In Colombia, A Town Badly Scarred By Wartime Rape
"He pulled off the shorts I was wearing," she says. "Then he tore off my underwear. I said, 'No.' I don't know if it was minutes or hours, but it felt like an eternity."
She remembers limping home afterward. The pain was excruciating. "It felt like a stick inside me. I couldn't walk," she recalls.
Women have made huge gains across Latin America. They are holding high-powered positions as executives, cabinet ministers and even president. In some Latin American countries, female students outnumber male students in universities.
But violence against women in the region is also pervasive, including a recent wave of acid attacks in Colombia. And now, rights groups and government investigators in Colombia are piecing together horrific crimes repeatedly perpetrated against women and girls in a long and shadowy civil conflict between the government and Marxist guerrillas known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
Today, there's a real chance for peace with the state and rebels negotiating what could be an accord for later this year. But as talks progress, investigators from Historic Memory, a state-supported group, are unearthing details of war crimes.
Camila Medina is an anthropologist with Historic Memory.
"Crimes against women have been of a gigantic magnitude," Medina says, "but they haven't been visible even though they're national in scope."
War Changed Everything
Perhaps no town has endured the wholesale degradation of women as much as El Placer, which is reached by a bone-jarring journey on rutted, dirt roads. The town is a collection of modest cinderblock homes, many of them decaying in the Amazonian sun and overrun with weeds and bugs.
Fewer than 2,000 people live here now. But it was once home to nearly three times as many, bustling with schoolchildren and markets where peasant farmers sold their crops.
Maria Estela Guerrero's family was among those that founded El Placer a half-century ago. She wrote a song about how the community has been altered by the war.
One Sunday, the song goes, the town heard loud gunfire as paramilitaries came in to take out FARC guerrillas.
Allied with the Colombian army, the paramilitaries were an illegal militia of hardened fighters that used terror to erode support for the rebels. Their forte: massacres of villagers. And in 1999, they quickly killed 11 people the day they came to El Placer.
With no state presence here, the paramilitaries stayed for seven years. Their occupation ended only when the national paramilitary movement disbanded.
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