Symposium ON VIOLENCE: Victoria Sanford – MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST

Описание: 2 March 2019 at MUSEUM MMK
Victoria Sanford
The Disappeared of Guatemala

Guatemala has the dubious distinction of having invented the political phenomenon of "disappearance” in late-20th-century Latin America. In Guatemala's long history of re-pressing its own citizenry, forced disappearance is rooted in the 1954 US-backed over-throw of democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz and was used throughout the military dictatorships that followed. Driven by a Cold War ideology that conflated group identity with real or imagined political beliefs, three decades of successive military regimes expanded their repressive practices to include massive forced disappearances, which culminated in a deliberate campaign devoted to the extermination of ladino (non-Maya) political activists and ultimately the genocide of the Maya. This lecture traces the state deployment of the forced disappearance of opposition leaders in Guatemala from the mass disappearance of members of the Guatemalan Workers Party in 1966 to the mass disappearance of union leaders in 1980 in an effort to convey a sense of the systematic use of forced disappearance by a state so fragile that it caused children to disappear in the 1980s. Specifically, I consider the case of Dr. Marvyn Perez, who was forcibly made to disappear and tortured by Guatemalan security forces at the age of 14. More than 30 years later, he continues to seek justice for himself and others who did not survive.