(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)October 24, 2012

(MAHWAH, NJ) – Dr. Victoria Sanford, Director of the Center for Human Rights & Peace Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Lehman College & the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York, spoke at Ramapo College of New Jersey on October 24 about “The Guatemalan Genocide–Command Responsibility and Possibilities for Justice.” The History Club, Human Rights Society and Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies co-sponsored the talk.

Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, Guatemala was torn by mass terror and extreme violence in a genocidal campaign against the Maya, which became known as “La Violencia.” The Guatemalan Truth Commission documented 626 village massacres and 200,000 dead or disappeared in the Guatemalan genocide of the 1980s.

Drawing on two decades of research in Guatemala and a thorough review of declassified US government documents, Sanford explored the three phases of the Guatemalan genocide and pointed to command responsibility on the part of current and former members of the Guatemalan army. She also discussed ongoing genocide cases in the national and international courts, especially the various proceedings against the former dictator, Efrain Rios Montt.

Sanford received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2000, where she also received training in International Human Rights Law and Immigration Law at Stanford Law School. Additionally, she received a certificate in Human Rights Law from the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in Costa Rica.

Sanford joined the Lehman College and City University of New York anthropology faculty in Fall 2004. Previously, she was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute on Violence and Survival at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. She has also taught in the Department of Rural and Regional Development at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, Stanford University, and the University of Notre Dame where she was appointed Faculty Fellow at the Kroc Peace Studies Institute and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

She has worked with Central American refugees since 1986 when she founded and directed a non-profit refugee legal services project representing Central American asylum-seekers. As a human rights activist and scholar, she has conducted extensive field research with Maya communities in Guatemala, Afro-Colombian and indigenous peace communities in Colombia, and Colombian refugee communities in Ecuador. Her research focused on collective memory, community reconstruction, human rights, and international humanitarian law during internal armed conflicts and in post-conflict countries in Latin America and Africa. Sanford is an expert on post-conflict violence, drug-trafficking, and crime with a specific focus on forensic investigation and judicial reform.

She is the author of Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (Palgrave Macmillan 2003), Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (FyG Editores 2003) and co-author of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation’s report to the Commission for Historical Clarification (the Guatemalan truth commission). She is also the author of Del Genocidio al Feminicido (FyG Ediotres 2008), La Masacre de Panzós: Etnicidad, tierra y violencia en Guatemala (FyG Editores 2009) and Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy and Activism, co-edited with Asale Angel-Ajani (Rutgers University Press 2006).

She is currently writing The Land of Pale Hands: Feminicide, Social Cleansing and Impunity in Guatemala. Most recently, she testified as an expert witness before the Spanish National Court in the international genocide case against the Guatemalan generals.

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