Violence against Women in Latin America

Domestic Violence

Though there are multiple ways in which a (neo)patriarchal order enforces women’s subordination, their domestic subordination is guaranteed by a variety of violent acts. Violence by men against women is both a reflection of a system of gender inequality under which women are subordinated and a way of maintaining and/or ratifying that inequality. Latin American women may be subject to domestic violence, whether verbal, physical or sexual, to rape by intimates or, as seen above, as a political tool against insurgents or counterinsurgents or their partners, or to waves of femicide such as that which has occurred in Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) and Guatemala. Furthermore, there are occurrences of incest forced upon girls in their homes by uncles, cousins, brothers, or fathers and stepfathers (see, e.g., González-López, 2007) or prostitution forced psychologically or through physical threat.

The extent of domestic violence in Latin America is unknown, though various studies support the claim that it is widespread. A 2006 World Health Organization study based on interviews with 24,000 women in 10 countries attempted to map the incidence and types of physical and sexual violence against women. In Latin America women in rural and urban Peru and Brazil were interviewed. Provincial Peru showed the highest rates of physical violence of any of the 10 countries: 61 percent of women had been subjected to such violence by their partners. Moderate physical violence (being slapped, pushed, or shoved) was found among 52 percent of the women interviewed, and 49 percent had experienced severe physical violence, having been “hit with a fist, kicked, dragged, threatened with a weapon, or having a weapon used against [them]” (WHO, 2006: 6). Injuries occurred in 50 percent of the Peruvian provincial sample: over 20 percent reported injuries to eyes or ears and over 25 percent reported having lost consciousness as a result of physical aggression by an intimate partner (15). In anonymous reports 19 percent of the Peruvian urban sample and 18 percent of the Peruvian provincial sample admitted to having been sexually abused by male family members before the age of 15; in Brazil 9 percent of the rural sample and 12 percent of the urban sample had been so abused (13). The incidence of suicidal thoughts was much higher among women who had been subject to physical or sexual abuse than among women who had not: 47 versus 20 percent in the Brazilian city, 40 versus 16 percent in the Peruvian city, 35 versus 14 percent in provincial Brazil, and 34 versus 14 percent in provincial Peru (16).

Research based on interviews with 359 women in metropolitan Lima found that psychological, physical, and sexual violence against female partners occurred among both the poor and the middle-class, though the incidence of this violence was higher among the poor (Gonzáles de Olarte and Gavilano Llosa, 1999: 38). More than 80 percent of the women interviewed reported that they had been subjected to psychological (emotional) violence; almost 40 percent had suffered physical aggression and slightly over 13 percent had received injuries because of this violence; and 48.5 percent had been sexually coerced by their partners (being forced to have sex when or in a way that they did not want) (Gonzáles de Olarte and Gavilano Llosa, 1999: 38). Domestic violence has often led to migration within Peru in order to escape an abusive spouse or relative (Alcalde, 2006).

In 2003 the Mexican government conducted an extensive study concerned with domestic violence that included samples from all 31 states and the Federal District (INEGI, 2004). Types of violence were divided into emotional, economic, sexual, and physical. Emotional violence was defined as psychological damage due to threats, insults, intimidation, humiliation, or sarcasm (INEGI, 2004: 97). Economic violence consisted of the withholding of economic resources from the household (this definition assumes that the male head of household is the breadwinner). Sexual violence included marital rape and incest, although the study did not look at the incidence of the latter. Physical violence involved aggression that causes bodily harm, whether temporary or permanent.

