On June 25, seven soldiers of the Colombian army confessed to raping a 13-year-old Indigenous girl from the Embera tribe. She was discovered at a nearby school after having gone missing from her home in the department of Risaralda on June 21. Upon seeing that the young girl could barely walk, she was sent to a hospital and then forensic services along with receiving assistance from the Organization of Indigenous Nations of Colombia (ONIC). Luis Fernando Arias, senior adviser for ONIC, told CNN that the girl “was kidnapped and raped for a period of 17 hours.” The Embera community requested that the soldiers be tried under their own laws along with ONIC “demanding that they be tried under Indigenous law, arguing that it's their jurisdiction since the alleged crime was against an Indigenous person, on Indigenous land.”
Since the alleged rape, the seven men accused were fired along with three of their superiors. The country’s attorney general, Francisco Barbosa, stated that if found guilty the men could face 16 to 30 years in prison, but Colombian President Ivan Duque urged a life sentence for the accused soldiers. He stated that, “If we have to inaugurate the life in prison penalty with them, we're going to do it with them. And we are going to use it so that these bandits and scoundrels get a lesson.” Although many are asking for the imprisonment of the soldiers, Gimena Sanchez, Andes director of the think tank Washington Office on Latin America, believes that, “There needs to be education and consciousness raising within the armed forces on how to treat and how to engage with ethnic minorities. Not just with Indigenous but also Afro-Colombians.”
The country’s response was that of fury, albeit bereft of shock due to the long-standing systemic issue of soldiers' abuse and violence against Indigenous women and girls in Colombia. On July 2, after pressure mounted and Indigenous groups held protests against the gender-based violence of Indigenous women, Colombian Army Commander General Eduardo Zapateiro publicly disclosed that 118 soldiers had been investigated due to incidents of sexual violence against minors since 2016, and of those only 45 have been fired. Despite these statistics, Zapateiro stated that, “These abuses are not systemic conduct. Understand that we are 241,000 men, who every day give everything for the Colombian people.” His argument is that this is not a systemic issue but since the reporting of this story, other cases of sexual violence against Indigenous girls have emerged. One case that was not widely reported until now reveals that a 15-year-old girl from the Nukak Maku Indigenous tribe was kidnapped, tortured and raped in the military barracks of troops in the southern Guaviare department.
Colombia is not exempt from the pandemic of sexual violence that affects women all over the globe but following a vote against a peace referendum to end the conflict in Colombia, women are disproportionately enduring violence on a systemic level. Colombia has the 10th highest rate of femicide in the world, according to U.N. data. The Colombian Femicide Foundation documented that “8,532 women and girls reported that they had experienced sexual violence in the first five months of this year. More than 5,800 were under the age of 18.” The outcome of this case may bring hope to those who want to see justice in the form of imprisonment, but the culture that normalized violence toward women remains.
Hanna Ditinsky
is a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is majoring in English and minoring in Economics. She was born and raised in New York City and is passionate about human rights and the future of progressivism.