Rape as a Weapon of Gang Warfare

Gangsters wield sexual violence in the hybrid wars of Latin America

When Paola was 21, she and her husband went to her mother’s home on the outskirts of San Salvador to celebrate the first birthday of her son, a trip she wished she never made. The problem was that she lived in the Campanera slum controlled by the Barrio 18 gang but her mother lived in another part of the Soyapango area run by the rival Mara Salvatrucha. Under the twisted gang rules, she was to be punished.

Family members were hitting the piñata when MS-13 thugs stormed into the house and held her husband at gunpoint. Amid the commotion, several of them grabbed Paola. They dragged her into another house and the aunt of one of them took her baby. Four of the gang bangers bound her hands with tape and took it in turns to rape her for an hour.

“They said if I didn’t do what they told me to they would kill my whole family,” Paola says, weeping hard. When I ask the reason for the attack, she says simply, “Because we came from a rival neighborhood.”

I was introduced to Paola (I’ve changed her name) on a trip to El Salvador in 2021, by a psychologist from Doctors Without Borders and the gang rape happened seven years earlier. Listening back to a tape of the interview, I clench up hearing her sobs and feeling her pure pain again. Rape is a psychological weapon that leaves wounds for life.

Since then, the gang situation in El Salvador has changed radically with a crackdown by President Nayib Bukele; violence like the attack on Paola shows why Bukele’s offensive is so popular. But this horrific rape points to a bigger issue of sexual violence by the organized crime mobs that ravage Latin America.

Criminal groups across the continent, whether gangs, posses or cartels, employ rape and other sexual violence as a weapon. A gang take-over in Haiti is an extreme example with women “at risk of being ambushed and collectively raped by armed gang members in broad daylight, while on their way to work or to school,” according to a United Nations report. But there are similar problems in many parts of the continent where well-armed gangsters operate. In Mexico, there are increasing rapes by cartel operatives of migrant women heading to the United States.

The attacks come amid a broader problem of violence against women in the region, especially the terrible wave of femicides in Mexico, which has rightly received a lot of coverage and provoked a lot of outrage. But I want to focus here more specifically on how mobs use sexual violence as a distinct tactic, which hasn’t been well covered. I join others in understanding the gangster violence in Latin America as going beyond crime to become a form of hybrid warfare. And within this, rape is a weapon of this hybrid war, as it is in regular wars.

It’s a thorny issue. While gangsters are often boastful about how they commit murders they are less talkative about how they commit rape. Mexico especially has a robust feminist movement that vigorously protests the repugnant attacks on women. But there is a more sensitive question of how we treat violence against females differently from violence against males. And the use of rape as a weapon reflects a deeper understanding of sex and about how it can be used as a way to dominate a conquered population.

As Patricia Sánchez-Espinosa, a journalist in Colima, the state with the worst level of murders of women in Mexico, tells me: “There is a saying that everything is about sex. Except sex. Which is about power.”

Psychological War

A horror of rape is that it can have such a long-lasting psychological impact. Right after the incident when Paola was finally released by her attackers, she ran into her mother’s home and hid in the bathroom. “I didn’t want to speak, or tell them anything,” she says.

She held that silence for years and attempted suicide. On one occasion, she cut her wrists and her husband found her bleeding. On another, she swallowed pills. “I didn’t want to think about what happened. I wanted everything to stop”

She only felt able to talk about it when the gang member who led the rape was himself murdered. She didn’t go back and see her mother for five years after the incident. Eventually all four who took part in the attack were killed. “Maybe I am selfish or bad saying this, but I am happy they are not here,” she says.

One of the most painful things for Paola was finally telling her husband about what happened. “He felt impotent that he could do nothing to stop it,” she says.

The husband’s feelings may seem of little concern compared to the victim. But this is part of what motivates the gangsters, to humiliate the husband and show they have the power.

Gangsters will also rape the girlfriends of rivals to get at them. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán had a lover in the Puente Grande prison called Zulema Hernández who he wrote impassioned letters to. Members of the Zetas mob eventually found her, raped and killed her and left the letter “Z” carved over her corpse.

In the Mexican cartel war, gangsters boast about their capacity for homicide. I have conducted various interviews with hit men and they will talk confidently about their serial murders. But it is rare that any of them discuss carrying out rape.

However, there are terrifying accounts of cartels unleashing sexual violence on a big scale. In Michoacán in 2013, the doctor José Mireles revealed that he was treating dozens of pregnancies of teenage girls who had been kidnapped and raped by members of the Knights Templar cartel.

In this interview, he describes one victim who was just eleven years old. This mass rape was his key motivation, he says, for taking up arms against the cartel and joining a vigilante squad or autodefensa. “Enough, I said. Are there not men in this town who will defend their girls, their women?” (His language reflects his outlook from rural Michoacán).

