The Winnipeg Sun article, “10 years of rapes?” quotes “Hans Warner, an assistant professor of history at the University of Winnipeg and an expert in Mennonite history” as saying “people are just shocked” and that “he has never heard of anything like this occurring in a Mennonite community before,” and also quotes “Rick Fast, director of communications with the Mennonite Central Committee Canada in Winnipeg” saying that “he has not heard much more about the incident than what has been reported in the media and declined to comment on it.”
But, according to this article, Hans Schroeder, who is the director of MCC’s Low German program in Bolivia, visited the colony and talked with some of the victims, families and community leaders, shortly after the arrests and allegations. MCC offered counseling support for rape survivors, but the offer was declined.
According to this article in the (Mennonite Brethren) MB Herald from Feb. 2008, the knowledge of sexual crimes against women and children in these Bolivian Mennonite colonies is not a “shock” to Mennonites in Canada. They have been aware for years that Mennonite children were being sexually abused there and that this “is the tip of the iceberg on abuse,” but Canadian Mennonites “have turned a blind eye to issues of abuse” when it involves their own Anabaptist children.
That is why “any such information is controversial among Mennonites in Canada, since Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) has been working in the colonies for years, establishing relationships with elders” – the same Mennonite elders in Bolivia who have been ignoring the sexual crimes being committed against their own children “including generational sexual abuse” – crimes (of incest) that have nothing to do with allegedly being drugged and raped while they slept, by roving gangs equipped with cans of sleep inducing aerosol spray and viagra, and then waking up naked in their beds.
What are the Mennonites in Canada and their fellow Mennonites in Bolivia covering up, considering their years of knowledge of these sexual crimes being committed against their fellow Anabaptist children, by claiming now that they are “just shocked”?
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Mennonite man killed by brethren
Mennonite man dies after brethren tie him to a pole for 9 hours
By CARLOS VALDEZ (AP) – 10 hours ago
LA PAZ, Bolivia — 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 Col. 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 Wednesday, 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 work of the devil’: crime in a remote religious community
A colony of Mennonites in the lowlands of Bolivia has been traumatised by allegations of drugging, rape and child abuse
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Andres Schipani
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The Guardian, Thursday 10 September 2009
Mennonite women and girls in the lowlands of east Bolivia. Photograph: Bojan Brecelj/Corbis
The road to Manitoba is dusty and the four-hour drive terribly hot. But at its end, there is a scene from a fairy tale. Shiny milk tanks line the entrance to farmhouses set amid impeccably manicured lawns. Laughing children pass on a horse-drawn carriage along a well-kept road without cars or lorries. Behind a gaggle of geese run a clutch of little blond girls wearing big straw hats with dark bows and flowery dresses.
But something has poisoned this apparent idyll. A little further on, three blue-eyed men sit by the roadside, all in the classical Mennonite outfit of dark overalls and baseball caps. One is Carlos Knodel. In the quiet sunshine, he tells me his family’s scarcely believable story: Knodel’s 57-year-old mother, his 29-year-old sister Ángelita, who has learning difficulties, his wife, his two teenage female cousins, his aunt and his pregnant sister-in-law have all been raped. Not – it’s said – by outsiders, but by young men from within this devoutly religious 2,000-strong community. With breathtaking understatement, he tells me: “This has changed us. This has changed us for ever.” The other two nod in agreement.
Here, in the lowlands of eastern Bolivia, a remote religious colony has been turned upside down. Investigators dealing with the case have arrested eight men and are questioning them about dozens of alleged rapes, but are now speculating that the number of victims could reach 300.
The eight men – all Mennonite, seven from Manitoba and one from a nearby community – have been charged with child abuse and rape. Their alleged victims range from five-year-old girls to women as old as 65.
The Mennonites are a Protestant group that fled religious persecution in 19th-century Europe to create isolated communities in America and elsewhere. Estimates suggest there are some 1.5 million worldwide. They follow the teachings of Menno Simons, a 16th-century radical Dutch Protestant reformist leader. Most are second- or third-generation Dutch; they reject wealth and power and to a certain extent the trappings of modern life. When North America modernised too much for their taste, some fled south to the less developed but fertile lands of Central and South America. Many went to Mexico in the early 1920s, where they were granted religious freedoms. But when they were stripped of some of those privileges in the late 30s and early 40s, some went even further south, to Bolivia’s eastern lowlands and neighbouring Paraguay.
Since then, they have carved settlements out of the jungle. Now, about 50,000 of them live there in farming communities. Families tend to be large, often with six to 12 children. The most orthodox Mennonite colonies eschew all forms of modernity, from rubber tyres to electricity.
