Former Peruvian soldiers are arrested for raping teenagers during armed conflict in the country

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Ten men were convicted Wednesday in Peru of raping nine teenagers while serving in the military during the country’s armed conflict decades ago.

Judge Marco Angulo, of Peru’s First Superior Criminal Court, ordered the former soldiers to serve prison terms, with sentences ranging between six and 12 years. Authorities accused them of raping the teenagers between 1984 and 1994 in the Andean community of Manta.

Angulo said that the absence of constitutional guarantees in the community during the armed conflict “turned the possibility of reporting sexual abuse into marginal acts that received no attention.” He added that the victims lived in the midst of social rejection that forced them “to carry out the demand for their violated rights in the most absolute helplessness”.

“The decision adopted is a message that… aims to respect people’s fundamental rights, even in the harshest social crises that the nation faces,” said Angulo.

After the sentences were announced, prosecutors, who were seeking harsher sentences, and victims’ lawyers said they would evaluate Angulo’s decision to decide whether to challenge it.

The war that raged between the Peruvian military and the Shining Path communist insurgency between 1980 and 2000 left around 70,000 people dead, most of them in rural areas.

Prosecutors began investigating the teenagers’ accusations in 2004, after a special commission investigating the armed conflict published a report detailing, among other abuses suffered by civilians in Manta, that “sexual violence was a persistent and daily practice” by which “Army members stationed at local military bases were primarily responsible.”

Angulo said on Wednesday that rapes sometimes occurred when teenagers entered their homes after being threatened with rifles, or after being detained and accused without proof of being part of Sendero Luminoso. One victim reported having a scar on her hip left by a soldier who used a knife to cut her underwear.