“We Did This!”

Mayerlis Angarita Robles is the leader of the victims’ community from Montes de María, a region in the Colombian Caribbean that encompasses a total of 15 municipalities in the provinces of Sucre and Bolívar. Mayerlis is a co-founder and currently the director of the organization“Telling Stories to Live,”a women’s collective made up of female victims of war. Mayerlis was born in San Juan Nepomuceno, a small village with about 30,000 residents, located roughly an hour and a half southeast of Cartagena de las Indias. That is her home, but she has had to flee many times. The threats against her were all too clear.

She has been an activist since her youth. After paramilitaries forcibly disappeared her mother and her family was subsequently forced to flee, she joined REDEPAZ, the national network of civil society peace initiatives against the war. In 2000, Mayerlis, together with Eleida Leiva and Katrín Martínez, founded the women’s collective “Telling Stories to Live.” Through the experience of storytelling and further training in workshops, the women are encouraged to process their war experiences, take control of their lives again, and become self-sufficient.

In 2015, Mayerlis ran for mayor of San Juan Nepomuceno. During this campaign, she faced off against the local political elite. Nevertheless, she gained supporters. But on the eve of the election, she was the victim of an assassination attempt. It was already the third such attack in her 35 years of life. This changed the entire dynamic. Her supporters became afraid, and her campaign was stigmatized. She was unable to win the election. Her work for and with women is very risky. She speaks her mind and publicly denounces the situation facing women. As a result, she must accept being accompanied day and night by three armed bodyguards and can only travel in an armored vehicle. Mayerlis represents women who have become victims of war, including on the gender advisory committee established as part of the implementation of the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC.

Yarima de Jesús Sierra Peñarte, an indigenous girl from the Zenú people, born and raised in the village of San Andrés de Sotavento in the province of Córdoba, in Colombia’s Caribbean region, sets out one day to run an errand for her mother. She is 14 years old. On the way, she encounters two armed and masked men—two guerrillas, as she would later learn. They threaten her with a pistol, overpower her, and rape her. The girl goes to school. She would like to earn a high school diploma and attend a Catholic school run by nuns. Later, the paramilitaries accuse her of being friends with a guerrilla. “But he wasn’t a guerrilla at all. He was just a classmate.” They claim she is this guerrilla’s wife. “But I wasn’t his wife at all.” The paramilitaries say they saw the guerrilla drop off dirty laundry at her mother’s house. They lie in wait for the girl, beat her, and torture her. In 1993, she has her first daughter. Her name is María Alejandra. In 1995, her second. Her name is Aida Marcela. Fifteen years later, the girl—now a woman—returns to Montes de María to live there. One evening, she’s home alone. Alone in the farmhouse. The guerrillas break in. They rape her. For the second time. She doesn’t say a word. Not to her husband, not to her mother. The guerrillas had told her they would kill her if she spoke. She is pregnant. She feels terrible. She can barely eat. She loses the baby. She works as a day laborer. She does everything she can to earn some money to survive.

In Montes de María, she hears about the collective “Telling Stories to Live” for the first time and meets Mayerlis Angarita Robles. Just like Yarima, another 840 women from Montes de María learn about “Tell Your Story to Live” and join the collective. Their lives, shattered by war, begin to change. Mayerlis talks about her work:

“I went from village to village looking for women. Some were afraid because, around here, when someone looks for a woman, it’s usually just to kill her. I knocked on doors and introduced myself: ‘Hello, nice to meet you, I’m Mayerlis. We want to bring women together so we can talk about what’s happening to us and how we can work together.” We met in the courtyards of our homes and cooked a huge pot of stew for everyone together. These were secret meetings. Technically, the curfew started at 6 p.m., but the armed groups thought we were just doing “women’s stuff,” so they let us have the meetings. If we’d talked about the war, they would have immediately suspected us of being collaborators. So first we had to discuss our name as a collective. Should we call ourselves the “Women’s Network Against Patriarchal Structures,” or the “Network of Women Who Have Been Made into Victims”? Actually, both—but when someone asked us, we said we were a network of women who built chicken coops. “Telling Stories to Live,” our organization, thus emerged in the midst of a spiral of atrocities. It arose from our need to tell what had happened to us. We didn’t know what storytelling meant. We only knew that it would help us voice what we were forbidden to name. That was our beginning. Today we don’t just tell our stories; today we educate ourselves and empower one another. We stand up to the Colombian government and demand our rights. We do advocacy work. I had to learn that, in fact, everything is political. Even in war, everything is decided at the political level. And that’s where the decisions are made—that’s where you have to start if you want to bring about change. At a women’s summit in Bogotá, I met Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. That was shortly after I had been the target of a second assassination attempt. She said to me, “Mayerlis, if you really want to bring about change, then you have to come to power. If we women don’t come to power, we’ll continue to be oppressed.”

In 1989, many years before Beatriz Suárez would become a leader with “Telling Stories to Live,” she was about to give birth to her first son, Antonio. At the hospital, a woman told her, “Hopefully it’ll be a girl. The men are killing them all here, and it’s only going to get worse.” That was the first time Beatriz encountered the violence in Montes de María. Ten years later, violence had taken root in the region. The women’s hope for a peaceful life had been shattered. The director of the nongovernmental organization Sisma Mujer explains: “Montes de María is one of the regions most severely affected by the armed conflict, especially when it comes to women. Violence against women has been disproportionately perpetrated here—violence against their lives, their bodies, and sexualized violence in its many forms: sexual slavery, forced abortions, and much more. This has left deep scars on women’s identities and destroyed their stability and life plans.”

