Menno Moto

by Cameron Dueck

  Palmasola was not Stony Mountain. Here there were no bars or cells and very few guards. The prisoners were dressed in normal street clothes. It looked like a poor and overcrowded urban ghetto of about 4,000 people. Palmasola had a well-structured real estate market where prisoners paid for their own cells, or “apartments,” as they called them. Apartments became available when a prisoner was released, the guards skimmed a transaction fee, and everyone made a bit of money except for the poor. If prisoners couldn’t pay for a bed they ended up sleeping in an alleyway on the fringes of the prison. It reminded me of the Hong Kong property market.

  Eric guided me through the streets to look for the Mennonites. Pedestrian streets wriggled between ramshackle buildings painted in a riot of blue, pink, and green. Laundry and tangled electric cables reached across the alleys under a hot clear sky. Small shops sold drinks and cigarettes. The smell of fried food filled the air. Men hung out of second-storey windows, smoking and calling to friends below. Women and children milled about in a dizzying, colourful rush, all of it drenched in noonday sun. Swarthy men slapped each other on the back and shared choreographed handshakes and fist bumps. I felt conspicuously white and square. I wished I hadn’t shaved that morning. Or worn my clean jeans.

  We rounded a corner to find a group of Old Colony Mennonites gathered in the shade of a tree. They were even more glaringly out of place in this ghetto than I imagined I appeared. The women wore long dark dresses and black kerchiefs despite the heat while the men were in their clean going-to-town schlaub’betjse and white cowboy hats. They stood in a tight circle, backs to the chaos around them. I recognized one of the men from the newspaper photos and introduced myself. But how do you greet a man like this? Hello, I saw your face in a newspaper clipping that described how you raped a bunch of your neighbours, how do you do? No, that didn’t work.

  “I see you have some visitors. Your family?” I asked him in Plautdietsch.

  He nodded. His guests remained quiet, watching me. I tried to make small talk but met only stares and murmured replies.

  “Where are the rest of the Mennonites, the ones that live here?” I asked him.

  He pointed down the street at a restaurant. A handful of Mennonite men were sitting around a table on the veranda. One of them raised his arm and waved at me.

  Tall, trim, and about fifty years of age, Peter Wiebe appeared both older and more confident than the rest of the men. I had seen newspaper pictures of him, and I could see he had lost weight during the three and a half years he had already served in prison. With wire-frame glasses and a neat yellow shirt, he looked like a casual businessman. He was their leader in prison, just as he was accused of being their leader on the colony. Peter was a self-trained veterinarian, and he was accused of manufacturing the magic spray that was so powerful that an angry bull would fall asleep like a baby with one squirt to the face. The spray that had earned him a twelve-and-a-half-year prison sentence.

  Peter shook my hand and welcomed me to prison. The other men offered muted hellos and then fell silent, staring into their empty coffee mugs as Peter took control.

  “Have you had lunch?” Peter asked.

  I hadn’t, and realized I was hungry. There were only dirty plates on the table. Peter stood up and shouted an order through a doorway, and within seconds a short, pudgy Mennonite with a blank face that glistened with sweat came and set a plate of rice and meat gravy before me. I thanked him in Plautdietsch and he replied with a confused look and a low grunt.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Jacob Wall. He’s the one that’s not quite there,” Peter said, tapping the side of his head with a forefinger. “He didn’t do well in school and then got into some trouble on the colony. He’s the one they grabbed first, the one that gave them all our names when they threatened him.”

  In June 2009, Jacob was caught on a property at night and he could not give an explanation for why he was there. After some rough interrogation and threats of lynching he agreed to everything that was put before him. Yes, he had raped women in their sleep. When presented with names of possible co-conspirators he agreed: yes to him, him, and him.

  A band of vigilantes formed, led by some of the wealthiest, most powerful men on the colony, and began rounding up the named suspects. Within a few days ten men from Manitoba Colony and neighbouring colonies were arrested and locked up in sheds, wellhouses, and pig crates.

