Victoria Sanford
Biographic Data
| ID | 116395 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Victoria Sanford |
| GIVEN NAMES | Victoria |
| FAMILY NAME | Sanford |
| SIGNATURE | SANFORD V |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of New York |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 178 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Sexual Violence as a Weapon during the Guatemalan Genocide
Command Responsibility and the Guatemalan Genocide: Genocide as a Military Plan of the Guatemalan Army under the Dictatorships of Generals Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt, and Mejia Victores
Drawing on forensic investigations conducted by the author in the Ixil Area of Guatemala, interviews with international observers, and ethnographic research among the Ixil Maya as well as extensive review of declassified United States government documents and newspaper accounts of the military regime of General Efrain Rios Montt, the author provides evidence that the massacres of Ixil Maya in Guatemala formed a part of a planned genocide and that…
Propaganda, Gangs, and Social Cleansing in Guatemala
Sí Hubo Genocidio: Anthropologists and the Genocide Trial of Guatemala's Ríos Montt
On the Frontlines: Forensic Anthropology
From Genocide to Feminicide: Impunity and Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Guatemala
This article analyzes contemporary social cleansing and feminicide in Guatemala. Fur-ther, it explores the costs of these murders for individuals, families, and Guatemalan society by exploring the homicide case of Claudina Isabel Velasquez Pais as it haltingly moves through the Guatemalan judicial system. This article offers a critically needed assessment of the lived outcomes of a society where the genocidaires have never been brought to justice…
Notes from the CfHR Chair
Memories of a Friend in the Field: Justice for Pepe, Justice for Guatemala
Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism
Anthropology has long been associated with an ethos of engagement. The field's core methods and practices involve long-term interpersonal contact between researchers and their study participants, giving major research topics in the field a distinctively human face. The fact that these interactions frequently cross social parameters, including class, race, ethnicity, and gender, raises important questions. Can research findings be authentic and ob…
Anthropology Can and Should Be Relevant
Anthropologies of Violence and Resistance
Encounters with Violence in Latin America: Urban Poor Perceptions from Colombia and Guatemala. Caroline O. N. Moser and Cathy McIlwaine. New York: Routledge, 2004. 272 pp.Violence: Theory and Ethnography. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern. New York: Continuum, 2002. 196 pp.Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Carolyn Nordstrom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 293 pp
Commentary: Inter‐American Court Condemns Guatemalan Government
The Exhumation and the Anti-Christ: Ethnography of Genocide Part II
The first few days following the massacre, the Ixiles of Acul slept in the mountains at night. In the day, the women returned to their houses to prepare food, and the men went to the fields to work. “But then, the army burned everything. So we stayed in the mountain,” Doña Ana explains. “We did not have anywhere else to go.” 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated…
Genocide and the “Grey Zone” of Justice
On October 13, 1999, a local Guatemalan court convicted three civil patrollers of murder for their participation in the 1982 army-orchestrated Rio Negro massacre. While at first glance the sentence of death by lethal injection might suggest that Guatemala’s newly reconstructed legal system is finally functioning, the verdict raises more questions than it answers—among them, the chilling effect this conviction will have on the collection of eviden…
The Power Effects of Declaring the Truth
Witnessing is necessary not simply to reconstruct the past but as an active part of community recovery, the regeneration of agency, and to a political project for seeking redress through the accretion of truth.’ Local community initiatives for land rights, literacy, access to health care, education, and justice met with state repression but were not silenced by La Violencia. Rather, these initiatives were held in suspension until the community co…
The Silencing of Maya Women
The chronicle of Plan de Sánchez massacre survivors organizing for an exhumation in chapter one provides a powerful example of local Maya community mobilizations for truth and justice. In response to these types of initiatives, the Guatemalan army, elite interests, and some academics have attempted to represent Maya political activism as a manipulation of the Maya by the guerrillas and/or popular organizations and religious groups. These represen…
From Survivor Testimonies to the Discourse of Power
