Mediated Intimacies: Legal, Literary, and Journalistic Textualities of Gender Violence in Post-War Nicaragua
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By Alicia Zoe Miklos, M.A. Graduate Program in Spanish and Portuguese
The Ohio State University 2015
Dissertation Committee: Ileana Rodríguez, Advisor Ignacio Corona Laura Podalsky
Copyright by Alicia Zoe Miklos 2015 Abstract
My dissertation examines representations of femicide as gender violence in legal, journalistic, literary, and online cultural production in contemporary post-war Nicaragua.
I begin with the passing of Law 779, the Integral Law Against Violence Towards
Women, approved by the Nicaraguan National Assembly in February 2012. The law fills a legal vacuum in the country by codifying femicide, as well as sexual, psychological, patrimonial, and labor abuse into Nicaraguan law as gender specific crimes. Prohibiting the long-standing practice of police and judicial mediation between accusers and aggressors, Law 779 set out to endow women with judicial agency in what had been largely hostile and re-victimizing institutional spaces.
The focus of the project is cultural, examining representations of gender violence as part of a social dialogue about Law 779, covering a variety of textual realms. The goal of the project is to explain how different mediums and social actors explain gender violence by studying discourse and narrative modes. The debate centered on Law 779’s re-balancing of power relations and its controversy stemmed from its challenge to existing family structures, which disguise masculine authority and impunity. The inertia of the status quo proved strong, with Law 779 being reformed and regulated between
2012 and 2014, reverting its original radical spirit.
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The chapters are divided into discursive mediums. In the first chapter I study the legal texts of Law 779: the legislative debates, the law’s original text, the Reform of the law, and the Regulation of the law. I conclude that its eventual deformation resulted from conservative and religious sectors’ anger over the prohibition of judicial mediation, and the reinstatement of mediation constituted a regressive reestablishment of masculine authority—a renewed politics of control over the feminine. The second chapter focuses on the Nota Roja crime section of the Nicaraguan newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, examining how hegemonic notions of femininity determine representations of femicide victims. I also analyze the spectacle of femicide perpetrators, monstrous masculinities portrayed as outside of culture. The third chapter is about contemporary Nicaraguan detective and novela negra fictions by Sergio Ramírez and Franz Galich. I study the
“criminal-protagonists,” whose characterization and development include violent intimate implosions that end in femicide, signaling crisis tendencies in Nicaraguan masculinities.
Finally, the fourth chapter extracts public comments from the online forums of
Nicaraguan newspapers about the Law 779 controversy. These comments reveal fear over balancing out power relations in favor of women, with extreme polarization over the meaning of intimate relations.
My dissertation leans on diverse geopolitical expressions of feminist theory that critique the legal, physical, and symbolic manifestations of asymmetrical power relations favoring masculine dominance and impunity. In the same vein of systemic criticism, I turn to inquiries about neoliberal models of thought and social organization that critique their polarizing and binary view of human relations. At this conjuncture in neoliberal iii
governance the law is malleable and subject to partisan maneuverings. This affirms that seeking the protection of the State continues to be a conflictive proposition for feminist movements against gender violence.
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Dedicated to my mom, Susan, for all her love and support. Also dedicated to my stepdad, the late Steven J. Czeiszperger, in loving memory.
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Acknowledgements
A few times in our lives, we come across those souls who are teachers in the most profound sense of the word. My adviser and “madre académica,” Dr. Ileana Rodríguez, shines as one of those true teachers. With the most profound sense of gratitude in my heart, I look back on her support, measured criticism, and boundless energy and I know how blessed I am to have her in my life. With humor and with personal engagement she helped me find my voice as a scholar. Beyond her status as one of the most prolific scholars of Latin American feminist theory and Cultural studies, she dedicates herself to her students with her whole heart and mind. She thinks with us and alongside us as we travel along in our academic journey. I can’t begin to count the invaluable gifts she has given me.
I would also like to thank Dr. Laura Podalsky for her encouragement, positive attitude, and extremely thoughtful input and criticism. Dr. Podalsky takes the time to reflect deeply on her students’ projects, giving them the gift of profound engagement with their work. Also, my deepest gratitude goes to Dr. Ignacio Corona for inspiring me to delve into Modernist poetry and prose, renewing my passion for literature. His eloquence and critical perspective influenced me during coursework and as I wrote this dissertation.
One of the greatest gifts Dr. Rodríguez gives her students is their connection to a
Central American community of scholars at the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y vi
Centroamérica (IHNCA) in Managua. I am profoundly grateful to Margarita
Vanini, the director of the IHNCA, for always welcoming us and providing a forum for immensely challenging scholarly debate. I would also like to thank the researchers at the
IHNCA and the Universidad Centroamericana for their friendship and academic inspiration: Juan Pablo Gómez, Adriana Palacios, Eimeel Castillo, Antonio Monte,
Camilo Antillón Najlis, Carlos Villanueva, Dariana Valenzuela, Gabriela Montiel, and
Ana Portocarrero.
Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my partner Mark Speer for his patience and encouragement. And of course, my most profound gratitude goes to my compañeras in ex/centrO, John Petrus, Bradley Hilgert, Nyanda Redwood, Jared List, and
Juan Pablo Gómez. We experienced it all together: academic growth, humor, working our tails off, and “celebrando la vida.” Thank you for thinking with me, challenging me, and supporting me over these last four years.
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Vita
2007...... B.A. Ohio University
2009...... M.A. Ohio University
2011 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department
of Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State
University
Publications
Miklos, Alicia. “Justicia estatal y revictimización de género en Nicaragua: El día que me
quieras (Jaugey, 1999).” Revista de historia IHNCA-UCA 29 (2013).
Fields of Study
Major Field: Spanish and Portuguese
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Table of Contents
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………ii
Dedication………………………………………………………………………………v
Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………...vi
Vita…………………………………………………………………………………...... viii
List of Figures……………………………………………………………….…….…….x
Introduction……………..………………………………………………………………..1
Chapter 1, Mediated intimacies: State intervention and Gender violence…..…………..15
Chapter 2, Gender Violence in the Nicaraguan Nota Roja: Myth, Melodrama, and the
Polarization of Gender difference…………………………………………………..……72
Chapter 3, The imaginary of intimate disintegration: Femicide and gender violence in contemporary Nicaraguan detective and novela negra fictions ………………………..131
Chapter 4, Public polarization: Anti-feminism takes on Law 779…………………..…184
Conclusion…….………………………………………………………………………..234
References/Works Cited……………………………..…………………………………240
Appendix A, Cases Studied, Chapter 2……...………………………………………….258
Appendix B, Online Comments in the Nicaraguan Press, Chapter 4.………………….268
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List of Figures
Figure 1, First article in the Contreras-Jiménez case...…………………………………84
Figure 2, Inset photo from Contreras-Jiménez case. .……………………..……………86
Figure 3, Photo of Yader Ismael Jirón Cruz, accused of femicide ...……………..……107
Figure 4, Photo of Juan Pablo Gadea Salmerón, accused of femicide .…………..……111
Figure 5, Photo of Juan Pablo Gadea, accused of femicide .……………………..……112
Figure 6, Photo of “Los Patitas,” after being sentenced to preventative imprisonment..113
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Introduction
In February 2012 the Nicaraguan Assembly passed Law 779, the Integral Law against
Violence towards Women, which codified the crime of ‘femicide’ into Nicaraguan law, prohibited police or judiciary mediation between aggressors and accusers, and mandated inter-institutional, governmental, and civil society coordination to address violence against women. Springing from a transformative impetus with broad-based societal support, Law 779 set out to inaugurate a legal, criminological framework for gender violence. Nor did it neglect women’s substantive rights, framing gender violence as a result of the asymmetrical power relations between men and women, mandating educational campaigns for sensitization, and promoting conscientious media coverage that would not “use the image of women as sexual-commercial objects” or “encourage violence against women” (1367).
I first traveled to Nicargua that very summer when Law 779 went into effect. I was intrigued when Adriana Palacios, a colleague at the Institute of Nicaraguan and
Central American History, pointed out this last clause in the law concerning representations of women in the media. Due to my background in journalism, I was already pulled toward studying crime stories, but this specific clause led me to reflect on the problematic relationship between violence and its representation. From there, my original inquiry into journalistic archives led me to see how the process of gender’s construction traverses a variety of narrative and visual images. This dissertation examines gender relations, therefore, through the intertwining and multiple vantage points of
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diverse cultural texts. These texts exercise definitive sway over how Nicaragua’s competing social actors narrate gender violence and its meaning within culture. Taking a study of Law 779 and its surrounding controversy as a starting point, passing through the journalistic representations of gender violence, arriving at literature, and, finally, online comments about Law 779, my project constructs a panoramic perspective of contemporary gender relations in Nicaragua. What I found was an entrenched deference to masculinity as authority that crossed all genre boundaries. The analytical process proved to me, therefore, that the balancing out of the power differential in gender relations must pass through the symbolic realm of cultural texts. Until then, the law will continue to be a problematic and easily breached terrain, malleable to the existing narratives that bolster masculine authority and impunity.
My dissertation tells the story of Law 779’s induction into Nicaraguan society and tracks the trajectory of its oft glossed, highly polemical tenets through a variety of textual realms. However, the object of study is culture, understood in this sense as the visual and narrative images that edify social relations. In this project, culture also includes the ways that narratives explain or contest violence. Be as it may a foray into reforming the legal framework and criminal-justice proceedings in Nicaragua, the new law caused explosive disputes in its wake that surpassed the discursive and punitive limits of jurisprudence.
Law 779 and its concomitant and varying interpretations unsettled a deep bedrock of social norms and moral platitudes regarding the family, women’s sexuality, and masculine authority.
Consequently, this dissertation interprets a societal conversation spurred by the law, but one that is acutely focused on cultural values; namely, preserving or displacing 2
the hegemonic, “collective fantasy of male power and female subjugation” (Segato 97).
Legal formulas for changing this medullar cultural conception of gender relations brought on fierce debate, as feminist analyses of gender violence entered the cultural scene through the term femicide and the prohibition of mediation. Law 779’s ambitious challenge to the status quo of masculine impunity sparked a society-wide working- through of gender relations, focused on the viability of the nuclear family. Therefore, this project takes on the key axioms and narratives that construct a picture of legitimate masculine authority in Nicaraguan society, a scenario that is hotly contested by feminisms and the mobilizations of the women’s movement.
This conjuncture demanded a methodology that would address not only law, but also journalism, literature, and the public debate itself. A Cultural studies model suits this project precisely due to the multi-faceted, systemic, and systematic array of epistemologies that encourage and justify masculine domination, logics that can end in femicidal violence. Femicide/Feminicide encompasses “the murders of women and girls founded on a gender power structure” and is gender-based violence that is both public and private (Fregoso and Bejarano 5). More than simply as a criminological question, femicide (the term preferred by Nicaraguan feminists) should be understood as an ethical, political, and relational question, an issue of collective health. Therefore, this project carries out a critical inquiry seeking to fill in the gaps in the legalistic framework where the law cannot scrape away the cultural residues of misogyny. It stares down the site where cultural actors take up the law and mediate its meanings. In the process, it also glosses the troubled relationship between violence and the law in Central America.
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In the cultural texts I study here, reactionary visions of romantic love, as well as melodrama and myth, shape visions of gender relations according to cultural common sense, adding narrative intelligibility to legal debates over these relations. In these narrative modes, the common thread is the fact that biological and social imperatives still weigh most heavily on women, assigning them the responsibility for physical care and for placating and ameliorating violence. Therefore, just as approaches to stopping femicidal violence cannot be limited to punitive measures, scholarly approaches to the topic must take on these varied manifestations and symbolic expressions of feminine passivity and masculine domination in Nicaraguan culture.
This approach led me to see how masculine impunity is inscribed into cultural texts, with violence treated as an individual, rather than a systemic issue. For example, when conservative sectors narrated the figure of mediation as a magic salve that could reconstitute family unity, they disguise the prevalence of violent, instrumental logics of abuse and control. On the other hand, I observed how the journalistic depiction of femicide perpetrators as monstrous masculinities props up the authority of purportedly safe, institutional masculinities. Both representations work to banish violence or violent individuals from the social consciousness, minimizing its impact in the first example and attributing it to psychopathic outsiders in the second.
Law 779 lent visibility to femicidal violence, but brought with it a deluge of contention over women’s place in society and their autonomy. The image of woman-as- victim saturated the journalistic scene, with images of beleaguered normative motherhood enshrining femicide victims’ innocence. On the other hand, online debates revealed suspicions of vengeance and opportunism on the part of the women’s groups 4
attempting to make this violence visible through the law. The stakes over representing violence are high when visibility runs counter to the cultural principle of masculine familial authority, as well as to the political and economic interests of the State. The newfound visibility of gender violence revealed polarized, vertical, and hierarchizing visions of gender relations, strongly resistant to relinquishing the privileges of hegemonic gender roles.
Jean Franco asserts that cruelty constitutes a central axis of modernity’s formation and that its violence cannot be relegated to the scars of a primitive past. Furthermore, she notes through modernity’s key institutions, physical, emotional, and symbolic embodiments of the feminine particularly become the target of brutal, often sexualized, forms of punishment, especially in armed conflict and post-war scenarios (Cruel
Modernity). Confirming Franco’s claims, in representations of violence in Nicaragua, I found a strongly gendered division of characterization. This division includes 1) the image of victimized femininities (often sexualized) and 2) that of violent strongman
(often psychopathic) masculinities. This disturbing and puzzling deprecation of the feminine and fascination with masculinist violence is reflected across a variety of texts and genres. In the journalistic imaginary, these images enjoy mass appeal and generate economic benefit. They do so through detailed depictions of rape and murder, as well as through abject depictions of monstrous perpetrators. Contemporary Central American detective and novela negra literature also reproduces this scheme by including one- dimensional feminine characters endangered by sexual slavery, rape, and femicide.
These two gendered representational poles lead me to conclude that today, both in
Nicaragua and across the globe, the intimate, as one site of gender relations, appears 5
wrought with trauma and disintegration. Moreover, as Lauren Berlant would tell us, these interpersonal breakdowns become a public spectacle and a source of economic boon to the market. In media and literary representations, there is a draw toward mass-based stories of victimization, crises in the nuclear family as a stabilizing structure, the dilemma of violent masculinities, and the ineptness of state institutions to deal with extreme polarization in gender relations. All of these topics exercise a sort of hypnosis when they are represented in the media, literature, and television. Perhaps we can conclude that a sense of impending social decay is sublimated and/or worked through in these representations of violence.
As Berlant asserts, “the immediacy of trauma is always sensual” (7). In a similar gesture towards explaining the aesthetic appeal of destruction of sacred institutions,
Michael Taussing’s theory of defacement unravels the negative charge and attraction created by the desecration of the family and the intimate, in that it refers to a general public secret (active not-knowing) of its instability (6-7). What I mean to say is that the marks of violence on feminine bodies in these cultural texts become symbolic markers of the breakdown of the dominant narratives of love and family. The marketability of sexual victimization and romantic catastrophe ending in murder lead me to conclude that we are dealing with new aesthetic sensibilities. Surging up in the narrative vacuum left by the fantasy of marriage, intimate fragmentation becomes the dominant story. New sensibilities, in turn, point to subjectivities formed by markedly more violent visual and narrative regimes.
For these reasons, my dissertation considers the lucrative and demonstrative power of violence, in the form of intimate disintegration, in the twentieth and twenty-first 6
centuries in Nicaragua and globally. Rampant gender violence signals the presence of troubled social bonds, incapable of finding a foothold for relational cohesion in the neoliberal milieu. To further explain why literary and journalistic markets hunger for these images of intimate tragedy, I turn to Sayak Valencia’s notion of “decorative violence” in her groundbreaking work Gore capitalism. In it she claims that violence is now both a highly marketable commodity for consumption, and a tool mobilized by third- world subjects, energized by hyper-capitalism, to try and grasp some small margin of consumptive power. Her theory recognizes that the mobilization of violence in the media, television, movies, video games, and other cultural products today exacerbates the instrumental dimension of violence. While decorative violence might be a luxury of consumption for the first-world consumers, the appeal and massive dispersion of these images lead to their extended use as a tool for survival and gaining prestige in the corners of the globe forgotten and exploited by the market. Increasingly, this instrumental violence also overflows the borders of these marginalized spaces.
All of the discursive venues studied here offer a brand of narrative seeking to ameliorate anxieties over the polarized state of gender relations, or at times, to benefit from them. The law attempts to re-signify the exercise of masculine violence within the family. Meanwhile, crime journalism uses hegemonic notions of femininity for a placating effect that creates innocent victims. In contemporary literature, heroism collides with intimate violence, placing masculinity at a crossroads by problematizing strongman culture. In each of my chapters, I discuss how images of gendered victimization and heroism traverse the boundaries of genre, informing changing societal perspectives on gender violence. 7
In my first chapter, I claim that conservative, religious sectors of Nicaraguan society carried out a discursive campaign again Law 779, the Integral Law Against
Violence towards Women, in order to reinforce the hegemony of the traditional nuclear family structure and the legitimacy of fatherly authority. As a result of the disapproval of these sectors, President Daniel Ortega reinstated the juridical figure of mediation and limited the definition of femicide to romantic relationships, reversing the progressive spirit of Nicaragua’s Law 779. I maintain, furthermore, that the reinstatement of mediation, which now takes the form of community-based Family Counsels, represents a push towards continued intervention upon and vigilance over femininities and their sexual and economic activities. Mediation signals a renewed effort to de-criminalize gender violence and enclose it once again within domestic, individual spaces.
The primary texts I analyze include the legislative debates for the drafting of Law
779, the body of Law 779, the Reform to the law in October 2013, and the Regulations to
Law 779, issued through a presidential proclamation in July 2014. Working from one of the key tenets of Critical Discourse theory, that “the link between text and society is mediated” (Van Dijk 353), I examine discourses presented by groups opposing Law 779 and those of the women’s movement groups, alongside the language of the legislative debates and the body of the law itself. As proof of the law’s permeability by other social discourses, I show how fear-mongering warnings of social decay and the collapse of the family pushed the Ortega government and the National Assembly to reform, regulate, and completely reverse Law 779 over a brief two-year period.
After the broad-based inter-institutional and civil society collaboration to draft
Law 779, a regressive campaign to code women’s autonomy as dangerous and conflictive 8
and to reaffirm masculine authority effectively demolished these efforts. A reactionary stance propelled by certain religious sectors and accepted by Daniel Ortega’s State, this reversal also indicates strong resistance to acknowledging women’s substantive rights, to seeing women as inviolable and valuable independent of their normative gender roles.
The second chapter analyzes representations of femicide in the “Nota Roja” crime sections of the newspapers, finding that certain narrative modes, such as melodrama and myth, cross genre boundaries, structuring journalistic representations of gender violence.
In particular, the “spectacle of monstrous masculinities” and the mythic archetypes of
“good” and “bad” women criminalize individuals, naturalizing and exacerbating already polarized notions of gender difference. In turn, I maintain that these narratives coincide with neoliberal economic and social policies and punitive, state-centered solutions to social ills.
To explain these conclusions, I study seven cases of femicide that appeared in El
Nuevo Diario, one of two principal Nicaraguan newspapers, between March and August of 2012. These dates correspond to the passing of Law 779 at the end of February 2012 and its passage into effect in June 2012. In my readings of the discursive and visual cues of these cases, I find that femicide victims’ lives and deaths undergo a process of scrutiny, whereby adherence to normative gender expectations of motherhood and caretaking lead to the enshrinement of innocent victims. In these cases, the archetypal myth of the “good mother” (Lule) combines with melodramatic portrayals that highlight the pain of aggrieved orphans and visual cues that feature images of familial innocence soiled.
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Many scholars assert that melodrama seeks to paint morally legible narratives of good vs. evil (Brooks; Anker; Williams). The gendered nature of this claim becomes clear in Nota Roja cases of femicide in which victims lack legitimating markers of normative femininity, such as marriage or responsible motherhood. Here, re-victimization takes the form of probing the victims’ choices and rapidly digresses into criminalizing portrayals. The criminalization of femicide victims coalesces alongside that of femicide perpetrators. I coin the term femicida monster to describe how the textual and photographic records of the Nota Roja mobilize abjection and the visual cue of juxtaposed masculinities to construct this new social-ill worthy of fear and loathing.
As a trope, the femicida monster is exemplary of the dominant neoliberal mass media’s predatory reliance on criminalizing representations. These images categorically dehumanize represented subjects by subtracting the nuances of their historical conjunctions and individualizing their immediate outbursts of violence, which have roots in systemic social and economic inequalities. I read these trends in the Nicaraguan Nota
Roja, therefore, as indicative of the media’s implicit or explicit bolstering of trends in neoliberal governance, in which ‘mano dura’ policies and mass incarceration replace programs for social welfare.
In the third chapter, I claim that the convergence of the detective and the villain in the “criminal-hero” protagonists of contemporary Nicaraguan detective, novela negra, or neopolicíaco fictions are emblematic of the crisis in legitimacy of masculinity in
Nicaragua today. I study how the convergence of aggression and seduction in the charismatic strongman heroes of these stories sheds light on the contradictions of contemporary masculinity, revealing unresolved tension in intimate relations. From 10
Castigo divino by Sergio Ramírez to Y te diré quién eres: mariposa traicionera by Franz
Galich, the heroes morph from the lettered aristocrat to the armed, militarily-trained social outcast in the post-war milieu of institutional decay, abysmal economic opportunities, and political disenchantment. In both novels, the heroes’ failure in romantic and professional endeavors, as well as their consequent deaths, indicate a lack of belief in modernity’s institutions. Here, the lack of hope for romantic understanding translates to a pessimistic view of consolidating and healing polarized social relations.
I analyze depictions of femicide and gender violence as recurrent scenes that fascinate due to unresolved dynamics of control over the feminine that plague gender relations. A central claim of the second chapter receives ample verification in the third chapter. As Rosa-Linda Fregoso so succinctly states it, “Non-normative sexuality is central to the causal chain that goes from transgression of patriarchal norms to murder”
(“Toward a Planetary” 4). In Ramírez’s novel, the mere exercise of sexual agency by female characters constitutes a social explanation for their murder. In Galich’s novel, the female sex worker protagonist is imprisoned and coerced into forming a sexual trafficking business, furthering the victimization and exploitation of the feminine. These knowledge-power dynamics are played out textually through autopsy and sexual violation. The desire to know the female body inside and out collides with the specter of lawlessness and vulnerability that haunt a troubled, fragmented postmodernity in Central
America.
My fourth chapter examines the online comments section of Nicaraguan newspaper reports on gender violence, focusing specifically on articles about Law 779.
The chapter places a finger on the pulse of contemporary public opinion regarding gender 11
relations, crime, and the law. The comments sections reveal that many commentators still do not view gender violence as a State problem, but rather they assert that it should be handled in the family unit. This belief is bolstered by State discourses about restoring family peace and harmony through dialogue. I conclude that this perspective constitutes a rationalization of masculine abuse and control and a refusal to consider this violence as a crime. Secondly, whether they attribute this belief to incompetence or partisan maneuvering, many online commentators do not believe that the State is capable of handling the issue. In fact, a prominent critique across partisan lines holds that the State is responsible for impunity.
Common characterizations in these comments included depicting gender violence perpetrators as savages, or outside of culture, much like the representations in the Nota
Roja. Another common depiction featured accusing the feminist and women’s movement organizations of being financial opportunists riding the coattails of international aid or of being revenge seeking social dissidents. Finally, one of the main complaints against Law
779 was that it inaugurates a war against men. These battles over representation reveal ceaseless anxiety over Law 779’s possibly ruinous effects on the family. Here, genuine fears and antifeminist sentiments rise to the surface regarding women’s sexual freedom and economic autonomy. Beyond the quarrels of political partisanship, allegations about the divisiveness of the law point to a longing for the return of traditional family narratives. Law 779 embodies several decades of women’s demands for respect, autonomy, and freedom from violence. After a rapid pendulum swing in society about the law, public opinion reflects extreme uncertainty and instability regarding changing expectations, both legal and social, for gendered behavior. 12
Rather than being bound by the disciplinary limitations of literary, mass media, or legal studies, this project constructs a comprehensive archive that examines the contribution of all these meaning-making regimes to the question of gender violence in
Nicaragua. All of this with the strong support of feminist theory, of course. One of the benefits of this macro-focus (though focused on a microcosm in Central America) is that it can be used comparatively to examine how legislation against gender violence fares in other Latin American contexts and how cultural platitudes, literary traditions, and partisan political conflicts influence these efforts to transform gender relations. Product of a shared colonial past and equivalently militarized societies, the troubled intimate ties and the vertical, authoritarian view of gender relations I find displayed in these debates in
Nicaragua likely prevail across diverse Latin American societies. In addition, the project offers critical insight into the malleability of legal frameworks in the region under neoliberal governance, as evidenced by Daniel Ortega’s 2014 presidential decree that unilaterally reversed the spirit of Law 779.
Despite legal inroads toward enacting legal protective and punitive measures against gender violence, the principle of masculine power and female subjugation remains entrenched in cultural texts. Neoliberal thinking and regimes of social organization exacerbate this symbolic-cum physical violence by marketing and selling instrumental uses of violence and, at the same time, representing them as irrational, unchangeable, and archaic in their origins (Jimeno and Valencia). Exemplary currents of representation in this scheme, such as self-help culture, mediated intimate traumas, and the polarization and individualization of good and evil, ravage collective notions of social responsibility and amelioration of social ills. 13
However, critical theory based in Latin American Cultural studies can break down the globally orchestrated elements of neoliberal culture and critique the ways in which they mobilize reactionary narratives about gender relations. The legacy of recent Latin
American feminist scholarship has been its unveiling of the systemic and systematic nature of gender violence, and, most importantly, of its symbolic ramifications in the field of cultural production. On the specific cultural terrain of modern day Nicaragua, this project maps out the narrative frames that attempt to contain or minimize the prevalence of gender violence, or, alternatively, those that mobilize populations to political action, to transform gender relations and write new stories of intimacy.
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Chapter 1, Mediated intimacies: State intervention and Gender violence
In a compelling scene from Florence Jaugey’s documentary El día que me quieras
(1999), which follows the police agents of the Women and Children’s Police Stations
(Comisaría de la Mujer y la Niñez) in Managua, Nicaragua for a day, a woman gives testimony to a police agent about her husband’s abusive and controlling behavior. She describes how he manipulates her psychologically by pitting the children against her. The woman police agent listens to Liseth’s story and then summons in the husband. From the start, the spectator witnesses the husband talking over and demeaning his wife, his dramatic gesticulating, and his attempt to assert his authority over both women, even alleging that things would be settled differently if they were at his home.
With this scene, Jaguey’s documentary characterizes mediation as a problematic judicial practice, given the conflicted interpersonal and institutional realms of gender relations in contemporary Nicaragua. Despite legal inroads toward enacting protective and punitive measures against gender violence, conflicts persist: crises in the nuclear family as a stabilizing structure, the dilemma of violent masculinities, and the ineptness of state institutions to deal with extreme polarization in gender relations. This is a visual archive of a disturbing and puzzling reality: today, both in Nicaragua and across the globe, the intimate, as one site of gender relations, appears wrought with trauma, disintegration, and often becomes a public spectacle.
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In the Post-war context of Central America, Nicaragua boasts of being one of the safest countries. The government recently released the results of a Gallup poll that names it as the safest country in Latin America.1 Of the Central American countries that experienced civil wars, Nicaragua has most effectively avoided the extreme social disintegration and violence of organized crime that other beleaguered countries have faced post 1990s peace accords (Martí i Puig and Sanchéz-Ancochea 112). Additionally,
Nicaragua has followed the regional trend towards enacting progressive national laws against gender discrimination and violence initiated by Mexico and Guatemala. But a great tension arises between the country’s shining regional reputation and the disturbing, persistent appearance of murdered woman and sexually abused adolescents and girls across the landscape.2 Indeed, the image of woman-as-victim saturates the representational scene, but social debates reveal the conflicted nature of making this violence visible, when it seems to run counter to the political and economic interests of the State.
My chapter forms part of an inquiry about the reach of legislative changes initiated by Law 779 in Nicaragua, the Integral Law Against Violence towards Women
(henceforth known as Law 779), passed in February 2012. The primary texts I analyze include the legislative debates for the drafting of Law 779, the body of Law 779, the
Reform to the law in October 2013, and the Regulations of Law 779, issued through a
1 “Nicaragua encabeza ranking de seguridad a nivel regional” El 19 22 August 2014. http://www.el19digital.com/articulos/ver/titulo:21762-nicaragua-encabeza-ranking-de-seguridad-a-nivel- regional 2 For example, by November 2014 there had been 61 femicides in Nicaragua, according to counts kept by Catholic women for the Right to Decide (Católicas por el derecho de decidir) “Violencia sin freno contra las mujeres.” La Prensa. 4 November 2014. http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/11/04/nacionales/216812- violencia-sin-freno-contra-las-mujeres 16
presidential proclamation in July 2014. I organize my discussion around the most controversial juridical figure in Law 779: that of mediation. Analyzing the trajectory of
Law 779 within the Post-war cultural scene in Nicaragua, I conclude that the reinstatement of mediation represents a regressive reaffirmation of patriarchal authority in the guise of community empowerment. The family centered rhetoric of the Regulation of Law 779 signifies capitulation to the most conservative, religious sectors of society and a dramatic reversal of feminist gains towards recognizing women as subjects with rights. These are in fact battles over the cultural interpretation of women’s place, their autonomy, and the troubled reality of the nuclear family and normative social bonds in twenty-first century Central America. They show that women’s autonomy continues to be symbolically coded as dangerous, even as a threat to the collective interests of the family and the nation.
I work from the premise of Critical Discourse theory that “the link between text and society is mediated” (Van Dijk 353), analyzing social controversies and journalistic debates around the law as equally salient and influential as the text of the law itself.
Following Patricia J. Williams, I emphasize the ‘rhetorical’ nature of the law’s language, maintaining a critical stance towards what she calls the legal discourse’s reliance on the supposed “existence of objective ‘unmediated’ voices by which those transcendent, universal truths [of the law] find their expression” (8). Due to my healthy dose of skepticism towards state-centered approaches to social transformation, the central question concerns how the terminology and rhetorical gestures of the law intercede in the symbolic construction of gender norms and relations. Where are the gaps between assertions, on the legal plane, of women as inviolable, autonomous subjects on the one 17
hand, and everyday social practices on the other? What can we learn from the social debate over Law 779 about the deep well springs of cultural belief about masculine authority and the array of threats that now accost it? (I’m thinking of not only the feminist movement, but also the Gay, Lesbian, Trans, and Queer rights movements). In the end, I conclude that the law is indeed permeable by other social discourses, whether they challenge or maintain existing gender hierarchies.
The social tension wrought by the introduction of feminist concepts into
Nicaraguan law reveals the limited capacity of legalistic discourse and procedure to transform deep symbolic currents of masculine supremacy and authoritarian culture. The inability of the law to effectively respond to both the demands of feminists and those of traditional centers of familiar and institutional—i.e. patriarchal—authority crops up through hotly contested, unresolved social debates over the laws most controversial tenets. My hypothesis is that the polemical fragments of the legislation unveil the most embattled institutional and ideological bastions of masculine dominance, where
“hegemonic masculinities” struggle to maintain supremacy (Connell). First, disputes over the spatial definition of femicide reveal the blurry lines that distinguish between public and private spheres, how these boundaries have been tossed asunder by neoliberal markets and mass-mediated culture, and how the terms can be discursively manipulated through political power-plays. Second, the prohibition, consequent reinstatement, and final enshrining of mediation in Law 779 proves that, in the legal discourse and in judicial practice, women are objects of power-knowledge who continue to be intervened upon and scrutinized rather than protected by the State. In other words, the strong resistance to acknowledging women’s substantive rights—to seeing women as inviolable 18
and valuable independent of their normative gender roles—is a reactionary stance propelled by the Church and accepted by Daniel Ortega’s state to legally consecrate the status quo of masculine authority.
Proof of this trend came in July 2014 with Daniel Ortega’s issue of Presidential
Decree 42, which unilaterally reverses Law 779’s spirit. The decree annuls the law’s recognition of women’s rights as collective rights and its attempt to legislate women’s substantive right to a life free from violence. As I discuss below, while the original text of the law prohibited mediation—a form of judicially or police mediated dialogue between the woman filing a police report and her aggressor—Ortega’s Regulation of Law 779 mandates that women reporting gender violence or intrafamilial abuse are obligated to go through a process of mediation with the Family Counsels, community based organizations run by the Ministry of the Family, Adolescence, and Childhood composed of volunteers, judicial facilitators, family pastors, and religious leaders, before she can report her case to the Women and Children’s Police Stations (6265).3 That is to say, the
Regulation to the law establishes the family and masculine authority, rather than women as individuals, as the “social good to be protected at all costs”(Barragán “Etnografía”
15).4 Make no mistake, mediation poses a grave danger to women. In the Parliamentary debates for Law 779, Supreme Court President Alba Ramos cites the prevalence of
3 There seems to be serious confusion in journalistic reporting and social debates over whether passage through the “Consejerías de la Familia” is obligatory or not. But the language of the Regulation does read “When at the the community level the situations provoking the couple or family conflicts are not solved …women will have the option of going to the Women and Children’s Police Stations” (6265, emphasis mine). The confusion arises in the interpretation of the law, since the 2013 Reform to the Law and the 2014 Regulations of the Law gut and reverse the original language and create these new community based institutions. See “Destacan necesidad de Reforma a Reglamento de Ley 779” http://canal4.com.ni/destacan- necesidad-de-reforma-a-reglamento-de-ley-779/ 4 “el bien social que debe protegerse a toda costa” (Barragán Etnografía 15). 19
femicide victims who had previously filed a police report, yet were killed regardless
(“Debates Parlamentarios” unpaged).5 According to the Autonomous Women’s
Movement (Movimiento Autónomo de Mujeres) in Nicaragua, the Regulations are illegal and constitute a plan of “social control and institutionalized gender violence”
(MAM “Posicionamiento”).6
The legalistic discourse, especially when subject to such continual executive manipulation, can be seen as a series of changing rhetorical gestures in a society-wide conversation that, at intervals, acknowledges or disavows femicide as a collective problem of public health. These discursive shifts are founded on coetaneous political interests or respond to increased social outcry and controversy. The story of feminist activism in the past 30 years of Nicaraguan history shows how social and legislative campaigns have changed the discursive terms of the game. The succession from a long- standing refusal to acknowledge intrafamiliar violence as a social-collective problem, to
Law 779’s broad-based feminist definition of femicide as public and private violence, to
Ortega’s restriction of femicide to interpersonal, romantic relationships, reveals extreme transformation, but also the highly conflictive and charged nature of gender relations.
While we can critique the Ortega regime’s reactionary stance and vested interest in riding each current wave of public opinion, the more pressing question is how will his short- circuiting of the law reverberate in the already fraught judicial terrain that victims of violence must traverse in order to seek protection? And, even more importantly, how
5 From here on, I cite to the Parlamentary debates as “DP.” http://www.asamblea.gob.ni/trabajo- legislativo/diario-de-debates/ 6 “…control social y violencia de género institucional.” http://www.awid.org/esl/Las-Noticias-y- Analisis/Temas-y-Analisis/Nicaragua-Posicionamiento-Politico-del-MAM-en-rechazo-al-ilegal- Reglamento-de-Ley-779 19 August 2014. 20
many more women will have to die before the State takes responsibility for violent masculinities as a dilemma of women’s human rights and general public health?
In light of the drastic reversal of Law 779, we can see that the manner in which femininities are visible to the state is paradoxical at best. The story of Liseth, along with the hundreds of cases like hers that have appeared in recent years, betrays the bewildering way in which female sexuality is constantly policed by individual masculinities, while, at the same time, these women seem to exist at the blind spot of the state’s eye. That women are the object of constant relational surveillance and intervention by husbands and partners is admittedly a difficult reality to take on through legislative and judicial reform.
On the other hand, when women do enter the state’s terrain to file a report, they are equally subject to scrutiny. They enter a complex procedural terrain in which the burden of proof and endurance still falls on their heads: the institutional procedures for filing a police report, the arduous process of following through with a case, the possibility of mediation, surveillance, and over-representation in the media, are all constant threats.
These all represent institutionalized forms of re-victimization. But despite the invasive and dehumanizing intervention of the State, even when they have bravely passed through the process of filing a complaint, they still run the risk of being killed by their aggressor.
Due to these failures and gaps in law enforcement and judicial procedures, Law 779 was already hard-pressed to stop gender violence or femicide. But it was a step in the right direction.
Ultimately, as can be gleaned from above, it is extremely difficult to establish a clear model of legislative reform stemming from a feminist philosophy that can be concretely enacted in the terrain of the political. We are discussing state-centered 21
approaches, a problematic equation for feminists in light of state complicity with masculinities in Latin America, as I explore below. In addition, a rights-based or punitive-based strategy for the policing of gendered violence pre-supposes traditional victim-aggressor dynamics, as well as gender categories. As Rosa-Linda Fregoso pointed out, “When we focus only on the judicial sphere, we empower the state to keep ideologizing and controlling” (Diplomado 27 June, 2014). Cautiousness about the State as a source of protection for women doubles in light of neoliberal socio-political formations in which crime control scenarios feed the furnaces of mass-incarceration, further dehumanizing and criminalizing those who dehumanized others.
Watching Ortega’s political maneuverings in the context of region-wide trends towards mano dura policies of social control reveals a strange narrative twist. Due to the recent international labeling of Nicaragua as one of the safer countries among the violence-ridden Central American nations, rather than cracking down on gender violence, his government seems to be playing a statistical game. That is to say, that some feminists and opposition leaders allege that Ortega released his Regulation of Law 779, which narrows the definition of femicide to those murders of women committed in the context of interpersonal relations, in order to maintain the appearance of gender non- discrimination and safety for women.7 Narrowing the legal definition of femicide certainly brightens up the numbers in support of Nicaragua’s international standing on
7 According to the President of the Movement for Sandinista Renovation, Ana Margarita Vijil Gurdián, “Es importante que haya leyes favorables a las mujeres, pero sería realmente importante si viviéramos en un país en el que las leyes se cumplen y no son solamente palabrería y demagogia para la exportación” (unpaged). La prensa http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/11/02/nacionales/1283304-14966 22
women’s rights.8 All of this sheds light on the paradoxical nature of legislative reform in the era of neoliberal policies, in which nation states must continue to project the image of compliance with international standards of human rights, despite declining standards of living that further foment violence and social fragmentation.
Even the original push towards recognizing gender violence as a public health and human rights problem in Nicaragua has been framed by punitively focused strategies for deterrence. The law certainly intended to inaugurate a new culture of punishment around gender violence. This approach can perhaps be justified in light of the historical impunity that has existed around crimes of gender violence. As I explore in the following chapters, however, carceral and punishment based strategies for stopping gender violence often go hand in hand with neoliberal strategies of social control that criminalize and individualize what is indeed a collective, systemic crisis. For this reason, my analysis of legal interventions into the cultural realm problematizes the facile categorization of ‘good men’ and ‘bad men’ that these punitive strategies entail, and additionally questions equations for social change or solutions for ending impunity that further polarize and exacerbate tensions in gender relations. Feminist scholars such as Kristin Bumiller and
Elizabeth Bernstein have written about the cooptation of feminist agendas against gender violence by neoliberal dynamics. Often, as they discuss, the international human rights discourse of global NGOs disguises and reinforces neocolonial social relations and fierce
8 In October 2014, the International Monetary Fund released its report on which countries have the smallest gap of inequality between the genders. Nicaragua placed 6th in the world, only behind several Scandinavian countries, angering many feminists and opposition leaders who claim that these numbers do not take into account quality of life and freedom from violence. These reports may rely on self-reporting of statistics from individual countries, making them a dubious source in some regards. 23
neoliberal crime-control strategies, instituting “feminism as crime control across the globe” (Bernstein 57).
The public debate around this legislation reveals the weighty symbolic repercussions of its proscriptions for Nicaraguan society. The mere fact of introducing feminist theoretical concepts—such as femicide, femicida—into the legal document and the local vernacular reveals a social impetus towards reexamining collective notions around gender violence.9 The debates about these new concepts in the Nicaraguan cultural scene have been fraught with conflict, revealing the terrain of gender relations as a rocky one in which serious challenges to old norms are afoot. These new terminologies and conceptualizations certainly hit a sore spot. Not only does the passing of the law point towards evolving societal conceptions in regards to what has historically been considered legitimate violence. It also reveals that feminist efforts to discursively intervene to politicize violence—in couples, the family, and public spaces—are taking effect and gaining credence in Nicaraguan society. As Argentina Espinoza, a Specialist in
Public Health in Nicaragua, claims, “We have an opportunity with the Integral Law that begins with recognizing that violence is a grave problem of human rights and public health.”10
9 See theoretical and legal definition of femicide below; The term femicida has been used in the press since mid-2012 to describe men who kill women, whether husbands, ex-partners, or acquaintances. From a feminist standpoint, it describes someone who commits a hate-crime by killing a woman because she is a woman, in the context of the unequal power relations between men and women. Only recently with President Daniel Ortega’s presidential Regulations to Law 779 has the press reverted to the terms parricide and parricida in a majority of cases that would have been previously typified as femicide. 10 “Tenemos una oportunidad con la Ley Integral que empieza por reconocer que la violencia es un problema grave de derechos humanos y de saludo pública.” This and all translations that follow are mine. “Neutralizar violencia intrafamiliar desde barrios” 29 March 2012. http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/246561 24
Gender violence and the law
From the vantage point of women’s legal status in Latin America since colonial times, it’s not difficult to argue that the law has been an instrument of violence. As
Rossana Barragán effectively argues, the independent nation states of Latin America enshrined colonial customs of racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination into their newly minted constitutions and penal codes, relying on concepts such as honor and infamy to maintain existing hierarchies (“The Spirit” 68-69). Patria potestad indeed entered most
Latin American constitutions as the form of tutelage under which women, their bodies, and their property were subject to the complete control of fathers, husbands, or brothers.
Patria potestad, according to Rossana Barragán, constitutes
…the power invested in the patriarch….and defines this power, or
potestas, as the command of the lord over his serfs, the power of the King
over his subjects, and the authority of the father over his children and
lineage. (“Absent Equality…” 31)
This history of subjugation undoubtedly colors the hesitance with which feminist groups appeal to the State for protection.
With the advent of international human rights treaties and conventions, however, women’s groups found new legal footing to stand on, specifically in the battle against gender violence. The creation of the International Criminal Court by the United Nations
Security Council in 1993, as a means to judge crimes committed in the Bosnia-
Herzegovina conflict, marks the first time that rape was recognized internationally as a war crime and a serious infringement of women’s rights (Masson 63). The International
Criminal Court and its recognition of rape indicate global changes occurring in 25
international law, due largely in part to the expansion of women’s movements across the world in the 1990s. The creation of international conventions such as the Convention to
Eliminate all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Inter-American
Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence Against Women
(Convention Belem do Pará) created international legal frameworks that sought to amend the formal equality of national laws that in fact harbored de facto inequality.
But feminist scholars of jurisprudence such as Catherine MacKinnon offer salient criticisms of the human rights paradigm and international law as well, for varying reasons. With the virtual dissolution of the state and the rise of multinational corporations, organized criminality, and religious fundamentalisms, MacKinnon rightly wonders if international law offers hope or if “…male dominance [is] equally present in and transmuting into transnational forms?” (4). I would affirm the fallibility of the law, whether international or national, in light of the new transnational forces that MacKinnon mentions. As I believe Sayak Valencia would argue through her concept of gore capitalism, legalistic frameworks are some of the faltering humanistic discourses that fail to ameliorate or address the violent realities of neoliberalism. Valencia points out that not only have “all of the economic taboos and of respect for life have been broken,” but additionally neoliberalism doesn’t know how to propose any model of social integration
(50; 81). As these developments suggest, it may be hard to imagine international law having the necessary clout to counter mutating group alliances and their nefarious effects on women’s safety across the globe.
What we’re talking about here are group alliances that transcend national boundaries and party politics. Therefore, as I will argue throughout this project, along 26
with Lauren Berlant and MacKinnon, the public-private distinction still constitutes a theoretical quagmire for feminist scholars. It is a distinction that Lauren Berlant, following Jürgen Habermas, suggests was no more than a “Victorian fantasy,” which became entrenched in political theory and medical and criminological discourse (Berlant
3).11 Indeed, even in international human rights law the public-private distinction permeates legal frameworks. According to MacKinnon, the human rights generations laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights hierarchize political and civil rights
(first generation rights) above social and economic rights (second generation rights), with those in turn placed above group or collective rights (third generation rights) (5). As
MacKinnon argues, however, women experience this hierarchy in reverse. This means that group rights are the real “first generation” rights concern for women:
Women are men’s unequals as groups. Real equality rights are collective
in the sense of being group-based in their essential nature. Individuals may
suffer discrimination one at a time, but the basis for the injury is group
membership. (5)
Furthermore, without fundamental social and economic rights, women have found political and civil rights to be largely superficial or ineffective.
So this calls for a re-thinking of the idea of group based power. MacKinnon helps us understand how women’s rights are collective rights. But, going further, we can see how certain interest groups outside of the State in Nicaragua were powerful enough to derail Law 779 and to short circuit a socio-legal recognition of women’s collective rights.
11 Berlant draws from Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass: 1989. 27
The Church constitutes the main block of power and harbors the main group-based affinity that could dissuade Nicaraguan publics from accepting the law. However, the fact that President Ortega has tightened his alliance with the Catholic Church in recent years is quite well known.12 Between their control over the Church and traditional political power, I believe that certain masculinities sincerely don’t want to give women, as a group, a share of power. For this reason, the acknowledgement of women’s collective rights in Law 779 was considered so threatening. This is what Celia Amorós calls
“patriarchal pacts”, those alliances across social and economic classes that cement men’s dominance. As I explore below, the fear of having to share power was already prevalent at the time the National Assembly first passed Law 779. Indeed, this impasse signaled the death of Law 779 in Nicaragua. In the following pages, I explore the history of the enactment of the law and how it was eventually neutralized by the opposition.
Networks of resistance: the road to Law 779
As part of the ground gained by feminist movements across Latin America in the last two decades, Nicaragua passed a national law against gender violence that went into effect in June 2012. The Integral Law Against Violence Towards Women, Law 779, codifies femicide, as well violations to women’s physical, sexual, psychological, and patrimonial integrity, into the Penal code as criminal offenses, outlining the corresponding punishments. In addition, the law adds patrimonial, labor, and institutional violence as criminal offenses. Law 779 also created the District Tribunals Specializing in
12 As evidenced by the Sandinista slogan: “Nicaragua: Christian, socialist, and solidary” [Nicaragua: Cristiana, socialista y solidaria]. 28
Violence (Juzgados de Distrito Especializados en Violencia) and the National Inter- institutional Commission against Violence Towards Women (Comisión Nacional
Interinstitucional de Lucha contra la Violencia hacia la Mujer). In its Article 46, Law 779 prohibited mediation: the long-standing, routine institutional practice of police or judicial agents facilitating a dialogue between the aggressor and the accuser to bypass legal sanctions. The prohibition in the original body of Law 779 attempts to halt this practice, due to the fact that judicial officials have often privileged the preservation of the family unit over the physical safety and integrity of individual victims of violence. All of these elements make Law 779 a groundbreaking piece of legislation that tackles the asymmetrical power relations between men and women through specific prohibitions and creative institutional innovation.
