by SUSAN SHAW
Five friends were watching the horror on the news from their homes on March 8. A shelter was going up in flames with girls inside. Stephany Arreaga picked up the phone and called her mom. “Are you seeing this?” she asked. “What can we do?”
“Let’s go down there,” Mayra Jimenez suggested. And so, Arreaga and Jimenez gathered their friends—Maria del Carmen Peña, Hane Herrera and Kimy De León—and went to help.
Until this moment, these women weren’t really activists: They were a graphic designer, a journalist, a sociologist, a dentist and a photographer making the nearly hour-long drive to Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción, just outside Guatemala City.
By the time they arrived, emergency workers were bringing out survivors and bodies.
The women started to help by meeting the families as they arrived and going with them to the hospital or to the morgue. “I knew, at that moment, that people were suffering and that I could be useful, somehow, for those families,” Jimenez told Ms. “But in relation to the girls, it was a tremendous feeling of pain and love; it was wanting to be with them in their final moments, even knowing that they were dying one by one.”
By the time it was all over, 41 girls were dead, and 15 were severely burned.
The girls were in shelter because they had been reported missing at some point—running away from abuse, kidnapped, trafficked. They were not criminals. They were there to be protected as the government sorted out a safe space for them to go. But at the shelter, they were mistreated. They were physically and sexually abused, medicated against their will, forced to undergo abortions and fed spoiled food. Some were even trafficked again.
Things weren’t much better at the boys shelter. The children tried to escape, but the national police were waiting. Rather than help these vulnerable children, Guatemala’s President Jimmy Morales and other government officials abdicated responsibility and turned them over to the police. The boys were locked in an auditorium; the girls in a small 22’-by-23’ room with a few mattresses but no blankets.
When the girls begged to be allowed to go to the bathroom, the police refused. They built a makeshift bathroom using the mattresses that had been left on the floor to create some small place of privacy. Quickly, however, the area overflowed, and the stench became unbearable. Again, the girls begged to be released. They refused the food the police brought because they suspected their food at the shelter had been drugged to make them compliant for abuse and trafficking.
Ms Magazine for more