Colombia Women Standing Up To Paramilitaries

by Constanza Vieira

(IPS) BOGOTA -- Women activists in Colombia's "oil capital," Barrancabermeja, provide a lesson in bravery, defying pressure and threats from the right-wing paramilitaries to continue their social activism.

Just 300 metres from the city's central police station, Ines Pena, a pregnant 22-year-old member of the Organizacion Femenina Popular (Popular Women's Organization -- OFP) was forced into a car by two armed members of the paramilitary militias on Jan. 28

While the car -- which the young journalist all-too vividly remembers was red -- drove along, the men burned her feet with scalding water and shaved her head.

"This is to make you leave that OFP that you're involved in, and for you to continue doing 'Culture for Life', but for real this time," said her aggressors, referring to the name of the segment of an OFP TV program that Pena presents.

'Culture for Life' focuses on human rights abuses against children, domestic violence, and the recruitment of minors by the armed groups involved in Colombia's four-decade civil war.

But "Despite the threats and torture to which she was subjected, Pena made her habitual presentation of her segment" of the program on Feb. 1, the local Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP) reported.

She was defying the odds: in the space of just one month, starting on Jan. 1, a total of 11 people were killed in Barrancabermeja, which is under paramilitary control.

The OFP emerged in 1972 when a group of homemakers began to organize community soup kitchens to help feed their children and alleviate hunger in their poor neighborhoods.

Today the group links more than 3,000 women nationwide, as well as local and international human rights groups, working for "the reconstruction of the social fabric of poor communities...and a more just and balanced society in socioeconomic, cultural and political terms," according to the OFP web site.

One of the group's slogans is that Colombian "women are not giving birth to and raising children for the war."

In and around Barrancabermeja there are 600 women's groups that "provide examples of courage in resisting forced displacement and kidnapping, and in continuing their struggle when their fellow activists are killed," said Jesuit priest Francisco de Roux, director of the Program for Development and Peace in the Magdalena Medio region.

Pena is one of those who decided to stay in her city and continue her work.

For decades, Barrancabermeja was a stronghold of the National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia's second-largest rebel group and, to a lesser extent, of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main insurgent group. The FARC rose up in arms in 1964, and the ELN in 1965.

But the right-wing paramilitary militias began to move into the city in 1990, and in 1998 they gained control over Barrancabermeja, waging a neighborhood-by-neighborhood and house-by-house battle with the guerrillas.

According to official figures, 510 people were killed in the city of around 300,000 between 1990 and 1998. In 2000, the U.S. Embassy reported 567 murders.

In 2003, the ombudsman's office documented 150 killings, 80 forced disappearances and 800 cases of people forced to flee the city.

One of last year's victims was Esperanza Amariz, whose body was found on Oct. 16, after she was forcibly disappeared.

When Amariz's body appeared, the Colombian office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights urged the "paramilitary groups to respect the right to life of all civilians, and of women in particular, as well as the work carried out by their organizations."

FLIP pointed out that in January, an international commission was shot at while visiting a housing project that the OFP is building in the municipality of San Pablo, to the north of Barrancabermeja.

In June 2003, the OFP addressed a statement to Colombia and the international community, asking "Are we willing to accept the paramilitary groups as the new authorities in the conflict zones?"

A report by the OFP describes the social control exercised by the paramilitaries since they took over the city, stating that local "social organizations are opposed to the paramilitary groups' assuming of authority and taking control of government functions and institutions."

According to the OFP, the paramilitaries "call together the local communities in the barrios to dictate their new rules," "punish children for what they consider 'misbehavior'...like bad grades in school, fighting or squabbling with their siblings, using drugs or failing to respect the 'curfew' set" by the paramilitaries.

IPS gained access to the "Rules of Coexistence" that regulate relations between the paramilitary militias -- who call themselves "self-defense groups" -- and the local population of Barrancabermeja.

The rules stipulate a 12-hour detention of minors who return home late.

The document sets curfews for public businesses and liquor sales, and states that the paramilitaries must issue permits for carrying firearms and wearing military fatigues.

It also provides for forced labor for those who fail to keep their homes looking "presentable," and underlines "respect for private property," establishing penalties for those found guilty of stealing livestock, household goods or personal belongings.

But the rules also provide for the "confiscation" of farms and homes located alongside roads, whose owners fail to "keep their boundaries clear and clean, in such a way as to facilitate visibility."

The paramilitaries "punish men and women, imposing penalties that range from being tied up, to lashings, the shaving of heads and eyebrows, and death," states the OFP report.

They also "rape young women for refusing to be their girlfriends and lovers," and ban the use of miniskirts by girls and long hair and earrings by boys.

"They drag people out of their homes to settle scores and punish them, and the victims are later found dead, or their names swell the long list of the 'disappeared'," according to the women's group.

"The Magdalena Medio river and surrounding areas are public cemeteries of human remains. The bodies found there are almost always in a state of decomposition and lacking parts," the report adds.

According to the newspaper El Colombiano, "the self-defense groups publicly punish children who disobey their parents. They do the same with women who are unfaithful, making them carry a sign that reads, for example, 'adulterer' or 'prostitute.'"

The paramilitaries "threaten social organizations, and impede their work. That is especially true in the case of the OFP, which faces more and more frequent and harsh pressure," the group complains.

Right-wing President Alvaro Uribe recently admitted that the guerrillas were not forced out of Barrancabermeja by the armed forces, but by the paramilitaries.

He also acknowledged, according to de Roux, that the remedy "is worse than the disease itself."

The United Nations as well as leading human rights watchdogs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch hold the paramilitary umbrella, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), responsible for the lion's share of the abuses committed against civilians in Colombia's civil war.

The international organizations also report that the AUC has ties to members of the Colombian armed forces, which is advised by Americans.

As part of peace talks with the Uribe administration, a portion of the AUC has agreed to demobilize in exchange for an amnesty-like arrangement by which the group's members will not go to jail for their abuses.