By Danilo Valladares
One of
the victims testifying before the judge, with the support of a psychologist and
a translator. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS
GUATEMALA CITY, Sep 28 2012 (IPS) - “In
the garrison they had rooms where they would rape us; sometimes there were
three, four or five soldiers,” Rosa Pérez*, one of the women used by the
Guatemalan army as a sex slave during this country’s civil war, testified in
court.
With her face covered, and with the support of a psychologist
and a translator, a crying Pérez told a court hearing this week that members of
the army kidnapped her husband and turned her into a sex slave and servant in the
Sepur Zarco military garrison in the municipality of El
Estor in the northeastern province
of Izabal.
She and 14 other Q’eqchi Maya Indian women who were subjected to
sexual and labour slavery between 1982 and 1986 testified at a preliminary hearing
held this week in a court in the Guatemalan capital.
Charges have been brought against 37 members of the military in
the case.
“Go to the garrison, the soldiers need someone to wash their
clothes, cook their beans, and make them coffee,” Peréz said she and the other
women were told by military commissioner Miguel Ángel Caal.
She said they did not imagine the appalling treatment and abuse
that they would suffer for so many months in the military garrison.
“They told me that if I didn’t let them, they would kill me, and
they put a gun to my chest” while she was raped by different soldiers after
washing their clothes and cooking and serving their meals from six in the
morning, she added.
“Once I gathered my courage and went to complain to the
lieutenant, and he told me that maybe I had got them used to doing that,” said
Pérez, who miscarried as a result of the constant sexual abuse.
She also said that before she was taken to the garrison, the
soldiers had kidnapped her husband, the father of her three children. She knew
nothing about his fate until his remains were found decades later.
Some 200,000 people – mainly Maya Indians in the country’s
highlands – were killed and 45,000 were forcibly
disappeared in Guatemala’s
1960-1996 armed conflict. The bodies were buried in
secret mass graves, unmarked graves in cemeteries, or on the grounds of
military installations, according to the Historical Clarification Commission.
In its 1999 report, that U.N.-sponsored truth commission found
the army guilty of over 90 percent of the deaths, and reported that one out of
four victims of the human rights abuses were women.
Hunger kills in the mountains
One of the most devastating testimonies was given by Juana
Morales*, who told the hearing that she and her three children fled into the
mountains in 1982 from San Marcos, a community on the border between Izabal and
the neighbouring province of Alta Verapaz.
Morales said a group of soldiers came to her home, took away her
husband – she still doesn’t know what happened to him – and then raped her.
“They put a gun to my chest and raped me. Three of them did it,
the rest just watched. One of my kids, who was four years old at the time, was
with me, and screamed when he saw what they were doing to me,” she said.
To save her own and her children’s lives, the Q’eqchi woman went
into hiding in the nearby mountains. “We had nothing to eat, we had no
tortillas, and my kids started to get sick,” she said.
“My daughter told me we should go back home, saying ‘there are
chicken eggs on the table there’,” Morales said between sobs. One by one, her
three children starved to death in the mountains.
After living in hiding in the forest for six years, she returned
to San Marcos one day, but her home and her belongings were no longer
there. “I had two houses, but they had burnt them down. I had nothing left.”
Lucía Morán, with Women Transforming the World, a local
non-governmental organisation, told IPS that with this case, “Guatemala is setting a historic legal precedent for humanity,
because a national court has never heard cases of rape and sexual slavery.
“Sexual violence has been used as a weapon of war, and it wasn’t
until the 1990s, in the international tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda, that justice began to be done in these cases,” she
said.
The activist pointed out that between 1982 and 1988 there were
no armed clashes between the army and the guerrillas in the so-called Franja
Transversal del Norte (northern transversal strip), where these communities
were situated. But the army set up the garrison in Sepur Zarco to protect the
economic interests of large landowners and the mining and oil industries.
In a 1982-1983 scorched-earth campaign, at least 440 villages
were razed to the ground, and the inhabitants killed.
