Ten soldiers who committed numerous rapes in a region of southern Peru where they were deployed to fight the Shining Path Maoist guerrillas were convicted this week of crimes against humanity, 40 years after the events.
The judge, Marco Angulo, said according to the Associated Press that the sentence was intended to send the message that “the fundamental rights of people must be respected even in the most serious crises that the nation can experience.”
Pascha Bueno-Hansen, a political scientist at the University of Delaware who attended the gathering of victims’ testimonies in the mid-2000s, said Friday that the decision was “historic” and set a precedent likely to have wide resonance in Latin America.
It is first of all, she stressed, the victory of a group of “incredibly courageous” women who fought to obtain justice and end the almost complete impunity from which the country’s military have long benefited. regarding sexual crimes.
“It took 20 years for them to talk about what happened to them outside their community and another 20 years for the convictions to come. One of the victims died before the process was completed,” Bueno-Hansen noted.
The victims of the rapes, which occurred between 1984 and 1994, were adolescent girls of indigenous origin living in rural areas in the Huancavelica region, one of the poorest in Peru. Several found themselves pregnant.
A military base was established early in the period near the towns of Manta and Vilca as part of the war against the Shining Path, which claimed nearly 70,000 lives over 20 years.
The soldiers, in theory responsible for protecting the population, regularly arrested residents of the region to detain and torture them under the pretext of detecting Maoist sympathizers and making them talk.
Women apprehended in this context were often held in solitary confinement and raped, sometimes repeatedly, over periods of several days.
Sexual violence also occurred during occasional military operations which on several occasions turned into massacres.
Soldiers also acted on their own initiative “because they knew they could do whatever they wanted to anyone and get away with it without reprisals,” she points out.
The rapes have long been denied by the military forces, who operated against a backdrop of a state of emergency in a context of lawlessness where any denunciation was likely to lead to threats and even new abuses against the complainants and their loved ones. .
A Human Rights Watch report produced in 1992, in the midst of the civil war, recounted the comments of a high-ranking soldier who dismissed accusations of rape as the invention of “subversive” women seeking to damage the image of the military. .
He defended the soldiers responsible for “rare” attacks, noting that they lived “far from their families” and “underwent a lot of stress due to the nature of combat”.
It was only after the departure of President Alberto Fujimori, who fled the country in 2000, and the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission that the extent of sexual violence could be documented.
The organization concluded that nearly 85 percent of the thousands of rapes documented during their research were committed by security forces. Shining Path also sometimes used rape, primarily to intimidate or punish activists who opposed its implementation in their communities.
The stigma attached to rape in Peruvian society complicated the collection of testimony by commission officials, who noted in their findings that they had found “no evidence of criminal proceedings against members of the army or police responsible for ‘sexual assault’.
Although many soldiers remain unpunished to this day for their actions, it is far from clear that cases like the one that culminated this week will multiply, notes Ms. Bueno-Hansen.
The country remains under the influence, she emphasizes, of a “right-wing elite” with an authoritarian bent which unreservedly defends the action of the armed forces in the fight against the Shining Path. Abused civilians are often portrayed in this light as “collateral victims” of the conflict, particularly when they come from marginalized indigenous populations.
This attitude, notes the academic, is echoed in the Peruvian Parliament, which is studying a bill providing for a limitation period for crimes against humanity committed before 2002.
A United Nations panel of experts recently warned that its adoption “would place Peru in violation of its obligations under international law” since crimes of this nature cannot be prescribed.