17/10/2012 - By Luz Mendez
Fifteen brave Guatemalan women from the indigenous q’eqchí people testified
before the High Risk Court in Guatemala City on Sept. 24-28, as part of the
first criminal trial for sexual slavery and rape during the armed conflict.
This legal action is historically transcendent, not only for being the first
time that sexual violence during the armed conflict in Guatemala has come to
trial, but also because it is the first trial for sexual slavery that has been
brought to a national court. Previous cases have been presented in international
courts.[1]
Rape constituted for many years the hidden dimension of the war in
Guatemala. As a result of the joint struggles of indigenous women survivors of
sexual violence, and feminist and human rights organizations, it was possible
to place the issue of sexual violence before public opinion and begin to break
the silence for these crimes against humanity.
The Historical Truth Commission in its report Remembrance of Silence
concluded that sexual rape during the armed conflict was a generalized and
systematic practice carried out by agents of the State in the framework of the
counterinsurgency strategy. Eighty-nine percent of the victims were indigenous
women.
The army used the rape of women as a weapon of war. Massive rapes, marked by
extreme cruelty, were carried out indiscriminately of women in communities that
were targeted by counterinsurgency campaigns. A complex web of
oppressions–class, gender and ethnicity– left as a result one of the most
ominous chapters of violence against women in Guatemalan history.
Sexual slavery in the Sepur Zarco base
The crimes of sexual slavery and violence against the women who testified in
the court took place in the military camp located in the village of Sepur
Zarco, Izabal Department, between 1982 and 1988. This military center,
installed by the army at the request of large landowners in the area, was used
as a center for rest and recreation for the troops, forming part of a circuit
of various military encampments in the Northern Transversal Strip. In this
region, economic, national and transnational interests converged around mineral
and oil extraction and production of agrofuels. In the eighties, the area was
the scene of a huge waves of land grabs against the peasant farmer population.
The tragedy for the group of q´eqchí women began in August of 1982. Their
husbands were captured illegally by soldiers and local landowners, then later
assassinated or forcibly disappeared. They were peasant leaders, who were
seeking open and legal land titles for land they had lived on for generations.
After torturing and murdering their husbands, the soldiers burned their
houses and their few belongings. One of the women testifying narrated how she
and her young children had to live outdoors for more than a year, covered only
by pieces of nylon hung from a tree.
The same day that their husbands were captured, the soldiers raped the women
in their own homes, in front of their sons and daughters. Later, they were submitted
to sexual slavery and domestic slavery in the military camp for six months. The
lieutenant in charge of the base ordered that they organize “women shifts”,
through which the women were obliged to report to the military encampment every
three days where they were submitted to sexual and domestic slavery. The
soldiers raped the women systematically and multiply. Moreover, the women were
forced to cook and wash the soldiers’ uniforms.
The history of Dominga Coc made a profound impression on the enslaved women
in Sepur Zarco. Dominga, a twenty year-old woman went to the military camp with
her two little daughters, Anita and Hermelinda, in search of her husband who
had been captured by members of the army in 1982. After arriving at the base,
she was captured and raped repeatedly by soldiers in front of her husband and
her daughters. After several weeks of being brutally raped, she and her
daughters were forcibly disappeared. Her body was found, in early 2012, on the
edge of the river and exhumed. Dominga’s husband survived. He presented the
testimony in the court. The story of Dominga Coc resonated for years among the
women enslaved in Sepur Zarco and became a permanent warning of what could
happen to any one of them at any time.
After six months the “women shifts” ended and the women were no longer
forced to report every three days to the military base. However, the ordeal
continued in other ways for another six years. The women had to continue to do
domestic work for free, preparing tortillas in their houses to take to the
encampment and washing the soldiers’ uniforms. The soldiers continued to rape
the women, in their homes or when they went to wash clothes in the river.
The exploitation reached such an extreme that the women had to buy the corn
to prepare the solders’ tortillas and the soap to wash their uniforms. This
meant that the women’s children went hungry, since the little money they earned
went to buy food for the soldiers under penalty of being sexually enslaved
again or murdered.
The effects on the lives of women survivors and their families are very
serious and long lasting. For thirty years, the women survivors have faced the
psychosocial consequences of these crimes. They have been stigmatized and
rejected by society in their communities. According to the patriarchal logic,
they themselves are held guilty of the sexual violence they suffered
Testifying before the judge
Thirty years went by before the 15 q´eqchí women could finally testify
before a judge and tell the horror stories of what happened to them in the
military camp of Sepur Zarco. Their testimonies, presented as preliminary
evidence, form part of the penal process that began in September 2011 and is
currently in the investigation stage.
The women walked up to the judge with confidence. Their old-woman voices
expressed sincerity, certainty, and at the same time deep pain, for the
atrocities they related. They spoke in their language q´eqchí and their words
were translated to Spanish by other women from their ethnic group. A profound
silence, an atmosphere full of consternation and rage, invaded the public, made
up mostly of women who filled the hearing room throughout the week.
I don’t want the die without seeing justice done is the
expression repeated over and over among the group of women of Sepur Zarco.
Their determination to find justice has lasted for thirty years. This
determination gave them the inner strength to present their testimonies in the
courtroom, in the context of extremely adverse socioeconomic, political and
security conditions and enormous risks. According to their concept of justice,
the assurance that these acts will never happen again figures prominently. They
do not want their daughters and granddaughters to experience the sexual
violence they suffered.
The unbreakable will of the women survivors of sexual violence joined with
the efforts of feminist and human rights organizations. These–motivated by a
political commitment to promote dignity, historical memory and justice for
women–have overcome many obstacles and though alliances been able to build an
unprecedented and multifaceted process of seeking justice over the course of
the past ten years.
As part of this process, women of Sepur Zarco, along with indigenous women
from other regions of the country, broke the silence by presenting their
testimonies in the First Court of Conscience on Sexual Violence against Women
During the Armed Conflict, held in Guatemala City in March 2010. This
political action help pave the path that the women are now walking in search of
justice.
All these political and legal actions renew hope and encourage women to keep
struggling to put an end to impunity for the deplorable crimes of sexual
violence committed against women during the armed conflict. They contribute to
confronting acute violence against women today and to continue working together
to build dignified and just societies.
Luz Méndez is President of the Advisers’ Council of the national Union
of Guatemala Women (UNAMG). She participated in the negotiations as a member of
the Diplomatic Political Team of the Guatemalan National revolutionary Unit.
She formed part of the team of Gender Experts for peace talks in Burundi,
called by UNIFEM; She is a member of the Advisors Council for the Global Fund
for Women and a contributor to the CIP Americas Program www.cipamericas.org
_______________________________________________________
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.
__________________________________________________________________
http://awid.org/News-Analysis/Announcements2/Guatemalan-women-testified-before-a-national-court-for-sexual-slavery-and-rape-during-the-armed-conflict#.UGy1Voyq2Ql.email
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)