Investigating the Investigated
This research addresses the disruption of familial and communal life in Guatemala through the exercise of state-sponsored terrorism. Such terrorism is dependent upon a structural-cultural system of impunity.
This culture of fear, violence, and impunity has been responsible for the prolonged disruption of pre-violence patterns of existence and social relations since its systematic inception in the early 1960s. Renewed patterns of adaptive social relations, however, based upon an anti-impunity political resistance, have also been formed. Respondents report that a “coming together” has arisen due to impunity and that the violence has given rise to a culture of survivor communities.Extensive ethnographic interviewing was conducted with eighty Guatemalans in two field research periods, in 1990 and 1992. The fieldwork was participatory and was conducted utilizing Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology (see Whyte et al. 1991). Respondents were selected on the basis of shared experiences of violence by state-sanctioned security forces and their death squad allies.
Additionally, respondents were active or peripheral members of Guatemalan “popular” movement organizations at the time of interview. These organizations are nongovernmental and mass-based, or populist, in nature, and were formed to address the systematic violence and impunity in Guatemalan society, as well as the consequences in movement members' lives. The great majority of respondents were involved with organizations who were affiliates of the UASP (Unidad y Accion Sindical y Popular; Popular and Trade Union Unity and Action). The social sectors integrated in the UASP, being involved in seeking redress, are members of communities historically subject to targeting by state-sponsored violence. The fight against such violence and impunity has been consistently taken up by all member organizations in that coalition. (Research was sponsored by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the School of Social Ecology, University of California at Irvine.)