Jo-Marie Burt, Ph.D.
jmburt@gmu.edu
George Mason University
About Me:
Jo-Marie Burt is associate professor of political science and Latin American Studies at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a leading human rights research and advocacy organization.Dr. Burt has worked collaboratively with human rights organizations in Latin America on a variety of research and advocacy projects, focusing on human rights research and documentation, trial monitoring, and advocacy training. Between 2002 and 2003, she was a member of the regional studies research team of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and her report on political violence in the urban community of Villa El Salvador was incorporated into the Commission’s 2003 Final Report. Dr. Burt has been an expert witness in several cases of human rights violations before the National Criminal Court of Peru, before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and in immigration courts in the United States involving both asylum cases and cases of suspected war criminals who face extradition or deportation proceedings from the United States. Dr. Burt was a Fulbright Scholar at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in 2006 and the “Alberto Flores Galindo Visiting Professor” at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in 2010. In 2011, the Government of Peru recognized Dr. Burt with the Award in Merit, in the Grade of Grand Official, for Distinguished Service in Defense of Democracy, Rule of Law, and Human Rights in Peru. She has received grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Open Society Foundations, the United States Institute of Peace, the Aspen Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, the Latin American Studies Association Otros Saberes Initiative, the Inter-American Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, among others. She has commented frequently on Latin American politics and human rights issues for various national and international news media.Dr. Burt received her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1999.
Research Interests
Political Violence
Human Rights
Latin American And Caribbean Politics
Conflict Processes & War
Non-Democratic Regimes
Gender and Politics
Transitional Justice
Memory Politics
Corruption/Organized Crime
Human Rights
Political Violence
Democratization And Authoritarianism
Countries of Interest
Guatemala
Peru
Argentina
Uruguay
El Salvador
My Research:
Dr. Burt has published widely on political violence, state-society relations, human rights and transitional justice in Latin America. Her early research focused on state and insurgent violence in Peru, and civil society responses to violence and violent actors. This was the subject of her 2007 book, Silencing Civil Society: Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru (Palgrave), which received an Honorable Mention for the WOLA-Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, and which was published in Spanish as Violencia y Autoritarismo en el Perú: Bajo la sombra de Sendero y la dictadura de Fujimori (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2009; 2nd expanded edition, 2011). She is also co-editor of Politics in the Andes: Identity, Conflict, Reform (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). In recent years, Dr. Burt’s research has focused on the ways postconflict societies confront demands for justice and accountability after atrocity. She engaged in research and advocacy in close collaboration with local human rights organizations in relation to several high-profile human rights trials in Latin America, including the 2009 trial of the former president of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, and the 2013 genocide trial of former dictator of Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt. She organized international observation missions to these trials, prepared public reports on ongoing developments, and advocated on behalf of the rights of victims to access justice in these and other cases. As a research consultant for Open Society Justice Initiative, she writes about war crimes prosecutions in Guatemala for International Justice Monitor. She is currently completing a book about transitional justice and war crimes trials in Guatemala.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Despite persisting impunity, over the past several years Guatemala has made important strides in prosecuting war crimes committed during the internal armed conflict (1960–1996). This article provides an ethnographic account of the 2018 Molina Theissen trial, which resulted in the conviction of four senior military officials for crimes against humanity, aggravated sexual violence, and forced disappearance. An ethnographic study of this critical human rights trial can help us understand how a country with a relatively weak judicial system and well-organized spoilers has managed to hold the intellectual authors of wartime atrocities responsible for their acts. It also contributes to a richer understanding of the construction, meaning, and impact of human rights prosecutions for victims and the broader society, and what role they play in broader public debates over the historical memory of conflictual pasts.
