http://www.libertadlatina.org/Crisis_La ... punity.htm

Latin-America - The Concept of Impunity

The use of impunity to commit severe sexual harassment, criminal sexual assault, and the open kidnapping, rape and trafficking of large numbers of women and girls in Latin America is a complex topic.

Many articles exist on the Internet that discuss the use of impunity in sexual oppression and political life within the Latin American context.

Within the context of the issues of sexual oppression covered by LibertadLatina.org, impunity refers to the blatant abuse of physical power without remorse to subject women and female children to severe sexual harassment, sexual coercion, sexual assault, rape, and even kidnapping and sometimes murder. Within Latin America, such violent crimes against women and children are commonplace.

Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF, states that: "Sexual harassment, maltreatment, child labour, violence in the home and sexual exploitation occur with such frequency that they can be considered a daily phenomenon." That social condition can only exist in an environment of impunity.

The doctrine of machismo, an institution that guides the social culture of many males in Latin America, encourages impunity as a tool of the oppression of women and girls in Latin American culture. That tool justifies the sexual abuse of women and girls in the home, in schools and in the workplace.

The use of impunity has been most blatant when applied against indigenous women and children in the Americas. Within the anti-Indigenous context, impunity is also a force damaging the lives of first-nations women and children in the United States and Canada.

- Over 40 million women and 2 million children are sexually exploited within Latin America.

- In the Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran and Peruvian civil wars of the 1980's, 10's if not 100's of thousands of indigenous women and girl children were raped, and some murdered, with an open impunity that carries over from the era of conquest.

- 82% of all indigenous rape victims in the United States were attacked by White American adult men who use the racial dynamics of our culture to inflict violent sexual assault and rape on women and girls with utter impunity.

- In Canada, an estimated 90% of the thousands of child prostitutes there are indigenous children. They are also subject to sexual abuse with impunity by adult men of a dominant culture.

LibertadLatina.org's collection of materials relating to how impunity makes the crisis of the sexual oppression of women and girls possible in the Americas.. will be expanded in the near future.

A good starting point in the understanding of these issues is Dr. Miguel De La Torre's below article on Latin machismo.

Dr. Miguel De La Torre, Hope College

This article explores the multidimensional aspects of intra-Hispanic oppression by unmasking the socio-historical construction of machismo. Usually, traditionally disenfranchised groups construct well-defined categories as to who are the perpetrators and who are the victims of injustices. All too often, we who are Hispanic ethicists tend to identify oppressive structures of the dominant Eurocentric culture while overlooking repression conducted within our own community. I suggest that within the marginalized space of the Latino/a community there exists intra-structures of oppression along gender, race and class lines, creating the need for an ethical initiative to move beyond, what Edward Said terms, "the rhetoric of blame." Specifically, this article will present a paradigm called machismo, which explicates intra-Hispanic oppression. The article then employs this paradigm to the Cuban experience by examining intra-Cuban sexism, racism and classism.