The term femicide first circulated through Anglophone academic circles through the work of Jane Caputi and Diane Russell, who claim that “femicide” is “the misogynist killing of women by men, [and] is a form of sexual violence” (3). The term feminicidio was used by Latin American feminist activists in the Dominican Republic in the 1980s and introduced to academia by Marcela Lagarde in 1987 (Fregoso and Bejarano 4). Rosa-
Linda Fregoso, Cynthia Bejarano, and Marcela Lagarde y de los Rios insist that feminicidal violence in Latin America requires a definition that reconfigures North to
South knowledge hierarchies, and therefore insist on defining concepts that correspond to local contexts.13 Their use the term feminicidio encompasses various dimensions: first, feminicide is defined as “the murders of women and girls founded on a gender power
13 “The concept of feminicide thus highlights the ‘local histories’ of theoretical reflection on the part of Latin American, Latina, and U.S.-based researchers; human rights and gender-justice advocates, witness- survivors, and legal scholars as we came into contact with bodies of knowledge elaborated elsewhere” (5). 29
structure” (5). Second, feminicide is gender-based violence that is both public and private, indicating the complicity of the state and of individual perpetrators, thus encompassing “systematic, widespread, and everyday interpersonal violence” (5).
Finally, it is a “systemic violence rooted in social, political, economic, and cultural inequalities”(5).14 These theoretical advances towards conceptualizing the murder of women continue to be debated and have wide-ranging consequences in national and international contexts.
Law 779 indeed carries out a radical legal gesture akin to those of contemporary laws being passed against gender violence in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Spain, and other Latin American countries that also codify femicide or feminicide.15 According to
Nicaraguan journalist and feminist Sofía Montenegro, “The law known as Law 779 is the legal instrument with the most history in the women’s movement in Nicaragua. Its necessity, its origins, and its content condense 30 years of struggle of at least two generations of Nicaraguan women (Montenegro et. al 2).16 It is fundamentally a legal codification of feminist theoretical principals, as evidenced by the preamble and Article
1, the object, sphere and policy of Law 779:
The present law has as its objective to act against the violence that is
exercised against women, with the purpose of protecting the human rights
of women and guaranteeing them a life free from violence, which favors
14 “In this sense, the focus of our analysis is not just on gender but also on the intersection of gender dynamics with the cruelties of racism and economic injustices in local as well as global contexts” (5). 15 In the Parliamentary debates, the representatives use femicide and feminicide interchangeably. I did not find a specific instance in the debates where they justified the use of femicide in the final law. 16 “La ley conocida como Ley 779 es el instrumento jurídico con más historia en el movimiento de mujeres de Nicaragua. Su necesidad, su origen y su contenido condensa 30 años de lucha de al menos dos generaciones de mujeres nicaraguenses” (Montenegro et. al 2). 30
their development and well being according to the principals of equality
and non-discrimination; establishing integral measures of protection in
order to prevent, punish, and eradicate violence and lend assistance to
women victims of violence, driving for changes in socio-cultural and
patriarchal patterns that support power relations.”17 (emphasis mine)
The Nicaraguan national law, much like that of the Mexican law, is innovative in its acknowledgement of the structural, systemic, and collective dimensions of violence against women. These laws came about as a result of extensive campaigning on the part of feminist organizations in both countries. Given that the majority of Latin American countries had ratified international accords that addressed violence against women such as CEDAW and the Convention of Belem do Pará, feminist groups began to demand that governments uphold their commitment to the tenets of these international agreements
(Fregoso and Bejarano 18).
Notably, the language of Law 779 is modeled on that of the Convention of Belem do Pará, whose rhetorical bent frames gender violence as a fundamental obstacle to women’s full participation as citizens, to the “free and full exercise of her civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights” (Article 5). While Article 1 of Belem do
Pará defines violence against women as “any act or conduct, based on gender, which causes death or physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, whether in the public or private sphere,” the preamble establishes that “violence against women
17 “La presente Ley tiene por objeto actuar contra la violencia que se ejerce hacia las mujeres, con el propósito de proteger los derechos humanos de las mujeres y garantizarle una vida libre de violencia, que favorezca su desarrollo y bienestar conforme a los principios de igualdad y no discriminación; establecer medidas de protección integral para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia y prestar asistencia a las mujeres víctimas de violencia, impulsando cambios en los patrones socioculturales y patriarcales que sostienen las relaciones de poder” (1362). 31
is an offense against human dignity and a manifestation of the historically unequal power relations between women and men.” The inclusion of symbolic and educational non-discrimination is also significant. Article 6 affirms “the right of women to be valued and educated free of stereotyped patterns of behavior and social and cultural practices based on concepts of inferiority or subordination.”18 Belem do Pará and the national laws modeled on it set a precedent acknowledging that gender inequality is false and detrimental to women’s ability to develop as full, autonomous beings. In the words of Catherine MacKinnon, commenting on the Convention, “This is what a substantive equality approach with the necessary substance looks like” (9).
The story of how Law 779 came to be passed in Nicaragua begins in the 1980s, when AMNLAE (Asociación de Mujeres Nicaraguenses “Luisa Amanda Espinoza”), the feminist organization within the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN), formed the Women’s Houses [Casas de la Mujer], which offered health-related, psychological, and legal services, as well as helpful workshops on sexuality, contraception, and professional training (Kampwirth 203). At this time, AMNLAE and other women’s groups and collectives began to include violence against women in their political agenda, offering legal support and medical and psychological attention (D’Angelo et. al 12). In
1983, AMNLAE opened the Woman’s Legal Office (Oficina Legal de la Mujer) to aid women and children living in violent situations, establishing coordination with the
National Police and gradually opening offices all across the country (D’Angelo et. al 12).
In the 1990s, after the Sandinista electoral defeat, AMNLAE, the major feminist organization associated with the FSLN, broke free of party control and, alongside other
18 See the English translation of the Convention at http://www.oas.org/en/mesecvi/convention.asp. 32
pre-existing and newly founded feminist groups, began to organize and form autonomous collectives (Montenegro “Nicaragua”; Kampwirth; Babb). During this time period many feminist groups sprang up across the country, participated in international summits, and came to be integrated into nationally organized “Redes,” or networks (Blandón Gadea
39). The organization of the feminist organizations into a loose collection of networks took place in 1992 at the Women’s Summit “Diverse but United” held as a national feminist congress in Nicaragua (Puntos de Encuentro).19 As strong evidence of the groundwork laid by feminists in the 1980s, the participants in a workshop on violence at the congress were ready to lay out an agenda with five concrete steps towards ending violence:
…that rape laws should be changed to make rape a public, rather than
private, crime; that the penal code be reformed to defend women; that
educational and media campaigns be launched; that a women’s network
against violence be formed; and that the public schools begin teaching sex
education. (Cuadra, Fernández, and Ubeda, quoted in Kampwirth 63)
Indeed, not long after all but one of these steps was under way, that being the push for the
Ministry of Education to change its policy on sex education (Kampwirth 63).
In line with the agenda set by the participants in the violence workshop, at the conference “Diverse but United” the longest lasting and most influential of the women’s networks was founded: the Network of Women Against Violence (Red de Mujeres
Contra la Violencia, henceforth RMCV). The RMCV incorporates activists from NGOs,
19 The feminist groups chose an alliance of networks due to reticence to being controlled by a dominating party or organization such as the FSLN had been. For an analysis of their critique of “vanguards” see Kampwirth’s chapter “Reacting to Revolution in Nicaragua: Feminist and Anti-feminist Politics in Post- Sandinista Nicaragua.” 33
government ministries, and autonomous feminist organizations to form a powerful coalition. The RMCV has wielded its influential, forceful voice against violence and impunity through the media and through mass organized protests since it was founded in
1992. Moreover, the RMCV, along with Catholic Women for the Right to Decide
(Católicas por el derecho de decidir), is considered one of the few accurate sources for statistical information on gender violence, since the National Police’s count has often been colored by the lack of proper indicators of gender violence or by political motives for concealing this violence.20 The broad-based organization of the RMCV has allowed for the continuous presence of feminist activists in the streets of major Nicaraguan cities, keeping the issue of gender violence visible and present in public debates.
These trends form part of a region-wide feminist movement against gender violence that took root in the past two decades. According to Monserrat Sagot, the
Central American Feminist Network against Violence towards Women (la Red Feminista
Centroamericana contra la Violencia hacia las Mujeres) and many other organizations have mobilized in the last two decades in the face of what she calls “the scandalous rise in the region of all forms of violence against women, including femicides” (80).
Inasmuch as it constitutes part of the struggle to establish the cultural meanings of gender relations and gender violence, Sagot confirms that Central American feminisms have been able to make visible and typify sexual violence, defining it as a systematic and citizenship problem, not a private or a family issue (85). Sagot’s claim is affirmed by
20 During the Parlamentary debates for Law 779, National Assembly Representative Wilfredo Navarro Moreira cites the RMCV for statistical information of femicide: “La escasa información disponible en Nicaragua incluye datos de la Red de Mujeres Contra la Violencia (RMCV), que contabilizan 79 mujeres asesinadas durante el año 2009 y en el primer trimestre de 2010, 12 mujeres –entre ellas 4 niñas menores de 6 años que fueron asesinadas con premeditación y en forma atroz, a manera de venganza contra las madres de las víctimas” http://www.asamblea.gob.ni/trabajo-legislativo/diario-de-debates/. 34
Montenegro in the case of Nicaragua, where she affirms that Law 779 is the culmination of a vindication that women began to demand, just as soon as the first women’s centers
“managed to place in the public space the problem of violence that people experienced in the interior of their homes, a reality that had remained hidden, concealed, silenced”
(Montenegro et. al 2).21
Along with the work of the feminist organizations, and due to their mobilizations,
Nicaraguan institutions have also evolved to address gender violence. In 1995, the
RMCV carried out a national campaign for the passing of Law 230, ratified by the
National Assembly in 1996 (Puntos de Encuentro).22 Law 230, for Reform and Addition to the Penal code to Prevent and Punish Intrafamiliar Violence, implemented specific protective procedures in cases of violence against women and children.23 In 1996, the
RMCV in Nicaragua was involved in negotiating with the National Police for the creation and proper operating of the Women and Children’s Police Stations [la Comiaría de la
Mujer y la Niñez] (D’Angelo et. al 14). In reality, the Women and Children’s Police
Stations were an accomplishment achieved by a new “cross-partisan, cross-class alliance for gender justice” composed of Sandinista feminists and right-wing women’s groups, who together helped create these women-staffed police stations where women could go report abuse without fear of re-victimization (Kampwirth 67).
The following year, the RMCV, the Supreme Court, and the Nicaraguan
Women’s Institute carried out an evaluation of the application of Law 230 all over the country, finding that the legal framework was insufficient for various reasons: many
21 “…lograron poner en el espacio público la problemática de la violencia que se vivía en el interior de los hogares, realidad que había permanecido escondida, oculta, silenciada” (Montenegro et. al 2). 22 http://www.puntos.org.ni/index.php/es/red-de-mujeres-boletina49 23 http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/population/domesticviolence/nicaragua.dv.96.pdf 35
women experienced violence from intimate partners, many experienced economic or social violence that prevented them from studying or working, and others had husbands or partners that stole their salary or personal goods; Law 230 didn’t tackle any of these problems (Montenegro et. al 3). These evaluations demonstrated the validity of the feminists’ demands for a special and integral law against violence.
Towards the end of the 1990s, a public scandal emerged that would have extensive ramifications for the movement against sexual violence. As an emblematic example of overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles to denouncing sexual abuse, in 1998 Zoilamérica Narváez, the step-daughter of former President and Sandinista leader
Daniel Ortega, publicly denounced that she had been sexually abused by her step-father since childhood. Without entering into the details of the case, which have been explored extensively by feminist thinkers,24 we can highlight the symbolic significance of the case for feminist organizers in the struggle against gender violence. According to one of the most influential voices in Nicaraguan feminism, RMCV leader María Teresa Blandón,
Zoilamérica’s case “obliged us to recover from the personal crises the case generated, rethink political-affective adhesions, reflect, debate, and keep fighting for all the women in similar situations to that denounced by Zoilamérica” (65).25 Furthermore, in the study that Blandón conducted of feminist movement leaders, she reports that all her interviewees cited the case as formative for the movement due to the courage of
24 See Sofía Montenegro, “La ‘Herótica’ nacional masculina.” Debate feminista. 19:10 (1999), p. 223-227; also Delphine Lacombe, “El escándalo Ortega-Narváez o la caducidad del “hombre nuevo”: volver a la controversia.” ISTOR. 40. (2010), 81-107. 25 “…obligaba a recuperarse de las crisis personales que el hecho generaba, repensar las adhesiones político-afectivas, reflexionar, debatir y seguir dando la pelea por todas las mujeres en situaciones semejantes a las denuncias por Zoilamérica” (Blandón 65). 36
Zoilamérica to break the silence. She explains that it also revealed the mechanisms used by masculinities to mobilize symbolic authority:
the force granted by the father role, political recognition or age…the
power of masculine complicity that puts the gender interests of men above
their political differences, [and] the real power of men, in addition to the
symbolic, that allows them to evade the law and remain unpunished. (65-
66)26
These elements of masculine privilege that the case brought to light continue to be relevant to the controversy over Law 779 and mediation, in the sense that they touch the prestige of the father and contribute to dismantling the myth of his protection over of the nuclear family in the Nicaraguan imaginary. I will revisit these mechanisms of symbolic authority below.
The RMCV’s involvement in the Women and Children’s Police Stations in the years following the 1997 evaluation of the legal framework included pushing for the eradication of a form of mediation called “extra-judicial arrangements,” where in cases of intrafamiliar violence, women had to sign a form and assume part of the responsibility for the violence and abandon their right to a trial (D’Angelo et al 14). Almost 20 years later, in 2014, the prohibition of mediation has constituted the most controversial part of Law
779, as I have discussed, provoking accusations on the part of conservative sectors and
26 “El poder que le otorga el rol paterno, el reconocimiento político o de edad…la fuerza de la complicidad masculina que pone los intereses de género de los hombres por encima de sus diferencias políticas, el poder real de los hombres, además del simbólico, que les permite evadir la ley y quedar impunes, entre otras cosas” (Blandón 65-66). 37
the Church that the law threatens the institution of the family.27 In the early 2000s, the
RMCV continued campaigning for legislative and educational change. As part of this struggle, the 2008 Reform to the Penal Code established “intrafamiliar violence” as a specific crime understood to mean “physical or emotional damage,” punishable with 2 to
13 years in jail, depending on the seriousness of the injuries (D’Angelo et al 18).
The draft bill of Law 779 sprang from the work of two separate commissions who elaborated separate draft bills for the law in 2011. The first came about as a result of the
National Assembly’s “Concerted Economic Agenda from Nicaraguan Women,” presented in January 2010, which demanded that “spaces for citizen participation and the laws that protect women’s rights be made effective, for the exercise of their citizenship.”
The Agenda also asked for the implementation of “public policies that take on crucial topics like non violence against women.”28 Based on this agenda, the Movement of
Women Workers and Unemployed “María Elena Cuadra” and 19 other governmental and civil society organizations got together and wrote a draft bill based on their study of legislation against gender violence in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Spain, Guatemala,
Honduras, México, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela.29
27 In September 2013, a reform to Law 779 was passed that permitted “mediation with exceptions.” According to Representative Irma Dávila, the reform stipulated that “se puede recurrir a la mediación si 1) el agresor no tiene ningún antecedente; 2) se ha obtenido una constancia del juez de lo antes señalado. Además, solo se puede mediar una vez y nunca se la puede imponer a una mujer que no desea mediar” (Mena y Lara, El Nuevo Diario 11 septiembre 2013 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/296507- reforma-a-ley-779-apunta-a-mediacion-excepcion). 28 Parlamentary debates for Law 779: “hagan efectivos los espacios de participación ciudadana y, las leyes que protegen los derechos de las mujeres para el ejercicio de su ciudadanía…”. Asimismo la implementación de “políticas públicas que aborden temas cruciales como”…. “la no violencia contra las mujeres.” 29 The other organizations included: Secretaría de la Mujer (FENACOOP R.L), Congreso permanente de Mujeres Empresarias de Nicaragua (CPMEN), Federación de Mujeres Productoras del Campo de Nicaragua (FEMUPROCAN), Voces Caribeñas, Comité Nacional de Mujeres sindicalistas de Nicaragua (CNMSN), Foro de Mujeres para la Integración centroamericana (FMICA), Fundación Mujer y Desarrollo 38
Additionally, in mid 2011 an inter-institutional team of legislators, members of the judiciary, public officials, police, and representatives of the Nicaraguan Women’s
Institute formed the Commission of Study and Reforms of Crimes of Violence against
Women, counting on the assistance of lawyers from the Women and Children’s Police
Stations, public defenders, psychologists, and doctors form the Institute of Legal
Medicine. Over some 22 working sessions they studied legislative models from all over
Central America, as well as international conventions such as CEDAW and the
Convention of Belem do Pará. During the presentation of the draft bill in the National
Assembly, Secretary Alba Palacios Benavídez noted that the laws across Central America vary between 1) partial reforms of penal law (Nicaragua, Panama); and 2) a set of norms that form precautionary laws of a mixed nature against the repetition of violence implementing concise, expedited judicial procedures (Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador,
Guatemala). All of these laws set up specialized tribunals for processing domestic violence cases. Palacios affirms that while none of this legislation resolves the deeper problem behind gender violence, the objective of all the laws is the protection of life and protection of the physical, emotional, sexual, and patrimonial integrity of women, in accordance with the norms established in Belem do Pará. (“DP” unpaged).
Going on to argue for the necessity of an integral law, Palacios explains that judicial practices in these countries have been applied in a biased fashion, given that:
Económico Comunitario (FUMDEC),Secretaría de la Mujer de la Central de Cooperativas se Servicios Múltiples (PRODECCOP R.L), Red de Mujeres Chontaleñas, Secretaría de la Mujer de la Unión Nacional de Agricultores y Ganaderos (SM-UNAG), Las Gaviotas(ASOMUPRO), Fundación para la Promoción y Desarrollo de las Mujeres y la Niñez "Blanca Aráuz" (FUNDEMUNI), el Consejo de Mujeres de Occidente (CMO), Colectivo de Mujeres Itza, Asociación de Mujeres para la Integración de la Familia (AMIFANIC), Instituto de Liderazgo de Las Segovias, Mesa por la Equidad de Género Nicaragua y Coordinadora de Mujeres Rurales. 39
…the measures of protection, security, and prevention established by
these laws are frequently breached by the aggressor, and the State doesn’t
have effective mechanisms for compliance. On many occasions,
procedural formalisms impede the persecution of aggressors and generate
impunity…
The penal process is impregnated with symbolisms and guarantees that
on some occasions are turned upon the victims of domestic violence,
where the evacuation of evidence goes more towards protecting the rights
of the accused than those of the victim… In penal law only the facts and
legal precepts are considered relevant in order to determine the case, it
doesn’t take into account emotions, fears, or relations of power implicit in
violence against women. (“Debates parlamentarios” unpaged)30
Palacios points out how the ingrained inequalities in judicial practice that stem from the androcentric framework of law and the shortcomings of “formal equality” have fostered impunity in Central America. For these reasons, Palacios argues for the incorporation into
Nicaraguan law of a human rights and anti-discrimination framework based on the non- neutrality of the protected subject, “breaking with the family-ist vision [visión familista]
30 Las medidas de protección, seguridad y cautelares que establecen las leyes, frecuentemente son incumplidas por el agresor y el Estado no cuenta con mecanismos efectivos para su cumplimiento. En muchas ocasiones los formalismos procesales impiden perseguir a los agresores y generan la impunidad…El proceso penal está impregnado de simbolismos y garantías que en algunas ocasiones se revierten en contra de las víctimas de la violencia doméstica, donde la evacuación de la prueba va dirigida a garantizar más los derechos del imputado que los de las víctimas…En el derecho penal únicamente los hechos y preceptos legales se consideran relevantes para determinar el hecho, no toma en cuenta las emociones, los temores y las relaciones de poder implícitas en la violencia hacia la mujer” (“DP” unpaged). 40
and the supposed neutrality of norms” in order to create true substantive legal equality for women (“DP” unpaged).31
During the debates, legislators and judiciary members also presented arguments as to why the existing legal framework was insufficient. President Justice of the Supreme
Court Alba Ramos affirmed that, although the reformed Penal Code (2008) codifies intrafamiliar violence, it establishes the penal figure based on the outcome only, punishing those crimes that cause an injury or damage. Furthermore, patrimonial violence, i.e. the extraction or destruction of the victim’s personal belongings, and femicide are excluded from the Penal Code. For these reasons, Ramos concludes that the
Penal Code does not establish an adequate penalization of the “diverse manifestations of violence against women, that are produced in the private sphere, as well as the public”
(“DP” unpaged).
The following is a brief outline of the findings [dictamen] on Law 779, resulting from the combined recommendations of the two commissions that worked on a draft bill for Law 779, presented by Representative María Dolores Alemán Cardenal, the President of the National Assembly’s Commission of Women, Youth, Children, and Family Issues.
The law’s objective is to prevent, assist, punish, and eradicate violence against women as a manifestation of discrimination, the situation of inequality, and the power relations that men exercise in any of their forms or places. The bill affirms that violence, in addition to being a public health problem, is a problem of citizen security, obliging the Nicaraguan state to act to protect women’s human rights. Its governing principals include the following: Non-discrimination, Non-violence, Due diligence on the part of the State,
31 “…rompiendo la visión familista y la supuesta neutralidad de las normas” (“DP” unpaged). 41
Celerity, Indemnification, No secondary victimization, Protection for the victims,
Concentration, Publicizing, Completeness and the Principle of Inter-institutional
Coordination. The bill establishes the Nicaraguan Constitution, its laws, CEDAW, and the Convention of Belem do Pará as its sources of interpretation. The bill mandates the installation of tribunals specializing in violence that include a Specialized Courtroom for violence in the Court of Managua, as well as a female magistrate trained in violence in each of the country’s regional courts. Feminicide was codified as a penal type, committed when a man kills a woman as a result of extreme violence in the public or private sphere.32 The law adds a new chapter to the Penal code that codifies the following crimes: physical, psychological, patrimonial, and economic violence, intimidation or threats against women, child abductions, violence in the workplace, violence against public functions of women, failure to denounce, and obligation to denounce sexual abuse. In addition, the bill establishes procedures for the judgment of these crimes and affirms the inadmissibility of mediation. It also creates the National Inter-institutional Commission of Struggle against Violence towards Women. Finally, it creates the policy to prevent, assist, and protect women who experience violence that includes the participation of
Non-governmental organizations, with the goal of getting suggestions from those groups that specialize in the topic of violence against women (“DP” unpaged).
After the presentation of these findings on Law 779, the National Assembly members debated the approval of the general outline of the law. Prominent representatives, such as co-author of its introduction, Wilfredo Navarro Moreira,
32 In the parliamentary debates, the representatives of the Assembly and the Supreme court still use the terms femicide and feminicide interchangeably. 42
vigorously supported the call for the codification of femicide/feminicide: “… [because it] tackle[s] violence against women in a specific manner, abandoning neutralizing expressions like domestic violence or family violence ” (Navarro Moreira “DP”, emphasis mine).33 Some of the highlights of the representatives’ speeches included just these types of assertions: that violence against women is a public, not just private, issue, one of both health and security; that power relations should be equaled out between men and women; that instances of femicide seem to be rising in an alarming fashion; and that there is a pressing need for inter-institutional coordination and a society-wide effort to stop the violence.
The triumphal and emphatic tone of the representatives’ comments disembarks into a unanimous approval of the general outline of the law. All of the representatives who took the floor acknowledged the necessity for this law in Nicaragua, with many affirming that violence against women has been considered a private affair and the business of the family for far too long. Some cited statistics such as the one mentioned by representative José Pallas Arana: “It’s awe inspiring, Mr. President, that with Spain being eight times more populous than Nicaragua, already our country has more victims of the crime of feminicide, with eight times more, I repeat, women inhabitants…” (“DP” unpaged).34 Others, such as Martha Marina González, emphasized the law’s significance as part of the historical struggle for women’s rights and the FSLN’s role in advancing these rights. Representative María Margarita López Blandón affirmed, “The Sandinista
33 “…abordan la violencia contra las mujeres en forma específica, abandonando expresiones neutralizantes como violencia doméstica o familiar” (“DP” unpaged). 34 “Es asombroso, señor Presidente, que teniendo España ocho veces más población que Nicaragua, ya nuestro país tenga más víctimas del delito feminicidio que España con ocho veces más, repito, mujeres pobladores de ambos países” (“DP” unpaged). 43
Front since its birth has come along championing, leading the struggle in favor of women. Thanks to the revolution women came out into public life” (“DP” unpaged).35
Despite some partisan remarks, the Assembly truly came forth as a united front in favor of the law. Representative Irma Dávila Lazo exclaimed:
Nicaragua has a woman’s name, the struggle has a woman’s name, and
justice has a woman’s name. This is why we’re here united, men and
women, creating justice for the Nicaraguan woman, approving this law in
consensus, a law that guarantees protection to women in all its forms and
spheres. (“DP” unpaged)36
The debates also included the radical feminist critique of Representative Mónica
Baltodano Marcenaro, who cited cultural stereotypes and the role of the media in perpetuating the depreciation of the feminine and provoking violence. Reading the debates, I perceive a spirited and united push towards expanding and protecting women’s rights in Nicaraguan society. Not one opposing argument is offered, and, in fact, many representatives indicate that their initial hesitation towards the law was overcome in the face of the commissions’ findings.
However, some representatives demonstrate an acute awareness of accusations already circulating in the press that the law is anti-male or attacks men. Indeed, those who mention it attempt to dispel this accusation. Representative Wilfredo Navarro
35 “…el Frente Sandinista desde su nacimiento viene abanderando, encabezando la lucha a favor de las mujeres. Pues, gracias a la revolución las mujeres salimos a la vida pública” (“DP” unpaged). 36 Dávila was emphasizing the linguistic and symbolic connotations of the fact that the nouns Nicaragua, lucha, and justicia, are all feminine. “Nicaragua tiene nombre de mujer, la lucha tiene nombre de mujer, y la justicia tiene nombre de mujer. Por eso hoy estamos aquí unidas, unidos, haciendo justicia para la mujer nicaragüense, aprobando esta iniciativa de ley en consenso, una ley que garantiza la protección efectiva a la mujer en todas sus formas y ámbito” (“DP” unpaged). 44
commented that although many people in the media claim that the law is a persecution of men, “we men shouldn’t fear the law, because this law is made to punish those that violate women’s rights, those who disrespect those rights” (“DP” unpaged). Commenting on this fear, Representative Salvador Talavera Alaniz affirmed,
I know some male colleagues are afraid…that with this law from here on
out women will probably have powerful weapons in their hands, and all
the sudden they may even use them…probably someone could even try to
believe that they could be unjustly used against some men… (“DP”
unpaged)37
The allusions to these fears refer us to a common discursive thread in thinking about gendered power relations in Nicaragua: men seem to conceive of feminism and women’s rights as a war and as a direct attack on their position in society. These concerns indicate a tendency towards polarized thinking that disallows the nuances of compromise or the possibility of shared power. Furthermore, they communicate various aspects of the tension implicit in the social debate about Law 779. First, these fears implicitly recognize the power imbalance that exists favoring masculine supremacy and feminine subordination. Second, they show an unwillingness to cede power to women. Finally, the reference to these fears foreshadows the sentiment that will eventually win out in official politics, destroying the advances made by Law 779.
Law 779’s original gesture (before the Reform and Regulation) was indicative of a monumental shift in the way women’s rights were conceptualized in Nicaragua. On the
37 “Conozco que algunos colegas varones tienen un temor no sé si legítimo o no, pero tiene el temor de que con esta ley probablemente las mujeres de ahora en adelante van a tener armas en sus manos muy poderosas y de repente las pueden hasta utilizar; así como se les garantiza los derechos, probablemente alguien pueda pretender creer que puedan ser usadas injustamente contra algún hombre” (“DP” unpaged). 45
one hand, the manner in which femicide was codified into the Penal Code signified a broad-based recognition of gender discrimination as collective in nature, and, consequently, acknowledged that women’s rights are collective rights. Article 8 states that violence against women in any of its forms or areas (in the home or workplace):
…should be considered a manifestation of discrimination and inequality
that women experience in power relations, recognized by the State as a
problem of public health, citizens’ security, and in particular: a) misogyny,
b) physical violence, c) violence exercised against women by public
institutions, d) labor violence, e) patrimonial or economic violence, f)
psychological violence, and g) sexual violence. (1364)38
In regards to the definition of femicide given in the original law, Article 9 outlines a conception that, just like Article 8, recognizes discrimination against women as a group- based phenomenon grounded in power relations: “He commits the act of femicide the man who, in the context of the unequal power relations between men and women, kills a woman whether in the public or private sphere in any of the following circumstances…”
(1364, emphasis mine).39 Though it may signify a challenge in procedural terms to conceive of individual instances of gender violence as collective and group based in
38 “La violencia contra la mujer en cualquier de sus formas y ámbito debe ser considerada una manifestación de discriminación y desigualdad que viven las mujeres en las relaciones de poder, reconocida por el Estado como un problema de salud pública, de seguridad ciudadana y en particular: a) misoginia, b) violencia física, c) violencia en el ejercicio de la función pública contra la mujer, d) violencia laboral contra las mujeres, e) violencia patrimonial y económica, f) violencia psicológica, g) violencia sexual” (1364). Article 8 also includes a description for each one of these forms of violence, which I’ve omitted here for the sake of space. 39 “Artículo 9: Comete el delito de femicidio el hombre que, en el marco de las relaciones desiguales de poder entre hombres y mujeres, diere muerte a una mujer ya sea en el ámbito público o privado, en cualquier de las siguientes circunstancias…” (1364). La Gaceta: Diario oficial de la Asamblea Nacional 35. 22 February, 2012. 46
nature, this is the type of discursive, rhetorical gesture that can signify the beginning of serious social transformation.
Rosa-Linda Fregoso refers to the law’s ability to educate and influence society through the deployment of new terminologies and cultural models for conceptualizing social practices as the “norms changing potential” of the law (Diplomado CIESAS 27
June 2014). This vision of the transformative power of the law places a heavy burden on civil society groups to mobilize the law and translate its tenets in a manner that will be decipherable and politically tenable. The existence of an active, autonomous feminist movement in Nicaragua, which has continued to develop since its initial years, surely allowed for the passing of such radical legislation and for its translation into mainstream social discourses. At the time the law passed, there was indeed a broad-based acceptance of the law across society. An article in El diario of Spain, reported that an opinion poll taken in April 2012 showed that 82% of Nicaraguans supported Law 779 (Fernandez unpaged).40 Despite the increasing influence of the Catholic Church and other conservative sectors on President Daniel Ortega’s mode of governance, he initially stood strongly behind Law 779. The question becomes, then, how could the National Assembly and the President completely change their stance over a period of two short years?
Reform of Law 779, October 2013
In the original body of Law 779, Under Title 6, Penal Procedures, Article 46
“Prohibition of mediation,” states that: “Mediation will not proceed in the crimes
40 “Nicaragua aprueba permitir la mediacion entre agresores machistas y sus victimas” 28 September 2013. http://www.eldiario.es/sociedad/Nicaragua-mediacion-denuncias-violencia-machista_0_179882016.html 47
signaled in the present law” (1372). That is to say that the article prohibited mediation in any of the instances of violence codified by the law, whether physical, emotional, patrimonial, or sexual. As a monumental reversal of what was in fact a common institutional practice, the prohibition of mediation provoked serious societal resistance.
The opposition has gathered under the banner of the unity of the Nicaraguan family, claiming that the law “atenta contra la familia,” literally “makes an assassination attempt on the life of the family.” The Catholic Church and Evangelical churches, whose rhetorical classification of the law verged on hyperbolic and apocalyptic, led the charge against the law’s reforms. The Bishop of Estelí, Juan Abelardo Mata, opened fire on Law
779 stating that, “The number of the beast is no longer 666, but rather 779, because it’s destroying families” (Fernández unpaged). Taking their allegations even further, they claimed that the law openly attacked men and that the jails were filling up due to women’s frivolous complaints (Fernández unpaged).
At the beginning of October 2013, a little over a year since Law 779 had gone into effect, the National Assembly voted to amend Article 46, allowing for mediation in certain crimes codified by the law, with the approval of the Nicaraguan Supreme Court.
When the Reform first came out, many media sources were reporting that mediation would be permitted in cases of felonies qualified as “less serious” [menos graves].41
However, the text of the Reform itself allows for mediation in nine out of the ten felonies established by the law. It allows for mediation in the following crimes:
41 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/299231-mediacion-de-ley-779-no-se-aplicando. “Mediación no se está aplicando.” El Nuevo Diario 15 October 2013. 48
a) physical violence if it provokes light injuries; b) psychological violence
if it provokes damage to her psychic integrity that requires
psychotherapeutic treatment; c) patrimonial and economic violence,
except for economic exploitation of women; d) intimidation or threats
against women; e) child abductions; f) violence in the work place; g)
violence against women in their public functions; h) failure to denounce; i)
obligation to denounce an act of sexual abuse. (La gaceta 1 October 2013)
Ironically, only femicide is omitted. The Reform also states that mediation can only go forward if the accused does not have a prior record in any of these crimes. Nonetheless, the Reform is a dangerous, ludicrous reversal of the initial stance of the National
Assembly, the Supreme Court, and the grass-roots elements of civil society that spent almost a year studying legislation and judicial practice to find viable methods of transforming institutions and stemming gender violence.
Immediately, feminist organizations began to denounce the government’s actions.
The Autonomous Women’s Movement released a statement explaining how the Reform fostered the culture of impunity in Nicaragua:
The social message that is sent from the State with the reform is lethal, not
only because this restitution [of mediation] implies the promotion of
impunity, but also because it makes the State and all its operators into
necessary accomplices of violence… what it does is deliberately consent
49
to and favor perpetrators of crimes, and, as a consequence, leaves women
completely defenseless. (MAM, quoted in Montenegro et. al 4)42
Wilfredo Navarro, the representative who supported the draft bill (and who was one of only 4 assembly members who voted against the October 2013 Reform) said that it was counterproductive, given that “It [Law 779] hasn’t even been permitted to develop”
(Fernández unpaged). After two separate commissions, one governmental and one from civil society, had carried out such a careful study of the conjuncture and the need to prohibit mediation, the government’s reversal of its stance bypassed these findings.
Unfortunately, this degradation of Article 46 would not be the last blow to Law 779.
Regulation to Law 779, July 2014
Less than a year later, Daniel Ortega’s Regulations to Law 779 were released with no public or legislative discussion and little fanfare in La gaceta on July 31, 2014.
Essentially gutting the initial language and gesture of the law, the presidential decree confines the definition of femicide to “the crime committed by a man against a woman in the frame of interpersonal couple relationships, and as a result giving death to the woman.”43 Illustrative of a complete reversal of the Ortega government’s stance on gender violence, the decree establishes the Family Offices/Counsels (Consejerías
Familiares), community based institutions integrated by local volunteers, pastors, religious leaders, and judicial facilitators, with which women will be obligated to consult
42 “El mensaje social que se envía desde el Estado con la reforma es letal, no sólo porque esa restitución implica la promoción de la impunidad, sino porque convierte al Estado y a todos sus operadores en cómplices necesarios de la violencia… lo que hace es consentir y favorecer deliberadamente a los perpetradores del delito y, en consecuencia, deja a las mujeres en total indefensión” 43 “Delito cometido por un hombre en contra de una mujer en el marco de las relaciones interpersonales de pareja y como resultado diere muerte a la mujer, en las circunstancias que la ley establece” Ibid, 6264. 50
before filing a complaint with the police through the Women and Children’s Police stations (Comisaría de la Mujer y la Niñez).
While the law originally prohibited mediation, Ortega’s decree institutionalizes it and places the process in the hands of some of society’s most conservative sectors. It is no exaggeration to affirm that the decree completely neutralizes the judicial empowerment of women and reinstitutes the family—i.e. patriarchal authority—as the social good to be protected by the law. As the first line of the Reglamento states: “the objective of Law 779 is to guarantee the strengthening of Nicaraguan families through actions of prevention that promote the right to life, dignity, equality, and non- discrimination in the relationships between men and women.”44 While Article 1 of the original law states as its objective “to act against the violence that is exercised towards women,” the fact that the Regulations to Law 779 appeal to the “strengthening of
Nicaraguan families” implies that the focus changes from the protection of women as individuals, to the restoration of the family unit. One of the opposition parties, the
Movement for Sandinista Renovation (Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista) released a comparative chart that shows the extreme difference between the language of the original law and the regulated law. As they state, the focus of the Regulations is family co- existence and cohabitation, rather than the rights of women.
More convincing evidence of the reactionary nature of the Regulations to Law
779 cannot be found than that in Article 8, the “Sphere of attention of the Family
Counsels,” which includes the following description:
44 “Que el objetivo de la Ley 779 es garantizar el fortalecimiento de las familias nicaragüenses mediante acciones de prevención que promuevan el derecho a la vida, dignidad, igualdad y no discriminación en las relaciones entre mujeres y hombres” (Ibid 6263). 51
During the family counseling for a woman, the partners or families will
listen to them, accompany them, and psychologically assist them, so that
the causes that could be producing any type of disturbance in interpersonal
relationships can be recognized within their family dynamic, and
mechanisms for reestablishing family harmony, based on communication,
respect, mutual support, and love through compromise, will be provided to
them.45 (6265)
Effectively, any acknowledgement of the unequal power relations between masculinities and femininities is erased from the law, replaced by a forced, superficial vocabulary of reconciliation: compromise, peace, harmony. All of these are terms that mean very little when one member of the family is mobilizing intimidation, dominance, and various types of physical violence to maintain control.
The Regulations also seem to put institutional control in the hands of the Ministry of the Family, Adolescence, and Childhood, stating that the Family Counsels will function on the community level and through this Ministry (Article 8). However, the language of the Regulations doesn’t offer a clear path that women should take, complicating what had already been a complicated institutional process of denouncing violence. According to the RMCV’s statement about the Regulations:
Women will have the option of going to the Women’s Police Stations or to
the Public Ministry, who will remit them to the Ministry of the Family
45 “Durante la consejería familiar a la mujer, las parejas o familias se les escuchará, acompañará, atenderá psicológicamente, para que reconozcan las causas que les puede estar produciendo cualquier tipo de alteración en las relaciones interpersonales dentro de su dinámica familiar y se les facilitará mecanismos para que restablezcan la armonía familiar basados en la comunicación, el respeto, el apoyo mutuo y el amor a través de compromisos” (6265). 52
with a summary of the situation in order to offer specialized family
counseling services, expounds Article 10 of the Regulation. After passing
through all these proceedings the woman will finally be able to go to the
authorities. (Pronouncement of the RMCV)
Supposedly, once in the Ministry of the Family “the couple can voluntarily receive psychosocial attention and have the opportunity to establish compromises” (Reglamento,
Article 10). The protagonist position given to the Ministry of the Family is troubling for various reasons. According to Lourdes Bolaños et al., in their Diagnostic Report on intrafamilial and sexual violence, the Ministry of the Family doesn’t have a special program to address VIFS [intrafamilial and sexual violence]: “…it’s priority is the family as the fundamental nucleus of society, it’s purpose is the restitution of values and the strengthening of community leadership in search of a solution to these problems” (50).
All of these aspects demonstrate that the Regulations will place delicate, violent situations in the hands of people with no training in issues of gender violence, whose focus is on the maintenance of familial bonds. The problem with sending untrained people to “mediate” is that religious values and “common sense” knowledge about relationships will most likely win out. This cannot favor the interests of women attempting to get out of a violent cycle. If the very objective and mission statement of the
Regulations is to preserve the family, gender violence will no longer be treated as a fatal threat, nor with the due seriousness it deserves by these institutions.
On September 23, 2014 Sofía Montenegro and a group of lawyers, sociologists, and psychologists presented the “Recourse against the Regulations to Law 779” before the Supreme Court, alleging the unconstitutional nature of the presidential decree. This 53
move happened in a parallel fashion to the public denunciation that was taking place among feminist groups. The Autonomous Women’s Movement declared that
In the case of the Regulations to Law 779, Ortega constituted himself as
the National Assembly, changed the objective of the law, reformed the
crime of femicide, reduced the sphere of its application, gave functions to
structures that are not legally valid, incited the commission of the crime of
legal prevarication, transformed felonies into misdemeanors, placed
obstacles to the access to justice, and created structures that will have
functions corresponding to those of the police and judicial organs.
(“Pronunciamiento” unpaged)46
Many other journalists and prominent public figures spoke out about the illegality of the
Regulations. Not only the opposition party, the MRS, but also a broad range of civil society groups demonstrated worry about such a unilateral reversal of a democratically established law.
In addition to the Family Counsels being unqualified to mediate in terms of a gender perspective, neither are they trained in principles of judicial proceedings.
Furthermore, as Sofia Montenegro points out, they are not a valid governmental body, as they were not created or approved by the National Assembly, but rather unilaterally appointed by Daniel Ortega. What’s more, there seems to be confusion about their jurisdiction and how the Regulations to the law will be mobilized. After the Regulations
46 En el caso del reglamento a la ley 779, Ortega se constituyó en Asamblea Nacional, cambió el objeto de la ley, reformó el delito de femicidio, disminuyó el ámbito de aplicación, le dio funciones a estructuras que no están legalmente vigentes, incita a la comisión del delito de prevaricato, transformó los delitos en alteraciones, le pone obstáculos al acceso a la justicia y creó estructuras que van a tener funciones que corresponden a la policía o a los órganos jurisdiccionales” (“Pronunciamiento”). 54
were passed, President of the Supreme Court Alba Ramos switched her position on the law. She reported that some judges had appealed to her court for a reform to the
Regulations, given that they perceived inconsistencies in the document. Jumping to defend the Regulations, Ramos said they were “adjustments that need to be made for interpretation, no more than words that in their moment will be made known” (Centeno unpaged).
Even the Church has expressed hesitance and confusion about its possible role in mediating judicial conflicts. In the article “We aren’t judges, or police officers, we’re the
Church” published recently in La Prensa, Bishop René Sándigo of the Episcopal
Congress of Nicaragua asked that President Ortega clarify the content of the Regulations, stating that the work that the Church completes with the family is from the perspective of evangelical doctrine, “the Church cannot persecute, nor condemn the family in the sphere of application of justice” (Chamorro unpaged).
The underlying result of the Regulations seems to be not only confusion, but also a public erasure of gains made in the past two years. The Regulations are principally a shrugging of the State’s responsibility in protecting women and offering swift, efficient access to justice. According to the RMCV
Contrary to the state’s obligation to protect the victims of crimes, these
counsels in practice try to submit women to mediations and/or obligatory
conciliations, as well as violating their rights with re-victimizing
55
procedures that could expose them to public ridicule and blame (Miranda
and Montoya unpaged).47
The reinstatement of mediation places many obstacles in the path of women who attempt to leave their aggressors because it opens the floodgates to a variety of re-victimizing practices. In a deeply disappointing development, it annuls the very legal advances that had been made towards stemming these practices. The institutional quagmire, in addition to establishing a muddled vision of who is qualified to mediate in situations of violence, will inevitably translate to an increased vulnerability for victims of gender violence. In the words of the Autonomous Women’s Movement, Ortega “…destroyed the system of attention to victims of violence and complicated the route of access to justice, which puts the life and integrity of women at a greater risk, from which only a misogynist and criminal state can result” (“Pronunciamiento” unpaged).48
Mediation: The feminine under surveillance and power-knowledge dynamics in the judicial realm
Drawing mainly from the arguments against mediation presented by Nicaraguan feminist organizations, such as the Feminist Current, the Autonomous Women’s
Movement, and the RMCV, and from the Nicaraguan Supreme Court as well, we can
47 “Contrario a la obligación estatal de protección de las víctimas de un delito, estas consejerías pretenden en la práctica someter a las mujeres a mediaciones y/o conciliaciones obligatorias, además de vulnerar sus derechos con procedimientos revictimizantes, que pueden exponerla al escarnio público y la culpabilización.” http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18890/decretazo-contra-ley-779-es-una-quot-orden-suprema-quot. “Decretazo es una orden suprema” 13 August 2014. 48 “…destruyó el sistema de atención a las víctimas de violencia y complejizó la ruta de acceso a la justicia, lo que pone en mayor riesgo la vida y la integridad de las mujeres, de lo cual no puede resultar más que un estado misógino y criminal” (“Pronunciamiento”). 56
conclude that feminist resistance to this practice hinges mainly on the protection and preservation of women’s lives. In their denouncement of the Reform to Law 779, the
Autonomous Women’s movement affirmed that before the instatement of Law 779, aggressors who had gone through mediation “reinforced their abusive practices against women and submitted them to reprisals after making [mediated] agreements” (Fernández unpaged). Furthermore, as an indicator of the former ubiquity of mediation as an institutional practice, María Auxiliadora Meza Gutiérrez reported in a 2006 study that of
559 crimes analyzed, 57 were resolved through mediation in cases of rape, statutory rape, and dishonest abuse, even though the Penal Code at the time supposedly prohibited mediation in “serious felonies” [delitos graves] (quoted in D’Angelo et al. 19). This explains why prohibiting mediation strengthened the other protections codified in the law, making Law 779 a truly integral approach to stopping violence. According to the
Exposition of Motives for the draft bill of the law, presented to the National Assembly by the President of the Nicaraguan Supreme Court, Alba Ramos, in January 2012:
One of the difficulties or limitations presented by existing laws is that they
punish the modality of violence that occurs in the domestic or intrafamilar
space, assuming that the protected subject is the family, because of this
they don’t protect women…The deaths of women originated after an
inadequate sanction or after mediation” (unpaged, my emphasis).49
As Ramos’s statement shows, the endorsement of the highest court in Nicaragua of the prohibition on mediation signified a benchmark decision towards protecting women’s
49 “Una de las dificultades o limitantes que presentan las leyes existentes es que sancionan la modalidad de violencia que ocurre en el espacio doméstico o intrafamiliar, asumiendo que el sujeto protegido es la familia, por lo tanto no protege a la mujer… Las muertes de mujeres se originaron después de una sanción inadecuada o después de una mediación.” (“DP” unpaged). 57
lives. In these institutional contexts, treating the family unit as more valuable than its individual members constitutes a secondary violence, a form of re-victimization. But even more than this, it means that the State does not fulfill its duty to protect citizens. It places a symbolic and imaginary unity above the physical well being of individuals, namely girls and women survivors of violence.
