ABSTRACT
In the Guatemalan context, the author first began to deploy the term “genocide” in his writing and public speaking. He had read extensively about the Jewish Holocaust as a child, and in his adolescence, picked up a second-hand paperback copy of Leo Kuper's seminal study Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. More generally, if men were overwhelmingly the perpetrators of murders and mass killings, other men were disproportionately their victims – as the study of the Central American genocides of the 1980s, among other atrocities, had made perfectly plain. The author was determined to move beyond a strictly political-military framing of genocide and gendercide to encompass structural forms of gender-selective destruction, such as female infanticide, “honour” killings and blood feuds, forced/corvée labour, and military conscription. His written output, however, has remained heavily concentrated on genocide and crimes against humanity.
