The Case of Raquel Martín Castillo de Mejía
This history of impunity and the shame and guilt associated with rape were what initially convinced Raquel Martín Castillo de Mejía to hide the rape she suffered in 1989, when her husband was abducted by members of the army from their home in Oxapampa, in the department of Pasco. Her experience forcefully illustrates many of the obstacles to prosecuting cases of rape by the security forces. At the same time, it is the only rape case from Peru to have been presented to an international legal body, in this instance the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Martín's husband, Dr. Fernando Mejía Egochaega, forty-one years old, was a journalist, lawyer and chair of the Oxapampa Provincial Committee of the United Left, a coalition of leftist political parties. Mejía was also a legal advisor to several peasant communities in Pasco and a well-knowndefender of the rights of the poor. Martín, forty-three years old, was a school teacher, and the couple has a daughter, then three years old.161
On the night of June 15, 1989, at about 11:00 p.m., hooded men carrying machine guns and wearing military uniforms pounded on the door of the couples' home. When Mejía answered, he was beaten and forced from the house. One of the abductors, stocky and over six feet tall, seemed to be directing the operation. In the bright moonlight, Martín saw her husband blindfolded, forced into one of the waiting vehicles, and driven away. About fifteen minutes later, the tall man who had given the orders again pounded on the door. Martín remembers seeing six to ten men behind him. According to Martín, the man smelled of liquor. He demanded her husband's identity documents and followed her into the bedroom as she searched for them. Then he showed Martín a list of names of supposed members of the armed guerrilla group the Movimiento Revolucionario "Tupac Amaru" (MRTA), including her husband and professor Aladino Melgarejo, president of the local branch of the National Teachers Union. Unbeknownst to her, Professor Melgarejo had been detained under similar circumstances the same night.
The man told Martín that she too was on the list as a suspected subversive. But he asked her no questions. Instead, he talked about "having a good time." He sprayed himself with her perfume and told her she was pretty. Then he removed his munitions belt, tore off her pants and raped her.
[Afterwards] I was in a state of shock and sat in my bedroom. I had no telephone and no family nearby, and I didn't want to leave in case they brought back my husband. Around 11:45 p.m., I heard another blow on the door. When I opened it, the man who had raped me entered. . .He said my husband would be taken to Lima by helicopter the next day. Then he raped me again and left. I washed myself and sat speechless in my room.
Despite Martín's efforts over the next three days to locate her husband, she was unsuccessful. On June 18, two bodies were found on thebanks of the Santa Clara river. Both her husband, still blindfolded, and Professor Melgarejo had been brutally tortured and summarily executed.
Martín reported her husband's murder but not her own rape. "What the military did to me they do wherever they go," Martín told Human Rights Watch. Soon after her husband's murder, Martín received three threatening phone calls and was forced to leave for exile in Sweden. Only then did she feel safe enough to talk about the rape.
Little action has been taken to investigate Mejía's murder. Independent of Martín's efforts, a petition was filed on her husband's behalf before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on September 25, 1989. The government of Peru did not respond; in January 1990, the commission declared that it presumed the allegations of human rights violations against Mejía to be true.
Following that decision, Martín formally filed a new petition for relief before the commission on October 17, 1991, asking that it be incorporated into the previous one. Her petition details the rape and asks for a full consideration of the case. Her lawyers argued that special consideration must be made for rape, on the grounds that local legal action constitutes a remedy that is "totally inadequate and ineffective." As of this writing, the petition was still before the commission.
161 The following information is taken from sworn statements by Ms. Martín and witnesses to the events described, personal interviews with her by Human Rights Watch and the petition for relief filed on her behalf by the Washington, D.C. law firm Arnold and Porter before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights on October 17, 1991.
This Web page was created using a BETA Version of HTML Transit 4.0.