Here I will explore several feminist criticisms of mediation as an institutional practice that touch the pragmatic and the symbolic levels of culture. These critiques dissect the superficial political discourses of familial reconciliation that serve to disguise coercion in the family structure, which in turn perpetuate feminine submission. They also attempt to dismantle essentialist discourses that naturalize women’s role as “angel of the hearth” or protector of the family, which place an inordinate burden on women to keep the family together, suffering and appeasing violent masculinities. Finally, the feminist critiques take on the medico-juridical discourse that constructs women as “victims,” as objects of knowledge-power, based on politics of “asistencialismo” and “tutelaje.” These are institutional tendencies of belittlement that in fact perpetuate antiquated legal mechanisms for controlling women and their assets, such as patria potestad. In
Nicaragua, the State is implicated in promoting masculine supremacy at all of these levels. Let us remember MacKinnon’s poignant critique of State power: “State behavior that promotes and institutionalizes male dominance has been found to distinguish public from private, naturalize dominance as difference, hide coercion behind consent, and obscure sexual politics behind morality” (MacKinnon 4).
Familial reconciliation is a strong motif in Nicaraguan political history. For this reason, appeals to the preservation of the Nicaraguan family proved to be an effective 58
rhetorical strategy for those who opposed Law 779. Reliant on normative morality and an imaginary of protection and peace in unity, these discourses echoed the conciliatory discourses mobilized by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro during the 1990 presidential campaigns, after almost a decade of bitter conflict between the Sandinistas and the U.S.- backed Contra army. Then, and during her presidency, Doña Violeta’s image in the press and her own self-representation revolved around her as “a loyal wife and widow, reconciling mother, and Virgin Mary” and played on a theme that has been prevalent in right-wing politics in Latin America: “…the triumph of traditional femininity over political divisions and the apparent eliminations of such divisions through motherhood”
(Kampwirth 40). Indeed, the mobilization of the family unity discourse in the crusade against Law 779 probably appealed to Nicaraguan publics on a deep level due to just such symbolic appeals to motherhood/the family as a source of peace in the conflictive
Post-war years. The social kick back over the prohibition of mediation points to the parallel and polarized struggles over gender relations taking place since the 1990s. An autonomous, extremely well organized feminist movement has flourished and fought back against what Kampwirth classifies as public policies that since the 1990s, have
“…tended to push family relations toward an older, more hierarchal model than had been the case under the FSLN” (47-48).
However, as Ileana Rodríguez and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo have shown, even the revolutionary narratives of the 60s, 70s, and 80s presumed a masculine, heroic first person account of revolution that marginalized women and peasants, coding them as the nameless “masses” (Women, Guerrillas, and Love; The Revolutionary Imagination).
Both the revolutionary imaginary of authority and the post-revolutionary one seem to be 59
founded on models that verge on authoritarian, where the term “revolutionary” or
“family” disguises the potent symbolic image of the hero or powerful father figure.50
These family preservation discourses presuppose the family as a site extent of power dynamics, and in fact mirror how the figure of mediation has functioned institutionally. Any assumption that aggressors and accusers can meet to dialogue and come to a compromise supposes that participants enjoy equal standing and prestige. This perspective circumvents the bare dynamics of dominance and submission that, more often than not, coalesce in the family around a dominant, abusive masculine presence. To ignore this power imbalance is to tacitly accept masculine supremacy and ascribe to an authoritarian model of the family: that it’s normal for a man to have two women, that it’s normal that he hit the children, that denouncing violence breaks up the family, and that economic necessity means women must suffer through abuse.
As Rossana Barragán notes in her study of re-victimization in institutional practices in the Bolivian justice system, it’s extremely difficult to combat these types of logic in the “scenes of justice” [los escenarios de la justicia], when “In the family environment, the good [bien] that is preserved above all else is the family, a term that conceals, in reality, patriarchal and masculine authority associated with the provider”
(15). A study carried out by the Pan American Health Organization found that women face gender inequalities that expose them to distinct forms of discrimination and violence that are supported by:
50 It may be possible to extend to Latin America George L. Mosse’s claim that in late nineteenth-century Europe, the masculine body became infused with morality and goodness through art and other discourses, and therefore came to represent the health of the nation (5). I imagine that similar processes infused masculinity with those powers in Nicaragua. 60
…an authoritarian model of the family, in which respect is not understood
as reciprocity between its members, but rather is defined by a structure of
power based on the acceptance of masculine superiority…in which, also,
violence is considered a legitimate tool for the preservation of the
appropriate family order. (citado en Lourdes Balaños et. al 13)
Therefore, while Law 779 took strides towards deconstructing this prevailing model of the family, the terms used in the Regulations to Law 779, such as respect, mutual support, and harmony, must be exposed as deceptive and insufficient to tackle the extreme actions of violent masculinities. In the absence of institutional protection and with enshrinement of re-victimizing practices, these dominating masculinities will find as much cultural support as they did before Law 779.
A second aspect of the feminist critique of the ideology of mediation is that it places extreme pressure on women to suffer and bear abuse in order to salvage the family unit. This discursively displaces blame for violence onto to the woman alone, excusing violent masculinities. During the legislative debates for the Reform of Law 779, Corina
Leiva, a representative for the Independent Liberal Party declared that: “women are made to conserve the home, not to destroy it” (Fernández unpaged). This type of a discourse shows how, in the case of Nicaragua, women are held responsible for family harmony, and as a correlation, often held responsible for men’s sexual crimes. In her study of sexual abuse and incest in the Nicaraguan newspapers, Ileana Rodríguez claims that these sorts of narratives propagate a naturalization of abuse, rather than a naturalization of human rights. She claims that placing the blame on families, i.e. women, instead of the
State in cases of sexual abuse is common in “failed or weak States”: 61
…where the nature/nurture divide is not marked by a strict division
between the public and private as in other States. Little or no governance,
State evasion of responsibilities is clear when women are publicly held
accountable for men’s sexual crimes and when mass media espouses the
idea of family responsibility as opposed to the State’s obligation to protect
the rights of children. Blaming the victims and naturalizing behavior is
perhaps the stimulus and protective mantle that culture extends to men.
(“Human Rights/Sexual Desires” 39)
To assert that women who refuse to mediate “destroy the family” is to naturalize and excuse masculine violence. Given that comments like Representative Leiva’s commonly circulated about Law 779, blaming feminists for the destruction of the family, it’s clear that Rodríguez’s claim extends to the naturalization of the various forms of masculinist violence that exist at the heart of the family. Rather than fostering a space for assertions of feminine autonomy, it is most likely that mediation proceedings will instead replicate naturalizing discourses, forcing women to accept blame for the abusive actions of male family members.
Finally, mediation may be though of as an approach to gender violence that considers women to be incapable, to be perpetual victims and second-class citizens.
Known as “asistencialismo,” these approaches see women survivors of violence as being in constant need of support and intervention. Rather than allowing for expanded autonomy or allowing them to guide their own processes, these institutional frameworks subject femininities to tutelage. In this sense, mediation may be the most egregious expression of subjecting women to scrutiny and questioning their decisions. Mediation 62
through the Family Counsels would be a continuation and a boon to the tendency that already existed in police and judicial institutions to demean and infantilize women who attempt to assert their autonomy.
As Ana Carcedo Cabañas and Mónica Molina Subirós explain, policies that are
‘asistencialistas,’ often result from the absence of aggressors on the institutional scene:
“…institutions usually deal with women. From them they pull out all the information, they can dig in their lives, question, judge what they think and do, submit them to bribes and control” (Carcedo and Molina 43). It remains to be seen how the Family Counsels will integrate aggressors into the mediation process. However, not much doubt remains among feminist organizations about the Regulations to Law 779 working as a mechanism to control women:
The structures it creates called “Family Counsels” will invade the privacy
and decide, over the word, voice, and rights of women, who will be
reduced to the category of “tutelaged” people without the capacity for
their own agency and representation. By way of these regulations we are
returned to the Napoleonic Code that consecrated the civil and political
death of women, by declaring them legally incapacitated and subject to the
authority of the father, brother, or husband and in this case, to the partisan-
State structures. (MAM “Posicionamiento unpaged)
Where institutional practices of re-victimizing existed before, the Regulations seem to inaugurate a new culture of patria potestad in modern times. What Carcedo and Molina deem the central obstacle to women getting away from aggression, “the weight of social
63
mandates on women to cede their personal projects to what the aggressor asks of them,” will now be central in the justice system through processes of mediation (11).
From the complete prohibition of mediation to placing mediation as a central tenet, the deformation and neutering of Law 779 tells the story of the bold-faced obstinacy of conservative sectors and elite groups whose social power depends on upholding the status quo of masculine authority. For this reason, mediation became the embattled juridical figure within the overall framework of Law 779, as opposed to other aspects, such as the definition of femicide, which did not receive as much criticism from the Church. Analyzing the feminist movement as a counterweight that attempts to even out the balance of power in favor of women in society allows us to perceive elite masculinities’ death-grip on exclusive, hegemonic power. The prohibition of mediation threated the interests of these conservative social actors. Women refusing to capitulate, dialogue, or compromise signaled a refusal to shoulder the burden of family structures that were disintegrating due to violent masculinities. Refusing to enter mediation, therefore, means subverting those forms of interpersonal violence that have been contiguous with masculine authority and that demonstrate its negligence of its purported duties and roles. Alongside the preservation of the personal safety of these femininities, then, on a symbolic level, refusing to enter mediation is a sign of resistance. It is a clear sign that the prestige of masculine, paternal authority is in deficit of its obligations. By prohibiting mediation, feminist groups are engaged in a struggle towards valuing the feminine over these failing traditional social structures.
Church leaders and municipal authorities with a strong stake in existing hierarchies in the family and community proved that they were unwilling to relinquish 64
their cultural supremacy by admitting that the failure of paternal authority and responsibility represents a serious social crisis. That they would hold such a position, even in the face of the continual violation and violent annihilation of women, lays bare the deep roots of misogyny in authoritarian cultural modes and in the Christian narrative and symbolic tradition. As Sandra Ramos, leader in the María Elena Cuadra Women’s
Movement (Movimiento de Mujeres María Elena Cuadra), expressed it, “We felt that we were handed over once again to the demands of a highly conservative and misogynist ecclesiastical hierarchy that doesn’t respect the women of this country” (Miranda unpaged).51
Conclusion
The forming of rigid gender identities that require violence to affirm their solidity points to relational processes in the family and in hierarchized institutional settings, such as church and the schools. As we’ve seen with the controversy over Law 779, the media’s mobilization of certain tag lines and catch phrases, however, exacerbates the already existing tensions in gender relations. The manner in which the derisive idea that Law 779 was “A law against men” circulated in society reveals masculinities’ underlying anxiety about their place in a gendered hierarchy. This discursive controversy also proves that the workings of the visual, the symbolic, and narrative elements, which have legitimated gender relations and naturalized violence in the past, may be more powerful than the law
51 “Reglamento sepultó la ley 779” 16 August 2014. http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18940/reglamento-sepulto-ley-779 65
itself. If they harken back to a time before feminism’s challenge to patriarchal relations, this surely shows that they possess a staggering staying power.
Here I understand gender violence to be largely produced by and predicated upon, in the words of Rita Laura Segato, “…a collective fantasy of male power and female subjection” (Terrorizing Women 97). The source of this fantasy is mainly traceable to religious imagery and narrative, and I think also to liberal principles of individuality and private property, as Catherine Davies claims (376). The petrification of these ideals in contemporary visual cultural, in romantic novels, mainstream Hollywood film, television, and pornography, places representation at the forefront of producing models of gender that are taken up and reiterated. Teresa de Lauretis calls these the “technologies of gender,” as a reworking of Michel Foucault’s notion of “technology of sex,” to show the ways in which gender is produced through representational forms. In the words of de
Lauretis, “The construction of gender is the product and the process of both representation and self-representation” (9, emphasis in original). Representations and self-representations of masculinity were mobilized in the controversy over Law 779. The social discourses that claimed that the law “attacked” individual men appealed directly to individual masculinities, implicating collective notions of masculine authority in individuals’ empowerment or sense of self.
In Nicaragua, as in other places colonized by Catholicism, the roots of the fantasy of male power and female subjection exist in the Biblical imaginary of “the fall,” of women as the source of ultimate evil and sin, a notion that has been internalized even by women themselves in Nicaragua (Milagros Palma 12). This imaginary itself was an import from an embattled Europe, torn apart by the transition from feudalism to 66
capitalism, brought to Latin America in its sixteenth-century Spanish form, in which women’s knowledge and control of reproduction were targeted as key bastions of social power to be dominated (Federicci 14). Though it may seem a stretch to trace these imaginaries back to the conquest, what I want to highlight is Western institutionalized religion’s avowed suppression of women’s autonomy and reproductive rights. The liberation of women’s sexuality and reproduction from marriage, even if it means freeing them from violence, does not portend well for the Church’s hold on society. Therefore, its resistance to Law 779 can be traced to its stake in the “fantasy of male power and female subjugation”: this imaginary upholds its social authority.
However, because masculinity and femininity have been scripted so thoroughly and so rigidly through this plethora of representational channels, a disconnect surges up between the norm and each individual’s ability to enact or perform that norm. As so many scholars have said, masculinity is constructed in such a way as to constitute an unattainable ideal, a masculine stereotype, in George Mosse’s words, that no one man can embody (Mosse 4).52 For this reason, I agree with Domínguez Ruvacalba’s definition of gender violence, which recognizes violence surging up in the fissures of self- representation: “In the space between the model of gender that I want to achieve and what I can actually do, there, gender violence is produced. Gender ideology produces sad beings, violent beings, insecure beings” (Diplomado, Oaxaca 5 June 2014).
How does this gap between self-represented masculinity and the ability to concretely exert force and control over feminized others play out in culture? Certain
52 As scholars like de Lauretis claim, the same is true for femininity. For a discussion of the difference between Woman, as constructed by the various narrative forms and scientific discourses, versus alive or historical women, see Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, and Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1984. 67
features of gender violence, and femicide specifically, in Nicaragua reveal that complete possession of the feminine other has been coded into definitions of masculinity and romantic love. There is an elision in meaning when jealousy, coded as synonymous with romantic love, passes to the realm of discursive explanations for gender violence. This brings to mind Domínguez-Ruvacalba’s notion that regimes of violence create their own protocols of complicity, codes of vengeance, methods of coercions; these constitute systems and codes, denoting that violence is “an apparatus of norms that has been expanded and consolidated through a process of learning” (“El hombre invisible” 144).
Women, physically, are possessed sexually and politically by men, and
this is frequently seen to be the norm in heterosexual ‘love.’…In my view
the possessive relationship is part of the wider philosophical setting in
which personality itself and the various attributes of personality can be
conceptualized as property. And it is typically women who become the
‘propertised’ objects. (Davies 372)
Dominant philosophies on love do code possession positively, as an attribute of successful masculinity. Looking at gender violence in Nicaragua, however, “being possessed” takes the shape of the interpersonal emotional slavery and psychological warfare endured by women who attempt to leave psychotically controlling husbands or boyfriends. That their male counterparts felt entitled to the very life-breath of these women makes their presumed “ownership” of female bodies blaringly obvious.
R.W. Connell offers a framework for theorizing masculinities and violence that considers the benefits that masculinities reap from their position of dominance. He calls this the “patriarchal dividend,” meaning by this the way that “men gain a dividend from 68
patriarchy in terms of honour, prestige and the right to command. They also gain a material dividend” (82). His theory simply provides a complementary terminology to theories about masculine privilege of foundational feminist thinkers like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. But Connell rather extends the implications of the disempowerment en masse of women. He affirms violence as an expectable outcome of the “modern gender order,” given the extreme power imbalance that “culturally disarms” women:
Violence is part of a system of domination, but it is at the same time a
measure of its imperfection. A thoroughly legitimate hierarchy would have
less need to intimidate. The scale of contemporary violence points to crisis
tendencies (to borrow a term from Jürgen Habermas) in the modern
gender order. (Connell 84, emphasis mine)
I agree with Connell’s assessment of violence as a signal of unresolvable conflicts and tensions in gender relations resulting from a system of domination. Intimidation becomes necessary in the face of resistance. Dominguez Ruvacalba’s definition of gender violence complements Connell’s, in the sense that it also conceives of gender violence as an expression of rage and frustration related to the unattainable norms of masculinity and romantic love.53 In her study of the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez, Rodríguez corroborates these ideas by shedding light on the types of masculine subjectivities evidenced by the murders. She says we are witnessing “…the trauma of a wounded masculinity that kills
(189). Femicide in Nicaragua is no less marked by these extreme expressions of violence
53 Dominguez-Ruvacalba affirms his definition: “Gender violence: the discrepancy between hegemonic ideologies and social practices” (Diplomado, 5 June 2014).
69
that provoke serious worry about the emotional and psychological state of certain masculinities.
Even though so many social actors fought for the passage of Law 779, the symbolic support for masculine authority is deep rooted. Perhaps the idea of the protective shell of the nuclear family, with a strong, protective father, represents an attractive bastion of order and stability. It’s plausible that the fight against Law 779 was a regressive, defensive stance taken in the face of the undeniable social instability and deteriorating social bonds. As I have outlined here, this social instability is largely a product of neoliberal social arrangements, which allow few spaces for social integration or the healing of rifts in intimate relations. As Connell explains,
The incapacity of the institutions of civil society, notably the family, to
resolve this tension [between the genders] provokes broad but incoherent
state action (from family law to population policy) which itself becomes
the focus of political turbulence. (Connell 85)
Discourses fomenting mass anxiety about feminists attacking the institution of the family certainly proved an effective mobilization of political disaccord to the advantage of conservative sectors.
There are many reasons to consider Law 779 as an organic, grassroots effort to address violence and to transform Nicaraguan cultural values in regards to gender relations. According to Domínguez Ruvacalba, “Understanding violence is basically a hermeneutic task, practiced by the community itself, in which violence becomes a form of communication” (148). Though I am not from the community, I believe that Law 779 was just such a hermeneutic exercise, carried out by civil society and public officials in 70
the hopes of deconstructing the language of violent masculinities in Nicaragua.
Regardless, the intense social controversy over the law tells us that the “patriarchal pacts” between men in the Nicaraguan state do not cede easily to the pressure of recognizing gender inequality. In these adamant protests from men against national laws, who claim that they discriminate against men or are unconstitutional, Ana Carcedo Cabañas and
Guiselle Molina Subirós identify “The resistance that exists to accept violence against women in reality, beyond the discourse, and to take it on as a problem of the disequilibrium/imbalance of power between the genders” (13).
The controversy over Law 779 in Nicaragua proves that law is not as separate from other social discourses as it would purport itself to be. Though it grants itself this specific privilege, it is permeable to interrogations, multiplicities, and deformations from a variety of (gendered) social interests (Threadgold 372). The line between the law and public opinion is surely quite blurry in states where the Executive power bestows upon itself the ability to change the law at will. Through these gaps in legalistic framework and procedures, we see the fractures and sutures in the social link. The law can’t fix polarization and conflict in gender relations, but the law and the social debates it provokes will necessarily reflect them. We may need to look to the persistence of authoritarian modes of culture and to the ravages of neoliberal capitalism to understand the violent deaths of women that are resulting from this extreme gender polarization and crisis.
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Chapter 2, Gender Violence in the Nicaraguan Nota Roja: Myth, Melodrama, and the Polarization of Gender difference
In early 2014, a campaign arose on Facebook under the name
#NomásFemicidiosNicaragua. Feminist activists and individuals from all over the country sent in personal photos with messages like, “No more violence,” and “Education is the vaccine against violence.” Activists for #NomásFemicidiosNicaragua and other groups, such as Actions for the Lives of Women (Acciones por la Vida de las Mujeres), were also vocal on Facebook about counting the number of femicides, in opposition to official State counts. The need to carry out this online monitoring of cases arose because for the first time in recent years, the National Police’s count of femicides differed drastically from that of the feminist organizations. At the date of this writing the police reported 18 cases, while the Network of Women Against Violence (Red de Mujeres
Contra la Violencia, RMCV) reported 47.54 The feminist activists’ Facebook denouncements serve as a resistant counterpoint to the array of references to and images of murdered women that appear in the Nicaraguan Nota Roja crime press.
These virtual interventions came at a moment when the rigorousness of ‘femicide’ as a legal-conceptual category was in danger of becoming terminally handicapped by official State discourse. In early July 2014, Alba Ramos, the Chief Justice of the
Nicaraguan Supreme Court, issued a statement explaining that the Court would consider
54 “Informe Semestral de Femicidio” Red de Mujeres Contra la Violencia. http://www.reddemujerescontralaviolencia.org.ni/webrmcv/wp- content/uploads/file/Informe%20Semestral%20de%20Femicidio%20RMCV%202014(1).pdf 72
restricting the definition of femicide to those cases in which there was a previous romantic relationship between victim and aggressor.55 This move would severely narrow the scope of Law 779, the Integral Law Against Violence Towards Women, (from now on Law 779) whose original text broadly defines the act of femicide as occurring when
“…a man, in the context of the unequal power relations between men and women, kills a woman whether in the public or private sphere in any of the following circumstances…”56
Since 2012, when Law 779 was passed, the category of femicide has rocked the
Nicaraguan cultural scene, seriously challenging masculine impunity and garnering scathing criticism from religious and conservative sectors, as I have stated in Chapter 1.
The Court’s remarks, however, represented a rollback of the recognition of femicide in society. Perhaps here the intent could be linked to the preservation of Nicaragua’s reputation of being one of the safest countries in Central America. More telling still of this trend, after Ramos’s statement was made public, the National Police’s practice of typifying crimes evolved at break-neck speed. In regards to the case of a man who killed a female acquaintance with a machete outside a bar, fourteen days after the Chief
Justice’s statement, a police agent declared that the crime “…is being typified as homicide, because neither had any type of relationship [with one another].”57
55 “Otra embestida oficial a la Ley 779” La Prensa. 12 julio 2014. 56 Translation mine. “Artículo 9: Comete el delito de femicidio el hombre que, en el marco de las relaciones desiguales de poder entre hombres y mujeres, diere muerte a una mujer ya sea en el ámbito público o privado, en cualquier de las siguientes circunstancias…” (1364). La Gaceta: Diario oficial de la Asamblea Nacional 35. 22 February, 2012. 57 “…está siendo tipificado como homicidio porque ambos no tenían ninguna relación.” “Mata a una mujer de dos machetazos” La Prensa 28 July, 2014. http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/07/28/ambito/205192- mata-a-mujer-machetazos ; It’s also worth noting the fragment that follows the above sentence, indicating La Prensa’s stance on police practice: “Obviando los articulos 2 y 9 de la Ley Integral Contra la Violencia Hacia las Mujeres.” 73
As I discuss in Chapter 1, an equally shocking development in this controversy came on July 31, 2014 when President Daniel Ortega released Decree 42, Regulations to
Law 779.58 Essentially gutting the initial language and gesture of the law, the decree confines the definition of femicide to “the crime committed by a man against a woman in the frame of interpersonal couple relationships, and as a result giving death to the woman.”59 Illustrative of a complete reversal of the Ortega government’s stance on gender violence, the decree establishes the Family Offices/Ministries (Consejerías
Familiares), community based institutions integrated by local volunteers, pastors, religious leaders, and judicial facilitators, with which women will be obligated to consult before filing a complaint with the police through the Women and Children’s Police stations (Comisaría de la Mujer y la Niñez). While the law originally prohibited mediation, Ortega’s decree institutionalizes it and places the process in the hands of some of society’s most conservative sectors. It is no exaggeration to affirm that the decree completely neutralizes the judicial empowerment of women and reinstitutes the family— i.e. patriarchal authority—as the social good to be protected by the law. As the first line of the Reglamento states: “the objective of Law 779 is to guarantee the strengthening of
Nicaraguan families through actions of prevention that promote the right to life, dignity, equality, and non-discrimination in the relationships between men and women.”60
These political maneuverings reveal an embattled cultural terrain, where shifting notions of gender norms explode into physical and symbolic disputes. Faced with
58 Decreto N° 42-2014, La Gaceta: Diario oficial de la Asamblea Nacional 143. 31 July, 2014. 59 “Delito cometido por un hombre en contra de una mujer en el marco de las relaciones interpersonales de pareja y como resultado diere muerte a la mujer, en las circunstancias que la ley establece” Ibid, 6264. 60 “Que el objetivo de la Ley 779 es garantizar el fortalecimiento de las familias nicaragüenses mediante acciones de prevención que promuevan el derecho a la vida, dignidad, igualdad y no discriminación en las relaciones entre mujeres y hombres” (Ibid 6263). 74
sobering displays of masculinist domination, whose end game is complete mastery through death, many social actors in Nicaragua continue to minimize and justify the brutal excesses of these “extreme masculinities” (Jean Franco 15). The Nota Roja crime press is one of those forces. In this chapter, I claim that the Nota Roja capitalizes on the subjection and violation of the feminine, illustrated by its ultimate expression, femicide, through a colonial, hetero-patriarchal gaze of dehumanizing categorization towards all embodiments of gender. As a cultural product, this press further entrenches existing polarization around gender performance and norms. Obviating more clear-eyed perspectives on the complexity and mobility of gender relations, the Nota Roja converts the most extreme expressions of struggles over defining gender norms—violent annihilation—into commercial fodder colored by the victim-perpetrator binary.
Media practices in Nicaragua reflect troubling global tendencies of the dominant media to employ criminalizing representations—that is to say, representations that categorically pigeonhole and dehumanize people, while simplifying complex social conjunctions. Affecting victims, perpetrators, and communities, this media tendency to categorically ridicule those they represent capitalizes on the suffering of those populations most exposed to violence. For these reasons, I follow Sayak Valencia when she asserts that physical, symbolic, and media violence all form part of a conceptual axis that maps out the lucrative and demonstrative power of violence in today’s world: “The exercise of physical, symbolic, and media violence is a transversal that provides the backbone for understanding the contemporary world and it creates a market on the rise
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that generates surplus value” (“Necropolítica” unpaged).61 I draw on Valencia’s assertion in order to conclude that violence and representations of violence loop over one another in a vicious cycle of discursive-physical subjugation. Thus, ideological struggles over cultural forms of representing violence equate to a head-on confrontation with that violence itself.
Accordingly, in the Nicaraguan press we find a number of representational battles conjugated in one set of cultural texts: 1) the social and legal meaning of the term femicide (as discussed in Chapter 1); 2) the identity and social value of the murdered women; 3) violent masculinities as a public health problem and a social crisis. Surveying the polemics around representations of the murdered women and their aggressors, the dilemma hangs heavy in the air as to who will be considered human. Whose lives and deaths merit symbolic recognition and garner social bereavement? How are their lives or deaths made legible by representational practices, both textual and visual? The impasse in regards to masculinities proves to be equally vexing: if the press paints these men as monsters, how can the society that created them intervene to change them?
During the six-month period under study, I isolated seven cases of femicide or attempted femicide, all of which received lengthy coverage and multiple articles in El
Nuevo Diario, one of the two principal newspapers in Nicaragua.62 These cases represent
61 “El ejercicio de la violencia física, simbólica y medial es un trasversal que vertebra la forma de entender el mundo contemporáneo y crea un mercado al alza que genera plusvalor” (“Necropolítica” unpaged). 62 As a reference, here are the first articles that came out about each of the cases: “Estrangulada y abusada junto al rio” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/244598; “Oficial de Estelí agrede a su expareja” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245391 ; “‘Los Patitas’ violan y asesinan a joven meretriz” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245710 ; “Hombre mata a su ex y se suicida” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/248874 ; “Brutal agresión contra neosegoviana” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/251471; “Estrangulan y apuñalan a doméstica” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/253053; “Anciana fue violada y asfixiada” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/260921 76
a wide swath of age ranges of women targeted—19 to 87 years old—, as well as a wide range of relationships with the aggressor: partners, ex-partners, neighbors, and acquaintances. Across all the cases, we witness a tight typecasting of these women on the basis of their adherence or non-adherence to normative standards of femininity.
Meanwhile, representations of the perpetrators reveal a simultaneous aesthetics of demonization and ridicule, pointing towards the creation of a new social evil to fear: the femicida-monster.63 All of these perpetrators acted out of misogyny—the belief of complete ownership and domination of the feminine—whether acting against an intimate partner or an acquaintance. What we witness in the Nota Roja, however, rather than recognition of the deeper social ill of misogyny, is a polarized portrayal of blameless victims and monstrous, uncontrolled psychopaths. This decontextualized polarization remits us to the cultural mode of melodrama, as well as to the integration of myths into journalism, both of which I will argue are dominant representational tactics in the Nota
Roja.64
The Nota Roja press allows for a thorough discussion of the connection between polarizing, melodramatic representational tactics in the press, neoliberal economic and social policies, and punitive, state-centered solutions to social ills. All of these phenomena lean heavily on a moralistic, binary-driven view of human relationships and
63 I owe much to Héctor Domínguez Ruvacalba’s idea of scapegoated masculinities vs. the “invisible men,” or the true perpetrators of the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez. See “El hombre invisible: masculinidad y violencia” en De la sensualidad a la violencia de género: La modernidad y la nación en las representaciones de la masculinidad en el México contemporáneo. 141-154. 64 I follow Linda William’s interpretation of melodrama as an American cultural mode, rather than a genre. Though she analyzes racially and gender marked melodramas in a U.S. context, I argue with her that the melodramatic mode has global resonance and expands across genres. See Linda Williams Playing the race card: Melodramas of the black and white from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. 77
partake in a form of instrumental logic that short-circuits creativity in regards to other possible modes of social organization. In addition, these larger systems of representation and organization utilize and exacerbate gender difference as a central component to their functioning. A strengthened notion of gender as a fierce binary is a central pillar upholding inequality and oppressive systems of socio-political organization all over the world. For these reasons, I end the chapter with a discussion of hyper-consumption of female bodies, neoliberal crime control discourses, and “Carceral feminism,” pointing towards the limitations of a mainly punitive view on transforming gender relations.
Femicide cases: The exceptional, the quotidian, and the polarized representation of gender relations
During the six-month period under study, El Nuevo Diario reported 96 cases of gender violence. These included 31 cases of femicide or attempted femicide, 55 cases of rape/statutory rape/incest, and 10 cases involving sexual slavery or human trafficking.
The main scenes of these crimes included the bedroom, back roads, rivers, and deserted outdoor spaces. In reference to femicide, several commonalities link the cases that attracted a lot of coverage: children witnessed the violence, the couple was separated and the man wanted to reconcile, the man was ‘stricken’ by jealousy, and/or these were described as crimes of passion. Also, in the extremely limited characterization of the women, they were either described as self-sacrificing, hard-working, and not receiving help from the partner, or as women who drastically transgressed the ‘good woman’ or
‘good mother’ stereotype. The narrative style and structure of these cases tends towards
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the rapid fire telling of events, reliance on the testimony of police and bystanders, and the figure of ‘death’ or ‘rape’ sometimes personified in the narrative.
Alongside the push for legislative change that I described in Chapter 1, feminist groups in Nicaragua, such as Programa Feminista La Corriente, have been elaborating media and social network campaigns that utilize the language of Law 779 to de-naturalize the murders of women. The mobilization and making visible of the term ‘femicide’ has figured prominently in their political strategies, this being a powerful way to link the local manifestations of gender violence with a continent wide, geo-politically grounded and politically charged feminist movement.65 The dynamism of their activist work also pivots on the de-naturalization of romantic love as a symbolic and sentimental constellation worthy of killing and/or dying for. This radical gesture is made visible in the slogan “No son arrebatos, son asesinatos” [“They’re not fits of madness, they’re murders”].66 This strategy attempts to further the legislative work of Law 779 by intervening in the cultural realm of representations of emotions. In line with Rosa Linda
Fregoso’s idea of the “norms changing potential” of the law, Gladys Acosta Vargas states that these types of cultural mediations demonstrate the symbolic value of laws against gender violence, which “…[reverberate] through society and can be a vehicle for education and emancipatory change” (quoted in Bueno-Hansen 291).
Feminist strategies against gender violence, therefore, have been played out not only in the legal realm, but also largely in the field of representations. For not only is it a
65 In Law 779 and in the Nicaraguan press, the term ‘femicide’ is used. I use the term ‘feminicide’ here following Marcela Lagarde’s conceptualization of the term to include State negligence and impunity. See “Preface: Feminist Keys for Understanding Feminicide” in Fregoso and Bejarano (2010). 66 This slogan was used during protests the week of July 7-13, 2014 in Managua and other part of the country as part of a week of political actions against femicide. I heard it at the “Vigilia por la Vida de las Mujeres” at the Universidad Centroamericana the night of July 9, 2014. 79
question of the political maneuverings around the definition given to murdering women, as we have already discussed. There are also the concerning contradictions that coalesce around the need to raise awareness about these murders and their shameless, repetitive exploitation by media commercial interests.
Cases: Femicide by Intimate partners
President Daniel Ortega’s bold-faced attempt to restrict the legal definition of femicide to “the crime committed by a man against a woman in the frame of interpersonal couple relationships” puts a new twist on the problematic spatial distinction that feminists have worked so hard to politicize: the private, intimate sphere vs. the public sphere. My understanding of the public vs. private taxonomy comes from Lauren
Berlant’s work on intimacy, which alleges that liberal society was founded on intimacy expectations moving between the public and the domestic. That is to say, while the public vs. private distinction is a throwback to the Victorian ideal of “a controllable space (the private-affective) and an uncontrollable one (the public-instrumental),” Berlant follows
Jürgen Habermas’s assertion that “the bourgeois idea of a public sphere” depended on the development of “critical publicness,” or a mode of discourse through which civil society could address the state (Berlant 3). According to Habermas, paraphrased by Berlant, circulating print media, the café and other semiformal spaces, and industrial capitalism all contributed to people experiencing their intimate lives collectively, through “the intimate spheres of domesticity, where they would learn (say, from novels and newspapers) to experience their internal lives theatrically, as though oriented towards an audience”
(Berlant 3). I understand this to mean, as Doris Sommer and Mary Louise Pratt have 80
shown, that since the nineteenth century, intimate stories function to construct notions of publicness, the national, and the global.
Berlant’s notion of intimacy also relates to the ways in which the master narratives about marriage, romantic love, and fidelity fail when faced with contemporary social transformations in social mores, the acceleration of savage capitalism, and hyper- consumption. Reactionary notions about romantic love serve as justifications when they circulate through the media. They stand out as starkly inadequate to describe the brutalizing mentality of extreme masculinities. Nonetheless, femicide as an expression of
“machismo” is the desire to dissolve all boundaries between the self and the
(female/feminized) other. The violent acts in these cases constitute gestures towards completely owning or mastering that other, a notion about romantic love that is born out and encouraged in an array of cultural products. Therefore, I begin my analysis of the
Nota Roja with the three cases of femicide or attempted femicide where women where murdered by husbands, partners, or ex-husbands. These women were Reina Isabel
Contreras Villareina, Ivania Elizabeth Caceres Galo, and Mercedes Veronica Victor
Saldana, all assaulted in the period between March and August 2012.
As a theoretical entrance point into these stories of extreme masculinities, and the
Nota Roja in general, I look to studies on the appearance of myth in modern day journalism, such as that by Jack Lule. Jesús Martín-Barbero’s notion about the myth- making role of the mass media can also help to explain the narrative structure and archetypal content that is repeated across the crime press stories:
I refer to myth, not in the sense of R. Barthes (1974) (a form of ideology),
but in the deeper anthropological interpretation: myths as the source of 81
cultural unity, the myths that cause and remove deep anxieties, the myths
that protect us from the terror of chaos, and the myths that save us. We
find our motivating symbols in our myths.... (“Mass Media” 111)
To define myth, I also defer to Denis de Rougemont in his Love in the Western World:
Speaking generally, a myth is a story—a symbolical fable as simple as it is
striking—which sums up an infinite number of more or less analogous
situations. A myth makes it possible to become aware at a glance of
certain types of constant relations and to disengage these from the welter
of everyday appearances. More narrowly, a myth expresses the rules of
conduct of a given social or religious group. It issues accordingly from
whatever sacred principle has presided over the formation of this group.
(18, emphasis in original)67
That is to say that myth’s appeal as a representational strategy is that it makes visible and legible those common rules of conduct of a culture. In the same vein, melodrama as a cultural mode invokes normative morality to create a Manicheistic diegetic world that will be legible in a given cultural context. Studies on the use of melodrama, such as those by Linda Williams and Elisabeth Anker, can provide analytical tools to isolate several formal, narrative features of this press, where representational tactics tend to be reactionary and produce individualizing views of social conflict.
Reina Isabel Contreras Villareina, the only woman out of four cases who survived the femicide attempt, was 36 years old at the time of the crime and was separated from
67 Martín-Barbero continues: “from the myths that give meaning to the life of the poor to the myths that sustain our poor life. It is television that is articulating and catalyzing the integrating myths of our societies” (“Mass Media” 111). 82
her aggressor, non-commissioned police officer Álvaro Antonio Jiménez, to whom she had been married for 15 years.68 This case is exemplary in that it brings together and plays upon myriad anxieties that exist in contemporary Nicaragua around the stability or the instability of the nuclear family as an institution. The story articulates concerns about masculine economic viability, about women working in the public sphere, and the impact of parental separation and violence on children. At stake also is the legitimacy of the patriarch, i.e. masculine authority. The aggressor’s status as a police officer evokes an especially potent symbolic referent of societal authority.
An outline of the main points of interest of this story, which merited four articles in El Nuevo Diario, illustrates that it touches cultural sore spots regarding motherhood, the home, and fatherly authority. The hook of the story, the first information presented to the reader, is that in the early hours of the morning a police officer, Jiménez, showed up to his ex-mother-in-law’s house and fired two bullets at his ex-wife, who remained in delicate condition at the time the article was published. The first article’s accompanying image is a family photo that shows an unsmiling Contreras Villareina, alongside an almost smug looking Jiménez. Their two children are pictured, with only black censuring strips covering their eyes (see Figure 1). A small inset photo of a blood-soaked bed shows us the exact scene of the crime (see Figure 2). The next bit of information places the two children, who we are told are the product of the couple’s 15-year union, in the house at
68 This case was reported across 4 different articles in El Nuevo Diario: “Oficial de Estelí agrede a su expareja” 18 March 2012. http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245391; “Señalan a policía de balear a su cónyuge” 19 March 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245422; “Decretan prisión preventiva contra subinspector que disparo a su ex esposa” 21 March 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245684; “Subinspector tenía prohibido portar arma” 23 March 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245844.
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the time of the attempted femicide, with the detail added that the 5 year-old girl was resting in bed with her mother when her father drew his gun and shot. According to the reporter, Máximo Rugama, her father “nearly killed her as well” (“Oficial” and
“Señalan”).
Figure 1. First article in the Contreras-Jiménez case.
From the very first article on the Contreras Villareina frustrated femicide,
“Official from Estelí attacks his ex-partner,” the narrative weft that culturally contextualizes the assault is a desecration of the family. I use the word desecrate quite purposefully in order to emphasize how the coverage of this story plays on this shocking violation of the sanctity of the principle of fatherly protection, and of the nuclear family unit, main cultural tenets of Nicaraguan society, historically and especially emphasized
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under Daniel Ortega.69 According to Merriam-Webster, to desecrate is “to damage (a holy place or object)” (Merriam-Webster’s dictionary). What I want to emphasize here is that it was not principally the violent destruction of the woman’s life that gave this story so much mileage in the press, but the reckless and brutal endangerment of the children shown by their father. Proof of this fact can be seen in the narrative emphasis placed on the children’s experience, their proximity to the scene, as well as in the images chosen, such as the photo of the children and that of the bloody bed, on which a small pink children’s backpack is visible (See Figure 2).
The draw of this story seems to be that, from his position of power, Jiménez violated things that are purportedly sacred in Nicaraguan culture: he used lethal violence, endangering his own children, attempted to destroy motherhood, and blatantly disregarded his duty as a police officer to protect members of society. This case clearly illustrates how such a violent act of annihilation can be made to seem exemplary by the
Nota Roja press, disguising the deeper roots of physical, psychological, emotional, and sexual violence present in the nuclear family unit in Nicaragua and around the globe.
This scheme, which focuses on the exceptional nature of Jiménez’s violations, also obscures the more subtle forms of meaning making around the value of Contreras’s life.
Returning to the questions and claims I posed at the beginning of the chapter, the issue is when and if women’s lives merit social value. How are these lives, and their value, made legible by representational practices?
69 See Rosario Montoya “State and Community Formation” in Gendered Scenarios of Revolution: Making New Men and New Women in Nicaragua 1975-2000 (44); The motto of Daniel Ortega’s presidency is “Christian, socialist, and solidary.” [Cristiana, socialista y solidaria]. 85
Figure 2. Inset photo from Contreras-Jiménez case.
In his book Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism,
Jack Lule isolates what he calls the “Seven Master Myths in the News,” which he calls
“Eternal Stories.” According to his argument, beyond the retelling of common story forms, “…news stories offer sacred, societal narratives with shared values and beliefs, with lessons and themes, and with exemplary models that instruct and inform” (18).
Lule’s seven master myths include the Victim, the Scapegoat, the Hero, the Good
Mother, the Trickster, the Other World, and the Flood. Applying Lule’s ideas to the reading of the Nicaraguan Nota Roja in cases of gender violence, we find many examples of the Good Mother archetype as a structuring narrative strategy for giving meaning to femicide victims’ lives. We also find shades of the archetype of the Victim, in the sense that there is a symbolic blending between representing motherly sacrifices and
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representing women allegorically as sanctified societal victims, representing the collective.70
Lule’s discussion of the archetype of the “Good Mother” focuses on Mother
Teresa as the ultimate maternal, self-sacrificing figure, whose extensive press coverage pivoted on these exaggerated qualities. In general, however, he states that the Good
Mother archetype calls upon images of the comfort and protection of the womb or the cradle and is associated not only with birth and creativity, but also with death, as she presides over the deathbed or coffin (106). The Good Mother’s traits are kindness, gentleness, selflessness, and compassion; all of which are enumerations of the socially conditioned traits traditionally expected of a mother, on whom the burden to keep the family unit afloat often falls in Nicaragua.
Reporting on this particular case, El Nuevo Diario reporter Máximo Rugama portrayed Reina Isabel Contreras Villanueva as la Buena madre: the Good Mother. While quotes from Contreras’s mother narrate the events surrounding the femicide and establish that Contreras was lying defenseless in the bed with her daughter when Jiménez shot her, another family member attests to her character as a dedicated mother: “‘She sacrificed herself for her children, during the day she worked at an office, and afterwards she went to the restaurant to obtain more income so that her children wouldn’t go without, because in the last 5 months Jiménez didn’t help them out at all,’ said Daniel Conteras, another
70 See Héctor Domínguez Ruvacalba, for a critique of sacrificial logic. “El hombre invisible: masculinidad y violencia.” De la sensualidad a la violencia de género. La modernidad y la nación en las representaciones de la masculinidad en el México contemporáneo. México: CIESAS, 2013. 87
family member” (“Señalan…”).71 While she was working two jobs to take care of their children, he purportedly wasn’t providing for his family at all. It’s not difficult to deduce that these details are meant to legitimize Contreras Villanueva as an innocent victim. But what, then, are the gendered dimensions of this legitimization?
Lule’s very limited treatment of gender relations within the Good Mother archetype, or any of the archetypes for that matter, includes the following comments:
Mother archetypes can also be highly charged, ideological symbols. They
can affirm matriarchal power structures. Conversely, they can proscribe
restrictive social roles and idealized cultural images of femininity and
gender. (106, emphasis mine)
I would correct Lule to affirm that mother archetypes are always charged ideological symbols, because motherhood is a highly polemic, contested symbolic construct across cultures.72 Furthermore, in Latin America the archetype of the Virgin Mother, through the Virgin of Guadalupe and her multiple other forms, has been mobilized to project an undoubtedly idealized cultural image of femininity, synonymous with the equation “not a mother and not a virgin, must be a whore,” as numerous Latin American feminist scholars have shown.73 Indeed, women’s social value in Nicaragua has depended historically on their status as mothers. That is to say, journalistic appeals to the archetype
71 “Ella se sacrificaba por sus hijos, por el día trabajaba en una empresa, y luego iba al restaurante para obtener más ingresos económicos para que los niños no pasaran dificultades, porque en los últimos cinco meses Jiménez no les ayudaba en nada”, dijo Daniel Contreras, otro de los familiares.” 72 See Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater.” Poetics Today 6.1-2 (1985): 133-152. 73 The phrase “No madre y no virgen resulta puta” comes from Barbara Dröscher’s “Huérfanas y otras sin madre.” Revista de Crítica Latinoamericana 30.59 (2004): 267-295; For a critical feminist perspective on the Virgin (and her counterpoint La Malinche), see Norma Alarcon “Traddutora, traditora: una figura paradigmática del feminismo de las chicanas.” Debate feminista 8 (1993): 19-48.
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of the Good Mother legitimate and sanctify women, but only on the basis of their fulfillment of the socially sanctioned demands of motherhood. As we will see in the case of Maritza del Carmen Bermúdez Medrano, the reactionary dimensions of this tactic of representation fall heavily on those who do not fulfill its expectations.
In the third article on the Contreras Villanueva case, “Policeman fingered for shooting wife”, Rugama quotes family members who claim that Jiménez had come over, intoxicated, the night of the crime in order to chastise Contreras Villanueva for taking a second job at a restaurant. Fears about economic impotency and women’s sexual agency collide here. In this anecdote we see how the grit of the neoliberal world economy, with its dramatic effect on men’s ability to provide, meets culturally ensconced notions of motherhood and women’s relegated places. As in many Central American countries, men’s economic viability in contemporary Nicaragua leans precariously upon call center jobs, the informal economy, or sometimes organized crime. Perhaps for this reason, and due to the fact that men commonly maintain more than one household in Nicaragua, many families feel the sting of absentee fathers, and are burdened “…with all the economic and social disadvantages that await households headed by women” (Lancaster xiv). Looking at the broader contextual developments in contemporary Nicaragua that lead to anxieties about women working, Rosario Montoya argues that, at least in the
Southwestern town of El Tule
…men’s preoccupation with the need to exert violence on their wives was
rooted in male fear of female subversion as conditioned by political and
economic events and processes occurring in the 1980s under the
Sandinistas and, in the 1990s, under neoliberal governments. (152) 89
In this list she includes men’s decreased economic agency, a concern mentioned by
Lancaster, but also those trends of modernization that led women to increasingly assert their sexuality and rights to sexual pleasure (152). Given that these processes intertwined chronologically, Contreras’s story particularly exemplifies the dominant associative taxonomy between women’s work outside the home and their fulfillment of sexual agency.
