From Genocide to Feminicide: Impunity and Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Guatemala

This article analyzes contemporary social cleansing and feminicide in Guatemala. Further, it explores the costs of these murders for individuals, families, and Guatemalan society by exploring the homicide case of Claudina Isabel Velasquez Pais as it haltingly moves through the Guatemalan judicial system. This article offers a critically needed assessment of the lived outcomes of a society where the genocidaires have never been brought to justice and impunity reigns more than a decade after the signing of peace accords. I conclude with an analysis of the state's role in preventing violence against women. Understanding the state's role enables us to interrogate the official explanations of the killing of women which, in turn, leads us back to the historic role of the state using terror as a primary recourse of power guaranteed by impunity from the genocide of the 1980s to social cleansing and feminicide today.