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67 /////////////~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 3 Body of Evidence Feminicide, Local Justice, and Rule of Law in “Peacetime” Guatemala VICTOR IA SANFOR D AND MARTHA LINCOLN The last time Claudina Isabel communicated with her parents was around 11:45 P.M. on August 12, 2005. Around two in the morning on August 13, her parents were awoken by Zully Moreno, the mother of Claudina Isabel’s boyfriend , Pedro Samayoa Moreno, who went to their home to inform them that Claudina Isabel was in grave danger. Señora Moreno claimed that Claudina Isabel called her to tell her she was walking home and that this call was cut short by Claudina Isabel’s screams for help. Claudina Isabel’s parents immediately went out to search for their daughter first at the house where Claudina Isabel had attended a party in the nearby neighborhood of Colonia Panorama. With no results or leads from the partygoers, they began to search the neighborhoods from the party back to their home. Desperate, they attempted to make a report at the local police station at about 3:00 A.M. on August 13. The police, however, refused to take a report or even listen to the worried parents. They suggested that Claudina Isabel had run off with her boyfriend and that, in any case, they would not receive any reports until Claudina Isabel had been officially missing for twenty-four hours. It was not until 8:30 that morning that the police formally received Claudina Isabel’s parents and made an official report that classified Claudina Isabel Velasquez Paiz as missing. This was three and one-half hours after her lifeless body was found on the street on 10th Avenue in Colonia Roosevelt in Zona 11—a neighborhood not more than two miles from the party where she was last seen by friends. Despite the obvious connection between the location of Claudina Isabel’s body and her parents’ anguished report to the police, she was not identified until much later that day. In fact, Claudina Isabel’s case, like more than five hundred murder cases of women in Guatemala in 2005, was dismissed from the moment her cadaver was found. This was because, as one official acknowledged, “the 68 V ICTOR I A SA NFOR D A ND M A RT H A LINCOLN crime scene was not developed as it should have been because of prejudices about the social origin and status of the victim. She was classified as a person whose death did not merit investigation” (PDH 2006b, 5). The first police officers on the scene determined that Claudina Isabel’s murder was “not worthy” of investigation because she had a belly button ring and was wearing sandals. In the parlance of the Guatemalan police, this meant she was a gang member or a prostitute. But Claudina Isabel was not a gang member or a prostitute. Claudina Isabel Velasquez Paiz was a nineteen-year-old law student. She was beautiful , gregarious, and well-liked by her peers: more than one thousand people attended her memorial service. Her father, Jorge Velasquez, did not understand what was happening when several uniformed armed officers in bullet-proof vests arrived at the memorial service and demanded access to his daughter’s body. When Mr. Velasquez refused, the police threatened to arrest him and his wife. The coffin was removed from the memorial service and placed in a private room, where police officers unceremoniously took fingerprints and nail clippings from the body in the coffin. When they were finished collecting this material for forensic analysis, they handed Mr. Velasquez a paper bag. In response to his dismay, the officer explained that the bag contained the clothing Claudina Isabel had been wearing at the time she was murdered. “Most families bury the clothing in the coffin,” the police explained. Distraught, Mr. Velasquez responded that he would not be burying it in a coffin, that he would not allow them to ever again disturb his daughter. Without thinking about the implications, he asked the funeral home to burn the bag and its contents, which in murder cases throughout most of the world would be part of the evidence held on file. Claudina Isabel was one of 518 women murdered in 2005 in Guatemala. With each year that passes, it is becoming more dangerous to be a woman in Guatemala. More than six hundred women were killed in 2006. Since 2007, on...

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