Rita Segato: ‘The present is sinister. We are all threatened’

Rita Segato has been searching for a reason all her life. Why do men rape women? Why do they torture them, enslave them? Why do they dispose of them, in pieces? Why, for what? They have called her to answer the question in Brasília, in Ciudad Juárez, in Guatemala, in El Salvador, and in Colombia. They keep calling her, like an oracle. In each location she hesitates — “it is what a scientist should do” — but in each one she returns to her original idea. “The cruelty on women’s bodies is an exhibition of the capacity for cruelty, of territorial domination, of power and impunity,” she says, and in that last word she finds the threads that take her to a new place, one she has never set foot in, but which does not let her sleep: “Gaza is a watershed in history.”

Segato has been studying violence for 30 years — also race, power, and colonialism — and with each investigation she adds a new layer, like a Russian doll, more serious, more complex. Hand in hand with her original idea she now delves into what she considers the end of an era, that of respect for human rights. She has found ethnographic examples of the “failure of humanitarian reason” at Madrid’s Barajas airport, in the election of leaders such as Javier Milei or Georgia Meloni, but above all she has found them in Palestine. “The present is sinister. We are all threatened, the new card of non-rights is being displayed to us. When there is someone who is a nuisance in a territory, the power of death will be the law and they will be swept away, exterminated; in other words, Gaza is all of us.”

Segato (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 73 years old) is an anthropologist, thinker, and writer. Author of more than a dozen books, she is one of the most cited researchers in Latin America. She has an honorary doctorate from the University of Salamanca, in Spain, from the University of El Salvador, and from the University of Entre Ríos and Salta, in Argentina. The Chilean group Las Tesis created the protest anthem “You are the rapist” based on her work. She holds the Latin American and Caribbean Prize for Social Sciences, the CLACSO, and the Daniel Cosío Villegas Prize, awarded by the Colegio de México. She fills the room at every presentation and holds her head in her hands when the applause doesn’t stop. Segato is a rockstar of the academy.

She found herself in Guadalajara (Mexico) in December in the framework of the International Book Fair, after a month away from home. From one of her homes, she specifies: “My life is very complicated, very.” The house that she considers her “place in the world” is in the Andes mountain range, in Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina; the one in Brasília is where she has her archive, her library, the family paintings, and where she is an emeritus professor at the university. She left there at the end of October and then traveled to Lima, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, New York, and San Luis Potosí. She finishes listing her destinations and says: “I am in a state of mental confusion.” And so begins this interview.

The end of happy anthropology

“I never chose to study violence against women,” she says without irony from a hotel in Guadalajara. Around her neck she wears the raised fist of the feminist movement, a gift from a craftswoman from San Luis Potosí, in central Mexico, where she was accompanying mothers whose daughters had been murdered or had disappeared. Segato has dedicated several decades and some of her best-known books (Writing on the Body of Murdered Women in Ciudad Juárez or The War Against Women) to analyzing feminicides, but she still insists: “I never wanted to, it was not my own choice.”

It was 1993 and Segato was in the period she calls her “happy anthropology.” She was studying an African religious tradition in Brazil, a variant of candomblé, when the rector of the University of Brasília called her along with the two other women who were investigating in the area. The Secretary of Public Security had asked the university to explain why there was an “outbreak of rapes” in the city. “I thought: ‘Let’s find out what’s going on, let’s identify who is doing this: a group, a gang… and we’ll send that information to the police and the police will stop this.’ I was totally wrong!” she now exclaims. “I could never let go of the issue! It was never resolved and from that moment on it just grew, grew, grew, grew... and I could never let go of the issue again.”

She based this research — for which she went into prisons to interview convicted rapists — on the first leg of her theoretical analysis. The rapist speaks on two axes: vertically, towards the victim, “the rapist is a disciplinarian, a moralizer,” and horizontally, where he addresses his peers, “sexual domination over the victim’s body territory is a statement, it is a discourse to call themselves men”— as in the case of Dominique Pelicot, she will say later. “In other words, sexual violence is expressive and not instrumental. That is very fundamental,” she says, as she looks into the reporter’s eyes, “because it accompanies me to the present.”

That thesis (published in 2003 in The Elemental Structures of Violence) took her to El Escorial, in Madrid, to a summer course directed by the then-High Court judge Baltasar Garzón. There she met mothers and activists from Ciudad Juárez. The U.S.-Mexico border was filling up with dead women. Claudia, Esmeralda, Laura, Ángeles, María, Elizabeth and Juliana had already been found in a cotton field. All raped, with obvious signs of torture. “The mothers said that there was a problem of impunity in Ciudad Juárez,” says Segato, referring to the 95% of crimes in Mexico that go unsolved, “so there I had a glimpse, an epiphany, we could call it, and it occurred to me to say: ‘No, what there is is an exhibition of impunity, which is a very different thing. What you are seeing is a spectacle of impunity.’ That thesis serves me to this day.”

