Menno Moto

by Cameron Dueck

The zangfast had put me in a good state of mind. It had distracted me from the dark stories, suspicions, and angry accusations. I had met people who refused to succumb to that darkness. Now, with the last crumbs of my toast gone, I was forced to once again return to the darkness.

  I had become less bothered by questions of innocence and guilt as I’d heard more about the case. Instead, I was thinking about how sexual naïveté and suppression of knowledge had made the communities more vulnerable to abuse, and to the mad witch hunt that had followed. Obsessed with sexual control and told to remain quiet and ignorant, this community was fertile soil for such a tragedy to grow in. I agreed with David’s theory.

  “Did some of those in jail abuse their daughters? Many, or maybe all, did. But did they rape the women they’re accused of raping, in the way they’re accused of doing it? Not many people around here believe that those stories are entirely true,” David said.

  I believed that there had been incest and rape, and maybe even by some of the men in prison. A lot of women had been sexually assaulted, but some of the stories had grown over time. But who had the authority to tell a woman who fully believed she had been raped that the facts as presented by the powerful masterminds were not the facts as they’d happened?

  The men had been tortured, there was a dead body to prove it, so their confessions were worthless. That meant there was a high probability that some of the men in prison were innocent. That meant that some of the perpetrators were probably still on the loose, and, when I stood back for a wider view, there were good reasons to think that some of the men who had led the witch hunt might be the guilty ones. That meant that if the rapes had poked a hole in the fabric of the community, the way the case had been handled had torn these people in two.

  David believed the charges had been trumped up to draw attention away from the more powerful leaders in the community who were suspected of incest. The rapes had not stopped. Girls were still being molested by fathers and brothers, even as community leaders proclaimed that the guilty had been caught and punished. The women who came to confide in Lisa were still scared of the men in their own homes. The whispers had not stopped.

  “The fact that it’s still happening, that we still hear about cases, says that it wasn’t quite as simple as the leaders want to make it look,” David said.

  I’d lost track of who the victims were. They were all scapegoats of the colony, of the old way. Everyone was pushed farther back, deeper into the darkness. Disgust and unease had grown to the point that I wanted to walk away, but there was one more person, someone who I was told was impartial, even if only by the convoluted standards of this case.

  “They owe me US $12,000 for the chemicals they bought from me, so I am holding their tractor,” Peter Fehr said as he pointed to a chunky green machine parked in the middle of his yard. One of the tires—rubber tires, I noted—was flat and the tractor slouched to its left. “I’ve had it here for a long time and still they don’t pay. Now they need the tractor for seeding, so they come begging for it, but they still haven’t paid.”

  He shook his head and laughed, as if recounting the silly disobedience of a child. Peter sold agricultural chemicals and fertilizers, and his business had grown beyond his colony and made him rich and powerful. The debtors were his Brazilian neighbours, who, like himself, had come to Bolivia for its plentiful and rich land. Now they’d come to ask for grace on their debts.

  He excused himself to talk business with the petitioners while I tried to eavesdrop. Peter was tall and lean with an angular face. He had a boisterous confidence and chattiness about him that was rare among Old Colony men, many of whom tended towards the stern and dour. Now he was using that charm on the farmers, sprinkling the negotiations with smiles and the occasional chuckle. After fifteen minutes of to-and-fro Peter walked away to call their boss. He went into a small office in the corner of his shed and hid himself from view as he pulled a mobile phone from his pocket. Up plietch.

  I was standing outside in the sunshine when I had the sensation I was being watched. I looked towards the house and saw the curtains twitch as a pale face pulled back from the light. A few moments later I glanced back at the house and again the watcher retreated into the shadows.

  Ten minutes later Peter returned and shook the Brazilians’ hands—he had struck a deal with their boss.

  “If they don’t have the tractor they can’t plant their crops, and then I’ll never get paid,” he explained as he led me to some lawn chairs beside his house.

  “So, you came here to talk about those boys that are locked up, right?” Peter said as he turned to me. Boys, not men. He clapped his hand on his knee as if calling a meeting to order. Peter had known who I was when I arrived on his yard—people had been talking about the Canadian Mennonite writer on a motorcycle.

  “As soon as I heard about it, I felt so sorry for the boys that I hoped it wasn’t true,” Peter said. “I imagined what it was doing to the parents. I’m a parent too. What if one of my boys had done that? Then I was hired to translate, because they saw me as impartial, but that was very hard to do.”

  One of the accused had once been Peter’s daughter’s teenage sweetheart, while another had worked on his farm, but in a tight-knit community of intermarriage and blurred lines of authority, he was considered impartial.

  “When it started, I was sitting there in the court and I thought I knew which side was true. I thought, this can’t be. It’s just not possible. And if you listen to different people talk about it, as I know you have, listen to those who were involved in it, you’d also believe that it’s not true. Right?” Peter paused just long enough for me to take a breath in preparation of my answer, and then he barrelled on. “Then you go and listen to the other side, and again you are 100 percent convinced that it’s happened exactly how they say.”