Mennonites traditionally handle crime and punishment themselves. But not this time. “This was way too big to deal with,” says Johann Klassen, a community elder. “That is why we handed these people to the Bolivian authorities. We don’t want them back.”
Klassen knew the suspects. “I thought I knew them quite well,” he says. “But I remember they were not hard workers.” He adds: “There was always talk about those things happening here; there was a woman who said so, but no one believed her.”
Some of the elders, including Klassen, became suspicious after they noticed that one of the men was getting up particularly late in the morning – Mennonites are devoted workers who start the day at sunrise – and followed him. They caught him about to break into a house. He then named seven other men. They were all locked up in a warehouse for a couple of days; there were suggestions that cells should be built, to keep them locked up for 15 years. Eventually the community’s council of elders decided to hand them to the police.
Uncertainties abound. There is speculation that the alleged rapists used a narcotic spray to drug their victims and members of their families. “I remember smelling the spray,” recalls Knodel. “It smelled terrible. It used to give me a horrible headache, make me vomit, feel dizzy. It was very hard to wake up in the mornings.” His sister Ángelita is standing barefoot next to him beneath the porch, looking concerned. “I cannot remember a thing,” she says in a faltering voice. Her mother thinks that she herself was raped several times but can only remember pain and seeing torchlight one night. Her family are still waiting for the results of forensic tests.
When the women and girls woke up in pain, or naked, some wives blamed their husbands. Some said it was the work of the devil. The same story is repeated at farm after farm. Two miles from the Knodels’ property is the isolated farm of their cousins, the Neufeldts. They believe the rapists broke in several times, attacking the mother Isabel and her daughters, Inés and Sancha. “I’ve felt presences over and over again,” says Isabel. “One night I felt something on my leg, but I couldn’t wake up. I just managed to open one eye but fell asleep instantly again. A couple of mornings I woke up with my body aching, and really, really tired.”
‘I felt a lot of pain for days’
Speaking in Plattdeutsch or Low German – an old dialect that mixes German and Dutch – 15-year-old Inés says: “I woke up a couple of times with my nightclothes upside-down. I felt a lot of pain for a couple of days.” According to the Bolivian forensic scientists working on the case, she had been raped three times. “And now . . . I don’t know . . .” Her voice fades away.
Mennonite religious orthodoxy is emphatic that women must be virgins at marriage. This is an added worry for the victims. “I hope that when they turn 18 or 20, they will get married, because it was not their fault,” says Peter, Inés’s father. “I hope they won’t have problems in finding a husband. But I don’t know. This is the first time something like this has happened. The ministers are still deciding what to do.”
Wherever they have settled, Mennonites have tended to lead quiet, dedicated, religiously inspired lives. They are known for their espousal of non-violence. Nevertheless, these events have started to change things. “If I had found this man raping my wife, I don’t really know what I would have been capable of doing,” says Knodel. “That is something not to be forgiven. The Bible says everything can be forgiven, but I don’t think it is easy to forgive such a thing.”
This view echoes around the community. A man named Juan tells me that he was gripped with rage after his wife was a victim of rape during her pregnancy. “After, my wife gave birth to a premature child that fitted in the palm of my hand,” he says. “I am not sure if he will survive or if he will have life-lasting consequences. She is traumatised. This is too painful, too painful.”
The alleged attacker is the woman’s brother, Martin Wieler, a ginger-haired, long-faced man, who is accused of raping his pregnant sister twice: the first time he threatened to kill her if she told her husband; the second time she was deeply asleep.
Wieler is now in custody in the town of Cotoca, about 20 miles from Bolivia’s richest city, Santa Cruz. He greets me from behind the bars, with an unnerving half-smile. He is being held, together with the other seven suspects, in a single white cell that looks more like the sleeping quarters in a refugee camp: rubber flip-flops, dirty sheets and towels, plastic Coca-Cola bottles filled with water and sliced lemons, and cigarette butts litter the floor. The eight men are lying on thin mats on the ground. They are expressionless.
“We have done nothing and we have nothing to say,” one says. He is Abraham Wieler, an untrained veterinarian who is also being prosecuted for “forming a criminal gang” and supplying its members with Viagra pills and other drugs.
It is alleged that the gang raped women for about two years, some of them in neighbouring Mennonite communities. “But those colonies are more orthodox than Manitoba,” says Freddy Perez, the Santa Cruz prosecutor. “It will be hard to make them talk to us. The women there are afraid of being pushed away by the community and their own husbands.
Perez says the trial is expected to start early next year; he hopes the men will serve at least 15 years behind bars, with no prospect of bail. “I feel I need to make every possible effort as the Mennonites are very concerned about these people being left free. This is the first time they have come to us. They’ve been very cooperative.”
