Note: The following story discusses violence, sexual violence, and murder.
In October 2020, CHMA donated radio equipment to help the Organización Femenina Popular (or the Popular Women’s Organization) to kickstart a women’s community radio station in the Middle Magdalen Region in Colombia.
With the help of CHMA board member and OFP liaison Juan Facundo, we checked in with Kelly Campo from the organization to hear a firsthand report of the ongoing national protests and state violence, and how the station is doing.
The protests are slowing down bureaucratic processes, says Campo, but the station is doing well.
“We’re really grateful and really thankful for what happened last year with the with the the amount of money that was raised,” says Campo, as translated by Facundo. “That has allowed them to pick a place for the radio station to locate it, and to build it… We are also really looking to work within the community and talking to a lot of different community members about the radio station, because the OFP would rather have everybody in the community to be a part of it. We’ve also kind of honed in on some key players of the editorial team, each one will have a different kind of focus.”
Facundo explained in a separate conversation with CHMA news that the protests currently ongoing in Colombia are as a result of long-term inequalities.
“There’s a big history from the time of the independence happened in Colombia,” explains Facundo. “There was a big divide between the people that ended up getting all the land and the money, and the farmers. Usually this was done just because of like the classes that were already instilled through the bourgeois culture of Spain, and the colonization that happened. Usually the people that got all the land, and all the money were lighter skinned. So that happened, which created two different parties, the conservative party aligned with the Catholic Church, and then all of the other people.”
State-sponsored violence also has a long history in Colombia, usually justified by either battling the guerilla Marxist group that took up arms against the government known as the FARC or by the “war on drugs.”
However, it was not just members of the FARC the government allowed violence against.
Anti-extraction activists were targeted by paramilitary groups despite the 2016 peace deal.
According to a report published by Front Line Defenders, 177 human rights defenders were killed in Colombia last year, the majority of whom were Indigenous.
International involvement from the United States also escalated state-sponsored violence by providing arms to the far-right government, supposedly to further the war on drugs.
“The ideology has always been the same,” says Facundo. “It’s an ideology of like terror. They [the government] have a lot of paramilitary groups that will go around killing people just because of who they are. They would basically takeover towns and say, ‘This is our law.’ They give out books saying, ‘You can’t have an earring, you can’t have long hair if you’re a guy,’ all of these really intense, patriarchal, and right-wing ideologies would govern all these towns and and the government itself wouldn’t do anything because they saw that as a good thing. They were usually aligned, there’s a lot of ties between the right wing governments and these paramilitaries.”
Kelly Campo of the OFP says that the current government is spreading misinformation about the protests, specifically about why people are protesting.
“The first thing is that we have to take stock of like who the government is,” says Campo, as translated by Facundo. “It’s an ultra far-right government whose main tactic is misinformation. The misinformation is filtering into the international news, they are using it to hide legitimate non-violent protests.”
“The question of why are people protesting is a very complex question,” says Campo. “You’re going to get a bunch of different answers from a lot of people. Now the the answer that I think is the best is that they’re not spontaneous protests. They’re not like out of the blue. Rather, this is a combination of the inequalities that have existed [for] a long time.”
Another tactic used by the Colombian government is violence against protestors, particularly young people and women.
“The political force of the current government is basically to take control no matter what,” says Campo. “They’re ready to infringe on human rights and do whatever they need to do to take control again. [As of June 3, 2021] 80 people have died since the 28th of April, just from the protests. There have been over 600 disappearances of people protesting and they don’t come home. 1,400 people who have been brutally injured, this includes people that have lost their eye. This is one of the tactics that have been used against the protesters. There’s also been a strikingly high amount of sexual abuse of women. This kind of a state response is just generally what the state has been doing since the start of the protests. It’s a war against the people.”
Campo says that protests against the government’s unfair and violent treatment of its citizens have been underway for a while, but have caught national attention because they are happening in more urban areas and on a bigger scale.
The OFP provides Colombian women with legal, psychological, cultural, and artistic support, and are continuing to do so during the protests.
“We have saved a lot of lives doing this,” says Campo. “What we’ve needed from the international community throughout this has been mostly visibility. Get first hand information from the OFP and out into into the international world. Help us spread the word of what’s going on and, and replicate our actions.”
The OFP is on Facebook.
