Violence against women in the era of terrorism

 

It is well-known amongst peruvian people the damage that terrorist movements caused in our country, leaving thousands of casualties, families destroyed, massive economic crisis and a terrified population in such level that our parents remember such times as if they would’ve happened yesterday. Peruvians will never forget the fear of leaving the house and not coming back again, the fear of walking across a car that turned out to be a car bomb, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time and getting your life taken out of nowhere.

Among several atrocities were committed in this time, violence against women was present in many ways during this period. We can take for example the 7426 women that were forcibly dissapeared, unfairly detained, tortured and executed. It is also believed (although is not confirmed) that all those women were also victims of sexual violence, including forced prostitution, forced union, sexual slavery, forced abortion, forced pregnancy and overall rape. 

What is more outrageous is that principal victims of terrorism were people who lived in really humble conditions. This basically means that these savage abuses were committed towards the most vulnerable women who were, essentially, abandoned by the government.

Although not all of this crimes were committed by the terrorists. As a matter of fact, one of the worst crimes was committed by the government itself, the theft of women’s right to create a family. 

Multiple cases of forced sterilization were discovered but a lot of them are still unpunished. In 1998 a report about this topic was presented, and this report had proof that revealed how under threats, a lot of women were forcibly sterilized. This subject is still considered as “taboo” nowadays due to the attempts of the government to silence the victims and delete any proof, and we’ve had little or no answers from the Fiscalía when the affected women tried to demand justice and reparation.

The women in this organization initially had the purpose of being heard after the wealthy women were praised after independence, the lower class women did not have any recognition and continued to perform the same domestic tasks and suffered abuse from their husbands ; They saw the opportunity to improve their situation by going to the “Sendero luminoso” because they made a voice of protest against the state, this being something that attracted them to be able to say out loud what they thought and felt.

Initially they were assigned logistics and domestic tasks, but they gained weight when the Senderistas took advantage of women to attract media attention with news such as that 50% of its members were women, apart from the fact that many of them occupied high positions and had completed higher education.

But later they began to use them as weapons, this being the use of women as murderers due to the feeling that they had about being up to the violence as a man carrying out the actions in a more violent and sadistic way according to the Shining Path members "were bloodthirsty by nature” for which they were the executors of several policemen and soldiers who caught them.

However, their role does not end here, but they were degraded as mere sexual objects to bring more Senderistas to the world and most of these were brought from the poorest areas being illiterate and mostly under 20 years old; Those who opposed ended up being murdered or forced to watch their husbands and children being murdered. The authorities also exercised attitudes of sexual violence against the members of this party, forcing them to perform sexual favors in exchange for giving them information about their relatives.

Undoubtedly, no option was viable, since if they notified the authorities of anything, they were branded whistleblowers by the Senderistas and subjected to punishments such as shaving their hair or severely injuring parts of their bodies to take away their beauty; This fight for gender equality and making them heard brought nothing but greater inequality on the part of both sides, being violent and sadistic extremists on the one hand and the same apart from turning a deaf ear on the other, leaving women in a less favorable position than they had before being relegated to suffer more abuse in this harsh time.

María Elena was a social activist, a Peruvian neighborhood leader, popularly known as Mother Courage. At a time when the country was attacked by terrorism, Moyano rose up against Sendero Luminoso. In addition, she fought against poverty, for the defense of human rights and women's rights. Her leadership skills were manifested in all her activities, but mainly in the founding of the "Micaela Bastidas" mothers' club, which had the purpose of defending mothers from the manipulation of OFASA and other government agencies. The discrepancies with “Sendero Luminoso” terrorist group were accentuated as a result of some flyers published by said group and where it said that María Elena had seized the money from some donations from foreign entities. In September 1991, María Elena, in a public statement, categorically denied such infamy and harshly rebuked the Maoists, with these words: "... the revolution is not death or imposition, submission or fanaticism...”.

With the women's organizations Sendero Luminoso had a great conflict: their democratic nature, the clear distance that these organizations have marked with the use of violence and terror, the daily organization to face the adverse circumstances that the economic crisis brings of the country, are some of the absolutely antagonistic aspects to the Shining Path political project. For these reasons, Sendero begins a campaign of assassinations, of terror, of attempts to separate the leaders from the bases based on accusations of betrayal of the popular cause. Thus, the leaders are accused by Sendero of being reformists and of collaborating with the government, of being immediate for their attempts and achievements in improving the living conditions of their families and their communities. The day before his death, Sendero Luminoso called for an armed strike throughout the district. María Elena, along with several women, took to the streets of Villa El Salvador to defy the strike and the terrorist group's threats to kill anyone outside their homes. The armed strike called by Sendero Luminoso was a failure and the Senderistas were seeking reprisals. On February 15, 1992, María Elena Moyano, 33 years old, was assassinated by a commando unit for the annihilation of 15 Shining Path terrorists in the district of Villa El Salvador, when she was attending a gathering organized by the Vaso de Leche program. Inside the premises, a woman from the commando shot him in the chest and head, then dragged his body and dynamited it with five kilos of explosives in the street.

Mannion, S. (s/f). Violencia contra la mujer y terrorismo en el Perú: el caso de Sendero Luminoso – HAHR. Hahr-online.com. Recuperado el 31 de octubre de 2022, de https://hahr-online.com/violencia-contra-la-mujer-y-terrorismo-en-el-peru-el-caso-de-sendero-luminoso/

Ramírez, S. C. (2018, diciembre 16). Esterilización forzada en Perú. Un camino vindicativo por verdad, justicia y reparación. Revista Marea. https://revistamarea.com/2018/12/16/esterilizacion-forzada-en-peru-un-camino-vindicativo-por-verdad-justicia-y-reparacion/