Sexual Violence Against Indigenous Women as Represented by the Performance of Regina José Galindo

What did Guatemala do to deserve so much suffering? This question, like those so often posed to the indigenous victims of sexual violence committed during the Guatemalan internal conflict (who were accused of being somehow culpable for the attacks they suffered), drives at the heart of the problems addressed in this essay: how can artistic performance find new modes of representing violence that stop this practice of victim blaming, and how can it make this violence visible in a society that refuses to come to terms with its past? For centuries, the sexual abuse of women has been invisible in patriarchal societies due to the wide-spread belief that any woman not supported by a man is available for sexual satisfaction. This sentiment is even stronger in places with a long colonial history, where the indigenous population has been controlled and discriminated against in the process of imposing a European political and economic organization. The answer to the question what did Guatemala do is the same as that given by women conscious of the sexual crimes perpetrated against them: nothing. Neither Guatemala nor the women did anything to deserve so much suffering, the latter ‘guilty’ only of having been born female