Documentation As Erasure: Interrogating the Absences of Operation Sofia and the Death Squad Dossier

With the signing of the peace accords in 1996, Guatemala entered a period of supposed post-conflict and peacetime that left Guatemalans reckoning with a civil war (1960-1996) where 200,000 people were disappeared. According to... [ view full abstract ]

With the signing of the peace accords in 1996, Guatemala entered a period of supposed post-conflict and peacetime that left Guatemalans reckoning with a civil war (1960-1996) where 200,000 people were disappeared. According to the truth commission report conducted by the United Nations, the Guatemalan army committed acts of genocide against indigenous people. 85% of the massacres that occurred consisted of sexual violence, and 87% of those cases were Mayan women. This paper will argue that Human Rights rhetoric is not enough to adequately make a difference in the endemic violence against women in past and contemporary feminicide. I critique neoliberal human rights discourses that seek justice for crimes committed during the civil war to non-indigenous leftist male victims of forced disappearance. Absent from this discourse are the 6,500 feminicides in Guatemala committed since 2000 that remain in impunity, many of who were indigenous women subjected to sexual violence and torture. I argue for alternative epistemological frames that recognize genocide as sexualized, racialized and gendered acts that have simultaneously operated during past and present to produce feminicide. I focus on two of popular archival documents concerning transitional justice, the Death Squad Dossier and Operation Sofia. I use a modern colonality/decoloniality framework to situate Guatemala’s gender violence as a product of colonial structures (the church, the state and the military) that historically subject women to racialized, class and gendered ontologies that reproduce different sexual forms of violence as manifested through feminicides. I argue that truth telling genres such as the discipline of history and archival science can function to erase genocide as sexualized and gendered structures.

A main research question I address is why the promise of justice under the name of human rights and law becomes a contentious site for gendered indigenous bodies? This paper challenges heteronormative and patriarchal norms that construct tropes of the “disappeared” and the “revolutionary man,” that erase genocidal violence against indigenous women. I conduct a discursive analysis on the Death Squad Dossier and Operation Sofia and argue that indigeneity and sexual violence is made absent from the archive by archival and forensic science built upon patriarchal and masculine understandings of war. This paper challenges the legal implications of genocide and the moral imagination that gives certain bodies values over others and incites public outrage for genocide. I interrogate the use of archival documents as the only avenue of justice. My aim is to read the archive differently and expose the moments of what Gayatri Spivak calls, epistemic violence. For example, sexual violence is not named and is nowhere to be found in the Operation Sofia and the Death Squad Dossier written by the Guatemalan state, even though it was as frequently committed or perhaps even more than the murders and kidnappings. Yet, I aim to read Operation Sofia as a counterinsurgent document complicit in the racialized feminicide against indigenous women during the internal armed conflict and feminicides, despite its lack of evidentiary value as measured in a legal and human rights framework.