Discourse plays a significant role in the development and institutionalization of racist ideologies and in the consequent social reconstruction of power relations leading to genocide.1 While Holocaust survivor testimonies and Latin American testimonial literature have challenged the traditional limits of oral history, the exploration of the role of survivor discourses in the reconstitution of power relations is a relatively new site of exploratio…
“It Fills My Heart with Sadness”: Ethnography of Genocide Part I
In December 1997, I assisted the FAFG in its forensic investigation of the April 1981 army massacre of civilians in Acul and its subsequent report to the Commission for Historical Clarification. To reach Acul from Guatemala City, you leave the noise and grit of the city by taking a scenic and winding four-hour drive through the green grass and red earth of the lowland mountains of Chichicastenango and Santa Cruz del Quiché. You leave Santa Cruz o…
The Phenomenology of Terror
In 1978, the same year as the Panzós massacre, the Guatemalan army began a selective campaign of political disappearance and assassination in Guatemala City and other urban centers. 1 It also accelerated construction of military bases throughout rural Guatemala. Prior to 1979, the army had divided the country into nine military zones, each centered around a large army base. By 1982, the army had designated each of the twenty-two departments as a …
Guatemalan Army Campaigns of Genocide
In this chapter, I demonstrate how massacres as a strategy of state terror systematically shifted to a tripartite, decade-long campaign of genocide against the Maya. It is when this shift happens that the Guatemalan army’s human rights violations are no longer limited to the human rights instruments previously mentioned in chapter five. 1 It is here that the army moves to a new level of atrocity and violates the Convention on the Prevention and P…
“The Bones Don’t Lie”
In June 1994 I began my fieldwork, which focused on the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala—FAFG) exhumation of a clandestine cemetery in Plan de Sánchez. After a six-hour bus ride, Kathleen Dill and I reached Rabinal— a small rural town of about 6,000 inhabitants with some 18,000 more liv-ing in surrounding villages. 1 It was in the late afternoon on a Thursday, and we noticed that all the …
Excavations of the Heart: Healing Fragmented Communities
In Plan de Sánchez, we were excavating eighteen mass graves. This meant we were unearthing a tremendous number of artifacts and clothing associated with each skeleton. On one occasion, local villagers sorted through artifacts found in a grave of burned skeletons. The bones were so badly burned and contorted from the fire that though we could count that there had been at least sixteen victims, we had no complete skeletons and were unable to associ…
Prologue
Julia, my translator, arranged for many clandestine meetings in outlying villages. One of the first such meetings was in Tzalbal, which lies about an hour outside Nebaj by vehicle. I had never been there before and had not asked specifically that she set up these, or any other, meetings. In March 1997, several days before we went to Tzalbal, the first guerrilla combatants had come down the mountain to a United Nations reinsertion camp that had be…
The ‘grey zone’ of justice: NGOs and rule of law in postwar guatemala
Through the ethnographic exploration of the trial and murder conviction of military commissioners for their participation in the massacre of Rio Negro, the NGO-sponsored exhumation of clandestine cemeteries as well as other human rights NGO initiatives, this article discusses contemporary debates about truth versus justice, national security ideology and impunity, and the role of national and international NGOs. The author problematizes rule of l…
Eyewitness: Peacebuilding in a War Zone: The Case of Colombian Peace Communities
Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala
Between the late 1970s and the mid 1980s, Guatemala was torn by a civil war which came to be known as La Violencia. During this time of mass terror and extreme violence, more than 600 massacres occurr
From Genocide to Feminicide: Impunity and Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Guatemala
This article analyzes contemporary social cleansing and feminicide in Guatemala. Fur-ther, it explores the costs of these murders for individuals, families, and Guatemalan society by exploring the homicide case of Claudina Isabel Velasquez Pais as it haltingly moves through the Guatemalan judicial system. This article offers a critically needed assessment of the lived outcomes of a society where the genocidaires have never been brought to justice…
Eyewitness: Peacebuilding in a War Zone: The Case of Colombian Peace Communities
Sí Hubo Genocidio: Anthropologists and the Genocide Trial of Guatemala's Ríos Montt
