In this dissertation, I discuss the epistemic framing of violence that directly impacts the communities I have worked with or been a part of. I examine how epistemic violence operates in the context of capitalist globalization and epistemic imperialism by investigating events related to epistemes of dispossession, grief, and violence in Nicaragua. They occurred in different periods of the country’s history from the recent past but came together as a constellation in Benjaminian’s sense (2006, pp. 395-397), intersecting in the last crisis and emerging from a longer horizon of memory in terms of the U.S. military occupation of Nicaragua at the beginning of the twentieth century. To do so, I examine specific episodes as instances of collective experiences of violence and unpack silencing patterns in these moments by different global agents, which I examine in multilayer and multiscalar structures of epistemic violence. Based on my findings, I bring into view a blueprint of silencing and erasure of Indigenous healers’ knowledge in the imperial archive and historical studies. Grounded in the lived experience of extreme state violence, I disentangle it, ultimately unraveling the mechanisms of silencing around how “the Nicaraguan crisis” was initially perceived and addressed by inter-American agents and global human rights bodies to constitute a state crime that was finally recognized by the international community. By examining the model used in studies of gender based violence on health and violence prevention programs in global health discourses, I make evident the specific form of violence against Indigenous and Black Caribbean communitarian women that this model excludes and silences, which is situated in the context of extractivism.
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