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University of California Press
The following review appeared in the February 2024 issue of CHOICE. The review is for your internal use only. Please review our Permission and Reprints Guidelines or email permissions@ala-choice.org.
Social & Behavioral Sciences
History, Geography & Area Studies - Latin America & the Caribbean
This volume by Sanford (anthropology, CUNY) is an important text on violence against women and girls in Guatemala and how this violence is treated with dismissal, contempt, incompetence, and impunity. The author has done extensive research on human rights violations committed during the US-supported, decades-long Guatemalan civil war and genocide committed against Indigenous peoples, but here she focuses on the case of the 2005 murder of law student Claudina Isabel Velásquez and her family’s struggle for truth and justice—a case that was eventually heard and adjudicated by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Sanford illustrates how this case is emblematic of thousands of cases in Guatemala and how Guatemala’s legacy of sexism, racism, classism, blaming victims, and violence combined with the interrelationships among government leaders, police, judges, gangs, and cartels ensures that justice will not be served in most of these cases. Anyone seeking truth and justice, including Claudina Isabel’s father and the book’s author, will likely be threatened with violence.
--K. Sorensen, Bentley University