Leaders against all odds: Women victims of conflict in Colombia

This article represents a first attempt to address a gap in the literature where the relevance of WVC peace-building capacity has been ignored. The interviews and ethnographic work conducted by the author revealed a wealth of information, much of it beyond the scope of this article. This study both corroborates findings drawn from secondary sources and reveals new evidence about WVCs and their leadership.

Colombian WVC leaders have to overcome at least two kinds of victimization: conflict victimization and victimization as leaders (mainly in the form of death threats). Some leaders are under constant and others under sporadic threat, but none of the leaders have been able to live free from danger. Overcoming complex conflict trauma requires heroism in itself, but living under constant threat takes superhuman fortitude. These are the kinds of leaders the author interviewed.

Puzzlingly, of all the WVCs studied here, it is precisely those who suffered more than one form of victimization and who were subject to the most severe forms of victimisation (sexual violence and disappearances) who have assumed leadership roles. These findings challenge previous studies suggesting that sexual trauma inevitably leads to shame, fear, distrust and ostracism (Levi, 1988; Human Rights Watch, 2003; Denov, 2006) and that reconciliation is difficult in conflict regions where sexual violence is prevalent (Ni Aolain et al., 2012: 122, 140).

WVC leaders have found diverse ways to overcome their victimizations and traumas, but they all have one thing in common. Joining or creating victims’ organizations and helping others are themselves part of their own complex healing processes. The informality of some of these organizations makes it hard to know exactly how many WVCs are current members, but it is worrying that until 2012 the vast majority of WVCs were not organized (CMH, IOM, Universidad de los Andes, 2012). There are a number of reasons for this. Many WVCs are afraid of being targeted, threatened or killed (Comisión de Seguimiento, 2008; Petesch and Gray, 2009, cited by Lemaitre and Sandvik, 2015). As described above, hundreds of WVCs have been killed or disappeared and threats to prominent women are common. The personal interviews also revealed that some WVCs do not join organizations because they are unaware of their existence. Clearly, WVCs’ fears for their personal safety, the dispersed nature of the organizations themselves and the lack of education common among WVCs (RUV, 2015) all affect their ability to join associations. This in turn may impede the political impact of women’s collective agency.

It is a humbling experience to meet a WVC. Most of the WVCs interviewed are single mothers and sole or main breadwinners. They often have to support their entire surviving extended families. All are IDPs and most of them live in very basic conditions, in violence-prone urban neighbourhoods where prospects for proper reintegration are poor. Bogotá’s slums are riddled with invisible boundaries (Sandvick and Lemaitre, 2013 and personal interviews, 2015) and no-go zones where random violence is commonplace (two of the WVCs had family members who were killed for unknown reasons) and where daily existence is precarious, because of hazardous roads, poor infrastructure, hilly surroundings and/or little or no state presence. Potrero Largo’s urban landscape may seem safer, but overcrowding and domestic and street violence are very common there. The structures of community life are absent from both areas, with the exception of schools, comedores comunitarios, and a dispersed web of charities and NGOs working independently of each other. Schools and comedores comunitarios feed hundreds of children and old people daily at their communal dining facilities.

Of the 16 WVCs interviewed, only five are affiliated with organizations (two of whom, WVC leaders #1 and #2, created their own organizations). The author also discovered that the three leaders happened to have been the respective victims of the three main actors in the conflict: Esther was a victim of the paramilitary, Ruth of the military and Bromelia of the guerrillas. Table 2 summarizes the characteristics and motivations of the three WVC leaders, comparing them with other WVCs, using the classifications employed in the Supplementary Information—Appendix.

