No gender utopia
Rios’s mountainside camp regarding the municipality off Icononzo holds 3 hundred individuals, at which 125 was women, consistent with the latest gender proportion out-of FARC as a whole.
“For us, women have the same liberties since the dudes,” told you 38-year-old Gregory Morales, good 17-year veteran of your own break the rules category.
In place of the right-wing paramilitaries they conducted, FARC has actually a beneficial gender commentary, told you Kimberly Theidon, a teacher and you will academic movie director out of gender investigation within the globally training from the Tufts University’s Fletcher College or university.
The previous and you may most recent women in FARC IRIN questioned said that they had registered the latest rebels voluntarily together with been able to like the sexual people. None said that they had encountered sexual assaults – comments consistent with exactly what one trauma counselor whom works together ex-combatants got and additionally noticed.
These accounts vary from reports written by individual liberties watchdogs for example Amnesty Around the globe and the ones liberties don’t extend on the bodies whenever they found pregnancies.
“While you are a guerrilla, you have to get birth prevention,” said Victoria Sandino, an elder FARC frontrunner who was the group’s affiliate toward a gender sandwich-commission during the comfort conversations inside the Havana, Cuba.
She told you it absolutely was a necessity once the FARC was a student in an active combat. In the event the guerrillas had pregnant and you will wanted to secure the baby, they had to go out of the group. Whenever they wished to stand, that they had so you can abort, told you Sandino.
“There is the latest ideology and there is reality, as there are a space between the two,” said Theidon, listing just how she had seen center-old commanders having rather girls by the its side. “What exactly is on forty-five-year-old-man to the younger guerrillera?”
Theidon, that explored the newest FARC widely, said male guerrillas have said they will not should wed its comrades due to the fact female fighters experienced several sexual people. “There is an effective stigma around these female, also one of the of them they served with.”
Women aren’t portrayed regarding the best echelons of one’s equipped clothes. On the eight-representative secretariat one to governs new FARC, for instance, there aren’t any women.
“For people, it’s been tough to get in positions out of leaders since it is an army which have an effective patriarchal program and you can machismo,” Sandino accepted, incorporating one inside tranquility negotiations, an internal fight to have recognising women ensued.
„When you’re attending place the landmine, you need to make sure you never inhale, that the give do not shake“
Five years ago, she said, there had been zero female among 30 older commanders of your own FARC’s joint standard personnel. Today, you’ll find 61 commanders and eleven of them try female.
Relationship and you may fraternity
Ever since thirty-two-year-old Yurany Cardenas is actually a kid broadening abreast of a farm boxed in of the araderie. She dutifully helped their unique mother and absolutely nothing aunt develop corn and you may yucca, nonetheless it are a mature men cousin she searched as much as. Whenever she are fourteen yrs old, you to definitely cousin, old twenty-two at that time, kept to participate the newest FARC.
Cardenas, such anybody else increased when you look at the secluded corners from Colombia, had been familiar with the team. Their mother is also terrible to deliver Cardenas and her aunt to school and FARC fighters pitched within the. “It gave my personal mommy currency and so i might have to go to school, pick courses and you may clothing,” told you Cardenas. “With their assist, We examined three years out-of number 1 school.”
However, Cardenas was not looking school. She planned to subscribe their unique cousin. Cardenas said she produced multiple tries to convince this new guerrillas and it ultimately agreed, into the reputation she spoke so you can their mother regarding it. Their particular mommy, unsurprisingly, begged their to remain: “You happen to be larger, however big enough,” Cardenas appreciated their own stating.