From Annihilation to Revitalization in Guatemala: Uses and Misuses of the Ixil Mayan Language in a Post-genocidal Justice Court

Guatemala experienced a brutal internal armed conflict between 1960 and 1996. The conflict took on genocidal overtones in several autochthon regions, including the Maya Ixil area, where the author of this article conducted a year-long ethnographic field study as part of her doctoral thesis in social anthropology. The policies put in place as part of the counterinsurgency struggle undermined both the Ixil culture and its language, the use of which was banned in certain areas controlled by the army. Following the conflict, several associations sought justice for these various acts, and in 2013, a trial was opened against the country's former genocidal dictator. As part of this trial, witnesses were assisted by interpreters who simultaneously translated their accounts from Ixil into Spanish. Based on the testimony of a woman who was raped during the armed conflict, this author examines the linguistic negotiations that take place in a transitional justice tribunal and analyzes the effects of these negotiations on the memory of individual traumatic episodes and on their dissemination as narratives of a collective traumatic memory. Finally, by analyzing the different ways in which the experience of rape is expressed, this article sheds light on the changes in language that take place in the context of a trial, thus provoking broader questions about the way in which cultural differences are included in this type of space.