  “Weren’t you mad at him for getting you into this mess?”

  “It’s not his fault. Everyone knows that he isn’t smart enough to have thought this whole thing up. They used him because they knew they could get him to say anything they wanted.”

  Conversation drifted to prison life, about those who had visited, those who would come soon, and the quality of the food. All I could think of were the rapes. I wasn’t sure how I expected the men to act, but now that I was sitting next to them, I was taken aback by how relaxed they were. Their initial shyness towards me was no different than if I’d arrived, a stranger, on their colony. We were having a regular old Mennonite spezeare, catching up on the latest gossip. I knew the case against them was in doubt, but still, I expected them to look more remorseful. While they might be in jail on trumped-up charges and forced confessions, David said several of them had been accused of incest previously, making it harder to believe their claims of innocence.

  They certainly acted as if they felt no need to prove their innocence. If they were innocent, I wanted to know what unlucky series of events had landed them there. If they were guilty, I wanted to know how men who chose to live nineteenth-century lifestyles in the name of spirituality could stoop to such wretched lows. I wanted them to say it out loud.

  “So, this whole story that brought you here. I’d like to hear more about it,” I said nervously.

  To my surprise they were eager to tell me their version, leaning into the center of the table as Peter took the lead.

  “Everyone knows that most of these men were just easy targets, the easy ones to blame,” Peter said, pointing at the men around the table, who nodded in agreement. Most of them were underdogs on the colony. They were all short on money and influence. Peter, with his important work and his twelve children and eleven grandchildren, had more respectability to his name than the rest combined.

  Abram Peters was in his early twenties and the youngest in the group. He had sandy blond hair and his eyes flickered towards the floor whenever I looked in his direction.

  “Why did they come after you if you didn’t do anything?” I asked. I was surprised at the hard, accusing edge to my words. I resented Abram’s sullen, pimply face, even though I’d just met him.

  “I mean, if you’re innocent, they must have had something else against you,” I added.

  “I was targeted because I was making trouble,” Abram said. “I was unpopular and poor. I was falling behind in school, and I even ran away once. They accused me of leading a bad, sinful life.”

  A bad, sinful life. That could mean everything or nothing. Maybe he was caught drinking beer or kissing a girl. Maybe he was caught with a mobile phone or a bicycle. Maybe he’d played sports, up plietch. That could have been me, a bored young man. I’d snuck cases of beer into the house when my parents weren’t home, tried to lure neighbourhood girls into the night for some grabby-grabby, grown my hair too long, strutted with an attitude I couldn’t back up. But I wasn’t a rapist. Was he? Regardless of his guilt, he said the vigilantes had locked him in a hot, airless shipping container, choked him until he passed out, then hooked a 220-volt electric fencer to the chains binding his body and given him a shock that made him confess to everything they accused him of.

  Jacob Wiebe, Peter’s veterinarian assistant, was dark haired with sideburns and a blue striped T-shirt that was one size too small. He was accused of having peddled the spray to the other men, but he’d long been a thorn in the side of powerful landowners.

  “Th
e rich farmers on the colony would buy two pieces of land, one big and one small. They’d pay the tax on the small piece and then pay bribes, so they didn’t have to pay tax on the big piece,” Jacob said. His spoke in a high-pitched, plaintive tone that made me feel sorry for him and distrust him at the same time. “I said something about it, and they didn’t like that. Now I have to be quiet. I’m in jail, so who will believe me?”

  The spray had become an easy explanation for all the inexplicable aspects of the case. They had used the spray to sedate entire households in the dead of the night before they crept through windows and raped the women and young girls. Why didn’t the farmyard dogs bark when the rapists approached the house? Because they were sprayed with the magic spray. How could a girl sleep through a rape and wake up confused about whether she was raped or not? The magic spray had wiped her memory clean. Why did the men of the house or the teenage boys sleeping in the next room not hear anything? Because the spray was so powerful that with one squirt through a window screen the entire household was knocked out cold.

