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escargot1 Joined: 24 Aug 2001 Total posts: 17896 Location: Farkham Hall Age: 4 Gender: Female |
 Posted: 24-11-2009 17:13 Post subject: |
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Was going to post this a while ago under 'Weird Sex', but found it just too depressing and baffling -
Mennonite father dies in Bolivia after being hung for nine hours
| Quote: | A Mennonite father of nine has died after being hung from a pole for nine hours by 22 of his brethren who accused him of rape, abuse and violating their religious rules, police said.
There have been no arrests for the death of Franz Wieler Kloss, 37, but police said community members thought he was a participant in a two-year mass rape case that was uncovered this summer.
"The Mennonites punished Kloss according to their customs and that punishment killed him," said Cololnel Miguel Gonzales, special crime unit director.
The murder comes three months after Bolivian prosecutors charged eight men from several Mennonite farming villages with raping dozens of women at the settlement. Prosecutors say more than 60 women, from 11 to 47 years old, have accused the men of rape. The men were suspected of using some form of aerosol spray to drug the women.
Kloss had been locked in a cage as punishment several times for a variety of alleged sins including mistreating his wife and children, drinking alcohol, and slacking off on his farm work, according to Bolivia's El Deber newspaper.
His final punishment came almost two weeks ago, when his accusers tied him onto a pole and left him there for nine hours. When he was taken down he couldn't move his arms. He was taken to a hospital a few days later and placed on a respirator, but he died yesterday, police said.
Bolivia's insular Mennonite community lives traditionally, shunning modern conveniences such as electricity as they farm soybeans, corn and other crops. They use wagons, not cars, for transportation and sew their own clothes.
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The aerosol drug spray sounds just too UL-like, somehow.  |
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| Anglocelt Grey Joined: 18 Nov 2009 Total posts: 9 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 11-12-2009 12:30 Post subject: |
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I've been to Mennonite communities in the north of Mexico, where two distinct types have emerged; the more progressive who dress more individually and married outside the community, and those who didn't. They all drove pickup trucks though, and they were all pretty rich and had big houses. Where I was they ran their own hospice/care home, owned farms, furniture stores, restaurants, and tyre remould centres in the town, and had a museum. They're regarded as one of the three nationalities in Chihuahua state; the Mexicans, the indigenous Taramuhara people, and Las Mennonitas.
Their religion is essentially Baptist, but the traditional Mennonites I met conducted their church services in High German, the English equivalent of which would be a bit like listening to a church service where everything was in Shakespearian 'thees and thous'.
I think it's interesting that some ideologies that were so forward-thinking and really broke the mould in their day, become hyper-traditionalist; in some ways almost the opposite of what they started out as.
As for the issue of the crimes mentioned in this thread, I'm absolutely sure there are crimes among Mennonites such as rape and manipulation just as much as there are in the 'outside' world. I have no idea if cases are statistically higher or lower, though; it's sometimes hard to tell when the media gets sensational about sex crimes when they're committed by priests or minority communities, but ignores hundreds of similar crimes when there isn't an interesting enough spin on it for them. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17933 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 28-08-2011 14:08 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Bolivian Mennonites jailed for serial rapes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-14688458
The convicted men were part of a 2,000-strong Mennonite community
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A court in Bolivia has sentenced seven members of a reclusive conservative Christian group to 25 years in prison for raping more than 100 women.
The men, members of a Mennonite group, secretly sedated their victims before the sex attacks.
The victims' lawyer said the 2000-strong Mennonite community where the rapes happened welcomed the sentence.
The group follows a strict moral code and rejects modern inventions such as cars and electricity.
An eighth man was sentenced to 12-and-a-half years for supplying the sedative used to drug the women.
The rapes happened in the Mennonite community of Manitoba, 150km (93 miles) north-east of the city of Santa Cruz.
Shocking crimes
The court heard that the men sprayed a substance derived from the belladonna plant normally used to anaesthetise cows through bedroom windows at night, sedating entire families.
They then raped the women and girls. The youngest victim was nine years old.