In another case, Reuters investigated the rape of female migrants heading through Mexico to the United States in 2023. Reporters found an increase of documented sexual attacks and spoke to a Venezuelan victim who was raped in a broken-down bus in the city of Reynosa. Like many victims, she was already being held by the cartel to get a ransom payment from her family. “Rape is part of the torture process to get the money,” the sociologist Bertha Bermúdez Tapia told Reuters.

Haiti could be the worst case of all. The U.N. Human Rights Office described in a report in March how gangs, which have taken over much of the country, use rape on a terrifying scale. Gang members kill men and rape their wives in their homes, it said in the report, and also use rape to get ransoms. “Gangs continued to use sexual violence to spread fear, subjugate and punish the population,” it said.

This violence is part of a general breakdown of order that the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights described as “cataclysmic.” In June, Kenya led a multi-national force to try and restore security.

Why Do They Do It?

Sexual violence has been weaponized in war since ancient times. As Greek historian Herodotus writes: “Some women were raped successively by so many Persian soldiers that they died.” When the Soviet army invaded Nazi Germany in World War II, there are estimates of troops raping over a million women.

However, human rights groups began documenting it more extensively following the rape of Bosnian women during the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. These rights groups tend to argue that sexual gratification is not a primary cause. I personally think that sexual desire might be more of a factor than it’s comfortable to admit. But I certainly agree there are other forces as well.

One motive is to show power and humiliate the enemy. If you are able to carry out rape you are the one in charge. Another is to spread terror in a territory you are occupying. Scared people are more subservient. Another is to coerce people to do what you want, whether to pay a ransom or stay away from a barrio.

All of these factors can be seen in both regular wars and in the hybrid “crime wars” of Latin America. Mobs claim territory, albeit in a different way from regular armies, and spread fear in the subjects they want to control.

Researchers also make the point that rape is a way to implant the genes of a conquering ethnic group onto a conquered one. Pointing to the Yugoslavian war, a Doctors Without Borders report said: “In Bosnia systematic rape was used as part of the strategy of ethnic cleansing…Women were raped so they could give birth to a Serbian baby.”

This may not seem relevant to the crime wars. Yet the idea of one group imposing its genes on another could be rooted in older tribal instincts. And gangs can replicate aspects of “band society” in other ways.

A Broader Dehumanization of Women

Male gangsters can also rape men. Rape in prisons, especially American prisons which have less conjugal visits, are an infamous example. And there are female drug traffickers and female sicarios. Yet the overwhelming cases of gangster rape on the street (at least the ones we know about) are of male perpetrators attacking women.

Feminist writers point to how sexual violence is linked to the broader dehumanization of women in Latin America. Nikola Vargova, a lawyer in Colima - the worst Mexican state for murders of women - describes to me how there was a long tradition of kidnapping brides.

“Here in Colima, the raptos, or abducting women, is part of the culture. The woman has always been an object. She was not human.”

Femicides are classified as murders of women that are done specifically because of the victim’s gender and lead to harsher punishments. A problem in Mexico though is that a pre-investigation to define whether a killing was a femicide can slow the whole case down. Prosecutors are often keen to classify murders of women as not being femicides as it is bad publicity for their state. Perhaps by fudging numbers, Colima is now number two for femicides in Mexico while it still the top place for murders of women. To get around this, some activists argue that all murders of women should be classified as femicides.

An issue that comes up is that a female murder victim can be linked to the drug trade. There are many women and some teenage girls in Colima who sell meth and marijuana in bars and get caught up in the cartel war. There are also victims who are girlfriends of narcos.

The journalist Patricia Sánchez points out, however, that targeting a woman because she is the lover of a rival is definitely a femicide. Gangsters will also rape some female drug dealers they are targeting before they kill them.

The broader femicides in Mexico include many that are nothing do to with gangs and cartels. Many victims are women attacked by jealous boyfriends. Maybe the worst serial killer known as the Cannibal of Atizapán had worked as a butcher and picked up victims at bars.

In some ways, the high number of femicides in Mexico is just a reflection of the sky-high murder rate overall. It must also be noted, however, that many more men are murdered than women; over the last three decades, about 90 percent of murder victims in Mexico are male.

This ratio is not actually a constant across the world and in some countries with low homicide rates, such as Japan, more than 50 percent of murder victims are female. Either way, most murderers across the world are male. At a global level, it is about 95 percent according to a United Nations study.

This gets into a broader debate about how we see men and women in a post-feminist world and whether we view them as the same or different but equal. The reality is that most of us view attacks on men and women differently as we probably should.

It also gets back into how we understand sex. We see a gang rape such as that inflicted on Paola as horrific as most of us view intercourse deep down as more than just a biological act. It took something from her humanity, which was why it drove her to suicide.

Paola’s fought to get over it for years, talking to psychologists and her family. When I listen back to her account and her tears I don’t just feel pity. I feel admiration for how she fights a genuine struggle to overcome it and really can claim to be not just a victim of an atrocity, but a survivor.

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Top photo, Ioan Grillo

Copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOutMedia 2024