{"id":28104,"date":"2022-01-25T16:09:33","date_gmt":"2022-01-25T16:09:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/?p=28104"},"modified":"2022-01-25T16:09:33","modified_gmt":"2022-01-25T16:09:33","slug":"guatemala-indigenous-women-celebrate-ruling-on-sexual-violence-conflict-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2022\/01\/25\/guatemala-indigenous-women-celebrate-ruling-on-sexual-violence-conflict-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Guatemala: Indigenous women celebrate ruling on sexual violence | Conflict News"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Guatemala City, Guatemala \u2013<\/strong> Survivors of Guatemala\u2019s decades-long armed conflict<\/a> have welcomed a Guatemalan court ruling that found five former paramilitary patrolmen guilty of raping and sexually abusing Indigenous women during the war.<\/p>\n

Judges Yassmin Barrios and Gelvi Sical on Monday ruled<\/a> that 36 Indigenous Maya Achi women had been subjected to domestic slavery, sexual violence and rape during the 36-year conflict, which pitted the Guatemalan military against leftist forces from 1960 to 1996.<\/p>\n

The court sentenced five former members of the so-called \u201cCivil Self-Defence Patrols\u201d paramilitary group to 30 years in prison for crimes that took place in the early 1980s.<\/p>\n

The Indigenous Mayan Achi women plaintiffs in the case are from villages around the municipality of Rabinal in Baja Verapaz department, about 176km (109 miles) from the capital, Guatemala City.<\/p>\n

They spent years demanding justice for crimes committed during the conflict, which saw the Guatemalan government and military mobilise paramilitaries in their fight against leftist fighters in rural communities \u2013 and said this week\u2019s ruling is a key step in the path to justice.<\/p>\n

\"AA woman holds a rose in her hands ahead of the Guatemalan court\u2019s decision on Monday [Jeff Abbott\/Al Jazeera]<\/figure>\n

\u201cI feel happy,\u201d Pedrina Lopez, a 51-year-old Indigenous Maya Achi survivor and one of the plaintiffs in the case, told Al Jazeera outside the court in Guatemala City before the sentences were handed down.<\/p>\n

Lopez was only 12 when she was taken and raped by the paramilitary patrolmen in her village in the early 1980s. \u201cWe did it,\u201d she said, about the ruling. \u201cWe do not want what happened to us to ever happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fight for justice<\/h2>\n

Lopez and the other women involved in the case faced an uphill battle in their quest for justice.<\/p>\n

The court\u2019s decision came 11 years after they first began to organise to seek justice. That was when lawyers in Rabinal began to find evidence of sexual violence through local women\u2019s accounts of what had happened.<\/p>\n

The court did not accept the case on multiple occasions, and in 2019, the accused were set free after Judge Claudette Dominguez ruled that she \u201cdid not believe\u201d the testimonies. But the case advanced after the judiciary was changed upon appeal.<\/p>\n

The Indigenous women had lived with their trauma for decades \u2013 even after the Guatemalan government and leftist forces from the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity signed a peace deal in December 1996 to end the fighting.<\/p>\n