Of the sample of 19,471,972 women with partners, almost half (46.6 percent), or 9,064,458, had suffered at least one incident of domestic violence within the 12-month period prior to the interview (INEGI, 2004: 37). Of the total sample, 38.4 percent had suffered emotional violence, 29.3 percent economic violence, 7.8 percent sexual violence, and 9.3 percent physical aggression (37–39). Physical abuse by a husband was held to include pushing his wife, pulling her hair, kicking her or tying her up, throwing objects at her, hitting her with his fists or other object, attempting to choke or smother her, and threatening her with a knife or firing a gun (50). After having lived in a colonia popular in Mexicali for six years, I consider the reported incidence of physical violence very low. Perhaps women, for reasons of family loyalty, did not wish to report violence in their marriages to interviewers, or perhaps, as is common among abused women, they blamed themselves for attracting this violence (see Martin, 1981 [1976]: Chap. 5; Walker, 1979: Chap. 1).

Better-educated women suffered a higher percentage of violence than less well-educated women, with women without any education having the lowest percentage of violent incidents (38.0 percent) and women who had completed the 8 years of secondary school having the highest (52.2 percent) (INEGI, 2004: 43). Women who worked outside of the household reported more abuse than the average (49.6 percent as compared to 46.6 percent). They showed higher incidences than housewives of emotional abuse (42.1 and 36.7 percent respectively), economic abuse (30.5 versus 28.8 percent), physical abuse (10.5 versus 8.8 percent), and sexual abuse (9.1 versus 7.1 percent) (46).

That economically active women should be subjected to greater violence than stay-at-home wives is not a surprise given the culture of machismo. This culture, sometimes glossed as the “culture of patriarchy,” is not restricted to Latin America but has been well-documented there. As Melhuus (1996: 245) points out:

Not only does a working woman show visibly that her husband is not man enough to provide for her (and their children); a working wife also brings to the fore a husband’s jealousy. In fact “los celos” (jealousies) was the reason most often given, especially by young married women, for why they stopped working once they were married. Thus a married woman’s work has a double implication: it detracts from her husband’s honour and is associated with her being public, potentially available to other men.

Domestic violence, including physical, sexual, and verbal aggression, is typical of machismo and a way to strengthen men’s power within the household, especially if they feel economically insecure (Casique, 2010; García and Oliveira, 1994: 162; González de la Rocha, 1988; 1994: 31–32; Gutmann, 1996: 237; Olivera, 2006; Romanucci-Ross, 1986: 56; Roldán, 1988: 233, 237). Men’s self- and other-perceived failure is converted into domestic violence. Although this is changing with changing expectations in marriage (see, e.g., Hirsch, 2003), a working wife can be seen as marking the normative breadwinner’s failure. A number of other factors can lead to spousal abuse, including the woman’s entry into public space where she might meet men or her questioning her husband about his income, activities, absences, or infidelities. A highly educated woman or a woman more highly educated than her husband or partner may also be seen as threatening his normatively dominant position in the household.

Physical, sexual, or verbal aggressiveness often takes place when husbands are drunk, leading wives to “blame their behavior on their drinking” (González de la Rocha, 1994: 144). Drinking can lead to spousal abuse in a number of countries and a number of ethnic groups, both dominant and subordinate, in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America and around the world. Among a Quechua-speaking people of the Peruvian Andes drunkenness frequently leads to wife beating and is associated with men’s attempt to reassert their dominance in a society in which they are politically subordinate (Harvey, 1994: 226). A study of a Highland Chiapas Maya community has shown that drinking and wife beating are related; Eber (1995: 205) argues that this kind of problem drinking follows a mestizo model (that of the dominant ethnic group) and co-occurs with greater fragmentation of the community and “women’s growing participation in the cash economy.” The argument is essentially that men who feel stressed will drink and become violent. This view is endorsed by men as well as by women. Women often “forgive” violence against them when their menfolk are drinking on the grounds that they were drunk.

Research in a village in Ecuador shows the association between gender subordination, masculine privilege, and domestic abuse that relies on peer pressure (McKee, 1999: 170):

Village men have a collective interest in the perpetuation of gender hierarchy, . . . and individual behavior, particularly of young men, is monitored by the male community. If a man feels his domestic authority is compromised, his marital situation soon becomes a subject of village talk. If the “problem” persists, ridicule or insults from a coterie of male villagers who consider themselves hypermasculine, as well as a man’s own reading of his gender role, may prod him into beating his wife.