The first column of Table 2 demonstrates that, before they were victimised, all the WVC leaders experienced and rebelled against extreme forms of family-related victimization or hardship. Maria Eugenia’s parents died of natural causes when she was 9 years old, leaving her an orphan. She and her two younger siblings were sent away from her birthplace, Cali, to live with extended family in a rural community in Caloto (Choco). In Caloto, Afro-Colombian women often wear very few clothes and expose their breasts. Victims believed that their own nudity could have provoked paramilitaries to rape them when they arrived in the region. Rape was a well-established military strategy among the paramilitaries. The victimized women actually felt responsible for their own rapes. Esther generously initiated “kitchen talks” with a group of rape victims, telling them not to blame themselves for the abuse. She became a local inspiration before being victimized herself. Ruth was a victim of her paramilitary partner’s continual violence until he was eventually killed. She claims to have lost seven children as the result of his attacks. She fled to Bogotá with her remaining five children to escape her abusive partner and the killing of her two brothers by the Armed Forces. Bromelia ran away from home and went to live with an aunt when she was 8 years old, to escape her father’s violence against her mother.

All three leaders had their own inspirational role models, predating their conflict victimisation. Esther describes her paternal grandmother, whom she never met, as her main source of inspiration. Her grandmother rebelled after being raped by the liberals during the La Violencia period (1945–1965), and inspired other women to dissent and resist oppression. Ruth is extremely religious and views God as her protector. Her extreme piety has strengthened her in the most difficult moments of her life. Bromelia both rebelled against and emulated her own mother who inspired her to lead the women’s organization that initially saved her and then, ironically, was the main cause of her disappearance. Many people expect women leaders to be rebellious and to have had inspirational role models. What is more surprising is that they all had early experiences of victimisation and extreme hardship.

In demographic terms, it is worth noting that all three women are mothers, with more than one child each. All the women acknowledged that at some point their children had given them the strength to carry on, a fact which contradicts the common perception that having children limits agency (Carlman, 2012: 82–83). See also Aroussi (2009), for a critique of feminist representations of women as mythical peace-builders and postmodern feminists who have insisted on “the futility of any attempt to define an essential female nature” (Spegele, 2002: 392, cited by Arousi, 2009). All the women who had partners before their conflict victimization (partners who had often fathered all or most of their children) had separated from them after being victimized by the conflict (Esther’s partner left her when she was raped, feeling that he was the main victim), and none of them cites a partner as a source of emotional or economic support. While all three now have new partners, these partners were never explicitly mentioned as relevant to their lives as leaders. All leaders are older than the average victim (40 versus 28 years old). Importantly, recent empirical research, has linked Colombian women’s victim’s age to resiliency. Amar et al. (2014) in a study of 113 IDP women in Colombia show that victims older than 40 are more resilient than the younger ones. Finally, all the women completed high school, something we would expect leaders to have in common.

The third column of Table 2 describes the women’s traits after conflict victimization. All three leaders (and all fourteen pilot leaders) suffered severe and multiple forms of victimization: all three are IDPs; Esther was threatened and raped twice by the paramilitary; Ruth’s two brothers were killed by the military; Bromelia’s mother was disappeared by the Farc and, during her initial search for the truth, they first threatened to kill her and then forced her to live. We might expect such severe victimizations to have left these leaders mere ghosts of their former selves (Shultz et al., 2014). However, all the leaders (including those from the pilot study), together with some of the WVCs, saw their displacements as opportunities. This finding has been confirmed by a 2011 study conducted by Ibañez et al. and by Shultzs et al. (2014). To them, while their victimizations and forced displacements remained traumatic, their meaning was transformed over time. Most of the women felt that their experiences had given them the chance to overcome patriarchy and other cultural forms of oppression. And, for some, they had even opened up hitherto unimagined opportunities in the cities. Gladys, one of the WVCs interviewed, is a prime example. Raped by the paramilitaries at a very young age because she refused to become their informant, Gladys fled to Bogotá. After overcoming almost indescribable difficulties, she trained as a jeweller at a state school, saving up her earnings as a domestic worker for more than 5 years to help get her life back on track. She felt that her training, together with the support of the women with whom she had associated, had helped her overcome her trauma and become a “uni-personal enterprise”.

