemala, by a local militia. It was September 1983, the height of Guatemala’s brutal counterinsurgency war. She was brought to a military base about 15 minutes from the town. There, she was held illegally for 25 days in a small room with several other people, including her cousin, Pedrina Ixtapá Rodríguez, and at least two other women. For more than three weeks, Paulina and Pedrina, who were 18, were tortured and repeatedly gang-raped by local militia members and by soldiers, who repeatedly accused them and their family and community members of colluding with the guerrillas. A few days after she was released, Pedrina had a miscarriage, a pregnancy that was a result of the rapes she had endured. As has been widely documented, sexual violence was wielded as a systematic tactic of counterinsurgency during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.
Paulina and Pedrina have waited 40 years to have their day in court. After many twists and turns, on January 28, 2025 the trial opened against three former members of the civil defense patrols (PACs), Pedro Sánchez, Simeón Enrique Gómez, and Félix Tum, who are accused of being the direct perpetrators of sexual violence against Paulina, Pedrina, and three other women. The PACs, which were created by the Guatemalan army in the early 1980s to combat the guerrilla forces and as a way to exert control over rural and Indigenous communities, were responsible for nearly 20 percent of the human rights violations perpetrated during the civil conflict, according to Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification.
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Sánchez, Gómez, and Tum had been previously detained in 2018, but were freed along with three others after pre-trial judge Claudette Domínguez dismissed the charges against them. The lawyers for the Maya Achi women, Lucía Xiloj, Haydeé Valey, and Gloria Reyes— also Indigenous women—filed a motion to have Domínguez recused from the case, which was eventually granted. A new pretrial judge reopened the case against the other three men who had been released, alongside a man who was deported from the United States and another who was apprehended in Belize, eventually leading to a trial in January 2022. All five men were convicted of crimes against humanity in the form of sexual violence against five Maya Achi women who described similar experiences as those recounted by Paulina and Pedrina in the present case. The Maya Achi women refused to stay silent and continued to press their case against Sánchez, Gómez, and Tum, eventually securing an annulment of the 2019 decision that dismissed the charges against them.
You can read the full piece, with photos and links, here, Indigenous Women Survivors of Guatemala’s Rape Camps Seek Justice.
Categories: Accompaniment, Corruption, Criminalisation, Criminalization, Culture, Femicide, Gender, Genocide, Guatemala, Human Rights, Impunity, Indigenous peoples, Justice, Land, Military, Poverty, Racism, Resource Extraction, Solidarity in Action, Violence
Guatemala Solidarity Network 
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