HUMAN RIGHTS: Refuge From Femicide: Facing Gendered Violence in Guatemala

Graduate student Anthony Fontes reports on Karen Musalo’s talk on the case of Rodi Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman who sought asylum in the United States to escape her abusive husband.

For 10 years, Rodi Alvarado’s husband beat her mercilessly. He used his fi sts, his belt, his boots, his gun, his knife. He had been a soldier in the Guatemalan military during the country’s long civil war, and he would taunt her during the beatings, bragging about having bayoneted babies and burned old people alive during his years in combat. The threat behind the verbal abuse was not lost on Alvarado. She was meant to understand that he would think nothing of killing her, too.