Turning now to the formal aspects of the articles in the Contreras Villanueva case, we can envisage just which visual and narrative aspects work to establish the innocence and legitimacy of the victim based on her status as a mother. In her study of the U.S. media, Elisabeth Anker found that media discourses following the September 11 attacks partook heavily in melodramatic modes of representation (22). The Nicaraguan Nota
Roja, like other contemporary mass media outlets, also employs the rhetorical and formal devices of melodrama in its depictions of villains and victims. In her work, Anker extends Linda William’s claim that melodrama’s knack for leaping across genre boundaries should lead us to describe it as a cultural “mode,” rather than a genre
(Playing the Race Card). As a cultural mode, melodrama extends out from literature, film, and television into news reporting. I read this as an indication of the neoliberal media’s reactionary and binaristic mobilization of affect, through criminalizing and othering practices that encourage viewers and readers to react with moral outrage.
According to Marilena Chauí, in neoliberal social formations and representations, “good transforms into the mere absence or lack of evil, it’s not something affirmative or positive, rather purely reactive” (35).
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Decidedly in line with my main claim, the formal aspects of melodrama described by Williams and Anker, like the Nota Roja press, include polarized, decontextualized images of evil perpetrators and saintly victims. According to Williams, a cultural product mobilizes melodrama if the following characteristics are present:
If emotional and moral registers are sounded, if a work invites us to feel
sympathy for the virtues of beset victims, if the narrative trajectory is
ultimately more concerned with a retrieval and staging of innocence than
with the psychological causes of motives and action, then the operative
mode is melodrama. (Williams “Melodrama” 42)
Returning to the Contreras case, we have established that in this narrative, the culturally sanctioned archetype of the Good Mother, which is meant to activate the readers’ sympathy, enshrines femicide victims’ innocence, through what Williams calls the
“retrieval and staging of innocence.” Likewise, the striking lack of exploration of the motives of Jiménez, the aggressor, leaves the psychological and social bedrock of misogyny, possession, and control completely untouched. Undoubtedly, another element of the emotional appeal in this case comes from Rugama’s direct, exploitative narrative style regarding the endangerment of the couple’s children. All of these details shed light on the scaffolding of the “moral register” of the Nota Roja, and on the role of morality in permitting or justifying gender violence in Nicaragua.
In her article, Anker identifies some key characteristics of the cultural mode of melodrama. Of the five qualities that she lists, I find that these three frequently describe the structure of Nota Roja stories:
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(b) the three characters of a ruthless villain, a suffering victim, and a
heroic savior who can redeem the victim’s virtue through an act of
retribution (though the latter two characters can be inhabited in the same
person: the virtuous victim/hero); (c) dramatic polarizations of good and
evil, which echo in the depictions of individuals and events… (e) the use
of images, sounds, gestures, and nonverbal communication to illuminate
moral legibility as well as to encourage empathy for the victim and anger
towards the villain. (Anker 24)
We’ve already explored some of the strategies Anker mentions in terms of narrative structure and personification. Her claim about the use of images, sounds, and gestures to
“illuminate moral legibility” translates to some of the formal aspects of the Nota Roja, even though it is a written discourse. These appear in the formal aspects of the Nota Roja press through the combined effect of dramatic headlines, gruesome photos that focus on the victim’s body or personal items, brief summarizing sub-headlines within the article, and acutely descriptive narrative focus—i.e. almost images—on children and relatives in pain.
Let’s return to the Contreras Villreina case for examples of some of these strategies. The photos that accompany the first two articles fall within the purview of an emotional appeal to readers, in the sense that they depict quotidian gestures (a family portrait) and an intimate space (the bedroom). Nonetheless, in a gesture of innocence soiled, these images perform a cruel twist on our expectations of normalcy. The images echo the narrative emphasis on the children’s presence during the crime, reiterating
Jiménez’s violation of both normalcy and childhood innocence. 92
Only one of the articles on the case, “Policeman fingered for shooting wife”, is long enough to merit sub-headlines. While one of the headlines underscores, yet again, the children having witnessed the crime, “Minor is witness,” interestingly, the other sub- headline provides an important piece of contextualization concerning the attempted femicide: “There was a police report.”74 This indicates that Contreras had filed a police report against her husband for domestic violence, as confirmed by her family members. It is in the same paragraph we learn that he was formerly the Department head of the Estelí police force, but was demoted to the tiny town of Condega and prohibited to use his firearm. The article does not specify if the domestic violence charges were the catalyst for this demotion. These facts contribute to establishing Jiménez as a feared villain.
Finally, referring back to Anker’s qualities of the cultural mode of melodrama, it’s crucial to highlight the descriptive focus on relative’s pain and sorrow so common in the Nota Roja. This type of narrative strategy can encompass descriptions of them stricken by panic during an instance of gender violence or destroyed by grief in its aftermath. In the Contreras case, one of the eyewitnesses was the couple’s oldest son, who was 11 years old at the time. According to the reporter, Rugama, who interviewed the child, “Jiménez had separated from his mother a few weeks before, but that he came home ‘just to gun down my mom with two bullets,’ he [the child] stated between sobs”
(“Señalan”).75 The emphasis on the child’s emotional turmoil and strife borders on exploitative, in that it offers little new information about the case, except that the couple
74 “Menor es testigo”; “Existía denuncia.” 75 “Jiménez se había separado de su mamá hace varias semanas, pero que regresó a la casa “solo para darle dos balazos a mi mamá”, manifestó entre sollozo el menor.” 93
had separated weeks before. What it does provide is a dramatization of tragedy meant to highlight the vulnerable state of the two children.
As an apt transition to the case of Ivania Elizabeth Caceres Galo, 27 years old, we find a similar descriptive strategy.76 This time, it’s one of her children that finds her after her partner attacks her. In the first article to come out about the case, “Brutal aggression against New Segovian woman,” we find the sub-heading “Her son found her in her bed bleeding to death,” which already invokes the disturbing experience from the point of view of the child. According to reporter Leoncio Vanegas, the incident was reported when one of her children went to her room at six in the morning to wake her. The child saw that the door was locked but his attention was drawn by “a sound inside the room, which caused him to forcefully enter, finding his mother prostrate in bed, bleeding from her nasal cavities and ears.”77 In these last two examples, the children’s testimony serves to prop up the innocence of their mothers, by way of narrative details of the femicides, but also by appealing to the meaningful nucleus of childhood as symbolically associated with innocence.
Following Ileana Rodríguez’s claims in her work about rape, incest, and pedophilia in the Nicaraguan Nota Roja, this description of Caceres’s case also brings us into the narrative realm of horror (“Human Rights/Sexual Desires” 42). The gory description amounts to superfluous detail when placed in larger ethical scheme of the
76 Caceres’s case was covered across three articles: “Brutal agresión contra neosegoviana” 16 May 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/251471; “Luna de miel termina con brutal agresión” 17 May 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/251514; “Expira víctima de un mal amor” 23 May 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/252148. 77“un ruido que se producía en su interior, por lo que forzó la entrada, encontrando a su progenitora postrada en la cama, sangrando por las fosas nasales y oídos.”
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journalistic intent to inform. Furthermore, as Rodríguez points out in regards to gory details about rape, they “fill the entire narrative space” in the case she mentions, leading the reader to forget about the journalist’s original intent to inform about the State’s lack of responsibility in protecting minors (41). This rings true in the Caceres case, where the main plot points mentioned in all three articles include the couple falling in love while cutting coffee, the child finding his injured mother, and a description of the rough piece of wood her aggressor, Ariel Ponce Andrade, used to beat her over the head and bar her bedroom door shut with before escaping. These horrific details loom large, distracting readers from the perpetrator’s fugitive status. Considering that in the first semester of
2014, of the 47 femicide cases counted by the Network of Women Against Violence, 16 of the perpetrators were fugitives from the law, the State continues to evade its duty to pursue and capture these aggressors, a detail which gets swept under the narrative rug in
Caceres’s case (“Informe semestral”).
Several more aspects in the case of Ivania Elizabeth Caceres Galo illustrate the reactionary, ridiculing, and moralistic deployment of the discursive universe of romantic love. This tactic disguises or normalizes violent, misogynistic practices of control and possession. The headlines and sub-headings in the Caceres case gloss some of the most culturally meaningful terminology in regards to love. Consider these two main headlines:
“Honeymoon Ends with Brutal Aggression” and “Victim of a ‘Bad Love’ Expires.” The sub-heading within this last article is “Excessive Jealousy,” which suggests that a certain measure of jealousy is expected and acceptable. The articles contain strikingly ridiculing quotes such as this one: “the unfortunate woman was living a sort of ‘honeymoon’ with
Ariel Ponce Andrade, 27 years old, who she fell in love with a few months ago, during 95
the coffee trimming season.” Or another, which says that they fell in love among the coffee plants, “like what happened in the soap opera “Gaviota”, but unlike in the show, the relationship between Caceres and Andrade ended with fights and excessive jealousy on the part of the male.”78
Her partner assaulted Caceres in their home. The Nota Roja articles’ use of romantic love is reactionary and sexist because its terminology erases the very unequal power relations that have permitted men to claim ownership over women’s lives and bodies throughout Nicaraguan history. Decades of feminist campaigning, in Nicaragua and Latin America at large, have intervened to show that concepts like “honeymoon period,” “bad love” (“mal amor”) and “indifference, dislike” (“desamor”) are utilized across popular culture, in songs, movies, and television shows, to disguise or justify misogynistic practices such as jealousy, control, emotional manipulation or abuse, and physical violence, practices which can, and very often do, end in femicide. (Ana Carcedo
40; Gabriela Montiel unpaged).
The case of Mercedes Verónica Víctor Saldaña, 30 years old, killed by her ex- partner Reynaldo Fajardo Sevilla, was first reported in the article “Man kills his Ex-wife and Commits Suicide.”79 In the second article, “Man commits suicide after killing his
Ex,” we find this sub-headline: “The femicide perpetrator was in Costa Rica and came back to end the life of his ex-partner because he couldn’t bear to see her in the arms of a
78 “Celos desmedidos”; “…la infortunada mujer vivía una especial de ‘luna de miel’ con Ariel Ponce Andrade, de 27 años, de quién se enamoró hace un par de meses, durante el corte del café.”; “…como ocurrió en la telenovela “Gaviota”, pero a diferencia de esta, la relación de Cáceres y Andrade finalizó con discusiones y celos desmedidos por parte del varón.” 79 “Hombre mata a su ex mujer y se suicida” 21 April 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/248874 ; “Se suicida tras matar a su ex” 22 April 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/248903. 96
foreigner.”80 In this article, the reporter, Lésber Quintero, reports that the couple separated a year ago, but that Fajardo spent all his time harassing her to get back together with him, a proposition which she continually rejected due to the fact that he raped one of her family members and physically mistreated her. Again, like in the case of Caceres’ attacker Andrade, Fajardo had been a fugitive, living in Costa Rica to avoid capture from the rape charges. But yet again, the focus in the sub-headline on jealousy, in addition to a graphic photo of Saldaña and Fajardo’s corpses (with only the eyes censured), absorb the narrative space to capture the readers’ fascination and capitalize on this image of death.
Let me drive home the central point about femicide in Nicaragua that these cases demonstrate, but that the Nota Roja’s representational tactics minimize: the precise moment when a woman is in the greatest danger of being murdered is when she attempts to break free of her partner’s control (Tania Montenegro, unpaged). As evidenced in other cases discussed below, choosing to narrate the motive as jealousy or classifying femicides as ‘crimes of passion’ depoliticizes this element of total control that leads to femicide. As Silvia Chejter explains,
It’s still common to hear that these are crimes of passion, a completely
ideological concept in the sense that passion appears as an element that
justifies an emotional fit, of a supposedly romantic and uncontrollable
nature, when faced with disappointment, an unbearable and unacceptable
provocation. (unpaged)
80 “El femicida estaba en Costa Rica y regresó para acabar con la vida de su ex compañera por no soportar verla en brazos de un extranjero.” 97
The Nota Roja’s common usage of the term “crimes of passion” evokes an image of bestial, uncontrolled men purportedly blinded by love. According to Chejter, in using this phrase, “what’s hidden is that the unacceptable part has been that a woman has tried, or been able to, escape the control of her partner or attempted to recuperate her autonomy and liberty” (unpaged).
Femicide expresses a murderous desire to possess the other completely. It is a phenomenon of global proportions and a serious threat to public health. The terms
“jealousy,” “bad love” do not carry sufficient symbolic charge or weight to express the cold, naked efficiency and determination of femicidal violence. Likewise, the notion of
“crime of passion” uses biological determinism to insinuate that this violence is irrational and men cannot control their impulses. For this reason, feminist scholarship on gender violence seeks to tear down these dominant epistemological constellations around masculinist violence, theorizing femicide as a rational(ized) practice bolstered by symbolic, institutional, and economic inequality in gendered relations of power (Ravelo
Blancas and Domínguez Ruvacalba; Fregoso and Bejarano). As Héctor Domínguez
Ruvacalba has pointed out in the case of Ciudad Juárez,
…we have to argue that violence cannot be an irrational phenomenon, but
a rationalization of abuse and control. This rationality constitutes a daily
politics, expressed in language, the use of space, and forms of social
interaction. (145)81
81 “…tenemos que argumentar que la violencia no puede ser un fenómeno irracional, sino una racionalización del abuso y el control. Esta racionalidad constituye una política cotidiana, expresada en el lenguaje, uso del espacio y formas sociales de interacción. (145).
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Rather than simple ‘jealousy,’ as the dominant language on romantic love in the Nota
Roja would propose, we are dealing with systematic practices of domination and control of female and feminized bodies carried out both interpersonally and institutionally.
To sum it all up, Nota Roja articles capitalize on a formal tension/contradiction between their appeal to the melodramatic mode, which reinforces the victim’s (women’s) innocence, and their reliance on the commonplace terminologies of romantic love, which tend to justify masculine violence. Therefore, they simultaneously confirm femicide victims’ social value and deny it on the basis of sexist moralism. According to Peter
Brooks, “The underlying aim of melodrama is to create a space of ‘moral legibility’ in which Manicheistic designations are clear and recognizable” (12-13). Consequently, efforts to construct the ‘moral legibility’ of those subjects represented in the Nota Roja depend on gendered expectations of goodness or evil that revolve around the nuclear family unit. As demonstrated by the appearance of the Good Mother archetype, in the
Nicaraguan Nota Roja, the ‘moral legibility’ of women often depends on their compliance or noncompliance with the normative demands of motherhood; a representational politics that reduces women’s value to a relational, secondary one.
Conversely, below I will explore how violent masculinities are made ‘morally legible’ through their complete demonization. I argue that this trope of the ‘femicida monster’ equally distorts and obscures the root economic and socio-political causes that shape violent masculinities.
Markedly, the Nota Roja depends on this good vs. evil, victim vs. perpetrator binary, polarizing gender relations and glossing over the societal nuances of racial, ethnic, and economic inequality. Anker affirms, “In reshaping every encounter into a 99
primary conflict between good and evil, melodrama moralizes all problems and relationships” (24). This moralizing tendency becomes even clearer in cases of femicide where the victim’s social status is not bolstered by the traditional markers of hegemonic femininity: marriage or the legitimation of motherhood. Upon contrasting the cases of
Contreras, Caceres, and Saldaña, with the case of Maritza del Carmen Bermúdez
Medrano, the contours of moralistic standards of representing women stand out starkly.
Maritza del Carmen Bermúdez Medrano was a 19 year-old sex worker who was murdered by two acquaintances or clients, who happened to be twin brothers, Luis
Alberto y Alberto Elías Arana, alias “Los Patitas,” or “the Footprints,” in the Managua neighborhood of Villa Israel.82 This case received considerable coverage, with four articles in El Nuevo Diario over the span of a week. In what amounts to a textbook example of re-victimization, the majority of the press coverage focuses on discrediting
Bermúdez by digging into her past and exposing her abandonment of her children. The articles also offer abundant descriptive detail, both forensic and narrative, about her rape and murder. Additionally, the first two articles, “‘The Footprints’ rape and murder a young prostitute” and “The eighteenth femicide,” include a photograph of Bermúdez’s corpse, showing her face down in the dirt with her naked legs exposed.83 This leads me to the conclusion that, as a sex worker, Bermúdez does not warrant the same (minimal) respect or ethical treatment by journalists that might be given to other feminine victims.
82 ‘Los patitas’ violan y asesinan a joven meretriz” 21 March 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245710; “El decimoctavo femicidio” 22 March 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245734; Jueza inmoviliza a ‘Los Patitas’” 24 March 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245962; “La mataron por sexo” 30 March 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/246666. 83 I choose not to republish this image, due to its exploitative nature. 100
Re-victimization, as feminists define it, refers to interpersonal and institutional practices that submit victims of gender violence to a secondary violent treatment, be it through aggressive or accusatory questioning or through exploitative and insensitive representational practices in the media. In regards to institutional treatment of sexual violence, Rossana Barragán alleges that because of re-victimization, carried out by the complicity between men, women experience rape specifically as a process of multiple violences, through which they are victimized again and again (3). Bermúdez was certainly subjected to multiple violences, since the media’s re-victimizing practices in this case demolish Bermúdez’s memory and social value. The two longest articles contain the following sub-headings: “She gave her children away,” “Woman from Jinotega,”
“Stabbed [woman],” and “Without a Family Bosom.”84 Markedly focused on Bermúdez, the articles offers testimony from her neighbors, who lambast her by reporting several facts about her: 1) She was drinking liquor with the Arana brothers before she was murdered, when they purportedly led her under the bridge in the neighborhood “through trickery” (although in later articles neighbors report seeing them take her away at knife and gun- point) (“El decimoctavo”); 2) Apparently, as reported by a neighbor, she had two children between the ages of 1 and 3 years old, who she “gave a way to a lady in
Masaya, because she couldn’t take care of them due to the life style she led” (“El decimoctavo”); 3) She moved to Managua from Jinotega because she had a romantic
84 “Regaló a sus hijos,” and “Jinotegana” are from “El decimoctavo femicidio.” “Acuchillada,” and “Sin seno familiar” are from “La mataron por sexo.” An additional note is that the word ‘seno’ in Spanish means bosom and is used metaphorically to represent the home, with an additional meaning being “protection.” 101
relationship with “a young man who drinks liquor” (“El decimoctavo”).85 It would be difficult to deny that these comments directly attack Bermúdez’s character.
If we follow Lule’s claims about the underlying mythic structure of news stories, the characterization constructed by reporter Roberto Martínez sets Bermúdez up as a direct foil to the Good Mother archetype, discernible in the case of Contreras, for example. According to Lule, “The Good Mother implies a polar, oppositional figure, the
Terrible Mother” (Lule 106). Bermúdez’s characterization evokes the dark-side of the
Good Mother Archetype: she gave her children away to someone else because she couldn’t care for them. This mythic trope references deep-seated anxieties about women’s reproductive power, sexuality, and potential abandonment of the home.
Studying how the Terrible Mother Archetype functions in these articles, it’s symbolism seems to imply that by not fulfilling her socially sanctioned roles, Bermúdez placed herself in danger, simply by leading “the life style she led” (“El decimoctavo”).
Contextualized within the representational schema of the Nota Roja crime press, this transgression is enough to symbolically justify her getting killed.
This tact of exploring women’s past has historically been used to exonerate rapists and murderers. Here, the intent is to symbolically place the blame on Bermúdez for being violated. The marginality of her social status seems to allow for a more exploitative treatment by the press, a gesture that has roots in the historical denigration and disqualification of sex workers, and the unruly ‘appetites’ that they satisfy through their work. Rosario Montoya describes a symbolic formulation that most likely enjoys/ed widespread currency across Nicaragua (and around the world), although she discussed it
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specifically with residents of El Tule, in Southwestern Nicaragua. While conducting ethnographic research on the Sandinsta Revolution’s impact on gender roles, the Tuleños informed Montoya of the distinction between “ ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women, which also corresponded to the spatialized designations of ‘women of the house’ and ‘women of the street’” (124). Bad women were those who shook up gendered expectations, but especially sexual norms. These women earned an association with the street, “a highly sexualized space where only men and ‘bad’ women were supposed to venture” (124).
These highly charged spatial designations lead us back to Berlant’s public vs. private taxonomy and the steadfast attachment that privileged (masculine) individuals have to it. Since Berlant theorizes intimacy as unpredictable and not easily bound by ideology,—rather, attached to multiple sites, interactions, and stories— she would affirm that the type of intimacy clients share with sex workers must be discredited and banished in order for the normative institutions of intimacy to maintain their hegemony” (i.e marriage, the Churchy) (5). In the symbolic economy described by Montoya and Berlant,
Bermúdez represents the hidden, unacknowledged, and dangerous side of intimacy. A reminder of the unpredictable nature of sexual desire, and the potential for women’s sexuality to become unhinged from normative institutions, her image is actively denigrated in the Nota Roja.
The good woman vs. bad woman dichotomy, as well as the public vs. private taxonomy, are blown open as constructed fantasy, specifically in the case of contemporary gender violence. In regards to femicide, both distinctions disguise the fact that women can be killed at any time, regardless of their purportedly ‘protected’ status.
This is made clear by comparing the visual records of the Contreras and the Bermúdez 103
cases: the blood soaked bed and the inert body of Bermúdez. As Rodríguez affirms, while analyzing the photographs of the feminicide victims in Ciudad Juárez in Charles
Bowden’s book Juárez: Laboratory of our Future, they visually prove to us the existence of “a wounded masculinity that kills” (Liberalism 189). These images also push us to ask ourselves, as Rodríguez does, if as spectators consuming textual or photographic representations of these bodies, we are not confronted with “…a truly maddening social development that speaks loudly about limits, such as the pleasure of inflicting pain, the killing at the moment of pleasure, the pleasure of torturing women—lustmord” and our own pleasure at viewing these images (Liberalism 190)? Later on, we will examine
Rodríguez’s further inquiry into the kinds of affect and desire that consuming such images provokes in spectators.86
In conclusion, in the face of melodramatic representational tactics and their bolstering of societal justifications for masculine violence and lack of control, the symbolic gesture of the term femicide takes on additional weight. The term femicide seeks to politicize affect, desire, and people’s inner emotional worlds, a terrain that has conventionally been populated by the fictions of undying devotion and fidelity, a symbolic nucleus that, in its inevitable implosion, justifies murdering those most meant to abide by its rules: feminine and feminized individuals. The construct of romantic love is a deadly one. As Denis de Rougemont said, in his Love in the Western World, “Love and death, a fatal love—in these phrases is summed up, if not the whole of poetry, at least whatever is popular, whatever is universally moving in European literature, alike as
86 “What kind of absolutely perverse affect enters into the capturing, torturing, raping, killing, and posing of this woman [see Jaime Bailleres’s photograph in Charles Bowden’s Juárez: The Laboratory of our Future. New York: Aperture, 1998. 66]? What kind of intentionality and purpose, what kind of desire does it evoke in the photographer, the onlookers, in myself writing this piece?” (190). 104
regards the oldest legends and the sweetest songs. Happy love has no history” (15).
Hence the mythic appeals to betrayal, sacrifice, and honorable victims in the Nota Roja.
As we’ve seen, spatial taxonomies and the socio-symbolic construction of romantic love deem some victims as worthy and others as unworthy, to use a concept that
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky describe as a global trend in the mass media
(37).87 The challenge for feminist theory and activism is to make women valuable in and for themselves, and not relationally, as the “mother of,” the “wife of,” or belonging to nobody and therefore disposable. Maritza Bermúdez’s murder affirms the vicious cycle of violent discourses begetting more violence in a fatal loop. Representing murdered women as an object of news, as in the case of Bermúdez, shows how representational practices beget violence. In his study of the art of the daring Guatemalan performance artist, Regina Galindo, Pablo Hernández Hernández claims that subjection mainly functions as a process of discursive pigeonholing, in the realm of the symbolic. On the one hand, machista violence seeks to produce subjection and submission in its direct target. On the other hand, representational practices produce violence. Violence:
Refers not to what produces subjection but rather to the violence that is
produced from subjection: the allocation of roles, of representations and
social functions to women provoke them being perceived as objects at the
87 Although Herman and Chomsky use this concept to refer to worthy victims as those inside states that are U.S. enemies, vs. unworthy victims, which are found inside states friendly to the U.S., the distinction is applicable if we consider Catherine MacKinnon’s notion of violence against women as collective violence, due to their group status. See “Introduction” Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues. 105
disposition of the will of those who, in front of women, are presented as
powerful. (451)88
In a powerful piece entitled, The pain of a handkerchief [El dolor de un pañuelo],
Guatemalan artist Galindo places herself in the storefront window of a mall in Guatemala
City, where, “tied to a vertical bed, news stories about rapes and abuses committed against Guatemalan women are projected on my body” (reginajosegalindo.com).
Completely naked, with her eyes blindfolded and her hands bound in the form of a cross,
Galindo’s body bears headlines such as the following: “(They) Murdered a woman. Body left in Planes de Minerva” and “Thirty rapes in only two months” (Hernández Hernández
453). Galindo’s installation boldly states that these methods of presenting the news are violence in and of themselves. The printed words of the newspaper page hover over
Galindo’s body in a haunting display of the reverberations of discursive practice on human flesh.
The Construction of the Femicida Monster
When police apprehended Yader Jiron Cruz, of Carazo Nicaragua, for the rape and murder of Candida Rosa Canales Peña, he confessed to the crime, stating that he was jealous.89 El Nuevo Diario reporter Tania Goussen narrates his confession in this way:
88 “…se refiere no a la que produce sujeción sino a la violencia producida a partir de la sujeción: la adjudicación de roles, de representaciones y funciones sociales de las mujeres provocan que sean percibidas como objetos a disposición de la voluntad de quienes frente a ellas se presentan como poderosos” (Hernández Hernández 451). 89 The murder of Candida Rosa Canales Peña appeared in three articles in March of 2012: “Estrangulada y abusada junto al rio” 11 March 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/244598; “Violada y estrangulada a la orilla del rio” 12 March 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244631; Yo la maté por celos” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244759. 106
‘I killed her. I waited where she passes by and it entered my mind to kill
her, and I did it with my own hands. I was jealous, because she was going
with another guy, no matter… I didn’t think about the consequences,’ said
Jiron Cruz, laughing coldly. (“Yo la maté por celos”)
The photo of Jiron Cruz shows a young man, probably no more than 25 years old, staring defiantly (or indifferently?) at the camera (see Figure 3). Shot in the style of a mug shot, the photo is set against a dirty, whitewashed wall with no reference point for place or context. The article provides little additional information, save the fact that Canales had signs of violence all over her body and that the jail sentence for aggravated rape is between 10 and 15 years, while the murder charges could bring 15 to 20 years in prison.
Figure 3. Photo of Yader Ismael Jirón Cruz, accused of femicide.
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In this section, I look at visual and narrative elements used to represent femicide perpetrators in the Nicaraguan Nota Roja. I claim that these articles sell the image of the femicida monster. Constructed as the new social ill to fear, the femicida monster as a trope is exemplary of the neoliberal media’s predatory reliance on criminalizing representations. I define criminalizing representations as those that categorically dehumanize represented subjects by subtracting the nuances of their historical conjunctions and individualizing their immediate outbursts of violence, which have roots in systemic social and economic inequalities. These can be read as indicative of the media’s implicit or explicit bolstering of trends in neoliberal governance, in which ‘mano dura’ policies and mass incarceration replace programs for social welfare.90 Referring to
Kristin Bumiller and Elizabeth Bernstein’s discussion of ‘carceral feminism,’ I address how feminist strategies for combatting gender violence in Nicaragua must necessarily address historical impunity, and have done so through a punitively focused agenda. It means entering into a thorny terrain indeed to question the focus on criminalization and incarceration, when the urgency of the daily threat of femicide begs that something be done to stop these outbursts of violent masculinities
In the Nicaraguan Nota Roja, formal elements of criminalization include the photographic record, which depends on the visual cues of abjection or juxtaposed masculinities to establish aberrance or monstrosity. Meanwhile, the narrative creation of the monstrous image centers on chilling testimonies from family members or perpetrators. Finally, the forensic discourse often lays out a graphic reading of the marks
90 For a discussion of mano dura policies and their relationship to vigilante justice, see Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America. Redwood City, CA: Standford UP, 2006. 108
of violence on female bodies, which can be read as a code of communication, blatantly revealing the low social worth of female bodies, as Segato shows.91 In this chapter, I focus on the combined aesthetic effect of the photographic and narrative characterization in two cases: the Bermúdez case, and the murder of 87-year-old Rosa Emilia Cano.
Rosa Emilia Cano was found in her bed, asphyxiated and apparently having been raped before she was killed.92 Covered over a series of five articles, the case obviously garnered attention based on the exceptional nature of Cano’s age and her having been sexually assaulted. In the days following the femicide, police took away several suspects from the neighborhood. In a rare foray into forensic technology, which doesn’t commonly appear in the Nota Roja, Roberto Martínez reports that the suspects will be subjected to serology tests, or the testing of plasma or other bodily fluids (“Practican examen…”). By the third article, “Neighbor involved in the death of the grandmother”
[“Vecino involucrado en asesinato de la abuela”], police mention a 40-year-old suspect, who turns out to be Juan Pablo Gadea Salmerón. Purportedly, there was a pre-existing conflict between the two, because Cano had filed reports against Gadea in 2009 and 2011 for robbery (“Una coartada…”).
91 Psychologizing scientific discourses are not commonly used to analyze femicide perpetrators, as Rodríguez has shown to be the case with the language in Nota Roja articles about rape, incest, and pedophilia, which often use the terms ‘pervert,’ ‘degenerate,’ or ‘aberrant.’ See “Del acto: odio en su forma erótica” and “Human Rights/Sexual Desires.” 92 “Anciana fue violada y asfixiada” 15 August 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/260921; “Practican examen a sospechosos por muerte de anciana” 16 August 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261039; “Vecino involucrado en asesinato de la abuela” 17 August 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261131; “Una coartada muy singular” 18 August 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261248; “Acusado por femicidio al psiquiatra” 25 August 2012 http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261940.
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Characterizing Gadea Salmerón as a twisted, monstrous figure does not prove to be difficult for reporter Martínez, given the audacity involved in raping and murdering an
87-year-old woman. But in addition to the nature of the crime, Gadea’s alibi contributes to the complete ridiculing and diminishing of his character. In the fourth article “A very unique alibi” [“Una coartada muy singular”], Gadea’s sister testifies that he could not have raped Cano because he is sexually impotent. “My brother has always drank liquor and scientifically speaking, he’s a sexual impotent, they have to prove what they’re saying (in the accusation)” (“Una coartada…”). His abhorrent treatment of Cano already made him worthy of social stigma and rejection, but this additional information elevates him to the position of an outright spectacle.
The photographic record of Gadea’s case demonstrates that the aesthetic of the femicida monster in the Nota Roja fluctuates between an aesthetic of pity, or “lastima,” and a colonializing, stigmatizing one that positions certain masculinities as acceptable and others as detestable. Both types of images are used in the articles about the murder of
Rosa Emilia Cano. The photograph that accompanies “A very unique alibi” shows Gadea in the courtroom, looking small and frightened, centered in the frame between the court officials and his sister as she gives testimony (see Figure 4). Clad in a sleeveless tank top that has slid down to reveal most of his chest, Gadea appears dwarfed by his surroundings and, in turn, by the circumstance he finds himself in. The combined effect of the photograph and the narrative details of his impotence by no means intend to inspire pity, but rather attempt to capitalize on the ridicule that this incongruous scenario could inspire. It may not be a stretch to call this figure of the modern media spectacle a throwback to the circus “freak show” of the past. 110
Figure 4. Photo of Juan Pablo Gadea Salmerón, accused of femicide.
The final article, “Man accused of femicide to the psychiatrist” [“Acusado por femicidio al psquiatra”], includes a photo of Gadea in an institutional space, either the police station or a courthouse, being escorted by a police agent (See figure 5). Gadea stares directly into the camera, with what seems to be a mixture of sadness and frustration, but could also be interpreted at first glance as coldness. His face visibly dirty, with a black smudge on his forehead, his appearance again contrasts starkly with the institutional surroundings. The police officer that leads him looks away from the camera towards some unknown destination, his face showing a hard indifference.
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Figure 5. Photo of Juan Pablo Gadea, accused of femicide.
This last photograph invokes a device of visual pairing that we can call juxtaposed masculinities. As visible markers of class, Gadea’s informal style of dress and dirty appearance set him up against the more normative markers of masculinity embodied in the police officer at his side. This photographic scheme markedly highlights Gadea’s difference, perhaps even positioning him as detritus, a body that is ostracized and no longer belonging to the community. This can be interpreted as a visual enactment of
Rocío Santiesteban’s concept of symbolic trashing or “basurización simbólica.” Symbolic trashing can be both discursive and literal. According to Santiesteban, basurización is an authoritarian discursive and physical practice of violence that organizes the Other as an excess element in a symbolic system, i.e. the nation, by conferring on this Other a 112
representation that causes disgust (18). As she explains, this type of discourse is produced by patriarchal, colonial cultures, and was specifically used by the Peruvian government during the civil war of 1980-1996, as a way to justify torture, rape, discrimination, and all the other excesses which were meant to exclude or expel large sectors of the Peruvian population (18). The characterization of Gadea by the Nota Roja carries out a symbolic trashing that seeks to destroy their image and, indeed, carry out a symbolic expelling that banishes them from the realm of the salvageable.
Figure 6. Photo of “Los Patitas,” after being sentenced to preventative imprisonment.
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Returning to the Bermúdez case, the sole image of “Los patitas” that appears conjugates the principle of juxtaposed masculinities and symbolic trashing. The twin brothers, Luis Alberto and Alberto Elías Arana, appear in the photo with their heads completely ducked down, flanked on both sides by police officers, as they are led out of the judicial building where they have just been sentenced to preventative prison (See
Figure 6). While only the outline of the Arana brothers’ is visible, the police officer who leads them seems to carry himself in an almost princely posture, his head held high, eyes looking forward with some hint of optimism and a half-smile on his face. Both he and the other officer are dressed in white uniforms, contrasting with the street clothes of the two perpetrators. This image visually suggests that these police officers are safe masculinities, while luckily the two perpetrators are being led to a place where they cannot pose a threat to society any longer.
Photography is historically implicated in categorizing and colonizing representations, through early anthropological and ethnographic fieldwork to modern day media images of “terrorists” and “rioters.” As a technological innovation, photography was first made accessible to and mobilized by judicial, psychiatric, and police institutions for the purpose of cataloging and studying criminality (John Tagg 252). I am claiming that photojournalism has strong roots in the visual regimes that have been used to categorize, control, and criminalize populations. Criminalizing images visually and discursively pave the path for any number of repressive operations: discrimination, colonization, or incarceration. As I will discuss below, the Nota Roja’s representational tactics in regards to masculinities tacitly contribute to neoliberal models of social control that envision incarceration as the sole solution to complex social issues. They can serve 114
to justify a model for social control supported by the idea that social ills can somehow be enclosed and locked away safely, and like the perpetrators, no longer threatening our everyday reality.
Something else to note about the representational tactics of the crime press in regards to masculinities: Jiron Cruz’s case, analyzed at the beginning of this section, is one among many in which the femicide perpetrator cites jealousy as his motive.
However, the description of his confession provokes a strange feeling. Is it due to the disconnect between the severity of murder and the way he is narrated as cold and matter- of-fact about his jealousy? Indeed, in this and many other cases, the explanatory catch phrases associated with rape, incest, or statutory rape—such as ‘jealousy,’ ‘bad love,’
‘bad husband,’ ‘half orange’ or ‘better half,’ ‘Romeo,’ ‘courtship’ or ‘jalencia’ (for statutory rape)—present a strange paradox.93 The paradox lies in the fact that the Nota
Roja reports emphasize, unquestioningly and without reflection, common cultural- symbolic constructs to explain gender violence, while at the same time representing the perpetrators of gender violence as exceptional, aberrant, or monstrous.
This paradoxical representational tactic in journalism exemplifies the crux of misogyny globally: while its symbolic underpinnings, affective manifestations, and institutional supports are widespread, the violent realizations of its mandates tend to be narrated by the media as exceptional cases of transgression.94 Rita Laura Segato points out this contradiction by highlighting that aggressors and the rest of society share a common cultural-symbolic framework. She explains that their beliefs and actions are:
93 Some of these terms don’t translate well to English: “Mal amor,” “mal marido,” “media naranja,” “Romeo,” “jalencia/noviazgo.” 94 The shootings in Santa Barbara, California in 2014 bring this fact to light, as few mainstream media sources gave credence to or emphasized the shooter Eliot Roger’s misogynist confessions via youtube. 115
…expressions of a deep symbolic structure that organizes our acts and our
fantasies and gives them intelligibility. In other words, the aggressor and
the collective share the same gender imaginary, they speak the same
language, they can understand one another. (16)
In my estimation, Segato’s gesture calls for bravery in confronting perpetrators with more than simple condemnation. Acts of femicide appear impenetrable and shocking precisely because of the lack of understanding of extreme masculinities, a void that is now being filled by masculinity studies, a prime example being R.W. Connell and James W.
Messerschmidt’s revision of the concept of hegemonic masculinities. Though it is a dark prospect indeed to suggest that a shared symbolic structure connects our thoughts and actions to those of rapists and murderers, it is a necessary step towards resolving these vexing expressions of extreme misogyny and violence.
The victim-perpetrator binary in journalistic and activist representations glosses over society’s role in producing violent masculinities. It constructs readers and viewers as consumers of annihilated female bodies, while it encourages the facile condemnation and marginalization of certain masculinities. In his analysis of the feminicides in Ciudad
Juárez, México, Héctor Domínguez-Ruvacalba claims that a “sacrificial system” structures representations and social views of gender violence, engraining the notion of the victim-perpetrator binary as the only way to conceptualize these crimes. Because the authorities in Ciudad Juarez continually re-victimize and discredit feminicide victims, while also delegitimizing critics of impunity, they “perpetuate the myth of inevitable sacrifice” (142). But Domínguez Ruvacalba proposes that we deconstruct this ‘myth’ of the victim and the perpetrator, a symbolic system that, even in the discourses of feminist 116
critics of impunity, relies heavily on moralized binaries: “Nonetheless, when these critics
[of impunity] extrapolate the relationship murderer-victim in moral terms, that is, the murderer as a monster and the sacrificed woman as a saint, they also participate in the construction of the social myths of violence and sacrifice” (142-143).
Domínguez Ruvacalba’s argument centers on the invisibility of the true murderers in the Ciudad Juárez feminicide cases, with an emphasis on the scapegoating of individuals who are not the true culprits.95 In Nicaragua, as I have argued, the perpetrators of femicide are indeed visible, and are subjected to process of symbolic trashing in the Nota Roja crime press. But Domínguez Ruvacalba’s conclusions about the representations of victims and perpetrators in Juárez ring equally true: “But here, the identification focuses on the construction of the body of the victim (that reaches the condition of an allegorical representation of society as victim) and fails at offering convincing characterizations of the criminals” (143, emphasis mine).
Given that gender performance is one of the structuring axes of inequality in the current world-system, and that economic, political, and epistemological systems disseminate and perpetuate the symbolic rationale for these asymmetrical gendered power relations, the violent, domineering acts of individual men are not precisely aberrant or monstrous. Their actions communicate the socio-historic and culturally specific contours of gender based domination at a given geographical place and time. As Domínguez-
Ruvacalba states, these actions must be historicized and politicized: “Thinking about the victims and the culprits within the sacrificial system de-historicizes and de-politicizes violence” (142). The shared, socially constructed belief system about gender norms that
95 Ignacio Corona presents a similar argument in “Over their dead bodies: 117
Segato mentions should be questioned and analyzed, in the press and through education, therein furthering social transformation beyond the condemnation and incarceration of individual perpetrators.
But, as I will argue in the following section, these shared symbolic fantasies, as well as constructed, normative stories about marriage, love, and betrayal, are already crumbling before our eyes. Visible in widespread expressions of gender violence and the breakdown of the nuclear family as a viable institution of intimacy, it is becoming clear that these traditional stories of building “a life,” as Berlant puts it, cannot withstand global economic change, nor can these stories roll back the transformations brought about by feminist challenges to the sexual-moral economy of patriarchal cultures.96 As Berlant affirms:
In particular, across the globe challenges to the public/private taxonomy
from feminist, antihomophobic, antiracist, and antipoverty movements
have been experienced as an irruption of the most sacred and rational
forms of intimate intelligibility, a cancelling out of individual and
collective destinies, an impediment to narrativity and the future itself. (7)
Expressions of extreme violence reveal that masculinities are reeling from the potential threat of women’s sexuality being freed from stabilizing institutions and narratives.
The Press in Nicaragua: Opposition and Polarization
96 The term “sexual-moral economy” comes from Rosario Montoya’s study of gender relations in El Tule, Nicaragua: Gendered Scenarios of Revolution. 118
As Benedict Anderson claims, in his notable Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, the circulation of print media, in particular through the medium of the newspaper, provided stories and images meant to bring citizens into a discursive network that they would come to think of as a national community. As Juanita Darling has shown, in Nicaragua in the nineteenth century, newspapers mainly provided a textual forum for political struggles between opposing oligarchies (57). While during the forty-year reign of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, the newspaper was a vital symbol of democratic process and struggle, with press censorship was an ongoing motivating factor of dissent against the dictatorship
(Rothschuh Villanueva Comunicación 25). During the dictatorship, the newspaper La
Prensa functioned as the opposition newspaper against the Somoza backed Novedades
However, due to limited circulation and low literacy rates, newspapers were inaccessible for the large majority of Nicaraguans in that time period (Darling 44). But La Prensa remained a symbol of democratic participation and dissent. The moment when Pedro
Joaquín Chamorro, owner and editor of La Prensa, was assassinated in 1978 is recognized as the moment that catalyzed moderate sectors of society to join the fight against the dictator, leading to a broad based opposition coalition and the eventual defeat of Somoza (Belli 233; Darling 45).
In the twentieth century the Sandinista government carried out a literacy campaign to invite “those outside the lettered city inside the city’s walls” and made newspapers their top media priority, founding the newspaper Barricada (Darling 80).
During the ten-year period of Sandinista governance, La Prensa eventually became the voice of opposition, though interestingly the Chamorro family split down the middle 119
between those who worked for Barricada and those who stayed with La Prensa (Barrios de Chamorro 196).
Until recently, both of the main newspapers in Nicaragua today, La Prensa and El
Nuevo Diario belonged to the Chamorro family (Kodich 103). El Nuevo Diario was founded in 1980, due to political conflicts at La Prensa, with Xavier Chamorro, long time
La Prensa editor Jaime Chamorro’s brother, and several other journalists leaving La
Prensa to form their own paper (Kodich 103). In the 1990s, El Nuevo Diario supported the Sandinista opposition party, although shortly after Daniel Ortega’s reelection, its bent was largely anti-Ortega (Estepa, El Mundo 15 May 2011). In May 2011 El Nuevo Diario was sold to businessman Ramiro Ortiz, owner of Banpro, although Francisco “Chico”
Chamorro stayed on as editor (Estepa). Seven months later, however, Chamorro resigned amidst rumors that the new owners wanted to dislodge those voices that were critical of the government and turn the paper into a mouthpiece for the new Sandinsimo. (Rogers,
Nicaraguan Dispatch 30 diciembre 2011).
Though it’s beyond the purview of my study to analyze this history completely, it’s important to note the tendency towards polarization in the Nicaraguan press, most often in its history because of the split between an opposition paper and a paper presenting a state-backed discourse. Currently, La Prensa maintains a decidedly anti-
Ortega stance, calling him the “Unconstitutional President” in all the articles they publish. The Nota Roja crime press, however, is a feature of both newspapers, although
La Prensa releases their crime section separately as Hoy, instead of including a Sucesos
(Happenings) section. Though I could not include both newspapers in my analysis, the coverage I have studied in Hoy seems to follow similar principles in representing 120
femicide victims as those of El Nuevo Diario. In both cases, discursive pigeon-holing of femininities and criminalization of masculinities seem to be the dominant mode of representation.
Mass Media in the Era of Gore Capitalism
Judith Butler speaks of shared physical vulnerability to others as the point of departure for developing a new global ethics of care. Her reading of Emmanuel Levinas
In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning, calls for an ethics based in the understanding of the precariousness of life, beginning with the precarious life of the
Other. She defines loss and mourning as common human experiences that reveal the manner in which human beings are constituted relationally—we are defined by our links with others (20). Butler’s discussions centers on how media representations selectively facilitate the acknowledgement of this link, by culturally scripting victimhood to indicate which deaths are worthy of mourning. Comparing the heroification of 9/11 terrorism victims to the complete invisibility of Iraqi civilians murdered by the U.S. armed forces, she highlights how the media helps to short-circuit any possible recognition of the humanity of these other victims and thus inaugurates a national melancholy wrought by a lack of mourning or connection with the rest of the globe (30). Through her condemnation of the physical and psychological ravages of the U.S. empire, in its contemporary role of policing other nations, Butler points to the media’s pivotal role in constructing notions of innocence and personhood.
The philosophical dilemmas brought up by the media representations I have discussed pivot on the notions of innocence and guilt, good and evil, and ethical and 121
unethical, in a faithful consolidation of the victim-perpetrator binary, with its connections to sacrificial logic and myth. Colored by local morality and (waning) belief in the solidity of the nuclear family as the sustaining social institution, this representational axis erects the blamelessness of femicide victims upon the shrine of motherhood. The most problematic issue in regards to representations of gender violence in literature and journalism is that they have always circulated as symbolic currency used to prop up larger value systems. That is to say that the murder of a woman has allegorically signaled the plundering of the land or the betrayal of the nation, while a rape can indicate similar symbolic defiling, especially of masculine honor. In deconstructing these representations, the issue at hand is how to push for women to be valued as human beings in their own right. Not just as ‘mother of’ or ‘wife of’ (i.e. ‘property of’). That is the struggle over representations that feminisms take on, unveiling the remnants of archaic beliefs about women’s place, women’s value, and the unrestrained accessibility of their bodies.
Analyzing the media’s designation of “worthy and unworthy victims,” as Edward
S. Herman and Noam Chomsky have called them, we realize that representations have the power to designate who counts as human and who will not (37). But returning to
Butler argument, an underlying claim is that moments of violence, along with the humanizing process of loss and mourning, dissolve the boundaries between human beings and reveal the fragility of our supposed independence and autonomy.97 Butler’s gesture
97 See also Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of Fight Club, in “The Masochist Social Link,” where makes a similar claim about the need for connection, though it is achieved in this case through direct violence “…it is clear that its fundamental stake is to reach out and reestablish the connection with the real Other, that is, to suspend the fundamental abstraction and coldness of the capitalist subjectivity best exemplified by the figure of the lone monadic individual who, alone in front of the PC screen communicates with the entire world” (116). See also Jessica Benjamin’s “Master and Slave: The Fantasy of Erotic Domination.” Powers 122
seeks the establishment of a new ethics of care based on this shared vulnerability.
