‘Get me out of here': In gutted Guatemala horror home, history of rape and abuse

March 22, 2017

Mar 22: When firefighters entered the home for troubled youth, they discovered more than two dozen girls on the floor of a locked room, most of them dead.

Guatemala

A moan rose from one of the bodies, piled on top of each other. When firefighter Danial Perpuac turned the girl over, flames came out of her mouth — she was burning up inside.

“That is something you cannot forget,” Perpuac said helplessly. “I know I will have the smell of grilled meat and hair in my nose and throat for life.”

The fire on March 8 that killed 40 girls at the Virgen de la Asunción Safe Home started when ringleaders took a match to a foam mattress to protest the abuse they had suffered there. Their hell at the government-run shelter began long before the inferno, as documented in several warnings from four different agencies. At least two orders for closure were ignored.

The Virgen de la Asunción home is on a hill 14 miles east of Guatemala City. The shelter, protected by high walls and barbed wire, is surrounded by an idyllic pine forest covered with mist every morning. The forest and ravines have offered hiding places for more than 100 children who have escaped what they consider a jail.

About 700 children — nobody knew exactly how many — lived in a home with a maximum capacity for 500. Some dormitories housed more than twice the number of children authorised for the space.

The majority had committed no crime. They were youths sent there by the courts for various reasons — they had run away from home, they were left in the streets, they were abused, they were young migrants. Most came from families so poor they could not afford the $50 in lawyers' fees to get their children out.

Once inside, the children lost out on schooling. Because of a lack of funds, their education was limited to six hours per week in classrooms with up to 80 students.

The abuse at Virgen de la Asunción was no secret, and the courts had intervened before. Teacher Edgar Rolando Diéguez Ispache has been in prison since 2013 and is on trial for alleged rape. Another employee, mason José Roberto Arias Pérez, has been in prison since 2014 for raping a mentally disabled girl. He was sentenced to eight years.

Several reports criticising the shelter were put out by the country's attorney general and the National Adoption System in 2015 and 2016. One recommended the gradual closure of the facility, and another its immediate closure.

Despite the complaints and the reports, the abuse continued.

The story of one girl who escaped the shelter on October 30, after six weeks inside, was told in a case file seen by The Associated Press. The girl, 16, is not named because she is an alleged victim of rape.

She fled from her own house in August to escape the extortion demands by a gang that had been threatening her with rape for a year. On August 13, she told her mother she had found a job and would be home late. Instead, she ran away to protect herself and her family.

“She hugged me tight that day, tighter than normal,” her mother said.

The mother reported her missing daughter to police. On August 22, they located the girl, and a youth court sent her to Virgen de la Asunción. Officials separated mother and daughter as they cried.

“Mama, get me out of here,” the girl begged, according to her mother.

The shelter did not have a procedure for visits, and they did not see each other for a month. By the time of a hearing on Sept. 13, the girl had been beaten, forced to get a tattoo with the name of a female staffer, and repeatedly raped, her mother said.

The first time, the female staff called her in for a physical exam and sedated her. She woke up and her whole body hurt, and she realised what they had done, according to the case file.

Several days later, they took her to the same place. This time, she was awake and tied to a gurney. The young man who raped her had his face covered.

The third time, it was several men, she said. They raped her and beat her.

A little more than two months after she was sent to the shelter, the daughter escaped along with three others. The girl was afraid to return home because that could mean being sent back to the shelter, but she contacted her brother. The family contacted their lawyer, who filed a motion for habeas corpus.

The lawyer managed to return the girl to her mother, but she didn't reveal all that had happened to her until after the fire. At that point, she said she wanted to testify against her abusers.

On November 11, the state attorney requested that the centre be closed. He asked that areas known as “the cage” and “the chicken coop” be closed within 48 hours. Both facilities looked like punishment cells, with metal doors and no windows.

Also in November, a state human rights prosecutor filed a complaint with the Inter American Human Rights Commission charging rampant abuses. The accusations included charges as serious as “forced recruitment for human trafficking for the purpose of prostitution”.