The research report “Women and War” by the National Center for Historical Memory (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica) describes how, between 1997 and 2005, the AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia)—an illegal paramilitary force—established the so-called “Route of Terror” as part of its territorial strategy in the Caribbean region. This was no coincidence, as the report explains. In 2000, one of the deadliest years, the AUC carried out 83 massacres in the Caribbean region, 20 of which took place in Montes de María. One-third of the victims of massacres, torture, and sexual violence in the Caribbean region are women. Only 5% of cases result in charges, according to the report “Women and War.” It also states that “many female victims fit a specific, emblematic profile. They were prominent figures in their villages.”

These are—or were—women like Mayerlis Angarita Robles, who says:

In 2000, we were afraid to speak out; in 2003, we broke the silence; and since 2005, we have been acting as a community of victims. As women who were made into victims of war, we—no longer anonymously—demanded justice from the paramilitaries.

By 2013, we had been threatened 36 times. Then we filed a lawsuit seeking collective compensation. We were stigmatized as guerrillas; we had to go into hiding because we were declared military targets. Even the state cast suspicion on our collective, “Telling Stories to Live.” That’s when I learned to move invisibly, like a fish in water. Wearing my rubber boots and carrying my backpack, I slept one night here, the next there. In 2012, I began studying law. My life was a bit more stable at that time. One morning, an assassination attempt was made on me in my house. My father and my brothers had to flee. They were angry with me. After that, I stopped going to university. My family wanted me to stay home to take care of my children and not put the family in any more danger.

The hearings in the trials against the paramilitaries were terrible. At first, the defendants didn’t say a word, and then, after two hours: “Yes, we murdered him—he was a guerrilla, after all.” They said it as if they were talking about a dog. Or they rattled off their speeches by heart, just like Commander Salvatore Mancuso.

Or they fiddled with their cell phones to provoke us. It was terrible to face the perpetrators. We weren’t prepared for it. We had no support and were not accompanied. We didn’t even have money to buy water, but we traveled to the hearings in Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Bogotá anyway. In effect, they turned us women into victims all over again there. But some women wanted to face their perpetrators. We accompanied them. The only thing the Justicia y Paz trials achieved was that we were acknowledged and people could see that we existed.

Mayerlis Angarita doesn’t beat around the bush. She states quite clearly that during the paramilitary demobilization process, not all of them surrendered their weapons. She states quite clearly that so-called “neoparamilitarism” exists today. Mayerlis Angarita demands that victims be recognized as legal entities. She doesn’t want pity. Mayerlis Angarita points to corruption in elections. She calls for free elections and condemns those who allow themselves to be bribed for a paltry 15 dollars.

Mayerlis Angarita speaks loudly and with conviction. Her speeches brim with strength. She has many opponents—opponents with a great deal of power and influence—but that does not silence her. Sandra Sánchez, a historian and specialist in gender issues, explains: “With this blend of strength and passion, she breaks with traditional norms of behavior—not only because she is a woman, but because she speaks out in a society that has a very specific idea of how a woman is supposed to be. But she does not bow to this ideal. She remains true to her character and shows other women how to tackle challenges and how to realize their full potential. In doing so, she destabilizes existing paradigms.” Through her approach, Mayerlis has influenced many women at “Erzählen, um zu leben.”

On the day that Yarima Sierra, the Zenú girl from back then, was asked to design a mask, the tears finally broke through. She decorated the mask with nails and taped her mouth shut. On that day in San Juan Nepomuceno, she spoke for the first time about being raped as a teenager. In 2013, unknown assailants tried to rape her again. This time, she turned to Mayerlis, Eleida, and Katrin. They accompanied her to Barranquilla, where she reported the incident to the police. In 2014, likely in response to her courage, her house in the Villa Esperanza neighborhood was burned down. She rebuilt it. She still works with the women of “Telling Stories to Live”:

“I discovered my strength there. We must tell our stories to live. We will never forget, but when we speak out, we find a little peace and quiet. We’re also working on agricultural projects. We grow corn, raise chickens and vegetables, and run a small livestock operation.”

Mayerlis comments:

How can you talk to people about peace in workshops when they’re hungry? Without bread, there’s no peace. Peace cannot exist unless poverty is combated. It’s not enough that the guerrillas have demobilized—and that’s it. We sometimes say here, “We trudge from workshop to workshop; they shove us there like old cars. The training is good, but how are we supposed to put food on the table for our children?” So it’s important that we educate ourselves economically and financially. That’s how we can stop violence against women. If a woman can afford her monthly sanitary pads and can feed her child, then she is autonomous and can also have a say in family decisions. Here in San Juan, we hold many workshops on small-scale farming projects and handicrafts.

Ever since we founded “Erzählen, um zu leben” (Telling Stories to Live), we’ve been involved in peacebuilding. Actually, even before that—each of us within our own families. But it was only through coming together, through collective activism, that we truly became visible. We’ve also grown spiritually. The Mayerlis of 18 years ago and those of today are fundamentally different. I used to be very radical. If a street needed to be occupied, I’d do it. Until I said, “No, I can’t take any more rocks hitting my head.” Sometimes, though, I still pause and think: “Things can’t go on like this. We women must be taken seriously.”

When the peace negotiations began in Havana, it was clear to us that this could not happen without the participation of women. If we have been abused as spoils of war for decades, then we must now be made protagonists of peace. “Telling Stories to Live” is one of 18 organizations that participated in the Subcommittee on Gender Issues. This is the first time such a committee has existed, one that also monitors the implementation of the gender-related issues negotiated. I am the representative of four million women who have been made victims of this war. This is a victory for the country’s women’s movements. Neither the government nor the guerrillas granted this to us . We achieved it. It was us!

Also available in Spanish on our Colombia office’s website: "Fuimos nosotras!"