A Review of Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velásquez and Her Father’s Quest for Justice

Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velásquez and Her Father’s Quest for Justice by Victoria Sanford (University of California Press, 2023)

When I saw Claudina Isabel’s face on the cover of Victoria Sanford’s new book Textures of Terror, I held it in my hands for a long time. In 2007, I invited her father, Jorge Velásquez Durán, to share his story at the University at Buffalo, where I was studying at the time. He shared his testimony with a crowded room. He calmly projected photos and told stories about his daughter, describing her joyful life and ambitious dreams for the future. His voice was soft, and it made you lean in and really listen as he talked about her death and “the tragedy Guatemala is living.”

Jorge walked through several excruciating details of the clearly mismanaged case. He cried at the end, and his glasses fogged up. As he brought his talk to a close, Jorge urged the audience to pay attention, to not look away and to keep Guatemala in their hearts. Later that year, I stayed with Jorge, his wife, Claudina, and their son, Pablo Andrés, in their Guatemala City home, and began visiting them regularly when I came to Guatemala to carry out my own research. My presence in their home was likely complicated for them, as I was in my twenties, just a few years older than Claudina Isabel.

Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velásquez and Her Father’s Quest for Justice felt personal to me. This book is about Claudina Isabel, but it is also about the thousands of women and girls who fall victim to partner violence, intrafamilial violence, workplace violence, and the everyday attitudes and structures that subordinate women, normalize gender-based violence and render the pursuit of justice for violence against women futile. It is also a book about the devotion of a father to his seek justice for his daughter.

Claudina Isabel was a 19-year-old law student with a bright future when life was violently cut short on August 13, 2005. For more than a decade, Sanford accompanied Claudina’s father to meetings with state authorities as he advocated for the case to move forward—a necessity when 98% of the country’s feminicide cases remain unsolved. Sanford consulted with forensic experts and crime scene investigators to document Claudina Isabel’s murder as emblematic of Guatemala’s feminicide.

In the course of the book, we meet Esperanza, a Mam Maya woman sold into marriage without her consent at age 12, handed off as property to a man who became verbally, physically and sexually abusive. We meet Maritza, who was never allowed to attend school and instead sent to work on a finca, where she and her children were attacked by plantation henchmen and tied to a tree. We learn about Lidia, whose abuse by her wealthy and well-connected husband continued to torment her even as she and her daughter sought refuge in the United States. We learn about Manuela, who bravely resisted the advances of a gang member in her neighborhood and was forced into a sudden and decisive decision to leave Guatemala for her own protection. The circumstances of each case are distinct, but what follows is an eerily similar sequence of events, so similar that a reader might think they accidentally flipped the pages back to a previous chapter: a man commits violence against a woman, the woman suffers mightily until she finally reaches a point at which she can no longer sustain it, seeks protection from authorities, who either refuse to help her or who stamp piece of paper, then send her off, where she is left to navigate ongoing threats and potential reprisal in the absence of a system of protection. Whatever preceded and whatever follows are her fault—for the way she dresses, for the company she keeps, for the choices she makes, for being poor—but above all, for being female. The differential identities and positionalities of these female victims showcase distinct risks, means and legal claims. However, as Sanford emphasizes, feminicide cuts across class, ethnicity and geography. Social and economic status cannot guarantee safety for women and girls, though it does interact with other structural inequalities and hierarchies.

As the title suggests, it is Claudina Isabel’s story that is the backbone of the book, given Sanford’s extensive involvement and accompaniment with Velásquez. In contrast to the other women’s stories—which center on self-narratives of prolonged suffering at the hands of abusive men—Claudina Isabel’s life is only told through the memories of others, and what we see is joy, love, potential. Given the ongoing nature of the case, there is much we do not know about the circumstances of violence that befell her, or what private suffering she might have endured. Instead, we meet a man who is not dominating a woman, but defending her, demanding dignity and justice in the face of a system that deemed her not worthy of investigation. In a perverse extension of the gender dominance and hierarchy under scrutiny in Claudina Isabel’s case, it is Velásquez who becomes overpowered, silenced and belittled by state actors. It is here that Claudina Isabel’s case shifts from emblematic to exceptional, in that her father takes on the risk and anguish of continued advocacy, and their family has the socioeconomic resources to support this endeavor.

Claudina Isabel and other women’s stories are set within a wider context of gender inequality and a history of violence. Sanford shows how the nature, frequency and intensity of violence against women and girls in Guatemala constitute feminicide. Distinct from femicide, feminicide is a political term that foregrounds the role of the state in the murder of women through commission or toleration of violence, or through the omission of state responsibility to protect its female citizens.

