In Ecuador What Do Families Burn in Hopes That Their Faults Will Disappear?
A Locked Door, a Burn and 41 Girls Killed equally Police Stood By
GUATEMALA CITY — As fire swept through the classroom, the pleas from the 56 girls locked inside began to fade.
Well-nigh were unconscious or worse by then, as an eerie silence replaced their panic-stricken shouts.
The police force officers guarding the door — who had refused to unlock it despite the screams — waited nine minutes before stepping inside. They got water to cool down the scorching knob.
Inside, dozens of girls placed in the care of the Guatemalan land lay sprawled on the blackened floor. 40-one of them died.
It was ane of the deadliest tragedies in Guatemala since the end of its civil state of war decades ago, and it happened inside a group dwelling for at-take chances youth who had been put there by the government, supposedly for their own protection.
Now, nearly ii years afterward, the trials against public officials accused of declining to forestall the deaths have all begun.
But a review of more than two dozen case files of victims and survivors — along with interviews of family unit members, group home employees and public officials — reveals a pattern of physical, psychological and sexual abuse allegations at the facility stretching dorsum for years.
Half-dozen children had previously died in the regime-run abode from 2012 through 2015, mostly from preventable health-related complications, officials said. The authorities are too looking into 25 episodes of abuse reported in the year before the fire.
Across that, several girls had told their relatives well before the tragedy that they were forced to have sex with older strangers, co-ordinate to interviews with members of three different families.
"When I went to see her a month earlier the fire, she begged me to get her out of at that place; she said they were pain her," said Estelita de Jesus Chutan Urrias, a sister of one of the girls who died in the blaze. "She told me they were taking a few of the girls out at midnight, bathing them and dressing them and forcing them to sleep with strangers."
The deaths are a reflection of the brutal passage to adulthood for many immature girls in Republic of guatemala, a journey ofttimes marked by poverty, violence and desperation. The nation has 1 of the highest child pregnancy rates, and the homicide rate for women is among the worst in the globe.
"To be a girl in Guatemala is a risk, it's been this way for generations," said Marwin Bautista, an under secretary in the Ministry of Social Welfare who oversees the group homes. "This was a failure in the institution. And to be honest, it didn't merely happen. It was the terrible result of years of fail and problems."
The disaster began with an escape effort. Nearly 100 of the children in the state-run group home, known as Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción, had decided to flee en masse.
But officials rounded them upwardly and locked them within the facility — the boys in an aplenty auditorium, the girls in a small classroom meant for only a few people.
Afterward hours of incarceration — in which the girls were not allowed to employ the bathroom — someone lit a lucifer, thinking a burn might forcefulness the police force to let them out.
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Instead, almost of the girls died as more than a dozen police officers argued over whether their supervisor, continuing 10 feet abroad, should unlock the door with the keys hanging from her belt.
In that time, fire tore through the cheap polystyrene mattresses that the teenage girls had been given to sleep on, searing their flesh and muting their cries with noxious fume.
The girls, who had cleaved no laws and posed no threat to society, were victims even earlier the fire. As survivors of sexual abuse, violence or abandonment — often at the hands of their own families — the government had assigned them to the institution for their own safe. In theory, the earth outside posed the greatest threat to them.
"These are girls who had been driveling, sometimes raped, by members of their ain family," said Norma Cruz, the director of Survivors, a group representing the families of nearly two dozen victims. "These girls were placed there for their protection."
The Escape
Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción was created for children with nowhere else to go. Opened in 2010, it housed boys and girls from infancy to 17 in a gated facility on the edges of the capital, Guatemala Metropolis.
Escape had long been a theme of the dwelling house. Between September and Nov of 2016 alone, more than 90 children ran away, according to prosecutors who have charged more than a dozen officials in connectedness with the fire.
Local journalists had recounted harrowing reports of abuse within the dwelling house as far back as 2013 — rotten food, filthy bedsheets that caused skin diseases, violent orderlies.
Then, in Feb 2017, another batch of children began planning their own escape.
