When Sebastián Silva* thinks about the night of 26 January last year, he smells burnt skin and sees blood gushing from the wounds on his right arm as he lays on a wet floor, surrounded by broken furniture, in a care home for teenagers in Montevideo.
Having turned 19 this year, and moved 340 kilometres away from the Uruguayan capital, Sebastián is talking for the first time about how a police raid on his former state-run care home – a place where he should have been safe – led him to receive 31 painful scars across his arm and back, and left him with physical and mental trauma that he says will never go away. Two of his fellow child inmates, both girls, were also assaulted in the course of the raid.
No prosecutor, police officer, doctor, or official from the Uruguayan Institute for Children and Adolescents (INAU) has ever asked the children what happened that night, when officers from Montevideo’s second precinct stormed the Himalaya centre, a care home for adolescents struggling with addiction and mental health issues.
