Five former Guatemalan paramilitaries were sentenced Monday, January 24 to thirty years in prison each for the rapes of indigenous women in the 1980s, during the civil war.
The acts with which the defendants are charged constitute crimes against humanity, said judge Gervi, of the court in the capital of Guatemala, which delivered the verdict. “We, the judges, absolutely believe the testimonies of the women who were raped”, insisted the magistrate reading the judgment against the five former members of the Civil Self-Defense Patrols, militias created by the Guatemalan army.
The condemned are the brothers Benvenuto and Bernardo Ruiz, aged 63 and 57, and three men from the Cuxum family: Damian (67), Gabriel (60) and Francisco (66). The five men listened to the verdict by videoconference from the prison of a barracks in the capital, where they are being held.
Rapes by soldiers
The victims, of the Achi ethnic group, were repeatedly raped in their village of Rabinal as well as in a military post located in this Mayan community about 175 kilometers north of the capital.
Before sentencing, the victims, assisted by activists, performed a ritual near the courthouse in the historic center of Guatemala City.
“I was 19 when I was taken to the station and the soldiers raped me,” said Margarita Siana, 59. “I suffered a lot in this military post. It was a great pain, a great suffering” for three months, added the woman, dressed in her traditional dress, and her face covered by a sanitary mask. “It still hurts us, we don’t tell lies,” claimed Pedrina Lopez before the judges retired to deliberate.
Not far away, in the grounds of the courthouse, relatives of the accused demanded their release by brandishing placards proclaiming that the testimonies were “False Accusations”.
“Iconic breakthrough”
This is the second time that a Guatemalan court has condemned the perpetrators of sexual assaults against indigenous people during the civil war: in February 2016, two former soldiers were sentenced to two hundred and forty and one hundred and twenty years in prison for having notably reduced eleven indigenous women as sex slaves. “Once again, it has been shown that sexual violence during the internal armed conflict was used as a strategy by the Guatemalan state”, denounced Mand Lucia Xiloj, one of the victims’ lawyers, deploring that the military leaders implicated in the rapes committed in Rabinal have not been judged.
The office in Guatemala of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights welcomed the verdict, which “constitutes an emblematic step forward for access to the rights to truth, justice and reparation for women victims of sexual violence [durant la guerre civile] ».
Guatemala’s civil war has left 200,000 dead and missing, according to a commission that investigated atrocities committed during the conflict, most of them by the armed forces.