Despite the arrests, no one in Manitoba feels secure. Bars are being put on windows and locks on doors; this in a village where houses were traditionally left wide open. The tranquillity of this community has been replaced with paranoia. “There are more, there are still rapists around,” Felipe, Knodel’s brother, tells me. “We are living in fear now. This used to be a very peaceful community and people are scared, they cannot sleep in peace.”
Sleeping in basements for safety
As I leave the community, I stop by Manitoba’s small, red-brick church and peek through the window. Four women, of different ages, are praying together in silence. Two wear black headscarves, showing that they are married. The two others wear white scarves, meaning that they are single. Were these women victims; and if so, what will their futures hold?
Back on the road, Klassen is feeding the pigs on his farm. Wiping his forehead with a spotless white handkerchief, he says: “We are still worried. We are sure this is not the end. We think there are more. We feel we cannot trust anybody any longer. This is not over.”
A few weeks later, Klassen’s fears are confirmed when another man, Peter Kennel, is arrested. He had allegedly travelled to a neighbouring community with the intention of raping his sister-in-law. In his confession, Kennel said he began raping four years ago. “I raped about 23 women . . . I cannot say why, but after the first time it became a habit and I used to do it twice a week.”
The prosecutor tells me that he has the names of at least three other men thought to be involved in the attacks.
Some of the families in Manitoba have apparently started sleeping in their basements for safety. “The Bible says that in the last days we will see such things,” Abraham Waal, one of the town’s elders, reportedly told prosecutors. “The devil must be very happy with all this.”
Some names have been changed
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Mennonite Community “shocked” over ‘rapes’ in Bolivia
The Winnipeg Sun article, “10 years of rapes?” quotes “Hans Warner, an assistant professor of history at the University of Winnipeg and an expert in Mennonite history” as saying “people are just shocked” and that “he has never heard of anything like this occurring in a Mennonite community before,” and also quotes “Rick Fast, director of communications with the Mennonite Central Committee Canada in Winnipeg” saying that “he has not heard much more about the incident than what has been reported in the media and declined to comment on it.”
But, according to this article, Hans Schroeder, who is the director of MCC’s Low German program in Bolivia, visited the colony and talked with some of the victims, families and community leaders, shortly after the arrests and allegations. MCC offered counseling support for rape survivors, but the offer was declined.
According to this article in the (Mennonite Brethren) MB Herald from Feb. 2008, the knowledge of sexual crimes against women and children in these Bolivian Mennonite colonies is not a “shock” to Mennonites in Canada. They have been aware for years that Mennonite children were being sexually abused there and that this “is the tip of the iceberg on abuse,” but Canadian Mennonites “have turned a blind eye to issues of abuse” when it involves their own Anabaptist children.
That is why “any such information is controversial among Mennonites in Canada, since Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) has been working in the colonies for years, establishing relationships with elders” – the same Mennonite elders in Bolivia who have been ignoring the sexual crimes being committed against their own children “including generational sexual abuse” – crimes (of incest) that have nothing to do with allegedly being drugged and raped while they slept, by roving gangs equipped with cans of sleep inducing aerosol spray and viagra, and then waking up naked in their beds.
What are the Mennonites in Canada and their fellow Mennonites in Bolivia covering up, considering their years of knowledge of these sexual crimes being committed against their fellow Anabaptist children, by claiming now that they are “just shocked”?
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Winnipeg Sun
10 years of rapes?
Women, girls in Bolivian Mennonite community with Manitoba ties allegedly attacked by 8 men
By PAUL TURENNE, SUN MEDIA
A South American Mennonite community with historical ties to Manitoba was the scene last week of allegations of a shocking mass rape.
Eight men from the small farming community of Manitoba, Bolivia — named after the Keystone Province, where the residents’ ancestors came from — were arrested last Monday and charged with drugging and raping at least 60 women and girls as young as 11 years old.
The men, aged 18 to 41, are accused of sneaking into homes, drugging the women using an aerosol spray and sexually assaulting them. The news agency Reuters reported earlier this week that a Bolivian federal prosecutor said the rapes may have been occurring for the past 10 years.
“People are just shocked,” said Hans Werner, an assistant professor of history at the University of Winnipeg and an expert in Mennonite history.
Werner said he stays in professional contact with members of the more conservative Mennonite community and that they are among those who were shocked to get the news.
Werner said he has never heard of anything like this occurring in a Mennonite community before.
The Bolivian community of Manitoba is a farming town of about 2,000 located in the country’s southeastern plains.
