Mass killings of females in Guatemala
Al Jazeera reports on the shocking levels of violence against women in Guatemala:
“Gang-related violence has increased sharply here in recent years, amid an increase in drug-trafficking activity. But while the murder rate cuts evenly across both sexes, women’s groups point out that females are often killed simply because of their gender.
In 2007, more than 700 women and girls were murdered. The pattern of violence includes sexual assault and physical torture before the women are killed and their bodies dumped in public places. Odilia Sanchez’s niece was raped and killed by three men hoping to rise through the ranks of their gang. She was only three-years-old.”
Women can be murdered simply for not dating someone. As so often, drugs are at the heart of the problem. I know that legalisation is not a panacea for every problem, but at least with drugs widespread legalisation would take the trade out of the hands of the drug gangs. Without meaning to sound flippant, you can’t see Tesco and Sainsbury have a shootout in Central America. Alcohol too is an addictive and popular drug, but precisely because it is legal there aren’t the gang problems related to it.
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Filed in: Sex equality
On the other hand, then the sex trade might become the primary gangster profit-maker, ending up not improving things much for the women of Guatemala. That’s assuming that not everyone currently involved in narcotrafficking would simply “go straight” and become legitimate businesspeople if drugs were legalized.
That is true dtr300. I don’t think legalisation would solve all the problems, but it would certainly reduce the circle of violence that surrounds the drugs trade. It would also give young men (in particular) more opportunities to make it in the non-criminal world.
Good article and profile – glad someone is looking at the differential impact of drug and gang related violence on women and girls – usually perceived as male territory.
I would love to see Ross Kemp do a documentary on this when he does his usually great short docs on gangs and violence in different parts of the world.
America.gov (Mar 09) reported that Norma Cruz, co-founder and director of the NGO Survivors Foundation, provides emotional, social and legal support to hundreds of victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse and to the families of murdered women. In 2007 alone, her foundation helped find, prosecute and convict 30 individuals accused of murdering women. The NGO runs a victims’ shelter — one of only a handful in the country — and also fights to protect mothers whose babies are stolen for adoptions.
The increasing number of killings of women in Guatemala, Cruz says, is tied to the poverty that is the aftermath of Guatemala’s civil war and to narco-trafficking. Gangsters are known to kill the female family members of rival gangs, often as an initiation rite, with little fear of legal retribution because these crimes are underreported and underinvestigated. Less than 3 percent are prosecuted.
The more common police response, according to the Guatemala Human Rights Commission, is that a victim was a prostitute, a gang member, engaged in criminal activities or guilty of infidelity.
Under pressure from groups including the Survivors Foundation, the U.N.-led International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) was approved by the Guatemalan Congress in August 2008. It could be an important tool in combating the targeted killing of women.
Rumbold,
And here is where I am more libertarian that you!
De-criminalising all drugs would probably put a stop to this.
Sell them through Chemist Shops or something. Stop pretending that it is a war worth winning. For the reasons you outline.
Yeah I’ve long believed that d/cing drugs is something worth serious consideration…
Or just sell drgus through supermarkets, in the same way as alcohol and cigarettes.
Legalise, regulate and tax the sex and drugs industry. I’m surprised that poorer nations do not do this by default. We should do it here.
Rumbold @ 7,
Och, your just trying to out manoeuvre me!
Child rape?
I think that is an IDEAL justification for the legalisation of drugs! Fucking hell. I’m sure that Westerners are not the only consumers of drugs, but fucking hell, when you hear about things like this, you can’t help but curse people’s goddamn fucking selfishness.
I don’t get why legalisation is such a bitter pill for govts to swallow… !
Rumbold, drugs are likely to be only one factor. more important is the impunity with which the killings can be carried out. Sexual violence as a weapon was common during Guatemala’s genocidal civil war and many of the perpertrators are now police officers or security guards.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Central_America/UnrelentingDangerGuatemala.html
While I agree with drug legalisation to a limited extent, I don’t think the problem of violence against women is simply down to drug violence.
Of course if the drug violence didn’t exist then the problem would be a lot less.
But once a culture develops of violence against women as a form of retribution then the problem takes a life of it’s own.
During the partition of India and Pakistan for example, women were frequently raped or kidnapped to get at the other side. That misogyny flares up in different forms even now, for example when gangs complain that ‘our women are being forcibly converted or preyed on’ by men of other religions. It’s that idea that women are property that is at the root of the problem here.
Sunny – yup, and I was actually going to ask how you fight such violently misogynistic attitudes, when the alternative to them (in most poorer countries) is usually religion. Which, of course, reinforces the same ideas and there are the cross-over points where corrupt church members may even be involved in drug trafficking (or similar), no matter how indirectly…
Rumbold’s idea of selling the drugs through mainstream outlets seems like a pretty good one to me.
Part of the problem with sexual violence used as a weapon is that while its physical effects are horrific, its mental effects are even worse. It draws its power from the ‘betrayal’ by a man of his role as ‘protector’. Thus, to fight against sexual violence, you need to challenge gender roles and assumptions and that is where we fall down.
For example, lots of the prickfaces of Cif seem to think that treating women equally – accepting that they can be as capable and intelligent as men – means that women automatically forfeit the right to have their physical disadvantages against men (being usually smaller, weaker, etc.) recognised.
In short, if women want to be treated equally, we should be allowed to hit them without feeling bad for having unfairly used our physical advantage against them!
