Women seek justice for Chilean sex victims

By Associated Press in Santiago, Chile | China Daily | Updated: 2014-12-05 08:21

Four women who said they were sexually tortured as political prisoners following Chile's 1973 military coup have filed a complaint they hope will bring to light dictatorship-era rapes that have been buried by fear, shame and silence.

The allegations were made in a complaint filed in May and the women gave their testimony to Chilean judge Mario Carroza this week.

They are being allowed to raise the decades-old charges because of international human rights accords recently signed by Chile, said Carroza, a specialist in crimes against humanity who is presiding over the case.

The women also are pressing for an update of the 140-year-old penal code to classify rape and torture of political prisoners as political crimes, which would subject violators to harsher sentences.

"We demand the Chilean government, the authorities, the state, change the laws and accept that this sort of sexual torture exists," Nieves Ayress, 66, an educator and community activist now living in New York, said on Tuesday.

Ayress was a 25-year-old socialist activist when she was detained in 1974, along with her father and 15-year-old brother. Upon her release in 1976, she was forced into exile.

She appeared before Carroza on Monday to present her testimony and underwent examinations, on Tuesday, to document the lasting psychological impact and physical scars she bears as a result of the alleged assaults. DNA evidence is absent, but she said she has scars from military saber cuts to her stomach, razor cuts to her breasts and injuries to her genitals caused by torture that included electric shocks.

With the examination results still pending, it is unclear when Carroza will formally accept the case and start the investigation that could lead to criminal charges.

During her detention, Ayress said soldiers would tie her naked to a bed and her torturers penetrated her with rats and dogs.

"They formed a line of soldiers and forced me to have oral contact with all of them," she said.

Ayress and the other women in the complaint - Carmen Holzapfel, Soledad Castillo and Nora Brito Corez - all said they were sexually assaulted during their separate detentions. Several men who initially were part of the complaint dropped out of it.

Cristian Castillo, director of the memorial site created at a former torture center known as Villa Grimaldi, said he has no doubt victims will be emboldened to speak out "as a result of the declarations by these women that specifically denounce this crime against humanity".

The dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet toppled Chilean President Salvador Allende and ruled until 1990. Officials said more than 40,000 people were victims of the dictatorship, including more than 3,000 who were killed. Some 70 officers and soldiers and a handful of civilians have been convicted of various crimes.

Chile's National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, which collected the testimony of thousands of people tortured during the dictatorship, said nearly all of the 3,399 women it interviewed reported sexual torture. More than 300 said they were raped while in custody.

Rape committed during a conflict became classified as a crime against humanity in 1993 when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia adopted the definition.