Popular Women’s Organization
Barrancabermeja Magdalena Medio - Bogotá
Women’s Voices
We Women Will Not Keep Silent
As women, we want to state a series of facts that support our denunciation
and our proposal, that are a cry from our hearts to defend our right
to be civilians, lawful subjects.
More than fifteen months ago, our city lived through a takeover, of blood and fire, like all those that have taken place in Colombia and in the world. With that action, one armed participant was exiled and another positioned as the owner of the city, which would allow one to assume that the political armed struggle is over and that today we are in a period of transition and para-institutional or institutional positioning. This is a fact that may not be seen with any clarity, even in the city, because the mixture or the fight to separate one from the other has not been publicized in the same way, unlike the radical change of the city toward peace, which has been proclaimed everywhere.
The assertion that today we are a haven of peace and tranquility is
permanent. We can accept that there are no public demonstrations
of armed political struggle, but to assert that in the city violence
has been defeated, we can neither accept nor share because the facts
that we gather in our communities confirm for us that violence continues
to be our daily bread.
It is a violence that is no longer directed against a state government,
but rather against human beings, women and men civilians, denying them
their freedom, their role as lawful subjects, to be whatever the dominant
person and leader of the city allows them to be for the people in the
communities.
The activist groups with autonomy disappear each day, replaced by those
that are permitted and created by the boss of the city. To demand
work, education, health, or any social right, has today more than ever
been transformed into a signal for persecution or the label of being
dangerous. Today thinking and acting outside the boundaries established
by those who run the city are prohibited.
As we invite true reflection and assume the role of civil subjects during
Holy Week we do it with a Christian spirit, because each day more we
are more convinced that although we seem widows or hired mourners, as
some man in the city says, what must be defeated is not a person, but
violence, which has become a regular part of everyday life of the communities,
and extraordinarily make a plan for development for citizens that allow
the strengthening of an establishment that would allow violence to be
defeated.
We feel a moral and political obligation as women to denounce the violation
of human rights and international humanitarian law and that even today
they want to convince us that in Barrancabermeja nothing is happening,
when the facts demonstrate the opposite.
1. To date in our city there have been 30 homicides. It
is worth noting that 50% of them were first disappeared and then assassinated,
and among them are eleven corpses that have not been identified.
2. In our city, the phenomenon of disappearance as a strategy
of war has increased, but the worst is that fear and lack of confidence
in state organisms do not allow denouncing these facts, so much that
during the current year there are only three registered denunciations,
when unofficial information in the community tells us that there are
about thirty disappeared persons this year.
3. In Barrancabermeja, in the first three months of 2002, organized
crime, under which robberies and attacks occur every day, has been developing.
We must mention four significant ones for the city.
Banco Bogotá was robbed of 110 million pesos. Bancafé
(Cashier) 8 million pesos. Ideal Drug Store.
Barrancabermeja Gas Works (three vigilantes captured, robbery interrupted).
Coomultrasan de Torcoroma.
4. Stealing gasoline is one way for armed illegal participants
to finance the war; taking advantage of the impoverishment of the communities,
they turn the thievery into a source of employment for poor women and
men. Today we see a parade of buckets full of gasoline in the
neighborhoods, on the street corners, in the patios of houses, where
entire families, children, men, and women, hope to earn each day’s
bread.
Another form of employment is the pipe cartel, which families and communities
become a part of in order to obtain food by this illicit means.
5. The paramilitary troops continue having meetings in the neighborhoods,
open spaces,
street corners, blocks, parks, headquarters of some communal action
and political groups. In this first third of the year one objective
was to present the manual of coexistence as a behavioral norm for each
man and woman, each young person and child.
6. On February 1, 2002, paramilitary troops moved to San Rafael
de Lebrija about twenty
buses filled with women, who work in municipal cleanup and are paid
with money from the Plan Colombia, to be interviewed by the high chief
of the paramilitary squads and thus support the naming of the person
who manages these contracts and read them the manual of coexistence
as the norm for behavior established by them.
7. Displacement continues to be a way to control the city. We
have to say that Barrancabermeja continues to receive dozens of families
from different towns in the region and expells dozens of families from
different neighborhoods of Barrancabermeja who are given only hours
to abandon the area. As a consequence their house or property
are confiscated by the paramilitary troops and given to other families.
8. The paramilitary commandos continue in different neighborhoods and sectors of the city, with a public presence of armed men who punish and torture, manage and apply the norms of coexistence and decide who lives and who dies.
9. Punishment of young people continues (hair cutting, shaving
eyebrows, whippings, punished by doing clean up), and by posting party
schedules, making them turn off equipment according to the time they
establish.
10. Paramilitary squads manage the employment exchanges, deciding
who works and how much time they work, carrying it out by raffles.
11. Death threats to, targeting, and assassinations of social
leaders, union members, and church members continue.
12. Elections, the greatest exercise of democracy, continue to
be manipulated and managed with direct pressure on voters to support
those candidates who back the paramilitary squads.
13. In a breaking and entering carried out on January 7 in the
Las Granjas neighborhood of the northeast sector in a house targeted
by paramilitary troops, among long distance weapons and grenades was
found a list of orders to capture by the public prosecutor’s office
dated May 24, 2001 and received by the DAS on May 25, when Jhon Jairo
Fernández was captured.
14. The Criminal Court Judge Nubia Pinilla, who forwarded denunciations
of paramilitarism to the federal Attorney General’s Office, was
transferred to Bucaramanga because of threats to her life.
15. To date, threats against the leaders and some coordinators
of the Popular Women’s Organization and in general against all
activities of the Organization continue.
We will not keep silent.
In view of this panorama the women of the Popular Women’s Organization
have to say that in Barrancabermeja very serious things continue to
happen, in spite of the end of armed conflict, which does not mean peace
because the current state of postconflict encourages the increasing
degradation of human beings, more hunger, greater deterioration of the
social fabric, more families destroyed, and more violation of civility.
We must contradict the voices that proclaim the haven of peace
in Barrancabermeja. We are obligated to call attention to and
for justice for a city whose democracy, autonomy, and civility are in
danger.
We have to make perfectly clear that we women want no armed participants,
neither guerrilla nor paramilitary, we do not want power that comes
from weapons, we want the re-establishment of civility safeguarded by
its legitimately constituted institutions of order.
We request that an investigation be launched into the civil, military, and police authorities for action or omission in the facts denounced as violating human and civil rights.
We propose supervision of the economic contributions and investments made by the international community in order to check their application to the true social development of communities, and the strengthening of their civility, and not of war and the para-state power consolidated in Barrancabermeja up to now.
We call on the citizenry to rescue the value of civility, to not fall into the seduction or pressure of weapons that continues to militarize our lives and make us part of the war. A call to not recognize any authority other than the State’s, a transparent and legitimate State.
Popular Women’s Organization
Barrancabermeja, March 20, 2002.