VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN PERU'S ARMED CONFLICT
Throughout Peru's fifteen-year internal war, women have been the targets of sustained and frequently brutal violence committed by both parties to the armed conflict.136 Both sides often use violence to punish or dominate women believed to be sympathetic to the opposing side. Women have been threatened, raped and murdered by government security forces; and women have been threatened, raped and murdered by the Communist Party of Peru (Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path). Many times, the same woman has been the victim of violence by both sides.
During our 1992 investigation, Peruvian human rights monitors agreed that the number of rapes by security forces in any given year was high, although no group maintained aggregate statistics. Reported cases involved the insertion of foreign objects into the vagina and anus combined with other forms of torture including electric shock to the genitals and breasts; rape of pregnant women and of minors; and gang rape by police or security force personnel. Government soldiers have used rape as a weapon: to punish, intimidate, coerce, humiliate and degrade. Often, women were raped while blindfolded, so they could not identify their attackers. Frequently, the women have been told that they or their family members will be killed if they report the rape. In some instances, groups of women reportedly have been raped by the security forces and then killed. In many cases, soldiers have forced family members to witness such abuse. Just living in a certain area can put women at risk for rape because of suspected sympathy with the insurgency or because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Despite the pervasiveness of the abuse, few police officers and even fewer members of the security forces have been prosecuted, even when thecases were reported to the appropriate authorities.137 To the contrary, evidence demonstrates that the police and army actively protect rapists from their ranks and continue to promote them, thus implicitly condoning their crimes.
As far as the military is concerned, rape is an occasional, regrettable excess. General E. P. Petronio Fernandez Dávila, under-secretary of human rights and pacification in the Defense Ministry, told Human Rights Watch in July 1992, "Those boys are far from their families and suffer a great deal of tension because of the nature of combat." He went on to claim that many of the women who report rape are subversives who seek to damage the image of the armed forces.
Rape of women by the Shining Path has been much less common, perhaps because the organization explicitly prohibits it and because of the high number of woman militants. Shining Path attacks against women have been more a result of women's role in founding and participating in survival organizations, like community soup kitchens, than because they were women. Moreover, the type of violence used against women has been used against male non-combatants as well.
To some extent, women activists also have been targeted by the Shining Path because of their efforts on behalf of women's rights. Some women community activists killed by the Shining Path also have been leading feminists. From 1985 until 1992, ten female grassroots leaders were killed by the Shining Path.
On September 12, 1992, government forces captured the Shining Path's leader, Abimael Guzmán, leading to a reduction in the fighting between government forces and the guerrillas. Since the arrest of Guzmán and more than fifty of his top followers, who remain incarcerated, attacks on women and other civilians by the Shining Path have declined. Nonetheless, although much weakened and diminished in geographical scope, the Shining Path continues to violate international humanitarian law.
Violence against women, including rape, by government security forces also has decreased as a result of the overall decline of the internalconflict. But little has been done to end the impunity for security forces who commit rape. Moreover, on June 15, 1995, President Alberto Fujimori approved a law providing a blanket amnesty to members of the security forces who have committed human rights violations in the counterinsurgency hostilities since 1980. Among the crimes that are excused are extrajudicial executions, "disappearances," torture, and rape.
136 The following material was adapted from Americas Watch and the Women's Rights Project, Untold Terror: Violence Against Women in Peru's Armed Conflict, (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992). The information on government security forces was gathered for this case study during a three-week mission to Peru in July 1992. Interviews were held with victims and their families, the military, judicial and Public Ministry officials, journalists, human rights monitors, social workers and women's rights groups. Information on Shining Path threats and attacks was gathered during the same mission and from the same sources mentioned above, as well as from interviews with women who belonged to the Shining Path.
137 From 1985 to 1990, only ten police officers were sanctioned formally and dismissed from the force for rape. Local human rights groups suspect that most of the cases involved officers who committed rape while off-duty and in circumstances unrelated to detention or counterinsurgency operations. Statistics from the Department of Statistics, National Police, and elaborated on by the Instituto de Defensa Legal. To our knowledge, no police officers have been punished for rape since 1990.
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