However, a disturbing development in consumer culture is that those very moments of violent dissolution have been transformed into cultural commodities today. Increasingly, cultural products seem to cater to a desire to consume that very sense of limitlessness, to sell those experiences or images of moments when boundaries dissolve. Images of violence are a commodity, as are stories of the dramatic breakdown of celebrity families and political sex scandals.
As Berlant affirms, the mass mediated fascination with intimate traumas, infidelity, and intrafamiliar violence speaks to the existence of widespread societal ambiguity in regards to the normative systems of organizing intimacy, indeed to the fragility of the social bond itself (7). Berlant asks:
What kinds of (collective, personal) authority, expertise, entailment, and
memory can be supposed, and what kind of (collective, personal) future
can be imagined if, for example, sexuality is no longer bound to its
narrative, does not lead to stabilizing something, something institutional
(like patriarchal families or other kinds of reproduction that prop up the
future of persons and nations) [?] (7)
A chasm has opened between conventional morality and evolving systems of social organization. Rapidly changing social mores confound the old stories. Meanwhile, the widespread privatization of public services, the increasing demands of hyper- consumerism, and the burden of day-to-day survival in the absence of economic
of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. Eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. New York: Monthly Review P, 1983. 280-299. 123
opportunity are stunting the ability of the conventional ideological narratives, like patriotism and marriage, to structure modern day lives. While the neoliberal governments pander to corporations, their paring down of social benefits and services forces stark and rapid change in communities. Between old value systems and new economic, technological, and philosophical realities, an epistemological and a narrative gap materialize.
Sayak Valencia offers the following formulation in regards to contemporary mutations of violence: Humanism, ethics, and other Western discourses, which undergird hegemonic concepts like the nation and the nuclear family, have never materialized or been accepted in the “Third World” in the same way as they have in the “First World,” where they are unquestionable. In other societies with different developments and cosmovisions, as Valencia affirms, these categories “can be considered some empty, abstract and tremendously far off from everyday reality” (76). In fact, Valencia notes that the mobilization of violence as a structuring epistemological system across the globe blows open the hypocrisy of humanist discourses and morality.
In the same vein, Jean Franco’s astute observation about cruelty as an inherent structuring value of modernity is now born out in frightening displays, where private individuals allied with organized crime carry out atrocities in the style of Cold War state terrorism. In July 2014, Honduran police were notified that the bodies of three women had been abandoned outside a mechanics workshop in plastic sacks. The murderers hung a sign on one of the women that read “We killed them for being MS (Mara Salvatrucha)
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bitches.”98 As Valencia points out, these third world subjects now begin to mobilize violence as currency, now perceiving it both as “a tool of self-affirmation, at the same time as a mode of subsistence” (Capitalismo gore 91). This is an inevitable reaction, she says, as we have reached the heights of hyper-consumerism, whose mandates call equally to empowered and disempowered consumers. Combined with extreme individualism, these ideologies are a deadly pair. By hoisting profit, consumption, and personal gain to the heights of a collective global religion, the transnational corporations have shattered the bases for social altruism and instead empowered the exercise of violence as the main pathway for achieving these new social ideals.
Sayak Valencia’s notion of violence as a transversal for understanding the modern world links the physical exercise of violence—as tool of self-affirmation and as a mode of subsistence—to its symbolic and market predominance. Violence becomes a commodity that inaugurates its own system of communication, entailing that a diverse array of violent images can be mobilized to gestate political agency or to generate capital.
The twist is that the real deaths of human beings generate political or economic capital, through images broadcast on the internet or via dismembered bodies left in public places.99 Though Valencia’s main focus is the culture of narcotraffic, where human bodies become expendable vehicles for drug loads or fodder for intimidating enemies, the same logic drives the dissemination of videos of Islamic be-headings captured and
98 The Mara Salvatrucha is one of two dominant gangs operating in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. This sign indicates that the rival gang, Barrio 18, was responsible for the murders. “Hallan cadaveres de tres mujeres” 30 July 2014 http://www.hoy.com.ni/2014/07/30/hallan-cadaveres-de-tres-mujeres/ 99 See also Rodríguez’s analysis of the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez as “public violence,” a concept that Rodriguez elaborates to explain how certain crimes are meant to send a message of terror to the social body as a whole (Liberalism 170). 125
broadcast via youtube across the globe.100 This politically motivated peddling of death images coexists alongside the economic megalith that is the pornography industry; the boundless availability of pornography on the Internet appeals to every taste and tenor, including its most violent variant in torture porn. These are media acts of atrocity that function as political or economic currency.
These are prime examples of the demonstrative and lucrative power of violence in the contemporary world. According to Valencia, those privileged subjects who consume violence, as opposed to those having to use it in order to belong to consumer culture at all, participate in what she calls “decorative violence,” wherein “no sector or niche of the market escapes violence, whether it’s presented as a commodity providing symbolic value or as a tool for dystopic empowerment” (91). Decorative violence as a cultural phenomenon multiplies and intensifies this desire to consume death.101
Drawing from my discussion here, the Nota Roja shows us that decorative violence is a commodity available to all socio-economic levels. The aesthetic experience of the Nota Roja likens itself to stepping to the edge of a great abyss and beholding the limitless, the endless possibility of death. Perhaps the fascination with violence points to the potential in all of us to embrace the extremes, to reach that moment of rupture when
100 In her study of Islamic beheading videos, La muerte como espectáculo, [Death as Spectacle] Michela Marzano’s argument hinges on the West-East opposition of civilization vs. barbarity: “Intención o negligencia, la circulación de estos vídeos en el límite de lo insoportable tiene como resultado instalar progresivamente en el espectador una forma de insensibilidad y de indiferencia frente al sufrimiento de los demás. De manera que el objetivo último se habrá alcanzado: eliminar, con la propia complicidad de los occidentales, toda forma de civilización” (39). 101 “Es necesario aclarar que no sólo el uso de la violencia se populariza, sino también su consumo. De esta manera la violencia se convertirá no únicamente en herramienta sino en mercancía que se dirigirá a distintos nichos de mercado; por ejemplo, el que va dirigido a las clases medias y privilegiadas, a través de la violencia decorativa. Este fenómeno hace que ningún sector o nicho de mercado escape a la violencia, sea el caso de que ésta se la presente como mercancía proveedora de valor simbólico o como herramienta de empoderamiento distópico” (91). 126
we are capable of any evil. The articles of the Nota Roja appeal to this desire for limitlessness—for a brush with the extreme—by condensing incomprehensible moments of violence into a predictable and easily consumed aesthetic package. They do so by employing palatable and familiar narrative formulas of romantic love that appeal to hegemonic notions of morality.
From my analysis of the Nota Roja, we’ve seen how mythic archetypes and melodrama provide an easily accessible moral-narrative framework for conceptualizing limit situations of violence. Many scholars have pointed out this connection between mythic narrative and the news media. As Lule claims, “More than any mass media, the daily news is the primary vehicle for myth in our time. News, of all things, has become the inheritor of humanity’s essential stories” (19). Jesús Martín-Barbero puts forth a similar notion in his article “Mass Media as a Site of Resacrilization.” He claims that television specifically “is the place for the visualization of our common myths” through mass mediated sporting events, concerts, and advertising (“Mass Media” 111). According to Martín-Barbero, today the mass media must be analyzed beyond their role as economic and technological leviathans, taking into account their contribution to the social education of our time:
Rather, the media must be analyzed as a process of creating cultural
identities and of bringing individuals into coherent publics that are
‘subjects of action.’ To conceptualize the relations of modernity,
religiosity, and media, one must see the media as a central factor in the
constitution of social actors. (“Mass Media” 102, emphasis mine)
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My question throughout this chapter, therefore, has been directed towards understanding how representations of gender violence push us towards new forms of consumption. As Rodríguez claims, the availability of aesthetics of death, especially when pertaining to dismembered feminine bodies points to new ways of seeing and knowing: “Seeing beauty in horror currently breaks down the idea of idealized selves that are separated from their object and their acceptance of the great variety of optical principles, and of all image-producing gadgets that practice constructing and deconstructing bodies” (Liberalism 193). What types of “subjects of action” do images of death create? What subjectivities do the polarized, typecast tropes presented in the Nota
Roja attempt to construct?
Myth is comforting, formulaic, repetitive, and predictable, breaking down the world into villains, heroes, and innocent victims. In a world where all guarantees are gone, and the realm of cultural products is saturated with violence, the crime press places these limit situations into a tight narrative package. The Nota Roja is a throwback, an attempt to grasp at an archaic piece of certainty in a terrifyingly uncertain world. Myth persists, but it is also true that its gendered connotations are connected to antiquated systems of morality that cannot adequately explain or fit with new forms of subjectivity wrought by hyper-consumption and technological advances.
In light of the decay of conventional stories for building “a life,” Lauren Berlant again poses the poignant question of what kinds of stories are operable when “…a generation is no longer defined by procreational chronology, but marked by trauma and death?” (7). It seems that a sense of the fragility fills the air in regards to intimate relationships. Femicide, and its consumption through narrative and visual imagery, 128
fascinate because it signifies what many already intimate: the breakdown of the patriarchal nuclear family in a spectacular fashion. Berlant affirms:
The immediacy of trauma is always sensual, but it is as likely to be a
mass-mediated event, an event of hearsay and post facto witnessing, as it
is to be a direct blow to the body; and we can see from trauma’s current
prevalence as an occasion for testimony how shocking it is when an
intimate relation is animated by sheer devastation. (7)
Fascination with femicide images translates to fascination with the horrific images of the institutions of intimacy failing, and failing in the most final and dramatic way: with death.
The polarizing and criminalizing representations in the Nota Roja constitute a facet of current economic and political trends that focus on individuals, and the individual body, as sites for disciplining, reordering, and structuring society. These ends are met through punitive and technological methods of control. Mass incarceration and neoliberal strategies of social control directly involve the mass media as vehicles for producing consent among populations (Herman and Chomsky). Marco Lara Klahr and Fracesc
Barata also address how the spectacle of media violence feeds and bolsters punitive, repressive strategies for social control:
Violence won’t be prevented with official discourse and ‘mano dura’ laws,
strategies of zero tolerance, nor with more police and troops in the streets,
acting out for the avid mediatic eye, personified by reporters and
managerial editors, a show that tries to recreate war. Apart from that,
when news agendas and content turns into an instrument to subsidize a 129
strictly punitive state focus, the media help to legitimate that repressive
State. (Klahr and Barata 134)102
Elizabeth Bernstein also highlights the troubling corollary that exists between neoliberal strategies for social control, media spectacles, and the feminist and evangelical anti-trafficking campaigns that have developed in the past fifteen years. They all embody
“a form of political engagement that is consumer and media-friendly and saturated in the tropes and imagery of the sexual culture it overtly opposes—a feminine, consumptive counterpart to the masculine politics of militaristic rescue” (63-64). Most importantly, along with Kristin Bumiller, she notes how carceral feminism implies “a vision of social justice as criminal justice, and of punitive systems of control as the best motivational deterrents for men’s bad behavior” (58). In this chapter, my claim has been that the Nota
Roja crime press participates in these broader movements towards social control through criminalization. These representations polarize gender relations by capitalizing on the already conflicted terrain of gender relations, filtered through the master narratives of romantic love, marriage, and motherhood. Above all, these representations point to troubled sites of intimacy and the consequences wrought on feminine bodies, when the unsolvable aporias of the symbolic construction of the masculine and the feminine do not find suitable answers in collective storytelling.
102 “No se prevendrá la violencia con discursos oficiales y leyes de ‘mano dura’, estrategias de ‘cero tolerancia’, ni más policías y tropas en las calles, escenificando para el ávido ojo mediático, personificado por reporteros y editores funcionales, un espectáculo que pretende recrear la guerra. Por lo demás, cuando las agendas y contenidos noticiosos se convierten en instrumento para abonar el enfoque estatal estrictamente punitivo, los medios ayudan a legitimar ese Estado represivo” (Lara Klahr and Barata 134)
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Chapter 3, The imaginary of intimate disintegration: Femicide and gender violence in contemporary Nicaraguan detective and novela negra fictions
In contemporary Nicaragua, the bodies of femicide victims constitute an unavoidable absence and a persistent presence. Replete with reports of femicide, the newspapers abstain from showing bodily destruction since the passing of Law 779.
Nonetheless, these archives, when added to the feminist protests in the streets, convey an unfathomable sense of social loss. In the wake of a recent case of femicide, La Prensa reporter Juan Tijerino stated that, “There is mourning and pain in two Nicaraguan families.”103 Affecting populations at a community level and reaching beyond the loss experienced by individual families, this social crisis seeks expression. When women are murdered in Nicaragua, in their wake representational dilemmas and conflicts infuse the scene with this sense of presence-absence. On the one hand, the tactical political policies of the Ortega regime make these deaths invisible through statistical manipulation. On the other hand, the women’s movement carries out a crucial exercise in memory-work
(Jelin), which keeps the image and identity of victims visible on the streets and in social media. This presence-absence in the spectacle of femicide seems to invoke society-wide sentiments of fascination and dread. These conflicting representations indicate widespread uncertainty. Who are the victims? Why were they murdered? Of equal importance, who are the perpetrators?
103 “Historia de violencia termina en femicidio.” La Prensa 15 January 2015. http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2015/01/14/nacionales/1745348-historia-de-violencia-termina-en-femicidio 131
Some of the root issues that answer these questions can be addressed through literary representations of gender violence in contemporary Nicaraguan literature. To do so, I examine narrative models of heroism, since recent literary heroes, guerrilleros and outcasts, have surely impacted the formation of national ideas of masculinity.
Furthermore, the troubled state of masculinities in contemporary Nicaragua begs for a thorough look at available literary models of characterization. When novels spectacularize intimate violence, often committed by the heroes themselves, we begin to ask if literary culture condones and capitalizes on this violence. What I find in these hero characters is a rather univocal conversation between masculinities that eschews any recognition of femicide and gender violence as a political, ethical, and collective health dilemma. Given that literary and mass media critics are speaking of the global rise of snuff sensibilities in popular culture, the existence of these same trends in Nicaraguan literature is cause for concern and begs further study. We may look towards the most popular variants of this aesthetic in contemporary detective and novela negra literature, television forensic crime dramas, and horror movies for clues.
In this chapter, I explore Central American variations of the detective and novela negra or neopoliciaco fictions. The heroes of these novels share a level of criminality and some measure of institutional transgression. We find in the heroes, and even secondary characters, a convergence of detective traits and criminal motives. For these reasons, I call them “criminal-hero” protagonists. I argue that this re-working of detective genre formulas is born from the ambiguous relationship to modernity in Central America.
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Molding genre expectations to Nicaraguan realities, the foiled, failed protagonists can be read as portends of a crisis of masculinity in Nicaragua.
This chapter examines two novels: Castigo divino (1988) by Sergio Ramírez and
Y te diré quién eres Mariposa traicionera (2006) by Franz Galich. These novels offer a road map for studying changing notions of crime and criminality across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Nicaraguan context depicted in these novels include the
1930s, post-marines occupation in Ramírez’s novel and the early 2000s of the
Nicaraguan post-war in Galich’s. Both novels address the malleability of the law in a compromised national context, where modernity is thwarted by imperialist intervention
(Ramírez) or by organized crime and corruption under hyper-capitalism (Galich). Also salient to their adaptation of the genre formulas of detective fiction, the criminal cases in these novels are beset by the woes of scientific underdevelopment and failed forensics
(Ramírez) or a complete vacuum of these institutional interventions (Galich). Mutating notions of crime in these conjunctures and the heroes they produce can certainly inform us about the formation of masculinities in the literary imagination. Through a feminist reading of these texts, we can envisage a crisis in the legitimacy of the charismatic strongman character and the masculine authority he embodies.
In both these novels, criminal-heroic masculinities find their occupation or find their thrills through the forensic dissection or probing of the pasts of dead female or feminized bodies, when not through their destruction. The reader truly gets the sense that these female characters are nothing more than props whose voices reach us faintly, being muted throughout the narrative. Their bodies, dead or enslaved, serve as literary currency to communicate and critique the larger values of the nation. I base my claims about the 133
centrality of these women’s corpses in Central American narrative on Ileana Rodríguez’s work on twentieth-century Central American testimony and fiction. In this masculine dominated scene, women’s bodies serve as vehicles for working through ideas of nation and community. Then, just as in contemporary fiction, women characters are one- dimensional supports for the larger projects of the masculine institutions of modernity.
The novels by Ramírez and Galich liken themselves to bookends, bracketing the transition from a revolutionary, collective national imaginary to that of the post-war transition, with its narrowing, privatized realm of collective welfare. They provide ideal counterpoints for one another due to their loose adherence to the genre of the detective novel and to the fact that, as species of crime genres, they reflect the changing social conditions from one epoch to the next. Castigo divino puts representatives of a variety of modernizing forces —journalism, criminology, forensics, policing—into play, framed in the early twentieth-century conjuncture of post-marine occupied Nicaragua. Meanwhile,
Y te diré quién eres interweaves these same institutions of the modern liberal state into a web of corrupt complicity with organized crime: arms-running and the smuggling of fine jewels.
On the other hand, various structural features unite these novels: both novels feature thwarted attempts at solving the central mystery or vanquishing the villains. They also end with the deaths of their thwarted, murdered protagonists. Furthermore, in both these novels, betrayal and trauma at the site of intimate relations precipitate the downfall of the hero and mirror his violent demise. It should come as no surprise that gender violence and issues of intimate life figure centrally in the crimes represented in these narratives. Crime stories, with the appeal of transgression they offer, have historically 134
been concerned with sexual morality. As part and parcel of the advent of modern institutional methods of social control—penal codes, police, judges—and the spread of print technology, crime stories have been read, in part, as a tool of the middle and upper classes to enforce normative moralities; often, these stories fanned the flames of fear around sexual degradation and transgression. These sexual-moral panics refer me to a critique of the bourgeois family and positivism, subtended in Latin America by racial and class tensions. Both novels deal with deep anxiety over sexual mores, though the moral panic of the twentieth century in Ramírez’s novel, to that of a moral vacuum in Galich’s novel set in the twenty-first century, in which sexual enslavement goes unnoticed and unpunished.
As I have stated, the charismatic sway of criminal-heroic masculinities includes the curious element of requisite violent intimate implosions. Indeed, images of femicide, rape, and financial opportunism occurring between protagonists reveal themselves as central literary mechanisms in these novels. Their repetition across detective and novela negra genres in other national contexts suggests that gender violence itself is central to narrating social relations in contemporary Central America. These intimate catastrophes suggest the impossibility of stable romantic bonds. They tell us that literary stories today are fraught with polarization, reflecting the troubled state of gender relations appearing in the law and in the press.
I conclude that, in these novels, femicide is a reoccurring scene that fascinates due to unresolved dynamics of control over the feminine that plague gender relations.
Knowledge-power dynamics are played out in various ways. Through a mode of characterization common in other Central American novels of these genres, female or 135
feminized characters receive a mix of dubious and/or idealizing treatment, annulling their hard-won political agency during and after the Nicaraguan revolution. They are pigeonholed into the trope of the scorned lover, the prostitute, the ill-willed femme fatale or the gold-digger. Within the narrative, these facile, one-dimensional characterizations work to highlight how femicide depictions lead to conceptions of femininities as disposable. This is a representational schema on par with political stances like mediation and asistencialismo (Chapter 1), fueling a vision of femininities as inferior and readily controlled. In its literary form, the empty characterization and consequent destruction of female characters collides with other mass-mediated spectacles that dehumanize and devalue human life. They warn us of the specter of vulnerability and precariousness that haunt a troubled, fragmented postmodernity in Central America, leading to a growing presence of gender violence across the region.
With this study, I contribute to the growing body of theoretical work on Latin
American literary crime genres by offering a feminist critique of gender relations in these novels. More specifically, the archetype of murdered women in the most recent Central
American and Mexican novela negra and policiaco novels must be read through the lens of femicide as a concrete reality in these regions. When the disturbing tales of pulp literary imaginaries seem to match the gory details of daily news reports of desecrated female bodies, we find ourselves before a most terrible form of emplotment. According to Jane Caputi, we are living in the “age of sex crime,” where the murdered, violated bodies of women proliferate across narrative forms:
Since the crimes of Jack the Ripper in 1888, sexual murder has emerged as
a mythicized criminal genre and, concomitantly, as a ritual of male sexual 136
dominance. This ritual hammers home its meaning through the most dire
physical symbolism—the displayed, frequently tortured, mutilated, and
murdered female body—an image which haunts this culture and this age.
(Caputi 6, emphasis mine)
More sharply defining this recurrent image in the Latin American context, feminist scholars who study the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez, such Julia Estela Monárrez
Fragoso, Rita Laura Segato, and Ileana Rodríguez, have advanced our ability to read these scenes of sexual murder and to understand their systemic causes. Certainly all of their work on Ciudad Juárez points to the real-life use and desecration of feminine bodies to deliver commercial, political, and inter-group messages. In post-war Central American novels, the imaginary of femicide equally communicates with readers. But the message remains unclear, since the aesthetic in these novels borders on using femicide for entertainment sake and making a denouncement. In either case, they reveal traces of a lingering misogyny and persistent anxiety about women’s place in the domestic circle and in the family in both eras. Neither novel is capable of resolving this tension, weaving instead what I call an imaginary of intimate disintegration.
Analyzing the hero in these novels means interpreting the construction of romantic love and its corollary of possession, as they constitute the nucleus of the intrigue and motors for the plots of both novels. Decoding these literary heroes can unravel the deeper social meaning derived from personal and sexual catastrophes in these contemporary texts. In an attempt to describe this textual reality, I use the term imaginary of intimate disintegration. This idea refers to the spectacular nature in which normative intimate relations, embodied in a heterosexual coupling, implode violently in the Central 137
American war and Post-war literary field, forming a central nucleus that signifies continued gender polarization and the wider social collapse.
Signaling the untenable and opposing interests of heterosexual partners, the term imaginary of intimate disintegration alludes to the aesthetic appeal to romantic catastrophes and traumas, most often in the form of partner violence and femicide, in these novels. What’s more, economic self-interest moves to the fore in the later novel, indicating the social decay wrought by hyper-capitalism and the frailness of bonds of solidarity. If the intimate relations are a site of trauma, intervention, and spectacle across the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century they are haunted by the specter of complete commercialization: here lurks the possibility of being used, robbed, or even sold into sexual slavery.
This chapter carries out an examination of the imbrication of criminality, sexuality, and intimate bonds in these twentieth-century cultural texts. Ramírez’s novel tears down the normative early twentieth-century fantasy of the family, parodying sensationalized discourses that warned of perversion, aberrance, and moral degradation, and thus revealing the fragility of the nuclear family’s bonds. The journalistic visions of scandalized and scandalizing intimacies echo contemporary journalism’s use of hegemonic markers of gender performance to assign guilt or innocence.
The most recent fiction, however, evidences a complete lifting of taboos on the literary depiction of sexual practices—both coerced and consensual (although various episodes trod the blurry line between them)—and a simultaneous embracing of snuff imaginaries. Echoing Jean Franco’s claim that the twentieth century witnessed the erasure of all taboos in regards to human cruelty, here I explore this notion in regards to the 138
breakdown of understanding in romantic relations. I believe that sexual violence in the literary imagination reflects both the desires of a market avid for sexual trauma and destruction and, simultaneously, a clamorous rejection of these disconcerting developments in the social realm.
The changing texture of social organization in contemporary Central America, and the literature engendered by these changes, calls out for new conceptual frameworks that are capable of explaining polarization in the region. I argue that narrative scenes of gender violence provide a key to this puzzle because they represent a microcosm of larger processes of unrest and social disintegration. As we collectively uncovered in a seminar on Masculinities in Central America, carried out by Ohio State students and researchers at the Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America, the micropolitics
[micropolítica] of the intimate social realm prove most tenacious and unpredictable in their assimilation and reenactment of violence mirrored on a macro-social level. The question that repeatedly came up in our seminar was the polemic of how to trace a genealogy of violent masculinities and their corollary of aggression in intimate relations.
Which currents of culture—literary, visual, political—continue to foster reactionary brands of interpersonal relations that are resistant to the growing influence of socially egalitarian movements? This is strikingly perplexing precisely because of the breadth and diversity feminist movement in Nicaragua.
I suspect that the imbrication of aggression and polarization in intimate relations can be explained, in part, by Michel Foucault’s notion of sexuality as a productive discourse in modernity. Foucault defines the “devices of sexual saturation,” as those institutional spaces of modernity that became saturated with power-pleasure dynamics: 139
educational and psychiatric institutions, the family home, the dorm room, or the consulting office (45). In Galich’s novel, an aesthetic appears that sheds light on what we might be able to call the contemporary mutation of the devices of sexual saturation, which are still rooted in the institutions of modernity such as the military and the schools.
The new devices, however, also include mass-mediated forms of entertainment that make violent images available and glorify their use. The commercialization and spectacularization of imaginaries of violent death, which are often sexual in nature, create new venues for power-pleasure dynamics where the viewer or reader increasingly can access these representations. This term also refers to the parallel social world of organized crime in Central America, where violent models of sexuality stem from wartime experiences. The technologies and mechanisms of market relations under neoliberalism foment an increasing commercialization of human bodies. These images seem to expand across genres and mediums, creating new mediatized modes of exercising power and pleasure that involve a violence-tinged death aesthetic.
These larger global currents of representation blend with existing paradigms of masculinity in Nicaragua. My main argument here is that the figure of militarized masculinity in visual and literary culture, with all its authoritarian implications, coupled with persistent notions of possession as integral to romantic love, have been strong enough factors in the construction of contemporary sexuality to illicit the forms of gender violence appearing today. By tracing the transformations of these literary criminal- heroes, we can envision these contours of contemporary Nicaraguan masculinities.
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Crime in modernity and postmodernity: Nicaraguan Detective and novela negra fictions
As many critics confirm, detective fiction constitutes a truly modern genre due to its appeal to scientific rationalism and the structuring capabilities of liberal institutions of justice. According to Persephone Braham, the defining characteristic of the detective novel in Spanish American letters has been “…a concern with foreign paradigms of modernity, and ultimately the failure of liberalism and its constituent elements in a
Hispanic context” (ix). Undoubtedly, the appearance and growth in popularity of crime fiction and detective novels intertwine with processes of scientific and institutional modernization. Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and the
English novels of enigma, the foundational texts of the modern detective story, communicate blind faith in the scientific method and the abilities of the non-professional, ingenious detective to thwart the schemes of evil individuals (Bailey and Hale 8-9). In the imaginaries of these variations of the genre, crime stemmed from the inborn flaws of twisted, evil characters and echoed the positivist social theories of the day, fruit of thinkers like Comte and Spencer.
Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia claims that the development of the novela policíaca or novela negra in Latin America owes more of a debt to the North American hardboiled novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, than to the English and
French models of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Poe (67). Commenting on his early evaluation of these hard boiled novels, Piglia states that when judged on the criteria of the classic novels of enigma, they seemed to be “bad police novels: confusing, unformed, chaotic, they seemed to be the degraded versions of a refined and harmonious genre” 141
(67).104 However, this early perception changed in light of the capacity of these variants of the genre to question the legitimacy of the social order itself. Most fitting for my discussion of Ramírez and Galich’s novels, Piglia’s definition of the novela negra strikes at the heart of conceptions of crime and intuitional justice in Latin American modernity.
The best definition, he claims, is based on a poignant quote from Bertold Brecht, who asks, “What is robbing a bank, compared to founding one?” (70).105 Indeed, critics such as Misha Kokotovic, Braham, and Piglia agree that Latin American authors were more apt to develop novels akin to the hard boiled, or novela negra traditions due to their questioning of the institutions of modernity:
If the task of the detective in the ‘classic’ police narrative is to resolve the
enigma of a crime to restore the social order, in the novela negra the
detective investigates and reveals the corruption and criminality of the
social order itself. (Kokotovic 185)106
Kokotovic’s assertion hits the mark when describing contemporary Central American variants of the genre, which are especially concerned with the growing imbrication of organized criminal associations with police and judiciary institutions.
The plots of both of the Central American novels that I explore here center on a crime that needs to be cleared up and, therefore, conform to the loose definition of detective fiction provided by Braham, who states that despite a lack of clear consensus, most critics agree that: “…detective fiction is a product of mass culture, that it is
104 “…malas novelas policiales: confusas, informes, caóticas, parecían la versión degradada de un género refinado y armónico” (67). 105 “¿Qué es robar un banco comparado con fundarlo?” (70). 106 “Si la tarea del detective en la narrativa policial ‘clásica’ es resolver el enigma del crimen para restaurar el orden social, en la novela negra el detective investiga y revela la corrupción y criminalidad del orden social mismo” (185). 142
formulaic, and that its nucleus is the reconstruction of events leading to a criminal act”
(xii). Both novels adhere to the more systemic, socially aware perspective of the hard- boiled novel, which focuses on the decay of urban landscapes, the inner workings of criminal institutions and organizations, and the general decadence and immorality of modern societies. Both novels also evidence the particular mood of the hard-boiled genre, portraying “…disaffection and alienation and focus[ing] closely, often obsessively, on human character flaws; depict[ing] in a more or less realistic fashion both its setting and the social or ideological problems of that setting” (Braham xiii).
My main focus in this chapter will be the clear divergences that Ramírez and
Galich’s novels take in terms of their characterization of heroes, formulas that embody a mix of the hard-boiled and neopolicíaco trends. Castigo divino employs a collective cast of heroes, exemplified by the Dr. Antanasio Salmerón, a lower class medical doctor, and his rag-tag team of everyman-cum-investigators of the “Table of the Damned” [la Mesa
Maldita] led by the journalist Rosalío Usulutlán. The search for the truth hinges on scientific proof and public rumor in the novel, likening it, in part, to a classic enigma novel. In a strange twist, however, the purported criminal, Oliverio Castañeda, is converted into a hero at the end of the novel in his capacity as a martyred victim of
Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard. In this way, Ramírez’s critique takes an anti- imperialist bent, understandable in the context of the Contra War that was ravaging the
Sandinista government’s projects in the late eighties. Interestingly, Ramírez wrote
Castigo divino during his years as Vice-president of Nicaragua.
On the other hand, the hero in Y te diré quién eres, demobilized ex-Sandinista special forces solider Pancho Rana, perfectly embodies Braham’s definition of a 143
neopolicíaco hero: “…its detectives are vigilantes who expose themselves to the viciousness and corruption of society with a paradoxical mix of cynicism and idealism”
(xiii). But in Pancho Rana’s character we envisage the disillusionment and aimlessness that characterize the figure of the demobilized solider in Central American Post-war literature. He is haunted by the betrayal of revolutionary ideals by his commanding officers that got in bed with the counter-revolutionary leaders through formalized politics after the democratic transition. This betrayal leads Rana to adopt a stance of apathy and cynicism, a materialist opportunism that knocks down his social ideals. In fact, at the beginning of the novel, which is a sequel to the novel Managua Salsa City: Devórame otra vez, Rana is already deeply involved in criminal activities. His moral and political stance remain ambiguous, as he tracks down his bosses’ stolen jewels that he originally had planned to steal before being thwarted by a gang of ex-Contra fighters. His search for the missing jewels is interwoven throughout the novel with his growing vendetta against the traitors of the revolution, ending in a spree of crimes throughout Central America and two spectacular attacks against current political leaders. As I will argue, Rana can be called an anti-hero, or a criminal-hero, who exemplifies the contradictions and polarizations of a crime-ridden Central American post-war scene.
The formulas used by Ramírez and Galich reveal how Central American authors utilize detective, novela negra, and neopolicíaco genre formulas to deconstruct autochthonous or imported institutional and commercial ideologies that characterize modernity and postmodernity, respectively. Akin to Braham’s assertions in her monograph on Mexican and Cuban detective fiction, I believe that the adaptation of these genres by Ramírez and Galich “…serve as a fulcrum for exposing the fissures and 144
divergences that characterize the performance of modernity” (x). Though these novels offer critiques of a multitude of aspects of modernity and postmodernity, I am most interested in the models of modern masculinity that they enact. Furthermore, the imbrication of criminal transgression and gender violence in these novels can inform us about the sites of continued polarization in social relations as they are informed by these institutional, political and economic realities.
In her book El cuerpo del delito, Josefina Ludmer claims that transgressions of the law in literature provide a discursive space in which to discuss changing social terrains. In the introduction, she focuses on crime in Argentinian fiction through the lens of its productive capacities in modern societies. Quoting Karl Marx, she emphasizes that the criminal not only produces crimes, but also produces police, laws, courts, judges, lawyers, and professors of criminology who teach about the laws (12). This certainly holds true today in the age of mass-incarceration, as ever increasing prison populations require more lawyers, judges, police, and private security firms. In turn, the popularity of mystery and thriller novels, television true crime stories, and forensic crime dramas remind us that stories about crime continue to be mobilized to found and delimit the boundaries of cultures. Literature especially, through stories of crime and transgression, has been a central transmitter of knowledge about the boundaries of social life. According to Ludmer, “Since the very beginning of literature, crime appears as one of the most utilized instruments to define and found a culture: to separate it from non-culture and to signal that which culture excludes” (13). Crime’s social and narrative utility has only been further confirmed with the advent of the broad sheet, the newspaper, the folletín, the novel, and other forms of mass media. 145
Mass fascination with crime stories dates back to before the spread of print technology, however, given that stories of heroic deeds and transgressions circulated via epic poetry, song, and folktales, as well as through a number of other channels before modernity (Bailey and Hale 5). But the spread of positivistic science and bourgeois morality translated to an intense societal focus on the nuclear family unit, as Foucault claims in The History of Sexuality. Through schooling, psychoanalysis, and medicine, this attention extended to the realm of perceived transgressions and violations of the sacredness of the family, itself understood as the foundation of liberal society. According to John G. Calwelti, in nineteenth-century England and America public enjoyment of crime stories involving families revealed ambivalence towards these transgressions.
Although the domestic sphere was
the focal point of conceptions of morality and social authority….the
literature of crime and the actual crimes that most fascinated the public
were primarily the murder of relatives…These were the staples of the
classical detective story and the great Victorian murder trials. (Quoted in
Bailey and Hale 6)
In the framework of Victorian conceptions of morality, the gendered connotations of these stories most likely hinged on the failure of women fulfilling their duty to control the uncivilized elements of human nature. This may well have also implied violations of the parent-child relationship in the myriad forms in which this could, and did, take place.
Ludmer contributes a thought-provoking notion as to how age or gender differences have often been utilized to mark the boundaries of culture. She traces the delimiting role of crime in literature back to biblical stories, as well as to the 146
psychoanalytic theories of Freud, as for example in “the feminine ‘crime’ in Genesis or afterwards ‘the murder of the father by the primitive horde of children in Freud” (13). As
I have affirmed in Chapter 2, religious imagery and stories continue to communicate the blameworthiness of women in Nicaragua today. Milagros Palma reminds us that an entire symbolic imaginary pierces the consciousness of men and women, it “confuses feminine consciousness, so that even women perceive themselves as evil subjects, or abject objects of pleasure” (12). This corroborates Ludmer’s claim that in order to delimit the boundaries of a culture, there must be an “anti-culture” and an outsider:
Founding a culture on the basis of the ‘crime’ of young people, of the
second generation, or founding it on the ‘crime’ of the second sex, implies
not only excluding anti-culture, but also proposing a blameworthy/guilty
second-class subjectivity. And also a pact. (13)
It is not an exaggeration to claim that Eve’s ‘crime’ colors modern morality and conceptions of the family in Nicaragua today. I will argue here that in the stories of crime presented in Ramírez and Galich’s novels, more than as victims of crime, women are depicted as adequate sacrificial bodies on the altars of modernity and postmodernity.
Whether they are burned up in the fires of moral intrigue and scandal, or sold into sexual slavery, their bodies seem to be fodder for the societal critiques carried out by these male authors.
Castigo divino: moral scandals and femicide
To begin to speak of gender violence in Sergio Ramírez’s novel Castigo divino takes us directly to the cemetery, where an archetypal scene of the detective novel is 147
played out: the autopsy. In this case, the scene involves the exhumation of two women, both suspected to have been murdered by poisoning. I start my analysis with this scene because it exemplifies the morally charged, invasive, and morbid curiosity with which the detectives and the whole of Leonese society investigate (women’s) sexuality in the novel.
At first glance, the enigma at hand appears to be whether the victims—the wife of the accused, a young woman, and her father—died from poisoning. However, it soon becomes clear that the real object of the amateur detectives’ search is the truth about the supposed sexual relations between the accused murderer and the deceased woman,
Matilde Contreras. Decaying corpses dissected and described in sterile medical terminology: few images portray the lengths that these institutions [of moral propriety] would go to in order to ascertain some grain of truth about intimate relations. Upon examining the cadaver of Matilde Contreras, the elite Dr. Darbishire asks that the record show: “Upon external examination of the genital organs, the complete integrity of the aforementioned organs was confirmed, from which it was concluded that the deceased died in a state of virginity” (321). Through this scene, Ramírez deconstructs the credibility of forensic medicine in 1930s Nicaragua, showing its susceptibility to the dictates of normative morality. But furthermore, it is symbolic of the intense scrutiny that women suffer due to these moral dictates, which in a chain of variants of violence can end in femicide.
Written with the formalistic underpinnings of a late nineteenth, early twentieth- century journalistic chronicle, Castigo divino examines the primary meaning-making institutions of modernity: the judiciary, the military, the newspaper, and even literature itself. Ramírez is playful regarding the prestige of lettered city, with journalists, judges, 148
and amateur poets members vying for social status in pursuit of the truth behind a highly publicized criminal case. The case involves Guatemalan émigré Oliverio Castañeda, who is implicated in a series of suspicious deaths that occur in his social circle and include his wife, his rumored lover, and his business associate. The social circle in question, we must note, provides a key for interpreting the class commentary of the novel, as critics such as
Uriel Quesada have pointed out (171). Through his charming, seductive mannerisms,
Castañeda gains access to the exclusive Contreras household, a bastion of tradition in the city of Leon’s tightly-knit, upper-class society. He manages a much coveted social invitation and an eventual lodging in the house, due to his good looks, after the two
Contreras daughters, Matilde and María Pilar, catch a glimpse of him from their wicker chairs during their evening social hour on the patio. In the usual fashion, Ramírez’s sense of humor around the functions of the human body tempers Castañeda’s handsome countenance with one tragic flaw: the poor gentleman suffers from persistent halitosis.
Castañeda’s entrance to the upper-echelon of Leonese society is most unwelcome by some, who label him as an opportunist and a social climber in the wake of the suspicious deaths.
According to the narrator, upon the death of Don Carmen Contreras, Maltilde’s father, the courts opened the “most talked about criminal case in the judicial history of
Nicaragua” (217). The Castañeda case gained such notoriety for myriad reasons: the fact that Castañeda was a foreigner, from the lower-middle class that was able to climb socially in an era when that kind of mobility was hard-won. Mainly, however, the case causes sever social anxiety and speculation, inspiring a morbid curiosity about the intimate access that Castañeda gained to the young women of this illustrious family. A 149
moral and sexual panic surges up at the center of criminal controversy and the city of
Leon burns with gossip. As I will discuss, a classed division of opinion appears between the moral puritanism of the upper classes and the mass of society that thrives off the rumor and intrigue.
Marta, Castañeda’s wife, becomes the first to succumb to a mysterious attack of convulsions. Many witnesses attest to Castañeda’s alarm over the sickness, which he reports to several bystanders has been caused by a menstrual hemorrhage. This does not coincide with Dr. Darbishire, the Contreras’ family doctor, who diagnoses malaria with pernicious fever as the cause of death. At this point in the story, Marta and Castañeda had spent a few months in the Contreras household and then moved into their own dwelling.
The death does not catch the public’s attention yet, despite the fact that the year before
Castañeda was involved in the poisoning of a crop of street dogs, for which he procured strychnine from the local pharmacist. Castañeda goes back to live with the Contreras, upon the insistence of Doña Flora Contreras, who according to the participants of the
Mesa Maldita “is much more beautiful that her two daughters combined” (98). The deaths of Matilde Contreras and her father Don Carmen occur shortly after the death of
Marta, in the same mysterious circumstances. Thanks to the amateur sleuthing of Dr.
Antanasio Salmerón, Judge Mariano Fiallos opens a judicial case against Castañeda. Dr.
Salmerón, who suspected Oliverio Castañeda ever since he saw the movie Castigo divino, starring Charles Laughton, and because of the dog poisoning episode, sets up a stake out in front of the Contreras house after Matilde’s death. Sure that Don Carmen will be next,
Dr. Salmerón is ready when his suspicions are confirmed and Don Carmen falls ill.
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Rushing to the bed side, Dr. Salmerón extracts the gastric juices that should prove whether or not strychnine was present.
Castigo divino represents an unveiled critique of positivistic knowledge. The possibility of objectivity in forensic science and the judicial system are put on trial and revealed to be flawed, this largely in the framework of disputes over institutional scientific underdevelopment and the constant meddling of the National Guard throughout the course of the trial. The two scientific tests performed to prove the presence of strychnine contradict one another: the gastric juices of Don Carmen test negative for the alkaloid, while the dogs and cats injected with the juices die in the same state of convulsions as the victims. Therefore, conclusive proof is never offered. We find no juridical, scientific, or sentimental resolution in the novel. Oliverio Castañeda’s criminality is never quite confirmed. Rather, we are left with the speculation of the “vox populi” as the only source of information. Consequently, the novel presents an array of conflicting and contradictory truths, but an overall fascination with criminality shared by members of society: a representational constellation that encompasses intrigue, sentimental scandal, and murder. “Literature, gossip, and adultery” come to foment moral panic in early twentieth-century Nicaragua (Ramírez 308).
Three powerful forces come together in the novel to try and suppress the rumors of sexual iniquity that begin to circulate upon the death of Matilde Contreras.
Representing the long-standing power structure in Nicaragua, the church, the upper class, and the military authorities come together to defend the status quo of the social order.
The crime story constitutes a threat to morality, to the class structure, and to law and order, as the criminal proceedings have attracted a fair-like atmosphere of crowds 151
gathering outside the university laboratories, the Contreras house, and the Court. In his chronicle that documents the crowds gathering around these institutions of modernity,
Rosalío Usulutlán reports that in the atmosphere is a fervor and massiveness he would normally attribute to Catholic celebrations. However:
…But Christian faith has been substituted for a pagan fervor, a high
voltage current that shakes the heavy drowsiness of commonplace
everyday happenings… sensation is in style, and so is asking and
responding; and in the anxiousness to know and to comment on, the young
and the old come together, those who wear suit jackets and those who
wear t-shirts, the powerful and the commoner, because that’s how the
news is when it electrifies. (249)107
What Usulutlán does not allege directly is the following: it is the news of romantic intrigue and intimate tragedy that have the ability to electrify. Attracting the attention of the moral guardians of society—Church, upper classes, and military—the case presents a serious threat to the most sacred nucleus for these powerful forces: the family.
The scandal truly explodes when public rumors about Castañeda’s sexual relations are textualized as a purportedly fictional story in one of Rosalío Usulutlán’s publications, entitled “When the river murmurs, it carries rocks,”108 an allusion to the credibility of public rumors. Written in flowery modernist prose using pseudonyms, the story weaves a tale of feminine competition and jealousy over the attentions of
107 “Pero la fe cristiana ha sido sustituida por un ardor pagano, corriente de muchos voltios que sacude la pesada modorra del zafio devenir cotidiano…la sensación está de moda, y lo mismo el preguntar que el responder; y en la ansiedad de saber y comentar, se unen el grande y el pequeño, los de saco con los de camisa, el pudiente y el mengalo, porque así es la noticia cuando electriza" 249 108 “Cuando suena el río, piedras lleva” (339-348). 152
Castañeda, alleging that all three Contreras women disputed, causing the jealousy and eventual demise of his wife Marta. The story also accuses Castañeda of killing Matilde and Don Carmen so as to marry the younger María Pilar and gain the family’s fortune.
The tone of the piece is mocking, essentially blaming the Contreras women alongside
Castañeda for the intrigue and murder. Even from the perspective of one of the detectives of the Mesa Maldita, these women are depicted as blameworthy due to their violation of moral norms. Much of the weight of blame falls on the mother, nicknamed Doña Ninfa in the article, for letting the wolf into her house and for pursuing him along with her daughters.
The story causes a social uproar and leads to the military persecution of Usulutlán and Dr. Salmerón, with the latter being thrown in jail. The church and a group of upper- class citizens of León band together in the wake of the article to institute a “Crusade of
Moral Salubriousness,” in which they march through the streets chanting such slogans as
“Up with the morals of our elders!”109 The Crusade goes to great pains to defend the honor of the widow and her daughter and deny that sexual relations occurred in their household (333). Class loyalty is espoused in the face of perceived social dissolution coming from the lower classes (or foreigners) that purportedly attack “order and family tradition” (333). In a petition that the Crusade passes around, entitled the “Agreement of
Just Reparations and Christian adhesion,” the members affirm:
Only social resentment and the dissolving of customs that carry with them
so many dangers in these times for order and family tradition, as well as
109 “La cruzada de la sanidad moral” (333). 153
for our religious beliefs, could have caused the author…to rebel in such a
manner against decency and in favor of excessive slander. (333)110
Clearly, a moral panic has broken out over the virginity of young women and the chasteness of married women. The coming together of sex and murder in this scandal refers us back to the troubled texture of the patriarchal nuclear family in early modernity.
Intimate items become charged with social meaning during moral panics. As rumors emerge about Castañeda’s sexual encounters with the youngest Contreras, María
Pilar, early criminological science mobilizes the soiled sheet from a romantic encounter to form a main part of the “cuerpo del delito” or body of proof in a criminal case. In effect, the sheet from the romantic encounters [“la sabana de los encuentros amorosos”] becomes a key meaning-maker in the Castañeda file, along with letters, journalistic chronicles, and small scraps of paper. These fragmented scraps of evidence confirm the vacuum of truth that coalesces around clandestine sexual relationships. The lack of conclusive evidence in the novel, propped up by rampant rumors, also asserts a lack of control over a terrain of human social relations that proves most difficult to constrict. It becomes clear that the father, Don Contreras, has lost control of his very domain of power: his own family.
The equation is simple: control over the women contained in the family unit is likened to the very health of society. The scandal becomes known across the country.
