Valentina, we write this letter with our most profound respect for your bravery and for your determination to demand justice. The idea arose because we recognise the very personal way in which you have suffered, but also because sadly your story reflects what is going on in this country. It is uncomfortable to acknowledge that our admiration for your valour is the result of your untiring fight against impunity. But it is all the more sad to acknowledge that we are dealing with a complaint so basic, it seems incredible that it hasn't been resolved in these eight years.
But these are the times we are living in. Times in which innocent people are imprisoned on weak evidence, untenable investigations and hearsay. For this reason your words destroy the vulgar legal technicalities that the federal government presented at the Inter-American Court. You said, “I am not lying, because I don't have any reason to lie that the soldiers abused me.” And with that you meet the challenge of a government which holds back justice. With that your strength acquires a greater relevance in this context, in which human rights abuses by members of the armed forces are offensively called “collateral damage”.
You narrated the events of 16 February 2002, when you were washing clothes in the stream near your house. You explained how eight soldiers surrounded you and sexually assaulted you. You described how the soldiers attacked you because you said you didn't recognise the names of the encapuchados that appeared in the list which they showed you. In each of your words, clear and simple, there was a deep analysis of what we are living.
The act of sexual torture that you suffered is not an isolated one. Let us not forget the three tzeltal sisters in the ejido of Morelia, in Chiapas, raped by members of the army in 1994, nor your fellow member of the Organisation of the Me'phaa Indigenous People (OPIM), Inés Fernández, who suffered a sexual assault in March 2002. They are cases which show how the body of a woman becomes a battlefield. Something which the women detained in Atenco identified as a way of living the repression. A violence which punishes not only for being a woman, but because those bodies are used to attack the masculinity of the male “enemy”.
You have told us what it meant, after the aggression, when you sought medical attention in the nearest clinic but they didn't want to attend to you. They gave you four aspirin and they sent you home. In spite of having fever and suffering great discomfort, you walked for eight hours to the nearest large town, Ayutla de los Libres, where they refused to receive you because you did not have a pre-arranged appointment. And then agents of the Public Prosecutor's Office waited a month after the assault before they provided a medical revision because they said that they didn't have the specialist personnel. This treatment demonstrates a state discrimination against your person: for being a woman, for being indigenous, and for being campesina. The saddest part is that those are the types of authorities we have. The type that are incapable of guaranteeing the security and physical integrity of women, but that are perfectly capable of hiding behind their fundamentalism when it comes to providing birth control medicine to rape victims.
Human rights lawyers signal that your case before the Court is paradigmatic because of the strategic nature of the lawsuit, given that it makes evident the lack of access to justice, particularly for indigenous women; and it shows the use of military jurisdiction as a factor of impunity and the urgency need for mechanisms to be established to control and oversee the conduct of the army in security tasks and the investigation of crimes.
But your case is emblematic for another equally important reason Valentina. For your capacity and conviction to convert your condition as victim into a series of concrete proposals in order to avoid future offences. You have said that, for you, the reparation for damages includes something so fundamental as “allowing me to live in peace with my daughter”. But it also goes beyond you, to structural problems: to the improvement of medical attention through a new clinic and the creation of a new community authority figure for situations of gender violence. You request an explicit acknowledgement by the Government that the aggressions happened, in a context of militarisation, and that they were not isolated incidents. And you ask that your community, as indigenous people, might have the right to prior consultation on the presence of the armed forces.
For these reasons, Valentina, we write you this letter. Because we hear in your words demands for justice which find an echo in the demands of thousands of citizens, above all of indigenous women. We trust that the federal government will feel obliged to recognise the same, after the sentence which the Court will emit in a few months time.
Mariana Mora Bayo and Miguel Pulido Jiméne, Investigator in the area of Human Rights and Executive Director of Fundar, Centre for Analysis and Investigation
