Women Flee for Their Lives
JALAPA, Guatemala — They climbed the terraced hillside in single file, their machetes tapping the stones along the darkened footpath.
Gehovany Ramirez, 17, led his brother and another accomplice to his ex-girlfriend’s home. He struck the wooden door with his machete.
His ex-girlfriend, Lubia Sasvin Pérez, had left him a month earlier, fleeing his violent temper for her parents’ home here in Jalapa, in southeast Guatemala. Five months pregnant, the then-16-year-old feared losing the child to his rage.
Ms. Sasvin Pérez and her mother slipped outside and begged him to leave, she said. Unmoved, he raised the blade and struck her mother in the head, killing her.
Her father rushed outside. Ms. Sasvin Pérez recalled watching in horror as the other men set upon him, splitting his face.
For prosecutors, judges and even defense lawyers in Guatemala, the case exemplifies the national scourge of domestic violence, motivated by a deep-seated sense of ownership over women and their place in relationships.
But instead of facing the harsher penalties meant to stop such crimes in Guatemala, Mr. Ramirez received only four years in prison. More than three years later, now 21, he will be released next spring, perhaps sooner. Under Guatemalan law, Mr. Ramirez has the right to visit his son upon release, according to legal officials in Guatemala.
The prospect of his return shook the family so thoroughly that Ms. Sasvin Pérez’s
father, who survived the 2015 attack, sold their home and used the money to pay a smuggler to reach the United States. Now living outside of San Francisco, he is pinning his hopes on winning asylum to safeguard his family.
But that seems more distant than ever. The Trump administration has struck at the core of asylum claims rooted in domestic violence or threats against families like Ms. Sasvin Pérez’s.
“How can this be justice?” she said before her father fled. “All I did was leave him for beating me and he took my mother from us. What kind of system protects him, and not me?”
Across Latin America, a murder epidemic is underway. More than 100,000 people are killed most years, largely young men who are victims of gangs and cartels. The turmoil has forced millions to seek refuge in the United States.
But violence against women, and domestic violence in particular, is a powerful and often overlooked factor in the migration crisis, though it plays a central role. Latin America and the Caribbean are home to 14 of the 25 deadliest nations in the world for women.
To win asylum in the United States, applicants must show specific grounds for their persecution back home, like their race, religion, political affiliation or membership in a particular social group. Last year, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions questioned whether women fleeing domestic violence can be members of a social group, overruling a common practice in asylum courts. In July, the new attorney general, William P. Barr, went further, making it harder for families to qualify as social groups, too.
In Guatemala, the homicide rate for women is more than three times the global average. In Honduras, it is one of the highest in the world — almost 12 times the global average.
Violence against women in the region is so prevalent that 18 countries have passed laws to protect them, creating a class of homicide known as femicide, which adds tougher penalties and law enforcement attention to the issue.
Though gangs and cartels play a role in the violence, most women are killed by lovers, family members, husbands or partners — men angered by women acting independently or enraged by jealousy.
“Men end up thinking they can dispose of women as they wish,” said Adriana Quiñones, the United Nations Women’s representative in Guatemala.
A vast majority of female homicides in the region are never solved. In Guatemala, only about 6 percent result in convictions, researchers say. And in the rare occasions when they do, as in Ms. Sasvin Pérez’s mother’s case, they are not always prosecuted vigorously.
In the courtroom, Ms. Sasvin Pérez’s father, Romeo de Jesus Sasvin Dominguez, spoke just once. It didn’t make sense, he said. How could the laws favor the man who killed his wife, who hurt his daughter?
“We had a life together,” he told the judge, nearly in tears. “And he came and took that away from us.”
‘It’s Like Our Daily Bread’
Insulated from Guatemala’s larger cities, Jalapa is a concentrated version of the gender inequality that fuels the femicide crisis, experts say. Of the several dozen complaints the Jalapa authorities receive each week, about half involve violence against women.
“It’s like our daily bread,” Dora Elizabeth Monson, the prosecutor for women’s issues in Jalapa, said of the reports. “Women receive it morning, afternoon and night.”
The most striking part, said Judge Eduardo Alfonso Campos Paz, is that most men struggle to understand what they’ve done wrong.
The problem is not easily erased by legislation or enforcement, he said, because of a mind-set ingrained in boys early on and reinforced throughout their lives.
“We are molded to be served, and when that isn’t accomplished, the violence begins,” the judge said.
Across Guatemala, complaints of domestic violence have skyrocketed as more women come forward to report abuse. But today, the countries with the highest rates of femicide in the region, like Guatemala, also suffer the highest homicide rates overall — leaving the killing of women overlooked or dismissed as private domestic matters.
The femicide law required every region in the nation to install a specialized court focused on violence against women. But more than a decade later, only 13 of 22 are in operation.
“The abuse usually happens in the home,” said Evelyn Espinoza, the coordinator of the Observatory on Violence at Diálogos, a Guatemalan research group. “And the state doesn’t involve itself in the home.”
The Smugglers’ Road North
Mr. Sasvin Dominguez woke suddenly, startled by an idea.
In a single day, it was all arranged. He would sell his home and use the proceeds to flee to the United States.
The $6,500 was enough to buy passage for him and his youngest daughter, then 12. He hoped to reach his two sons in California. With luck, he could find work, support the girls back home — and get asylum for the entire family.
A week later, in October of last year, he left with his daughter. A guide crossed them into Mexico. Soon, they reached the side of a highway, where a container truck sat idling.
The days went by in a blur. They rode in at least five container trucks, as best they can remember. Some days, they got half an apple to eat. Sometimes they got nothing.
In early November, they arrived in the Mexican border town of Reynosa. A day later, they boarded a raft and entered the United States, where they ran into border patrol and turned themselves in.
Mr. Sasvin Dominguez said he and his daughter spent four days in Texas, in a facility with no windows. When they were released in November, Mr. Sasvin Dominguez was fitted with an ankle monitor and instructed to check in with the immigration authorities in San Francisco, where he could begin the long process of applying for asylum.
He and his daughter now live with one of his sons in the family’s modest one-bedroom apartment. But Mr. Sasvin Dominguez remains suspended in the sadness and fear he left behind in Guatemala. His other daughters are still trapped, and there is no money to move them. His only hope, he says, is asylum.
That could take years, he is told, if it happens at all. The courts are tied up in a backlog of cases. He does not even have a date yet for his first hearing.
Left With Nothing
Stuck in Guatemala, Ms. Sasvin Pérez and her two other sisters moved into a small apartment where they share a single bed. A portrait of their mother hangs on the wall.
They all work now, making tortillas in town. But they go straight home after, to avoid being spotted. Not long ago, Ms. Sasvin Pérez ran into Mr. Ramirez’s mother.
They sometimes visit their mother’s grave, a green concrete box surrounded by cactus.
“We are left here with nothing,” Ms. Sasvin Pérez said.
She still bears the stigma of what happened. Neighbors, men and women alike, continue to blame her for her mother’s death. Now 20, she says she understands that women almost always bear the blame for problems at home.
She worries about the world her son will grow up in, what she can teach him and what he will ultimately come to believe. One day, she will tell him about his father, she says.
By then, Ms. Sasvin Pérez hopes to be in the United States, free of the poverty, violence and suffocating confines for women in Guatemala.
“Here in Guatemala,” she said, “justice only exists in the law. Not in reality.”