If that’s what it’s like in this country, I don’t even want to think what it would be like elsewhere…
It’s that idea that women are property that is at the root of the problem here.
Precisely. But when the police, judicial system, politicians and press seem to largely share the view that women are chattel, where do you start? As you say, once such a culture has developed it outlives the crisis which spawned it and can become entrenched. I can’t begin to imagine the courage it takes for a women in a violently misogynistic society to speak out and insist on her worth.
#12
I would say the root of the problem is that some people seem to view attacks on other culture’s women as some sort of blow for the cause. Once this crap starts then you will get the inevitable reaction from the other side.
It has nothing to do with women being viewed as property but rather attempts to demoralise/emasculate your enemy by making them out to be unable to defend a vulnerable section of their community. Yes I said it! Despite whatever politically correct crap white men come out with in regards to gender equality, generally men are physically stronger than women.
If whitey believes his crap so much, I would like to see him make a regiment consisting solely of women and then sending them to Afghanistan or any other serious conflict.
Anyway, people complaining about such lowlife attacks on their own community are not doing anything wrong.
This situation of the rise of gangs in Latin America is in part due to the USA deporting criminals who don’t have proper US citenship.
So LA gang members who came to the US as children as refugees from the wars there, (and never got properly naturalised), can be sent back to places like Guatemala.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7SMSN_en&ei=2KZ-SoyIE4GZjAe0sMzwAQ&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=us+deported+gang+members&spell=1
As for selling drugs at the pharmacy??
Have you thought this through? Will they be open 24/7?
Will there be a minimum age or an amount you can buy?
Can you just go in and say, ”I’d like to buy a kilo of cocaine please”?
Then you could go and take your kilo, cut it – and make it into two (or four) kilos. And then undercut the price it was being sold for legally.
I don’t take drugs, but I might be tempted to try a 4.99 hit of herion all pure and safe and ready to use in a sterialised syringe, if I could just pop down to the shops and get one right now. It might be fun.
‘Without meaning to sound flippant, you can’t see Tesco and Sainsbury have a shootout in Central America’
Oh, I don’t know. Fruit and fizzy drinks companies have comitted murders of union activists, so legalisation won’t stop violence entirely – but it’s a start.
I don’t think that legalisation would solve all the problems with regards to violence against women, as there are deeper societal forces at work there. What it woudl do though would be to reduce the impunity with which some of these people act.
Damon:
Like alcohol, drugs would be subjected to a minimum age requirement. As supermarkets would be able to mass produce them, it is unlikely that drug dealers could undercut them, or that it would be worth buying them from supermarkets and re-selling them.
Rumbold, I still don’t see how you could be selling that stuff like alcohol.
Even if it was heavily regulated like booze is in Norway and Sweden.
Friday night at the Dogstar pub in Brixton.
You make getting some coke as easy as it is to get a round of drinks?
I remember in New Zealand ten years ago when I was there as a tourist. I’d listen to the talk radio stations every afternoon, and one day some talk jock called Leighton Smith was spending his couple of hours on air lambasting (and calling for phone in derision) to some statement from an elderly (but prominent) Maori elder who had suggested that Maori people should be allowed to cultivate and sell marijuana, because there were far to many Maori in prison for doing so, and that in economically depressed parts of the country, (like the remote East Cape region) it was practically a cottage industry anyway as there weren’t good job opportunities.
Can you (one) not see the huge gaps and loopholes in such an argument?
Of course, cannabis, cocaine and opiates were available over the counter until well into the 20th century. Advertised as ideal for everything from fractious infants to hysterical women.
I can see the drawbacks, but if, for example, it were legal to grow half a dozen cannabis plants in your greenhouse then you would remove criminal control and make harvest festivals and leek shows much groovier.
As for the harder drugs, I would suggest people who want to do them should be required to be checked out by a doctor to make sure they don’t have a condition which would render them likely to die, and then they can collect a safe dose at a pharmacist.
I’m a middle-aged, middle-class liberal in leafy Tynedale, but if I wanted to score some coke (I don’t) I could do it in a couple of hours. There is no lack of availability under the present system, so legalisation would not necessarily make drugs more available.
In fact, it would quite likely decrease use. For kids there is a certain frisson in buying drugs from an ‘outlaw’. Not so much in queuing at the counter in Boots with a scrip.
Damon:
The benefits of legalisation are manifold. Legalisation of drugs has two main outcomes- the reduction in drug gangs and the benefits to drug users.
People would no longer be criminalised for taking drugs. This would mean that they could still be part of society, rather than pushed out onto the criminal fringe (how many convicted drug users go onto to good careers?). This reduces the prison population, allowing the prison systems resources to be focused on imprisoning and rehabilating other criminals. Police could also focus more on other crimes, with the resulting benefts of a drop in the crime rate.
Drug dealers would also be made redundant, which would eliminate the senseless turf wars over drugs (though there would still be gangs of some sort).
Set against this is the likely increase in the number of users. But that is a small price to pay.
I still cant see how it would work in practice.
Would it have to be readily availabe in towns such as Shrewsbury or Doncaster?
If it was only avaliable to registered adicts is one thing. But available on demand to the weekend masses?
I think that the black market would be all over this.
But for sure, certain kinds of legislation can work to varying degrees, as has been seen in The Netherlands with its coffee shop experiment.
Damon:
All adults would be allowed to buy what they wanted.