  Exactly. Every time I left an interview, I felt I had hit upon the crux of the story, that I could see it all clearly now. But then, half an hour later, riding my motorcycle through the colony back to my refuge, thinking about what had been said, I always began to doubt. I replayed their comments in my mind, compared them to what others had said, and saw the gaps, the contradictions. The outlandish claims that had seemed reasonable when matched with the earnestness in their eyes began to look flimsy upon second examination. “I have heard both sides now,” Peter said, his voice growing quieter. “I believe it happened, yes. It’s hard to believe, but yes, it did happen.”

  Manitoba Colony was not the only crime scene; attacks had taken place on other colonies as well. More than a hundred families were targeted, Peter said. The number of rape victims varied, depending on whom I asked. Some said a hundred, the court documents said a hundred and thirty.

  “I’d say the number that were used is around a hundred and sixty,” Peter said. “There were more that came forward after the court case.”

  Victims ranged in age from eight to sixty while court- ordered medical exams found that a three-year-old girl had a broken hymen, which suggested sexual assault. One victim was mentally handicapped, another was pregnant at the time and went into premature labour after she was raped by her brother.

  The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), an international aid group, had offered to provide counselling, particularly for the women, but they were rebuffed. One bishop had said the women did not need help because they were unconscious when the attacks had happened and therefore remembered nothing, so no emotional scars remained.

  “Were they used by men after the court case, or did the women just begin to talk about it afterwards?” I asked.

  I could see that Peter understood the real question in what I was asking, and he paused before answering.

  “That I wouldn’t know. It’s hard to say.”

  I’d heard that some boys were raped as well.

  “Ya, we have heard those things,” Peter said. “But it wasn’t discussed much. I don’t think the victims want
to talk about it.”

  Between one hundred and one hundred and sixty young women were raped, but there were no reported pregnancies resulting from the rapes. The accusers said the rapists had used condoms, but this was a society with zero education on issues of sexual health and pregnancy prevention.

  And always, the magic spray. A can of spray was produced as court evidence, but its origins were unclear. Bolivian farmers had testified at the trial that Peter Wiebe, the cow doctor, had used the spray to sedate bulls on their farms, and Peter Fehr, the translator, said a sample had been sent to the Instituto de Investigaciones Forenses, Bolivia’s national crime lab. The lab found it contained formaldehyde and scopolamine, an odourless, tasteless drug discovered over a century ago and used to treat motion sickness and postoperative nausea and vomiting. Until fifty years ago scopolamine was mixed with opioids such as morphine to put mothers into a semiconscious state during childbirth.

  “If no one has seen this spray and no one I’ve spoken to knows of an actual sample, what was sent to the lab? What did they do the tests on?” I asked Peter. He shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know.

  Scopolamine was once a common over-the-counter sleeping pill ingredient, but the US Food and Drug Administration pulled it from shelves in 1990 because it was not proven effective. In higher-than-therapeutic doses it can cause amnesia and fatigue, and can cause people to lose their free will while still remaining conscious. There are many reports of it being used criminally, much like Rohypnol, the date rape drug.

  A US government report said there could be as many as 50,000 cases of scopolamine used for robbery in Colombia per year, and that the drug could be administered through food or drink or even, in powder form, blown into a target’s face.

  “It’s the same drug that the FARC [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia] use when they rob banks,” Peter said. “They put the drug in powder form on a banknote. They know a man has come out of the bank after making a big withdrawal. The FARC are looking proper, even wearing a tie, and they go up to the man,” Peter said as he stood up, back straight, adjusting an imaginary necktie.

  “Señor, is this note a fake, do you think?” Peter asked his imaginary prey.

  “The man takes the note, like this, to look at it.” Peter held an imaginary banknote in front of his face. “And as he does that, puffff, the powder goes up his nose. And although his eyes are open he does not know what he’s doing.”

  Peter stood still, holding the imaginary banknote, eyes wide open, zombielike.

  “And the man that used the powder on him, the thief, says, ‘Please give me your money.’ And the man hands it over. He’ll do anything that is asked of him. And he’s left standing on the street, or maybe the thief told him, ‘Walk that way.’ And then later, he’ll come to and not have any idea of what happened. None. Well, maybe a glimmer, he’ll know something funny happened, but nothing more.”

  In large doses, scopolamine can cause respiratory failure and death. While some women on the colony complained of headaches and confusion in the morning, there were no deaths or respiratory problems attributed to the magic spray.

  “The amount that put an adult to sleep, to make them unaware like this, would be enough to kill a child,” Peter said. “No one asked— and it wasn’t my job there to ask questions, I was just translating—but I thought, why then are there no dead kids? Because the rooms that it was sprayed into, those rooms had people of different ages in them, from adults to small children, and yet they are said to have sprayed enough of this stuff through the window to knock the grown men out cold. But the children were fine. I have often wondered about that.”

  Peter stared at me, his eyebrows arched, eyes wide. He shrugged and shook his head.

  “But even despite that, you still believe that it all happened?” I asked.