Werner said conservative Mennonites here in Manitoba were being pressured by the provincial government on education and other issues during the First World War and one group left the country and set off to establish the community of Manitoba, Mexico, in the mid-1920s.
SPLINTER GROUP
A splinter group from that community — again the more conservative among them — set off from there a few decades later and established their own Manitoba in Bolivia.
Werner said there is some modern-day movement between the Mennonite communities here in Manitoba and in Bolivia, but given that there are nearly 60 Mennonite settlements in the South American country, he was unsure whether anyone from Manitoba, Bolivia, has any recent close ties to this province, or vice versa.
Rick Fast, director of communications with the Mennonite Central Committee Canada in Winnipeg, said he has not heard much more about the incident than what has been reported in the media and declined to comment on it.
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LATIN AMERICAN
HERALD TRIBUNE
Bolivia Jails Mennonites Accused of Rapes
LA PAZ – Eight members of a Mennonite community in the eastern Bolivian province of Santa Cruz were jailed pending trial on charges of raping some 100 women after knocking them out with drugs, prosecutor Freddy Perez told Efe.
Seven of the jailed Mennonites, ranging in age from 18 to 41, are accused of being the actual rapists.
The eighth person is a veterinarian who allegedly sold the rapists sleeping pills, condoms and even Viagra, the prosecutor said.
Defense attorney Jose Gutierrez told Efe that his clients deny the charges against them and lamented the fact that the prosecutor “has badly handled judicial procedure” by implementing an inquisitorial process, adding that “he implicated them without there being clear proof that they are guilty.”
“We do not deny that the crime of rape occurred, but it was never proven that it was my clients,” Gutierrez said.
The lawyer also criticized the judge in the case who, he said, “being a woman must have been guided by her hormonal processes and ordered my clients arrested.”
Gutierrez said he will appeal the judge’s decision to deny bail to his clients.
Three other people are also accused of the serial rapes, but they are currently fugitives.
The prosecutor said that authorities still do not know exactly how many women were sexually attacked, but the indications point to the estimate that at least 100 Mennonites of the Manitoba community were raped, among them “many” between the ages of 10 and 18.
The rapists entered the victims’ homes at night through the windows and doors, and then somehow managed to render them unconscious. Then, they sexually abused the women and girls while they were knocked out.
“They entered into many homes and many victims were raped repeatedly. They turned up in their bed, at the side of their husband. They were raped naked and at times (the women) fought with the husband because they thought that he was the one who had done that to them,” said Perez.
Located about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Santa Cruz city, the Manitoba settlement comprises descendants of Mennonites who emigrated to Bolivia from Canada.
In Bolivia, the Mennonite communities are located mainly in the eastern provinces of Santa Cruz and Beni. EFE
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BBC NEWS
Bolivian Mennonite women ‘raped’
Seven members of Bolivia’s Mennonite Christian community have been detained over the alleged rape of 60 women or girls from their own community.
Alleged victims in the Manitoba colony, which is in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands, include girls as young as 14, a prosecutor said.
The allegations emerged after the suspicious behaviour of one of the men alerted community elders.
All of those accused deny the allegations against them.
Some 30-40,000 Mennonites live as farmers in Paraguay and Bolivia.
While many Mennonites, particularly in North America, 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.
‘Jumping into windows’
Six of the men came from the same colony, Manitoba, in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia.
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 Members of the community told us… they didn’t move about late at night but these youths did and were spotted jumping into the windows of houses  Freddy Perez
Prosecutor |
The men have been charged with child abuse and rape, and forming a criminal gang.
They are now in custody in a prison in the town of Cotoca, in the Santa Cruz region.
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, said prosecutor Freddy Perez.
They then handed the case over to the police.
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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
Sources: Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia, Mennonite World Conference
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One suspect, who is from another Mennonite colony, is accused of complicity and of selling viagra to the men and narcotic sprays allegedly used on victims while they slept.
Denying the charges against him, the suspect said he was a veterinary surgeon and used the drugs in his work.
Mr Perez told the Associated Press: “Members of the community told us that for religious reasons, and because they didn’t have electric lighting, they didn’t move about late at night but these youths did and were spotted jumping into the windows of houses.”
Forensic doctors and psychologists have been sent into the Manitoba community to examine the victims, the prosecutor said.
Many in this very conservative and closed world have been traumatised, Mr Perez added.
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A man, whose name was not given, told Bolivia’s Unitel TV that his wife had been sexually assaulted when she was six and a half months pregnant.
“I spent US $1,500 to have a baby that was born weighing one kilogram,” he said. “It is very painful.”
Some of the younger girls fear they will now be unable to find husbands.
The criminal investigation into the case is expected to last six months.
