A woman at war for justice in Colombia

Jineth Bedoya Lima was viciously attacked and raped 14 years ago. She will not rest until Colombia’s women have justice, says Caroline O’Doherty

THERE is a photograph of Jineth Bedoya Lima taken at the International Women of Courage Awards, where she is squeezed between two towering personalities in international affairs. To the right of the diminutive journalist is the statuesque Michelle Obama and to her left, the formidable Hillary Clinton.

If the question was asked which of these three women was under 24-hour guard because of constant death threats, the most expected answer would be either the US first lady or its secretary of state and potential 45th president.

But the correct one would be Jineth, who was attending the event not as a reporter but as recipient of an award that in ways she wishes she had never been eligible for.

Jineth is a 39-year-old journalist from Colombia, where her career could at any time cost her her life.

She tells her story with quiet candour. “Fourteen years ago while I was working, I was kidnapped, tortured, and raped by paramilitaries. Five years ago, I decided to make my story public,” she says.

At the time of her abduction, Jineth was writing about weapons trafficking involving paramilitaries and state officials. “I’d been carrying out the investigation for two years and I was starting to touch very powerful people — politicians, police officers,” she says. “I had received threats from the paramilitaries before what happened to me occurred but I never thought that they would be capable of doing what they did to me.”

Jineth had secured an interview with a jailed paramilitary leader and went to see him in Bogota’s notoriously violent and heavily fortified La Modelo prison, home to some 11,000 feuding paras and guerrillas. “I was kidnapped in the front entrance of the jail in front of the police, in front of the jail guards, and no one saw anything,” she says.

“I was taken three hours from Bogota and we went through multiple police checkpoints and no one saw anything.”

During her ordeal, Jineth was savagely beaten and brutally gang-raped before being dumped by the side of a road.

She believes she wasn’t killed because her abductors, who told her what they were doing to her was a message to other journalists, wanted to make her a living reminder of the fate they tempted.

Just 25 at the time, Jineth had already made a name for herself with her courageous reporting. Her abduction was headline news but the details were not reported. “I didn’t tell anyone that I’d been raped,” she says.

“The kidnapping was a major news story but the rest of it, I wasn’t comfortable talking about.”

She left hospital after two weeks, badly bruised, barely able to walk, and went straight back to work. “After what happened to me, I felt I had two options — exile or suicide,” she says. “But then I decided to stay, which I guess was a kind of suicide because I continued working.

“I just went straight back to writing about the war, because that’s what I do, that’s what I’ve always done. I’m not sure if it’s a defence mechanism or if I’m crazy, but that’s just what I had to do.

“The only people who knew what had really happened to me were the directors of the newspapers, the doctors who examined me, and my family.

“I asked the directors of the newspaper not to tell anyone and no one asked out of respect but the weight was heavy on me.

“Every day I encountered the stories of other women who had been victims of sexual violence, who had the same stories.”

The more Jineth probed, the more women suffering in silence, shame, and fear she encountered, and the more appalled she became.

Each individual account she heard contained its own horror but the collective story that was emerging was of the deliberate, systematic use of rape as a weapon of oppression and terror by all players in Colombia’s bloody internal conflicts — Farc guerrillas, paramilitaries, and state security forces.

The statistics that she and various charities have gathered since make disturbing reading — in particular those in a report published in recent months by ABColombia, a project jointly supported by several Irish and UK agencies, including Christian Aid.

One study it draws from, covering 2001-09, found that, on average, 54,410 Colombian women suffered sexual violence every year. That’s more than half a million women in nine years, and with the armed conflict in Colombia now 50 years old, the total figure is most likely many times more.

The problem shows no signs of abating despite the demobilisation of many paramilitary groups — which really only means their reclassification as criminal gangs — and despite current peace talks between the government and Farc.

