Guatemala activists seek justice as women die

GUATEMALA CITY -- At a rate of more than one a day, the mutilated bodies of Guatemalan women are turning up on roadsides and in dumpsters. Some have been decapitated with butcher knives. Others have been strangled or burned beyond recognition. Many have been raped.

Since January 2002, 1,183 Guatemalan women have been murdered, many in unspeakable ways. And nobody knows why.

"The only link is the ways in which they were killed," said Giovanna Lemus, coordinator of the Guatemalan Women's Group, one of several activist groups that have been pressuring the government to give priority to solving the murders.

Lemus believes the violence is a legacy of the country's 1960-1996 civil war, when both sides committed horrific atrocities. "If you analyze the types of violence in the armed conflict, they are the same," she said.

The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, Yakin Ertrk, concluded after a visit to Guatemala in February that government apathy and the country's weak justice system made it virtually impossible to identify the killers, much less the causes of the violence. Less than 5 percent of all murders are solved in Guatemala, which lacks a specialized homicide squad, officials say.

Police have arrested only 11 suspects in connection with the murders of 360 women last year, according to a report released last month by the Attorney General's Office for Human Rights, which acts as the country's ombudsman. Lemus's group counted 383 murdered during that period, based on police figures and newspaper reports.

Mara Eugenia Morales, who oversees cases related to women for the semiautonomous human rights office, said there was evidence to suggest police had been involved in at least 10 of the murders.

But "the authorities don't want to accept that," she said.

The number of victims had surpassed that of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where the killings of more than 300 women over the past decade have captured world attention. Guatemalan officials, however, continue to downplay the violence, despite evidence that the number of killings are on the rise.

Otto Perz Molina, a former army general who was the country's top security official until last month, denied that women were being targeted. He said in an interview that many of the victims had ties to street gangs, which, together with drug operations, are blamed for a general rise in violence in Guatemala since the late 1990s. Officials cite police figures showing women account for 8 percent of all murders.

But Lemus and other women's rights activists argue that while the female victims are a minority, the ways in which they are being killed demand special attention.

"You don't see male victims looking like that," Lemus said, displaying a gruesome collection of photos of the crime scenes to make her point. "They don't cut them up in pieces like they do the women." Specialists offer no conclusive explanations why such brutality is directed against women.

In one of the most shocking cases, the dismembered bodies of two sisters, ages 11 and 14, were found crammed in an oil barrel last June. The older girl had apparently been killed for spurning a gang-member boyfriend.

Government critics -- in particular, the victims' family members -- dispute the allegation that most of the murdered women were involved in criminal activities.

"It isn't bad enough that she's dead, but they have to smear mud on her name," said Mara Elena Oroxon, whose 30-year-old daughter, Nancy Peralta, was killed in February 2002. Oroxon described her daughter as a serious student who worked as a secretary at a mechanics shop to put herself through school, and volunteered with handicapped people in her spare time.

Two days after Peralta disappeared from the University of San Carlos, where she was a third-year accounting student, her mutilated body turned up in a government morgue. She had been stabbed 48 times and her attackers had apparently tried to cut off her head.

Police closed the case months later, citing lack of evidence. Since then, the family has lobbied tirelessly to get to the bottom of Peralta's murder, gaining an inside view of the country's corrupt criminal justice system.

Mara Elena Peralta, Peralta's sister, said she had been followed at least 13 times by men she suspected were involved in the murder. When she informed the officer on the case, she said he told her, "What you need to do is keep your mouth shut."

Even worse for her family, the government now refuses to accept that Nancy Peralta died. In February, two years after her father and brother identified her corpse at the government morgue, police informed the family that Peralta had enrolled for the spring semester at the university. The news fueled the family's suspicions that university students participated in the murder and have since collaborated with police to cover it up.

Rosa Sandoval, a single mother, has faced similar obstacles in seeking justice in the murder of her daughter, 16-year-old Mara Isabel Vliz.

Vliz, a dark-haired beauty who dreamed of becoming a pilot, disappeared from the clothing shop where she worked in December 2001. Two days later, her mother learned of her daughter's death from the television news. She had been strangled with barbed wire and her skull was crushed. She had also been stabbed, her mother said.

"Nobody deserves to die like that, much less someone who was just beginning life," said Sandoval, sobbing in her tiny living room in downtown Guatemala City. Photos of Vliz in a shimmering white gown at her 15th birthday party hang in the cramped apartment, along with her Barbie dolls and stuffed animals, with which she had played even as a teenager.

"People say, 'it's only a woman who died,' as if they were flies," said Sandoval, who said she tried to kill herself and then suffered a heart attack after her daughter's murder.

But her sorrow has turned to anger over the failure of the authorities to act in the case. She said police investigators had dismissed several obvious leads, including eyewitness descriptions of her daughter's likely kidnapper and records of the calls made on her cellphone the day the teenager disappeared.

Police officials say they lack the tools to pursue every case.

"It's just not possible," said Sandra Zayas, the government's special prosecutor for crimes against women. She has a staff of six investigators to follow the roughly 80 women's murder cases her office has taken on so far, in addition to dozens of cases of adoption-related crimes, she said. Her agency was set up in 1997 to deal primarily with sexual abuse cases and has no offices outside Guatemala City.

Zayas said she believed street gangs were responsible for the most gruesome killings, and that there was little evidence that police were involved.

But those arguments are of little comfort for the victims' families. "To see that woman after woman is assassinated, beheaded, raped, we can't accept that," said Mara Elena Peralta. "The government has to do something."