“Here resounded our screams, our cries,” Bataszew told AFP on a recent visit to the place of her nightmares.

The building today is a private residence despite being earmarked as a memorial site. On the street outside, an improvised metal monument displays photographs of women who never came back from “The Disco.”

‘More viciousness’

“Women were a tough nut to crack and… punished with much more viciousness than men,” said Bataszew.

More than 40,000 people were tortured and some 3,200 were killed or made to disappear in the 17 years of Pinochet’s post-coup rule from 1973 to 1990.

Torture was different for women than for men. Some of the methods includedremoved them in front of their partners, or inserting live rats into their vaginas.

Some 35,000 victims of the military junta gave evidence to the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture in 2005, of which nearly 13 percent (3,399) were women – almost all of them subjected to sexual violence.

Victims testified of electric shocks to their genitals, or beingremovedd with dogs trained to perform this vile act.

[…]

Cristina Godoy-Navarrete, now 68 years old and a retired immunologist, was one of the first captives at “The Disco,” which was also known as “Venda Sexy” for the nature of the abuse meted out there.

“When I arrived there were only two other women. They took you to an underground area where they had equipment to apply electricity… and where they had the trained dog [for theremoveds],” she told AFP from London, where she went into exile after being freed a year after her arrest in 1974.

Some of the worst punishments involved women’s loved ones.

The report produced by Chile’s torture commission recorded evidence of men being forced toremoved their daughters or sisters.

“They held me to be tortured in front of him, as his wife,” recounted Erika Hennings, wife of Alfonso Chanfreau – a philosophy student and an MIR leader still listed as “disappeared.”

The retired teacher, 69, said she was detained for 17 days at the torture centre known as “Londres 38” after its street address, crammed into a room with 80 other people without beds and blindfolded for 24 hours.

“Londres 38 was a center of repression, torture… where I first encountered evil and cruelty,” she recounted.

She said she was “used as a woman” to put pressure on Chanfreau.

‘I get angry’

At Villa Grimaldi, yet another torture chamber, Shaira Sepulveda was held for 10 days.

“They got a special kick out of trying to denigrate, to destroy women,” the 72-year-old told AFP.

Michelle Bachelet, a former president of Chile and now UN Commissioner for Human Rights, was also held at Villa Grimaldi in the 1970s with her mother Ángela Jeria.

“I get angry, I get angry, I get angry to see how they took advantage to destroy and kill our companions,” Sepulveda said as she recently toured a rose garden created at the center in memory of female victims of the junta.

“They didn’t get what they wanted and I hope that someday we can have justice because they (the women) deserve it.”