LIMA, Peru (AP) — Ten men were convicted Wednesday in Peru of raping nine teenagers while serving in the military during the country’s armed conflict decades ago.
Judge Marco Angulo, of Peru’s First Higher Criminal Court, ordered the former soldiers to serve prison terms, with sentences ranging from six to 12 years. Authorities accused them of raping the teenagers in the Andean community of Manta between 1984 and 1994.
Angulo said the lack of constitutional guarantees in the community during the armed conflict “turned the ability to report sexual abuse into marginal acts and without any attention.” He added that the victims lived amid social rejection that forced them “to bear their claim for their violated rights in the most absolute helplessness.”
“The adopted decision is a message that… aims at respecting people’s fundamental rights even in the most severe social crises facing the country,” Angulo said.
After the sentences were announced, prosecutors, who sought harsher sentences, and attorneys for the victims said they will evaluate Angulo’s decision to decide whether to challenge it.
The war that raged between the Peruvian army and the Shining Path communist insurgency from 1980 to 2000 killed an estimated 70,000 people, the majority of them in rural areas.
Prosecutors began investigating the teens’ allegations in 2004 after a special commission investigating the armed conflict published a report that, among other abuses suffered by civilians in Manta, described “sexual violence as a persistent and daily practice was” for which “the members of the army were encamped.” in the local military bases were mainly responsible for this.”
Angulo said Wednesday that the rapes sometimes occurred when the teens entered their homes after being threatened with guns, or after being detained and accused without evidence that they were part of the Shining Path. One victim reported having a scar on her hip left by a soldier who used a knife to cut her underwear.
