2024 – Peru | Soldiers convicted of rape 40 years after the events

Ten soldiers who committed numerous rapes in a region of southern Peru where they were deployed to fight the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas were convicted of crimes against humanity this week, 40 years after the events.

Judge Marco Angulo said, according to the Associated Press, that the ruling should send the message that “people’s fundamental rights must be respected even in the most serious crises a country can experience.”

Pascha Bueno-Hansen, a political scientist at the University of Delaware who helped collect testimonies from some of the victims in the mid-2000s, said Friday the decision was “historic” and set a precedent that would likely resonate widely in Latin America.

It was first and foremost the victory of a group of “incredibly brave” women, she stressed, who had fought for justice and to put an end to the almost total impunity from which the country’s soldiers had long benefited in sexual crimes.

“It took 20 years for them to speak out about what happened to them outside their community, and another 20 years for convictions to be made. One of the victims died before the trial was completed,” M noted.^Me Hello Hansen.

“Systemic” sexual violence

The victims of the rapes, which took place between 1984 and 1994, were adolescent girls of indigenous origin living in rural areas of the Huancavelica region, one of the poorest regions in Peru. Several of them became pregnant.

At the beginning of this period, as part of the war against the Shining Path, a military base was built near the cities of Manta and Vilca, which cost almost 70,000 lives within 20 years.

The soldiers, whose job it is to protect the population, regularly arrested residents of the region, detained them, and tortured them under the pretext of tracking down Maoist sympathizers and forcing them to talk.

Women arrested in this context were often held in solitary confinement and sometimes raped repeatedly over several days.

Sexual violence also occurred during occasional military operations, which on several occasions degenerated into massacres.

The soldiers also acted on their own initiative, “because they knew they could do whatever they wanted to anyone and get away with it without fear of reprisal,” she emphasizes.

Charges dropped

The armed forces denied the rapes for a long time. They operated under a state of emergency in a context of lawlessness where any denunciation was met with threats and even new attacks against the complainants and their families.

A 1992 Human Rights Watch report, in the midst of the civil war, records comments by a high-ranking soldier who dismissed rape allegations as fabrications by “subversive” women seeking to tarnish the military’s image.

He defended the soldiers responsible for the “rare” attacks, pointing out that they live “far away from their families” and are “under great stress due to the nature of the fighting.”

Only with the departure of President Alberto Fujimori, who left the country in 2000, and the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, could the extent of sexual violence be documented.

The organization concluded that nearly 85 percent of the thousands of rapes recorded during its investigation were committed by security forces. The Shining Path also sometimes resorted to rape, mainly to intimidate or punish activists who opposed its establishment in their community.

The influence of a “right-wing elite”

The stigma attached to rape in Peruvian society made it difficult for commission officials to collect witness statements. In their conclusions, they stated that they had found “no evidence of criminal proceedings against members of the army or police who were guilty of sexual harassment.”

Although many soldiers remain unpunished for their actions to this day, it is by no means clear that cases like the one that occurred this week will become more frequent, notes M^Me Hello Hansen.

The country is still under the influence of an authoritarian “right-wing elite” that unconditionally defends the actions of the armed forces in the fight against the Shining Path, she stresses. In this light, abused civilians are often portrayed as “collateral victims” of the conflict, especially if they come from marginalized indigenous population groups.

This attitude, according to the scientist, is also represented in the Peruvian parliament, which is currently considering a draft law that would provide for a statute of limitations for crimes against humanity committed before 2002.

A United Nations panel of experts recently warned that the adoption of this law “would constitute a breach by Peru of its obligations under international law” because crimes of this kind are not subject to a statute of limitations.