In Amatenango del Valle, Chiapas, the head of an artisan cooperative was assassinated because her economic independence and power challenged the patriarchal structures in the village (Nash, 1993: 11-12).

Olivera (2006: 105) holds that male aggression toward women begins in small ways, with insinuations and insults, then objectification and exploitation, and moves on to greater violence, from intimate partners to others. Types of violence ranging from emotional to sexual and physical can be seen as a continuum, with perpetrators of relatively minor aggressions becoming capable of more serious ones, resulting, at the extreme, in the mutilation and/or murder of partners and others. These essentially misogynous actions are writ large in the case of non-family-based femicide.

Femicide

Femicide or feminicide (Fregoso and Bejarano, 2010) has been defined as “the assassination of women for reasons associated with their gender.” Femicide is the most extreme form of violence based on gender inequality (Carcedo and Sagot, 2000: 1, my translation). It has also been described as “the misogynist killing of women by men” and as “a continuation of sexual assault; in identifying femicide one must take into account the violent acts, the motives, and the imbalance of power between the sexes in the political, social, and economic spheres” (Monárrez Fragoso, 2003: 155). The femicides in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, have received the most media attention and have been the subject of a number of academic articles relating its occurrence to women’s subordination (e.g., Fregoso, 2000; Gaspar de Alba, 2003; Monárrez Fragoso, 2003; Olivera, 2006; Swanger, 2007; Vila, 2003). Concerning the more than 300 “young girls and women, some as young as five years old” who had been killed in Ciudad Juárez between 1993 and 2003, Gaspar de Alba (2003: 1) reports that “their bodies were found strangled, mutilated, dismembered, raped, stabbed, and torched; some were so badly beaten, disfigured, or decomposed that their remains could not be identified.” Femicide is occurring throughout Mexico, and while it sometimes involves acquaintances or intimate partners (Olivera, 2006: 105) about 90 percent of the cases are serial murders, with their perpetrators remaining unknown (Gaspar de Alba, 2003: 1–4).

Many monographs and edited collections have been dedicated to describing and attempting to come to grips with the causes of the rape, murder, and mutilation of young women in Ciudad Juárez (see, e.g., Domínguez-Ruvalcaba and Corona, 2010; Fregoso and Bejarano, 2010; Gaspar de Alba and Guzmán, 2010; Rodríguez, 2007; Staudt, 2008; Staudt, Payan, and Kruszewski, 2009; Washington Valdez, 2006). Numerous films have been made in Mexico using femicide in Ciudad Juárez as the central theme (Tabuenca Córdoba, 2010), and at least three, including The Virgin of Juárez (2005), Bordertown (2007), and Juárez (2008), have been produced in Hollywood (López-Lozano, 2010: 130). Novels have been written in Spanish, French, and English using the border femicides as an important theme while exploring other types of male violence against women. In English these include Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s (2005) Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders and Stella Pope Duarte’s (2008) If I Die in Juárez. Binational and international protests have attempted to pressure the government of Chihuahua and the federal government of Mexico to stop the killings. The journalist Diana Washington Valdez (2006: 61) tells us that “the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C., Amnesty International of London, the United Nations and Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights are some of the organizations that came to the border city at the insistent requests of activists and victims’ families.” Yet the femicides continue, and those responsible remain at large. The lack of viable suspects is often related to police corruption.

