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“It happened so many times, I lost count,” Sara Guenter, who said she was assaulted repeatedly in her home, as were her two daughters, told Vice, which produced the 2013 documentary The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia. The girls woke up with dirt in their sheets and feeling pain “down there,” she recalled. (Vice notes that the names of abuse and rape victims were changed at their request.)
Ashamed and assuming this was just occurring in their house, they didn’t tell anyone at first. But once Guenter confided in her sisters, it wasn’t a secret for long.
“No one believed her,” former neighbor Peter Fehr told Vice. “We thought she was making it up to hide an affair.”
But Guenter’s story coming out also meant that more women in Manitoba Colony were speaking up about their own experiences of waking up in pain, with blood, dirt and fingerprints on their bodies, rope fibers still clinging to wrists and ankles. Some had vague memories of crying out before losing consciousness.
