No gender paradise
Rios’s mountainside camp throughout the municipality of Icononzo holds three hundred some body, from which 125 are women, in keeping with the fresh new sex proportion out of FARC general.
“For all of us, ladies have a similar liberties because the boys,” said 38-year-old Gregory Morales, a beneficial 17-year experienced of push back group.
Rather than ideal-side paramilitaries it struggled, FARC has actually an intercourse commentary, said Kimberly Theidon, a teacher and you may academic director out-of gender study for the internationally studies during the Tufts University’s Fletcher School.
Both previous and current ladies in FARC IRIN questioned said they’d registered the fresh rebels voluntarily along with come able to prefer the sexual partners. None said they had experienced intimate attacks – statements in line with just what you to definitely shock counselor who works with ex-combatants got and seen.
Such membership vary from profile written by person legal rights watchdogs instance Amnesty International and the ones liberties did not extend on the government when it concerned pregnancies.
“If you’re an excellent guerrilla, you have got to just take contraceptive,” told you Victoria Sandino, an elderly FARC frontrunner who was brand new group’s associate on the a beneficial sex sub-commission during the peace talks during the Havana, Cuba.
She told you it was a necessity once the FARC was at an energetic conflict. In the event that guerrillas got pregnant and you will planned to contain the kid, that they had to exit the team. When they wished to stand, they had to abort, said Sandino.
“You will find the new ideology as there are reality, and there’s a space among them,” told you Theidon, detailing exactly how she got seen center-aged commanders that have quite people by its side. “What is actually towards the forty-five-year-old-man into the younger guerrillera?”
Theidon, having explored the new FARC widely, told you men guerrillas said they won’t want to wed the comrades due to the fact lady competitors experienced numerous intimate people. “There can be a beneficial stigma up to these types of ladies, even among of these it served with.”
Lady aren’t represented in the finest echelons https://datingmentor.org/edarling-review/ of the armed clothes. From the 7-representative secretariat one controls the latest FARC, as an example, there are no people.
“For us, this has been difficult to get in ranks from management because it’s an armed forces having a good patriarchal system and machismo,” Sandino accepted, adding that in the serenity dealings, an internal challenge to have recognising lady ensued.
“While planning to put the landmine, you need to definitely don’t inhale, that your give don’t move”
Five years before, she said, there are no female among the 30 older commanders of your FARC’s shared general staff. Now, you’ll find 61 commanders and you may eleven of these is women.
Friendship and fraternity
From the time 32-year-old Yurany Cardenas was a young child broadening up on a ranch boxed in from the araderie. She dutifully assisted the woman mommy and you can nothing brother build corn and you will yucca, nevertheless is a mature male cousin she looked doing. Whenever she is actually fourteen yrs old, one relative, aged twenty-two at that time, left to join brand new FARC.
Cardenas, for example someone else elevated from inside the secluded corners regarding Colombia, had been always the group. This lady mother is actually also worst to transmit Cardenas and her sibling to school and you will FARC fighters pitched in the. “It provided my personal mommy currency and so i might go to school, purchase courses and clothing,” said Cardenas. “Through its help, I studied 3 years away from number 1 college.”
However, Cardenas was not looking college or university. She wanted to join the woman cousin. Cardenas told you she made numerous tries to convince the new guerrillas and you may it in the end consented, on the status she talked to the lady mother about this. The lady mother, not surprisingly, begged her to stay: “You will be larger, but not adequate,” Cardenas remembered their stating.
