Ultraconservative Mennonite community

Manitoba Colony is an ultraconservative Mennonite community in the Santa Cruz Department or eastern lowlands of Bolivia. Conservative plain dress Old Colony Mennonites from Mexico and Canada began moving to Bolivia in the 1960s. Manitoba Colony, one of dozens of Mennonite colonies in Bolivia, was founded in 1991, named after a much larger colony in Mexico, which, in turn, has its origins in the Canadian province of Manitoba. The colony has a population of approximately 2000. Members of the colony speak Plautdietsch, dress plainly, and do not use electricity or automobiles.

Serial Rape Trial

Between 2005 and 2009, more than 100 girls and women in Manitoba Colony were raped at night in their homes by a group of colony men who sedated them with animal anesthetic. The youngest victim was three years old, and the oldest was 65. Peter Weiber, a veterinarian from a neighboring colony, provided the anesthetic in spray form, and the perpetrators sprayed the drug through open windows, sedating the entire household. Girls and women reported waking up bruised and bloodied, but the reports were at first dismissed as "wild female imagination," or else attributed to an "act of the devil" or demons. Eventually a group of colony men were caught in the act. The colony elders, deciding that the case was too difficult to handle themselves, called local police to take the perpetrators into custody in 2011.

Eight men stood trial in August 2011, and seven were sentenced to 25 years in prison for rape. Peter Weiber got 12 years for supplying the drug used to debilitate the victims. He has since been conditionally released. A further two men were tried and convicted in connected trials.

In popular culture

A fictional version of Manitoba Colony appears in Miriam Toews's 2018 novel, Women Talking. The novel, which Toews describes as a "reaction through fiction," imagines a group of colony women gathering secretly to discuss the nighttime attacks they have suffered, and to decide on a course of action. A film adaptation of the book by Sarah Polley was released in 2022.