Although it has not been explored to the same extent in other countries in Latin America, femicide is known to have occurred in Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Peru (Fregoso and Bejarano, 2010: 38). In Costa Rica the most frequent cause of homicides directed against women is related to domestic violence and rape (Carcedo and Sagot, 2001). In Guatemala, between 2001 and August 2004, 1,188 women were murdered, and a number of the victims presented “evidence of rape, mutilation and dismemberment” (Amnesty International, 2005: 5). By May 2006, 2,200 Guatemalan women had been “brutally assassinated” (Amnesty International, 2006). The mother of a murdered 15-year-old girl testified that her daughter “had been raped, her hands and feet tied with barbed wire, she had been stabbed and strangled and put in a bag. Her face was disfigured from being punched, her body was punctured with small holes, there was a rope around her neck and her nails were bent back” (Amnesty International, 2005: 1). In 2010, 685 women were murdered in Guatemala (Amnesty International, 2011). In Guatemala as in Mexico, authorities are apathetic about looking into the murders, and the police are often distrusted because of their corruption and/or lack of interest; furthermore, the police tend to blame the victim, claiming that these murdered women probably did not follow traditional gender roles and/or were immoral (Amnesty International, 2005: 21–22; Gaspar de Alba, 2003: 6; 2010: 67; Monárrez Fragoso, 2003: 157; Swanger, 2007; Vila, 2003: 85–86). In some cases the femicides have led to the organization of women to attempt to combat them, such as Justicia para Nuestras Hijas, Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, and Centro de Derechos de Mujeres in Mexico (Fregoso and Bejarano, 2010).

Torture During Civil Strife and Dictatorship

Under dictatorships in the Southern Cone, including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia, women activists or partners of activists or suspected activists have been subjected to torture (Bunster, 1993: 98–99). Torture may be physical or mental, the former usually including rape and gang rape, often carried out in front of a male relative in order to extract a confession from him (Bunster, 1993: 114). Children may also be tortured in order to extract information from parents, relatives, or friends. According to Nightengale and Wurf (1993: 144), Amnesty International “has documented the use of torture against children in Peru, Guatemala, Argentina, . . . Chile, and Ecuador . . . among other countries.” Under the Southern Cone dictatorships mental torture of women was common and included the threat of having a loved one “disappeared” or being forced to witness the torture of other detainees (Bunster, 1993: 108, 119). In Argentina women formed organizations such as Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in an attempt to find their disappeared relatives during the “dirty war” of 1976–1983 (Sutton, 2010) and were often met by violence.

Rape is a common tool of the military and has been used in Guatemala and elsewhere, including in the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca in Mexico. According to Hernández Castillo (2008: 153), “From the perspective of a patriarchal ideology that considers women as sexual objects and bearers of family honor, rape, sexual torture, and mutilation are mechanisms for attacking enemy men.” Whereas women are attacked directly, their menfolk suffer humiliation through undermining their masculine prerogatives as well as through the demonstration that they cannot fill their roles as protectors of their women. Thus raping women can be a weapon of war, carried out by invading troops (as during the Conquest) or by soldiers acting in the name of the state or guerrillas acting against the state. Rapes and “disappearances” of women occurred during the civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala (Amnesty International, 2005: 5–6). Rape by soldiers of women of “all ages and marital statuses: unmarried girls as young as 9 years old, older married women, women who were pregnant, and elderly widows” was common during Guatemala’s 36-year-long civil war in Guatemala (Hastings, 2002: 1164). Sexual slavery was practiced during that war and targeted indigenous women in particular. Only recently, 30 years after the war ended, has a group of victimized women come forward to denounce this aggression in front of a judge (Mendez, 2012).

The use of rape and torture has been common elsewhere in Latin America (Fregoso and Bejarano, 2010: 13):

Gang rape, sexual slavery, mutilation, torture, and forced pregnancy were part of the ongoing and insidious forms of terrorizing imprisoned women during the military dictatorships of the southern Cone countries such as Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay and in countries such as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala, where the states waged counterinsurgency wars against mostly unarmed civilians.

