[Witness spoke in Spanish, interpreted as follows:]
It's important to mention that women human rights defenders do suffer the aggressions that other human rights defenders suffer, but we also suffer from sexual violence and sexual harassment. We're threatened with sexual violence. For example, the message I received was that they were going to kill me, but before that they were going to rape me, and before that they were going to rape my daughter in front of me. It's permanent psychological torture that we must endure. There's also the contact with my children. Even though I'm not in the country and I can't be with them, I need that relationship with them. That is their right. I have the right to be in contact with them.
I am also accused of being a witch. My male counterparts are not. It's because we have a link or a connection with Mother Earth. A situation took place in my community, and as a result of that and other situations that took place, I was accused of being a witch. These pejorative, negative accusations have created a stigma against me. As a woman, I have been stigmatized differently. I have been stigmatized as a witch, as a prostitute, as someone who is crazy, as a stupid Indian—none of which they call my male counterparts.
They say that if I continue to express myself publicly and to act publicly, and if I don't just focus on working at home on domestic work, they will take me to a public judgment where they will hit me. This is the threat I have received in my community. They also generate a lot of racism, which my male counterparts don't receive, about the way we dress. They call me the pejorative “Indian”—in Spanish, it's a pejorative way of saying indigenous—and they say I'm controlled by external organizations. They don't believe in the collective wisdom that women have.
The other thing is that they use me even now, outside the country, as an image to encourage attacks against other women defenders. They have been told that if they continue to fight for women's rights, that if they continue to fight against violence against women, then the same thing that happened to me will happen to them. Their husbands are told to control them. They're told to control women and to keep us at home. They're told that men have to be the powerful ones, and that they have to keep us in line by being violent and keeping us at home.
Those are the examples I can think of now.
Thank you very much.