WUNRN
Film Trailer Segment:
Justice for My Sister - Guatemala -
Film
About the Film
Adela, 27, left home for work one day and never returned. Her ex-boyfriend beat her until she was unrecognizable and left her at the side of the road. Her story is all too familiar in Guatemala, where 6,000 women have been murdered in the last decade. Only 2% of those killers have been sentenced. Adela's sister Rebeca, 34, is determined to see that Adela's killer is held accountable. She makes tortillas at home and sells them in order to raise her five children, as well as the three children Adela left behind.
The challenges Rebeca encounters in her search for justice are illustrative of the thousands of other cases like this one in Guatemala. However, her willingness to practically take on the role of investigator while she is still mourning is exceptional. She encounters many setbacks during her three-year battle: a missing police report, a judge accused of killing his own wife, and witnesses who are too afraid to testify. Completely transformed by her struggle, Rebeca emerges as a feminist leader in her rural community with a message for others: justice is possible.
In the past decade, nearly 6,000 women were brutally beaten, raped, and killed in Guatemala. While violence against women is a global issue, it is particularly alarming in Guatemala, where abuse is rarely punished or even investigated. This Central American country, comparable in size to the state of Tennessee, is just south of Mexico. Guatemala has one of the highest per capita rates of murdered women in the western hemisphere. These murders–carried out by partners, family members, or gang members–are all marked by one thing: misogyny. Human rights advocates in the country call this gender-based violence “femicide.”
Some activists blame the rise of femicide on the destabilization of the state and rise of impunity during the 36-year civil war that ended in 1996. Often, cultural stigma, media hype, and societal justification of violence against women–the mentality that “she must have been looking for it”–enable the lack of investigation and impunity. Public investigators and the police blame the women for the violence and accuse them of being sex workers or gang members, as if that were justification to close an unsolved case. DNA evidence is rarely taken from the scene of the crime hardly ever preserved properly, forcing the case to hinge on witness testimony. Many witnesses and their families are threatened by the killer or their accomplices and intimidated to the point that they prefer not to testify.
In April 2008, Guatemalan feminists pushed Congress to ratify a law against femicide. However, activists and victims’ families struggle to assure that the laws are implemented. One such family member is Rebeca Eunece Peréz. This extraordinary woman’s story shows that justice is possible when laws are actually put into practice. However, this only happened because Rebeca put herself on the line to make her sister’s murder case move through the courts. Had Rebeca not carried out an investigation and brought the witnesses to trial, the killer would have very likely gone unpunished, like thousands of aggressors in Guatemala. In Rebeca’s words, referring to a judge who was sleeping on the bench, “Justice is asleep in Guatemala.” As local activist Rosario Escobedo exclaims in an interview, “The family shouldn’t have to be the investigators – that’s the state’s role!”
Kimberly Bautista - bautista.kimberly@gmail.com
Director/Producer, Justice for my Sister
www.justiceformysister.com