In the more than 40 years of civil strife in Colombia women have been raped, gang raped, tortured, and killed by security forces, army-backed paramilitary groups, and guerrillas, with the paramilitaries committing the most and the most atrocious acts (Amnesty International, 2004: 18–19). According to Amnesty International (2004: 1),

With their bodies viewed and treated as territory to be fought over by the warring parties, women are targeted for a number of reasons—to sow terror within communities making it easier for military control to be imposed, to force people to flee their homes to assist acquisition of territory, to wreak revenge on adversaries, to accumulate “trophies of war,” and to exploit them as sexual slaves.

Women in Colombia have been cut up by chain saws, had their breasts or arms sawed off, been impaled, been disfigured by acid or instruments, and had their bellies ripped open to cut out the fetus, these brutalities occurring usually after rape or gang rape (Amnesty International, 2004: 11, 18, and throughout). These types of torture—sexual and physical–are directed against women believed to be sympathetic to the “enemy” or women whose friends, relatives, or menfolk might be. Enslaving women and girls to perform sexual and/or domestic services such as cooking or laundering has been found to be common, especially among the guerrillas. HIV/AIDS and pregnancy are often the result of rape and sexual slavery. Lesbians, gay men, and sex workers are often killed as part of “social cleansing” operations carried out by all sides in the conflict. Whereas domestic violence occurs in domestic space and femicide in public space, these women (and men) are casualties of war whether attacked within or outside of their homes and communities.

Structural Violence

Structural violence may rest upon (neo)patriarchal practices incorporated into state legislation or result from economic processes such as neoliberalism and globalization that are inherent in the workplace and have gendered effects. Among the types of structural violence against women are rural women’s skewed access to or control of property and governmental inattention to them as agricultural producers (see, e.g., Zapata Martelo, 1996; see also Olivera, 2006: 110).

The neoliberal structural adjustment programs implemented in Latin America in the 1980s have had an especially damaging impact on women and can also be considered structural violence (see, e.g., Sutton, 2010). As privatization and openness to international completion dried up formal economic opportunities for men and as the wages of those employed fell and public services were eliminated or downsized, women were forced to take up waged work or to embark upon self-provisioning and informal income-generating activities that lengthened their work days and induced a pattern of self-exploitation (Fernández Poncela, 1996; see also, e.g., Alarcón-González and McKinley, 1999; Babb, 1996; González de la Rocha, 1995; Safa, 1995a; 1995b). That women wage workers tend to earn less than men is also a form of structural violence, incorporating (neo)patriarchal myths about men’s being the household breadwinners that are no longer sustainable since the 1980s economic crises that impacted Latin America (see, e.g., Safa, 1995b).

A number of works have considered, though without using the term, the structural violence against women employed in the maquiladoras (e.g., Fernández-Kelly, 1983; Peña, 1997; Salzinger, 2003; Tiano, 1994; Wilson, 2003; Wright, 2006). Though they differ in their stress on whether women’s subordination in those plants is primarily due to what has come to be called “public patriarchy” or to the workings of capitalism, they agree that the interaction of the two treats women as disposable and exploited workers. Nonetheless, some of these works stress women’s agency in the face of this oppression.

Salzinger (2003: 176) argues that the sexual objectification of the female maquiladora labor force—in the plants where this occurs—is part of the productive process:

Productivity . . . is born of the routinized sexual objectification of women workers by their male superiors. . . . Supervisors become voyeurs, and women workers become the productive objects of the male gaze. Labor control is established within this relationship, as young women workers are under constant watch and evaluation, both as sexual and productive subjects.

But female labor is not only often subordinated via sexual objectification but also severely undervalued. Unskilled women are not trained to become skilled workers, as they are expected (and encouraged) to leave too soon for training to be cost-effective. They are considered disposable workers, easily replaced and not worthy of training—a myth that enables capital accumulation through flexible production (Wright, 2006: 50–52). Wright (2006) relates this discourse of women workers’ disposability in the maquiladora plants to the femicides in Ciudad Juárez, arguing that it is a myth that becomes generalized into the wider society and becomes conflated with other discourses such as that decrying the “public” woman. In other words, women come to be undervalued and viewed as somehow inferior throughout the city just as they are at work (see also Arriola, 2010).