  “They say that if you sprayed it in the air dogs would fall asleep within fifty metres,” Jacob said to guffaws from around the table. “At first, when we came into the prison, the other inmates teased us and said they wanted magic spray too, it would make it easier for them to rob people.”

  At one point in the investigation a group of Mennonite vigilantes had come to Peter’s farm to search for the spray. They seized several bottles from the house. Peter said one was perfume, and another was Maxman, a spray-on remedy for premature ejaculation bought in Santa Cruz on one of his Saturday shopping trips. I didn’t ask him if that spray had worked as advertised.

  “They held the bottles up and said, ‘Aha, we found the spray!’ Of course, it wasn’t true, and my daughter grabbed one of them out of their hands and before they could stop her she sprayed herself right in the face with it. And, of course, nothing happened.”

  Magic spray, suspicious shadows, and a handful of misfits and whistleblowers. One girl claimed to have seen a man outside her window at night. She said the man’s eyes glittered in the darkness, and her testimony became evidence that he had had evil intentions.

  The accused were handed over to Bolivian police, battered and bruised, along with the confessions collected by their neighbours-turned-vigilantes. At first, they were kept in the nearby Cotoca county jail, where security was light. One man, who confessed he had raped his own daughters but denied attacking women in other homes, escaped to Paraguay. In 2011 the case went to court and, after a two-month trial—a single trial for all the men—Peter was sentenced to twelve years in prison while the others got twenty-five years each.

  The men fell silent, looked at their hands, picked at their nails, or fidgeted with the cups on the table. There was a cocky, defiant quality to them that I found both irksome and reassuring. As outlandish as the accusations sounded, as weak as the facts against them were, I also struggled to believe their version. Would Mennonites really create such a story, fabricate such lies and accusations, and ruin so many lives, to cover their own dirty deeds? And could they have convinced the courts, even ones as corrupt as Bolivia’s, to play along? Clearly the men weren’t beaten, not by a long shot. They didn’t look guilty. They didn’t sound ashamed. Or were they that callous?

  “Do you want to see the prison?” Jacob asked. “I can give you a tour.”

  He led me to a back corner of the prison wall where half a dozen filthy inmates rooted through heaps of smouldering rubbish. The stench crawled up my nostrils and made me breathe in shallow gasps. Gibbering, wobbling lunatics in blackened rags stared at us as we passed. One man had his hand down the front of his trousers, unabashedly tugging at his penis as we watched. He gave me a rotten-toothed smile when our eyes met. A few small children, nearly naked and streaked with grime, played games among the detritus, their shouts competing with the deafening cacophony of the prison. This was the bottom of the prison ladder, the last station for those rejected even by their fellow criminals, those too poor and shunned to claim even a spot on the floor.

  “We shouldn’t spend much time here,” Jacob said. He led me around a puddle of black water and quickened his pace. “It’s very sad, these guys. They’re all on drugs, so you don’t know what they’ll do. I don’t like to come here.”

  Jacob and the others were doomed to life behind bars for the next quarter century, but their Mennonite sense of otherness remained undiminished. They did not join the other inmates in the woodworking shop, even though Mennonites are renowned for their wooden furniture. They conducted their own church services under the guidance of a sympathetic missionary. Some of their isolation was fear of the unknown, with several of them expressing a desire to stay clear of prison politics, but the us-and-them mentality of the colony was also at play.

  “Are you scared of the other prisoners?” I asked. The Mennonites, even though no longer wearing their identifying schlaub’betjse, stood out in the prison. Too white and clean-cut, like me. I wouldn’t want to be here and have everyone know it was for raping children.

  “We haven’t had many disagreements with people,” Jacob said. “We just mind our own business. It’s very peaceful in here, maybe even more so than in Santa Cruz. In the city you hear of killings and problems every day, but here it’s calm. It’s not so bad.”

  It was calm except when you crossed invisible turf lines or caused offence. Jacob told me about an inmate who was suspected of taking pictures of another inmate’s child with his mobile phone.