The state has played a fundamental role in supporting the three WVC leaders, together with some of the potential leaders, such as Gladys. All the registered WVCs received humanitarian aid and counselling when they arrived at the cities, but the leaders also received economic assistance and home subsidies and some were even granted personal protection. This shows that domestic opportunity structures are critically important for leaders.

As we might expect, all the leaders have been involved in forms of political interaction while fighting for their rights. But none of them have joined existing political parties, which they perceive as clientelistic and alien to their cause. “I was forced to enter politics, since rights are politics and without them there are no opportunities”, Ruth explains. Esther’s first political act was to take part in leading the takeover of the Bogotá Red Cross building, to demand concrete action on behalf of IDPs. She claims that this act led to Constitutional Court Ruling T-025/2004. The takeover empowered her and enabled her to meet major public officials including then president Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002). Bromelia’s organization was very active in the creation of the Victims’ Law and has recently spearheaded a process of collective reparations for 2,000 of their members.

It is interesting to note that all the leaders and potential leaders (including three of the WVCs interviewed) have continued to educate and train themselves and all of them have expressed the wish to be better equipped. Bromelia “had to go from 0 to 100 in a matter of weeks”, as she puts it, when she retrained herself in basic skills ranging from accounting to public relations.

In a country where conflict is still on-going, most leaders receive death threats and many have been brutally re-victimized. Esther, for example, was raped for leading an organization which, ironically, helps women overcome sexual victimization. Others, as statistics and press stories have demonstrated, have been murdered because of their leadership activities, including five of the pilot leaders. Nevertheless, when asked, none of the three leaders saw these threats as deterrents. They regarded the dangers as “part of the job”. Esther, like other very visible leaders, has two bodyguards and an armoured car, provided by the state. Bromelia has no state protection, but is always accompanied by other women who act as her “shield”. Ruth has addressed safety issues “personally”. It is unclear how she did this, but she does have one son in the military and one in the guerrilla rank and file. While she regrets that her son is in the military, since they victimized her, she also claims that this is her way of repaying her “taxes” to the state. Esther also refers to her son’s military service as her “taxes”. In a way, this is their symbolic tribute to a state that abandoned them for so long and is now attempting to make amends.

After their relocation to the cities, all the WVCs interviewed found that their economic situations became more precarious. They all struggle to make ends meet, but leaders view this, too, “as part of the job”. As we might expect, leaders have very little time for any additional salaried work.

Table 3 lists non-relevant variables among leaders. It is worth emphasizing that they did not benefit from previous leadership or mentorship, nor were they members of civil society organizations or involved in partisan politics before becoming leaders. This suggests that these leaders were self-made. All three of the country’s main ethnic groups are represented, demonstrating that ethnicity and religion are not relevant factors in leadership.

Similarly, leaders have been able to overcome their traumas without necessarily receiving retributive justice. This finding coincides with those of representative victim surveys throughout the world, which have shown that victims prefer truth and reparations over justice and revenge (Kiza et al., 2006). This reflects attitudes in Colombia, where, on average, the population appears to be less vengeful and more prone to reconciliation (Rettberg, 2015). These findings have been indirectly corroborated by Rettberg and Prieto (2010), who also argue that Colombian victims have a high social proximity with demobilized combatants. Studying former conflict communities, Prieto (2012) found victims and former combatants peacefully sharing workspaces and schools. Explanations for this are diverse, but range from the superior status that demobilized combatants still have, to war fatigue, apathy, or a general willingness to leave the past behind.

In fact, most WVCs argue that helping others helps them to forgive. Some scholarly work on reconciliation and forgiveness in other countries has produced similar findings (Skaar, 2013). In addition, the constant threats that all leaders receive and the number of leaders who have been assassinated attest to the fact that these leaders are willing to sacrifice their own personal safety in the interests of the greater good.

Overall most of the main characteristics of WVC leaders show that they are self-made. However, without the structures of opportunity their empowerment and leadership wouldn’t have been possible. The combination of the two merits a further discussion on governments’ approach to WVC when designing peace-building agendas.