Kidnapped, Tortured, and Navigating an Indifferent Court System

Illustration: Anne Le Guern.

Content Warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual violence.

I still remember the newspaper photographs of Linda Loaiza López camped out on the steps of Venezuela’s Supreme Court. She lay on a thin patio-sofa mattress, tucked under a bright blue children’s comforter printed with toy boats. The slender young woman with twisted lips and fiery eyes was surrounded by her mother, father, and sisters holding simple posters with stencil-traced letters, demanding justice. 

“My hunger for justice is greater than my other hunger,” López told reporters, as medics inserted an IV into her arm. Given the frail state of her kidneys and pancreas, López was tempting death with her hunger strike. But she thought this was a small feat after having survived more than three months of torturous captivity. 

In 2005, I was working as a foreign correspondent based in Chile, and this was the first I’d heard about López. She was an eighteen-year-old who three years earlier had been kidnapped and brutally violated, and whose case was going nowhere in a corrupt and indifferent justice system because her abuser was well connected. The trial had been postponed 38 times and 59 judges had refused to hear the case. In a few weeks her case would reach the statute of limitations, after which her aggressor could be freed—a prospect that terrified her. 

Desperate, López waged a hunger strike, despite having received death threats and a recently undergone an operation of her pancreas—one of the multiple surgeries she’s needed since her abduction. 

“I have a rebellious side and when I want something, I always find the strength to do it,” she would tell me later. “It was hard, but I felt so much support.”

Thirteen days into her hunger strike, López finally got her trial, but it ended in an acquittal. She was launching an appeal of the case when I met her in September 2005, at the makeshift Caracas office of the non-profit she founded to support survivors of gender-based violence. On a spartan wall, paper sheets bearing dot-matrix-printed letters collectively spelled out the “Friends of Linda Loaiza Foundation.”

Decked in a teddy bear t-shirt, López spoke of her plans to study law. Frustrated but undefeated by everything she had experienced, she told me that if the appeal failed, she had her next step in mind: going all the way to the Inter-American Court. Her plan sounded David-and-Goliath-like. I remember wholeheartedly wishing her well, but believing that, inspiring as she was, she didn’t stand a chance. 

I reconnected with López in February 2018, as her case finally reached the Inter-American Court for Human Rights—coming full-circle seventeen years after her haunting ordeal. Beyond López’s stomach-churning victimization, it’s her persistence over years to seek justice for gender violence in a system that is profoundly broken, in a culture that