Guatemala is breaking new ground with a series of high-impact war crimes prosecutions. The 2016 Sepur Zarco trial was one such landmark case: it was the first time that Guatemala prosecuted wartime sexual violence, and the first time that a domestic court prosecuted sexual slavery as a crime against humanity. This case also set important precedents in legal and evidentiary practice. Based on my direct observation of the Sepur Zarco case, this paper examines the legal practices that placed the women- survivors, not the defendants, at the forefront of the proceedings, and which proved that the state of Guatemala systematically used sexual violence as a weapon of war against women and as a strategy to control the civilian population. It also examines the evidentiary practices in this case, which allowed not only for a conviction more than 30 years after the crimes, but for a broader understanding of the historical context, including land conflict, that led to the atrocities in Sepur Zarco. By piercing the veil of impunity surrounding wartime atrocities and making visible the faces of the victims —indigenous men and women who have historically been relegated to the margins of Guatemalan society— the Sepur Zarco trial is challenging entrenched narratives of denial that have sustained the power of military officials whose influence continues to shape present-day politics in the Central American nation.
Latin America leads the world in efforts to prosecute perpetrators of gross violations of human rights in domestic courts. Domestic justice offers a number of advantages to international and hybrid tribunals: proceedings take place in close proximity to the site of the atrocities, facilitating victim participation; they are directed by domestic prosecutors and judges, thus contributing to local buy-in; and they can strengthen rule of law and legitimize fragile transitional democracies. The case of Guatemala appears to contradict such arguments, however, given the overturning of the landmark conviction of former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity and the ongoing impasse of the proceedings. Drawing on the author’s work as an international observer to the genocide trial, interviews with those directly involved in the case, and comparative research on human rights trials in Latin America, this article suggests an alternative reading. By situating the genocide trial in relation to the broader transitional justice process in Guatemala and in the region more broadly, it argues that current setbacks should be viewed as a backlash to initial transitional justice success that is neither unexpected nor fatal to the accountability process. Second, the article argues that the genocide case is illustrative of a victim-centred approach to human rights prosecutions that hold important lessons for transitional justice theory and practice, and examines the way in which victims of sexual violence were incorporated into prosecutorial strategies and helped to prove that a genocide had taken place in Guatemala. Finally, the article argues that despite the undoing of the genocide verdict, the very fact that the trial took place is historically and politically significant, both for survivors and for the construction of collective memory in Guatemala and Latin America as a whole.
With the approval on 27 October 2011 of Law 18.831, the Uruguayan parliament voted to overturn the 1986 Expiry Law, a law long criticized by human rights advocates because it prevented the criminal prosecution of human rights abuses committed during the country’s military dictatorship (1973–1985). By overturning what many considered the lynchpin of institutionalized impunity in Uruguay, the new law restores the state’s capacity to prosecute human rights violations. Although a number of factors contributed to this surprising outcome, including a more permissible opportunity structure (the successive election of two left-wing governments) and the willingness of some judicial operators to challenge the Expiry Law, this article argues that the key explanatory variable to understanding these recent developments is the persistent demands of civil society groups over time. Civil society groups developed innovative strategies and incorporated new groups that gave renewed strength to the resurgent struggle against impunity in Uruguay. The article concludes with reflections on the significance of Uruguay’s renewed accountability efforts for transitional justice debates.
On 7 April 2009, Alberto Fujimori, president of Peru from 1990 to 2000, was found guilty of grave human rights violations and sentenced to 25 years in prison – the maximum penalty allowed by Peruvian law. The prosecution and conviction of Fujimori mark a watershed in efforts to achieve accountability after atrocity in Peru and across the globe. This article explores the factors that made the Fujimori trial possible. It briefly examines the global shift in norms favoring accountability for human rights violations that facilitated the extradition and prosecution of Fujimori, the interactions between these global norm shifts and local efforts to achieve accountability for grave human rights violations, and the specific domestic factors in Peru favoring prosecution. The article analyzes the Fujimori trial in terms of both process and outcome, and highlights its implications for politics in Peru and beyond, as well as for the broader field of transitional justice.