Guatemalan soldiers face civil war sexual slavery charges in historic trial
For the first time ever, sex slavery will be prosecuted where the war crime took place, 30 years after 11 Mayan women from Sepur Zarco were raped and enslaved
Women hold up signs that read ‘We look to justice, Sepur Zarco case’ in 2012 to commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women in Guatemala City. Photograph: Jorge López/Reuters
First the army came for the men. Fifteen Mayan peasant leaders in the tiny hamlet of Sepur Zarco in eastern Guatemala were seized and killed or forcibly disappeared.
A few weeks later, they came back for the women. Soldiers raped them in front of their children, burned down their houses and crops, stole their meagre belongings and made them move into shacks outside the nearby military base.
Every two or three days, each woman was made to report for 12-hour “shifts” at the base where they were forced to cook, clean and submit to systematic rape, often by several soldiers.
It was 1982, one of the bloodiest years of the country’s civil war as counter-insurgency operations against ethnic Mayans intensified under the rule of the military dictator and evangelical Christian, Efraín Ríos Montt.
First the army came for the men. Fifteen Mayan peasant leaders in the tiny hamlet of Sepur Zarco in eastern Guatemala were seized and killed or forcibly disappeared.
A few weeks later, they came back for the women. Soldiers raped them in front of their children, burned down their houses and crops, stole their meagre belongings and made them move into shacks outside the nearby military base.
Every two or three days, each woman was made to report for 12-hour “shifts” at the base where they were forced to cook, clean and submit to systematic rape, often by several soldiers.
It was 1982, one of the bloodiest years of the country’s civil war as counter-insurgency operations against ethnic Mayans intensified under the rule of the military dictator and evangelical Christian, Efraín Ríos Montt.
More than 30 years later, two former military officers will finally face charges of sexual and domestic slavery and forced disappearance in a landmark trial which opens on Monday.
The trial marks the first in the world that sexual slavery perpetrated during an armed conflict has been prosecuted in the country where the crimes took place.
The two defendants, former base commander Esteelmer Reyes Girón and former regional military commissioner Heriberto Valdez Asij, are accused of crimes against humanity, which are exempt from the country’s post-war amnesty law.
Throughout Guatemala’s 36-year conflict, state security forces used rape as a weapon of terror, according to the 1999 report of a UN-backed Truth Commission, but no officers have ever faced charges of sexual violence.
And while the plight of Korean and Filipino “comfort women” forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops during the second world war remains the subject of high-level diplomatic disputes, victims of similar crimes in Guatemala have had little or no official support.
