help survivors of sexual violence in Argentina
My friend Gaurav is on a Fulbright grant in Argentina. Recently he wrote an email to some friends. I asked him if I could post it here. Gaurav writes:
So, many of you already know this, but here in Argentina for the last eleven months, I have been working with several groups that have organized around questions of sexual violence. Here in southern Argentina - where I am right now - there is a group that I admire very much, that you are going to learn a little bit about (assuming you continue to read this email). As forewarning, there is some explicit talk of sexual violence, which may upset some readers. At the end, I talk about money, which is what’s lacking for the legal avenues that this group is pursuing as one part of their tactics.
Cinco Saltos (five jumps or leaps - the effort it supposedly takes to cross the river here) is a small, conservative town that everyone around here refers to as “traditional.” Part of that tradition is a certain portion of the town that carry their last names with pride; their last names, and their families’ arrival here early in the history of colonial Argentina, garner for them a number of privileges and various kinds of access. They get good business deals; they are born with political connections; the police will turn the other way if something goes awry. If they are men, they also have access to the bodies of working-class women and children, at least within certain limits.
Right now, those limits are being tested by the case of Dr. Carlos Anzaldo. Until recently, Anzaldo was both a gynecologist (at a private clinic that he co-owns) and a biology teacher at Kennedy High School. Over the course of 20+ years, he raped and sexually abused dozens of girls from his biology class as well as women who arrived at his clinic for medical services. Right now, there are over 25 police complaints filed against him, all of which have been filed in the last ONE YEAR, and the pattern is apparent: his usual approach was to single out girls in his classes who were nice, quiet, shy, well-mannered, got good grades, came from poor families, etc. He would then suggest that they visit his clinic, inviting them to receive free examinations/visits due to his remarkable generosity. He would, of course, proceed to personally examine them, and in that privacy violate them.
This process continued unabated for over two decades until February of 2006, when Anzaldo repeated this pattern and raped a 17-year-old student of his, named Jorgelina, during her summer vacation. She did not say anything about it for nearly a month, until she was back in school and he did what also seems to be a pattern - talk about sex and sexual assault in her classroom in a way so as to condition his students to view sexual violence as acceptable. As she tells it, this pushed Jorgelina to a point that she approached someone she trusted, a former teacher at the same school, whose friends call her Nani. They went together to the school officials and the police, to report the rape. The school officials said they were sorry and did the same thing they had last time this happened - they offered her 100 pesos (33 US dollars) and said she could stop attending biology class and just take the final for full credit. Jorgelina and Nani chose against this option, and when the police refused to take action, they began talking to other people about what had happened.
Together with a local radical feminist group, they organized a small number of people to go to Anzaldo’s house early one evening for an “escrache.” This tactic, adopted from the human rights organizations of Argentina, involves confronting someone at their house with the heinous crimes they have commited in order to publicly calling them out. In this case, it involved spray-painting warnings down the street and on his house of there being a rapist nearby, standing on the street and announcing into a megaphone some of the things that he had done to various young women, and generally working toward an end-result of what is called “social death” - isolating someone who is clearly without conscience from their blindly supportive or unknowing/apathetic community.
This garnered some media attention, and two months after Jorgelina and Nani had gone to the police, the media finally covered the story, and the school finally put Anzaldo on leave. Since Jorgelina’s story began to be known, over two dozen more women have filed charges, and numerous others have approached Jorgelina, her teacher, or her family members in tears with their own stories - often times of being abused or assaulted by him, but at times also of abruptly leaving his office disgusted and/or terrified.
The group around Jorgelina and Nani grew to include other survivors of Anzaldo’s sexual assaults and abuses, fellow teachers at the school, and other politically committed women. These women, who named themselves the Group of Support to Victims of Rape and Abuse, have pursued various strategies throughout the last year, including marches, rallies, putting up posters, painting murals, more escraches, building alliances with other various groups (including the worker-run ceramics factory where i am staying near cinco saltos), and of course, the legal case. Though Jorgelina’s parents were from the beginning supportive, many of her friends, neighbors, teachers and fellow students initially called her a liar, along with many other things. Over the course of the last year, this has changed very much so, to the point where people who before called her terrible names now call Anzaldo a rapist or spit on him when they see him in the street. He has already spent four months in special low-security confinement, rife with special privileges including unlimited visits, unlimited cell phone access, outside food and so on. (In response, rather than futilely requesting common jail for him, the women drew attention to usually heinous prison conditions by demanding the same privileges for all prisoners.) He has been out of jail for several months now, and the trial will be complete by about mid-April.
The group’s lawyers have charged them lower-than-usual rates, but this is fundamentally a working-class movement, in part because - as mentioned above - Anzaldo specifically chooses girls from poor families to sexually assault, and in part because teachers salaries are nothing to write home about. After cashing in some of their savings paying their lawyers for the trial, these women are in debt 2000 pesos (about 660 US dollars) - not that much to most of us, but - as Nani said - a fortune for people like them, living from paycheck to paycheck on significantly lower monthly salaries.
Let me say, I hope none of you feel any pressure to donate money if you can’t or don’t want to. Working with a lot of working-class people here makes me realize that I have NO idea how most of my friends are doing financially, and so if you get this it’s because:
1) I thought, for various reasons, that you might be interested in what this group is doing here in Argentina (some of you as friends &/or fellow activists from the US living in Argentina) &
2) of course, it occurred to me that you might be interested in lending a hand financially.Feel free to pass this on to anybody else who might be interested in knowing about this group of women and/or donating to their work. Insofar as my opinion goes, if you do want to donate money, anything between one and one-hundred dollars would be appropriate. And just know, this is not a desperate, last-ditch plea for funds - these are teachers and students and unemployed women who are doing their own fund-raising here, and asked me to help in any way I thought effective. That includes this, as well as announcements next week at the above-mentioned worker-run factory.
If you would like to collaborate financially, email me at gaurav dot jashnani at gmail dot com and let me know by the wee hours of Wednesday night (March 7) at the latest. I will give them the amount corresponding to what people tell me to donate before I leave here. If you want some sort of proof of the donation, let me know when you email me, because otherwise I will just give them the whole sum together. The donation is not tax-deductible, because this is not an NGO or a non-profit, its just women organized to defend themselves.
If you know Spanish, you can also contact the group directly by emailing Florencia at flortate80@yahoo.com.ar.
xoxo
Gaurav
Please forward this to anyone you know who might be interested. This is the kind of cause where you know your money will be used effectively and won’t end up funding some nonprofit bureaucracy. Plus, they only need $660.