Between Rigoberta Menchú and La Violencia: Deconstructing David Stoll's History of Guatemala
In Rigoberta Mench4' and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1998), David Stoll discounts lived experiences of state terror in general and Rigoberta's experiences in particular by presenting conjecture and hearsay as fact to attack details of Rigoberta's testimony. The reason he gives for scrutinizing the Nobel laureate, however, although somewhat buried in the work, is not to quibble about details but to contest her entire representation of the g…
The ‘grey zone’ of justice: NGOs and rule of law in postwar guatemala
Through the ethnographic exploration of the trial and murder conviction of military commissioners for their participation in the massacre of Rio Negro, the NGO-sponsored exhumation of clandestine cemeteries as well as other human rights NGO initiatives, this article discusses contemporary debates about truth versus justice, national security ideology and impunity, and the role of national and international NGOs. The author problematizes rule of l…
Anthropology Can and Should Be Relevant
The Blood of Guatemala-A History of Race and Nation
The Blood of Guatemala-A History of Race and Nation. Greg Grandin. Durham, NO Duke University Press, 2000. vxiii + 236 pp., appendixes, notes, references, index
Scientists and Human Rights in Guatemala: Report of a Delegation
To Disagree Is Not td Censor
Between Rigoberta Menchú and La Violencia: Deconstructing David Stoll's History of Guatemala
In Rigoberta Mench4' and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1998), David Stoll discounts lived experiences of state terror in general and Rigoberta's experiences in particular by presenting conjecture and hearsay as fact to attack details of Rigoberta's testimony. The reason he gives for scrutinizing the Nobel laureate, however, although somewhat buried in the work, is not to quibble about details but to contest her entire representation of the g…
The Blood of Guatemala-A History of Race and Nation
The Blood of Guatemala-A History of Race and Nation. Greg Grandin. Durham, NO Duke University Press, 2000. vxiii + 236 pp., appendixes, notes, references, index
The Exhumation and the Anti-Christ: Ethnography of Genocide Part II
The first few days following the massacre, the Ixiles of Acul slept in the mountains at night. In the day, the women returned to their houses to prepare food, and the men went to the fields to work. “But then, the army burned everything. So we stayed in the mountain,” Doña Ana explains. “We did not have anywhere else to go.” 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated…
Genocide and the “Grey Zone” of Justice
On October 13, 1999, a local Guatemalan court convicted three civil patrollers of murder for their participation in the 1982 army-orchestrated Rio Negro massacre. While at first glance the sentence of death by lethal injection might suggest that Guatemala’s newly reconstructed legal system is finally functioning, the verdict raises more questions than it answers—among them, the chilling effect this conviction will have on the collection of eviden…
The Power Effects of Declaring the Truth
Witnessing is necessary not simply to reconstruct the past but as an active part of community recovery, the regeneration of agency, and to a political project for seeking redress through the accretion of truth.’ Local community initiatives for land rights, literacy, access to health care, education, and justice met with state repression but were not silenced by La Violencia. Rather, these initiatives were held in suspension until the community co…
The Silencing of Maya Women
The chronicle of Plan de Sánchez massacre survivors organizing for an exhumation in chapter one provides a powerful example of local Maya community mobilizations for truth and justice. In response to these types of initiatives, the Guatemalan army, elite interests, and some academics have attempted to represent Maya political activism as a manipulation of the Maya by the guerrillas and/or popular organizations and religious groups. These represen…
From Survivor Testimonies to the Discourse of Power
Discourse plays a significant role in the development and institutionalization of racist ideologies and in the consequent social reconstruction of power relations leading to genocide.1 While Holocaust survivor testimonies and Latin American testimonial literature have challenged the traditional limits of oral history, the exploration of the role of survivor discourses in the reconstitution of power relations is a relatively new site of exploratio…
“It Fills My Heart with Sadness”: Ethnography of Genocide Part I
In December 1997, I assisted the FAFG in its forensic investigation of the April 1981 army massacre of civilians in Acul and its subsequent report to the Commission for Historical Clarification. To reach Acul from Guatemala City, you leave the noise and grit of the city by taking a scenic and winding four-hour drive through the green grass and red earth of the lowland mountains of Chichicastenango and Santa Cruz del Quiché. You leave Santa Cruz o…