Even renowned journalist Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Zelaya of La Prensa describes the threat of the scandal as an attack on society itself:
110 […solo el resentimiento social y la disolución de costumbres que tantos peligros entrañan en estos tiempos para el orden y la tradición familiar, así como para nuestras creencias religiosas, pudo haber llevado al autor…a rebelarse de tal manera encontra de la decencia y en favor de la calumnia desmedida” (333) 154
The republic lives through evil times, when the foundations of morality
find themselves defied by such vile and cunning attacks on the first and
most sacrosanct of our institutions: the family…the social body will soon
see itself covered in wounds and exposed to excruciating dismemberment.
(Ramírez 281).111
This sentiment reveals a patriarchal national consciousness that is more concerned with the appearance of moral purity than with the actual murdered women. This aesthetic appeal to death and dismemberment situates women’s adherence to sexual norms as a requisite for their survival and for the nation’s survival. The underlying concern is also with the patriarch Don Carmen Contreras’s ability to maintain the integrity of his family.
What is at risk, then, is masculine authority itself.
In Sergio Ramírez’s novel, the death of the father equals a crisis of authority and an institutional crisis, all communicated through the dead bodies of women. Declaring the virginity of a corpse becomes an incantation, an effort to scare away the serious threat of social collapse wrought by challenges to normative morality, with all their symbolic implications in official discourse. The stability of the local and national community founds itself on the control of the reproductive sphere. Commenting on the autopsy scene in the cemetery, where Ramírez offers explicit details about the terrible odor of the dead bodies, Rodríguez states, “The fact that women are putrid, or the ideology that holds that women stink, is invoked in that fetid rankness, stressing the distaste for a relationship
111 “Tiempos malos vive la república, cuando los cimientos de la moral se ven desafiados por ataques tan viles y arteros a la primera y más sacrosanta de nuestras instituciones: la familia...el cuerpo social se verá pronto cubierto de llagas y expuesto a lacerante desmembración” (281).
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between men and women problematized by the gender division (Women 11). The existing gender division portrayed in Castigo divino relies on submission of women to masculine authority. The shaking up of this scheme, embodied in Castañeda’s crimes of seduction and women’s succumbing to his advances, reveal the untenable nature of existing moral frameworks. The violation of upper class marriage and family in this text signals that intimate relations are a site of dissatisfaction and conflict.
In the figure of Castañeda, Ramírez instills some of the key values of the successful middle class political rebel: he questions traditional morality, he uses his charms to move through social circles and gain information, and he clandestinely moves arms to support a resistance movement. As a political dissident against the dictatorship in his home country of Guatemala, Castañeda’s forced exile sprang from his supposed leadership role in arms running and organizing an armed rebellion against General Ubico.
The regional bonds of friendship between military strongmen unite Ubico and General
Somoza are confirmed by in Somoza’s pursuit of Castañeda. But General Somoza acts to defend his own interests as well: his kinship ties with the Contreras family make the criminal-moral scandal a blemish on his aspirations to power. The imbrication of legitimate, morally pure kinship relations with legitimate political power in Nicaragua proves the colonial roots of these social relations. It also points to an authoritarian model of governance that is mirrored in the family relations I have analyzed here.
From Ramírez’s perspective, this mode of governance is due largely to foreign intervention, which undermines the authority of the justice system. We see this in the
National Guard’s snatching of evidence and extra judiciary execution of Castañeda.
Judge Mariano Fiallos may be the only character in the novel that clearly embodies a just, 156
unambiguous stance. On the other hand, in the end, the ambiguous criminal-hero
Castañeda is martyred when the National Guard illegally executes him. The court is effectively incapacitated in its duties. In this way, Castigo divino does carry out a critique of a colonized, corrupt society that the novela policíaca entails. According to Uriel
Quesada,
Castigo divino is a novela policíaca, that departs from the story of the
possible murders to explore the problem of historical truth, an elusive
truth, that places the legal framework in question that generates it, a truth
that is finally reduced to a violent imposition by the dominant social and
military class. (172)112
This leads us to question the notion of the very possibility of realizing modernity in
Nicaragua: its public sphere is perpetually tainted by foreign intervention and their military collaborators at home.
The explosion of violence at the heart of the family is by no means secondary to the violent actions carried out by the U.S.-backed National Guard. As I have argued here, the imaginary of intimate disintegration presented in Ramírez’s novel points to the uncontrollable, unpredictable nature of gendered sexual relations. The often untenable, incompatible interests that arise as a result of imposing masculine authority are reflected in the institutional crises that question the possibility of democratic political governance in Nicaragua. Throughout the novel, women balk at the moral standards imposed upon
112 “Castigo divino es una novela policiaca, que parte del relato de los posible asesinatos para explorar el problema de la verdad histórica, una verdad elusiva, que pone en crisis el marco legal en el que se genera, una verdad que se reduce finalmente a una imposición violenta por parte de la clase social y militar dominante” (172).
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them, but are silenced through a variety of measures: there is a complete absence of women protagonists, nor do they even speak in the novel, except through the judicial record. Marta and Matilde die, while the widow Doña Flora’s reputation is completely ruined. Women’s voices are but echoes in the journalistic and legal discourses that track their compliance or non-compliance with patriarchal society. Rodríguez’s stance on women’s dead bodies in twentieth-century Central American testimony and fiction that she puts forth in Women, Guerrillas, and Love confirms these conclusions:
I see the deconstruction of the nation-state inextricably linked to the
representation of women (erotics) as dead. The backdrop is Sommer’s
thesis on nation-building as a love story, and Franco’s metaphor of woman
as nation. My argument is that the casting of women as corpse, and the
gradual exclusion of love from literature, signals the nation-state’s
deconstruction, and the people’s de-nationalization—the representation of
love for women and love for country operating in tandem. (xix, emphasis
mine)
Indeed, no sentimental bond survives the conclusion of the novel. Relations between mother and daughter, husband and wife, and even the brotherhood of the Mesa Maldita, are torn asunder in these conflictive realities. From the historical vantage point of the breakdown of Sandinista governance, Sergio Ramírez reveals how the project of
Nicaraguan nationhood in modernity has been a problematic project. The aesthetic of spectacularization of dead female bodies connects his novel to contemporary Central
American fiction, where romantic love also collapses as a source of possible
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reconciliation. Any claims for women’s autonomy are safely buried in this textual landscape.
Y te diré quién eres: commodification and spectacularization of gender violence
The role of femicide and autopsy in Castigo divino confirms Glen S. Close’s assertion about the cadaver in modern detective fiction:
In modern literary culture, detective fiction, especially in its forensic
medical variant, has long thrived on the enduring fascination of the
cadaver and on the comfort provided by its imaginary containment within
narrative rituals of investigation. (122)
As I explored above, the institutions of science intervene with definitive statements about a woman’s corpse in order to affirm the validity of an obviously defunct normative order of morality. Fascination with women’s dead bodies was mediatized and sensationalized through the medium of print journalism in Castigo divino, enveloping these disturbing happenings in the narrative rituals of containment described by Close.
However, the additional strangeness provided by the cemetery setting and the un- scientific declaration of virginity place us squarely under the tutelage of weak, pre- modern states. Although Sergio Ramírez’s novel takes place in the 1930s, it captures a much more postmodern aesthetic of fragmentation and societal decay, symbolized by women’s cadavers. Ramírez weaves a textual aesthetic where women’s voices only become audible through the judicial record, while many voices speak about them and for them in journalistic discourse and rumor. Their dead bodies are made to speak to the impossible bonds of romantic love and the breakdown of community ties. Speaking about
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narrative containment through autopsy, Close asserts that, “the recent intensification of morbid spectacularization has altered this balance, but has not yet done away with it altogether” (122). He could very well be addressing the literary transition that occurs between Ramírez and Galich’s novels. While he would be correct in regards to the former, the latter novel completely embraces the “morbid spectacularization” of violence, and specifically of a snuff-tinged aesthetic of femicide.
Sergio Ramírez’s novel appeared in 1988, just before the Sandinistas would lose the elections and Doña Violeta Barrios de Chamorro would help bring about Nicaragua’s transition to a neoliberal model of governance. What took place during this period of transition would have lasting consequences, both conciliatory and polarizing, for the resolution of ten years of tenacious armed combat. The destruction of thousands of firearms, taken from demobilized Sandinista and Contra soldiers, would prevent the rampant spread of organized criminality that occurred in El Salvador and Guatemala. As
Salvador Martí i Puig and Diego Ancochea confirm, the Sandinista revolution
…created a police force that is close to the community and respects human
rights, a reduced army with less narco penetration and an extensive
network of civic associations in the neighborhoods that are able to contain
juvenile delinquency. (112)113
Due to this legacy, Nicaragua enjoys lower levels of crime and violence, though the penetration of the maras from El Salvador and Honduras seems a constant threat.
113 “…creó una policía de proximidad y respetuosa a los derechos humanos, un ejército reducido con menor penetración del narco y una extensa red de asociaciones cívicas presente en los barrios que logra contener la delincuencia juvenil” (112). 160
Unfortunately, these promising aspects of Nicaraguan post-war society don’t translate to increased security for women. In contrast with official political discourse, that confirms Nicaragua’s place as the safest Central American country, femicide in intimate relationships plagues the country. Uniting these two novels, and forming a bridge between revolutionary governance and the neoliberal turn, the imaginary of intimate disintegration presents itself yet again in the impossibility of realizing stable, reciprocal romantic relations. Y te diré quién eres textualizes the persistence of the problems presented in Ramírez’s novel: crises in the institutions of modernity, the illegitimacy of masculine authority on an individual and political scale, and the violent dissolution of romantic bonds. In Galich’s novel, several instances of gender violence cement this imaginary: the abduction into sexual slavery of La Guajira, the protagonist’s lover, the murder of a prostitute, and the hero’s participation in selling women for his own commercial gain. In contrast with Castigo divino, in Y te diré quién eres femicide and gender violence take place in a vacuum of “rituals of narrative containment” through institutional investigation, to borrow Glen S. Close’s terminology. There are no autopsies or judicial records of these crimes. They pass in the blink of an eye, their victims abandoned to a lonely, isolated fate.
Rodríguez’s assertion about the health of the nation being tied in literature to romantic outcomes could not ring more true in light of developments in contemporary
Nicaraguan narrative. In Galich’s novel, the impossible love between la Guajira and
Pancho Rana is framed by Rana’s acid hatred for the country’s elites who sold the country to further their own interests. As Rana’s cynical political stance goes as follows:
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What good is it to have or cling to the idea of belonging to a nation, where
those who have fought for the mother country, for the ideals of a nation,
we are constantly expelled by a small group of cunning people, [“vivos”]
for whom the mother country is only a cake… that’s why the stepfathers
of the country don’t mean jack to me. (103-104)114
As a former Sandinista Special Forces officer, Rana laments more than anyone the abandonment of revolutionary values. Referring here to La Piñata, the last push of
Sandinista legislation, through which many political leaders personally appropriated formerly state-held land holdings and enterprises, Rana’s communicates a deep disillusionment with the corruption that has taken hold of the country (103-104). As I argue here, his ill-fated, unrealized love for La Guajira parallels the disintegration of revolutionary patriotism, indeed of the very notion of political idealism itself.
Throughout the novel, Rana displays a complete lack of faith in corrupt neoliberal governments and a rejection of the possibility of finding the truth, a negation of reason itself. True political and economic allegiances are hidden from view, disguising the collusion of police officials with organized crime. So it is that Misha Kokotovic’s claim about the parentage ties of the Central American novela policíaca with the North
American hard-boiled genre rings true: “It’s a narrative that prefers violence to cold and distant deduction. Law, justice, and their representatives are questioned, and in many cases represent the biggest source of violence and corruption” (179). This societal state of affairs reflects cleanly the assertion that crime is productive in modern society, as
114 “de que sirve tener o hacerse la idea de pertenecer a una patria, donde los que han luchado por la patria, por los ideales de una nación, somos constantemente expulsados por un grupito de vivos para quienes la patria es sólo un pastel...por eso es que me valen turca los padrastros de la patria” 103-104 162
Ludmer showed us. However, neoliberal politics institute a model of corporate crime. In this scheme, the criminals occupy the seats of power, while criminality also permeates throughout the social classes of society. As Kokotovic affirms, in the Central American novela policíaca “the heroes tend, rather, to be losers, even despite having cultural and social capital that distinguishes them from the victims” (179). Echoing this new hyper- capitalist logic, Pancho Rana gains from his association with organized criminality, but loses in the end to the better-equipped forces of political corruption.
A sequel to the first novel, Managua Salsa City: Devórame otra vez, this second novel tells the story of the intrigues of the protagonist, Pancho Rana, after he narrowly survives the combat massacre at his bosses’, the Townsands’, cottage house called “El
Embeleso.” Working again with his bosses to supposedly locate the jewels that he himself was going to rob, but gave to his lover la Guajira, Rana disguises his true motive: that of finding la Guajira again. In the process of tracking the la Guajira, his heart’s true treasure, Rana gets involved in a crime wave of kidnappings and arms intrigue all over
Central America, meeting the contraband mafias of several countries. His deepest desire, perhaps even before finding la Guajira, however, is to carry out his revenge on the current political leaders of Nicaragua that betrayed the Revolution, and any person who crosses him. In the end, with the help of transsexual prostitute la Chobi-Xaquira, Rana reveals the collusion of the police with his bosses, the Townsands, in the robbery and sale of precious jewels all over Central America.
Galich’s novel Y te diré quién eres: Mariposa traicionera offers the perspective of the demobilized soldier after the civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s, along the same lines as novels by Horacio Castellanos Moya like El arma en el hombre. Pancho Rana 163
could be called a cynical hero, because his main values include seeking economic profit and protecting those that are faithful to him. In terms of any political clause, Rana states that it’s just not worth it because the same small group of elites always ends up with the riches and power. His friend, El Brujo, the witch, a demobilized soldier from the
Guatemalan guerrilla forces, has followed a similar path as Rana, working in arms trafficking after the civil war. These two figures corroborate the plight of characters like
Robocop in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre. These literary figures show how demobilized soldiers in Central America were left without work or social status and tend to turn towards criminal pursuits in order to survive.
In his article on neoliberalism and the novela negra in Post-war Central American literature, Misha Kokotovic suggests that the majority of the novels written by men avoid the issue of gender and represent women in traditional roles. Some of these works, he claims, “seem to want to deny women the right to the non-traditional roles they had assumed during the war[s]” (202). Though accurate, these characteristics would be grossly understated when referring to Y te diré quién eres. Suffice to say that Galich’s style verges on being an aesthetic of snuff, given the extent to which it glorifies the using and killing of feminine bodies.
Reading from the standpoint of feminist literary, Galich’s novel exhibits an aesthetic of complete and total misogyny, in both form and content. From the possible roles allotted to female characters to the use of metaphorical violence in his language, the novel demonstrates complete contempt for everything associated with the feminine, except when referring to the female body. The narrators constantly reduce female characters to their body parts: butts, breasts, mouths, eyes, etc., communicating through a 164
variety of mocking metaphors that their only value lies in the pleasure their bodies can provide to men. One salient example of violent misogyny in the language occurs when desperately hung-over journalist Parménides Aguilar grabs a bottle of liquor in the morning from under his bed. He describes the bottle in this way: “There she was, like a maiden awaiting sacrifice. He grabbed her by the throat and when he had her in reach of his other hand, he strangled her with such force the edge of the cap cut him”(56).115
When read in parallel with the other instances of gender violence in the novel, these linguistic indicators of misogyny only enrich a sense of sinister contempt towards the feminine.
According the Piglia’s analysis of the novela negra, the only enigma that these novels propose is that of capitalist relations themselves: “the money that legislates morality and upholds the law is the only ‘reason’ in these stories, where anything can be bought” (70). This description certainly serves to describe social and political relationships that appear in Y te diré quién eres, where patriotism and the ideal of revolutionary transformation succumb to pure commercial speculation. Only in this context could sexual trafficking be described as “sexual patriotic service” [servicio sexual patriótico]. Nowhere is this reality more evident than in the realm of intimate relationships.
As a general rule, the novel portrays women as inherently opportunistic and money grubbing. Most often communicated through the inner monologues of male characters, these sorts of misogynistic comments are common: “They’re all the same, as
115 “Allí estaba, como doncella a la espera del sacrificio. La agarró del cuello y cuando la tuvo al alcance de su otra mano, la estranguló con tal violencia que con el filo de la lata del tapón se cortó” (56). 165
soon as they smell cash…”, as police Captain Cerna muses about his lover Vilma (174).
This characterization corroborates the overall message of the novel that women are not to be trusted and that they are only valuable based on physical beauty. They are especially untrustworthy if they can capitalize on that beauty commercially. Echoing a trope that is repeated across crime genres in literature, television, and film, sex-workers are portrayed as sub-human and disposable, their bodies often subject to mutilation, torture, death, and subsequent display before avid spectators.
For this reason, I begin with the most gruesome scene of gender violence in
Galich’s novel. True to the form of the genre, our hero Pancho Rana murders a stripper and sex worker named La Gata, the Cat. His search for La Guajira takes him to a strip joint in Honduras that, unbeknownst to him, La Guajira now runs. When La Gata recognizes her boss as the woman Pacho Rana is looking for, she decides to lure him to a motel to find out more information. Both of them suspect that the other is out to get them, and La Gata attacks first by placing a crushed Valium in Rana’s beer. Realizing her ploy, he artfully switches the beers. After showing her the diamond necklace that was part of the jewel collection he is tracking across Central America, the two initiate sexual relations. The femicide scene could easily be taken from a snuff movie: Rana asks her to get on all fours and then breaks her neck, while ejaculating: “Pancho Rana was in orgasm when he pulled her head with a powerful motion and broke her neck. He ejaculated and let go of her little by little” (112). His actions after the act reveal an incredible callousness towards the life he has just taken: “La Gata didn’t even realize. Perhaps the last thing she saw was the necklace that was on the nightstand. Pancho calmly got dressed, he looked at her facedown and admired her body” (112). Aside from ascribing to 166
a widespread cultural imaginary where prostitutes lives value nothing, the scene also echoes a logic of the James Bond variety: kill or be killed. Rana imagined that she and her associates at the nightclub were going to kill him, so he acted first: “they wanted to rob me, she and the taxi-driver and bartender” (112).
Another scene involves the violent exploitation of La Guajira’s body by Rat Face,
“Cara de Ratón,” the opportunistic bystander that “saved” her from the massacre at the
Townsand’s cottage house. He takes her to a hotel where he keeps her as a prisoner. She still thinks she has an advantage, since she has kept the much sought after jewels stolen from the Townsands. However, she soon learns of Rat Face’s cunning. Although La
Guajira technically gives herself up to him because she knows she can’t avoid sexual relations with him, the scene provokes tremendous discomfort in the reader. The description of the “love session” is brutal and mechanical, describing his unrelenting potency, despite his being a virgin. She describes the feeling of being trapped and forced into sex:
Really no one, ever, had submitted her to a similar hustle, but the worst,
what most bothered her, pissed her off, was that it was an act against her
will. For the first time, she wasn’t the owner of the situation. (69)116
She wakes up with a headache and with all of her orifices sore from the abuse. Horrified, she realizes that he’s aroused again and that he’s wearing the jewels she had hidden under the mattress. Admitting her defeat, she asks what else he could possibly want from her.
His reply shocks her:
116 “Realmente nadie, nunca, la había sometido a semejante ajetreo, pero lo peor, lo que más le molestaba, lo que la encachimaba y enturcaba, era que se trataba de un acto en contra de su voluntad. Por primera vez, ella no era dueña de la situación” (69). 167
I want us to be business partners in the business I want us to start…Now
that we have cash, all that’s left is to put it together…Little girls… I have
a friend who has several houses, she manages forty young girls she rotates
in the bars. We would go to the departments and neighborhoods of
Managua and hire lustful girls. (71)117
In these scenes, the sexual violation of La Guajira seems to multiply, when the reader imagines the fate of the unfortunate young women that Rat Face will capture for his business. Rat Face’s sheer impertinence and ruthlessness reach the extreme of commercializing and benefiting from selling the bodies of young girls. Indeed, the horror of the rape scene is magnified by the image of the future business venture he has planned.
The final scene involves Alexa, a young woman that El Jefe, the Honduran crime boss, gives to Pancho Rana in gratitude for his services during an armed kidnapping. At first Pancho Rana is reticent to accept the woman as a gift, mainly because he is longing for La Guajira, who he has been unable to track down. In reaction to this, El Jefe explains,
Don’t be sad buddy, here in Zansivar what there are too many of are
chicks. I already offered you Alexa, that’s her name, but if she doesn’t do
it for you, there are more that you’ll soon see, or soon I’ll send you one in
Chalchuapa. (131)118
117 “Quiero que seamos socios. ¿Socios? preguntó soprendida. Sí, socios, en un negocio que quiero que pongamos… ¡De niñas!...Tengo una amiga que tiene varias casas, maneja unas cuartenta muchachas, a las que cambia constantemente en lso bares. Iríamos a varios departamentos y barrios de Managua y contrataríamos a chavalas rigiosas” (71). 118 “Pero no se ahueve chero, aquí en Zansivar lo que sobran son las jevas. Ya te ofrecí a la Alexa, que así se llama la chela, pero si no te gusta, hay otras que luego verás y al rato te mando una para Chalchuapa. ¿Qué me dice el Rambo Pinolero?” (131). 168
In the end, Pancho Rana accepts Alexa and they hide out together in a small fishing village. As he awaits further instructions for El Jefe, he becomes bored and listless without the intrigue and excitement of battle that he has grown accustomed to: “Even sex gets boring, despite how much ceviche and avocado, onion, and garlic one eats” (147).
His anxiety to escape the stagnant situation and continue his search leads him to ask an old fisherman to take him to Guatemala. When he finds out how much the old man will charge him to carry both he and Alexa across, he decides to exchange her for his safe passage. “Do you like the female I have there,” Pancho asks him, noticing “the lust in his eyes and the lechery of his mouth. “I’ll gift her to you,” Rana offers (148). As he thinks about leaving her, even despite the weeks they’ve spent together he even considers killing her, but concludes that would be “crummy” [“balurde”] (149).
These scenes have offered a brief sketch of the texture of intimate relations as depicted in Y te diré quién eres mariposa traicionera. The treatment of women by men in all these scenes indicates a complete commodification of the feminine in the literary imaginary of contemporary Nicaragua. As if in regression to a prior state of social organization, women are exchanged like material goods. These relations seem to suggest that hyper-capitalism precipitates just such a transformation in human relations, placing economic profit above all other values. Love is impossible in this story due to various factors. Mainly, the male characters display disregard and disrespect for women, a misogynistic current of sentiment that disallows true romantic feeling or reciprocity. The majority of female characters are suspect, if not of gold digging, then of possible violence against male characters. No possibility for understanding exists between femininities and masculinities in Galich’s imaginary. 169
Although in the first novel Managua Salsa City, Galich’s portrayal of La Guajira swayed more on the side of a true hero and protagonist of her destiny, she is largely absent in this second novel. About halfway through the novel the reader loses track of her. As it stands, the handful of scenes in which she does appear depict her in sexually demeaning situations. She has been transformed from the daring gang leader of the first novel to a captive, a sexual slave who nonetheless benefits from the enslavement of other women. Rana’s frustrated quest for La Guajira demonstrates the failure of romantic love to triumph over violence that cripples and fragments society, scattering lovers to the wind. Though Rana continues to idealize her in his mind, seeing love as his salvation, even in his dying moments, the connection seems empty for its brevity and incompleteness. All this fantasizing about her, keep in mind, is woven upon their one night spent together.
Sayak Valencia updates the ideas of Josefina Ludmer for a twenty-first century context, when she claims a different sort of productivity for violence in the twenty-first century. As Ludmer points out, tales of crimes in the intimate sphere and the family have produced and constructed societal norms. In this chapter, I set how to answer the following questions: how do we decipher the social and moral norms communicated by literature and popular culture today when arms runners and mara members are transformed into the heroes of crime stories? Which sexual norms now govern the intimate sphere of these hyper-capitalist subjects? In response to the first question,
Valencia answers that new subjects of a distinctly capitalist morality have been formed by this milieu: the fabulous, monstrous subject [“sujeto endriago”]. This terminology provides a manner of thinking about the way Third World subjects take up the principles 170
of hyper-capitalism and mobilize violence “…as a tool of personal affirmation, at the same time as a mode of subsistence (91).119 As we see in the case of Pancho Rana, the hero of crime stories achieves self-affirmation through continuing to utilize his military training to produce capital. Any individual could be utilized or destroyed to further these schemes. The value of human life is null.
In response to the second question, we might speculate that the sexuality of the
‘sujetos endriagos’ ceases to be governed by the “old stories” of fidelity, marriage, patriotism, or generational history. Rather, as many scholars of postmodernity argue, the possibility of endless consumption drives their desires. And this endlessness consumption stretches to encompass human bodies, whether through the real life consummation of violence or through its spectral image in literature, television, and film.
In Galich’s novel, it’s not only the glorification of sexuality, but also a dissolution of romance through violence in sexuality that characterizes these relationships. As difficult as it may be to admit, the constant collapse of relationships, with the concomitant dramas of betrayal and disloyalty, provokes a certain fascination that we experience as readers.
According to Valencia, in gore capitalism violence is used both as a technology of control and as a gag that becomes a political instrument. “This gag is part of humoristic and theatrical tradition, especially circus humor” (26).120 She goes on to cite Miguel
Brieva, who defines the gag as “a closed unity of pure hilarity: it has to do with the very infantile and primitive taste for surprise disintegrations, for disorder that bursts in, with the very instinctual pleasure from things coming out of place, falling, or unexpectedly
119 “…como una herramienta de autoafirmación personal, al mismo tiempo que como un modo de subsistencia” (91). 120 “El gag es parte de la tradición humorística y teatral, especialmente circense” (26). 171
collapsing” (26).121 If Galich’s novel offers one lesson, that lesson speaks through his characters endless commercialization of violence and our investment in it as captivated readers. Valencia refers to the expanding consumption of violence as gore reality and gore capitalism:
…the twentieth century can be understood as a synonym for violence,
which has radicalized itself through neoliberalism and the advent of
globalization…At this point the question arises as to why this form of
violence linked with gore capitalism is different from other forms of
realization. The answer resides in a structural framework strongly tied to
the economic benefits that its realization yields, just as much its
spectacularization and posterior commercialization in the media. (26,
emphasis mine)122
In Central American Post-war literature, Galich’s novel is a prime example of the spectacularization of intimate violence. Without a public sphere to appeal to, in the absence of the traditional institutions of morality, an imaginary of intimate disintegration takes full flight. Individuals react to this environment, defending themselves as they can.
But women especially find no respite from the besiegement of violent masculinities. As
Valencia states: “Gore capitalism tells us: nothing is untouchable, all economic taboos
121 ‘…una unidad cerrada de hilaridad pura: tiene que ver con el gusto muy infantil y muy primitivo por la sorpresa desintegradora, por el desorden que irrumpe, con el placer muy instintivo de que las cosas se salgan de su sitio, caigan o se desplomen inesperadamente’” (quoted in Valencia 26). 122 “…el siglo XX puede ser entendido como un sinónimo de violencia, la cual se ha radicalizado a través del neoliberalismo y al advenimiento de la globalización…En este punto cabría la pregunta de por qué es diferente esta forma de violencia vinculada con el capitalismo gore a las otras formas de ejecución. La respuesta radicaría en un entramado fuertemente ligado a los beneficios económicos que reporta tanto su ejecución como su espectacularización y posterior comercialización en los medios de información” (26). 172
and respect towards human life have been broken, now there is no place for restriction or salvation, we will all be affected” (50).
Excursus
Rebellion and seduction: Criminal-heroes as and the moral and political rebel
J. Mellen poses a simple but productive question for analyzing the intricacies of masculinity in crime genres: “Who is the hero and what makes him heroic?” (quoted in
Bailey and Hale 7). The contemporary literary heroes that I have analyzed in Nicaraguan detective and novela negra literature are all outcasts: of class, of nationality, or of traditionally legitimate economic pursuits. They also are figures that exercise considerable means of seduction over a variety of women. The Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines the word “seduce” as “to lead astray, usually by persuasion or false promises.” As a manner of conclusion, I discuss how being seduced by these heroes only leads to violent demise for the women involved. I think this textual trend speaks to the crisis in masculine authority embodied in an authoritarian view of heroism and leadership in Nicaragua.
During my first trip to Nicaragua in the summer of 2012, an encounter with one of the prominent guerrilla commanders of the Sandinista Revolution schooled me on the subtle imbrication of revolutionary rebellious masculinities, their social power in
Nicaragua, and their clever means of seduction. I had gone with a colleague from Tulane, who was also conducting research that summer, to interview this guerrilla commander at his home in Managua. Receiving us with warmth and hospitality, this revolutionary fighter sat down to tell us about the grit and grind of the struggle. One can imagine our 173
surprise to find that as we sat rocking ourselves on his breezy patio, he began to weave an image of his many exploits of seduction and romance over the years. He unfolded story after story of his sexual adventures as we, his captive audience, sat and received the blow with our jaws agape. As two young female researchers from abroad, we were stunned by his forwardness. We found his foray into sex and pleasure as unwarranted, perhaps even blatantly disrespectful. But I remember clearly how he insisted that he wasn’t machista, citing a particularly brutal case of rape from the Nota Roja to illustrate his enlightened masculinity as compared to the typical Nicaraguan male.
Thinking back on this episode now, I believe that this former commander relied on his status in Nicaraguan history, for he embodies a figure that to this day bequeaths power and denotes the possibility of seduction in Nicaraguan: the moral and political rebel. As a legacy of Augusto Calderón Sandino’s guerrilla struggle against U.S.
Imperialism and the oligarchic elite in the 1920s and 1930s and also stemming of the clandestine fight against the Somoza family dictatorial dynasty from the 1940s to the
1970s, the twentieth century hero in Nicaragua stands as the young, rebellious, under-dog outsider. However, he is also historically a man of letters, an amateur poet-philosopher.
This stands out in the former Sandinista militant’s mobilization of storytelling, primarily as a means for seduction. This heroic figure endures across the Nicaraguan literary imaginary of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His visual and literary salience is marked by ambivalence towards traditional institutions of political authority and his balking at constrictive moral standards around sexuality. However, as I explore here, his rebellion fails to escape from authoritarian stances and his seduction conforms to asymmetrical power dynamics that demand a captive, submissive feminine presence for 174
its fulfillment. This influential trope of masculinity is predominantly a militarized one, and its repercussions ring out today in Post-war Nicaraguan society.
Thinking about seduction in these novels leads us to notice how the art of seduction, which can be translated as grace, mobility, and power of influence in the social sphere, changed from the time of the publication of Castigo divino to that of Y te diré quién eres. The contours of masculinity, itself always coded as authority and social capital in Nicaragua, morph from that of the lettered aristocrat to that of the armed, militarily trained social-outcast/survivor. Ramírez’s depiction of an array of early twentieth century masculinities demonstrates how being an “hombre letrado,” a “man of letters,” provided social-sexual capital. At the same time, his novel warns of the force that the military man continued to exercise, with the National Guard imposing itself in the end and defeating the others strains of rebellious, lettered masculinity. Although in this novel the main figure of the armed military man, embodied in Captain Ortiz of
Somoza’s National Guard, symbolizes the continued threat of U.S. Imperialism embodied in the Contra, we can also read it from the vantage point of today as foreshadowing of the general lawlessness of armed groups that would plague Central America after the civil wars. As contemporary Central American literature shows us, the primacy of the demobilized, privatized armed man in the Post-war context eclipses earlier forms of lettered, clever criminality. In Galich’s novel, the demobilized Sandinista fighter represents the renegade force of militarized training when the ideals of revolution have been betrayed by political opportunism and financial individualism. Indeed, the very notion of criminality dissolves before our eyes in the milieu of institutional decay, nonexistent economic opportunities, and political disenchantment. 175
Characterization in these novels also instructs us on the ways in which masculine seduction and charisma often reaffirm themselves via the conquest of the belittled, commodified visions of a beautiful woman. These women’s possible protagonism is always subverted, thwarted, and overshadowed by the demands of normative narrativity that require a nucleus of heroic masculine authority to progress the plot. It seems to me that these clues from narrative structure teach us something about the negation and subjugation of the feminine in Nicaragua’s social landscape. The criminal-heroes of these novels prove that a crisis in masculine authority has been afoot in Nicaragua across the twentieth century.
Social polarization and violence in social practices today reflect a history of authoritarianism in political culture that spans the colonial period, the nation’s independent history, and the twentieth century. Edelberto Torres-Rivas calls this “the encomendero’s legacy” [las herencias del encomendero], a strongman philosophy that was continued through the oligarchical military regimes of the twentieth century: “The main characteristic of the oligarquichal military regimes was the use of force and their intolerance of the opposition” (216). Due in part to the colonial history of caudillismo, to repeated U.S. interventions, and to the militarization of society in the 1970s and 1980s, modernization processes in the country have always been tied to weaponry and force.
Even the arming of the factions of resistance to the Somoza dictatorship resulted in a further reinforcement of the power of the armed-militant. This, in turn, led to the modernization of security forces, as Torres-Rivas affirms:
The sectorial modernization [of militaries], on the one hand, and the
extension of their new political functions, on the other, elevated the role of 176
military men in the control of the State and justified the performance of
their traditional role, all of which multiplied their punitive ferociousness.
(236)123
These processes in Nicaragua may have begun with the Somoza dictatorship, but the
Sandinista resistance forces and later government were formed through these very developments. Nor were they able to abandon the “strong-man” tradition of leadership.
As Rosario Montoya affirms, since independence “political authority in Nicaragua was vested in caudillos, male heads of extended family groups who commanded broad- ranging patron-client networks and violence-making capacities via private armies” (43).
In her article “¿Es revolucionario el FSLN?” Sofía Montenegro explores the model of leadership of the Sandinista party. She affirms that the sway of charisma has been central to leaders establishing influence over followers and adherents. Within the historical Sandinista revolutionary imaginary, charisma equals exemplarity, heroism, and being a prophet, all organized around the figure of Sandino according to Montenegro
(Montañas 32). Although the models of heroic masculinity offered by this revolutionary imaginary seemed to offer a promise of transformation and transcendence, they fell short.
Due to clandestine nature of the organization, she affirms that it took on the characteristics of a “closed religious-military order,” which valued obedience and individual sacrifice to authority over autonomous thinking (32). She confirms that these models of leadership carried implicit with them “the traditional idea of seigniorial power, but of a benevolent paternalism” (32).
123 “La modernización sectorial, por un lado, y la ampliación de nuevas funciones políticas, por el otro, elevaron el papel de los militares en el control del Estado y justificaron su desempeño tradicional, todo lo cual multiplicó su ferocidad punitiva” (236). 177
From the vantage point of the contemporary period, a valid conclusion is that this cult of hero worship helped to mobilize mass social movements, but was curtailed by the geopolitics of globalization and neoliberalism in the 1980s. The contradictions implicit in a mode of authority based on paternalism, even if was a benevolent form, come to shine through today. In the opinion of Montoya, “the party’s current tendency towards caudillismo (strongman leadership) and even authoritarian vanguardism points to the further entrenchment of trends that became apparent during the revolution” (13). As I argue, along with Rodríguez, the exclusion of the feminine from social values and from political life plagued Nicaragua then, as it does now. According to Rodríguez:
The heroic subject has been shattered, class analysis stripped away, the
authoritarian and the ‘popular’ authoritarian traditions of the Latin and
non-Latin left laid bare, Marxism neutralized by instrumental reason and
bureaucracies. The revolutionaries did not show themselves capable of
withstanding the implosion of the values of Modernity. Formed within the
context of the Cold War, they were detained at the gates of
postmodernism. The death of the nation buried their “New Man” side by
side with his ‘revolutionary pussy.’” (Women xx)
The hero-outsider trope in Ramírez and Galich’s novels distinctly embodies a trend that has run parallel to the rule of authoritarian strongmen. The resister, the challenger to authoritarian power flourishes as a key figure in these novels precisely due to the strands of political domination that characterize Nicaraguan history. These models of seigniorial rule have prevented Nicaraguans from sustaining more collective forms of governance that have surged up across the twentieth century. This explains the persistence of amigo- 178
enemigo logic in politics and social relations today. As Martí i Puig and Ancochea claim,
“in the Central American cases, the processes of transition [to democracy] were carried out in an extremely violent wartime context, where the logic of amigo-enemigo lasted past the constituent periods and the first competitive elections” (108).124 But what still puzzle me are the nuances of misogyny that accompany these rebellious figures. To what extent is violent subordination of women integral to the authority of all masculinities in
Nicaragua?
The continued presence of a security culture in the region that endures after the resolution of armed conflicts, related to the privatization of guerrilla and counterinsurgency military forces, produces a paradox in regards to levels of general social well-being. Ironically, after the Peace Accords and elections, Central American women live in an environment of increasing insecurity. In January 2015, Reyna
Rodríguez, the national liaison for the Network of Women against Violence, indicated that the house continues to be the least safe place for women in Nicaragua. (Romero
“Mujeres viven”).125 This contradiction becomes all the more clear in light of the recent political repression by President Ortega’s security forces of the broad-based opposition to the construction of an inter-oceanic canal across southern Nicaragua. According to La
Prensa, a number of political opposition leaders suffered repression, with two protestors
124 “…en los casos centroamericanos, los procesos de transición se realizaron en un contexto bélico extremadamente violento, donde la lógica de amigo-enemigo duró más allá de los periodos constituyentes y de las primeras elecciones competitivas” (108). 125 “Las mujeres viven en la inseguridad.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2015/01/10/nacionales/1702139- mujeres-viven-en-la-inseguridad 179
killed during the mass protests took place on December 22 against the planned canal project (“Dos muertos”)126
These two contemporary novels offer two different vantage points from which to view heroism (i.e. rebellion and rejection of moral norms) as synonymous with the breakdown of normative family and romantic relationships in pre-neoliberal and neoliberal social formations. The aesthetic bent transforms from an avid search for judicial truth over the murders of several women, to a no-holds-barred proliferation of sex and blood. As I explored in other chapters, the interlacing of death and gender in
Nicaraguan journalism are symptoms of the lifting of taboos around the value of human life, which leads to the ever-deepening commercialization of death images. Central
American post-war literature does denounce how authoritarian modes of leadership and institutional corruption leave people exposed to violence. But in these novels, gender violence becomes the central symbolic nucleus signifying a social crisis. The fascination with scandal and intimate trauma and with the breakdown of intimate bonds may be part of more global currents of representation. But the crisis in masculine authority, i.e. the authority of the state, can securely be attributed to the exclusion, desecration, and abandonment of half of society.
Conclusion:
Literature, Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Nicaraguan Literature
126 “Dos muertos en protesta contra constucción de Canal en Nicaragua.” http://www.prensa.com/economia/muertos-protesta-construccion-canal-Nicaragua_0_4102839844.html 180
As I conclude, I think the key question that remains is to what extent is social breakdown blamed on the perceived “crimes of the second sex”? Which antiquated moral logics justify women meeting their violent demise in these novels? Is the imaginary of intimate disintegration predicated on misogyny?
Much literary criticism has been written about the role of normative notions of
(the heterosexual) family and (binary) gender in the formation of the nation-state and its imaginary, and how literary texts endeavored to create the illusion of a symbiotic unity where difference actually meant exclusion (Sommer 1993). In the case of Central
America, Patricia Alvarenga affirms that in early 20th century costumbrista and regional literature, sexuality and the family were molded by literature and institutions so that “the values of the patriarchal family prevailing in hegemonic sectors of society would be taken up by the social collective” (345).127 This literature took the form of cautionary tales, not extent of irony, such as the short story “La honra” by Sallrué, where a young girl is berated by her father after being raped, since she has lost the only object of value that she possessed: her honor.
In her chapter “Antistates,” in The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, Franco explores the problems of legitimacy of the secular nation-state through an examination of the literary trope of the ‘antistate’ in literary works of the mid-twentieth century. Myth, legend, and popular culture are alternatives to these ‘official narratives,’ which attempt to bury any story that contradicts theirs. Using the (dead) body as a trope for the disillusionment and dissolution of the social body (the Nation), Franco shows how a
127 “…los valores de la familia patriarcal prevalecientes en los sectores hegemónicos sean asumidos por la colectividad social” (Alvarenga 345). 181
certain form of governance that has predominated in Latin America, a patriarchal and authoritarian one, is an impossible project that therefore fragments itself. Literature, especially of Juan Rulfo and Augusto Roa Bastos, show that the nation is “no longer representable in a teleological narrative” (137). According to Franco, in these literary works, the feminine constitutes a resistant “ethics of responsibility,” which contest the violence of the patriarchal state. Through the esthetic of irony, inflection and silence, women in these works contest the dominant discourse of the Nation-state, because: “The codification of the nation-state is a process of abstraction (or deterritorialization in the language of Deleuze and Guattari), an abstraction not only at the level of the economic but also the affective and the social (132).
Official political discourse in Nicaragua utilizes the deep desire for symbolic family unification to move populations fragmented by intimate strife. That this unification has continuously been thwarted, and may indeed be an impossibility, is expressed in literature by the frustrated bonds of romantic love or by the pure exploitation of sexuality for social or material gain. Despite the salience of polarization in gender relations, both in literature and reality, the imaginary of the contemporary, fragmented nation-state has been saturated with the religious imperative of forgiveness and reconciliation. As I’ve argued in the previous chapters, however, the ideal of forgiveness, embodied in the legal figure of mediation, cunningly disguises the continued subordination of women’s rights and interests to masculine authority. I think Montoya’s assessment of the most recent mode of governance rings true: “Sandinista policies towards women are consistent with the antifeminist and religiously inspired interpretation of women’s roles that is being pushed today—ironically, against a vibrant feminist 182
movement that was spurred by the Sandinista Revolution itself” (13). It becomes clear upon reading Galich’s novel that these antifeminist currents of culture run deep and inform the possibility of who qualifies as a hero or a victim in Nicaragua today. Despite a clamoring for certainty that the sacrifices of the past were somehow worthwhile or justified, notions of absolution and vengeance dominate contemporary Nicaraguan narrative. However, in the fissure created by the opposing values of religious morality and neoliberal economic logic, the collective-political analysis of social formations struggles to be heard. As the constant watchdog of the nation-state, the autonomous feminist movement in Nicaragua has been capable of bringing together some semblance of resistance to these troubling trends. Though it may not be through traditional bonds of intimacy, feminist organizations in Nicaragua are creating new attachments that may prove fruitful towards healing the wounds that authoritarian violence has left on the country.
183
Chapter 4, Public polarization: Anti-feminism takes on Law 779
The current moment in Nicaragua is marked by fierce debates over the definition and structure of the nuclear family. In what has transformed into a legal tug-of-war and a fiery socio-political controversy, the Integral Law Against Violence towards Women,
Law 779 has undergone serious reforms and regulations since its entrance on the scene in
2012. Amidst ceaseless commotion and anxiety over its possibly ruinous effects on the family, genuine fears and antifeminist sentiment rise to the surface regarding women’s sexual freedom and economic autonomy. Indeed, beyond the quarrels of political partisanship, allegations by many men and by church leaders about the divisiveness of the law point to a longing for the return of traditional family narratives. Law 779 embodies several decades of women’s demands for respect, autonomy, and freedom from violence.
After a rapid pendulum swing in society about the law, public opinion reflects extreme uncertainty and instability regarding changing expectations, both legal and social, for gendered behavior. The family as a symbolic construct and practical unit of social organization is at stake in these debates in contemporary Nicaragua.
No doubt society has become quite divided over the issues raised by the Law 779 controversy. Revolving around the dilemma of broken families and conflictive intimate ties, the public debate over Law 779 brings up concerns about sexuality, masculine economic viability, moral values, and educating children. In reality, the law has been transformed into a target on which to displace severe concerns about these issues amidst a 184
rapidly changing social-moral landscape. In this chapter, I examine the online comments sections of several Nicaraguan newspapers, including El Nuevo Diario, La Prensa, El
Cronista Digital, and El Confidencial, in order to take a snapshot of public opinion regarding Law 779. The comments I study respond to articles ranging from opinion pieces to news reports on reforms to Law 779 to investigative pieces about femicide victims. In undertaking this study, I hope to outline the assumptions, as well as the characters, plot lines, and motifs that breath life into this ideological battle, creating intelligible stories out of the uncertainty wrought by extreme gender polarization.
Several main sentiments regarding appropriate social and political intervention against gender violence stand out in these comments. First, they reveal that many commentators do not view gender violence as a State problem, but rather they assert that it should be handled in the family unit. This belief is bolstered by State discourses about restoring family peace and harmony through dialogue and constitutes a rationalization of masculine abuse and control and a refusal to consider this violence as a crime. Secondly, whether they attribute this belief to incompetence or partisan maneuvering, many online commentators do not believe that the State is capable of handling the issue. In fact, a prominent critique across partisan lines holds that the State is responsible for impunity.
These views on impunity are a signal that Law 779’s original gesture has taken root in society, as many people acknowledge State ineptness, misogyny, and the need for transformation in gender relations. These critiques, along with the colorful array of sentiments in favor of women’s rights, prove that feminist critiques of society are spreading and gaining favor.
185
The online comments section of the newspapers undoubtedly only captures a small segment of Nicaraguan public opinion, being as it is mitigated by factors such as computer access, literacy, and available leisure time to read and comment on these articles. Though it is most likely that middle to upper class Nicaraguans dominate the comments sections, other technological trends have led to more accessibility in recent years: the wide diffusion of smartphone access, the spread of articles on Facebook, and the linking up of certain newspapers comments sections directly to Facebook, as is the case with El Confidencial. Perhaps these technological changes allow for a broader audience to contribute their opinions.
I have chosen 20 articles, with a variety from each newspaper: La Prensa, El
Nuevo Diario, El Confidencial, and one from El Cronista Digital. The articles date from when the law was reformed, in September 2013, and also from the months leading up to and following the Regulation of Law 779, from about May to September 2014. I selected these time periods simply because the reforms and regulations produced a flashpoint in public opinion, with many articles being published during this time period The articles correspond to a flurry of public controversy was sparked over Law 779, which inspired numerous online comments in the forums of these newspapers.
To enumerate the currents of thought that appear in these comments is to delve into a familiar narrative realm, populated by the exaggerated figures of man-hating feminists and lustful, irresponsible mothers who abandon their families. Markedly, a great number of the comments narrate Law 779, not as an ambitious legal push towards equaling out the gender divide, but rather as a dangerous threat to society, from a perspective of fear-fueled misogyny. Notably, some familiar figures, appearing in the 186
Nicaraguan social and literary imaginary, make their mark in these comments. Only, perhaps they have evolved slightly to accommodate the most recent conjuncture: the
(bad) woman of the street and the (good) woman of the home. The division between private and public that, until recently, demarcated the home as a terrain of State inaction in Nicaragua becomes magnified in these characters, showing that the belief still exists that the home should be outside of State control, along with the women in it (Sagot 37).
Studying currents of thought that emerge in the comments sections of online newspapers can help unravel these unresolved tensions and underlying beliefs about women’s place and role in the family and in civil society, tensions which inform public reception of the law.