Continue reading the main story
Mennonites
Mennonite Churches descend from Protestant communities in Europe
There are said to be some 1.5 million Mennonites worldwide
Mennonites follow the teachings of Menno Simons, a 16th Century religious leader from what is now the Netherlands
Recent figures suggest there are 15,400 Mennonites in Bolivia
The exact number of those raped is not clear. Some women had no recollection of being raped, while others feared being ostracised in the deeply conservative community, lawyer Oswaldo Rivera said.
Mr Rivera said almost 150 had taken part in the trial, but he feared there could be another 150 too ashamed to give evidence.
He said some feared they would not be able to find a husband if it was known they had been raped, as women are expected to abstain from sex until marriage.
Prosecutor Freddy Perez said colony elders suspected something was wrong when they wondered why one man was getting up so late in the mornings, and they decided to shadow him.
He was then spotted jumping through a window into one of the victim's houses.
The BBC's Mattia Cabitza in Santa Cruz said it proved difficult to gather evidence from the victims because of the community's isolation and patriarchal structure.
The convicted men were also accused of threatening the fathers of some of the victims not to speak out.
Irreversible damage
Many of the victims speak only low German, the language of the Mennonite founding fathers, and have never learned Spanish.
There are some 30-40,000 Mennonites in Paraguay and Bolivia.
While many of them are indistinguishable from their neighbours and have religious beliefs very similar to mainline Protestant and Evangelical groups, others reject modern life and live in isolated communities.
Manitoba Colony, where the rapes happened, is an ultra-conservative community, with no paved roads or electricity.
Its members move around by horse-drawn buggy and dress in traditional Mennonite dress.
Mr Rivera welcomed the sentences but said he feared some of the women had suffered irreversible damage.
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| AsamiYamazaki I was Dora Suarez
Great Old One Joined: 09 Sep 2004 Total posts: 466 Location: In the aeroplane over the sea Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-08-2011 18:44 Post subject: |
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We have lots of Mennonites in Ontario. Generally, I believe Mennonites are less extreme than Amish. The ones in Ontario have their horses and buggies, wear bonnets and braces, and work the land or make furniture and seem fairly happy. We've got a few farmers' markets where they turn up and it's obvious they have a handy balance between archaism and being modern enough to make hard cash.
However, a lot of the Latin/South American Mennonites are pretty extreme. A woman I work with has a brother who moved into a Mennonite community and adopted a couple of Mennonite children from Columbia (I think). Apparently the kids have a huge amount of problems, both being mentally challenged plus they grew up in an environment with a lot of sexual and physical abuse. The brother totally underestimated the extent of the problem, thinking that all Mennonites were good people, only to find he had two very damaged children on his hands. Very sad. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17933 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 16-09-2012 21:43 Post subject: |
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An article about Mennonites in Bolivia. Images at link.
| Quote: | Mennonites: Connected to the Land, Not the Web
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/09/technology-free-mennonite-community-purposely-lives-off-the-grid/?pid=3645
BY JAKOB SCHILLER 09.14.12 6:30 AM
Conservative Mennonite communities around the world have lived as simply as possible for centuries. They don’t drive cars and refuse to use electricity.
In eastern Bolivia, where photographer Jordi Ruiz Cirera recently spent time with the Mennonites who’ve settled there, families still use gas lights and travel by horse and buggy. They’re not used to the conveniences of the modern world and are still unfamiliar with most modern technologies, including cameras.
That unfamiliarity is present in many of Cirera’s photos, including one of a young girl that is now a finalist for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize awarded by the National Portrait Gallery in London.
“It’s obvious that she doesn’t know how to represent herself to the photographer,” he says. “I think the photo gives you a real glimpse of what life is like in this community. It shows you how far away they are from everyone else.”
While Cirera’s work is not nearly as extensive as Larry Towell’s famous Mennonite project, the photos have a similar feel and provide an updated look inside an isolated community.
Professor Royden Loewen, the chair of the Mennonite Studies program at the University of Winnipeg, says many Mennonites do without the conveniences of modern life because they’re trying to adhere to a strict code of simplicity that is based on original biblical teachings.
