My body is the Truth: the importance of listening
Have you ever felt powerless when trying to tell your truth? Have you felt that no matter how much you speak, no one listens to you because you don't have the necessary evidence? This, unfortunately, is the reality for many women and members of the LGBTIQ+ community who have been victims in the framework of the Colombian armed conflict.
Today, in our country, it is strange not to be informed about violence throughout the territories and its effects on certain communities and groups. However, it continues to be something that is not talked about enough in Colombian society, which ends up being reflected in the creation of various strategies that have emerged to inform and denounce what happens and what is ignored.
One of these strategies is the Final Report of the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition. The document is "the result of four years of research, committed listening and dialogue on more than half a century of war and armed conflict" (Comisión de la
Verdad, 2022). Within it, there are thousands of individual stories and of entire communities that were, and continue to be, victims of the ravages of the armed conflict. Among these are indigenous, Afro-Colombian and rural communities, but two other significant minorities stand out: women and LGBTIQ+ people. These two groups are among those represented in the report, so much so that there is an entire volume for their cases and experiences.
In order to know more about the subject, Vivian Cuello Santana, former co-coordinator and researcher of the volume on women and people from the LGBTIQ+ community, and member of the gender working group of the Colombian Truth Commission, sat down with Naife to talk of her experience dealing with this harsh reality seen in our territory. As a result of her efforts and achievements in the field, Cuello, who majored in International Relations at Universidad del Norte, was able to form part of the team that coordinated the investigation presented in "My body is the Truth", the chapter of the Truth Commission Report dedicated to recounting the experiences of women and LGBTIQ+ people in the context of the armed conflict.
"My body is the truth" is the chapter of the Truth Commission focused on the impact the conflict had on women and the LGBTIQ+ community.
In 2017, before finishing her studies in International Relations at the Uninorte, Cuello began working as a researcher at the Caribe Afirmativo organization, where she had the opportunity to coordinate reports before the commission on everything related to the impacts, affectations, events, and calls for help from victims. During her stay in the position, the researcher states that Caribe Afirmativo "was the LGBTIQ+ organization that presented the most reports before the Truth Commission." After 4 years in the position, in 2021, Cuello received the offer to work as a researcher, and later coordinator, in the gender working group of the Truth Commission, allowing her to contribute to a chapter dedicated exclusively to giving visibility to "a historically delegitimized violence on the part of communities [...] but above all on the part of state entities of civil servants". The purpose of this chapter is to give voice to all those who have not been able to do so, simply because the Colombian
state has done little but silence their experiences and reduce them to a single aspect of their identity.
In general, when dealing with the issue of the armed conflict in Colombia, sexual violence is one of the most important points to focus on, and one of the most intersectional, since anyone can be a victim of it. However, in this case, the Commission found it appropriate to dedicate an entire chapter to two minorities, women and LGBTIQ+ people, since they were not victims of this crime alone, but of many others such as threats, displacement, exile, homicide, attempted homicide, and kidnapping, among other acts that threaten the integrity of a person. The interviewee explains that the main motivation of the chapter was precisely to denounce those "questions that have historically been made to women and LGBTIQ+ people", without the need to make this product somewhat reductionist and ignore the other parts of the victims' story.
During the interview, Cuello clarified that the decision to write a complete chapter alluding to the subject was not as simple as it seems. When discussing the progress of the report, the researcher stated that there were periodic meetings between the commission and the organizations, which were called the Gender Technical Assistance Tables. In those meetings, the commissioner in charge of everything related to gender in the Truth Commission, Alejandra Miller, made the proposal to the rest of the commissioners, some of whom had to be convinced as to the need to raise awareness about these very specific experiences.
The importance of this chapter lies not only in its objective of presenting and denouncing violent acts against these groups, but also in outlining the trigger for many of these attacks: the identity of the victims. In the case of women, in Colombia and in many countries, their word does not have the strength or power it deserves, since society is often guided by the ideologies of the patriarchal framework, where women are seen as a being an extension of, or a possession of, someone else. Women are victims of attacks for the simple fact of being women, especially on the fringes of the Colombian armed conflict, where power is often exercised by those holding the gun. Cuello highlights that one of the reasons behind these acts against women is because they "have been the strength of the territories, [...] they have defended peace, life, and have gone against the armed conflict.". In the affected communities, women are seen as a fundamental part of the households, which is why the actors used strategies to forcefully mobilize them and, with this, bring in the rest of the community, because it is through them that the social fabric is sustained. It is precisely because of this that they are used as objects to manipulate the rest of the population and force them to clear the areas they want to occupy: "At the moment of violence against women, they [control] the territory, because they [impose] a moral, social, specific order on [this]".
In the case of LGBTIQ+ people, which is Cuello's principal research focus, their lives are often on the line simply for expressing their way of loving and for manifesting their non-normative gender identity. The researcher stated that one of the motivations for the chapter was "to tell the country, look, this violence occurred because of so many prejudices around sexualities and non-normative gender in the country", and give visibility to the type of conflicts that use diversity as a way to divide the population. Reading the chapter, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Colombian society owes a debt to the LGBTIQ+ community, with Cuello commenting on how the tacit approval of the communities was a factor in the violations experienced by the LGBTIQ+ community at the hands of the guerrillas, the paramilitaries and the public forces. For Cuello, it is essential that Colombian society overcomes these prejudices which allowed atrocious abuses against this community, and the first step would be to listen to the testimonies of so many victims. The researcher says that one of the advantages of the volume is that it was possible to work with the victims' first-hand testimonies, which is fundamental in the process of clarifying the truth. The LGBTIQ+ section highlights the
importance of giving voice and visibility to all people within the same community, taking into account their identity as such, and not simply locking them into broader groups. It is essential to separate identities in these cases in order to have a clear idea of the situation and its consequences for specific groups.