There were complaints about sexual abuse by male residents against female residents, including some under 13. One girl was killed in 2013, hanged with a scarf by two other girls.

On December 12, the Sixth Court of Children and Adolescents of the Metropolitan Area condemned the state of Guatemala for violations committed against the rights of minors guarded in the home. It also gave 48 hours to clarify the legal situation of a number of minors inside the home.

Nothing happened.

The secretary of social welfare, Carlos Rodas, who was responsible for the home, appealed the judicial decision. Rodas, who has since been arrested, has denied negligence and refused to resign. He blamed the girls' mutiny on them not liking the food, and said they had sharp weapons hidden in their hair.

“The problem is that judges mix children who have committed crimes with children abandoned by their families,” he said. “We ask the Public Prosecutor's Office to investigate but we do not directly blame anyone.”

On March 7, about 60 girls escaped from the shelter, as some had done on several occasions before. They rebelled because shelter staff had tried to beat them, said a 14-year-old survivor who had been there three months.

The girl, whose family did not want her name used out of fear for her safety, said she was not raped but officials took away her food. The girls also were made to wake up at 3am to bathe in cold water, she said.

So the girls jumped from the roof of the facility to the wall, and from there into the trees.

Riot police caught them and returned them to the shelter by force. The police sprayed pepper gas in their mouths and eyes, hit them with batons and kicked them, the 14-year-old told the AP. Police did not comment on the case because of a judicial order that prohibits discussion.

The angry teens waited outside the shelter for hours. They started throwing things at the police. Girls complained that they were abused, attacked and beaten.

The escapees eventually were brought in and locked in a 500-square-foot classroom as punishment. It is as yet unclear who locked them in and who held the key.

By 7:30 the next morning, they had been held for about six hours. They were not let out even to use the bathroom, the girl said.

Four girls who were ringleaders at the home had managed to get matches to smoke cigarettes during their brief escape. In an attempt to protest the lockup and force somebody to open the doors, they set fire to a mattress propped against a window.

The foam stuffing was already coming out of the mattresses because girls used it to fashion pads for menstruation when they didn't have anything else. The burning mattress fell onto other mattresses, and the flames quickly spread.

Locked into the room, the girls shouted, “Help me! Help me!” the 14-year-old said.

Nobody did.

“I saw how they burned, how they screamed, how they died,” she said.

She fainted. When she came to, somebody had finally opened the door. She ran out, and the staff doused the girls with water until ambulances arrived.

The girl suffered burns on both arms, a shoulder and part of her face. For many, it was too late. By 9am, 19 of the girls were dead, burned and asphyxiated. Twenty-one more between the ages of 13 and 17 would die at local hospitals over the next few days.

Kimberly Palencia Ortiz was one of the dead. The 17-year-old had been a ward of the state for nearly a year. Her father was in prison, her mother had disappeared, and her grandmother did not have the means to take care of her.

“It is an injustice,” Valeria Yojero said tearfully at her granddaughter's burial. “Nobody should die for being poor.”

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News Network
May 14,2020

May 14: The UN’s children agency has warned that an additional 6,000 children could die daily from preventable causes over the next six months as the COVID-19 pandemic weakens the health systems and disrupts routine services, the first time that the number of children dying before their fifth birthday could increase worldwide in decades.

As the coronavirus outbreak enters its fifth month, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) requested USD 1.6 billion to support its humanitarian response for children impacted by the pandemic.

The health crisis is “quickly becoming a child rights crisis. And without urgent action, a further 6,000 under-fives could die each day,” it said.

With a dramatic increase in the costs of supplies, shipment and care, the agency appeal is up from a USD 651.6 million request made in late March – reflecting the devastating socioeconomic consequences of the disease and families’ rising needs.

"Schools are closed, parents are out of work and families are under strain," UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said on Tuesday.

 “As we reimagine what a post-COVID world would look like, these funds will help us respond to the crisis, recover from its aftermath, and protect children from its knock-on effects.”

The estimate of the 6,000 additional deaths from preventable causes over the next six months is based on an analysis by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, published on Wednesday in the Lancet Global Health Journal.