The Phenomenology of Terror
In 1978, the same year as the Panzós massacre, the Guatemalan army began a selective campaign of political disappearance and assassination in Guatemala City and other urban centers. 1 It also accelerated construction of military bases throughout rural Guatemala. Prior to 1979, the army had divided the country into nine military zones, each centered around a large army base. By 1982, the army had designated each of the twenty-two departments as a …
Guatemalan Army Campaigns of Genocide
In this chapter, I demonstrate how massacres as a strategy of state terror systematically shifted to a tripartite, decade-long campaign of genocide against the Maya. It is when this shift happens that the Guatemalan army’s human rights violations are no longer limited to the human rights instruments previously mentioned in chapter five. 1 It is here that the army moves to a new level of atrocity and violates the Convention on the Prevention and P…
“The Bones Don’t Lie”
In June 1994 I began my fieldwork, which focused on the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala—FAFG) exhumation of a clandestine cemetery in Plan de Sánchez. After a six-hour bus ride, Kathleen Dill and I reached Rabinal— a small rural town of about 6,000 inhabitants with some 18,000 more liv-ing in surrounding villages. 1 It was in the late afternoon on a Thursday, and we noticed that all the …
Excavations of the Heart: Healing Fragmented Communities
In Plan de Sánchez, we were excavating eighteen mass graves. This meant we were unearthing a tremendous number of artifacts and clothing associated with each skeleton. On one occasion, local villagers sorted through artifacts found in a grave of burned skeletons. The bones were so badly burned and contorted from the fire that though we could count that there had been at least sixteen victims, we had no complete skeletons and were unable to associ…
Prologue
Julia, my translator, arranged for many clandestine meetings in outlying villages. One of the first such meetings was in Tzalbal, which lies about an hour outside Nebaj by vehicle. I had never been there before and had not asked specifically that she set up these, or any other, meetings. In March 1997, several days before we went to Tzalbal, the first guerrilla combatants had come down the mountain to a United Nations reinsertion camp that had be…
The ‘grey zone’ of justice: NGOs and rule of law in postwar guatemala
Through the ethnographic exploration of the trial and murder conviction of military commissioners for their participation in the massacre of Rio Negro, the NGO-sponsored exhumation of clandestine cemeteries as well as other human rights NGO initiatives, this article discusses contemporary debates about truth versus justice, national security ideology and impunity, and the role of national and international NGOs. The author problematizes rule of l…
Eyewitness: Peacebuilding in a War Zone: The Case of Colombian Peace Communities
Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala
Between the late 1970s and the mid 1980s, Guatemala was torn by a civil war which came to be known as La Violencia. During this time of mass terror and extreme violence, more than 600 massacres occurr
The Rigoberta Menchu Controversy
The Rigoberta Menchu Controversy. Arturo Arias. ed., with. response by David Stoll. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 416 pp
Commentary: Inter‐American Court Condemns Guatemalan Government
Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism
Anthropology has long been associated with an ethos of engagement. The field's core methods and practices involve long-term interpersonal contact between researchers and their study participants, giving major research topics in the field a distinctively human face. The fact that these interactions frequently cross social parameters, including class, race, ethnicity, and gender, raises important questions. Can research findings be authentic and ob…
Anthropology Can and Should Be Relevant
Anthropologies of Violence and Resistance
Encounters with Violence in Latin America: Urban Poor Perceptions from Colombia and Guatemala. Caroline O. N. Moser and Cathy McIlwaine. New York: Routledge, 2004. 272 pp.Violence: Theory and Ethnography. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern. New York: Continuum, 2002. 196 pp.Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Carolyn Nordstrom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 293 pp
Memories of a Friend in the Field: Justice for Pepe, Justice for Guatemala
On the Frontlines: Forensic Anthropology
Political science (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · History (15 works) · Genocide (9 works) · Archaeology (8 works) · Criminology (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Human rights (7 works)