The ghost rapes of Bolivia: Horrifying story of women who were drugged before being tied up and assa

[Judi Lynn]

The ghost rapes of Bolivia: Horrifying story of women who were drugged before being tied up and assaulted in own beds... and they can't even remember what happened

• In 2009, nine men in a Bolivian Mennonite community were jailed for raping at least 100 women and girls
  
  
• The gang used a powerful sedative adapted from a tranquilizer to drug households before carrying out the attacks at Manitoba Colony
  
  
• Women were not initially believed despite waking to blood-soaked sheets
  
  
• Despite the convictions, it has emerged attacks in the colony have continued

By Becky Evans

PUBLISHED: 10:22 EST, 6 August 2013 | UPDATED: 11:56 EST, 6 August 2013

The spate of terrifying night-time rapes in an isolated, orthodox Christian community went on for four years and yet the victims could barely remember the ordeal and many believed they had dreamed it.

It was not until 2009 that nine men were eventually convicted of the rape of more than 100 women and girls in their own homes in the Mennonite Manitoba Colony in Bolivia.

But despite the convictions, it has emerged that the sexual attacks in the closed community are continuing.

An investigation has uncovered that once more women and youngsters in the Old Colony, where motorised vehicles and electricity are banned, are suffering sexual assaults they can barely remember.

More:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2385413/The-ghost-rapes-Bolivia-Mennonite-Manitoba-colony-drug-rapes.html#ixzz2bDt9Bmi8

[get the red out]

1. "Closed community"

Very sad, very little recourse.

[Judi Lynn]

2. The story, from earlier DU posts:

Mennonite father dies in Bolivia after being hung for nine hours
Source: Guardian

Mennonite father dies in Bolivia after being hung for nine hoursDeath comes three months after prosecutors charged eight Mennonite men with raping dozens of women

Associated Press
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 September 2009 18.30 BST

A Mennonite father of nine has died after being hung from a pole for nine hours by 22 of his brethren who accused him of rape, abuse and violating their religious rules, police said.

There have been no arrests for the death of Franz Wieler Kloss, 37, but police said community members thought he was a participant in a two-year mass rape case that was uncovered this summer.

"The Mennonites punished Kloss according to their customs and that punishment killed him," said Cololnel Miguel Gonzales, special crime unit director.

The murder comes three months after Bolivian prosecutors charged eight men from several Mennonite farming villages with raping dozens of women at the settlement. Prosecutors say more than 60 women, from 11 to 47 years old, have accused the men of rape. The men were suspected of using some form of aerosol spray to drug the women.

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/17/bolivia-mennonite-rape

Earlier story:

Page last updated at 02:28 GMT, Thursday, 25 June 2009 03:28 UK
Bolivian Mennonite women 'raped'

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/media/images/45968000/jpg/_45968892_jex_393401_de27-1.jpg

(News clip at link.)

Seven members of Bolivia's Mennonite Christian community have been detained over the alleged rape of 60 women or girls from their own community.

Alleged victims in the Manitoba colony, which is in Bolivia's eastern lowlands, include girls as young as 14, a prosecutor said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8117999.stm

[center] ~ ~ ~[/center]

Verdict in Bolivia's Shocking Case of the Mennonite Rapes
By Jean Friedman-Rudovsky / Manitoba Colony Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2011

Katarina Wall remembers little about the worst night of her life. She recalls waking up in her bed, seeing a man on top of her and feeling her arms too heavy to lift in resistance. The next thing she knew, it was morning — but her pajamas were torn, and the sheets beneath her and her sleeping husband were stained with blood from her vagina. "It was like a terrible dream," Wall, 36, tells TIME in her native Low German, weeping as she stands outside a courthouse in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

But the nightmare appears to be all too real. Wall is among 130 women and girls of the Mennonite colony in Manitoba Colony, who claim that from 2005 to '09, the same cloudy horror visited them. They're the victims of what is allegedly one of the ugliest sex scandals in the history of the Mennonites, a pacifist Christian Anabaptist denomination founded in Europe in the 1500s, if not Bolivia and South America. In a criminal trial now under way in nearby Santa Cruz, Peter Weiber, 48, a Mennonite veterinarian, is accused of transforming a chemical meant to anesthetize cows into a spray to be used on humans. For four years, Weiber and eight other Mennonite men allegedly sprayed the chemical through bedroom windows in Manitoba at night, sedating entire families and raping the females. One of the men is a fugitive, the others have pleaded not guilty. If convicted, each faces a maximum 30-year prison sentence.

The criminal charges detail depraved acts few would expect inside a supposedly upright sect like the Mennonites. "When there were no grown women" in the houses that the men allegedly targeted, says Wilfredo Mariscal, an attorney for the victims, "they did what they wanted with the kids." Court-ordered medical exams reveal a 3-year-old girl with a broken hymen (most likely, doctors note, from finger and not penis penetration). The formal indictments list victims ages 8 to 60 years old, including one who is mentally retarded and another who was pregnant and sent into premature labor after allegedly being raped by one of the men — her brother.

More than 50,000 Mennonites with roots in Canada and Germany populate the Bolivian lowlands, and they are notoriously reclusive, especially in ultraconservative "old colonies" like Manitoba Colony. Their world of horse-drawn buggies and sorghum fields is segregated from the surrounding indigenous country; cars and electricity are prohibited, as are music, sports and television. Women's lives are even more circumscribed. They don't attend school after the age of 12 and, unlike many Mennonite men, rarely learn Spanish. They wear uniform, hand-sewn dresses, raise large families and seldom venture to (and almost never beyond) bustling Santa Cruz, three hours by car and cultural light-years away from Manitoba.

More:
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2087711,00.html#ixzz2bE7n7wYL

(UPDATE: On Thursday, Aug. 25, a Bolivian court found seven of the eight defendants on trial guilty of the rape charges and sentenced them to 25 years in prison each. Weiber the veterinarian was sentenced to 12 years, a lesser penalty, because the court said he was merely an accomplice. The defense lawyers say the verdicts will be appealed. The ninth man charged in the rapes is still at large.)

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2087711,00.html#ixzz2bE8EcUDr