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Here is the story of Belén López Peiró. This is a noon chart.

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She wrote books about sexual abuse by her uncle. Now, he’s going to prison

By Paulina Villegas

Washington Post

January 21, 2023

When the verdict came, the Argentinian author Belén López Peiró sighed with relief.

The man who had caused her so much pain, who had sexually abused her as a young girl “when she didn’t even know what love was,” she recently wrote, was finally found guilty.

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The long journey from the moment she first put down in words how her uncle, a respected former police sergeant, used to sneak into her room in the middle night and lay on top of her, until the day of the guilty verdict nine years later, had been excruciating.

On Dec. 26 a local court in Argentina found Claudio Marcelino Sarlo guilty of “grave sexual assault," committed against a minor, López Peiró, and sentenced him to ten years in prison. The judge concluded Sarlo had assaulted his niece repeatedly between the age of 13-17 years in Santa Lucia, a small community in the province of Buenos Aires where she used to spend the summer at her uncle and aunt’s house. The court also ruled that Sarlo will have to pay roughly $78,000 and that he cannot maintain any contact with her.

Sarlo’s attorneys did not immediately respond for a request for comment.

“It’s done," López Peiró wrote in El País newspaper. "That’s it. It’s finished. C’est fini. I am freed.”

In an interview with the Washington Post, the 30-year-old described the “torturous” judicial fight, during which she was forced to testify eight different times, and was subjected to repeated psychological and medical evaluations. The years-long process also shattered her own family, she said, who saw details of their lives made public, she said.

The author detailed her fight to have to uncle prosecuted in two books, earning praise in literary circles for López Peiró's innovative narrative approach to both her own experience with sexual assault and the criminal prosecution process. Her work also helped spark a national debate about child sexual abuse and the failures of the judicial system, becoming intertwined with a national feminist movement that pushed the country to give victims’ testimonies more credence.

Although the legal resolution brought López Peiró much anticipated relief, it came with great personal costs.

López Peiró said she endured the pain of having to run into her attacker at court, the revictimization that came from testifying over and over, of dealing with a callous prosecutor asking her “how does it feel to be abused?” She felt it was her, not him, on trial.

When asked if, in the end, was it all worth it? If justice can actually heal? López Peiró confessed that the answer still escapes her, but the decision to accuse her uncle led to her books.

"In that process I found a new dimension of the power of words that marked my destiny and my literary path,” she said in an interview from Barcelona, where she currently lives.

“And that, I will never regret.”

López Peiró filed the initial complaint in 2014. A few years later, while deep into the trial, she attended a literary workshop and realized how deeply the experience had influenced her own identity. She then decided to reclaim her own trauma.

“After all those years of seeking and not finding justice, of realizing it was in the judicial sphere where I felt the most revictimized and vulnerable, I understood my relief and solace had to come from somewhere else,” she said.

Words is where she found it.

In the books “Porque Volvías Cada Verano” (“Why Did You Come Back Every Summer?”) and “Donde No Hago Pie” (“Where There Is No Standing”), the author denounced not only her uncle, but also her own family for neglect and mistreatment. She also criticized the legal system and the prejudice and social stigma that often surround those who dare to speak out.

“Why Did You Come Every Summer?”, first published in 2018, narrated the abuse through multiple points of view and voices: her mother, a prosecutor, psychiatrists, her aunt and wife of Sarlo, who admitted that although she believed abuse had occurred she would not leave her husband-a literary technique rarely seen in novels or autobiographical nonfiction, where a first-person protagonist narrator is common.

“Writing these books helped me to leave that place of ‘victim,’" she told The Post, "and made me feel I had certain control over something, in this case, words, that allowed me to say exactly what I wanted to say, nothing less, nothing more, and express all that anger and say all those things that embarrassed my family.”

While the books resonated in literary and feminist circles in Argentina, their greatest impact was inspiring other women to come forward.

One was renowned Argentinian actress Thelma Fardín accused Brazilian actor Juan Darthés of sexually assaulting her when she was a minor. Darthés has denied the allegations in an ongoing trial.

In several televised interviews, Fardín credited López Peiró for inspiring her to denounce her alleged attacker, which led to a spike in book sales and stirred a national conversation around the issue, said Leonardo Rodriguez, editor at Madreselva, the book’s publishing house.

“While this was not the first book published in Argentina to touch on the issue of sexual abuse, it was perhaps the first time that a book solely focused on it and went to the very center of it and generated this kind of massive discussion and debate,” Rodriguez added.

Soon, López Peiró found herself invited to speak in public universities, high schools and libraries.

The case also illustrated the shortcomings of Argentina’s judicial system, where victims often "make great sacrifices and are forced to take on the burden to convince authorities to gather evidence and push the case forward, and it’s them who have to keep rowing and rowing,” said María Piqué, a federal prosecutor.

Luli Sánchez, López Peiró's attorney, echoed the criticism and pointed at the nine years it took a court to find Sarlo guilty, a period which, she said, was “although terrible and inhuman, not unusual.”

Sanchez said that in Argentina there are many challenges to prosecuting sexual abuse cases, particularly of minors, because of stereotypes towards victims and the judicial institutions often don’t take these cases seriously.

In a 2022 report by The Economist Intelligence Unit analyzing how countries respond to cases of child abuse and exploitation, Argentina ranked 50 out of 60 countries.

“Not long ago, when a person denounced being victim of sexual crimes, and there was not physical evidence or direct witnesses, prosecutors would easily dismiss them,” Sánchez said.

This has changed in the past decade, according to legal experts, who say prosecutors and investigators have received training on empathy and avoiding victim-blaming behaviors, which are entrenched in Latin American countries.

