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criminal center personally tortured them through beatings with a stick on
their testicles, the leg, and feet. Also, the alleged victims were fed in a dirty
plastic bucket used to feed the kitchen dogs;
“The general imprisonment conditions applied to the survivors constituted torture
because they were an dishonor for the prisoners’ human dignity”
m)
“the general imprisonment conditions applied to the survivors and
described in detail in each of the statements presented before the InterAmerican Court and recorded in the document List of Victims constituted
torture because it was a regimen intentionally inflicted on them;”
“Gender violence in the present case”
n)
the female inmates were seriously injured during the massacre and
were dragged over dead bodies, without being allowed to receive help from
other people;
o)
the violence was also directed against the mothers, sisters, and wives
of the alleged victims that went to visit their next of kin, submitting them to
psychological tortures for having had to witness the massacre, as well as to
physical and verbal attacks by the authorities of the operative. During those
attacks they were thrown water and tear gas bombs, they were shot at and
beaten. Several of the women were pregnant or were accompanied by
children. The mothers also received death threats if they did not leave the
place where “the operative” was taking place;”
p)
it is meaningful that the State carried out the military operation on a
female visitng day to the prison, even more so, “the attack was carried out
[…] the week of Mother’s Day.” The State’s violence “had been planned in
such a way that the exemplary punishment of the female and male political
prisoners […] be witnessed by their own mothers and sisters.” On Mother’s
Day, the prisoners’ mothers would be picking up bodies at the morgue or
visiting hospitals to find out if their loved ones had survived. Similarly,
“several prisoners that were mothers would always […] remember the
connection between [Mother’s Day] and their extreme suffering in each
killing.” The Castro Castro massacre was carried out so that “each Mother’s
Day, [the] women would relive the suffering caused,” as well as to influence
in “mothers or wives deny[ing] there children the possibility to join [the
senderista lines];
q)
“[t]here is no torture that does not take the victim’s gender into
account. There is no […] ‘neutral’ torture […]. Even when a form of torture is
not ‘specific’ for women[, …] its effects will have specific results on women.”
Due to the aforementioned, “even though not all forms of violence in this case
were specific for women, […] it constitue[d] a gender violence since it was
directed […] to attacking female identity;”
r)
“the type of insults directed to [the women], the way in which they
were beaten, and the prison regimen that denied them access to artifacts of
feminine care, gynecological attention, [and] maternity rights, along with the
offering of a ‘prize’ system to those who ‘abandoned’ their freedom of thought
in exchange for ‘returning them’ their femininity giving them access to