A rough-skinned dwarf with a penis that turns his body several times is the protagonist of a popular Paraguayan legend. It is called the kurupí and lives deep in the jungle. His favorite activity is approaching homes and raping virgin girls during nap hours. This myth became the last resort of families to curb the desire of girls to play outside the home during the longest dictatorship in South America. Few knew then how real the danger was. According to the recent investigation by journalist Andrés Colmán, there were at least twelve centers where kidnapped girls were sexually enslaved by dictator Alfredo Stroessner and his relatives.
Julia Ozorio Gamecho was 13 years old when she was kidnapped. It was February 4, 1968, a Sunday in Nueva Italia, a tiny town in the Paraguayan countryside that still has about 3,000 inhabitants. General Stroessner had been in power for 14 years when "a fat man, belly" arrived at Julia's house with two soldiers pointing rifles at her sisters, her and her mother.
The man looked first at his 16- and 17-year-old sisters and then at her. "I'll take this little one," he told his mother before loading the girl into a car. He didn't say another word until he locked her in a house in San Lorenzo, a city near Asunción.
"The first night was horrible. There are no human words that can express my pain that night," Ozorio recalls in his book Una rosa y mil soldados, published in 2008 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he went to revive, to work cleaning houses and taking care of children after surviving two years of kidnapping and rape.
"The Wolf, satiated and drunk, kept snoring in his bed. I slept on the floor. I could hardly sleep because of the pain," she remarkes in the book that, after exhausting the second edition, has not wanted to edit again due to the pressures and threats received.
The one who kidnapped her was Colonel Pedro Julián Miers, in charge of the dictator's security and also of the network of "harems" of enslaved girls that Stroessner and his allies maintained throughout the country. Julia was to be handed over to the dictator, but Miers decided to seclude her for two years. She lived locked in a cell, with little food and also exposed to the abuses of the soldiers who guarded her. Once, the colonel dressed it up and displayed it in public.
The Hunters of Girls
"The hunters of girls were lower-ranking soldiers, captains, lieutenants, who were dedicated to watching the girls to decide who they were going to kidnap that day, to please the president. (...) For delivering a virgin girl, her relatives occupied a position," Ozorio said.
Ozorio is now 68 years old and does not want to return to Paraguay. "I spent 40 years crying. And then I regained my memory. Those kidnappers and murderers died like little angels and I was cleaning floors here," he says. "I don't want to leave this world without telling that there were two Spaniards. I want you to look for them, they were two little Spanish girls. They had them drugged, they asked me for help, but how was I going to save them. I would like them to find them, I can make them an identikit, "he claims. Her dream was always to create a shelter for abused girls. He says he knows there are many more.
Rogelio Goiburú, head of the Directorate of Historical Memory of Paraguay, recalls that at the end of the sixties, Paraguay had two million inhabitants and the control exercised by the Colorado Party over the population was almost total. "There were spies, military and police everywhere. The population was one of the most impoverished in the world, living without freedom of expression, movement, religion or political association. Being accused of being a communist by anyone could land you in prison without trial. Torture was the usual treatment of any detainee," he says.
Prisons were filled with innocent opponents, rivers of corpses, families weeping for the disappeared. The same script as the dictatorships of Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, which, in fact, worked together on the well-known Plan Condor.
The journalist Andrés Colmán, in his book Las orgías del general, chronicle about the girls sexual victims of the Stronista dictatorship, recently presented at the Asunción Book Fair, explains that this reality remained semi-hidden for a long time "because the witnesses and neighbors of this perverse criminal also maintained a complicit silence."
There are women who have told their experience to the Truth and Justice Commission and the Prosecutor's Office, but ask to remain anonymous, such as those in the documentary Calle del Silencio, by José Elizeche, available on the Internet. Julia Ozorio is the only one with a first and last name who denounced her case.
"I saw the lifeless bodies of three girls"
In 1975, Malena Ashwell and her husband, a Navy lieutenant, were having lunch at the home of one of their superiors in the Saxony district. Malena went outside and saw neighbors crowding in front of a nearby house. He walked into the courtyard.
"With horror I saw the lifeless bodies of three girls, two of them about 8 years old, the other 9 years old, lying naked on a pile of sand at the back of the house," Ashwell would later recount in an interview published in The Washington Post, on December 20, 1977. It was the first publication of the denunciation of the drug trafficking network that involved high military leaders of Paraguay and Stroessner himself.
It was the first time it was published, not the first time it was attempted. For trying before, Ashwell was kidnapped by Paraguayan police and tortured with rape included. They also kidnapped Miguel Ángel Soler, secretary of the Communist Party at the time, for wanting to publish the story in Adelante, the party's magazine.
The house of Saxony was administered by Colonel Leopoldo Perrier, better known as Popol, a close friend of the dictator and leader of the kidnapping network for sexual exploitation at the service of the head of government, summarizes Colmán. There are many testimonies that certify that Stroessner visited the place assiduously.
His book includes more testimonies of violations related to the Truth and Justice Commission that documented the crimes against humanity of those responsible for the dictatorship. Like when hundreds of soldiers invaded the small town of Costa Rosado in 1980 in search of a leader of the Christian Agrarian Leagues, cooperative farmer groups. When they did not find him, they locked children in a school. They accused them and their parents of being communists. They tortured them with drowning techniques. The 10- and 12-year-old girls were raped in the school bathroom.
Sexual abuse that persists
"In Paraguay, women are not treated properly. I know it's everywhere, but then and until now they have them as a rag. It's a matter of stronism and the culture that the male does what he wants," says Julia Ozorio.
Paraguay is the country with the highest proportion of teenage pregnancies in South America. 72 births per 1,000 are to women aged 15 to 19. There is no comprehensive sex education in public schools, the word gender is banned and eliminated from textbooks and even from the recent law that recognizes femicide.
Juan Carlos Ozorio, a deputy from the ruling Colorado Party, resigned from his seat last year when he was denounced in Paraguay's biggest anti-drug and money laundering operation in recent history. The deputy also had an open case for the alleged abuse of a 9-year-old girl, but that had not made him resign. A candidate for departmental councilor of the opposition National Concertation, Luis Fernando Ramos Amarilla, was denounced for alleged sexual abuse of a 16-year-old girl. The investigation has not advanced in two years and Ramos Amarilla was elected on April 30. Now the victim's family fears the case will go unpunished.
For the third most voted list of the elections last April, National Crusade, Rafael Esquivel was elected, known as Mbururu despite being prosecuted and imprisoned for sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl and for another cause with a 15-year-old girl. The Feminist Articulation of Paraguay, in charge of organizing and convening the marches of March 8, maintains a campaign to prevent Esquivel from occupying a place in the Senate.
Every year there are about 2,000 complaints of sexual abuse against children and adolescents in Paraguay. 80% of them occur in the family: parents, grandparents, uncles or stepfathers, according to official data. The same number of girls that the dictator came to have subdued, according to the calculations of Goiburú and the Directorate of Historical Memory.
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