Shelter of tears
Rape, abuse and death of girls come to light after Guatemala home goes up in smoke.
GUATEMALA CITY: When firefighters entered the home for troubled youth, they discovered more than two dozen girls on the floor of a locked room, most of them dead.
A moan rose from one of the bodies, piled on top of each other. When firefighter Danial Perpuac turned the girl over, flames came out of her mouth – she was burning up inside.
“That is something you cannot forget,” Perpuac said helplessly.
“I know I will have the smell of grilled meat and hair in my nose and throat for life.”
The fire on March 8 that killed 40 girls at the Virgen de la Asuncion Safe Home started when ringleaders took a match to a foam mattress to protest the abuse they had suffered there.
Their hell at the government-run shelter began long before the inferno, as documented in several warnings from four different agencies.
At least two orders for closure were ignored.
The Virgen de la Asuncion home is on a hill 22km east of Guatemala City. The shelter, protected by high walls and barbed wire, is surrounded by an idyllic pine forest covered with mist every morning.
The forest and ravines have offered hiding places for more than 100 children who have escaped what they consider a jail.
About 700 children lived in a home with a maximum capacity for 500.The majority had committed no crime. They were youths sent there by the courts for various reasons – they had run away from home, they were left in the streets, they were abused, they were young migrants.
Most came from families so poor they could not afford the US$50 (RMM221) in lawyers’ fees to get their children out.
The abuse at Virgen de la Asuncion was no secret, and the courts had intervened before.
Teacher Edgar Rolando Diguez Ispache has been in prison since 2013 and is on trial for alleged rape.
Another employee, mason Jos Roberto Arias Prez, has been in prison since 2014 for raping a mentally disabled girl. He was sentenced to eight years’ jail.
Several reports criticising the shelter were put out by the country’s attorney-general and the National Adoption System in 2015 and 2016.
One recommended the gradual closure of the facility, and another its immediate closure.
Despite the complaints and the reports, the abuse continued.
On Dec 12, the Sixth Court of Children and Adolescents of the Metropolitan Area condemned the state of Guatemala for violations committed against the rights of minors guarded in the home.
It also gave 48 hours to clarify the legal situation of a number of minors inside the home. Nothing happened.
The secretary of social welfare, Carlos Rodas, who was responsible for the home, appealed the judicial decision. Rodas, who has since been arrested, has denied negligence and refused to resign. He blamed the girls’ mutiny on them not liking the food, and said they had sharp weapons hidden in their hair.
On March 7, about 60 girls escaped from the shelter, as some had done on several occasions before.
They rebelled because shelter staff had tried to beat them, said a 14-year-old survivor who had been there three months.
The girls also were made to wake up at 3am to bathe in cold water, she said.
So the girls jumped from the roof of the facility to the wall, and from there into the trees.
Riot police caught them and returned them to the shelter by force. The escapees were eventually locked in a classroom as punishment.
By 7.30 the next morning, they had been held for about six hours.
Four girls who were ringleaders at the home had managed to get matches to smoke cigarettes during their brief escape.
In an attempt to protest the lockup and force somebody to open the doors, they set fire to a mattress propped against a window.
The burning mattress fell onto other mattresses, and the flames quickly spread.
Locked into the room, the girls shouted, “Help me! Help me!” the 14-year-old said.
Nobody did.
For many, it was too late. By 9am, 19 of the girls were dead, burned and asphyxiated. Twenty-one more between the ages of 13 and 17 would die at local hospitals over the next few days. — AP