I spent the winter writing songs about getting better
BRTD
Atlas Prophet
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Political Matrix E: -6.50, S: -6.67
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« Reply #2 on: April 12, 2005, 12:29:43 AM » |
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Colombia's communist guerrillas take on feminine face By Karl Penhaul, Globe Correspondent, 1/7/2001
AN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, Colombia - The pink nail polish was chipped on her trigger finger. A Russian AK-47 assault rifle hung on her lean shoulder.
The sun glinted off her small gold earrings, and off the brass tips of the 7.62-caliber bullets stuffed into her ammunition pouch, as she squatted amid the tall grass of this sprawling savannah and jungle region of southern Colombia.
Twenty years old and a veteran of at least seven battles with Colombian security forces, this Communist guerrilla fighter, Lorena Nastacuas, seemed to give a new twist to the term ''femme fatale.''
Nastacuas is one of thousands of women warriors serving in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Latin America's largest guerrilla army.
''Everybody feels fear in a firefight; we're all human,'' Nastacuas said solemnly before breaking into giggles as her pet parrot, Hamil, began pecking at her necklace of bright plastic beads. ''But it's all a question of destiny. We're here to triumph or die.''
When the FARC took up arms against the government in the mid-1960s, two of the original group of 48 combatants were female. Rebel leaders now say that 30 percent to 40 percent of the combat force, which has grown to about 17,000 fighters, is made up of women.
The sharpest rise has come since mid-1997, when fewer than one-in-five FARC guerrillas were women.
By comparison, only about 2 percent of the Colombian Army are women, and all of them perform administrative tasks, not combat duties.
For a rebel commander, Joaquin Gomez, the head of the battle-hardened Southern Bloc division, women have a key role to play in Colombia's 36-year guerrilla war.
''A woman perceives injustice through every pore in her body; from the moment she's born, she is discriminated against,'' he said, referring to the machismo that is rife in Latin American society.
Colombian government statistics attest to stark inequalities between the sexes. Pay levels are as much as 70 percent lower for women than men, illiteracy rates are higher among females, and more than half the women polled in a government survey said they had been beaten or abused by their partner.
An economic slowdown during the last three years has further skewed the picture.
Unemployment rates, now the highest in Latin America, are on average 40 percent higher among Colombian women than men. The situation is worse in the countryside, creating potentially fertile ground for rebel recruitment.
''The economic crisis has meant that women cannot find a suitable place in society and see greater possibilities in the armed struggle,'' said Olga Marin, one of a team of guerrilla envoys that travels the world trying to curry international support for the uprising.
Nastacuas, born to a peasant family, enlisted in the guerrillas four years ago because she could not find a job and her father's plot of land in southern Putumayo province did not provide enough food for her five brothers and sisters.
She is stationed in a Switzerland-sized zone of southeastern Colombia that President Andres Pastrana cleared of government troops in November 1998 to create a forum for peace talks.
The pace of negotiations to end the conflict, which has claimed 35,000 lives in the past 10 years, has been glacial. But the demilitarized zone has provided a safe haven for the guerrillas, who have stepped up their training and recruitment drive. Many of the new arrivals are women.
One of them is a 19-year-old, Andrea Saenz. She joined the guerrillas two months ago in the cattle-ranching town of San Vicente del Caguan, at the heart of the demilitarized zone.
''The first weeks of training were difficult; I got tremendous bruises from the recoil of the rifle,'' she said as she sat in an abandoned farmhouse, straightening her T-shirt, emblazoned with the logo ''No More Yankee Soldiers.''
The Colombian military has accused the guerrillas of pressuring hundreds of teenagers, many of them minors, into service. It also has accused the guerrillas of fitting female fighters with contraceptive coils and forcing them to perform sexual favors for their commanders.
But Saenz and Nastacuas rejected allegations of sexual exploitation and insist they carry out the same duties as their male counterparts. Absolutely no concessions are made for gender when it comes to hiking over rough countryside with backpacks weighing up to 75 pounds, or frontline combat duties. Despite the influx of female fighters, the FARC's seven-person ruling council is still an all-male domain.
But women are gradually working their way up the ranks, and many are now mid-level field commanders, say rebel leaders.
Adriana Rondon, 27, the daughter of a peasant family from central Huila province, commands a 20-member unit operating the rebel radio station inside the demilitarized zone.
''There's a lot of machismo in Colombia, and as a woman you grow up accepting what the man says and feeling inferior,'' Rondon said. ''But women don't have to be submissive.''
She said she took up arms 15 years ago, when she was just 12, after troops burst into her home and beat her father on suspicion of being a guerrilla collaborator.
''I just wanted revenge, and I begged the guerrillas to let me go with them,'' Rondon said.
That revenge came in August 1996, when she took part in a rebel raiding party that stormed the Las Delicias army base in a remote corner of Putumayo province. In the ensuing battle, 31 soldiers were killed, and 60 more were captured - one of the guerrillas' biggest victories to that date.
At the height of the 14-hour battle, she said, her Israeli-made Galil assault rifle jammed, and she had to advance under enemy fire to seize another weapon from one of the dead soldiers.
Unlike many regular armies, the FARC does not frown on love in a time of war. But male and female guerrillas are told not to begin a relationship without first seeking permission from their superiors, who issue them birth-control pills and condoms.
''The guerrilla movement says that women are free here,'' Rondon said. ''But that means free to learn and act. That doesn't mean, though, that she's free to have five or six partners. If we're carrying out the armed struggle, things have to be well-ordered.''
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