She had done nothing but leave a nightclub. In September 2023, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a young woman was stopped by police who said she smelled of cannabis. She was driven to a station and locked in a cell alone. Before the night was out, an officer had demanded money she did not have, ordered her to undress, and raped her.
She was let go, her abuser able to victimise her unchallenged because of the faint whiff of a controlled substance.
That’s the case that opens a new report from Programa Libertas and Acción Andina Bolivia, which documents 21 emblematic cases of sexual torture against women held in Bolivian police custody. Nine of those cases came from the enforcement of Bolivia’s drug laws.
Written by human rights lawyer Gloria Achá, Besieged Women: Bringing to Light The Practice of Sexual Torture Under Drug Policy and By Police Authority argues that this kind of violence is neither random nor exceptional. It is manufactured by Bolivia’s drug laws and the violent, patriarchal police force that enforces them.
Drugs and detention
Bolivia’s Article 49 of Law 1008, in force since 1988, makes drug consumption itself a crime. Not trafficking, not supply: use. Between 2009 and 2015, an average of 30% of all arrests under the law were for use alone.
In Bolivia, as the report puts it, “the concept of harm reduction is completely unknown.” Officially, the sanction for drug use is remand to a private rehabilitation centre, paid for by the person committed as the state runs no public facilities. But, from arrest to rehab, it’s a long journey.
After arresting someone under Article 49, Bolivian police may hold someone for up to eight hours before notifying prosecutors. They also run their own courts for minor offences against ‘good morals’ or ‘public decency’, punishable by detention in police cells. The report points out that “there is no oversight of police actions in these cases, nor is there any institution that regularly inspects the police holding cells where such detentions are served.” Many arrests take place without any recourse to legal formality at all, meaning that anyone, at any time, might be put into arbitrary detention with no oversight. It is here that profound sexual violence occurs.
The report documents women taken briefly to holding cells, patrol cars, or places with no connection to police work at all. The report states they’re there “solely for the purpose of sexual subjugation,” with the officers often using Bolivia’s drug-related violations as a pretext.
The system criminalises drug use, giving officers a permanent pretext even as custody rules provide an unwatched room. Women who use – or just suspected to use – drugs face harassment, extortion, and sexual violence amounting to torture, according to the report.
Systemic violence
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda set the threshold in 1998: sexual violence amounts to torture when a state agent commits it, when it inflicts the same severe harm, and when it serves the same purposes of oppression. Emma Bravo, who directs Bolivia’s Institute for Therapy and Research on the Aftereffects of Torture and State Violence, broke down how sexual torture works. It begins with groping, she told Ipas Bolivia, which women arrested under Law 1008 have learned to expect as part of being detained. Then, it escalates.
The report outlines nine emblematic cases specifically tied to Bolivia’s drug laws. A woman with a drug dependence was intercepted leaving a Cochabamba red-light district and offered a choice in the patrol car: sex, or a fabricated dealing charge. A woman whose partner was in custody was told he could be released for 500 bolivianos (around 40 US dollars). When she could not pay, she was taken to a motel and raped. These record just the few instances where the victims were willing and able to come forward. Through her years of advocacy work, Achá is sure that there are many, many more.
Achá blames institutional machismo: a police culture completely saturated in gender violence. Detainees are at particular risk, but the violence does not stop there. Data from women’s rights group CLADEM-Bolivia shows that at least 60% of female officers report sexual harassment from colleagues and superiors, she said.
Hidden Victims
Impunity for sexual violence against women in Bolivia exceeds 80%, according to UN Population Fund research cited in the report. Only two of the report’s cases led to convictions. In these, the officers were found guilty of rape; the charge of torture was never brought. There is no official data on torture convictions in Bolivia at all, and the sentencing framework explains why so little is at stake for the accused. Murder carries a maximum sentence of 30 years, whereas an official who kills a detainee through torture only faces ten.
Achá has sat in hearings where detainees told a judge they had been tortured and were told it was not relevant. Sexual torture appears nowhere in the annual reports of the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture, an omission familiar to harm reduction campaigners.
“The lack of visibility surrounding the issue of sexual torture exacerbates the isolation and lack of support experienced by survivors,” according to the report. Speaking to TalkingDrugs, Achá is blunt about why it stays hidden: “the police force protects its own officers and a strong institutional corporate culture facilitates impunity.”
The powers that be
Drug policy is among the many aspects of Bolivian life rapidly changing after a political swing to the right. President Rodrigo Paz, elected in October 2025, has spent his first months in office restoring ties with Washington, welcoming back the DEA after a 17-year absence, and joining the US-led “Shield of the Americas”.
Paz inherited the country’s deepest economic crisis in decades, leading to widespread protests. His government has since adopted the language of narco-terrorism against the protestors, borrowing the term from Trumpian rhetoric, and cracked down on dissent through drug laws and drug trafficking accusations.
As Paz’s new government asserts itself and its agenda, Achá expects drug policy to become more punitive than before. But, she is equally clear that the system’s violence towards women who use drugs is not new; for the past two decades where the leftist Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party governed in vocal opposition to Washington and moves to liberalise coca cultivation, the criminalisation of drug use through Article 49 remained in place. But what’s changing now is Paz’s emphasis on militarised policing, supported by deals with the US. This will ultimately mean more officers, more arrests, and more opportunities for abuse.
What comes after
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, ruling on sexual torture in Peru, described the aftereffects of sexual torture lasting a lifetime: sleep destroyed and replaced by nightmares, an inability to concentrate or to function within a family, consequences passing to children. In Bolivia, survivors must also carry these scars with little help. They “endure post-traumatic stress and other long-lasting psychological and physical effects without support”, the report finds, with the state “unable to prevent reprisals against them by the police officers who have been reported or prosecuted.”
The report calls for the state to reform Law 1008 and the decriminalisation of drug use. Achá does not expect that to come from politics. The route she is pursuing runs through the courts: Acción Andina Bolivia has prepared the grounds for a constitutional challenge to Article 49, the path by which Colombia, Mexico and Argentina similarly ended criminalisation. Strike down the article and the pretext goes with it. Fewer arrests mean fewer women in unwatched rooms.
But Achá knows this isn’t a silver bullet. Decriminalisation alone “will not put an end to institutional machismo”, she said, and the cases that never involved drugs would continue. “There are many challenges ahead, such as restructuring, or even refounding, the police force, establishing external oversight of police actions, fostering a cultural shift to reduce patriarchal violence, and effectively implementing gender policies,” she said.
As time passes, more victims are still exposed to sexual violence at the hands of the authorities. One of them accused three officers of raping her in June 2025.
“I have been through an ordeal and have suffered greatly,” she said: “I am asking for justice.”