  “They thought he was doing it for bad reasons, so they killed him. We saw it all. They beat him to death with an iron bar,” he said. “Now there are no pictures allowed, and you have to be sure that no one thinks you are taking pictures with your phone.”

  We passed a dusty soccer pitch filled with bare-chested men in the throes of a match, their families packed along the sidelines, cheering raucously. The spectators licked ice cream cones and sucked at straws stuck into soda cans. Some of the children beside the football pitch lived in the prison and passed through the gates to and from school every day, while others were here for the day to visit inmates. Wives and girlfriends moved into the prison to join their partners and left for their jobs every morning but came back at night in order to keep the family together.

  Jacob’s tour ended in his room, a small but tidy space that felt more like a college dormitory room than prison cell. A small barred window looked out over the prison roofs and brought a flood of fresh air and sunshine. Underwear and socks were hung out the window to dry. A few small stools doubled as bedside tables. Jacob wove colourful hammocks to pass the time and earn pocket money, and a bundle of them hung in a corner. A Plautdietsche Bible and a few hymn books were stacked atop one of the tables alongside a modest collection of toiletries and combs. On one wall hung a small picture of Jesus, uncommon in a Mennonite home because displaying crosses or pictures of Jesus was considered a Catholic practice. An old television, a forbidden pleasure on the colonies, sat atop a wooden cupboard. There was no need to do things up plietch here, without the church leaders looking over his shoulder with their oppressive rules.

  Jacob had recently bought his apartment for US $1,400. Two beds were taken up by other Mennonites and one was used by a Bolivian who was in prison for raping his daughter.

  “His wife accused him,” Jacob said. “He’s a good guy, I could see that right away. He’s got a good spirit, and he’s poor, so he didn’t have a place. I said he could stay here for free.”

  Jacob’s wife, Otta, came to visit him for a week at a time, and he had rigged a thin curtain around his bunk for privacy during her visits. She still lived on the colony with their youngest son and two daughters while the older three sons had moved away.

  “One of my older boys worked in the colony cheese factory and he heard the workers talking about how we should have been killed rather than turned over to the police. It hurt him
very much to hear that, so he quit his job and moved to another village,” Jacob said, his face pinched with concern.

  It sounded harsh, but I knew that there were numerous threats against the men’s lives if they dared to reenter the colony. Mennonite pacifism only went so far.

  “It’s not bad staying here, but it’s very hard to stay patient,” he said as we sat down on his bunk. “I don’t feel alone here. We know many people support us and pray for us. I thank God that I am here because here we’ve learned a lot about the Bible and about life, and we wouldn’t have learned these things if we were on the colony.”

  Jacob grew quiet. He looked more vulnerable in the privacy of his room than he had outside.

  “So, did you do it?” I asked, hoping I’d get a better glimpse inside his head now that we were away from the rest of the men. “They say you confessed, and then changed your story. So which story is true?” Jacob looked at me sharply. He shook his head, still staring at me with defiance in his eyes. “I would not take on a sin I have not done. There’s no way I’d admit to something I have not done. If I had done that, the things they say I did, I’d end my life. I would not welcome visitors here and look them in the eye,” he said.

  Jacob was looking me in the eye, watching the impact his words had on me.

  “I’d often come home from work late, because I’d work on cattle, help with calving, these sorts of things,” Jacob explained. “Someone saw me come home late one night and they said I was out making this trouble.”

  “How about the others, do you believe them?” I asked. The men appeared remarkably unified given that some of them were arrested based on the accusations made by the others. I wondered if that united front was just for my benefit.

  “I believe them that they did not do these things,” Jacob said. “They did not use their daughters, or others. If you’re in prison with someone for three years you talk a lot, about all kinds of things, and about the case, and the stories are always the same, never changing. If they were lying the stories would change a bit. Just a detail or two would be different. But not with these guys, it’s always the same. But the story on the colony, the story told by those that have accused us, their story always changes. It’s different every time.”