From the above, we can have an idea of the complexity of the issue and the importance that this volume represents both for the victims and for the rest of Colombian society. It is not easy to cover something as delicate as the situations of these two groups in a certain number of pages. The researcher explains that, at the beginning, they had approximately a thousand pages presenting all types of information and data considered relevant for public knowledge, but unfortunately, they could not be approved and had to be shortened or directly discarded. "The volume of the report before was much longer, and we would have loved to [publish it], but in order for people to actually read the report and be interested in this as a Colombian society, we had to do a pedagogical exercise of cutting," says Cuello. The intention was never to exclude or minimize certain stories, but to make the chapter much more accessible to the general public;
The main objective is for people to read it and to stop ignoring the reality that millions of Colombians are forced to face.
Due to the rigor that the process of clarifying the truth requires in its quest for non-repetition, the preparation of this chapter had to overcome many obstacles. One of the main factors that made the information gathering process difficult was the deadline established for the delivery of the results. In this regard, Cuello states that, as a Commission, it would have been much better to have had more time to try to effectively report on certain aspects of a conflict of more than 60 years and counting. Faced with the impossibility of covering all the national territory, a decision was made to focus on
case studies exploring specific regions and sub-regions, with Montes de Maria in the Caribbean region being one such example. Apart from this, due to the nature of the document and the importance of hearing from the victims directly, the lack of security in certain areas was a major obstacle. The coordinator comments that there were many cases in which they had to take the victims out of their homes, either because their relatives did not know about the situation or because of the presence of armed groups in certain communities, which put the victim's safety at risk, once again, and that of the interviewing team. It is worth mentioning that several of the stories that were going to be included in the report could not be heard due to things like the fear of the victims and the discrimination they could suffer as a result.
The pandemic also played an important role in this process. In the case of LGBTIQ+ people, for example, due to the precariousness in which many find themselves, virtual interviews were not always the solution. "Many did not have access to a computer or to wifi on their cell phones to be able to have a video call [...] with a person from the Commission. [...] that was another difficulty that we had to face hand in hand with... I mean, from the fear of talking in your house as well." In these cases, Cuello explains that they decided to provide a transportation subsidy to the victims so that they could travel to the closest headquarters of the Commission, and have the opportunity to recount what had happened to them in a safe space.
Another challenge mentioned in the interview was the emotional and psychological impact on the members of the research team itself. Cuello explained that members of the team required leave on occasion in order to maintain their own mental health given the impact of the testimonies they were working with; testimonies which detailed attacks conducted by not only guerrilla or paramilitary forces, but also by state forces. Unfortunately, regarding the LGBTIQ+ community in Colombia, their safety is one of the last issues to be covered by state and government entities, since in our country "[...] there has not been a case of public policy in favor of LGBTIQ+ people". This has been a group ignored by the majority of citizens, especially those in power and with the ability to control the most important sectors in the country. In the chapter "My body is the Truth", there is a focus on the 'lack of state protection' and how this has been the trigger for many of the violent acts committed by groups such as the FARC and the paramilitaries against the members of the collective. During this section of the interview, Cuello mentioned examples which occurred in Cali and Montes de María, where the public forces, when assigned functions to effectively enter the war, took advantage of their power and ended up violating, torturing, threatening, killing and arbitrarily detaining LGBTIQ+ people. Some of the cases covered in the report are simply beyond belief.
The chapter has hundreds of testimonies that indicate the violations suffered by the LGBTIQ+ community. To give just one example, the case of Paloma is presented, a trans woman who was unjustly arrested as a so-called false positive, when she was falsely accused of being alias Karina, a notorious FARC commander. In 2018, Paloma and Cuello met in Medellín to talk about what had happened to her in Dabeiba, her homeland, and how she was coping with it. "The last image that people have is that they arrived in a helicopter at the stadium, at the Dabeiba field, which is huge, and they took me out of there because I was alias Karina, the FARC commander," Paloma commented to Vivian. What was frustrating about the situation was the fact that it was evident that Paloma was not alias Karina, mainly because the FARC commander is Afro-Colombian, unlike the victim, and because the members of the security forces and the inhabitants of the municipality had known Paloma, and as such knew the arrest to be fraudulent. After the meeting, the Commission provided support to the victim and was able to support her to return to her home.
"My body is the Truth" provides a voice and visibility to all those stories, like Paloma's, which were silenced for such a long time by the ravages of the conflict, and the complicity of different sectors in
society. The chapter was titled as such due to an event of the same name held in 2019, in Cartagena, by the Commission on the day against sexual violence in Colombia. Vivian Cuello elaborated further about the significance of that title:
"I am telling the truth and my body is saying it, my body and the experience that I have lived from my corporality and what has happened to me, whether it is sexual violence or whether it is another type of violence as a woman or person LGBTIQ+ that has been historically forgotten and silenced".
This is the truth because it is our lived history is effectively the message that is expressed in the volume by all the victims who had the opportunity to raise their voices. This chapter wants to denounce the treatment of both groups at the same time as informing of their painful history on the fringes of the armed conflict, so that each reader reflects on the subject, and hopefully chooses empathy and becomes motivated to initiate the change that we need as a country.