Exhuming Guatemala's gender-based violence: Justice, truth-telling, and rebuilding in a post-conflict society.

This interdisciplinary thesis is grounded in forensic anthropology, feminist geography, and the violent history of the past century in Guatemala. I seek to determine a link between past and present gender-based violence in Guatemala. Historically, Guatemala has been gripped in periods of political, economic and social transitions. I argue that gender-based violence becomes most pervasive during these periods of transition, and suggest that the 36-year armed conflict that began in 1960 exacerbated the pre-existing forms of gender-based violence that began before the Spanish Conquest. I describe the characteristics of gender-based violence as they differ between men and women despite the fact that more men were and are murdered in Guatemala than women, the method by which women have been and are killed is personal, with greater physical contact than in the cases of men. This form of violence is labeled femicide, that is, the killing of women because they are women, a crime associated with the impunity that perpetrators are granted by the state. The research for my thesis was in collaboration with the Fundación de Antropologia Forense de Guatemala (Guatemala Forensic Anthropology Foundation) (FAFG), the Fundación Sobrevivientos (Survivor Foundation) (FS), and the Grupo Guatemalteco de Mujeres (Guatemalan Group of Women) (GGM). Based on this fieldwork conducted in Guatemala in May 2008, I share the interviews of family members of victims as they voice their testimonies of violence. I examine the history of violence that occurred in the preceding 100 years, since the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920) who introduced the ideology of the Caudillo to the emerging nation state. Post-peace gender-based violence, the period of violence since the signing of the Peace Accord in 1996, is explored, and I provide evidence that there is an increase in gender-based violence, despite the declaration of peace. The challenges to reconciliation are described using a framework of forensic investigation to