COLOMBIA: Victims of Sexual Violence Under Threat and on Their Own

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

BOGOTÁ, Sep 21 2011 (IPS) - “Another one? Another rape?” was the response Mari got at the Attorney General’s Office in Colombia when she went to report what she had been through. “When they said that, I froze and got up and said ‘Thank you, I’ll come back another day’,” she told human rights defenders later.

Barrancabermeja, July 2007 demonstration by members of the Organización Femenina Popular women's group. Credit: Jorge Mata/Amnesty International

This happened to Mari (not her real name) in December 2010, when she finally mustered the courage to report that she had been gang-raped in 2001 by far-right paramilitaries.

“I am displaced, I am a raped woman under threat, I’ve lost a son,” Mari, a community leader from the western department or province of Valle, told rights watchdog Amnesty International in February.

Hers was one of the testimonies by victims of sexual violence in Colombia cited by a new report presented in Bogotá Wednesday by Amnesty International, which describes how the justice system has failed the victims, sets forth recommendations, and calls on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to set a date for seeking authorisation to open an investigation into the situation in Colombia.

The report, “‘This is what we demand. Justice!’ Impunity for sexual violence against women in Colombia’s armed conflict”, is part of Amnesty’s Campaign for International Justice.

“In large part,” it adds, “this endemic failure has been due to a lack of political will on the part of successive governments to tackle the numerous causes of impunity for human rights violations, especially sexual violence“.

Colombia’s current armed conflict has its roots in a period from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s known simply as “La Violencia”. Since 1964, leftist guerrillas have fought government forces, and ultra-right-wing paramilitary militias reappeared on the scene in 1977. After a demobilisation process in 2003 to 2006, many of the paramilitaries regrouped, and the government now refers to these groups as “bacrim” (short for “criminal bands” in Spanish).

According to the United Nations, the paramilitaries are responsible for 75 percent of the human rights crimes committed in this country’s decades-old civil war.

Guerrillas were apparently the perpetrators in 8.5 percent of the 183 cases of sexual violence against forcibly displaced women that the Constitutional Court ordered the Attorney General’s Office to investigate, in a groundbreaking 2008 ruling.

The security forces accounted for 19.4 percent of the cases, the paramilitaries for 45.8 percent, unidentified illegal armed groups for 4.5 percent, common criminals for 4 percent, and a family member for 1.5 percent, while in the remaining 16.3 percent of the cases, the group to which the alleged perpetrator belonged could not be determined.

As of September 2010, the courts in Colombia had handed down guilty verdicts in five of the 183 cases, four of which were not war-related. In the only case related to the conflict, the paramilitary who was charged was acquitted, although the ruling has been appealed. In another 140 cases, the investigations are at a preliminary stage and the perpetrators have not been formally identified.

In territories controlled by the security forces and paramilitary groups, which are the most populous and wealthiest regions, one common element is invariably present in the cases: When a woman reports to the authorities that she was raped, she immediately begins to receive death threats.

Leidy (not her real name) was abducted, drugged and raped by paramilitaries in 2001 in the northeastern department of Santander when she was 17 years old. The first time she tried to report the rape, she received a threatening phone call, and decided not to go through with it. She then fled to Bogotá.

In the capital, “Two days after I went and found out how to file a complaint, my mum began receiving threats. They called her on the phone and told her to keep it quiet, to stop digging things up that shouldn’t be dug up,” she told Amnesty. “How did they find out? How did they know so much?”

“You can’t report these things because you don’t know which offices (the paramilitaries) are in…you don’t know how they find out that you were asking questions. Why does no one complain? For fear that they will do something to you… And it makes me angry that when you try to do something, you get threatened, and there’s no one to protect you.”

As the mother of another of the rape victims whose story is told in the Amnesty report said: “I’ve knocked on so many doors and found not one of them open to me.”

A survey by the relief and development organisation Oxfam and the Colombian women’s organisation Casa de la Mujer found that 82 percent of the victims of sexual violence who were interviewed did not report the incident.

Moreover, the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences only classified a mere .62 percent of all cases of alleged sexual violence in which forensic testing was carried out in 2009 as “socio-political” or conflict-related.

Rape sows terror in communities and leads to forced displacement and, thus, to the theft of land. Former health minister Camilo González, who is the head of the Institute of Peace and Development Studies (INDEPAZ), says that up to eight million hectares of land have been taken from their legitimate owners during the armed conflict.

The Constitutional Court’s 2008 ruling concluded that “sexual violence against women is a habitual, extensive, systematic and invisible practice in the Colombian armed conflict.”