It began on Valentine's Day, when the children were allowed to mingle. Scores of boys and girls agreed on a mean solar day to flee, only discussion of the plot began to leak. Around lunchtime on March 7, two girls faked a fight in the cafeteria, cartoon the orderlies into the fracas.
The others ran.
Nearly 100 in all, they scaled the walls of the outer building and jumped into a ravine, a few injuring themselves in the fall. They scattered across a creek, taking off in different directions.
By 2:30 p.m., the authorities had caught them and brought them dorsum to the home, where they were kept outside in the cold for hours as officials debated what to practice.
Under protocol, the authorities had to wait for a magistrate to arrive and decide how to proceed, officials said. But the magistrate never showed, despite receiving numerous calls enervating her presence. Her trial began this week.
Around midnight, the officials decided to lock upwardly the children until the judge arrived. The girls, 56 of them, were crammed into a room of less than 500 foursquare feet and given 23 polystyrene mattresses to share. One girl had fractured her pelvis in the escape attempt. Another was pregnant, though neither she nor the administrators knew it at the fourth dimension.
Xv female constabulary officers were put in charge, given the keys to the locked classroom and instructed to allow no one out, officials said.
At 6 a.m., notwithstanding cold and wet, the girls began to complain. They needed to use the bathroom. Without recourse, they stood upward ii mattresses to create a makeshift latrine.
Hours passed. Then one girl, fed up, lit a lucifer, hoping to forcefulness the police into opening the door.
The officer-in-charge afterward told prosecutors that she risked her life to save the children. But phone records obtained by investigators show that she was busy dialing numbers from her phone, and witnesses say she dismissed the urgency to her subordinates.
"'They escaped in one case today,'" she said, according to testimony from v witnesses. "'Let them escape again if they're and then tough.'"
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Worlds of Pain
The boys and girls at the facility were long accustomed to the cruelty of the streets, and for many it followed them into the group home.
The allegations include employees physically and sexually abusing children, gross overcrowding and filthy conditions. The homo rights division of the attorney general'southward office is investigating 25 reports of abuse betwixt 2016 and 2017, co-ordinate to Claudia Maselli, the head of the part.
But for prosecutors, those investigations have taken a dorsum seat to the burn down, the deadly culmination of many of these problems.
Almost all of the girls had faced a deep, pervasive poverty that fabricated even the nuts of life a struggle. Many were runaways, fleeing their upbringings for a variety of reasons, including physical and sexual abuse past relatives.
Even as a child, Indira was preyed upon — sexually abused by her begetter, who is now in prison, and badly neglected by her mother, according to lawyers representing the families.
When she was 16, afterward several attempts to run away from domicile, a judge determined she would be safer in a group habitation.
Instead, she died there, from fume inhalation, stretched out beside girls who shared stories like her own.
The burn also claimed two sisters, 12 and 14. Like the others, they were born in destitution, sharing a ramshackle single-room abode with their parents and two more siblings.
They were constant companions, ane tranquility, the other extroverted and playful. Simply schoolhouse was an uphill boxing for both, dwelling house was inappreciably any better, and the two began to run away. Violence was a standard part of their lives, particularly when their families found them, the lawyers said.
A long series of court interventions followed and a judge eventually placed them in the group home — where they died together.
Fifteen girls managed to survive the burn, simply many at present live with deep physical and emotional scars layered on top of the ones they already had.
One girl has burns over 95 percent of her body. The fire stripped her face up of eyelids, lips and her nose. She hardly goes outside anymore to avoid the stares and teasing from other children.
For some, there is hope, particularly in contrast to what they have endured. Ane fourteen-year-former was pregnant when the fire ripped through the classroom, though she didn't know it at the time.
She survived the blaze, and her child was born months later. Prosecutors overseeing the case have become an unofficial family to the child. A few even attended the birth, donning scrubs for the delivery.
"We booked her in a private clinic to handle the complications and got her emergency surgery," said Edgar Gomez, the prosecutor handling the case. "We all adopted this infant."
Today, the immature mother, at present xvi, is back in state custody, forth with her newborn daughter.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/world/americas/guatemala-shelter-fire-trial.html
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