The anthropologist already knew Mexico “quite well” — her uncle had married a woman descended from Francisco I. Madero and she had been visiting him in Parras, Coahuila, since she was 19 years old — when they asked her to travel to Ciudad Juárez. They wanted her to investigate the question that resonates to this day in the border city, more than 2,300 murdered women and hundreds more missing later. “Why do they kill someone who is not the foot soldier of the enemy cartel, who is not the warring enemy?” asks Segato, before she answers herself: “It is a discourse of jurisdictional power. In other words, the way in which power is expressed in the territory is in the bodies of women. Why do these women have to die? I go so far as to say something quite daring, and that is that I believe that there are men who are participating out of obligation, because if not they would be excluded.”

The researcher, who has written about what she calls the mandate of masculinity and about how “the shared access to women creates a solid pact of male fraternity among the members of the troop,” extends the idea to criminal groups: “In mafias, certain tests of cruelty are always imposed in order to be a member.” Segato calls this mafia — in a broad sense — the second state, the second reality, and finally, the parastate. A prosthesis of the state that lives within organized crime. “The power of life and death of this underground universe is uncontrollable,” says the anthropologist, who connects it with a new term: femigenocide, the genocide of a people in the physical, moral, and reproductive massacre of women.

Segato created this concept to distinguish crimes that occur within the realm of personalization (either by the aggressor or by the victim) and those that represent “the new form of war”: “The women kidnapped for torture to death by sexual means did not do so for an interpersonal reason. Crimes like those in Ciudad Juárez, which are fully public, have to be investigated and judged in a different way because they are related to mafia language.”

The slavery of Sepur Zarco

Violence is a language, Segato always says. An anchored and profound discourse, which meanders and transforms between conflicts and nations, between cities in the same country, which also expands, as happened with Ciudad Juárez (she has said it several times: “Mexico has become Juárez”). It is in the bodies of women where war is written. It is in this cruel language where the anthropologist found differences in the armed conflict in Guatemala: Indigenous women were not raped in the same way. She confirmed this in Sepur Zarco.

In 1982, the army established an outpost for personnel to rest in this small rural community in the Polochic Valley in northeastern Guatemala. At the time, the Quekchí leaders were fighting to gain rights to their lands, and the military responded with torture, forced disappearances and murder for the men, and sexual and domestic slavery for the women. The constant violations of the women of Sepur Zarco reached the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Segato was one of the expert witnesses in the case and wrote: “It is a characteristic of contemporary wars, not only the insemination of women as war spoils or the annexation of conquered territory, but their moral and physical desecration or destruction by sexual means in order to reach, in this way, the Achilles heel of the subjugated people, their dignity and trust in institutions.” In 2016, the Court ruled against two of the uniformed men, although dozens of soldiers participated for months.

— How does it feel to be so close to this type of crime, to this horror?

— Horrible. I realize something in my life that is strange. First, that I am a feminist, but I have dedicated my whole life to studying masculinity. Then I realized that studying masculinity is to investigate what power is and what it is like. And third, that in all my texts there are efforts to identify and model what is behind the epiphenomena that the diaries or testimonies describe, but I do not describe cruelty. You will not find a text in which the cruel act is described. Because describing it hurts. When I heard some very horrible things, a certain form of extreme cruelty that was perpetrated against women in the repressive war in Guatemala, I was sick for a week. I was very ill, I couldn’t cope. The second week I managed to write down what I had heard, to write it down for my expert opinion. And the third week I managed to talk about it, to tell others. What happened? My tolerance threshold for cruelty has moved, it has widened. That is the pedagogy of cruelty. It is double-edged because, on the one hand, you are denouncing, but at the same time you are normalizing. You are making possible something that could not be possible.

Gaza and the end of words

It is 2009 and Segato writes in La Jornada: “If words are harmless in the face of barbarism, if the rhetoric of texts does not reach and touch the ears of the Beast and does not succeed in shaking the chaos of the astonished crowds, there will be no way out: only brute force will remain to oppose brute force.” She was not writing about femicide violence, but about Palestine. Although years later she would use those phrases to crown her expert report on the rapes in Sepur Zarco. It is one of the first connections the researcher made between the two subjects. Now, it is one of her obsessions: “In Ciudad Juárez they are telling us that they have power, they are telling us that they are unpunished, and that, on a global scale, is Gaza. It is the definitive spectacle of impunity and jurisdictional power.”

Segato, who is of Jewish descent, compares what happened under the Nazi regime with the massacres in Gaza, perpetrated by the Israeli army, which have already claimed the lives of over 40,000 Palestinians. “The level of violence in Gaza has existed before, but not the spectacle. In the Holocaust, with all the terrible and frightening abominations that took place, there was something hidden. Many people, even in Germany, did not have a clear notion of what was happening. In Gaza, it is not like that, what they are doing is this: look. It is the total exposure of genocide as a legitimate law of the power of death, there is an end to the rule of law,” she says. “When we are in a world where the power of death is the domain, grammar disappears. Legislation has always been a legal fiction, but it is a grammar that allows us to live together. Now there is no statement that reaches its destination and the cry becomes inaudible; that is what is happening to us.”

“I could have some joy, but I can’t have joy, because I can’t stand it. What’s happening in Gaza is making me sick. I get up very early, at five in the morning, in a state of absolute terror and anguish. Because it’s a threat to the world,” she says, and ends the interview: “Now I won’t be able to sleep.”

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