Early on Saturday, January 27, two nuns from the Congregation of the Daughters of Saint Joseph Protectors of Childhood, located in the center of Santiago de Chile, in the Yungay neighborhood, about three blocks from the house of President Gabriel Boric, were assaulted. inside the convent.
The women, in their 60s, were intimidated with knives, tied hands and feet for an hour by two criminals who have not been identified until now, and who also threatened to rape them.
They both entered through the roof, climbing the trees, and stole one million pesos (a little more than $1,000).
The violent assault has shocked Chile, a country experiencing an unprecedented security crisis and which, according to all surveys, has crime, by far, as the main concern of citizens.
“We spent an hour with knives in our bodies, I had to negotiate our own freedom and our own life.
"They threatened us: that if we screamed they were going to rape us and that we would give them the money," Rosa Elena Bahamonde, the mother superior of the congregation, told National Television, one of the victims along with the nun Cecilia Muñoz.
“They were foreigners, but we also have to classify, because I work with a lot of foreign people and we cannot put them all in the same bag.
There are different ways how foreigners arrived and different types of foreigners.
The same thing happens in our country.”
The congregation occupies a block of the Yungay neighborhood.
In one part of the building live a dozen nuns, between 50 and 94 years old, some of them prostrate;
In another is the San José temple, which was also attacked at dawn on January 27, and in a third area is the María Luisa Villalón School, run by the Daughters of San José Protectoras de la Infancia, where she is a teacher. Bahamonde.
It was precisely a former student of that school, Eva Lehto, who made the assault public on Tuesday through a letter she sent to the newspaper
El Mercurio
.
“With a lot of pain, anger and helplessness I write these lines,” begins the letter, in which she said, in detail, that two nuns “were taken hostage.”
The former students found out about the incident at dawn on January 27, when one of them, in a WhatsApp group, said that in the Sosafe neighborhood security application there was a report that stated the following: “People held hostage at the María school Luisa Villalón.”
Crime: “It's not us, it's the citizens who are suffering”
According to Rosa Elena Bahamonde, the criminals told her: “We want the money that the nuns stole.”
“I did the negotiation.
'You want the money, take the money, but don't take the students' resources.'
"I couldn't allow it, it was my life and the resources were bought with money from the State, which holds you accountable."
Bahamonde continued: “I didn't want to lose my life, I preferred to lose my money.”
And he said that the criminals searched three offices and that when she warned one of them that there was a prostrate nun in a room, he told her: "'Have mercy on her.'
Not a respect.
(Then) she went to the chapel to pray and I said to her: ''Do you also know how to pray?'
It was at that moment that Bahamonde took advantage of the minute: “I sprayed him three times with alcohol spray and he told me: 'Why are you hurting me?
And I say to him: And do you think that the damage you do to me is less than the damage I do to you?
You touch me, and you are going to know me.”
After the assault, Rosa Elena Bahamondes said upset: “We can't continue like this.
All the media today runs because it was the nuns, but it is not us, it is the citizens who are suffering.
Today one finds oneself locked in one's own homes and it is not normal;
"It is not normal that we have to put electricity even on the roof."
An entrance door to the facilities of the Congregation.Cristobal Venegas
The nun related that when she and the people of the Yungay neighborhood go out into the street today, they do so “hiding everything, so that nothing is seen.”
“This neighborhood is important for Santiago.
Everyone finds it beautiful, but for those of us who live here it is not beautiful (...) Security is impossible.
"You can't talk on the phone, you can't carry your purse, you can't come with your purchases because you are attacked, (especially) by old women, by lonely people."
“Thank God we came out alive, because at that moment you have no chance to think if you are going to live or die,” he added.
“Now [this] is news because we are religious, but it should be [news] every day.”
We victims are the backyard of politics and the Government (...) We are already inherent to pain.
We do not see the other's pain, and since we are not able to see it, one more assault is one more assault;
One more death is one more death.
The important priority is the right to life.”
The superior of the congregation said that this assault has been added to another crime suffered in December: “The neighborhood [Yungay] has been changing a lot.
Crime has increased a lot,” she noted.
And, regarding the arrival to the neighborhood of President Boric, who lives in a large house, he said: “For me it was the worst.
We have the president as a neighbor, but the neighbor no longer sleeps here.
"He doesn't live daily life."
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