UNICEF said it was based on the worst of three scenarios analysing 118 low and middle-income countries, estimating that an additional 1.2 million deaths could occur in just the next six months, due to reductions in routine health coverage, and an increase in so-called child wasting.

Around 56,700 more maternal deaths could also occur in just six months, in addition to the 144,000 likely deaths across the same group of countries. The worst case scenario, of children dying before their fifth birthdays, would represent an increase "for the first time in decades,” Fore said.

"We must not let mothers and children become collateral damage in the fight against the virus. And we must not let decades of progress on reducing preventable child and maternal deaths, be lost,” she said.

Access to essential services, like routine immunisation, has already been compromised for hundreds of millions of children and threatens a significant increase in child mortality.

According to a UNICEF analysis, some 77 per cent of children under the age of 18 worldwide are living in one of 132 countries with COVID-19 movement restrictions.

The UN agency also spotlighted that the mental health and psychosocial impact of restricted movement, school closures and subsequent isolation are likely to intensify already high levels of stress, especially for vulnerable youth.

At the same time, they maintained that children living under restricted movement and socio-economic decline are in greater jeopardy of violence and neglect. Girls and women are at increased risk of sexual and gender-based violence.

The UNICEF pointed out that in many cases, refugee, migrant and internally displaced children are experiencing reduced access to protection and services while being increasingly exposed to xenophobia and discrimination.

“We have seen what the pandemic is doing to countries with developed health systems and we are concerned about what it would do to countries with weaker systems and fewer available resources,” Fore said.

In countries suffering from humanitarian crises, UNICEF is working to prevent transmission and mitigate the collateral impacts on children, women and vulnerable populations – with a special focus on access to health, nutrition, water and sanitation, education and protection.

To date, the UN agency said it has received USD 215 million to support its pandemic response, and additional funding will help build upon already-achieved results.

Within its response, UNICEF has reached more than 1.67 billion people with COVID-19 prevention messaging around hand washing and cough and sneeze hygiene; over 12 million with critical water, sanitation and hygiene supplies; and nearly 80 million children with distance or home-based learning.

The UN agency has also shipped to 52 countries, more than 6.6 million gloves, 1.3 million surgical masks, 428,000 N95 respirators and 34,500 COVID-19 diagnostic tests, among other items.

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News Network
April 6,2020

Tokyo, April 6: Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is planning to declare a state of emergency in view of the surging cases of coronavirus in the country, especially in Tokyo and other large cities, government sources said on Monday.

Pressure had been mounting on Abe to make the declaration amid a spurt in COVID-19 cases recently, with calls for the move from Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike and the Japan Medical Association intensifying, Xinhua news agency reported.

The Tokyo metropolitan government, along with healthcare specialists, said that the number of hospital beds available for coronavirus patients will soon reach capacity, with the health ministry rapidly trying to secure more beds.

Adding to pressure on the government to demonstrably bolster its preventive and countermeasures to the spread of the virus, a panel of government experts warned recently that the country's healthcare system could collapse if coronavirus cases continue to spike.

The healthcare system in Tokyo and four other prefectures are under increased strain and "drastic countermeasures need to be taken as quickly as possible," the experts said.

As of Sunday, 143 new cases of COVID-19 were recorded in Tokyo, a record daily high for the capital, bringing the total to 1,034, with Japan's health ministry and local governments adding that nationwide cases rose to 3,531 as of Sunday afternoon.

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Agencies
June 16,2020

China on Tuesday justified the killing of an army officer and two soldiers of India and accused Indian troops of crossing a disputed border between the two countries.

Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Indian troops crossed the border line twice on Monday, "provoking and attacking Chinese personnel, resulting in a serious physical confrontation between border forces on the two sides".

An Indian Army officer and two soldiers have been killed in a "violent face-off" with Chinese troops along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), disrupting the fragile peace talks.

"During the de-escalation process underway in the Galwan Valley, a violent face-off took place last night with casualties on both sides," the Indian Army said in a statement.
 

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