It’s Time to Return to the Hotel Brochure
Day Three. One of the plenary speakers, I can’t remember who it was, told the delegates, ‘We are the privileged ones’. People nodded and you could see that this struck a chord. I have been wondering exactly what it meant. The most obvious reading belongs to the same family as the jesting remark made by Jane Austen’s Elizabeth when she suggests that she fell in love with Darcy when she first saw his lavish ancestral home, Pemberley. Here we are in the Casa Santo Domingo Hotel converted in the 1980s from an ancient monastery in the colonial town of Antigua. We are surrounded by quiet fountain-filled courtyards hung with bougainvillea, and scarlet macaw-bearing lilac jacaranda trees. Impeccably gracious Mayan servants with huge cloth umbrellas are ready to cover your head from the rain as you retire to your room, and the seductive counter-tenor voices of Latin American baroque are piped from the flower beds of sweet-smelling avenues, lit every evening by hundreds of candles. The conference food may not be as extravagant as the main hotel menu for the playboys of the western world who are its usual guests, but it is delicious and in ready supply. This is in a country where, we soon learn, 60% of the children are suffering from malnourishment.
Democracy opens doors
What on earth are we doing there, you may well ask? No doubt there are many ways of answering this, but perhaps the simplest response is that we are taking advantage of the capacity of democracy, at a time when “there are currently more people living in formal democracies that at any other time in history”, as the Nobel Women's Initiative invitation puts it, to open doors. Democracy opens all sorts of doors that are otherwise closed. With its mass communications, it gives ordinary people a chance to savour some glorious seventeenth century music written by and for a tiny elite. It creates quite a few spaces, like the many petitions circulating at this conference, to ‘speak truth to power’ – and occasionally to be listened to. The celebrity status of the Nobel laureates is an open door in itself, to funders who are willing to sponsor the event, the delegates, and sometimes the activist organisations that are lucky enough to attend. It allows a horizontal, comparative conversation to take place across boundaries and borders of the national silos in which we are generally managed. Perhaps most important of all, it empowers us to interrogate the mainstream narratives which are always telling women how little they can do, certainly in the public sphere, and how much better they are leaving matters in the hands of powerful men.
One version of this is to be found in the Casa Santo Domingo Hotel brochure, a tasteful volume which, like the permanent exhibition in the ‘hotel colonial museum’, is full of photographs noting in loving detail every "carving, each stroke of a brush, and each figure of the colonial period." There are archaeological and glass museums as well, and a chapel full of relics, so it comes as no surprise that the brochure is eager to share with visitors to Antigua “the dream words of our poet Carlos Wyld Ospina, 'This city closed its eyes to the present age and is in love with its old life, laid back to dream introspectively…'" Of course this is only one part of the story, because this hotel also has its Centro de Negocios y Locales Comerciales, its slightly temperamental internet connection in every room, and numerous opportunities for consumer spending, including the Original Jade Factory which offers you "jade … a treasure from the past... an asset for your future".
After a few days here, I am beginning to notice that this trope about the past and the future is fairly central to Guatemala’s tourist industry. Here is a typical account from a tourist website:
“Guatemala’s culture blends the old and the new: the ancient customs of its large Native American population and the modern life of Guatemala City. Ladino culture is dominant in urban areas and is heavily influenced by European and North American trends. Maya culture is deeply rooted in the rural highlands of Guatemala, where many indigenous people speak a Mayan language, follow traditional religious and village customs, and continue to produce traditional textiles and other handicrafts. The two cultures have made Guatemala a complex society that is deeply divided between rich and poor. This division has produced much of the tension and violence that have marked Guatemala’s history.”
It’s not a bad account, since at least it contains a passing reference to the export agriculture that has enriched the country’s small wealthy class on their large estates, at the expense of the people, and especially the native people, who remain devastatingly poor. But it is, as usual, extremely selective and deceptive in one regard, which is that it is an internal history – leaving the foreign visitor and his or her impact out of the picture. Nowadays, again thanks to democracy, when we travel to Guatemala we are more likely to encounter a no doubt long overdue eco-tourist concern about the impact of wood and meat exports to the developed world on the pell-mell destruction of Guatemala’s rainforests. But there is rather more to the relationship than that, even in this hotel brochure, if, rather than be seduced by the dream words of the poet, we care to stay awake to its signs. On the pages dedicated to the grateful acclaim of VIP guests, for example, we duly note that Hillary Rodham Clinton has availed herself of the appropriate trope in November 1998: – “Gracias por la calida y placentera hospitalidad en la Linda CSD, una combinacion unica entre lo antiguo y lo moderno. Espero poder regresar.”, followed more concisely by Madeleine Albright in March 1999, William Clinton in June 1999 - “Gracias. Es un lugar magnfico” - with Harrison Ford bringing up the rear in February 2000.
Bill Clinton’s stay at Casa Santo Domingo would have been around about the time that the US president was belatedly apologising for four decades of US support for Guatemalan military forces engaged in a bloody campaign of torture, forced disappearances, and 'scorched earth' warfare against their own people. What the US-owned United Fruit Company had begun in the early decades of the twentieth century to prevent agrarian reform in its Central American backyard, was extended during the Cold War to US government and CIA weapons, training and money for a series of US-backed military dictators, Guatemala’s army and the setting up of various “death squad” paramilitary operations against the ‘communists’. Initially, the victims of this state-sponsored terror were students, workers, professionals, and opposition figures, but in the last years of the ‘civil war’, brought to an end in 1996, hundreds of Mayan villages were destroyed and over a million people became internal and external refugees. In 1999, the U.S. president said that this US ‘support’ had been wrong.
