Engendering injustice: gendered lawfare in Guatemala

Abstract

On 16 December 2022, Virginia Laparra, the former head of Guatemala’s Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (FECI) in Quetzaltenango, was unjustly sentenced to four years in prison for abuse of authority, in a trial denounced by the international community (Barreto 2022). The weaponisation of the criminal justice system to persecute Laparra stems from her role as a woman working to dismantle organised crime, and points to the misogynistic enforcement mechanisms adopted by the Guatemalan state to undermine the rule of law in the country (Medinilla 2022). In their study, Carey and Torres (2010, 162) found that the Guatemalan legal system was designed and overseen by male elite interests, using the legal system to enforce patriarchal norms during authoritarian and democratic governments. Through the sentence and ongoing criminal proceedings leveraged against Laparra, the Guatemalan state reinforces gender inequity to govern and maintain the patriarchal status quo (Carey and Torres 2010, 161). Kate Manne’s (2018, 19) concept of misogyny, as the system that enforces women’s subordination and upholds ‘male dominance against the backdrop of other intersecting systems of oppression and vulnerability’, is particularly useful to understand the use of the legal system against Laparra. This definition departs from the mainstream understanding of misogyny as a personalised hatred of women by virtue of being women, and instead sees it as a systemic phenomenon that punishes a particular woman or group of women for their perceived violation of patriarchal law and order (Manne 2018, 19). These modes of enforcement stem not from directly challenging gender norms themselves, but rather by challenging the system of power more broadly. In her role as the head of FECI’s office in Quetzaltenango, Laparra led investigations and persecution of high-level corruption and organised crime cases in the departments of Quetzaltenango, Totonicapán, San Marcos, and Huehuetenango in conjunction with the now-defunct United Nations-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) (Aikman Cifuentes and Beltrán 2021). As such, she has been disproportionately punished by the state by virtue of her identity as a woman using the very legal system that has traditionally condoned the subjugation of women to dismantle entrenched criminal structures in the country. This is evident in the charges brought against her, which come as the result of presenting legal complaints against a high-risk judge, Lesther Castellanos, for filtering information