Survivors had to wait 40 years for the perpetrators of their assaults to be convicted in a Peruvian court. Ten military officers were sentenced in Lima by the First National Superior Criminal Court to up to 12 years in prison for sexually assaulting nine rural women and girls in 1984, when the army was fighting the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas and set up a base near the Andean towns of Manta and Vilca in Huancavelica, one of Peru's poorest regions. In May of this year, the government's Unified Registry of Victims of the Conflict estimated that there were 5,882 cases of sexual assault during this period of armed conflict. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES