Articles about "Guatemala"

Realidades socioculturales

Scopic regimes of a new war: photographs of gang members in the red note of the Guatemalan postwar period.

  • Luis Bedoya

Since the mid-1990s, Guatemalan newspapers have published photographs of tattooed men identified as mareros. The mobilization of these photographs plays a key role in the socialization of ideas about who these individuals are and what they do, leading to the formation of a public view of crime as a post-war phenomenon. The formation of the aforementioned public gaze, in turn, became a nodal component of a new counterinsurgency in the form of the fight against crime, of which the nota roja operated as one of its rhetorical devices. The discussion I offer focuses on the performance of the two representative newspapers of the genre: Al Día and Nuestro Diario, and is limited to the decade 1996-2005.

EncArtes multimedia

Community Justice and Ritual Spectacle: A Case of Mayan Law in Guatemala

  • Carlos Y. Flores

This essay that accompanies the documentary Suk' B'anik (Correction) is based on the follow-up of a robbery case resolved by the so-called "Mayan ancestral law" in the municipality of Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala, where more than 80% of its inhabitants self-identify as Maya-K'iche'. The material seeks to delve into the collective reasons and emotions that took place in the community trial that prosecuted him. Given the constant weakness of the state justice system, in this region popular tribunals coordinated by local community mayors and supracommunal coordinations of ancestral authorities have become common to collectively prosecute delinquents or alleged delinquents and apply some type of corrective sanction to them. Such judicial proceedings take place within their own cultural understandings, often featuring highly ritualized spectacular choreographies for both local and wider consumption. Such visuality, often accompanied by community video practices, lends to the performance The participants' individual bodies are given a consubstantial status within these judicial processes, while at the same time reaffirming local power structures. In such collective scenarios, the individual body of the accused is exhibited and judicialized by local authorities in front of audiences that demand sanctions to expel evil, that which is perceived as harmful to the community. This exercise, in turn, acts as a metaphor of moral sanitation and rebalancing of a social body processing its own conflicts. As in the rituals of passage or in the theater, the popular judgments in these Maya-K'iche' communities frequently appeal to other times and spaces, even supernatural ones, which affect the effectiveness of the reorganizing message that also reinforces their own identity constructions.

Realidades socioculturales

Social research and political action in the context of violence. Reflections on my experience in Community Press in Guatemala

  • Santiago Bastos

Keywords: communities, dispossession, Guatemala, collaborative research.

Dfter the genocide of the 1980s and the peace process in Guatemala, a process of territorial dispossession was launched linked to the activity of extractive industries and megaprojects. The response was a mobilization of the affected communities that became the axis of the indigenous and anti-neoliberal organization in the country, to which the State has responded with the delegitimization, repression and criminalization of leading activists and community authorities. In this context, a group of activists invited me to participate in a political project to support these communities through analysis, dissemination and reflection. The same context forced the project to end up becoming an alternative communication initiative - Community Press - and actions against criminalization. In this text I reflect on my experience in this space and this process, as a case of political use of the profession of social researcher. I dwell on the challenges and possibilities that the processes in which the social sciences are transformed into tools for communicative and legal action pose, and I show the tensions that were present.