The Messy Practice of Building Women's Human Rights: Truth-telling and Sexual Violence in Guatemala

This article seeks to contribute to broader discussions of how human rights emerge and become intelligible in moments of transition at national and transnational levels. It focuses on ad hoc practices of exposing war-time sexual violence in two major truthtelling processes in Guatemala, the Recuperation of Historical Memory Project and the Commission for Historical Clarification. These initiatives collected testimony to document thousands of cases of state-sanctioned violence during the 36 years of war that officially concluded with the peace accords in December 1996. Among their other achievements, these processes were the first truth-telling bodies in Latin America to expose and condemn gender violence in war. In Guatemala, the postwar transition occurred at precisely the moment that the organizing of women internationally was beginning to bear fruit at the statutory level, but the feminist analysis that developed is not attributable merely to the uptake of developments in international law. This article considers these Guatemalan cases to argue that, although legal progress is crucial, practice has been a key alternative source for the development of women's human rights around sexual violence.