Recent History
What conference delegates learn this week is that this murderous history is not yet at an end. Throughout the 1980s within the framework of the counterinsurgency tactic implemented by the military dictatorship in Guatemala and backed by US intelligence agencies, sexual violence was used as a tool to humiliate, leading to numerous massacres of Mayan women. According to a document compiled by Radio Internacional Feminista and circulated before the panel devoted to ‘Women in Guatemala: Current struggles’ - “sexual violence visited upon women’s bodies was used as a weapon to destroy families, communities, and to subvert and undermine revolutionary movements.” The same people who led these counterinsurgency efforts are now organised in clandestine groups that still control state institutions. They ensure that nothing is done to expose their current activities in arms and drug trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping for ransom and other illicit activities. So the perpetrators have never been brought to justice, and Guatemalan human rights activists are joining their rural sisters in the front line of another rising wave of violence, including abduction and torture against women.
Only a month before our visit, on March 25, Gladys Monterroso, human rights defender and professor at San Carlos University was kidnapped, held captive for twelve hours, tortured and subjected to sexual abuse. They let her go without any demand for a ransom. This was one day after her husband, the Human Rights Ombudsman, had released a groundbreaking report, The Right to Know – documenting mountains of evidence in recently-discovered police archives linking officials to human rights violations during the 1960-1996 civil war. Here again, democracy opens doors that some people and forces would much rather were still closed. Only this time the access is to us, representatives of the international community who must bear witness to a cover-up. The panel of brave women who come to tell us about the impunity which protects the perpetrators are calling for international solidarity and accompaniment for survivors of decades of conflict, together with the human rights defenders under attack.
But we are not detached observers of an alien disorder. Many of us as witnesses will be going back to countries – yes, democracy heartlands – where issues of impunity for those who administer torture are also hanging in the balance. Democracy opens doors, but it also pulls the blinds down on anything it would rather not share with the public at large if it thinks it can be done. In the US, the Obama administration, pushed by Freedom of Information Act inquiries, has been releasing the last grisly details of what was already largely publicly known about what the previous administration consciously permitted in this regard. But, as we return home, he too is in the middle of some kind of U-turn on Bush’s military tribunals. We await to see what effect this decision will have in the UK, accused by the European Court of Human Rights this February of breaching the rights of a number of people detained ‘on the basis of national security’ by its ‘system of secret courts’. You can read the details in Gareth Peirce’s article on ‘Torture, Secrecy and the British State‘ in the current issue of the London Review of Books where this soul-searching woman lawyer describes the UK as "the most secretive of democracies, which has developed the most comprehensive of structures for hiding its misdeeds, shielding them always from view behind the curtain of ‘national security’".
So if we are the ‘privileged ones’ who gather here in Antigua, alongside our Guatemalan sisters who are finally able to talk about things that have been kept silent for 25 years, it is because we have been allowed, through all the opening doors and closing blinds, to glimpse the unadorned and naked face of democracy in our world today.
Another History
In the evening, we gather for an amazing theatrical performance by Wings of the Butterfly, also in the confines of the hotel, in which four Guatemalan and Costa Rican actresses evoke for us a broad panorama of women throughout world history who in their lives’ endeavours have made significant contributions, and yet have hardly been acknowledged. The play calls for an end to patriarchy with its use of war and violence to resolve differences, and an end to the "game of authority/power to separate, control, dominate". It invites us to become the excavators of lost paradigms; to break silence, as the Korean ‘Comfort women’ broke silence to ensure that history is not repeated; to transcend the limits of the places assigned us. It does this with wit, and the same joy in life, sheer gusto, that I remember from Friday night on the streets of Guatemala City.
Now when I leave the theatre, I cannot help thinking that the paradisal surroundings have a little more of the James Bond film-set about them. But I am glad that these women activists and artists have been admitted into these jacaranda-perfumed avenues with their real links to the corridors of power. What we do with that access, how we use these days to fortify ourselves and the causes we believe in – well that of course is the challenge. Perhaps what is most impressive about day three, after all, is that the entire morning is given over to exploring, ‘Media and communications: making women’s voices and perspectives visible and influential’ in the company of another inspiring panel – Ana Cofino, Guatemalan journalist and editor of La Cuerda; Pat Made from Genderlinks/Info-press, Zimbabwe; Maria Suarez from Feminist International Radio Endeavour (FIRE) Costa Rica; Jila Baniyaghoob, Iranian journalist; and Anisha Desai, Women of Color Resource Center, USA.
Let the sister from the USA have the last word:
“I am here to share some of the framing techniques and communication strategies that young, grass roots women of color in the US have introduced to disrupt the hegemony of pro-military messages in our media… The US media machine is so unabashedly corporatised and editorialised that we do not dream of getting a sufficient tour of the key issues facing our nation let alone a thumbnail tour of world affairs… the ongoing divestment of resources and opportunities for communities of color, the ongoing budget crises where services for the poor are cut first and where a defence budget is given the premium share of tax dollars, where the racist paradigm of the deserving and undeserving poor persists in a so-called ‘post-racial climate’, and where connecting the dots - that is, making explicit linkages about how lack of economic investment and opportunities impacts on violence in our communities - is completely absent… This leads to a deep complacency, one that has us assuming that the war is elsewhere, that militarism has nothing to do with our day-to-day lives and that people in the US by and large can do nothing about it… But we have proved that this is not the case…”