A large number of commentators differ from this polarized characterization of femininities as either faithful servants or willful manipulators and deserters. Indeed, a plethora of commentators support Law 779, giving gender violence due consideration as a crime that endangers women’s lives and citizenship. Many spoke out against the regulation of Law 779 by pointing out the reactionary nature of the Family Counsels.
Several commentators warned of the danger that mediation poses to victims of violence.
In general, a strong chorus of voices questioned the dominant currents of thought that would enclose violence within the intimate sphere and foreclose the possibility of collective social intervention in the transformation of gender norms.
These disagreements reveal the embattled status of gendered power relations that pre-date the passing of Law 779. Nonetheless, it is highly significant that many commentators attempt to ascribe the “war of the sexes” to the law itself. Rather than addressing the underlying asymmetry in power relations that has favored masculine 187
impunity, or reflecting on the troubling persistence of violence in intimate relations, a strong current of thought in the on-line comments falls into a reactionary, scapegoating stance. These commentators blame the agents of change, Law 779 and the women’s movement, for all the woes brought on by masculinist violence and impunity.
More troubling still, however, is the fact that this contingent of thought, which sought to blame Law 779 for pre-existing violence, gained enough momentum to reverse the government’s stance. The Reform and Regulation of Law 779 prove the tenacity of cultural beliefs about women’s heavy burden of responsibility in the family and also demonstrate persistent societal complicity with masculine impunity. In light of the recent political back-peddling of President Ortega and the Nicaraguan Supreme Court, this chapter addresses the following questions: Which arguments against Law 779 became mobilized or made massive in a way that allowed for some level of acceptance of the
Reform and Regulation of the law? Where are the main points of contention and anxiety over Law 779?
The conflictive weft of these comments shows that attempts to reorganize the reproductive and intimate spheres are met with the solidity of hegemonic notions of family and motherhood in Nicaraguan culture. With this in mind, Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “symbolic common denominator,” helps to comprehend the power and continuity of mother images in the construction of gendered expectations in the family. The symbolic common denominator refers to the representational constellations of cultures rooted in the “…cultural and religious memory forged by the interweaving of history and geography,” which constitutes a response, not to the problems of production of material goods “…but, rather, to those of reproduction, survival of the species, life and death, the 188
body, sex, and symbol” (13-14). With this concept, Kristeva argues for the persistence in collective memory of artistic, philosophical, and religious representations of sexuality, motherhood, and the family. Despite the fact that these images may come from a somewhat distant past, their influence supersedes economic and technological transformations. They remain written into the symbolic contract.
A determinant portion of the symbolic common denominator in Nicaragua includes Judeo-Christian and popular mythological imagery in which femininities appear as subjugated subjects, submitting to masculine will and authority. As I have argued in previous chapters, the image of female submission to masculine authority appears in
Catholic and Protestant theology and artistic renderings. The Virgin plays a protagonist role in religious belief and practice, but her heroism remains contingent on her sexual purity and sacrifice. Here in lie the roots of sexuality and motherhood in Nicaragua. This was the expectation of the ideal woman even during the Revolution as well; a woman, according to Ileana Rodríguez, “who gives everything for others, who suffers when others suffer and who also laughs when others laugh” (Women 87).
I suspect that much of the discord over legislation against gender violence finds its root in the challenge it poses to consecrated, symbolic divisions of protagonism and space in Nicaraguan culture. As noted by Rosario Montoya and discussed in earlier chapters, spatial taxonomies inform the qualification of good (confined to the home) and bad (venture into the streets) women (124). Law 779 reconstitutes these spaces by establishing the home as a sphere of state intervention and by re-signifying the violent control of femininities as a crime.
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Milagros Palma also elaborates on spatial vetting according to gender in her ethnographic study of popular festivals in Nicaragua, claiming that for young women public spaces are dangerous, while for older women, being seen in the public space damages their reputation. In contrast, “Men reign in public space and there’s no age limit, not even the shriveled appearance of the old man is penalized” (63).128 As she affirms to be true across various popular festivals in Nicaragua, representations of women are often acted out by men dressed as women, while women’s roles are limited to the most normative ones: “In general terms, the intervention of women in public space is limited to reproducing her domestic role of godmother, mother, cook, caretaker…Beyond this function her image is ferociously attacked” (63).129 Palma’s assertion signals how festival representations reinforce existing spatial hierarchies. Despite being conceived as moments of exceptionality, where men may dress as women and norms are transgressed, the depreciation of feminine images that occurs in these popular festivals communicates deeply held cultural beliefs about the strict limitation on women’s designated roles and spaces.
In her analysis of patriarchal violence, in “Violencia contra las mujeres y pactos patriarcales,” Celia Amorós argues that women constitute a topos in relation to the practices of serial auto-designation by which men confirm their masculinity. Topos means the place of non-thought, “a referential commonplace” constituted by “a distancing from ‘the other’ and from all the rest” (43). According to Amorós,
128 “Los hombres reinan en el espacio público y no hay límite de edad, ni se sanciona la apariencia marchita del anciano” (63). 129 “En términos generales la actuación de la mujer en el espacio público está limitada a reproducer su papel domestic de madrina, madre, cocinera, cuidadora…Más allá de esa function su imagen es atacada con ferocidad” (63). 190
this same reoccurrence in a series is what configures the topos as a space
for all, as a transactional realm, in the sense that it’s no man’s land—also a
symbolic space of indiscernibility—and of any of them. (43)
Therefore, the concept of topos explains pre-conceived notions of women’s use value.
This logic is relevant in Nicaragua in the scene of public festivals. Amorós continues,
“Woman located in certain spatial-temporal coordinates…is a land of nobody—she has de-territorialized herself with respect to the private sphere protected by a male—and therefore, she’s a realm of sexuality availability virtually for everyone (44).130
Furthermore, as Rodríguez has shown in her work on incest in Nicaragua, within familial and intimate spaces assumptions about use value and proper roles also mark women and girls as topos: available material for the affirmation and desire of masculinities.
Femininities indeed become responsible for their own protection in a variety of spaces, through adherence to strict norms of behavior. Even this self-vigilance does not prevent attacks, as becomes markedly clear by reading the news in Nicaragua today.
Additionally, women may be held responsible for not preventing this violence. One online commentator offered the following judgment, communicating clearly the way women are blamed for violence in the family: “Let’s not blame the Nicaraguan man for machismo. Let’s look at how his mother raised him and responded to the family”
(“Ortega ordena”). In ever increasing circles of responsibility, women are held
130 “la mujer ubicada en ciertas coordenadas espacio-temporales (entre varones—en auto—a hora avanzada; las mujeres, al parecer, tenemos toque de queda: también hay un tiempo de ‘ser usada’ sexualmente) es tierra de nadie—pues se ha desterritorializado respecto al ámbito privado acotado por un varón—y, por tanto, es ámbito de disponibilidad sexual virtualmente para todos. ¿Para qué iría a ceñirse un juez a una interpretación de leyes en situaciones concretas cuando existen estas proto-leyes constituyentes ancestrales?” (44). 191
responsible for guarding their own safety in ALL spaces, as well as for stemming the tide of violent masculinity in the second generation.
The notion that women and girls hold the majority of responsibility for the care, maintenance, and protection of the family unit, therefore, has its counterpoint in the norm of masculine impunity. The sense of entitlement and impunity extends to cover harassment and sexual abuse, with masculinities assuming ownership over the bodies of female relatives and acquaintances. The complicit silences, along with the institutional failures and negligence contribute to a societal justification of violent masculinities. The norm of masculine impunity extends across judicial, political, and cultural terrains. The push to change this status quo meets with massive societal resistance that takes on many forms.
On the other hand, another noteworthy aspect of the online comments is the overall level of polarization that appears, namely regarding the role of the Ortega government. Palpable antagonism and anger color the dialogue about gender violence to the point that the issue itself is almost buried under partisan politics. No matter the article, it seems that the attention turns from the topic of violence to partisan comments.
As evidenced by the massive protests against the regulation of Law 779, coming from feminist organizations, the women’s movement, and the political opposition party, the
Movement for Sandinista Renovation (MRS), the arbitrary actions of the Ortega government sparked intense anger and indignation. With the societal memory of a 45- year dictatorship strong at hand, old tensions and new polarizations sharpen political conflict. Law 779, along with the hushed planning of the Canal Project, have been key points of contention among dissidents who call Ortega’s government a new, 192
unconstitutional dictatorial regime. Indeed, many commentators seem to fear a return to the dictatorial past, embodied in the Ortega regime’s repressive policies. This fear should not come as a surprise, given the historical and affective footprint left on the social body by the dictatorship. Many commenters even express the fear that their comment will be censured, revealing the legacy of intensive press censorship under Somoza (Darling).
I will begin my foray into the online comments sections of the newspapers by exploring the most commonly occurring arguments against the law. Online commentators enumerate a variety of reasons for opposing Law 779. The overriding and most oft cited reason is that it intrudes where it does not belong and it divides the family and disrupts family harmony. Some of the most common angles taken to further this argument appear to be the following: 1) that the law directly attacks men and, therefore, causes more discord and violence in the family; 2) the law allows women to “sacar provecho” or
“benefit themselves” financially or personally in the form of capricious revenge plots; 3) that the law’s punitive focus will not stop femicide but, rather, will encourage more violence.
On the other hand, the fears that crystallize in the comments sections of the newspapers point to a generalized and diffuse fear of social collapse or decay. There is a palpable level of tension revolving around several main points of disaccord: 1) the envisioning of gender relations within a vertical, hierarchical framework that conceives of social capital (power) as a limited and coveted resource, to which masculinities hold exclusive rights; 2) feminist groups and their politics tend to be coded as divisive, dangerous, or following imported, internationalist agendas; 3) the State and its institutions are responsible for impunity; 4) readers’ comments emphasize the marginality 193
and aberrant nature of femicide perpetrators, thus reproducing the image of femicida- monsters that appear in the Nota Roja crime press, isolating them and dismissing them as
“beasts of culture”; 5) the reigning conjuncture of political polarization decides and divides public opinion in regards to Law 779, with partisan allegiances coloring the comments.
Family matters: State intervention or non-intervention
In the documentary El día que me quieras (Jaugey 1999), which documents a day in the life of the Women and Children’s Police stations in Managua, a man is brought in after his wife accused him of physical abuse. After he spiritedly explains how the fight started, with no absence of dramatic flair, the female police agent tells him to calm down, stating that nothing justifies hitting a woman. Still visible upset, the man declares: “If we were in my home, this would be handled differently” (49:33). This statement, appearing as a loosely veiled threat, is meant to reassert masculine authority within an institutional domain that this man considers illegitimate. Through his dramatic behavior and through this phrase, the man challenges the agent’s authority in this intimate matter. His defiance surely stems from dealing with a female officer. In addition, his words signal a common belief that crops up in the comments sections of Nicaraguan newspapers: that violence within the family unit can and should be dealt with in that domain.
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With the theoretical crafting of the term feminicide,131 feminist scholars placed responsibility squarely with the State for its negligence, complicity, and often blatant participation in femicidal violence. Scholars such as Rosa-Linda Fregoso, Cynthia
Bejarano, and Marcela Lagarde assert that, indeed, this violence against women as a group constitutes a State crime when states fail to guarantee the security and the lives of women (Terrorizing Women). For the women’s movement in Nicaragua as well, a central element in the campaign to end violence against women involves dispelling the notion that violence occurring in the home or between romantic partners constitute private matters. Taking this idea a step further, the women’s movement in Nicaragua has also campaigned extensively to place the responsibility with the State for ending impunity.
Judging by many online comments, however, public opinion still relegates gender violence to the private, individual terrain of the family. In what constitutes a complete denial and reversal of the feminist coding of gender violence as a state crime, some online commentators claim that the main fault of Law 779 is its delegation of “family” or
“affective” problems to state institutions. Some goes as far as to say that the law’s interference causes more violence.
• Due to feminine banditry, the number of illegal arrests of many men have
increased [because] they don’t let them resolve their problems in the bosom of the
family and, without mediation, they’re taken to jail, because of pure feminine
whim [.] This is why many men make that fatal decision against women.132
131 “Feminicide” is the term preferred by Fregoso, Bejarano, and Lagarde de los Ríos, precisely because it acknowledges State complicity with gender violence. Femicide has been used in the Nicaraguan context, including in the language of Law 779. 132 All the original comments in Spanish appear in Appendix A: Online Comments in the Nicaraguan Press. They are listed in the order of appearance in this chapter, including the article name and page number on 195
• Law 779 is a legal aberration that has destroyed many families. First error:
bringing family arguments to the penal realm, that the feminists call it
psychological abuse is absurd. But still more absurd still is saying that only
women can accuse men of this abuse, while men can’t accuse women.133
• I’m a woman, wife, mother, and grandmother and I view this law with worry [.] It
comes to divide the Nicaraguan family, the homes, and plant discord between the
natural couple of man and woman. This law should be completely abolished.134
• In all couples, “even in the best families,” arguments and differences arise; but by
satanizing the man and victimizing the woman, conflicts of passion overflow
instead of seeking a point of agreement or coexistence o a peaceful divorce at
least. Many women have used this law to take advantage.135
• It’s an absurd law, that takes the family environment, where there should be
couples counseling, and moves it to the penal environment, where only the man is
held responsible for everything wrong that exists in the family.136
The core of these conflicts rests on the antiquated, though effective, division of spaces that has historically relegated women to the domestic sphere, as well as delimited a realm of legitimate masculine violence. In the online comments, people cling tightly to the symbolic constructions of the private realm as comforting, manageable, and safe; in
which they appear. In the footnotes, I provide the article title and web address. “Parricida confiesa crimen.” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/328363-parricida-confiesa-crimen#comentario 133 “Decretazo contra la Ley 779.” http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18826/decretazo-contra-la-ley- 779 134 “Llaman a no aprobar reforma de Ley 779” de Gloria Picón Duarte 24 septiembre, 2013.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2013/09/24/politica/163615-llaman-a-no-aprobar-reforma-de-ley-779 135 “Lo que no se dice sobre los femicidios.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/06/30/opinion/200980-lo- que-no-se-dice-sobre-los-femicidios 136 “Decretazo contra la Ley 779.” http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18826/decretazo-contra-la-ley- 779 196
Berlant’s words, “domestic privacy can feel like a controllable space, a world of potential unconflictedness…a world built for you (Berlant 6). The persistence of this symbolic coding of the home space leads to fierce resistance of interventions into the personal, private realm of intimate relations. Indeed, public opinion is divided over who is qualified to address the topic of violence, and in which spheres: within the family unit or in the realm of state institutions. The focal point of social disaccord seems to be that of
State intervention in the highly fragmented, contested sphere of the intimate.
Family-ist [familista] discourse from Ortega’s State reaffirms reactionary notions about gender violence that advocate for solving these problems “in the family.” It is troubling that online comments affirm this isolation of violent issues to this domain. But their sentiments echo the gesture of Ortega’s recent presidential decree. Indeed, the
Regulation of Law 779 makes the Ministry of the Family and the Family Counsels the central mediating institutions between victims and the proper criminal justice institutions, such as the Women and Children’s Police Stations. A troublesome prospect, because as
Wendy Flores points out, the Family Ministry’s mandate does not extend to criminal justice issues. “‘You would go to the Family Counsels in order to fix family problems not criminal situations,’ affirms Wendy Flores, lawyer for the Nicaraguan Center for Human
Rights (Cendih). ‘People aren’t seeing the topic of violence as a public health situation, as a situation that shouldn’t be resolved in the realm of the couple” (López unpaged).137
President Ortega’s delegation of criminal cases of violence to unqualified bodies is the
137 “A las Consejerías de familias irías para arreglar los problemas de familias no las situaciones delictivas”, valoró Wendy Flores, abogada del Centro Nicaragüense de Derechos Humanos (Cendih). “No se está viendo el tema de violencia como una situación de salud pública, como una situación que no se debe de resolver en el ámbito de parejas”. El confidencial 6 August 2014. http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18787/golpe-orteguista-contra-las-mujeres
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main cause for considering the Regulations of Law 779 as an imminent threat to women’s safety and security.
In order for gender violence—emotional, patrimonial, sexual, psychological violence—to be treated as a serious public health problem, it first must be treated as a crime. These forms of violence threaten the exercise of women’s full liberty and citizenship. On the contrary, the recent Regulations of Law 779 released by President
Daniel Ortega frame gender violence and intrafamilial violence as interpersonal dramas that can be resolved through mediation and community counseling, within the realm of the family. This represents a regressive step away from State intervention in the intimate sphere. The Regulations indeed present a worrisome contradiction, given the fact that the they identify the home (i.e. the couple) as the most dangerous place for women, isolating the definition of femicide to this context, while also enclosing women in mediation procedures specifically within this same environment.
Without doubt, this polemic about defining the place for combatting violence centers on the meaning and relevance of the present construction of the nuclear family.
An exchange between two commenters clearly illustrates this battle. Commenter 1: “[The
Regulation] is in agreement with our constitutional norm that fundamentally protects the family as the central nucleus of society.” Commenter 2:
Your comment seems out of place to me, because we women are part of
the family. This Regulation leaves the door open to violence in the family
and makes it invisible as a society-wide health problem. (López)138
138 Commentator 1: Esta muy atinado el reglamento a la Ley 779, máxime que esta en concordancia con lo dispuesto en nuestra norma constitucional que tutela fundamentalmente a la familia como núcleo central de 198
Indeed, given the symbolically charged way that the Regulation codes the image of the mediation in the family and its use in the familialist political discourse of the Sandinista party, violence against women is no longer coded as a crime, but rather as an affective problem that can be mediated by love and understanding. This is a bold-faced refusal to acknowledge polarization and the explosive violence of extreme masculinities.
Furthermore, the Regulation turns a blind eye to changing social dynamics that displace the nuclear family as the most viable form of organization.
Gendered pacts: polarization and verticality in power relations
Many online comments reflect the notion that Law 779 is an “anti-male” law.
This idea was present before the law was put into effect, evidenced by the legislative debates, and seemed to spread through Nicaraguan society afterwards. A rampant sense of fear in these comments predicts that the playing field might be leveled and women might now be able to count on juridical tools of protection. Reading online comments, one perceives a palpable degree of resistance to this transformation. The most common accusation leveled against Law 779 constitutes clear proof of this resistance. Moreover, it is backed up by a polarizing discursive strategy. When commentators claim that the law
la sociedad...; Commentator 2: Me parece fuera de lugar su comentario, porque las mujeres somos parte de la familia, este reglamento solo mantiene abierta la puerta a la violencia dentro de la familia y la invisibiliza como un problema de salud de toda la sociedad. http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18787/golpe- orteguista-contra-las-mujeres
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attacks men, they appeal to a centuries long tradition of masculine juridical privilege under the liberal Nicaraguan republic.
• “[the law needs some sort of regulation] so that it can’t be used as a weapon or
blackmail[.] At the present time it’s enough for any woman that wants to damage
the integrity or personality of a man, [with] only the words coming out of her
mouth accusing him of something and, without an investigation, the consequences
arise.139
• Why does this law protect women and not include the protection of men?...[we
should] eliminate this law or make a similar one to protect the rights of men that
God gave them, in the Bible only the man appears before God, never the woman,
for that reason Law 779 disrespects men.140
These comments that categorize Law 779 as “anti-male” reveal complete ignorance or willful denial of the historical precedent of androcentric legal systems. Some appeal to religious doctrine, which historically justified the implementation of androcentric laws in hierarchized colonial contexts. Male privilege was cemented in the Penal Code through juridical figures like patria potestad and further ensured by an all male judicial apparatus.
In addition, decades of military rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have bolstered closed, exclusionary, and arbitrary uses and interpretations of the law, due to the way that military strongmen manipulate and bend its tenets. All this contributes to
139 “Decretazo contra la Ley 779.” http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18826/decretazo-contra-la-ley- 779. 140 “Recurso contra Reglamento de Ley 779.” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/328958-recurso- contra-reglamento-de-ley-779
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Catherine MacKinnon’s notion of the “deeply gendered legal arrangements” that constitute national bodies of law (Are Women 7).
What’s more, the sentiments in these comments surpass a simple refusal to acknowledge the historical precedent of androcentric state-legal apparatuses. The problem is that these commentators accept legal frameworks as natural, judicious, state- sanctioned, and clear on their rights. In fact, in the face of unequal exercising of physical force by masculinities, they move to deny women a special protected status under the law. As Catherine MacKinnon has pointed out, gender neutrality in the law is the masculine standard and the rule of special protection is the feminine standard (Women’s
Lives). Law 779 sought to establish juridical figures in the Penal Code that would institute just this sort of a special protected status for women in Nicaragua. But many of these comments about the “anti-male” nature of Law 779 show an obstinate refusal to grant any special legal protection that might “give women tools” to use in order to rebalance these power relations. Furthermore, they reveal that hierarchical notions of power relations remain culturally predominant. Instead of acknowledging women’s vulnerability, those commentators cling to the norm of masculine dominance and authority, blatantly ignoring or denying the fact that the purported “neutrality” of normative liberal legal frameworks disadvantage women in institutional practice.
As I explored in Chapter 1, as early as during the legislative debates, several male
National Assembly representatives expressed fears that Law 779 would be used “against men.” In fact, during the debates, these male representatives’ opinions on the law revealed a will to terminate women’s subordination, but it was one that was simultaneously coupled with fears about how this re-balancing of power would transform 201
their position in society. Let us remember Representative Salvador Talavera Alaniz’s sentiment from the legislative debates:
I know some male colleagues are afraid…that with this law from here on
out women will probably have powerful weapons in their hands, and all
the sudden they may even use them…probably someone could even try to
believe that they could be unjustly used against some men… (“DP”
unpaged)141
Interestingly, Talavera’s comment, as well as several other online comments, features lexical allusions to war. In the phrase “women will probably have powerful weapons in their hands,” the assumption is built in that women have 1) been subjugated, and 2) have good reason to want to fight back. We could even make the argument that the Law makes men feel threatened, perhaps even feminized by the equaling out of the power balance.
These fears signal an all-to-acute awareness of the asymmetrical nature of gendered power relations, but also point to a marked hesitation towards releasing their advantaged position in these relations. Like Talavera, commentators use the rhetorical tactic of calling foul play. This tact reveals the will to deny a dominated group its right to fight back. As we see here, several commentators accuse women of using the law to personally benefit or to exact revenge on their partners.
141 “Conozco que algunos colegas varones tienen un temor no sé si legítimo o no, pero tiene el temor de que con esta ley probablemente las mujeres de ahora en adelante van a tener armas en sus manos muy poderosas y de repente las pueden hasta utilizar; así como se les garantiza los derechos, probablemente alguien pueda pretender creer que puedan ser usadas injustamente contra algún hombre” (“DP” unpaged). 202
• The alarming rise of feminicides is related to the Manichaestic focus of this law
supposedly favoring women…Many women have used the law to take
advantage.142
• What’s going on is that the majority of women have stuck firmly to this law, one
because they wrongly interpreted the law and they want everything they say to be
valued [.] They leave men without any defense. What’s more, the majority of
women demand an alimentary pension for their children and these pensions are
used for their convenience… and if you don’t give it to them they’ll even accuse
you of sexual harassment or bad treatment.143
• [This law doesn’t protect men] because women want to have their lover and keep
all the fruit of a man’s efforts in building a house, raising his kids, getting a
business, [things] that perhaps the woman had no idea how to do.144
These comments express a fear of being defenseless before the law and before women.
Economic concerns creep into the debate, revealing a stereotyped vision of women as opportunistic in their leeching off of men’s earnings. They also presume that women do not contribute economically to the family. This sentiment echoes the historical devaluation of household labor, as well as a denial of Nicaraguan women’s presence in the formal and informal labor market. The comments indicate an inability to conceive of social relations outside of a vertical, authoritarian model of personal benefit. According
142 “Lo que no se dice sobre los femicidios.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/06/30/opinion/200980-lo- que-no-se-dice-sobre-los-femicidios
143 “Reglamento sepultó Ley 779.” http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18940/reglamento-sepulto-ley- 779 144 Recurso contra Reglamento de Ley 779.” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/328958-recurso- contra-reglamento-de-ley-779
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to how these commentators perceive of social relationships, if women gain any power, men must necessarily lose it. No room remains in this scheme for compromise, flexibility, or renegotiation of the status quo of social relationships. In situations of supremacy and domination, clearly there exists a marked resistance to relinquish privileges.
On the other hand, reflecting the attitude of the man mentioned earlier from
Jaugey’s documentary, concerns coalesce around the aspect of female authority in government institutions. Commentators assume that the Special Tribunals on Violence and the civil servants specializing in violence will carry an inherent bias towards men.
Another protest from the man cited above in El día que me quieras—that “all men are the bad guys and I’m the bad guy just because I’m a man”—also appears in the online comments. The commentators make no distinction between judicial and psychological professionals specially trained to deal with gender violence and “feminist judges” or
“feminist psychologists.”
• Don’t be naïve, if you hit her the police will grab you in two minutes. Once
you’re a prisoner, there’ll be no therapy/counseling, rather you’ll be moved to the
Special Tribunals for gender [violence], where there are only feminist judges that
will give you the maximum possible sentence.145
• When a woman accuses a man, a feminist psychologist interviews her and decides
if there are light or serious psychological wounds to see if they incarcerate the
man or not. This is subjective, and the worst is that it ‘remains carved in stone,’
145 “Decretazo contra la Ley 779.” http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18826/decretazo-contra-la-ley- 779 204
that is, no one can dispute the ruling. If one asks that another professional
psychologist examine the women, Law 779 doesn’t allow it because they say it’s
submitting the woman to a double victimization??? How stupid!!146
Implicit in these comments is the notion that “feminist judges” cannot be impartial, but rather seek to attack and incarcerate men indiscriminately. It seems a ludicrous and ironic perspective, given the empirical observation that the majority of legislators, judges, and lawyers in Nicaraguan history have been men. As a result of the Revolution, women did begin to enter government professions (Kampwirth 26), arriving to the point we are at today, in which the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is Alba Luz Ramos, while Aminta
Granera is the head of the National Police. But what these comments reveal, again, is the fear of relinquishing full power and the suspicion that women in positions of authority will exact revenge for centuries of unequal power relations between men and women.
They know that the absolute power they have exercised is now in question.
In the end, anti-male allegations against Law 779 constitute a simple, effective rhetorical strategy. This strategy appeals to masculinity’s weight as a valued cultural asset by homogenizing the term and blocking dialogue about that sector of “the male” occupied by violent masculinities. This tact corresponds to a desire to defend the valuable social capital of authority that is associated with masculine figures in Nicaragua. It seems that the commentators who allege that 779 is “anti-male” understand the symbolic power of this new law and how it could begin to chip away at their privileged position. The vehemence with which they attack it reaffirms that many see masculinity as a network of complicity. Though in reality it’s a network tempered by racial and class distinctions, in
146 Ibid. 205
the discursive realm of online comments the homogenization of “maleness” better serves to defend privilege. Aware of the society-wide scale of the law’s reach, these commentators, along with conservative sectors, refuse to accept this symbolic blow to masculine authority.
According to Pierre Bourdieu, “social capital” includes the resources or possible resources connected to having
…a durable network or more or less institutionalized relationships of
mutual acquaintance and recognition…which provides each of its
members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a ‘credential’
which entitles them to credit. (248-249)
Dominion over familial and institutional authority is the social capital of Nicaraguan masculinities. Its product is a sense of self-entitlement that leads certain masculinities to treat the feminine and feminized bodies as exchangeable, useable property. In the online comments, we see how anti-779 commentators seek to maintain that social capital by refusing to recognize the excesses of certain masculinities in this situation of domination.
This hierarchical, exclusionary notion of power also points to conclusions I have drawn in previous chapters about the staying power of the image of the strongman patriarch who exercises absolute authority over the family unit and, by extension, over
Nicaraguan society in general. This can be further nuanced using Héctor Domínguez
Ruvacalba’s notion of “the violent man” image across Nicaraguan history, a figure that also dominates in contemporary popular culture. The term “the violent man” comes from
Domínguez Ruvacalba’s study of film and theater depictions of the feminicides in Ciudad
206
Juárez.147 In this chapter, he explains that a key process in creating modern civilizations has been the dissemination of “convincing and seductive images” through the medium of
“technologies of gender,” which have been employed to signify the national (149).148
Domínguez Ruvacalba’s argument hinges on the centrality of violent masculinitites in the greater constellation of images available across Mexican historic, literary, and general popular culture. As he affirms, “The violent man, is, therefore, a constructed and disseminated notion in the market of images” (150).149
In Nicaragua several figures epitomized this symbolic image of the strong man in
Nicaragua: Anastasio Somoza García, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, and now Daniel
Ortega. More often than not, these figures have exercised exclusionary, possessive, and narcissistic models of power. Drawing their symbolism down to micro-political conceptions of interpersonal relationships, their conceptions of power are useful for understanding the jealous guarding of power that appears in contemporary notions of familial, patriarchal authority. It may not be a stretch to apply Domínguez Ruvacalba’s idea to these models of authority, where, pleasure for the violent man comes from subjugating others to his will and domination is the object of desire.
Anti-feminist logics
147 See “El hombre invisible: masculinidad y violencia.” De la sensualidad a la violencia de género. La modernidad y la nación en las representaciones de la masculinidad en el México contemporáneo. México D.F.: CIESAS, 2013. 148 Domínguez Ruvacalba is using Teresa de Lauretis’s notion of “technologies of gender.” See my Chapter 2 for an explanation of the term. 149 “El hombre violento es, entonces, una noción construida y diseminada en el Mercado de imágenes” (150). 207
Feminist groups become a target for harsh criticism by some online commentators. According to these online users, the feminist movement is a dangerous source of corruption of morality due to their hatred for men and their purely economic motivations. Their ranks swelling with financial opportunists, these feminists purportedly ride the coattails of international aid organizations. They may even take part in an international conspiracy to jail innocent men. These heated accusations reveal anxieties and anger over the role of the women’s movement in civil society, questioning their quite visible presence on the political and social scenes. Perhaps at the heart of these accusations rests the belief that Law 779 wasn’t locally gestated, but was an import from international feminism.
What other motives arise behind these demonizing visions of the various organizations of the women’s movement in Nicaragua? In these comments the diversity of the movement is stripped away, with commentators referring to the organizations as
“the feminists” or “the NGOs.” The conflation of feminist organizations with international NGOs is especially compelling, in that it hints both at a distrust towards supposedly “imported” ideologies, as well as deep seated suspicions of political and financial opportunism.
• I believe that the bigger problem than femicides in Nic[aragua] are the NGOs, that
because of a lack of professionalism (statistics pulled out of thin air), make a fuss
about femicides (that for the moment are relatively low)… Do the NGOs find
208
work for the women that put up with everything so that their husbands keep
supporting them?150
This comment echoes a common accusation that feminist activists and NGOs are good for nothing other than protesting. Eliding a whole body of activist organizational work done by different NGOs, which does in fact include employment and professional support for women, the commenter insinuates that these groups literally do nothing for women. Interestingly, the NGOs themselves are deemed a more pressing problem than femicides.
Perhaps an even more compelling aspect of this brand of comments is the accusation of financial opportunism. Several commentators allege that feminist organizations benefit economically from their activism, as evidenced by the following comment:
• …what I suspect is that [for] the organizations championing the law, the business
of living at the expense of international aid is ending and now they’ll have to look
for a new way to earn a living, since the buck stops here.151
• Criminality is a phenomenon that should be taken on in its totality. It shouldn’t be
twisted by the calculating opportunism of feminists and NGOs interested in
receiving economic benefit from it.152
150 “Prevención contra la violencia sin fuerza.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/05/17/ambito/194695- prevencion-contra-violencia-fuerza
151 This comment refers to the Regulation of Law 779. The commenter asserts that now that the law has been disabled, feminist activists will be out of luck financially. “Golpe Orteguista contra las mujeres.” http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18787/golpe-orteguista-contra-las-mujeres 152 “CSJ promueve marcha contra la violencia hacia las mujeres.” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/323381- 209
• Did you all know that the María Elena Cuadra Women’s Movement receives at
least 500 dollars for each case that they win against a man, even if he’s
innocent?153
With hues of an international conspiracy against men, this last commentator maintains that the women’s organizations receive money for criminal charges brought to trial against men. According to this logic, activists’ financial opportunism trumps genuine concern about society and the problem of violence. This focus seeks to discredit and undermine the reputation of the women’s movement, at the same time that it minimizes the issue of violence as central to women’s citizenship, security, and wellbeing.
In the comments cited above, feminists appear as outsiders propelled by an ideology of internationalist leanings and by predatory economic motivations. Given
Nicaragua’s long history of U.S. military interventions and back handed meddling in national affairs, the residue of anti-imperialist energies is understandably channeled into resentment and distrust of the motives of U.S. and European NGOs. Some activists and scholars do allege that the plethora of NGOs that settled in Central America in the 1990s brought with them a predetermined internationalist agenda, imposing global categories and criteria to understudied local conjunctures (Howe). Much as the etiquette of
“subversive” or “Communist” labeled political dissidents as dangerous infiltrators of
“national” culture during the Central American civil war years (Torres-Rivas 219), the associative labeling of all women’s groups as “NGOs” seeks to disqualify and silence
153 “Prevención contra la violencia sin fuerza.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/05/17/ambito/194695- prevencion-contra-violencia-fuerza
210
what is perceived as a troublesome, foreign imported critique of the status quo, in this case of gender relations.
Although critiques of NGO culture merit consideration, leveling the charge of
“importing ideologies” against the diverse organizations of the Nicaraguan women’s movement is at best reductive, and at worst, misleading. As Sofía Montenegro explains, the emergence of the women’s movement in Nicaragua was made possible by the
Sandinista movement, which provided the “political structure of opportunity,” while the
Revolution “and its vicissitudes” allowed women to radically politicize their stance (370).
She acknowledges that the international feminist movement contributed information, spaces for exchanging experiences, and also activists and ideology to the Nicaraguan movement (375). However, upon conducting 30 interviews with representatives of the movement from mixed organizations, women’s organizations, and individual activists in
1997, Montenegro reports that the interviewees defined the women’s movement as heterogeneous in nature, adding that it is “a space of expression of all the groups of women that fight against subordination and discrimination” (376). Feminisms may have global scope, but the heterogeneous, grass roots nature of the Nicaraguan movement dispels facile, reductive accusations that they all live off of international aid.
The ostracizing power of internationalist labels becomes clear in these comments.
Pulling from a twentieth-century history of struggles for national autonomy, these comments capitalize on the distaste for outside impositions, qualifying feminism as an international import. But beyond the idea that feminist groups live on a salary paid by international aid money, something about their prevalence and visibility disturbs many commentators. Indeed, it may be iconoclasm at its purest: feminism seems a threat to 211
traditional love and marriage. But historically those prone to challenging the status quo of the organization of intimate life have been subject to an “othering” treatment, similar to that received by immigrants. Often the defenders of hegemonic, institutionalized intimacy paint sexual and gender dissidents as a sort of Outside, besieging the walls of the safe, insulated bastions of normalcy. With respect to feminism and the changes proposed by
Law 779, many fears coalesce: disorder, the breakdown of familiar structures, cultural contamination, etc. In many of the newspaper comments, these distressing social concerns can be condensed in the figure of the feminist—especially that of the loss of tradition. These are indeed the fears that have been stirred up by sexual and gender dissidents and deviants in Nicaraguan history, even during the Sandinista revolution.154
A constellation of fears revolving around the spread of feminism came to prominence after the Sandinista electoral loss of 1990. Karen Kampwirth uses the term antifeminism to describe sentiments that arose in the 1990s and directed public policy under the government of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. Kampwirth claims that antifeminism “…is organizing that rhetorically responds to, and attacks, feminism” (48).
In her autobiography, Barrios de Chamorro looks back on the years of the Sandinista revolution and sums up the sentiments that would color her government’s stance on gender relations:
The girls also rebelled against the ladylike image that had been imposed
upon them by their mothers. They too donned army fatigues and combat
boots. I suppose they saw it as a symbol of their equality with the men.
154 The short documentary Sex and the Sandinistas (date), directed by Lucinda Broadbent, demonstrates the uneasiness that non-heterosexual intimate ties caused in the ranks of the Sandinista party. Members were often subject to harassment and demoted for their preferences. 212
Unfortunately many excellent family values were thrown overboard as
well. (194)
In the political climate of the 1990s, Barrios de Chamorro’s glorification of family values proved to have wide appeal. As we see in online comments, this discourse of family unification and harmony addressed concerns about social organization that were relevant at the time and continue to trouble commenters today.
These online comments seem to recycle old, yet persistent fears provoked by the idea of women’s autonomy. This could be one explanation for why the independent and active mobilization of the women’s organizations provokes hostile reactions and suspicions of opportunism. With Law 779 being linked in recent religious rhetoric to the breakdown of the family, morality, and customs, attacks on the women’s organizations that promoted it would not follow long behind. Whether or not transformations in intimate relations and social organization can be attributed solely to the impact of the feminist movement, distinct interest groups look for ways to grapple with changing mores, often searching out a scapegoat that can be blamed for disorder and disintegration.
As Rosanna Reguillo affirms, in her article on fear and citizenship under neoliberal governance, “…it can be said that the generalized perception of crisis, the expanded representation that society is disintegrating, should have some form of explanation”
(194). In the minds of conservative proponents of traditional family structures, feminism’s challenging of masculine dominance and authority can be blamed for the faltering of traditional modes of social organization.
More pointedly, I suspect that demonizing representations of feminists come from deep anxiety over their persistent presence in public scenes of the streets, rotundas, and 213
plazas. Since the 1990s, the protests of the Autonomous Women’s Movement
[Movimiento Autónomo de Mujeres] and other affiliated groups have enlivened the streets of the main Nicaraguan cities with colorful posters and banners and an insistent message: Stop the violence against women and stop male impunity. As a few comments expressed, protesting is characterized as frivolous or as a useless vocation that international NGOs pay these groups to engage in.
Though not made explicit in all the comments, an underlying sense of indignation surfaces in regards to the prominence and legitimacy that feminist and women’s groups have gained since the 1990s. Their vibrant exercises of popular protest that take to the streets may appear to some as a violation of the spatial logics discussed earlier in this chapter, designated by what Amorós calls “the ancestral proto-laws of patriarchal design,” referring to how spatial divisions deciding women’s use value precluded a liberal legal framework (Amorós 44). Expanding beyond the domain of the streets and plazas, Law 779 provides proof that these protests and the continued demands of the women’s movement for substantive rights had been successfully integrated into state and civil society agendas. As Ana Carcedo Cabañas and Giselle Molina Subirós maintain, the growing legitimacy of feminisms means that more sectors are influenced by their proposals, appropriating them and accommodating them to their own logic (8).
Observations of financial opportunism seem a cheap strategy indeed for writing off the myriad propositions for social transformation that they advance. However, according to
Sofía Montenegro’s interviewees, already at the end of the 1990s, the women’s movement had gained considerable prestige and legitimacy before society (377).
Montenegro reports the words of Aminta Granera, the Chief of the National Police, who 214
said, “The women’s movement is strong, it makes its presence felt, it demands respect. In the Police they fear and respect the movement” (377).
Responses to impunity and the arbitrary reversal of Law 779
Despite intense disagreements over the motives of the protesting women’s organizations and their place in civil society, many comments did demonstrate acute awareness of the dilemma of masculine impunity. One particular recent event catalyzed public opinion and permitted an outpouring of anger over judicial and executive inaction or negligence. During the summer of 2014, first lady Rosario Murillo’s announced an official convocation of female civil servants to attend a march against violence towards women.155 The President of the Supreme Court, Alba Luz Ramos affirmed her institution’s commitment to the march and encouraged other civil servants to attend. On the other hand, women’s groups immediately began to speak out against the first lady’s action, with the Autonomous Women’s Movement publically declaring their boycott of the march.156 Reyna Rodríguez, of the Network of Women against Violence, declared:
“In addition to a march, what’s needed is a budget [to fund anti-violence programs]”
(Romero “Mujeres rechazan”). In the same spirit as Rodríguez, Magaly Quintana, of
Catholic Women for the Right to Decide, affirmed that the employees of the judicial branch themselves are responsible for existing impunity and called the march a “media show” (Romero y Vargas).
155 “Poder judicial participará en marcha anunciada por Compañera Rosario Murillo. 27 June 2014. http://www.poderjudicial.gob.ni/prensa/notas_prensa_detalle.asp?id_noticia=4786 156 “Mujeres rechazan la marcha del oficialismo” 1 July 2014. http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/07/01/politica/201191-mujeres-rechazan-la-marcha-del-oficialismo. 215
This institutional march provoked many scathing comments about the State’s role in perpetuating impunity. Many commentators pointed out the irony of justice officials protesting impunity. Their comments are also generally tinged with distrust for the
Ortega government.
• No way, that’s the last straw of the last straws, a march against violence towards
women, headed by the President of the CSJ[.] I also ask myself who are they
going to demand justice from, the people[?]. Yes it will once again be a big
obligatory circus by the most depraved couple in the country.157
• It rather appears that the judicial branch’s march is to support the impunity of the
beasts that commit murders against women.158
• A double standard due to partisan obedience, that’s how I qualify the Magistrate
of the CSJ, because they themselves fertilized the climate of defenselessness in
which women live[.] The gifts, bribes, trafficking in influence by murderers of
women make it so that it seems disgusting that the main representative of justice
in the country, Alba Luz Ramos, would participate in what, in reality, her
institution has promoted by the corrupt elements mentioned before.159
• What nerve of the Orteguista civil servants to convene a march seemingly
supporting women when they are the ones that foster impunity in these crimes, the
judiciary employees play deaf and blind in these cases.160
157 The comment refers to President Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo. “Marcha de la CSJ es un show.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/07/02/nacionales/201363-marcha-de-la-csj-es-un-show 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid. 160 Ibid. 216
• What cynicism of the CSJ of injustice[.] Now they’re going to march, in
Nic[aragua] lead floats and corks sink, plain and simple. What nerve! It’s they
themselves that protect these delinquents.161
A slew of comments like these lambast the Supreme Court of Justice of Nicaragua for taking part in the protest organized by Rosario Murillo. These online users place explicit blame on the justice system for impunity around gender violence, with the Supreme
Court and its Chief Magistrate being the top culprits. The vocabulary they employ professes extreme frustration and loathing: “the last straw,” “depraved,” “double standard,” “disgusting, and “nerve.”
Commentators accuse the Supreme Court not only of negligence, but also of active complicity with perpetrators. Through accepting bribes and offering explicit protection, they claim, the operators of the justice system permit the atmosphere of violence against women to prosper, while perpetrators go unpunished. They pose a very legitimate question. Who are the government employees directing their protests to? As the following comment illustrates, online readers shared the opinion that the march was a joke, nothing but a show put on for the mass media.
• A BIG SHOW in which the main actress is Rosario Murillo!162
Their stance reveals an opinion shared by many feminist activists against violence: that the State embraces the discourse of stopping violence against women, but refuses to treat the issue seriously in pragmatic policy. As Reyna Rodríguez, spokesperson for the
Network of Women Against Violence, explains in an article that appeared in El País in
161 Ibid. 162 Ibid. 217
June 2014, since the passing of Law 779, Ortega’s government has not allocated proper funding to the projects for the prevention of gender violence or for campaigns of sensitization (Salinas Maldonado). The Regulation of Law 779 offered further proof that
Ortega may have supported the law as a boon to his own image from the start.
Reacting to the feminist and women’s groups’ boycott of the march, several commentators called for broad based societal protests against impunity. These comments generally criticized feminist groups for being exclusionary.
• With this march the president of the Supreme Court is inviting us, the whole
society, to expand platforms for working against violence and to foment a more
humane and more just Nicaragua, and to reduce the asymmetries between men
and women and better these profiles from the home [.] These organizations are
excluding themselves instead of forming one single profile for working against
violence [.] Join the march with no shame.163
• And the ones [protests] that the others do aren’t a show.—what’s good for the
geese is good for the gander—one notes how obstinate [they are]. Have an
attitude of dialogue…we should support all the actions that generate opinion
against femicides.164
• Only they [Catholics for the Right to Decide] can protest against violence towards
women? This problem is social, not political[.] These organizations only criticize,
nothing else, only they have the right to protest? What I think is that they have a
163 Ibid. 164 Ibid. 218
visceral hate for men… who knows where these organizations get the money to
survive.165
Arguing from a different angle, these comments see the march as supportive of the already numerous public actions of the women’s movement against femicide and gender violence. This position, in fact, points to a palpable dilemma at the heart of women’s movement protests against impunity. This dilemma involves the inherent contradiction of condemning the State for its negligence, while demanding reform and protection from its institutions. The crucial stance of denouncing impunity puts the organizations at odds with government officials, and this is made evident by the symbolic gesture of the
Autonomous Women’s movement refusing to participate in the march. At the same time, written into Law 779 itself is the imperative for dialogue, cooperation, and coordination between the State and civil society organizations. Historical impunity and continued neglect in the budget, not to mention the bold-faced reversal of the State’s stance through the Regulation to Law 779, prove this conciliatory relationship a difficult one to achieve in Nicaragua.
Only a few short weeks after the government sponsored protest, Daniel Ortega quietly published his Regulation of Law 779 in the official government paper, La Gaceta.
Through this presidential proclamation, President Ortega bypassed channels established by the constitution for regulating a law and did not consult with the National Assembly
(Montenegro et. al. “Recurso” unpaged). As I explore in previous chapters, the
Regulation to Law 779 restricted the codification of femicide to interpersonal, romantic relationships, as well as reinstated the figure of mediation in the form of the Family
165 Ibid. 219
Counsels, community groups with which women should consult before reporting gender violence to the police.
Along with the outrage of the diverse organizations of the women’s movements, many online commentators react with indignation in opposition to Ortega’s Regulation of
Law 779, informed by the array of articles that came out in the press informing the public about this development. Commentators criticize the reinstatement of mediation and the
Family Counsels, asserting the dangers of allowing unqualified individuals to mediate.
