http://lap.sagepub.comLatin American Perspectives
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X07311364 2008; 35; 151 Latin American Perspectives

by
R. Aída Hernández Castillo
Translated by Mariana Mora
The first months of the Calderón administration in Mexico have been char-
acterized by the militarization of indigenous regions throughout the country
and the continued criminalization of social movements—the perpetration of
state violence and repression in the name of “social peace.” The April 26
reforms of the Federal Penal Code designed to “punish terrorism,” which
impose severe sentences on those who threaten the peace and tranquility of
the population “by any violent method,” have been denounced as yet another
strategy for criminalizing social movements. The Fox administration’s
“neoliberal multiculturalism,” which appropriated and trivialized indigenous
peoples’ demands (see Hernández, Paz, and Sierra, 2005), has been replaced
by neoconservative policies and actions that treat organized indigenous peo-
ples as delinquents. The rhetoric of cultural recognition has similarly been
exchanged for a developmentalist discourse against poverty.
In this new context, indigenous women are suffering the consequences of
militarization in a special way. Aclimate of insecurity and intimidation has
emerged in regions known historically for the presence of indigenous and
peasant organizations. The rape of the 73-year-old Nahua woman Ernestina
Ascencio Rosario by four soldiers in the Sierra de Zongolica, in Veracruz, on
February 25 called attention to indigenous people’s rejection of military pres-
ence in their communities. The national debate spurred by President Felipe
Calderón’s questioning of the veracity of the victim’s testimony and the
reports of three forensic physicians transformed her body into a series of polit-
ical struggles between the federal, state, and municipal governments in which
justice for the victim was the least of their priorities.
This case evidences the racism and sexism of those in power and the net-
works of complicity that permit and perpetrate impunity in Mexico. Ernestina
Ascencio denounced her assailants before dying, and 15 people, including
family members, community authorities, and forensic physicians, were witnesses
to her words and corroborated that her body showed clear signs of having
suffered multiple rape. Calderón, however, without offering any medical or
legal information to substantiate his claim, determined that she had “died of
gastritis.” As in the days of the monarchy, the word of the Supremo was sufficient to refute the death certificate written by the doctor, Juan Pablo Mendizabal, the autopsies signed by three forensic physicians, the judgment of the Veracruz state prosecutor, Miguel Mina Rodríguez, and the testimony of the victim herself. The National Human Rights Commission and the National
Institute of Women, institutions supposedly created to defend citizens’ rights,
echoed the official version. María del Rocío García Gaytán, president of the
women’s institute, attempted to discredit the last words of Ernestina Ascencio
Rosario by arguing that they were pronounced in Náhuatl and that, after all,
the woman was dying.
This is not an isolated case. Amnesty International has documented 60
sexual assaults against indigenous and peasant women by members of the
armed forces since 1994, especially in the states of Guerrero, Chiapas, and
Oaxaca (precisely the states in which there are important organizing efforts).
The same type of impunity and racism was experienced by the Méndez Sántiz
sisters, 3 Tzeltal women who were raped at a military checkpoint in Altamirano,
Chiapas, in March 1994; by Delfina Flores Aguilar and Aurelia Méndez
Ramírez, Tlapanecas from the village of Zopilotepec, Atlixtac de Álvarez,
Guerrero, who were raped by 5 soldiers on December 3, 1997; by the 12 indigenous women from the region of Loxicha, Oaxaca, who were raped by
members of the Mexican army in 1997; by the Nahuas Victoriana Vázquez
Sánchez and Francisca Santos Pablo, from Tlacoachixtlahuaca, Guerrero, who were intercepted and raped by military personnel in abandoned houses in April 1999; by Valentina Rosendo Cantú, who was sexually assaulted by the soldiers of the 41st Infantry Battalion in Barranca Bejuco, Acatepec, Guerrero, in February 2002; by Inés Fernández Ortega, who was raped in her house by 11 soldiers in Barranca Tecuani, Ayutla de los Libres, Guerrero, on March 22, 2002; by the 23 women sexually assaulted in the town of Atenco by state security forces in May 2006; and by the 13 women from Castaños, Coahuila, who on July 11, 2006, were victims of multiple rape by 20 soldiers.
These reports point to a politics of intimidation that employs sexual violence as a coun- terinsurgency strategy and a tool for political demobilization. The bodies of indigenous women have become battlefields for a patriarchal government
that is embarked upon an undeclared war against the indigenous movement.
While in the past their bodies were used as raw material for the mestizo
nation, now they are the disputed terrain over which a hegemonic nation-
building project that excludes indigenous peoples is conducted.
Women have played a key role in the struggle of peasants and indigenous
peoples for self-determination and self-government. The images captured by
the Mexican photographer Pedro Valtierra of Tzotzil women expelling the
army from the village of Xo’yep, in the autonomous Zapatista municipality of
Pohló, or preventing troops from advancing into their villages with sticks and
stones in the community of Morelia, in the autonomous municipality 17 de
Noviembre, have traveled the world. As part of the current historical juncture
in the state of Oaxaca, women took over the university radio station, where for
three months the feminine voices aired daily by “Radio Caserola” demanded
the removal of Governor Ulises Ruíz from office and called for continued
resistance. These images call into question the representations of indigenous
and peasant women as passive and silent, their activities limited to the domestic space, that have been reproduced in classic ethnographies on Mesoamerica.
The participation of women in the Zapatista movement and in the peasant
and teachers’ movements in Atenco and Oaxaca destabilizes gender roles
within their communities and challenges exclusionary Mexican state policies.
It is no coincidence that the local and national authorities situate violence
against organized women at the center of their efforts to counteract “threats of
destabilization.”
For the most conservative sectors of mestizo and indigenous society, the
presence of organized women in a community or region is virtually synony-
mous with political radicalism. Organized indigenous and peasant women
have become a symbol of resistance and subversion, and this makes them the central targets of political violence. The government’s new neocolonialism
criminalizes social movements in order to dismember organizations and
imprison their leaders. Sexual violence is used to intimidate and terrorize
organized women.
Gendered analyses in other militarized zones, such as the work of Diane
Nelson in Guatemala, Davida Wood in Palestine, and Dette Denich in Sarajevo, have demonstrated that feminine sexuality tends to become a symbolic space of political struggle. Rape becomes a tool for demonstrating power and domination over the enemy. Chiapas, Atenco, Guerrero, and now Oaxaca are no exception. Militarization and paramilitarization specifically target women in
this undeclared dirty war. From the perspective of a patriarchal ideology that
considers women as sexual objects and bearers of the family honor, rape,
sexual torture, and mutilation are mechanisms for attacking enemy men. As
did the Serbian soldiers described by Denich (1995), the repressive forces of
the Mexican state “take possession of women’s bodies one after another, as
objects of sexual abuse and as symbols in a fight against their male enemies,
thereby reproducing traditional patriarchal patterns where the male inability
to protect their women, to control their sexuality and their reproductive capac-
ities, is considered a symbol of weakness in the enemy.” Sexual violence has
become a constant threat for any woman who participates politically or whose
family is identified as part of an oppositional social movement. The “punishment” for Zapatista women or for the women of Atenco who break with traditional gender roles and question the structures of power is a message for all women who defiantly raise their voices in public spaces.
All of these cases of sexual violence by the military or public security forces,
which seem to be taken from files dealing with the repression in Guatemala
during the worst years of the counterinsurgency, have taken place in the
Mexico of the “democratic transition,” at the same time that the government
has been signing the protocols of the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of
Discrimination against Women (in 2002), the Convention against Torture (in
2005), and the Inter-American Convention to Prevent, Sanction, and Eradicate Violence against Women (in 1998). These international commitments have proved only empty words. This two-faced policy continues to characterize the Calderón administration. In February Congress approved one of the most advanced laws in Latin America against gendered violence, while at the same time women activists in Atenco and Oaxaca continued to be incarcerated and sexual violence by the police and the military persisted with impunity.

