The reproduction of indigenous women in Guatemala, between control and resistance ; Ligatures : la reproduction des femmes indigènes au Guatemala, entre contrôles et résistances

In 1996, the government of Guatemala put an end to 36 years of civil war by signing the peace accords. This war specifically affected the country’s indigenous populations. The two Truth commissions concluded that the army and paramilitaries carried out acts of genocide against the Mayan populations, in part because of the widespread use of sexual violence against women. Over the next two decades, many development projects led by the State as well as various foundations and NGOs sought to alleviate the extreme poverty affecting rural indigenous populations. One of these projects is the dissemination of family planning programs. It is Indigenous women who are the main targets of the medical and educational devices that are implemented in this context. Their objective is to drastically reduce these women’s fertility, through sustainable and permanent methods such as female sterilization. This objective is accompanied by the establishment of a set of standards of good maternal and reproductive practices. The medico-social staff that is mobilized towards the integration of these standards sometimes goes so far as to use violence in order to ensure that the indigenous women comply with them. In the exercise of their mission, the medical staff believes to be working for the common good not only of the nation but of those women as well. However, the constraints faced by women in managing family planning make it difficult for them to fully access reproductive rights. In addition, many women liken the violence and discrimination they experience in these programs to the violence of war and the violence that they experience in other social spaces. The poverty the live in and the oppression and multiple forms of violence they face are particularly related to neoliberal policies.The aim of this thesis is to decipher certain issues around the promotion of targeted sterilization of indigenous women, in a post-conflict context where renewed violence against these women is developing. The research work conducted with institutions ...