“That’s when they started making lists, to track down peasant
leaders who were fighting for legal title to their land,” she said, adding that
the husbands of the 15 women who testified at this week’s hearing were all
rural activists, and were all forcibly disappeared.
Another of the victims described how she was raped and forced to
work as a servant in
Sepur Zarco.
“I was sexually abused by five soldiers every day. I was there
for six months, every other day,” said Marta López*, who had to leave her eight
children home alone while she worked at the garrison from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.
But before that, soldiers had come for her husband. “In 1982,
the military came to our house and took him away, killed him, and dumped him in
a pit,” she said.
The army’s version of events
As the women testified, former army reserves sergeant Ricardo
Méndez Ruiz admitted that “the army committed abuses during the conflict,”
but said “the guerrillas did too.”
He argued that “justice should be the same for everyone.”
In 2011, Méndez Ruiz, a businessman, brought legal action
against 26 people for his 1982 kidnapping by left-wing guerrilla groups. Today
he is a spokesman for the defence of the military personnel accused of civil
war-era human rights violations.
“It is clear that the witnesses that the Public Ministry (office
of the public prosecutor) is providing and the plaintiffs are people with very
low levels of education. They don’t even have any idea of exact dates, which
makes you think they may have been manipulated,” he told IPS, referring to the
women who testified.
Méndez Ruiz has repeatedly claimed that the work of the
prosecutor’s office is “biased” and is being used “to wreak vengeance on the
army.”
And in this case, he said, the interest is also “for money.”
“On other opportunities, the Inter-American Court of Human
Rights has condemned the Guatemalan state to pay millions in reparations, which
I’m sure go into the pockets of the plaintiffs,” he said.
* The names of the victims have been changed for security
reasons.
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Guatemala
-Women Testified Before A National Court For Sexual Slavery And Rape During The
Armed Conflict
Source: Alianza
Rompiendo el Silencio (Alliance Breaking the Silence)
03/10/2012 - From
September 24th to the 28th, fifteen Guatemalan women, who
are part of the Qeqchi´ indigenous people, testified before a national court,
as part of a legal process aimed at getting justice for sexual slavery and rape
used as a weapon of genocide and femicide during the armed conflict in
Guatemala.
The hearings took place at Court B
ofHigher Risk in Guatemala City.
This case becomes a referent in the
search for justice for the instrumentalization of gender violence in crimes
classified as war crimes and crimes against humanity –crimes for which there
has been total impunity in Guatemala for more than 30 years. It also represents
the struggles of many women in diverse communities, who yearn to break the
silence and get justice for the multiple acts of gender violence during the
armed conflict.
The significance of this event is
historic because it was the first time in the history of Guatemala and the
world that women victims of rape and sexual slavery testified before a national
court, asking justice and reparations for such grave crimes. All the previous
cases have been addressed in international courts.
The women who presented their
testimonies of horror are part of communities located in the Northern
Transversal Strip of Guatemala, where strong transnational economic interests
related to oil, mining and agrofuel crops converge. This is a region of large
estates whose owners asked the army to settle on the farms in order to protect
their interests during the armed conflict. Military detachments were deployed
on the farms, functioning as centers of torture and extermination, forming a
circuit. Several units were used as centers of recreation and rest for the
troops.
In that context, between 1982 and
1986, women victims in this case were enslaved, after their husbands —who were
peasant leaders fighting for land titling— were killed or “disappeared.” The
army destroyed their houses and other assets. Women were forcibly
displaced and subjected to domestic and sexual salvery in a military
detachment. This nightmare lasted several years. The effects on the lives of
women survivors, their families and communities have been severe, as they have
been condemned to stigmatization, marginalization and poverty.
Alianza Rompiendo el Silencio (Alliance
Breaking the Silence):
Unión Nacional de Mujeres Guatemaltecas
(National Union of Guatemalan Women)
Mujeres Transformando el Mundo (Women Transforming the World)
Equipo de Estudios Comunitarios y Acción Psicosocial (Association for Community
Studies and Psicosocial Action)