WITH human faeces smeared on the walls and patients allegedly raped, campaigners say this is the most dangerous hospital in the world.
Guatemala’s only psychiatric hospital, Federico Mora, operates more like a prison than a hospital, a court revealed.
The sick abuse was exposed over ten years ago and the court ordered the facility to crack down on rampant abuse.
It found that 334 children and adults locked up inside were subjected to physical and sexual abuse, denied medical care and exposed to “serious and contagious” illnesses and infections.
Many contracted HIV – a problem compounded by the “widespread sexual abuse in the institution”.
“The stench of urine and faeces is overwhelming”, said one campaigner upon visiting the facility.
Some practices can be described as “torture” under guidelines of the UN.
Patients were shut into pitch-black isolation rooms for several days, and it was claimed that staff at the hospital set up a sex-trafficking ring and sold patients for sex.
Despite a crackdown, very little has changed in the last decade.
The Sun spoke to the lawyers and campaigners Eric Rosenthal and Priscila Rodriguez, who last visited Federico Mora in February of this year.
They got a court order to force the Guatemalan government to give them access to the facility.
Speaking to Rosenthal and Rodriguez, detainees claimed that they were victims of sex trafficking.
They said staff collected money from outsiders and forced the patients to have sex with them.
It is also claimed that outsiders would be brought to the hospital to rape the detainees, and patients were sometimes taken outside to be trafficked by hospital staff.
One woman told Rodriguez she was raped in exchange for a cigarette for the guard.
Officers from the National Civil Police patrol the facility with loaded guns.
There are no separate rooms in the facility, with just a long corridor with beds, according to Rodriguez.
Over 60 people are crammed into a space with half that capacity.
Rosenthal said: “People remain crowded in rooms with nothing but beds and nothing else to do. People have no privacy, almost no personal possessions, no control over their lives”.
“Many people spend their days laying on floors or on the ground outside or sitting in chairs with nothing to do but stare into space.
“We still saw some people tied to wheelchairs”.
People with disabilities are said to be locked up against their will, or beyond the time they were supposed to be detained.
Nurses in the hospital told Rosenthal and Rodriguez that some staff “have links to criminal gangs” operating in the area.
Others say they are “forced” to work there and angry at the conditions.
Despite the rampant alleged sexual abuse and bleak conditions, there are still 330 people living in the facility – and a long waiting list to get in.
Patients live in “inhumane and degrading conditions” with a “lack of food and water”, Rodriguez said.
What food they are given is often rotten and cooked in kitchens with visible mould.
“Of course they have to eat it or otherwise they starve”, Priscila said.
Gangs congregate around the Federico Mora hospital, which is located next to a prison in one of the most dangerous parts of Guatemala city, Zone 18.
Criminals are also sent to live with the hospital patients, and their wards are often cleaner and nicer than those in care, according to Rosenthal.
He said: “On our last visit, we did not see people covered in urine or feces”.
But he added: “There we’re powerful smells of cleaner in sections that had clearly just been washed before the visit”.
“Conditions are still bleak and utterly dehumanizing”, he concluded.
Now, a new lawsuit has been launched against the hospital by Disability Rights International and other human rights organisations – in America’s highest court.
“Federico Mora is the most violent and dangerous facility we’ve discovered anywhere in the Americas,” Rosenthal said.
He condemned the hospital as “a dumping ground for people with any kind of disability and none” – and criticised the Guatemalan government for having an “old-fashioned, 1950s era understanding of mental illness”.
For patients inside the hospital, they have no means to complain as they have to gain permission of their legal guardian to file a lawsuit.
However, their legal guardian is in fact the director of Federico Mora Hospital.
The new case demands that people with disabilities have the right to decide on their own treatment – and to not be imprisoned against their will.
They also want the government to investigate the violence and sexual abuse towards patients and to pay out thousands in compensation.
Advocates also seek punishment for the rapists and abusers within the facility.
Currently, the Guatemalan government blows most of its mental health budget on Federico Mora – estimated at over $12million a year.
But a chief psychiatrist told Rosenthal: “This is a facility you would never go to for your mental health”.
Rosenthal and Rodriguez estimate that about 70 per cent of patients are sent to the hospital because they have no place else to live.
“People need a place to live, get food”, explained Rosenthal.
Guatemalan disability rights advocate Silvia Quan said that there is “almost nothing set up for people with disabilities”.
“They are abandoned,” she added.
“Poor families cannot pay for their care… so the way the state takes care of them is to send them to Federico Mora”.
Extreme stigma, fuelled by myth and superstition, still surrounds people with disabilities in Guatemala.
Quan said that some Guatemalans believe a pregnant woman “cannot eat avocadoes because it could cause a malformation of the fetus”.
And disability in children is seen as a generational curse triggered from someone in the family doing wrong.
In Guatemala, people with disabilities are regarded as incapable of making their own decisions.
The new lawsuit – which will be heard in autumn of this year – hopes to overturn their lack of legal rights.
Disability Rights International hopes community care can become the norm for people with disabilities so that inhumane hospitals like Federico Mora can be shut down, once and for all.
The Sun has reached out to Dr Romeo Minera, the current director of Federico Mora.
He was fired in 2022 after accusations of mismanagement, leading to severe shortages of medicine and water, but subsequently re-hired.
Guatemala’s Ministry of Health said that the hospital was “committed to public health, continuous improvement of services, and unwavering respect for human dignity”.
Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/16407131/worlds-most-dangerous-hospital-patients-sexually-assaulted/