• My comment is that this government again gives evidence of the partisan control
it wants to exercise in the life of citizens, placing the Family Counsels, through
force, now with the new role of supposedly giving counseling visits house to
house for prevention…[and] the coordinators of the Family Counsels that are
from the same neighborhoods, whether men or women, have suffered or caused
violence and that’s known throughout the neighborhood. Now with what moral
authority can they arrive at their neighbor’s house and want to stick their nose in
without being a professional on the subject to offer help in order to solve the
problem? In summary they want to make this over saying that they’re carrying out
prevention when it isn’t that way.166
• Let’s get this straight… If I’m an abuser from all angles, that is, psychologically, I
don’t contribute money to the household, I insult my wife and kids, and to make
things more exciting, I beat her up now and then. So, La Chela from the store
down the street, that’s a volunteer for the Family Counsels, is going to be the first
166 “Golpe Orteguista contra las mujeres.” http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18787/golpe-orteguista- contra-las-mujeres 220
[judiciary] instance, with her experience in couples therapy acquired in the
conversations she has with people who come to the store, is going to mediate
between us?... People, what is this? Let’s protect our women. This altered law
becomes a misogynist law.167
These worried sentiments over delegating criminal issues to untrained community members repeat themselves across many comments. The key point of contention in these criticisms is precisely the lack of training of the people who will make up the Family
Counsels. But also, these comments point out the impossibility of unbiased mediating, when community members know the lives and histories of those involved. Moreover, given the language of the Regulation, which delegates that the Family Counsels should be composed of “family counselors from the values schools, volunteers, judicial facilitators, familial pastors, and religious leaders” (6265), commentators rightly assert that the hegemonic reasoning of protecting family unity will win out. A reactionary reversal of the law, the Regulations irresponsibly place a serious public health problem in untrained hands. As Gonzalo Carrión, judicial director of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights, asserts, the form in which Ortega changed the law is a direct repeal of the law itself
(Romero “Ortega ordena”).
Femicida-monsters and the outside of culture
In their hard reality, the types of violent acts that characterize femicide in contemporary Nicaragua give proof of an excess of hatred, frustration, and possession
167 “Decretazo contra la Ley 779.” http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18826/decretazo-contra-la-ley- 779
221
acted out by perpetrators. No one can deny the evidence of intense rage at the scenes of these crimes, carried out with machetes, blunt pieces of wood, guns, or kitchen knives.
The image of this cruelty has left a distinct impression on the public imaginary. Filtered through the photographic archives and textual representations of femicide perpetrators that appear in the Nota Roja crime press, newspaper readers might receive a sensationalized vision of bestial, homicidal maniacs. It’s not terribly surprising, then, that online comments utilize similar vocabulary as the Nota Roja, placing these masculinities in the realm of the primitive and the monstrous, locating them outside of culture.
• Those are the “New Men” that the Revolution forged, Great Brave Men
murderers of defenseless women[.] Let’s see how they would like it if someone
killed their mothers.168
• An idiot that found a telephone number on his wife’s phone murders her without
asking just because of that, this beast of criminal culture should be executed, until
someone gives them a lesson like that, these beasts that like to mess with women
won’t stop.169
• [Nicaraguan women] are victims of these heartless subjects that aren’t human
beings, but rather beast-vultures and the authorities in charge of the security of
Nicaraguans should reflect and stop this carnage against the humble women that
fall, murdered daily by these predatory troglodytes.170
168 “La historia de Elba Calixta.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/07/27/seccion-domingo/205003- historia-elba-calixta 169 “Ola femicida es imparable.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/06/30/portada/201019-ola-femicida- imparable 170 Ibid. 222
• The death penalty it should be for these half-men abusers.171
It is not only their violation of the norms of protection of human life purportedly enshrined in the Constitution and Penal Codes that causes such categorical classification of perpetrators as beasts. But furthermore, their crimes often violate intimate heterosexual bonds, the very bonds that should constitute the bedrock of society. The reaction reveals an impulse toward expelling this desecration from the social body. The descriptions,
“half-men,” “beast-vultures,” “predatory troglodytes,” seem to indicate a desire to relegate these individuals to the domain of the non-human, or at least to a primitive age.
In her study of the impact of “private” sphere violence on citizen interaction with
“public” institutions under neoliberalism in Colombia, Myriam Jimeno claims that everywhere we receive messages that tell us “…that violence has nothing to do with our daily relationships and our learning, but rather that it comes from the far-away inner depths of savage lands and unexpectedly attacks us” (197). Classifying femicide perpetrators as “beast-vultures” discursively carries out a similar operation. We also observe this phenomenon today in the way the dominant U.S. news media warns of the threat of “lone wolf” terrorist attacks, a racially charged ploy that aims to educate populations to perceive violence and violent individuals as sick or foreign. “It’s usually believed,” Jimeno continues, “that these furies also reside inside ourselves, in the form of primitive instincts or the illness or madness of a person or social group” (197).
Whether it invades from a savage land or explodes unexpectedly from inside ourselves, each of these views on violence disregards violence as a rationalized, instrumental practice that is sanctioned by many forms of political and popular culture.
171 Ibid. 223
The types of comments that focus on the monstrous nature of femicide perpetrators dismiss the deeper cultural roots that engender violent masculinities. Rather than trying to dig deeper into the reason for such extreme actions, the epithets of “beast” and “savage” write off their use of violence to a “lack of culture.” On the contrary, reaffirming Hannah
Arendt’s notion of the instrumentality of violence, Jimeno asserts that violence multiplies not because of the madness of individuals who use it, but precisely because it can be exercised effectively and rationally to subdue or destroy individuals (198).
Comments that describe violent men as primitive beasts, as images that correlate with the popularity of the Nota Roja, give evidence of a certain fascination with instances that are portrayed as uncontrollable violence. These perspectives carry out a further masking of the chronic nature of misogyny and control over the feminine in Nicaraguan culture. Although the comments purportedly address the issue of violent masculinities, the vantage point is one of a safely sensationalized distance from the actual practices of control that led to murder. I suspect that the femicida-monster becomes a safe target for fears, while he displaces legitimate concerns about the prevalence and the relative normality of the patterns of ownership and possession that exist in romantic and familial relationships. This perspective dismisses the myriad expressions of femicidal violence that can be common in romantic relationships: psychological and emotional abuse, patrimonial violence, and sexual harassment.
Expelling the femicida-monster from the common ground of shared cultural values in the discursive realm easily flows into justifying hardline crime and punishment stances. I have pointed out in Chapter 2 that authoritarian tendencies of social control arise under neoliberal political and economic models, isolating the systemic ill of gender 224
violence to sick, psychopathic individuals. I maintain a critical stance towards relegating these perpetrators to some primitive or sick state of being, because it short-circuits critical discussion of how they embody extreme expressions of what is considered normal masculinity. In the same vein, I agree with Kristin Bumiller when she warns us of how criminalizing representations of gender violence perpetrators can be elided into larger neoliberal projects of social control through mass-incarceration.
Public opinion online indeed echoes those authoritarian tendencies to excise extreme individuals from society. This understandable urge to banish this extreme violence form the community provokes calls for ever harsher prison sentences or for the death penalty. This logic is seen in the comment cited above: “this beast of criminal culture should be executed.” But on the other hand, the outpouring of emotion against these criminals presents an outlet for the painful after effects of femicidal violence in communities. The women’s movement has used similar strategies in recent protests by carrying posters with photos of femicide victims that also bear the names of their killers.172 These discursive and performance gestures in demand of justice seek to carry out, through protest, “older mechanisms, in which the magic punishment of the criminal permits the expression of pain and rage, at the same time that a peaceful order is reestablished” (Jimeno 209). Public condemnation and shaming constitutes a venue to mourn the unfathomable loss wrought by femicide on these communities.
The Ortega regime
172 Following videos posted on Facebook by the Programa Feminista La Corriente, Puntos de Encuentro, and Acciónes por la vida de las mujeres, I have seen several protests that used this tactic. 225
In 1997, when Sofía Montenegro speculated about what would happen after the presidency of Violeta Barrios, she spoke of continuing polarization in Nicaragua politics, asserting that the division between “sandinismo and anti-sandinismo” still dominated the political scene (365). Calling this situation “civilized polarization,” she claims that it harkens back to the disappearance of centrist forces and the reduction of political diversity resulting from the dictatorship and revolutionary years (365). Montenegro’s comments remain relevant today, when many opposition leaders now liken Daniel
Ortega’s presidency to the Somoza dictatorship due to his arbitrary hold on power.173 In recent months, government forces have dispersed massive peaceful protests against the
Canal Project taking shape in the south of the country, with many arrests noted. These events confirm fears of growing government repression.
Therefore, it may be worth revising Montenegro’s use of the adjective “civilized” to describe the current atmosphere of political polarization in Nicaragua. As expressed in the comments about the Supreme Court’s participation in a protest against violence, many commentators stressed their disintegrating faith in the State and its institutions.
Repeated allusions to Ortega’s focus on maintaining appearances show that many are questioning his government’s actual commitment to citizens’ security and safety. The mistrust of his government shines through in these comments:
• It’s not in the government’s interest to put this law completely into practice,
because defending women en all aspects includes those that aren’t in agreement
with the government, or those that denounce its arbitrary acts…therefore this law
173 The Movement for Sandinista Renovation (MRS) has been most vocal in characterizing Ortega’s government as a “regime,” due to his modification of the Constitution to permit his continued command of the country. The newspaper La Prensa always refers to Ortega as the “unconstitutional president.” 226
comes to be one of many that this government breaks. This government is
machista, even though it’s a woman who always shows her face.174
• The underlying question here is that this reform is done to makeover the statistics.
This is a government that likes to administer in appearances, to afterwards fill its
mouth with enviable statistics for the region…Outside any legal discussion…the
backdrop is political, besides that in this way, they attack and defame the feminist
organizations, that is to say, two birds with one stone.175
• I think that the appearances given by the statistics matter more to this government
than the people themselves. The appearance of a safe and tranquil country, where
everyone lives in harmony and eternal love. But we know that it’s not that
way…Now, any protest that the feminine movements carry out will be
unconstitutional and illegal. This isn’t how a president should act.176
In response to Ortega’s restriction of the definition of femicide to interpersonal, couple relationships, he is accused of “making over the statistics” [maquillando estadísticas] to keep up Nicaragua’s reputation as the safest country in Central America. Beyond the accusation of negligence, these political maneuverings lead commentators to directly accuse the government of being machista or misogynistic. They even express suspicion that the government will begin to suppress the women’s movement and feminist organizations.
174 “Prevención contra la violencia sin fuerza.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/05/17/ambito/194695- prevencion-contra-violencia-fuerza 175 “Golpe Orteguista contra las mujeres.” http://www.confidencial.com.ni/articulo/18787/golpe-orteguista- contra-las-mujeres 176 “Ortega ordena cambios a Ley 779.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/08/06/nacionales/206453-ortega- ordena-cambios-a-ley-779
227
On the other side of the argument, several commentators alleged that people opposed Law 779 simply because it was Ortega’s project. In all of these debates one senses a level of frustration at the arbitrary nature of governance in Nicaragua. As seen in the comments quote about, some applauded Ortega’s Regulation of Law 779. But winning out in numbers were the comments that condemned the unilateral reversal of the law carried out by his government.
Suspicions about the possible repression of the feminist organizations provide disturbing portents for the future. With the Regulations of Law 779, Ortega proved his willingness to over step the judicial and legislative branches of government in order to carry out his desired program of governance. This project seeks to affirm the family unit as the central protected nucleus of Nicaraguan society. It is a regressive stance that dismisses the urgency of expanding women’s security and the exercise of their full citizenship. There may indeed be credence to the suggestion that the Ortega government could be considered hybrid, that is to say, as neither a democracy nor a dictatorship, but somewhere in between (Martí i Puig and Ancochea 110). As he pushes his discourse of family unity and harmony, women’s access to legal protection hangs precariously in the balance.
Conclusions
Somewhere between the fear-mongering focus on foreign-influenced feminists and terrifying femicida-monsters, the intense conflicts over Law 779 reveal anger, worry, distrust, and insecurity in the realm of gender relations. From this small sample of public opinion, these key markers of public sentiment rise to the surface and prove that the 228
conversation about gender and power relations is a contested, mobile and highly charged state of affairs. To quote Roger Lancaster’s study of masculinity in post-revolutionary
Nicaragua, I don’t claim that the comments cited here “necessarily ‘embody,’ ‘typify,’
‘demonstrate,’ or ‘exemplify’ an abstract Nicaraguan culture (xix). Nor do they reveal a
“preexisting unified system of power” (xix). Rather, in this study of comments I’ve attempted to show the nuances in the struggle over Law 779, through examining these
“many-seamed and often ambiguous microstruggles over power” (xix). The comments analyzed here can reveal how older arguments that justified masculine authority mutate and adapt to changing circumstances. We can also see how critiques of this authority, especially in its embodiment in violent masculinities, become more acceptable and more widespread.
The political and social scenes of Central American societies, since colonization, have been marked by racial, gender, and class divisions. But even since those days, social practices have defied attempts at unifying society under hegemonic notions of morality and social control. Dissident modes of intimacy have surged up to challenge the construction of the oligarchical patriarchal family that has been mobilized as the model to follow (Alvarenga Venutolo 345). The women’s movement in particular has vocally reminded society of the potential of alternate forms for organizing the family and society.
The authoritarian model of the family that has historically predominated in Nicaraguan society has come under attack by an increasing number of liberation movements. This impetus revolves around imagining and promoting new modes of courting, parenting, and relating to one another. A potent example of these new modes of thought comes from a
229
sticker produced by Grupo Venancia in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, directed towards women which reads: “Before carrying others, take care of yourself.”177
The existence of rebellion and transgression points to the inherent contradictions in a model of family organization based on authoritarian principles and masculine domination. In spite of these recent rebellions, however, the imaginary of the unified family holds considerable sway in Nicaragua still today. As Ana Amado and Nora
Domínguez note, even though the normative, modern conjugal model is increasingly displaced by new forms of organizing intimacy, “…the symbolic force of its model seems to be intact, as a significant remainder from which it is possible to extract the terms with which to interpret the present” (Amado and Domínguez 15).
With the topic of gender violence being such a heated one, the polemics it brings up reveal growing anger over the lack of political freedom and options under the Ortega regime. His tenure and tactics seem to reproduce feelings of instability and fear of arbitrariness that echo the Somoza dictatorship. As we’ve seen here, the Ortega regime’s stance on gender violence and its reversal of Law 779 provided a flash point for online debate over a plethora of related issues: punishment, financial opportunism, the maintenance of political appearances, the fragility of the nuclear family as a viable social structure, and misogyny as a continuing social ill. This new phase of “Sandinismo,” with its populist political stances and neoliberal economic policies, exacerbates the remnants of social and political polarization existing during the guerrilla struggle and the Contra war, especially by reactivating hegemonic notions of family unity that disguise a solid reaffirmation of masculinity as the source of stability and authority. That these tactics
177 “Antes de cargar con otros, hacete cargo de vos.” 230
translate to a re-entrenching of the “amigo-enemigo logic,” which predominated during the Cold war years (Martí i Puig and Ancochea 108), is nowhere more evident than in the public responses to Law 779 analyzed in this chapter.
In the hopes of concluding with optimism, a large majority of online comments confirm Sofía Montenegro’s assertion that Nicaraguan women have gone through a complete re-socialization since the revolution and into the 1990s. Due to these political turning points and the “wide and systematic political work developed by the women’s movement and the high feminine visibility in different roles across the media” women have experienced “a coming to consciousness and a rupture with traditional ideals and values” (370). Indeed, the conversation arising around Law 779 in the online community shows a well-honed, belligerent critique of attempts to reverse its gains. Many users embrace feminist analysis of gender violence and attempt to demolish the unquestioned authority of masculinities and their recourse to violence:
• How everyone ridicules this law instead of saying that we have to do something,
Nicaraguan society is machista and vulgar. The Nicaraguan man is used to doing
whatever he wants.178
• If every woman could use a revolver, this question would already be resolved.
This way women would never let men who attack women with machetes get away
with it. No law is going to stop [this violence] or defend women, it’s better that
she has the tools to defend herself on her own!179
178 Ola femicida es imparable.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/06/30/portada/201019-ola-femicida- imparable 179 “Marcha de la CSJ es un show.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/07/02/nacionales/201363-marcha-de- la-csj-es-un-show 231
These comments represent an active, critical stance. Others indict the political and judicial systems, calling for an end to impunity and a transformation of educational models in the family and society at large, challenges that many acknowledge reach beyond the scope of the immediate effects of Law 779.
• The system privileges men over women. Men consider women’s bodies as
property to control, dominate, subdue, exploit, and sexualize. In Australia,
Canada, Israel, South Africa, and the U.S., between 40 and 70% of murders of
women correspond to violence in which the aggressor is the partner of the victim
(boyfriend and spouse) according to the World Health Organization.180
• ‘Machismo’ is a product of our family culture and it can only be eradicated in the
short and long-term with an education that is well cemented in the rescue of our
human and moral values. This education should be pragmatic so that, teachers as
well as public servants serve as permanent examples to educated children and
young people.181
Law 779 emerged from this political conjuncture appearing as a unified societal push towards transforming gender relations and confronting the problem of violence, supported by the president, the National Assembly, and a seemingly large portion of
Nicaraguans.182 But conservative sectors in Nicaragua struck back with force against the perceived undermining of the sacred structure of the family. Along with the need for legal change, the commenters calling for educational transformation realize the deep-
180 “Lo que no se dice sobre los femicidios.” http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2014/06/30/opinion/200980-lo- que-no-se-dice-sobre-los-femicidios 181 Ibid. 182 I base this affirmation on the fact that Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo supported the law, as well as the unanimous approval of the draft bill of the law given by the National Assembly. 232
seated nature of these conflicts over the “symbolic common denominator,” or the symbolic organization of reproductive relationships. When R.W. Connell said that patriarchal definitions of femininity “…(dependence, fearfulness) amount to a cultural disarmament”, he hints at the discursive and symbolic strata that uphold masculine domination. The persistence of feminine subjugation in cultural imaginaries and the tenacity of masculinity’s clinging grip to authority lend credence to Connell’s affirmations about the conflictive nature of gender relations: “the battle of the sexes is no joke. Social struggle must result from inequalities on such a scale” (82). By all means, the struggle for a more equal distribution of rights and obligations continues in Nicaragua, in legal, media, and literary domains.
233
Conclusion
Massiel: Andy and Massiel were together for six months when the abuse began. He lifted her up by the neck and threatened her with a pistol; he locked her in a room and outside the children heard her screams…. Finally, the young woman seemed she had decided to get out of this hell (del Cid “El infierno de Massiel”).183 Elba: From his prison cell he explained to the media that he killed her because she had insulted him by saying “he wasn’t a man.” He was annoyed, he said, because he didn’t like that the girl would tell “his wife” that he would “woo her.” With “woo her” he was referring to harassment and trying to slip into her house (del Cid “La historia”).184 Heidy Lucía: Perhaps you’ve seen her in the Nota Roja in the national newspapers. Perhaps you saw the photos of her multitudinous funeral and the indecipherable face of the femicide perpetrator. But, permit us to tell you who Heidy Lucía really was. The child. The woman. The singer. The rebel. (del Cid “Heidy, un espíritu libre). 185
The written word can sometimes seem a feeble tool, incapable of capturing the ephemeral beauty of life or the grinding pain of loss. But the small moments encapsulated in
183 Andy y Massiel llevaban seis meses juntos cuando comenzó el maltrato. La levantaba por el cuello y la amenazaba con la pistola; la encerraba en el cuarto y afuera los niños escuchaban sus gritos… Finalmente la muchacha parecía decidida a salir del infierno” (del Cid “El infierno de Massiel”). 184 En las celdas preventivas explicó a los medios de comunicación que la mató porque ella lo había “insultado” al decirle que “no era un hombre”. Estaba molesto, dijo, porque no le gustó que la muchacha le contara a “su mujer” que él “la enamoraba”. Y con “enamorar” se refería al acoso y a intentar metérsele a la casa…” (del Cid “La historia de Elba Calixta”). 185 Quizás usted la ha visto en las páginas rojas de los diarios nacionales. Tal vez miró las fotos del multitudinario funeral y el rostro indescifrable del femicida. Pero, permítanos contarle quién era Heidy Lucía. La niña. La mujer. La cantora. La rebelde. (del Cid “Heidy, un espíritu libre”).
234
intimate anecdotes, written with subtlety and sensitivity, can lend depth and meaning to lives lost and the fatal logic that brought their demise. These brief excerpts all come from
La Prensa’s weekly investigative feature entitled “The Face of the Victims,” authored largely by reporter Amalia del Cid. Throughout the process of writing this dissertation, I have presented sharp criticisms of the way journalism and literature represent gender violence, pointing out how they tend to limit women to the normative, submissive roles that unequal gender relations have historically assigned them. From my vantage point today, provided by time and reflection, I believe that the investigative articles from La
Prensa come closest to enacting an ideal representation of gender violence. They account for the twisted, complex relational dimension of intimacy. The stories detail the obsessive habits and rampant fears of masculinities longing to possess and control, while the portraits of the women narrate their day-to-day lives, their dreams, and also their struggle with the intimate attachments that proved fatal. The investigative pieces offer testimony of the emotional quagmires experienced by human beings educated under polarized, cutthroat, and unequal economic and political systems. Habits of domination and submission persist, haunting these particular women’s lives in the form of harassment, abuse, and an endless will to control.
In this dissertation, I have reviewed literary mediums and discursive forums in order to explain the society-wide debate that took place in Nicaragua between 2012 and
2015 about gender relations and the role of the law. As I have shown, the discussion centers not only on troubled intimate ties, but also on the legitimacy of violence and control within these affective realms. At stake as well is the allocation of responsibility for dealing with said violence: history read through feminist critique shows us that 235
relegating it to the family minimizes and hides systematic abuses of power and abandons the aggrieved party to their own devices. That being said, I have also argued here that to curb gender violence it must be treated as a crime by the State and its institutions.
Alongside this sentiment I include the caveat that the terrain of the State is fraught with partisan conflict, ideological battles, and historic and contemporary negligence. My cautiousness about the State as a source of protection for women therefore remains unresolved, especially in light of the extreme difficulty of breaking down binary identity politics and victim-aggressor dynamics in legal frameworks. I challenged journalistic representations for the same reasons, because their representational tactics rely on an instrumental, categorizing logic that isolates explanations of violence to the victim- perpetrator dyad. This view bolsters crime control scenarios, eschews collective responsibility, and feeds the furnaces of mass-incarceration. These concerns are doubly relevant under neoliberal socio-political formations, whose policies of abandonment exacerbate competition, frustration, and social fragmentation. Rather than further dehumanizing and criminalizing those who dehumanized others, a utopic vision of gender transformation exists in the loosening of harsh identity categorizations and their consequently strict and murderous norms.
These concerns open many future terrains of scholarly exploration for me.
Primarily, I hope to continue analyzing the relationship between violence and the law, with a focus on the so-called “norms changing potential of the law,” mentioned by Rosa-
Linda Fregoso. Written into Law 779 itself, the imperative for dialogue, cooperation, and coordination between the State and civil society organizations was a bold step toward creatively transforming social formations and education. That is, it attempted to construct 236
a broad-based coalition that could find ways to reach the symbolic roots of inequality.
Historical impunity and continued neglect in the budget prove this conciliatory relationship between the State and social movements a difficult one to achieve in
Nicaragua. But the impetus was truly potent. For these reasons, I hope to carry out comparative studies of other laws against gender violence in the region and trace their passage through troubled institutional spaces. In a parallel manner, I hope to deepen my knowledge of investigative journalism and crime reporting in relation to these debates.
This field especially piques my interest since Central American reporters, such as those from El Faro in El Salvador, have been producing groundbreaking investigative pieces that explore institutional corruption, criminality, and law enforcement in the region.
In regards to my theoretical framework, I believe that undertaking such a diverse corpus of texts necessarily limited the depth with which I could address certain formal concerns. Therefore, I look forward with anticipation to widening the breadth of my theoretical engagement as I work to turn this dissertation into a book manuscript. Delving deeper into media studies, feminist jurisprudence, theories of narrativity, and melodrama as a cultural mode all top my list of scholarly goals in the future. Though I stand behind the transdisciplinary scope of my project, the expansion of my knowledge with respect to more field specific formal concerns will surely aid me in developing this project. The areas of debate opened up by my dissertation research indeed beg for further research.
A central conclusion of my project is that images of popular culture, literary, and political figures actively construct notions of gender performance. I’m referring to the hombre violento mentioned by Héctor Domínguez Ruvacalba, whose presence across culture influences micropolitical notions of power and intimate relationships. In 237
contemporary Nicaraguan detective and novela negra novels, as well as social debates, visions of unilateral masculine authority fiercely dispute the vindication of feminisms for a long-needed balancing out of power in gender relations. Even after confirming how firmly entrenched this belief in masculine authority may be, however, I am still left with hope. This hope comes from several sources. First, the image of masculinity that comes through in these texts reveals an entitled, self-destructive model of relating that clings tightly to its privilege. In the end, these hegemonic, violent embodiments of masculinity prove to be untenable. As best embodied in the literary figure of Pancho Rana, “El
Rambo centroamericano,” their schemes have only one endpoint: anger, desperation, and loneliness. These figures prove that exercising absolute power can only lead to destruction, never a true understanding of the other.
As I look back on my dissertation project, I reflect on the harsh criticisms I leveled against attempts to represent gender violence. It seems that at every turn, my feminist critiques struggled against the symbolic weight of the nuclear family and the seductive image of masculine power and authority. How difficult it is to dismantle the symbolic scaffolding of heterosexual romantic love and its images, a formation that generally makes aggressive self-assurance attractive and submission pleasurable. So enmeshed is this formula in social relations, that at times I feel that we’re living a saturation point of victimization and violence across entertainment mediums. And this formula sells. It is thus quite true that feminisms necessarily take an iconoclastic stance, tearing apart our engrained, errant desires. Truth be told, this stance raises much self- doubt and some measure of guilt over my own stake in victimization as the principle story line for feminisms. 238
But this brings me to my second source of hope. If the vibrant, proliferating cultural production of Nicaraguan women’s groups, feminist collectives, and the
Diversidad sexual movement teach us anything, it’s that the magnetism and pull of new narratives have a lasting, serious impact on society. From as simple a verbal turn as
“They’re not fits of madness, they’re murders” [No son arrebatos, son asesinatos,] seen in feminist protests against femicide, to the radical, open dialogue about sexuality and gender appearing in the telenovela El sexto sentido (produced by Puntos de Encuentro in
Nicaragua), new linguistic and visual frames for discussing gender relations re-plot the terrain. Nowadays, the feminist group Puntos de Encuentro frequently holds workshops in which young men work on constructing alternate, dissident expressions of masculinity.
The claims and alternate stories of feminism carve out spaces to imagine different forms of relating, even in the face of stubborn resistance, as shown by social debates in the online forums. All of these developments prove to me that there is much fluidity and mobility in the stories, characters, and images that narrate gender norms. These new stories propelled by Nicaraguan social movements are gaining momentum, affecting the cultural vocabulary, and will continue, to quote the original objective of Law 779,
“driving for changes in socio-cultural and patriarchal patterns that support power relations.”186
186 “La presente Ley tiene por objeto actuar contra la violencia que se ejerce hacia las mujeres, con el propósito de proteger los derechos humanos de las mujeres y garantizarle una vida libre de violencia, que favorezca su desarrollo y bienestar conforme a los principios de igualdad y no discriminación; establecer medidas de protección integral para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia y prestar asistencia a las mujeres víctimas de violencia, impulsando cambios en los patrones socioculturales y patriarcales que sostienen las relaciones de poder” (1362). 239
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Web. 257 Appendix A: Cases Studied, Chapter 2 “Breves judiciales” [“Piden 14 años para padrastro violador” y “’Tocón y cuchillero’”] http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/243520 “Condenado a 510 años” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/243667 “Más víctimas del violador” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/243751 “Operación contra explotación sexual infantil en Granada” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/243834 “Sentencia a violador suma 669 años” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/243829 “Alarma ante crímenes de homofobia” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/243927 “Pierde la salud mental tras violación” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/243908 “Piden esclarecer asesinato de mujer en Siuna” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/244127 “Exigen esclarecer asesinato” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244170 “Sucesos departamentales” [‘Culpables por abusar de menores’] http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244169 “1,152 horas de prision para femicida” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244317 258 “Estrangulada y abusada junto al rio” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/244598 “¿Dónde está mi mama? Como darle la noticia a los huérfanos de femicidio” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244555 “Violada y estrangulada a la orilla del rio” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244631 “Cadena de abusos sexuales alarma a las autoridades de Esteli” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244635 “Encuentran cadáver femenino en Las Playitas” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244815* “Encuentran a fémina desmembrada” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244761* “Yo la maté por celos” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244759* “Quema a su mujer con gasolina” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244758* “El terror de las universitarias” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244884 “Aves carroñeras destrozan cadáver y evidencias” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/244888 “Encuentran osamenta” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245006 “Otra masacre en Bluefields” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245198 “Identifican cuerpo de desmembrada” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245128 “Oficial de Estelí agrede a su expareja” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245391 “Adolescente mancillada vendida al mejor postor” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245330 259 “Breves judiciales” [‘Gritos la salvan de violación’] http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245329 “Señalan a policía de balear a su cónyuge” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245422 “Féminas sufren lesiones” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245421 “No le echaremos tierra” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245416 “Quinceañera prostituida está embarazada” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245520 “‘Los patitas’ violan y asesinan a joven meretriz” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245710 “Decretan prisión preventiva contra subinspector que disparo a su ex esposa” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245684 “El decimoctavo femicidio” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245734 “Breves judiciales” [‘Cárcel para joven que violo a niño de 5 años”] http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245732 “Subinspector tenía prohibido portar arma” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245844 “Enamoramientos prohibidos” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245842 “Jueza inmoviliza a ‘Los Patitas’” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/245962 “Preso por confundir a empleada con esclava sexual” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/246066 “Turismo sexual en Xiloa” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/246153 260 “Audiencia hoy para sospechosa por trata de personas” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/246260 “Cárcel para supuesta ‘promotora sexual’ http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/246416 “Siete trabajadoras sexuales han sido asesinadas en Nicaragua” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/246752 “La mataron por sexo” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/246666 “Breves judiciales: ‘Fin a 30 años de calvario’ ‘Tres años de violaciones’” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/246664 “Instituciones de gobierno revictimizan a niñas violadas” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/246827 “La maté por celos” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/246772 “Sucesos departamentales: ‘Su hija fue violada’” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/246771 “Muere acuchillado por su pareja” (hombres) http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/246984 “Mantienen prisión para proxeneta de Xiloa” (sexual slavery)http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/247066 “Prisión para dos policías ‘tocones’” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/247556 “Tío mata a sobrina no vidente” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/248023 “Violan a jovencita en bar-restaurante” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/248091 “Nina manosea a otra imitando programa” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/248178 261 “Madre de joven violada en Venezuela exige al Estado de Nicaragua intervenir” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/248784 “Piden 17 años de cárcel para femicida torturador” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/248673 “Hombre mata a su ex mujer y se suicida” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/248874 “A juicio por garrotear, lapidar y asfixiar a sobrina no vidente” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/248796 “Se suicida tras matar a su ex” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/248903 “Policia pide que la identifiquen” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/249013 “Padrastro violador termina en los Juzgados” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/249349 “Narcos ‘compran’ a ninas por $2000 en el Rio Coco” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/249512 “Extraña violación” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/249474 “Ejercitos nica y hondureño investigan compra de niñas” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/249624 “Cuidado con la trata de personas” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/249642 “Acosan a victima desde celda via correo electrónico” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/249660 “Sucesos departamentales: ‘Fue en busca de un empleo, pero encuentra a violador’ ‘Denuncian abuso contra menor’” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/249658 “Viola a suegra septuagenaria” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/249731 262 “Padre embaraza a su hija de once años” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/249728 “Breves judiciales: ‘Aquí viene el diablo’” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/249942 “Calvario termino en parricidio” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/250031 “Breves departamentales: Deja ‘chintana’ a su mujer” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/250030 “Padre acusado de violación” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/250143 “Grave denuncia” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/250138 “Intenta suicidarse porque no pudo matar a su mujer” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/250243 “Breves: ‘Media naranja’ le amputa la mano” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/250241 “Encuentran calavera de mujer en Cerro Lago” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/250443 “Apunala al hombre que la desprecio” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/250444 “Larga condena para violador” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/250911 “Nicas entre esclavas sexuales rescatadas en Night Club” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/251030 “Condenan a triciclero violador” “Detenido por violar a menor” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/251213 “Brutal agresión contra neosegoviana” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/251471 263 “Luna de miel termina con brutal agresión” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/251514 “Hombre vende a su prima” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/251743 “Desaparece cuando iba a clases” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/251822 “Detenido por tocón” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/251876 “Piden ‘pena máxima’ para abusador de menor en Estelí” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/252081 “Culpable por cortarle los dedos a su mujer” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/252010 “Expira víctima de un mal amor” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/252148 Breves: “Halando con un cuarentón” “El noviazgo se convierte en delito” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/252253 “Hombres armados violan a cinco mujeres en Guatemala” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/252476 “Campesinos encuentran cadáver de mujer sin identificar en Estelí” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/252464 “Confiesa salvaje violación” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/252508 “Jalencia termina con novio preso” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/252505 “Pide libertad de marido denunciado hace tres anos” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/252772 “Estrangulan y apuñalan a la domestica” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/253053 Breves: “ ‘Noquea’ a madre e hija” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/253052 264 “Exigen justicia por triple crimen” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/256968 “Asesinan de tres puñaladas a nicaragüense embarazada” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/258637 “Viola y quema partes íntimas de su exmujer” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/257823 “Cinco detenidos por violación y abuso a dos menores” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/258396 “Acusan a extranjero por delitos sexuales” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/nacionales/257813 “Joven en prisión por delito sexual” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/258393 “Arrestan a hombre que estaba con una niña en un motel” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/256972 “Vendió a su hija de trece años?” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/257353 “Viola a niña para ‘cobrarse’ la crianza” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/258225 “Acusado de violación se declara loco” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/256847 “Nica mata a su mujer e intenta suicidarse” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/257092 “Perdona amenaza de muerte de marido” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/256971 “Adolescente queda embarazada por violación” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/257091 “Apuñala a su mujer y se suicida” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/260296 265 “Acusan a nicaragüense por supuestamente esclavizar a 14 mujeres” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/260446 “Violan a niña camino a la escuela” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/260786 “Anciana fue violada y asfixiada” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/260921 “Practican examen a sospechosos por muerte de anciana” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261039 “Vecino involucrado en asesinato de la abuela” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261131 “Una coartada muy singular” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261248 “Acusado por femicidio al psiquiatra” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261940 “Nino de tres años es abusado por quinceañero” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261032 “Violan a jovencitas camino al trabajo” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261326 “’Embola’ a su amigo para violarle a la hija” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261479 “Femicida se autoinculpa” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261831 “Apuñala a su exmujer por celos” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261830 “Cárcel para femicida frustrado” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/262295 “Pornógrafo norteamericano culpable” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/261939 “Clinton será deportado hacia Estados Unidos” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/262296 “Tocón en cárcel preventivita” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/262115 266 “Cierran hospedaje por permitir actividades ilícitas de clientes” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/262182 “Degüellan a quinceañero y a su madre, por celos” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/262300 “A juicio maestro por violación y embarazo de alumna” http://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/sucesos/262520 267 Appendix B: Online Comments in the Nicaraguan Press, Chapter 4 1. Jousban Álvarez Ruiz: “[algo que rija] de manera que no se pueda utilizar como arma o chantaje hoy por hoy basta que cualquier mujer quiera dañar la integridad o personalidad de un hombre solo es que la palabra salga de su boca acusando de algo y sin haber investigación las consecuencias surgen” (“Recurso” 5). 2. Zapato del otro: “por que esta ley protege a las mujeres y no incluyen la protección de los hombres…eliminar esa lay o hacer una similar para proteger el derecho de los hombres que Dios le dio, en la biblia solo aparece el hombre ante Dios nunca sale la Mujer desde ahí la ley 779 le falta el respeto al hombre” (“Recurso” 5-6). 3. Revisar maniqueismo de ley chamuca: “El aumento alarmante de feminicidios está relacionado con el enfoque maniqueista de esta ley dizque a favor de la mujer…Muchas mujeres han usado esta ley para tomar ventaja” (“Lo que no se dice” ). 4. Armengol García: “…lo que pasa [es] que la mayor parte de las mujeres se han atenido a esta ley, uno por que han mal interpretado esta ley y quieren que todo lo que ellas digan sea valoradas y dejan a los hombres in ninguna defensa, es más la mayor parte de las mujeres exigen una pensión alimenticia para sus hijos y estas 268 5. pensiones son utilizadas para su conveniencia…y si no les das hasta te acusan de acoso sexual o te acusan de mal trato…” (“Reglamento sepultó” ). 6. Zapato del Otro: “por que una mujer quiere tener su amante y quedarse con todo el esfuerzo que realizó el hombre en construir una casa, preparar a sus hijos, obtener un negocio o tal vez la mujer ni idea tenia como hacerlo” (“Recurso contra”). 7. Francisco Mirada: No sea ingenuo, si la golpeas la policía te cae en cosa de minutos. Una vez que estas preso ya no hay terapia, sino que vas a ser trasladado a los juzgados de genero, donde hay solo juezas feministas que te van a poner la máxima sentencia posible” (“Decretazo”). 8. Francisco Mirada: “Cuando una mujer acusa a un hombre, una psicóloga feminista la entrevista y decide si hay heridas psicológicas leves o graves para ver si le dan cárcel al hombre o no. Esto es subjetivo, y lo peor es que ‘queda grabado en piedra”, o sea que nadie puede disputar ese dictamen. Si se solicita que otro psicológico profesional examine a la mujer, no lo permite la ley 779 porque dicen que es someter a la mujer a doble victimización?? Que clase de estupidez!!” (“Decretazo”). 9. Álvaro Moreno: “…por bandidencias femeninas han aumentado la cantidad de detenciones ilegales de muchos hombres que no los dejan resolver sus problemas en el seno de la familia y sin mediar son llevados a la cárcel, por puro capricho femenino, a eso se debe que muchos hombres toman la fatal decisión en contra de la mujer. (“Ortega ordena” ) 269 10. Francisco Mirada: “La ley 779 es una aberración legal que ha destruido muchas familia. Primer error: traer al campo penal las discusiones de familia, que las feministas llaman abuso psicologico es absurdo; pero mas absurdo todavia es decir que solo las mujeres pueden acusar de este abuso a los hombres, mientras que los hombres no pueden acusar a las mujeres” (“Decretazo”). 11. Karla: “Soy mujer, esposa, madre y abuela y veo con preocupación esta Ley[.] Viene a dividir la familia Nicaragüense, los hogares y sembrar la discordia entre la pareja natural hombre y mujer, esta Ley debería ser derogada totalmente” (“Llaman a no”). 12. Revisar maniqueismo de ley chamuca: “En toda pareja, ‘hasta las mejores familias’, se suscitan discusiones y diferencias; pero al satanizar al hombre y victimizar a la mujer, las querellas pasionales se desbordan en vez de buscar un punto de coincidencia y convivencia o un divorcio en paz por lo menos. Muchas mujeres han usado esta ley para tomar ventaja” (“Lo que no se dice”). 13. Francisco Mirada: “Es una ley absurda, que toma el ambiente familiar, donde debería de haber asesoría de pareja, y lo traslada al ambiente penal, donde solo al hombre se le responsabiliza de todo erróneo que existe en la familia” (“Decretazo”). 14. El Viajero: “Creo que el problema más grande de los femicidios en Nic son las ONGs, que por falta de profesionalidad (estadísticas haladas de los pelos) hacen una alharaca de los femicidios (que por el momento son relativamente bajos), y se desenfocan del problema más grande que es la violencia intrafamiliar. Las ONGs 270 les consiguen trabajo a las mujeres que aguantan de todo para que las mantenga el marido?” (“Prevención”). 15. Valentin Barahona“…lo que presiento es que los organismos abanderados de la ley, se les terminara el negocio de vivir a expensas de la ayuda internacional y ahora tendrán que busca un nuevo modo de ganarse la vida, pues el negocio hasta aquí les llego” El Confidencial “Golpe orteguista contra las mujeres” (“Golpe Orteguista”). 16. Salvador Davila Ruiz: “La criminalidad es un fenómeno que debe ser aboradado en su totalidad. No debe sesgarse con oportunismo calculador por feministas y ongs interesados en sacarle ventajas económicas” (“CSJ promueve”). 17. Bello: “Sabían ustedes que el Mov. de Mujeres Maria Elena Cuadra recibe al menos 500 dólares por cada caso que ganan contra un hombre, aunque este sea inocente. (“Prevención contra”). 18. R.S.P.: “Sea caballo, el colmo de los Colmos, una marcha contra la violencia hacia las mujeres, encabezada por la presidenta de la CSJ, yo también me pregunto a quien van a demandarle justicia al pueblo, si q será todo un circo obligado una ves mas por la pareja mas degenerada del país” (“Marcha de la CSJ”). 19. Aniceto Prieto: Mas bien parece que la marcha del poder judicial es para apoyar la impunidad de las bestias que cometen asesinatos en contra de las mujeres (“Marcha de la CSJ”). 20. M.S.H. Yo no lastimo a la mujer: “La doble moral por obediencia partidaria, así califico a la Magistrada de CSJ, porque ellos mismos han abonado al clima de 271 indefensión que viven las mujeres, las dadivas, coimas, trafico de influencias de victimarios de mujeres hacen que se vea asqueroso que la máxima representante de la justifica en el país como es Alba Luz Ramos participe de lo que en realidad su institución ha promovido por los elementos corruptos antes mencionado” (“Marcha de la CSJ”). 21. Tula Cuecho: “Que descaro el de los funcionarios orteguistas convocar a una marcha dizque de apoyo a las mujeres cuando ellos son los que propician la impunidad de estos delitos, los operadores de justicia se hacen los sordos y ciegos en estos casos” (“Marcha de la CSJ”). 22. Agapito Pérez: “Que cinismo el de la CSJ de injusticia ahora van a marchar, de plano que en nic el plomo flota y el corcho se hunde. Que descaro si ellos mismos protegen a estos delincuentes” (“Marcha de la CSJ”). 23. Frankie: UN GRAN SHOW en la cual la actriz principal es Rosario Murrillo! (“Marcha de la CSJ”). 24. Responsable social: “con esta marcha la presidenta de la corte suprema nos esta invitando a toda la sociedad a que ampliemos las plataformas de trabajo contra la violencia y fomentar una nicaragua mas humana y mas justa, y disminuir las asimetrías entre el hombre y la mujer y mejorar estos perfiles desde el hogar estas organizaciones se están excluyendo ellas mismas en vez de formar un solo perfil para trabajar contra la violencia únanse a la marcha sin pena” (“Marcha de la CSJ”). 25. Daniel Ruiz: Y las que los otros hacen no son show - lo que es bueno para el ganso es buena para la gansa - se nota lo recalcitrante - tengan actitud de diálogo, 272 inicien con eso o las regañan los que les pagan si van a la marcha? - apoyemos todas las acciones que lleven a generar opinión en contra de los femicidios. (“Marcha de la CSJ”). 26. Martha: “…solo ellas se pueden manifestar en contra de la violencia hacia la mujer? Este problema es social y no político, estas organizaciones solo para criticar sirven, acaso solo ellas tienen derecho a manifestarse? Lo que pienso es que tienen un odio visceral por los hombres, no debemos generalizar, no todos son iguales, quien sabe de donde sacan dinero estas organizaciones para vivir (“Marcha de la CSJ”). 27. Francisco Palacios: “Mi comentario es que este gobierno de nuevo deja en evidencia el control partidario que quiere ejercer en la vida de los ciudadanos metiendo a plomo y fuego los famosos gabinetes de familia ahora con nuevo rol supuestamente dando consejería visita casa a casa para prevención….los coordinadores CPC o Gabinete de familia como lo quieran llamar que son del mismo barrio sus miembros ya sea hombre o mujer ha sufrido o han causado violencia y es conocido por todo el barrio ahora con qué autoridad moral pueden llegar a la casa del vecino a querer entrometerse sin ser algún profesional de la materia para brindar ayuda a solventar el problema. En resumen quieren maquillar dicen que está haciendo la prevención cuando no es así” (“Golpe Orteguista”). 28. Unan Leon Nicaragua: “A ver si entendí…Si yo soy un maltratador desde todos los ángulos. O sea, psicológico, no aporto dinero a la casa, insulto a mis hijos y a la mujer, para ponerle más emoción, la pimporreo de vez en cuando. Entonces la Chela de la venta, que es la voluntaria de los Gabinetes de la Famila va a ser la 273 primera instancia. Ella con su experiencia como terapeuta de pareja, adquirida con las conversaciones que tiene con los que llegan a la venta, va a mediar entre nosotros… Señores, qué es esto? Protejamos a nuestras mujeres. Esta ley alterada se vuelve una ley Misógina (“Decretazo”). 29. Eddy: “Al gobierno no le conviene poner en práctica esta ley a toda capacidad, porque defender a la mujer en todos los aspectos incluye a aquellas que no están de acuerdo con el, o las que denuncian sus arbitrariedades…por lo tanto esta ley viene a ser una más de las tantas que este gobierno rompe. Este gobierno es machista, aunque sea una mujer la que siempre este dando la cara” (“Prevención contra violencia”). 30. Elias Jose: “El tema de fondo aquí es que esta reforma se hace para maquillar estadísticas. Este es un gobierno que le gusta manejarse en las apariencias, para luego llenarse la boca dando estadísticas envidiables en la región…Fuera de cualquier discusión legal…el trasfondo es político, además que de esa forma atacan y denigran a las organizaciones feministas, o sea, 2 pájaros con un mismo tiro” (“Golpe Orteguista”). 31. Presidente Misógino: Creo que a este gobierno le importa más las apariencias que las estadísticas muestran, que las personas mismas. La apariencia de un país tranquilo y seguro, donde todo el mundo vive en armonía y amor eterno. Pero sabemos que no es así….Ahora, toda protesta que hagan los movimientos femeninos será inconstitucional e ilegal. No así el actuar del presidente. 274 32. Basta ya: “…como ridiculizan esta ley en vez de decir hay q hacer algo, lo es la sociedad Nica es machista y bulgar el hombre Nica esta acostumbrado a hacer lo que quiere…” (“Ola femicida”) 33. Mujer enojada: si cada mujer pudiera usar un revolver, ya se resuelve este tema. Asi no se deja de los hombres que se atreven a machetear a las mujeres. Ninguna ley va a impedir o defender a la mujer, mejor que tenga las herramientas para defenderse sola! (“Marcha de la CSJ”). 34. Daysi Ramírez: El sistema privilegia al hombre por encima de las mujeres. Los hombres consideran los cuerpos de las mujeres como su propiedad para controlar, dominar, someter, explotar y sexualizar. En Australia, Canadá, Israel, Sudáfrica y Estados Unidos, entre el 40 y el 70 por ciento de los asesinatos de mujeres corresponde a violencia en que el agresor es la pareja de la víctima (novio y esposo) según la Organización Mundial de la Salud. 35. Fultp: “El ‘machismo’ es producto de nuestra cultura familiar y solo puede ser erradicada a mediano y largo plazo con una educación bien cimentada en el rescate a nuestros valores humanos y morales. Esa educación debe ser pragmática para que, tanto maestros como funcionarios públicos, sirvan de ejemplos permanentes a niños y jóvenes educados” (“Lo que no se dice”). 275