As a Protestant Christian group, Mennonites “often talk about following Christ’s example rather than having faith in Christ,” Loewen says. “Mennonites are known for taking Christ’s teachings literally.”
Because the Bible talks about Christ as a pacifist, Mennonites believe in pacifism. In the name of simplicity many are farmers. But just like any religious group, Loewen says there are varying levels of devotion. He says about two-thirds of the Mennonites in Bolivia are more conservative and adhere strictly to the no technology rule. But the other third, which he says are often referred to as “car-driving Mennonites,” use most modern technology freely.
Around the world he says there are many different ways that Mennonite communities interpret the rules.
Cirera says most of the people he stayed with were more conservative. They chose to be farmers and raised corn and soybeans that were then fed to cattle that they sold in the Bolivian markets. People in communities, or “colonies” as they are referred to, do have contact with regular Bolivians, he says, but it’s mostly the men who travel to sell the cattle or buy supplies. The women and children are more isolated.
Loewen says there are currently about 70,000 Mennonites in Bolivia, 99 percent of whom originally came from Canada in the 1920s. They fled that country, he says, because at the time Canada was trying to force Mennonite children, who speak Low German, to attend English-language Canadian schools against their will.
Many of those Mennonites originally moved to Mexico, but then migrated to Bolivia in the late 1960s when the areas in Mexico where they lived became too modern.
When it came to being photographed, Cirera says each person made their own interpretation about where photography fit into their beliefs on simplicity. Some were okay with having their portraits taken. Others said they couldn’t pose but were okay with candid pictures. Others refused to have their picture taken all together.
The one thing that was on his side, Cirera says, is that without electricity the people he stayed with were forced to rely on natural light. Their dining room tables were almost always in front of a window, he says, creating the perfect studio for impromptu portraits.
“The consistency was amazing,” he says.
All Photos: Jordi Ruiz Cirera |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17933 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 07-08-2013 00:24 Post subject: |
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Full text at link.
| Quote: | THE GHOST RAPES OF BOLIVIA
http://www.vice.com/read/the-ghost-rapes-of-bolivia-000300-v20n8
THE PERPETRATORS WERE CAUGHT, BUT THE CRIMES CONTINUE
By Jean Friedman-Rudovsky
All photos by Noah Friedman-Rudovsky. Noah Friedman-Rudovsky also contributed reporting to this article.
F or a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There was no other explanation. No way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night. No way of explaining how another went to sleep clothed, only to wake up naked and covered by dirty fingerprints all over her body. No way to understand how another could dream of a man forcing himself onto her in a field—and then wake up the next morning with grass in her hair.
For Sara Guenter, the mystery was the rope. She would sometimes wake up in her bed with small pieces of it tied tightly to her wrists or ankles, the skin beneath an aching blue. Earlier this year, I visited Sara at her home, simple concrete painted to look like brick, in Manitoba Colony, Bolivia. Mennonites are similar to the Amish in their rejection of modernity and technology, and Manitoba Colony, like all ultraconservative Mennonite communities, is a collective attempt to retreat as far as possible from the nonbelieving world. A slight breeze of soy and sorghum came off the nearby fields as Sara told me how, in addition to the eerie rope, on those mornings after she’d been raped she would also wake to stained sheets, thunderous headaches, and paralyzing lethargy.
Her two daughters, 17 and 18 years old, squatted silently along a wall behind her and shot me fierce blue-eyed stares. The evil had penetrated the household, Sara said. Five years ago, her daughters also began waking up with dirty sheets and complaints of pain “down below.”
The family tried locking the door; some nights, Sara did everything she could to keep herself awake. On a few occasions, a loyal Bolivian worker from the neighboring city of Santa Cruz would stay the night to stand guard. But inevitably, when their one-story home—set back and isolated from the dirt road—was not being watched, the rapes continued. (Manitobans aren’t connected to the power grid, so at night the community is submerged in total darkness.) “It happened so many times, I lost count,” Sara said in her native Low German, the only language she speaks, like most women in the community.
Mennonite children attend school in Manitoba Colony, Bolivia.