The Mexican government has not only been unable to prevent femininicide—
defined broadly as the premature death of women resulting from gender
inequalities characterized by the historic, repeated, and systematic violation of their human and civil rights (Lovera and Palomo, 1999)—but also is directly
responsible for the use of physical and sexual violence as a counterinsurgency strategy and a form of political repression. The state’s appropriation and institutionalization of discourses on gender equity, robbing them of their radical
criticism, makes it fundamental for feminism to reflect critically on the normal-
ization of gender demands and to reveal the networks of power that are using
feminist rhetoric to moderate the radicalism of our struggles.
It is urgent that we create alliances between the feminist and the indigenous
movement to denounce neocolonial strategies that use sexual violence as a
counterinsurgency tool. Given that the physical integrity of political prisoners
is constantly at risk, the demand for their liberty needs to be made a priority
for feminist organizations. According to the brave testimonies collected in the
book Voces de la valentía en Oaxaca: Violaciones a los derechos humanos de las
mujeres en el conflicto(Castellanos, 2007), during the conflict in Oaxaca 153
women were incarcerated, and many became victims of physical and psycho-
logical violence. Thirteen women who participated in the movement remain
missing, and 64 activists are behind bars, including 4 women: Elia and Hilda
Coca Gómez, Edith Coca Soriano, and Blanca Celia Mendoza Ramírez. In the case of Atenco, 29 activists remain imprisoned, including 4 women: Suhelen Gabriela Cuevas, Patricia Romero Hernández, Edith Georgina Rosales Gutiérrez, and Mariana Selvas Gómez. In the current political context, it is essential that
we recover the radicalism of the feminist critique in the face of state policies
that are using indigenous women’s bodies as a battlefield in the new dirty war
that is being waged in Mexico’s Southeast.

REFERENCES
Castellanos, Aline (ed.)
2007 Voces de la valentia en Oaxaca: Violaciones a los derechos humanos de las mujeres en el conflicto.
Oaxaca: Consorcio para del Diálogo Parlamentario y la Equidad/Comunicación e
Información de la Mujer, Liga Mexicana por la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos/Equidad
de Género: Ciudadanía, Trabajo y Familia.
Denich, Dette
1995 “Of arms, men, and ethnic war in (former) Yugoslavia,” pp. 30–58 in Constance R. Sutton
(ed.), Feminism, Nationalism, and Militarism.Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.
Hernández, Rosalva Aída, Sarela Paz, and Teresa Sierra (eds.)
2005 El estado y los indígenas en tiempos de PAN: Neoindigenismo, legalidad e identidad. Mexico
City: CIESAS-Porrúa.
Lovera, Sara and Nellys Palomo
1999 Las alzadas. Mexico City: Comunicación e Información de la Mujer/Convergencia Socialista.