RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Natalia Manso finds it difficult to follow the thread of identical complaints filed by her ex-husband in Peru’s labyrinthine court system, where her case exemplifies judicial harassment – another type of male violence practiced silently but systematically in this country.
This Spaniard resident in Lima since 2011 has spent the last two years between police stations, prosecutors’ offices, and courts, in an exhausting battle against the 11 legal proceedings filed against her by her ex-husband, from which she has had to defend herself along with another 7 lawsuits.
“It is a systematic campaign of attrition. He doesn’t care if they file the complaints. The objective of the judicial harasser is not to win trials; it is to annul you as a person by causing you stress, anxiety, and nerves,” Manso, an Asturian from Oviedo and mother of two daughters aged 12 and 9, told Efe.
The same complaint can be filed in Peru in several instances (police stations, courts, prosecutors’ offices). Each one follows a parallel course, which forces the same statements and proceedings to be made as many times as the complaint is repeated.
“They harass, harass and unhinge the person who takes care of their children, so it is also a form of indirect violence against children,” warns Manso, a businesswoman, and university professor.
“It is more serious if you are a foreigner with minor children who have no other family in the country. The denunciations are missiles against the family structure, a curl in the curls of violence,” she adds.
It all began when her ex-husband failed to comply with aspects of the divorce agreement, including allowing her daughters to travel to Spain once a year. She denounced him for psychological violence, and it was then that the criminal lawsuits rained down on her.
“One thinks that, when the relationship ends, the abuse ends, but it doesn’t,” Manso reflects.
UNPUBLISHED REPORT
After unsuccessfully asking for help at the Spanish consulate, where she was told that they could not intervene as she was on trial, Manso turned to the Ombudsman’s Office as a last resort. To her surprise, the Ombudsman’s Office issued a strong report.
“I cried when I saw it. For the first time, someone had taken the time to listen to the whole story and understood this systematic pattern of abuse,” she recalls, on the verge of tears.
The unpublished document acknowledges that Manso is judicially harassed by her ex-husband, who makes “misuse of the system, saturating it even more.”
As a solution, it calls for an integrated system to identify and group complaints in the same process and asks the Ministry of Women to register all the complaints received by women denouncing violence.
“We have discovered judicial violence with an abusive exercise of law against the victims that have to stop. This generates more burden of violence not only from the aggressor but from the system, which is not working as it should be,” says the deputy for women’s rights of the Ombudsman’s Office, Eliana Revollar.
“FEAR” OF REPRISALS
“I’m afraid,” Manso confesses after the report was published, because “it’s effortless for us to be labeled as crazy and wanting the limelight. But I have two daughters, and I don’t want them to have an abusive boyfriend when they grow up and think that this is love.”
She is also “overwhelmed and impressed” because “many women have written to her, many of them foreigners, not only Spanish but also Colombians, Venezuelans, and Mexicans who have also been “papered by their ex-partners” in Peru.
One of them is Carolina Nogal, another Spaniard who went through a judicial ordeal after denouncing her husband for physical violence and separating from him after a violent episode.
The response was four complaints: fraud, child abduction, and physical and psychological violence, coupled with an attempt to cancel her legal residency to separate her from her daughter.
“An even crueler war had begun,” recalls Nogal, who kept a diary so as not to forget all the hearings, expert opinions, and statements that piled up, and sometimes even wrote the documents to the judge herself because she could not afford a lawyer.
VIOLENT AND CORRUPT SYSTEM
“You think you can find protection in the system, but the reality is very different,” says Nogal, who two years ago returned to Avila with her daughter and still has several of the 17 cases in which she was involved open in Lima.
When she asked for guarantees of protection, she says that the authorities told her that it would be “por las puras” (in vain), because “you are pretty and your husband will always be jealous of you.”
Another day, the person who took her statement intimidated her by saying that she would end up in jail and ended up suggesting that if she did not have money, they could “arrange it in another way”. This was one of several sexual propositions she received from court officials during her ordeal.
“I started to want to disappear from the world because it is no longer one aggressor; it is that there are lots of aggressors who take advantage of your situation of vulnerability to try to take advantage of you,” she denounced.
For Nogal, this “horrifying” situation occurs because “there is a psychopathic mind that does not want to stop having power over you and is helped by a system that sees it and does absolutely nothing. That profile that of someone with money and with the idea of hurting you is the ideal of corrupt lawyers,” she concludes.
Source: efe