Historic Sentence Against Pinochet Dictatorship Women’s Torture Center in Chile

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Beatriz Bataszew was terrified when she heard what was going on in the basement of Venda Sexy (Sexy Blindfold). Hours earlier, on September 12th, 1974, she had been arrested by National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) agents, the secret police of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, who transferred her to that clandestine center installed in a two-story house in a middle-class sector of the Macul commune in Santiago de Chile.

The origin of the name Venda Sexy is registered in the first Report of the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture – better known as the Valech Report. It was established that it was part of the jargon of DINA agents and was related to their preferred method of torture: sexual abuse, particularly of women, who were naked and blindfolded during their stay in the house.

According to Beatriz Bataszew, a forestry engineering student and militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), she spent five days in the basement of the house, naked, blindfolded, with no contact with the outside and subjected to several interrogations in which she was tortured, beaten, and sexually abused. The place was also known as the disco: a record player remained on full blast to conceal the horror.

What happened in Venda Sexy, Beatriz says, was completely out of what she and other left-wing militants imagined about repression in the midst of the harshest years of the dictatorship. One of the first warnings of what she would experience came when she heard the story of Marta Neira, of whom they would lose all trace and would thicken the list of the over 1,210 missing prisoners under the regime.

“She came back from the basement and reported desperately, disconcerted, that she had been raped by the dog. This was terrible for us who hadn’t had that experience yet, because when she told me I thought it would happen to me, and it did indeed”.

The rapes were perpetrated by DINA agents and particularly by a woman: Ingrid Olderock, of German descent, with Nazi-influenced ideals, who became known in the secret police through her dog Volodia, a German shepherd trained to commit the abuses.

“It wasn’t just sexual violence, it was sexual-political violence, which aimed to tame us, discipline us and particularly punish us because we were women who fought resolutely against the dictatorship,” says Beatriz Bataszew, recalling what she experienced almost half a century ago.

Her case is part of an unprecedented decision by a Chilean court that incorporated a gender perspective by convicting former DINA agents Raúl Iturriaga Neumann, Manuel Rivas, and Hugo Hernández to 15 years in prison as perpetrators of kidnapping and torture with sexual violence against Beatriz and five other women: Cristina Godoy, Laura Ramsay, Beatriz Bataszew, Sara de Witt, Alejandra Holzapfel, and Clivia Sotomayor; as well as four men who were victims of kidnapping and torture between 1974 and 1975, inside Venda Sexy.

The peculiarity of Judge Mario Carroza’s ruling lies in the fact that the abuses committed during interrogations were considered “a specific form of violence against women,” in line with international standards. “In the study of what happened in the clandestine detention facility, the agents did not limit themselves only to kidnapping men and women, with the purpose of locking them up and extracting information from them, under torture, which in the case of women, by its nature and gravity, had an impact on them that marked their future lives,” explains Carroza.

According to the judge, what the women experienced inside the house “were dehumanizing, degrading and abusive circumstances,” which should be perceived as a different criminal type that “made these circumstances clear”. With the prison sentences of the former agents, Carroza sentenced the State of Chile to pay a compensation of 80 million Chilean pesos (about US$105,000) for moral damages to each of the plaintiffs. The sentence is final.

For Beatriz Bataszew, the sentence “has an important significance, but it has limitations, among the main ones the fact that the political component of this violence is not considered. This means that those who committed the acts are judged, but not those who orchestrated this instrument of state terrorism. In other words, political authority is not prosecuted. “There is progress in the sense that the truth is being advanced, but we don’t consider that an act accomplished almost half a century later is justice. If justice is not timely, it isn’t justice,” she says.

For attorney Camila Maturana Kesten, of the Human Corporation, a feminist organization that offers legal support to victims of human rights violations, “it is of the utmost importance that the Chilean judiciary recognizes and stresses the particularity of repression exercised by state agents in Venda Sexy, pointing out that in addition to inflicting serious physical and psychological distress on kidnapped people, systematic and massive sexual violence was committed, particularly against women.”

Source: El País