In the beginning, the family had no idea that they weren’t the only ones being attacked, and so they kept it to themselves. Then Sara started telling her sisters. When rumors spread, “no one believed her,” said Peter Fehr, Sara’s neighbor at the time of the incidents. “We thought she was making it up to hide an affair.” The family’s pleas for help to the council of church ministers, the group of men who govern the 2,500-member colony, were fruitless—even as the tales multiplied. Throughout the community, people were waking to the same telltale morning signs: ripped pajamas, blood and semen on the bed, head-thumping stupor. Some women remembered brief moments of terror: for an instant they would wake to a man or men on top of them but couldn’t summon the strength to yell or fight back. Then, fade to black.
Some called it “wild female imagination.” Others said it was a plague from God. “We only knew that something strange was happening in the night,” Abraham Wall Enns, Manitoba Colony’s civic leader at the time, said. “But we didn’t know who was doing it, so how could we stop it?”
No one knew what to do, and so no one did anything at all. After a while, Sara just accepted those nights as a horrific fact of life. On the following mornings, her family would rise despite the head pain, strip the beds, and get on with their days.
Then, one night in June 2009, two men were caught trying to enter a neighbor’s home. The two ratted out a few friends and, falling like a house of cards, a group of nine Manitoba men, ages 19 to 43, eventually confessed that they had been raping Colony families since 2005. To incapacitate their victims and any possible witnesses, the men used a spray created by a veterinarian from a neighboring Mennonite community that he had adapted from a chemical used to anesthetize cows. According to their initial confessions (which they later recanted), the rapists admitted to—sometimes in groups, sometimes alone—hiding outside bedroom windows at night, spraying the substance through the screens to drug entire families, and then crawling inside.
But it wasn’t until their trial, which took place almost two years later, in 2011, that the full scope of their crimes came to light. The transcripts read like a horror movie script: Victims ranged in age from three to 65 (the youngest had a broken hymen, purportedly from finger penetration). The girls and women were married, single, residents, visitors, the mentally infirm. Though it’s never discussed and was not part of the legal case, residents privately told me that men and boys were raped, too.
In August 2011, the veterinarian who’d supplied the anesthetic spray was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and the rapists were each sentenced to 25 years (five years shy of Bolivia’s maximum penalty). Officially, there were 130 victims—at least one person from more than half of all Manitoba Colony households. But not all those raped were included in the legal case, and it’s believed the true number of victims is much, much higher.
Mennonite children playing soccer in Manitoba, Colony, Bolivia.
In the wake of the crimes, women were not offered therapy or counseling. There was little attempt to dig deeper into the incidents beyond the confessions. And in the years since the men were nabbed, there has never been a colony-wide discussion about the events. Rather, a code of silence descended following the guilty verdict.
“That’s all behind us now,” Civic Leader Wall told me on my recent trip there. “We’d rather forget than have it be at the forefront of our minds.” Aside from interactions with the occasional visiting journalist, no one talks about it anymore.
But over the course of a nine-month investigation, including an 11-day stay in Manitoba, I discovered that the crimes are far from over. In addition to lingering psychological trauma, there’s evidence of widespread and ongoing sexual abuse, including rampant molestation and incest. There’s also evidence that—despite the fact that the initial perpetrators are in jail—the rapes by drugging continue to happen.
The demons, it turns out, are still out there. |
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| Kondoru Unfeathered Biped Joined: 05 Dec 2003 Total posts: 5788 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 18-08-2013 19:12 Post subject: |
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| Ok, just how easy is it to drug someone by spraying stuff though a window? |
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| Mythopoeika Boring petty conservative
Joined: 18 Sep 2001 Total posts: 9109 Location: Not far from Bedford Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 18-08-2013 19:40 Post subject: |
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| Kondoru wrote: | | Ok, just how easy is it to drug someone by spraying stuff though a window? |
Not that easy, I'd guess. Depends what is being used. |
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| kamalktk Great Old One Joined: 05 Feb 2011 Total posts: 705 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 18-08-2013 19:41 Post subject: |
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| Kondoru wrote: | | Ok, just how easy is it to drug someone by spraying stuff though a window? |
Can we ask the Mad Gasser of Mattoon? |
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