11 - Colombian Women Activists and the Potential for Peace

Summary

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, women activists have been at the forefront of efforts to resolve Colombia's half century of armed conflict (Rojas; ABColombia). Facing threats, attacks, and assassinations, civilian women have formed nationwide peace networks, traversed restricted territories to demand peace, hosted public forums and workshops, participated in hearings on national policy, published reports and dossiers on the conflict's effects on women, and hosted international seminars to highlight their proposals (Bouvier, Colombia; Lamus; Solano, “The Women's Emancipatory”). Though women are seldom given a seat at official negotiating tables, their recent efforts organized around formal negotiations between the Santos administration and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP), which began in 2012 and are set to conclude in 2016, have resulted in increased attention to women's needs and perspectives by both the government and the guerrillas. This chapter explores the development of three networks: Ruta Pacifica de Mujeres in Cauca, the Red de Mujeres del Caribe in the Caribbean region, and the Movimiento Social de Mujeres Contra la Guerra y Por la Paz in Bucaramanga. In this chapter I discuss the effects of the armed conflict on women's lives, their efforts to mobilize against those effects, and the successes and challenges of each of the three networks at the present moment. My goal is to better understand the activities of these networks in Colombia's changing context, the challenges they currently face in achieving their goals, and the effects that women activists’ political subjectivity, once claimed, has on the structures of sociopolitical and economic exclusion that underlie Colombia's long years of conflict. Women's organizing—in a political context in which their voices have long been excluded from the table—marks a new chapter in state-society relations in Colombia and is essential in the construction of a lasting and sustainable peace.

Women and Armed Conflict

From its outset, the conflict in Colombia has affected women in ways specific to their position in the gendered power hierarchy. Most scholars cite Colombia's exclusive and long-standing two-party system as giving rise to widespread and enduring violence that intensified in the late 1940s (Bushnell; Oquist). Violence deepened with the consolidation of leftist guerrilla groups in the 1960s and right-wing paramilitary organizations in the 1970s.