Those familiar with Sanford’s work on feminicide will not be surprised to encounter a scathing critique of a dysfunctional justice system, the willful incompetence of those charged with upholding women’s rights and a cast of institutional actors who seem hostile to the very idea of justice. Even Guatemala’s 2008 Femicide Law, a law designed to protect women, is unable to prevent, intervene or stop violence once it occurs. Walking through forensic reports in painstaking detail, Sanford documents the missteps and missed opportunities in Claudina’s case—things the state did and things the state didn’t do.

The book effectively establishes multiple linkages empirically, temporally and spatially through the underlying and interlocking concepts of feminicide, impunity, silence and indifference. Textures of Terror moves through time and space to various sites where Sanford has carried out groundbreaking research related to genocide and feminicide. With little exposition, these interludes illustrate the echoes between wartime violence and the enduring repressive and patriarchal structures, a “continuum of gender violence from the past to the present” (p. 86). Some pages move us outside the borders of Guatemala to consider how violence, corruption and impunity drive emigration. But external contexts, such as the United States, are not merely sites of refuge; they are also sites of continued violence and domination, where women and girls can again be treated as property. The reader is forced to reckon with the global prevalence of familial and intimate partner violence, police rape, gender-based violence as a tactic of war and genocide and the stigma and fear of reporting sexual violence.

In Chapter 5, Sanford reflects on the intersection of her privileged status as a U.S. citizen and academic researcher, her subordinate as a woman, and the hazard she becomes to herself and others as a human rights advocate. Here, the reader experiences how a sustained faith in truth and the rule of law can get sucked into the vortex of violence and the terror it wields, when warnings become threats. The choice to continue becomes existential. This is one of the most moving moments in the book, as Velásquez starts accompanying Sanford on visits to state authorities to document the threats she receives. The moment is brief, perhaps because Sanford is forced to flee in distress, but it is a powerful reminder of the unjust choices that all women and girls in Guatemala make when confronted by violence. It is also a microcosm of the ways that engaged researchers take on and share risk with participants in violent settings, and the reciprocal trust and care that motivates sustained collective advocacy.

The book culminates in what Sanford characterizes as “bittersweet” justice, as Velásquez Paiz v. Guatemala is adjudicated at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IAC) in 2015. After years of the state putting Claudina Isabel and her family on trial—so to speak—the state is on trial in the last chapter. We get a glimpse into the court hearings, Jorge’s powerful testimony and the state’s insistence that they properly investigated the crime, did not discriminate and did not violate the rights of Claudina Isabel or her family. At one point, there is even a “hallucinatory denial” (p. 155) that Claudina Isabel’s murder is part of a larger epidemic of violence against women. The IAC ruling affirms that the Guatemalan state failed its obligations to protect Claudina Isabel, and their recommendations include a call to carry out a “prompt, immediate, serious and impartial investigation to solve the murder… and identify, prosecute and, as appropriate, punish those responsible,” issue reparations to the family, transform state policy and investigative procedures in order to protect women, instill a culture of respect for women, and prevent gender-based violence. As the IAC case comes to a close, Sanford updates us on Guatemala’s lack of sincere commitments to changing practices in the years that have followed.

But what of Jorge and his family—did they experience the IAC ruling as justice, even if bittersweet? The IAC’s recognition of state accountability is a critical outcome, reinforcing the political dimension of feminicide and sending a message that the Guatemalan state has failed to uphold the human rights of women and girls. Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t matter that we don’t know who killed Claudina Isabel—because the answer is, in many ways, the state. In the words of Velásquez, “impunity was an invitation to kill my daughter.” But it does matter who killed Claudina Isabel. It matters that the state continues to investigate and resolve this crime, to give Claudina Isabel’s family a sense of closure, and to demonstrate that state officials are capable and committed to prosecuting individuals who kill women. It matters because it would break the culture of impunity and silence.

In 2007, Jorge told me, “I am a tired father, and this killer—he is … feeling fine, because he knows this crime will never be solved.” By the close of the book, I realized the shift I underwent as a reader—even one familiar with the case—from wanting to identify and prosecute Claudina’s murderer to wanting to hold the state to account. Yet my desire for justice at an individual level remains, and my wrestling with these tensions left me wondering how Jorge and his family evaluate their collective efforts and losses over the years in this pursuit. What did they win? What did they lose?