image source, Prom sex
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Azul Rojas Marín will never forget February 25, 2008.
As she was walking home that day on a rural road in the Casa Grande district of Peru’s La Libertad region, she was accosted by a group of police officers, forced into a police vehicle and taken to a nearby police station, where she was ill-treated and tortured.
For Azul it was a nightmare and at the same time the beginning of a 17-year legal battle inside and outside Peru.
In 2020, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a ruling ordering the reopening of the Azul case, initially archived, and for the first time a state was accused of violating the rights and torture of a victim of the LGBTI community, a ruling recognized as “historic” by the Peruvian judiciary itself.
And in December of this year, Peru’s Third National Criminal Court finally sentenced three National Police officers to 17 years in prison for crimes of severe torture and sexual abuse.
A victory that, as he told BBC Mundo, he does not consider complete: “The verdict is not a concrete reparation because they remain free thanks to the negligence of the state, which had to request preventive detention before the trial.”
BBC Mundo contacted the National Penitentiary Institute of Peru (INPE) to confirm whether the three convicts are free, but did not receive an immediate response.
An ignored complaint
When the events occurred, Azul was a 27-year-old gay man who was dedicated to raising pigs on the family farm in the nearby municipality of Lache, one of the many rural towns in Peru.
He was walking back along a local road when a police vehicle cut him off.
“The police forcefully took me to the police station and there they did whatever they wanted with me.”
image source, Raúl Arboleda / Getty
According to her, the officers beat her while they made insults and derogatory comments about her sexual orientation and inserted a baton into her anus.
The agents demanded information about one of his brothers who was allegedly wanted for murder, precisely one of the “sexist brothers” who Azul says made life at home impossible since he was a teenager because he had a different sexual orientation.
“When I left the police station the next day, I was in shock. I went home and told my mother that they had beaten me, but I couldn’t tell her anything else,” he remembers.
After the initial shock, she went to the police with her mother and asked for an explanation. “Then my mother understood what had happened and became so angry that she wanted to attack the inspector.”
It was the first encounter with the wall of silence and institutional incomprehension that he had encountered in years.
According to the court’s ruling, “strong prejudices against the LGBTI population existed and continue to exist in Peruvian society.”
According to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics, 62.7% of non-heterosexual Peruvians said they had been victims of violence and discrimination, but only 4.4% reported it to authorities. Of those surveyed, 27.5% reported poor care, while 24.4% reported very poor care.
Azul experienced it firsthand.
“We tried to file a report, but the police refused,” says Azul.
“Poor rural people in Peru are ignored and justice never comes, and I was also someone from the LGBTI community,” concludes Azul.
But after reporting her case in local media, she gained the support of Promsex, a local NGO, which helped her reach international bodies.
Meanwhile, the path in Peru remained difficult.
“Despite all the evidence, they told me that my story was not credible. The prosecutor in the case even told me that they couldn’t believe me because I was homosexual and might have had relationships that caused the injuries” that showed up in the medical reports, he recalls.
In 2009, the public prosecutor’s office requested and obtained that the preparatory criminal investigation court of the city of Ascope order the case to be archived.
The disciplinary proceedings initiated against the three agents involved, Dino Horacio Ponce Pardo, Luis Miguel Quispe Cáceres and Juan Isaac León Mostacero, have also been archived.
A partial victory
It took years of legal disputes in international bodies before the Peruvian authorities were able to reopen the case.
It was only in 2018, when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recommended this, that the public prosecutor ordered the investigation to be reopened.
Two years later, the Inter-American Court issued a ruling that forced the Peruvian state to arrest and try those who had tortured Azul.
In November 2022, a public act of acknowledgment of responsibility took place at the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, during which the Peruvian state apologized for the handling of his case.
image source, Carlos Mandujano/Getty
And finally, the verdict that was handed down just a few weeks ago and convicted the three police officers.
But for Azul, even that sentence didn’t do it justice. “They have not paid for their crime because they are free thanks to the state’s inaction,” he says.
According to him, he has not received more than a small part of the stipulated economic reparation and has not been provided with the medical and psychological care that the Peruvian state is obliged to provide, according to the International Court of Justice.
And yet Azul knows that her court victory, while perhaps insufficient, represented progress for non-heterosexual people like her.
image source, Prom sex
“On this side, I am happy because things are changing little by little. I know that there are universities where human rights are studied through condemnation. The change will come through education,” he said.
At the age of 44, he decided to look forward and study law thanks to a scholarship. Completing his studies is a thorn in his side after he had to drop out in his youth due to lack of money.
And he decided to live without resentment:
“Because of what happened, I carried a very heavy backpack for many years. But I decided to leave this backpack because you cannot live happily or peacefully with hate.”
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