A displaced woman carries her child June 15, 2010 in Tumaco in a neighborhood of houses on stilts. Jan Sochor (LatinContent via Getty Images)
When Yadira first saw a gun, she saw it up close and pointed it directly at her. “Get undressed,” the paramilitary commander yelled at him while holding the revolver in his hand. “I anxiously told him no, but he pointed at the gun. No protection was created, nothing created. It was my first time with a man.” It was also the last. “I never told anyone, absolutely anyone. Never, out of fear. To me it was like a stain, an insult, a shame that people knew. So I kept that to myself. I’ve never had a boyfriend since then either. I never had anything else.”
He was 16 years old and it happened in 1996 when the AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) in Sucre was already law. There lived Yadira who, after more than 20 years on the Truth Commission, told her story in the chapter My Body Is The Truth, which gives a voice to women who have suffered the worst of a war between men. 10,864 were heard and their stories reveal how their bodies were used as another weapon in the conflict.
The women suffered harassment, persecution and the dispossession of their land. Many were separated from their children and were the main victims of sexual and reproductive violence, especially in the midst of war. His perpetrators were all. The guerrillas, the paramilitaries, the public authorities. The Single Register of Victims says there are at least 32,446 people in Colombia who have suffered sexual violence during the conflict. Women and girls make up 92.5%. The Truth Commission heard 1,294 stories about this type of crime, 89.51% of which came from a woman. They were the ones who suffered the most from the violence of arms and who received the least justice. The Commission acknowledges that this part of the lengthy final report was one of the most difficult to produce, given that in many cases “the fear and shame of the victims prevail, as do the impunity and silence of those responsible for the atrocities committed by women.
A displaced woman enters her wooden home June 15, 2010 near Tumaco, Nariño. Jan Sochor (LatinContent via Getty Images)
Sexual and reproductive violence intensified in the midst of the war. Torture during pregnancy, forced abortions and forced pregnancies, including as a result of rape, were some of the forms of violence exposed in the document. The testimonials take your breath away. Rarely has the country heard what women experienced in war from their own voices.
The paramilitaries raped Sandra and when her husband tried to defend her, they left her a widow. “I suffered a lot when these people arrived. They grabbed me, tied me up, raped me, put a stocking in my mouth. I grabbed her with my fists. Then they pulled out a knife and I thought they were going to cut my neck, but they stabbed me in the back. That was the sign of my whole life. About four or five days later they killed my husband for confronting them. They pulled out a knife and cut his neck. I was at home doing laundry. He had small children. They told me I was a guerrilla and they insulted me.” Sandra wasn’t a guerrilla, she was a farmer from Yarumal, Antioquia.
Most testimonies come from rural women. Where the state presence is composed of the military, war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed against girls and young women. All armed groups were responsible, but not all did it in the same way. In the fights between them, they agreed in the way they acted, but in front of the women, they worried about making differences with the other armed actors. The cruelty of the paramilitaries is told in dozens of testimonies. They were cruel and ruthless. Jacobo, a former member of the AUC’s Centauros bloc, recounted the humiliation that manifested itself not only in sexual violence, but also in related events such as torture, physical and symbolic disappearances, misogyny, and even cannibalism.
“I remember so much that we devoured it and that part of the head was left that we couldn’t eat that. And they hung her up on a pole. And it took months and months and months until… The skin was gone, the flesh was gone, the whole skeleton. Then we had to take the skeleton and break it into pieces and start making bone knives and wear them.” The paramilitary says they killed a woman with a stick but raped her first. The Manes said: Strike everywhere. Eat her here, give her there, make her scream, I don’t know what, bite her.” The woman died after three hours of beatings. “We destroyed everything: arms, legs, stomach. She was covered in bruises on her face. You ate bruises, then you said, ‘How can we kill a man like that?’ But the answer was, ‘You eat and don’t ask, keep eating.’ Contempt for women was total, and in many cases, the report says, has been the state does not properly investigate these crimes, implement adequate differentiation mechanisms, and do not punish the perpetrators.
One of the most obvious expressions of the humiliation of war was the obsession of men associated with the armed groups with girls and youth. The guerrilla made sexual violence an uncontrolled and unpunished practice. “They raped me to show they were in charge of the area. On my own I had no one to say anything to or ask for help because while some were raping me, the others pointed their guns at me and told me to shut up, or else they killed me on the spot, so I couldn’t . And besides, that’s the strength of a man compared to that of a… It was three FARC guerrillas who raped me. Aside from physical harm, they caused me moral harm,” said one of the commission’s women, pointing out that both the FARC and the ELN planned this type of violence and the commanders who participated or were aware of it , no action was taken against them. these facts, “suggesting that these actions were introduced as accepted practice but detrimental to their ideological struggle and statutes.”
The commission also heard various testimonies holding members of the security forces responsible, although they were the main perpetrators. The institution with the most ascribed victimizations was the National Army, followed by the police. Data collected in the report shows that the worst moment for women in the armed forces was between 2006 and 2014. “As the country moved towards de-escalation of the conflict, public violence increased,” the document indicates.
The presence of the military in the areas led to an increase in sexual violence against women and girls. As a legal armed group, their relationship with civilians was more direct and characterized by power and coercion. In the fight against the guerrillas, women were one of their tools to demonstrate power. It didn’t matter if she was a child or a pregnant adult. “They opened me up, they tried to get my son out alive and left me dead; To them I was dead and there is my conscience. They cut me with a scalpel. I have the marks on my body,” says a woman who was believed to be close to a guerrilla and pressed for information.
A displaced girl waits for her mother, Jan Sochor (Image: LatinContent via Getty Images)
Reproductive Violence: Contraception and sterilization, forced pregnancy and abortion, torture during pregnancy, and forced maternity or child rearing worsened during the most humiliating period of the war between 1996 and 2007. The FARC imposed abortion on combatants in some blocs during that contraception is compulsory in all structures. “In situations of intense confrontation, forced abortions became a strategy to gain a military advantage for the armed group, regardless of the severe physical and psychological consequences it posed to women,” she says.
In the territorial dispute, sexual violence against women was used to punish those who were perceived as allies of the opponents: for the paramilitaries and for the public authorities they were guerrillas, and for the guerrillas they were allies of the paramilitaries. In every respect, women have been the target of armed groups, legal or not.
“There was the government, the paramilitaries and the guerrillas. We lived between these three wars; When the guerrillas came in, well, because they didn’t mistreat us very much, but when the paramilitaries came in, they mistreated us. The army came in and abused us because they said we were guerrillas and the guerrillas said we were paramilitaries.” Women suffered an all-out war.
“My act of sacrifice was when I was 12 years old. I remember sleeping with my grandparents and they would get me out of bed. They took me to a mountain, the moon was clear as day. It was one o’clock in the morning over there. That was the time they needed most: around one or two in the morning. They burned down houses. It didn’t matter if there were people inside. As it was, they set it on fire. Then they took us out and raped us. They told us that we were the daughters of guerrillas and that’s why they raped us. Even those two burns you see here are from cigarettes. I hate cigarettes, I don’t like them. They burned me and said to me, “Does that hurt? That’s because you’re the daughter of a guerrilla. “I kidnapped and held captive in the bush for a day and a night.”
The commission listened to peasant women, black women, indigenous women and community leaders. Also for those who have been persecuted just because they were born in the middle of a conflict, between men always armed and from different sides. Many were orphaned as children; others saw their daughters or themselves raped. Others were displaced and returned to the cities as victims of violence, arriving with their children or alone without news of their loved ones.
The Colombian armed conflict has exacerbated violence against women, and until now their stories are beginning to emerge.
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