ABSTRACT
The courts accustomed family members to filing legal suits against each other in court, a vital precursor to later attempts to combat domestic violence. Guatemala’s decision to create a system of family courts in 1964 was part of the nation’s halting bureaucratic modernization. Reform-minded Guatemalan lawyers proposed the creation of family courts in 1960. The reformers’ blueprint for family courts also revealed that their primary objective was to address the familial problems of “the lowest social classes.” Men initiated only about 16 percent of sampled cases filed in one Quezaltenango family court in that court’s first several decades of the existence. The Family Court Act’s framers intended the new courts to provide the greatest benefits to women and children. Guatemala’s new family courts, thus, did little to combat domestic violence. The creation of family courts in the mid-1960s should, in theory, have siphoned all domestic disputes away from Guatemala’s other courts.