Structural violence can thus be seen as a confluence of (neo)patriarchal and machista ideologies and practices in the public arena and the drive for capitalist accumulation. Nonetheless, capitalism, by providing opportunities for women to earn a wage, may undermine private patriarchy within the family by eroding the forces that kept women at home and economically dependent on males. At the same time, wives who show their independence though their economic activities and control of personal income may face a violent backlash. It is therefore necessary for them to organize, as many have done throughout Latin America, to assure themselves of a support group in their fight against the violence to which they are subjected.

The Articles in this Issue

The articles in this issue are concerned with violence against women in Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil, Mexico, and Ecuador. They examine the structural violence of race/ethnicity and class in legitimating violence, violence in the form of patrimonial practices, and the ideologies legitimizing discrimination against and subordination of women and brutality against them.

Friederic explores the high rates of domestic violence in a rural region in northwestern Ecuador. She points out that women who have learned of their right to be free of violence from their husbands—a right established through cooperation between women’s organizations and the Ecuadorian government in the 1990s—are now rebelling against it. Formerly it had sometimes been accepted as part of a “culture of gendered violence,” and women engaged in a discourse of deserved as opposed to undeserved violence. Human rights discourses, however, have at least partially empowered women to combat their victimization. Nonetheless, men often react to this discourse with further violence, and in most cases women lack the institutional, legal, political, and economic resources to combat the violence perpetrated against them and are thus faced by violence on a structural as well as a personal level.

Tovar and Irazábal look at the violence against indigenous women in Colombia and their organizing efforts against it. They hold that the impacts of and responses to armed conflict are ethno-gendered, affecting men and women in dissimilar ways. Focusing on Arhauca and Pasta women, they show how their livelihoods are affected by armed conflict. Women are restricted in their movements and prevented from working in their fields or carrying out other forms of securing a living by threats of rape and are forced to cook and wash for armed men. Many have become widowed, and some have migrated to cities. Yet, Tovar and Irazábal argue, women are organizing to challenge oppressive norms that originate both within their community and in the larger society. They hold optimistically that there are not only threats but also opportunities for indigenous women in conflict zones. Their work shows that violence against women can lead to greater consciousness of gender issues and result in organizational efforts.

Popular culture as revealed in performance art in Guatemala is fomenting a reaction to violence against women. Barbosa explores Regina José Galindo’s 279 Golpes, in which, invisible within a cubicle, the artist subjects herself to 279 blows with a whip, one for each woman murdered in Guatemala between January 1 and June 9 of 2005. Barbosa supplies a historical summary of violence against women in Guatemala that puts the continued violence against them in context, and her contribution supports the idea that political violence during times of civil war leads to other forms of violence against women, including femicide. It shows that art can foment a response to violence against women. Barbosa underscores that consciousness of the effects of neoliberalism on subaltern people, particularly women and the indigenous, has led to greater awareness of the problem. She holds, however, that the state is complicit in this violence by doing nothing to prevent it.

Talcott’s contribution examines the position of rural, primarily indigenous women in southern Mexico’s state of Oaxaca who have organized in reaction to the structural violence caused by neoliberal policies, including the Plan Puebla-Panamá initiated by President Vicente Fox (a revival of Zedillo’s Isthmus Megaproject). These women work through the Alianza Mexicana por la Autodeterminación de los Pueblos, established in 2002, and have taken an anti-neoliberal and pro-human-rights stance. Their involvement in combating neoliberal structural violence, Talcott argues, has led them to challenge violence against women in its numerous forms, including those related to poverty and class exploitation, racism, and patriarchal practices. She presents case studies of women activists describing how they became involved in the struggle to prevent violence against women. One of these women was assassinated by paramilitaries while engaging in human rights work. Talcott’s article is valuable in showing how organization to combat one form of violence (neoliberalism) can be generalized to combat other forms of violence (desecration of human and women’s rights) as women’s consciousness of their oppression develops. She stresses the agency of women in the face of the multiple forms of violence they experience in their daily lives.