“There has been a widespread social demand to treat survivors as actual victims of serious human rights violations, in other words, for them to be heard,” Sanchez said. “The neglect and mistreatment were infinitely worse and there have been tremendous strides made but there is still a long way to go,” she added.

While López Peiró recognizes the battles gained by the feminist movement and the significance of pursuing legal justice, the written word has remained her most loyal ally in her quest for self-restoration.

“I want other victims to know that words help, they help process, untangle, and restore -because I don’t think you can heal because this is not a disease, you can restore your memory, your body and your identity which is so often stripped from us,” she said.

As for her, she said she is ready to move on and finally, write about something else.

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Belén López Peiro: "That's it. The term. I freed myself”: the Argentine writer who denounced an abusive uncle in a novel and now managed to have him convicted by justice

BBC News

( translated from Portuguese)

The writer Belén López Peiró denounced her uncle nine years ago and wrote two novels about her experience.When she was a girl, Belén López Peiró spent her summer vacations with her uncles in the town of Santa Lucía, a former agricultural colony in the north of the province of Buenos Aires, in Argentina, where her mother had grown up.While her parents, separated, worked in the city, she had fun with her cousins and friends.But behind those apparently idyllic visits of hers, a terrifying reality was hidden: from the age of 13, her uncle -a policeman who was the husband of her mother's sister- began to abuse her.She suffered rape for three years, until a family member became aware of the situation.López Peiró wrote about those harrowing experiences in her first novel: "Why you came back every summer", published in 2018.And this week, she announced that, after a nine-year court battle, her abuser was finally sentenced to 10 years in prison.

"It's over"

It's over. That's it. It's over. C'est fini. I freed myself," said the 30-year-old writer in an opinion column published on January 3 in the Spanish newspaper El País."After nine years and a complaint. Statements, psychological tests, round trips to police stations, prosecutors, national courts. A file: 500 pages. Two lawyers. A prosecutor. A justice commission. Therapy for 15 years Half of my life! My entire family split in two. A town covering up the abuser. Seven years of writing workshops. Two books published (...) Finally. Finally, on December 19 the hearing of trial. And five days later, the sentence," he wrote."Now I say it well, with all the names that I could not say at one time: Claudio Sarlo, former commissioner of the province of Buenos Aires, political uncle, father of a family, sexually abused me when I was a girl," he said, detailing the crime contained in the sentence:"Seriously insulting sexual abuse aggravated by being the perpetrator in charge of the guardian and for having been committed against a minor under 18 years of age."

In statements to BBC Mundo, López Peiró said that the sentence brought her "in the first place, without a doubt, relief", although she said that what had relieved her even more than the ruling was writing the column and "locating all those emotions in a place"."With the difference that, when I wrote "Why you came back every summer" the word flowed, it was a very deep need. It was like a devastating waterfall, but I let it flow. In this case, the column cost me every word, as if from truth was the last thing he had to say," he revealed.She told there that she had decided to write about the sentence with the intention of "going back to writing to turn the page. Going back to where I found reparation."

Transform Abuse

In an interview with this medium in 2018, when her first novel came out, the author had said that she went through three states during her healing process: first, recognizing herself as a victim, then getting out of that place of victim, and finally, finding the empowerment that it allowed him to move on from that experience.The latter she found when she entered a writing workshop where they showed her "that she could transform abuse into a work of art."López Peiró not only wrote -crudely- about being raped. She also told how she had suffered during her long journey in search of reparation and justice, due to how she was questioned by those who should take care of her and listen to her-from family members, to doctors or judicial officials.Why hadn't she said anything to her before, why did she come back every summer, why did she do this to her family.Her response was to tell everything and make visible what many did not want to see.

In 2021 he published his second novel, "Where I can't stand", which reflects all the difficulties that a victim of child sexual abuse faces when they decide to report and start legal proceedings.The author says that her two novels are "books that I would have liked to read if I had not only experienced a situation of sexual violence and not knowing whether to report it or not, and not knowing what to do and finding a bit of redress, but also for any other person, so that a father, a mother, a brother, a friend, can better accompany the people who experience a situation like this".During the long process that led to this conviction, López Peiró not only highlights the support of her closest family nucleus.She also mentions a major turning point in the case."When I got a feminist lawyer who is Luciana Sánchez, she made us work in the judicial process in a more collective way. In some way she made us involve other lawyers, other communicators, that we go to associations, that this does not remain only about neither on my shoulders nor on her shoulders, but rather it made the work collective", explains the writer.

Write something else"

In her opinion column in El País, López Peiró says that she "didn't know if it was necessary or not to write this."But she that she did it "for all those who could not speak or denounce. For me."Her last sentence is an announcement: "From now on I dedicate myself to writing something else."Asked about this future project, she reveals that she is working on her third novel."It is too soon to anticipate something, but I think that now that I can be a little lighter I will be able to have a possibility that I did not have before, which is to create other worlds, that my head, that my emotionality have enough space to immerse themselves in other possible universes".

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More: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel%C3%A9n_L%C3%B3pez_Peir%C3%B3

Her books:

https://www.amazon.com/Books-Bel%C3%A9n-L%C3%B3pez-Peir%C3%B3/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ABel%C3%A9n+L%C3%B3pez+Peir%C3%B3

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Her natal Ceres is 6 Taurus, N.Node 29 Taurus, S.Node 7 Capricorn

Her natal Amazon is 22 Libra, N.Node 6 Taurus, S.Node 9 Sagittarius

Her natal Lilith is 00/18 Capricorn, N.Node 6 Capricorn, and the S.Node 24 Taurus

Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad