http://www.vice.com/read/the-ghost-rapes-of-bolivia-000300-v20n8
Vice
5 August 2013
The Perpetrators
Were Caught, but the Crimes Continue
By Jean
Friedman-Rudovsky
For a while, the
residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There
was no other explanation. No way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood
and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night.
No way of explaining how another went to sleep clothed, only to wake up naked
and covered by dirty fingerprints all over her body. No way to understand how
another could dream of a man forcing himself onto her in a field -- and then
wake up the next morning with grass in her hair. […]
Then, one night
in June 2009, two men were caught trying to enter a neighbor’s home. The two
ratted out a few friends and, falling like a house of cards, a group of nine
Manitoba men, ages 19 to 43, eventually confessed that they had been raping
Colony families since 2005. To incapacitate their victims and any possible
witnesses, the men used a spray created by a veterinarian from a neighboring
Mennonite community that he had adapted from a chemical used to anesthetize cows.
According to their initial confessions (which they later recanted), the rapists
admitted to -- sometimes in groups, sometimes alone -- hiding outside bedroom
windows at night, spraying the substance through the screens to drug entire
families, and then crawling inside. […]
On my last day
in Manitoba, I got a shock.
“You know that
it’s still happening, right?” a woman said to me, as we drank ice water
alongside her home. There were no men around. I hoped something was lost in
translation, but my Low German translator assured me it wasn’t. “The rapes with
the spray -- they are still going on,” she said.
I peppered her
with questions: Had it happened to her? Did she know who was doing it? Did
everyone know it was going on?
No, she said,
they hadn’t returned to her house, but to a cousin’s -- recently. She said she
had a good guess about who was doing it but wouldn’t give me any names. And she
believed that, yes, most people in Manitoba Colony knew that the imprisonment
of the original rapists hadn’t put an end to the serial crimes.
As if in a
strange time warp, after dozens of interviews with people telling me everything
was fine now, I didn’t know if this was gossip, rumor, lies, or – worse -- the truth.
I spent the rest of the day frantically trying to get confirmation. I revisited
many families who I had previously interviewed, and the majority admitted, a
bit sheepishly, that yes, they had heard the rumors and that, yes, they assumed
they were probably true.
“It’s definitely
not as frequent,” said one young man later that day whose wife had been raped
during the first series of incidents before 2009. “[The rapists] are being much
more careful than before, but it still goes on.” He told me he had his
suspicions about the perpetrators’ identities as well, but didn’t want to give
any more details. […]