Violence can also be perpetrated against transgendered individuals, as Cerullo and Valiño’s contribution underscores. They argue that a woman who lived as a man in a Mexican village was ultimately murdered for her gender “transgressions” by a murderer or murderers never pursued by the complicit homophobic Mexican state. The article adds to the literature by showing that gender oppression is part and parcel of (neo)patriarchal practice; a woman stepping out of the bounds of her normative gender role is to be punished with impunity. Furthermore, it contributes to the relatively sparse literature about violence against lesbians and trangendered individuals.

Smith discusses the structural violence that is embedded in the racism/gender discrimination directed against black women in Brazil. She examines the case of a domestic servant who was brutally beaten by five young men who pleaded in their defense that they thought she was a prostitute (and thus outside of the moral order). Smith argues that in Brazil black women are dehumanized and imagined as prostitutes against whom violence can legitimately be directed. Her article supports the argument that the intersection of racism, class, and gender (that is, structural violence) must be understood in analyses of violence against women. The mere fact of being black and thus considered lower-class legitimated the violence against her by nonblack, nonlower-class men. Smith’s contribution is of value in showing that justifications for gender violence are closely related to race/class/ethnicity.

England looks at changes in legislation in Guatemala aimed at combating femicide and pervasive sexual violence against women. These types of violence are widespread and not only historically rooted but normalized since the time of the conquest. England makes the point that, whereas men are usually found murdered by gunshots, women “are often found with signs of sexual violence, torture, and dismemberment.” She finds these femicides to rest on a continuum of violence against women that ranges from atrocities committed during civil strife to everyday practices that are intrinsic to the society. Laws aimed at reducing violence against women have, however, been enacted. In the 1990s, after the signing of the peace accords and under pressure from women’s organizations, the Guatemalan government endorsed internationally recognized statutes with regard to the equality of women. Legislation was passed protecting women from femicide, rape, and sexual exploitation of any kind. Yet women who denounce instances of sexual violence often face violent retribution or find their claims to have been victims simply dismissed.

Deere, Contreras, and Twyman explore what they call “patrimonial violence” against women in Ecuador. They argue that it should be added to physical, sexual, psychological, and economic violence as a type of violence perpetrated against women. Women in Ecuador have fewer rights than in other parts of Latin America, especially as concerns widows’ and divorced women’s control over property. Laws tend to favor children and (according to women) especially male children over widows, and women have little recourse if estranged husbands refuse to recognize communal property laws. Economic arrangements are legitimated at the political level through enacting and/or enforcing extant laws with their incorporated (neo)patriarchal practices and with the deep gender bias intrinsic to them. Deere and colleagues conducted interviews with 40 focus groups in three areas of Ecuador and found that women were often not conscious of their rights.

All of the articles in this issue contribute to our knowledge about structural and/or ideological violence against women and, in many cases, about the organizational efforts that have resulted from these types of violence. Several mention the effects of neoliberalism on women and how organizing against its depredations has led women to organize against the violence that has affected their daily lives through the actions of males who are sometimes intimate partners. The array of country studies shows that violence against women is widespread in Latin America and often has deep historical roots. It could be argued that societywide violence in the form of rape and torture during wars and civil strife presents a legitimating environment for other types of violence against women, including femicide and domestic violence. The articles also show that violence against women is often justified by reference to racial, ethnic, or class factors and is usually perpetrated against members of subordinate groups by members of dominant ones—the state and its legal system, males in the household or in the local community, or dominant ethnic groups.

We need continuing documentation of violence against women in all its aspects, the raising of consciousness against a culture of gender violence, and an examination of successful organizing against it and the means for pressuring the state (and the community) to take it into account and combat it. The papers in this issue contribute to these goals.