The Sexual Threat: A Motivation for Male Political Action

• In Event: Peacebuilding

Abstract

In February 1925, the Guna indigenous people of Panama staged a violent revolt against Panamanian police, who had sought for years to force them to abandon their culture. There was not much bloodshed—26 Panamanians and 1 indigenous person were killed—but the conflict prompted the Guna to request that American officials overseeing the Panama Canal Zone step in and broker peace negotiations. The Guna succeeded in getting the Panamanian government to agree to a series of concessions, including guarantees of the establishment of an autonomous territory. Tensions between the Guna and the Panamanian government would continue to simmer, but the peaceful resolution of this uprising is an extraordinary outcome when considered in comparison to the fate of many other indigenous groups throughout the Americas. What prompted the Guna to revolt and how did they win such an extraordinary victory?

The answer lies in a phenomenon I call the sexual threat. Key features of the Panamanian government’s effort to assimilate the Guna focused on women within the tribe. The laws the government passed to regulate women’s behavior and the ways in which those laws were enforced proved sexually threatening to Guna men, prompting them to unite and revolt. Guna men, in turn, highlighted the sexual threat that Panamanian police—whom they portrayed as Black—posed to innocent women in their appeals to American government officials to intervene in the conflict. For Guna male leaders, the perception that outsiders posed a threat to women in their community motivated them to engage in collective action against the state. In their entreaties to Panamanian officials and members of the U.S. legation that oversaw the Canal Zone, Guna leaders strategically leveraged what in white America was a common racist trope—Black men posing a sexual threat to non-Black women. Americans thus also responded to a sexual threat, although framed in slightly different terms: they responded to Guna appeals for intervention on the grounds that Afro-Panamanians were attacking and engaging in sexual violence against innocent (and, ostensibly, racially pure) indigenous women. Fear of sexual conquest of “their” women was not the Guna’s only complaint against the Panamanian government, but as tensions between them grew more acute, Guna leaders increasingly relied on the frame of sexual threat in their negotiations with all parties.

Author

• Lisa Baldez, Dartmouth College