Paulina Ixtapá Alvarado, a Maya Achi woman, was 19 years old when she was detained just outside the market in Rabinal, in northeastern Guatemala, by a local militia. It was September 1983, the height of Guatemala’s brutal counterinsurgency war. She was brought to a military base about 15 minutes from the town. There, she was held illegally for 25 days in a small room with several other people, including her cousin, Pedrina Ixtapá Rodríguez, and at least two other women. For more than three weeks, Paulina and Pedrina, who were 18, were tortured and repeatedly gang-raped by local militia members and by soldiers, who repeatedly accused them and their family and community members of colluding with the guerrillas. A few days after she was released, Pedrina had a miscarriage, a pregnancy that was a result of the rapes she had endured. As has been widely documented, sexual violence was wielded as a systematic tactic of counterinsurgency during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.
Paulina and Pedrina have waited 40 years to have their day in court. After many twists and turns, on January 28, 2025 the trial opened against three former members of the civil defense patrols (PACs), Pedro Sánchez, Simeón Enrique Gómez, and Félix Tum, who are accused of being the direct perpetrators of sexual violence against Paulina, Pedrina, and three other women. The PACs, which were created by the Guatemalan army in the early 1980s to combat the guerrilla forces and as a way to exert control over rural and Indigenous communities, were responsible for nearly 20 percent of the human rights violations perpetrated during the civil conflict, according to Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification.
A Legacy of Impunity
Sánchez, Gómez, and Tum had been previously detained in 2018, but were freed along with three others after pre-trial judge Claudette Domínguez dismissed the charges against them. The lawyers for the Maya Achi women, Lucía Xiloj, Haydeé Valey, and Gloria Reyes— also Indigenous women—filed a motion to have Domínguez recused from the case, which was eventually granted. A new pretrial judge reopened the case against the other three men who had been released, alongside a man who was deported from the United States and another who was apprehended in Belize, eventually leading to a trial in January 2022. All five men were convicted of crimes against humanity in the form of sexual violence against five Maya Achi women who described similar experiences as those recounted by Paulina and Pedrina in the present case. The Maya Achi women refused to stay silent and continued to press their case against Sánchez, Gómez, and Tum, eventually securing an annulment of the 2019 decision that dismissed the charges against them.
On February 19, 2025, Paulina and Pedrina both testified about their harrowing experiences in the rape camps of Guatemala. Paulina told the court that she was raped every night she was in military detention. A prosecutor asked her how many soldiers were involved in the rapes. “Oh, it is impossible to know the number,” she responded, “because the soldiers lined up, they lined up and one came right after the other, then another, and another. They also raped my cousin [Pedrina], Doña Candelaria, and Doña Lucía.”
Both women articulated the enduring trauma and shame they experienced after they were released from the military base. Pedrina told the court that she remained unmarried. She said this was because she could not have children as a result of the physical harm she was subjected to. “People told me that I was the soldiers’ woman,” she added. Paulina said that after she was released, people mocked her: “No one wants you. I did not feel well.” When asked what she meant, she responded, “To be well, well that is as if one has not been raped.”
The evidence presented by plaintiffs includes more than fifty different elements, including the direct victim testimony of five Maya Achi women and several expert reports. Anthropological reports detailed the cultural impact of the systematic use of sexual violence against Indigenous women. Expert military reports established the control exercised by the Guatemalan Armed Forces over the PACs, and established a clear link between nearby military zones and the PACs operating in Rabinal. Expert reports on gender-based violence established that rape was systematically used by the Guatemalan military as a weapon of war. The plaintiffs asked that the defendants receive the maximum sentence: 30 years for each victim.
Tactics of Silencing
The defense sought to cast doubt on the credibility of the survivor testimonies, calling a retired military officer, Colonel Juan José Recinos, as an expert witness. He claimed that there were multiple contradictions in the accounts of the women survivors and said the military expert report was misleading because it did not reference any orders from the military high command to the patrollers. He argued that the patrols had acted individually, not on military orders. In doing so, Recinos appeared more interested in absolving the Guatemalan army of any responsibility than defending the three men on trial.
Another tactic employed by the defense was to question whether victim testimony was a sufficient basis for justifying a conviction. Citing a 2010 ruling issued by the Inter-American Court for Human Rights in the case of Rosendo Cantú v. México, the defense attorney claimed that the Court had held that a victim’s testimony was not sufficient to prove sexual violence. However, a careful reading of this ruling reveals the contrary. On page 28 of the ruling, the Court explicitly states: “rape is a specific form of violence which, in general, occurs in the absence of persons other than the victim and the aggressor or aggressors. Given the nature of this type of violence, one cannot expect graphic or documentary evidence and therefore the victim’s testimony constitutes fundamental evidence of the act.” In this case, the Inter-American Court found the State of Mexico responsible for the sexual violence and ordered it to investigate, prosecute, and punish those responsible.
On two prior occasions—the Sepur Zarco sexual violence and sexual slavery case in 2016 and the first Maya Achi sexual violence case in 2022— Guatemalan courts convicted military officials and militia members for their role in organizing, authorizing, or directly perpetrating systematic sexual violence against Indigenous women. In a landmark 2018 ruling, four senior military officials were found guilty of the illegal detention, torture, and rape of 21-year-old Emma Molina Theissen in 1981.
The Maya Achi trial comes at a time when faith in the justice system is at an all-time low. Over the past several years, corrupt sectors intensified their control over the judiciary in an effort to stymie anti-corruption investigations. Independent prosecutors and judges have been persecuted and many have fled into exile. Several important cases against senior military commanders have been dismissed, including the mass forced disappearance CREOMPAZ case, while others, such as the Death Squad Dossier case, remain in legal limbo. Last November, Attorney General Consuelo Porras fired Erick de León, the lead prosecutor in the genocide trial against former army chief Benedicto Lucas García and head of the unit investigating wartime atrocity cases. A few weeks later, just days before the conclusion of the trial, an appellate court suspended the entire proceeding. In December, Porras put Noé Rivera, a loyalist, in charge of de León’s unit and transferred the prosecutors who had been working with him for years to investigate human rights cases to other units. Rivera—who was sanctioned by the U.S. government—has played a leading role in the criminalization of independent prosecutors, including Juan Francisco Sandoval, the former chief of anti-corruption investigations, and Orlando López, lead prosecutor in the 2013 genocide trial against ex-dictator Efraín Ríos Montt.
On May 30, the court, which is presided over by María Eugenia Castellanos Cruz alongside Justices Mayela González Arrivillaga and Missulla Eunice Solís Rodas, is expected to issue a verdict. We will know then whether the Guatemalan justice system values the testimonies of the Indigenous women who courageously spoke out about the sexual violence they endured at the hands of state forces. But even if a conviction is handed down, it will only punish members of the militias who were organized, financed, and directed by the Guatemalan Armed Forces, not the senior military commanders who designed and put in motion one of the most brutal counterinsurgency wars in modern Latin America.
Jo-Marie Burt teaches at George Mason University and is a Senior Fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).
Paulo Estrada is an archeology student and human rights activist, and a plaintiff in the Military Diary case. Burt and Estrada are founders and co-directors of the Judicial Observatory Verdad y Justicia en Guatemala, which monitors and reports on war crimes prosecutions in Guatemala. Find them @VerdadJusticiaG on Facebook, X, Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok.
Keily Colíndres studies anthropology at San Carlos University and is a member of the Judicial Observatory Verdad y Justicia en Guatemala.