  “I can’t explain that, but yes, I think in general, this story…well, something happened. Maybe we’ll never know exactly what, but those boys did bad things.”

  “Peter, what happened to those boys, I mean the men, in the backyard sheds where they were held? In those few days before they were taken to the police? When they were questioned…what went on there?”

  Boys instead of men. Sin instead of crime. Used instead of raped. Lies instead of truth.

  “Those boys were not tortured. No one tortured them, I know that for sure. Abram Peters told me that he was not shocked. They’d threatened to shock him, yes. The man holding him said, ‘Well, go get that livestock shocker, then he’ll talk.’ They said that to scare him, to make him talk. But he was never shocked. And his father has admitted to me that he lied about that as well. I had to go into the jail cell at one point to interview them, for the court. I asked Abram, ‘Did they use a shocker on you?’ He said no, they had not.

  “They did scare them. They held them,” Peter said, pretending to hold a person against the wall. “They scared them, and that has often bothered me. And they may have said things they should not have said to scare them more.”

  But how about Frank Klassen, the man who had died after he was hung from a tree to make him confess? Everyone agreed Frank was a drunken abusive father and husband. He was known to viciously beat his family. It wasn’t long before his name was added to the list of men who were accused of creeping around the community at night, raping innocent women and children.

  “That was terrible,” Peter said. “He’s my brother-in-law, his wife is my wife’s sister. I was there, I saw him. I took him to the hospital and came back from the hospital when he was dead. They say no, he didn’t die from that, but we know better. That was terrible, what they did to him. He did die from that.”

  “So if they tortured him, why should we believe they didn’t torture the others?”

  Peter again arched his shoulders, made a frown. He had no answer.

  “I do know that those who hung Frank from the tree were arrested and held in jail for a short time until the colony paid US $25,000 to have them set free,” he said.

  Peter had access to the colony’s financial records, and he said the colony had spent US $330,000 on the case against the eight accused rapists. The money had come from colony taxes, not from donations to the church, as some people had speculated.

  “But I’m not sure where all the money went, to whom exactly. Some of it was paid to the judges, and maybe some to some of the women, the witnesses,” Peter said.

  “And the laboratory that wrote a report about the spray? Were they paid?”

  “That I wouldn’t know,” Peter said.

  “But Peter,” I said, more loudly than I’d intended. I was frustrated. Peter struck me as more intelligent, more open-minded than many of those I had interviewed, and I suspected he was reverting to cluelessness at his convenience. “The men were frightened, and probably tortured, into confessing. And you know that the money was paid to get the case through court, to put these men in jail. You don’t know who all was bribed. No one seems to have seen the spray. How can you be sure which parts of this story are true?” “Well, there are some things that still are not clear, but you don’t understand. We don’t want to have to give people money for this thing to be settled, but that’s just the way it works here in Bolivia. If you don’t pay the police and judges, they won’t do anything.”

  The Mennonites had moved to Bolivia because they wanted to escape from the pressures of social progress in Mexico. They thought that seeking out even greater isolation would protect them—but it hadn’t. In each place Mennonites moved to, whether it was Russia, Canada, Mexico, or Bolivia, the cultural influences found their way into the community. Here it wasn’t better education or a foreign language, but the insidious criminality of this country’s crooked legal system. Their isolation had worked against them, allowing social rot to fester for years, hidden by imposed silence.

  “I heard that one of the judges did not officially sign off on the sentencing, and that t
he colony has to keep paying him so that he will keep the men in jail.”

  “Hmmm…well, there were some problems there at one point, yes,” Peter said.

  Peter was chosen as a court translator because he was a prominent member of the community and, without any of his family in the list of victims, he was considered impartial. But of course the truth—whatever that might be—was more complicated.

  “It was Wall, the fat one,” Peter said. He jumped up from his seat and beckoned me to follow him as he walked behind the house. He pointed up at the rain gutter, which had a few small dents in it. Directly above the dents was a window that led to a second-floor bedroom where he said his daughters slept.

  “Those dents are from a ladder. And look at the window screen, there are still holes in it. He tried to burn the screen with lighter, he thought it was a plastic screen, but it was steel. And then he tried to poke holes in it so he could reach in and open the window. The girls woke up and shouted. We ran out, and the ladder was standing here. And I don’t remember putting the ladder there. Later Wall admitted it was him. The spray didn’t work that time.”

  Peter grabbed my elbow and pulled me closer to him.

  “I don’t want them to hear, it’s very difficult,” he said in a low voice as he nodded towards the house. From inside, I could hear muffled female voices, young and old.

  “The court case was already under way when my wife told me that the boys had been in our house, after all. I didn’t know, she was too afraid to tell me. Two boys climbed a tree to get on the roof.”

  Peter led me to a tree that grew beside the house. “They crept across the roof and through the window into the girls’ bedroom and climbed down onto the bed. You could see the footprints the whole way. And a big footprint, right there on the bedding.”

  “He came and used my daughter and my maid. And the next day the maid had a horrible fever, and was very sore here,” Peter said, patting his hips and buttocks. “That’s how hard he was on her, like a rabbit.”