In fact, some of the worst cases documented by human rights groups have occurred after 2009. ABColombia’s report cites the following examples involving children from 2010-12: Eleven girls as young as 8 sexually abused by members of the army; an 11-year-old girl raped by an Farc member; a 13-year-old forcibly displaced and then abused by seven police officers; and a 14-year-old girl, tortured, sexually abused, mutilated, and then killed by demobilised paramilitaries.

In May 2012, a woman was raped by an army soldier 100m away from his barracks, indicating he knew neither his colleagues nor superiors would pay any heed.

The sheer scale of the problem is shocking but, says Jineth, equally so is the response of the state. “As we began documenting the cases, we looked at the response from the justice system,” she says. “The impunity rate in Colombia is 98%. That means that only 2% of the women have received some sort of justice, and in these cases it has not been full justice.”

Her own case is an example: “In my case there were three different crimes: Kidnapping, torture, and sexual violence. The judge decided to only take up the kidnapping part because that was considered the worst crime.

“Sexual violence is not seen as a major crime. It’s seen as a minor crime and the judges often don’t give it priority or sufficient attention.”

For the last five years, all eyes have been on the progress of 183 cases referred by the Colombian Constitutional Court to the attorney general’s office for investigation. The court had stated that sexual violence against women is a “habitual, extensive, systematic, and invisible practice in the Colombian armed conflict”.

“My case is among these 183 cases, but, over five years, not one case has been resolved,” says Jineth.

Prosecuting cases is not just important for individual victims but for Colombia as a whole, she says, adding that to ignore the crimes or to accept them as a symptom of the madness of war, rather than a deliberate component of warfare, risks creating a society with the mindset that violence against women is acceptable.

That kind of mindset could persist long after the armed conflict in the countryside ceases, she warns, allowing violence on the streets and domestic violence to flourish.

Since Jineth broke her silence about her own experiences in 2009, she has become a tireless campaigner for her fellow survivors — and those who didn’t survive — across the world.

Her slogan, ‘No es hora de callar’, or ‘It’s not the time to be quiet’, has become a familiar campaign cry in Colombia, although its wider application was evident when it appeared as a hashtag on Twitter, calling for the return of the kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria.

NEXT month, Jineth travels to London to take part in the UN-sponsored Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, which will hear how widespread the problem is.

Ireland is among the 140 signatories to the UN Declaration of Commitment to End Sexual Violence in Conflict invited to attend the summit on June 10-13, which will be co-chaired by British foreign secretary William Hague and actress and activist Angelina Jolie.

At the same time, the World Cup in Brazil will be kicking off and Jineth is counting on her national team to bring her message to an even wider audience.

Jineth managed to get teams in Colombia’s domestic football league to take to their pitches wearing her logo on their shirts in an awareness-raising day last month, and stars of the national team are backing her campaign through YouTube and social media.

There is some irony in the fact that the last time a Colombian woman featured prominently in the World Cup fanfare was in South Africa in 2008 when singer Shakira, famed for celebrating her sexuality in her lyrics and energetic dance moves, performed the tournament’s theme song.

This time, Jineth wants to move the discussion to a much darker side of sex and she is delighted to get well-known men on board.

“Football is a really powerful medium and it’s a way we can have an impact, because young men will listen to what their idols say.

“The reaction was really positive when I went to talk to them. I told them: ‘It’s not enough to be number one on the field — you need to be number one at home, too’.”

By that, she explains, she means urging them to be the best person they can be by respecting the women in their lives.

Jineth’s campaigning has brought her many accolades, including the 2012 Women of Courage Award but she says she is motivated by the tens of thousands of unnamed victims of sexual violence in Colombia whose suffering may never be known.

“I’m a well-known woman,” she says. “I have access to the power structures of this country. I have direct access to the attorney general’s office, to the president’s office. I have six armed guards and I move around in an armoured car. And still I continue to be threatened and I continue to have a difficult situation.

“So if that’s my situation with all the contacts I have, what about the other women of the country? What is their hope? They have no support and they don’t have the financial resources to leave their communities to look for justice. That’s why I have to look for justice for them.”