Affective Contestations: Engaging Emotion Through the Sepur Zarco Trial1 Alison Crosby M. Brinton Lykes Fabienne Doiron
Introduction We felt happy that the court allowed us in, listened to us, especially us women, because we never thought that they would grant us that right or give us that space. We thank the judges who listened to us… Then I felt calm and at the same time I cried from the effort. I remembered those of us who were sitting, watching and listening. When we rejoiced the most is when the judge issued the ruling, because we fulfilled our struggle and I felt calmer because I heard how many years the culprits were sentenced to serve in jail. Because before they were sentenced we were not calm, but when we heard it or when I heard it I felt calmer knowing that they will pay for what they did to us. (Interview with Demecia Yat, Impunity Watch and the Alliance to Break the Silence and Impunity, 2017, p. 46) The process of documenting human rights violations is paradoxical in that violence is often represented in order for it to be resisted. But are violent representations necessary for the construction of social and legal recognition? What forms of empathetic engagement are constituted as solutions to violence, and what are the limits of such forms? ... I use the term crisis of witnessing to refer to the risks of representing trauma and violence, to ruptures of identification, and to the impossibility of empathetic merging between witness and testifier. (Hesford, 2011, p. 99)
On 26 February 2016, three judges from High-Risk Court ‘A’ in Guatemala City convicted Es teelmer Francisco Reyes Girón, former second lieutenant of the Sepur Zarco military outpost, and Heriberto Valdez Asig, a former area military commissioner, of crimes against humanity in the form of sexual violence and domestic and sexual slavery committed against 15 Maya Q’eqchi’ women during the 1980s at the height of Guatemala’s 36-year armed conflict. Reyes Girón was found guilty of the murder of Dominga Coc and her two daughters, and Valdéz Asig was convicted of the forced disappearances of seven of the plaintiffs’ husbands. They were sentenced to 120 and 240 years in prison, respectively. At the reparations hearing the following week, the Guatemalan state was tasked with enacting 16 measures addressing health care, education, land, memory, and the (re)training of the military. Reyes Girón was ordered to pay 5.5 million Quetzales (USD $732,700) to the plaintiffs, and Valdéz Asig was ordered to pay Q1.7 million (USD $226,500) to the families of the seven men who had been disappeared.
1 This chapter is reprinted by permission from Springer Nature: Palgrave Macmillan, Resisting Violence: Emotional
Communities in Latin America, edited by Morna Macleod and Natalia De Marinis © (2018)
