The Internally Displaced in Colombia: Gendered Experiences of Destruction and Rebuilding of Life: Briefing Note
Donny Meertens, National University of Colombia, Gender & Development Program, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Programa de Estudios de Género, Mujer y Desarrollo, 1999

Political violence in Colombia has a gender-differentiated impact on social life. During the last two decades, one of the most dramatic social consequences of the armed conflict among guerrilla, paramilitary groups and the army has been the forced internal migration of more than a million people who, individually or in small groups, flee to provincial cities and to the national capital Bogotá. The gender perspective in this paper focusses on the different experiences and the transformation of roles among the internally displaced. Women and men act and react in different ways during the process of displacement, from the moment of destruction and uprooting until the rebuilding of their daily life and social networks. However, within gender categories we also find differentiation. Gender and other significant variables like personal experience, mobility and social capital before uprooting, influence the capacity of the displaced to build a new life project out of their first efforts to merely survive in the city. One of the most striking gender contrasts is that women, opposite to men, seem to gain some autonomy and visualize new horizons for their life projects in the urban environment.

In the second part of the presentation, to be performed by Isabel Ortíz, these general trends will be illustrated by women´s voices from the province of Santander, who speak out their views and proposals on violence and peace.

ABRIDGED PAPER

1. The context: actors and dynamics of violence in Colombia

Violence has been considered an endemic feature of Colombian history. During the last few decades, violence has extended itself to all levels of society and the most remote corners of the country, involving a conjunction of political violence perpetrated by guerrilla forces, the Army and paramilitary groups, and drug-related violence steeped in terrorism, vendettas and mercenaries. There are also milicias populares, a popular urban territorial defence that surged in reaction to other forms of violence and, to aggravate the situation even more, all kinds of so-called "ordinary criminality". During the nineties, the annual number of violent deaths oscilates between 25.000 and 30.000, representing a national rate of more than 80 per 100.000 inhabitants.

During the last ten years, the different guerrilla groups (FARC, ELN and EPL) have moved from their traditional strongholds in poor and isolated colonisation areas, to richer municipalities, specially those where unbridled capitalist accumulation has fostered social exclusion and popular discontent. The potential for extortion and kidnapping in these regions also constitutes a powerful reason for their presence, as these practices have always formed one of the most important financial resources for guerrilla warfare in Colombia. However, from the eighties onward, guerrilla actions have been counter-acted by paramilitary groups, sponsored by big landowners and drug traffickers and currently organised in a nation-wide organisation, the the Autodefensas Colombianas de Córdoba y Urabá (ACCU). At the individual level the paramilitary are driven by hate and vengeance, and frequently operate with the compliance of the Colombian military forces stationed in the disputed regions.
To understand the complex dynamics of armed conflict, three elements are crucial: the increasing importance of territorial, instead of ideological dominance in the dynamics of political conflict, the privatisation of territorial control at the expense of State sovereignity, and vengeance as a permanent spiral of reproduction of violence, not only at the political but also at the private level of rural (and increasingly urban) family life. These elements also explain why the civil population has been the target of so much violent action. Threats, terror and extortion make them easy victims of the paranoiac logic of "si no estas conmigo estas contra mí" ("if you are not with me, you are against me") and give way to massive displacement of the rural population.

2. Women and men on the move: the dynamics of internal displacement.

The first national study on displacement, carried out by the Episcopal Conference of Colombia, revealed a number of aproximately 600.000 displaced people between 1988 and 1994. The most recent official estimates (1997) prepared by the Presidential Council for Human Rights and the organisation CODHES, recognise a number of 1.200.000, which represents over 2.5% of the total poplation of Colombia (38millions). The rural population became expelled from regions like the Atlantic Coast (Urabá) in the north, the Magdalena Medio in the center of the country, the Eastern Plains and the southern coca-growing regions. Bogotá, the national capital, is one of the biggest receivers of inmigrants fleeing from violence. In the more distant regions, the flows of forced migration are directed towards intermediate cities near the zones of expulsion: cities that are close and at the same time large enough to grant a certain degree of anonymity to the displaced families.

In each city, people arrive as a result of different modalities of displacement. In the eighties, there were collective displacements, performed by entire communities, sometimes in a repetitive way, in periods of escalation of assassinations, massacres, disappearances and bombardments. Right now, collective displacements or exodus are the exception and when they occur, they assume characteristics of political mobilisation, like the 8000 peasants from the Bolívar Department who went to the city of Barrancabermeja (Magdalena Medio) in 1998, in order to pressure the Government into looking for a solution to the paramilitary presence in their zone of origin. Today, however, the dominant form of displacement is individual and dispersed. Rural families silently flee, arrive in a drip and look for refuge in the cities each on its own. Up to a third of these displaced housholds are female headed. In a recent survey in Bogotá, 40% of displaced women who headed households were widows, who had fled with their children after the murder of their husbands.

The different degrees of collectivity, organisation, political consciousness and prevention, are linked in a direct way to social support structures and to the capacity of the population to anticipate displacement, particularly in the case of women who never before had participated in public action. Anticipation, in opposition to surprise, also makes a big difference in the capacity to resist psychological trauma and to face the challenges of survival and the rebuilding of life in the city. However, in traditional rural society, opportunities for organisation and access to information are deeply gender-biassed.

3. Who are the displaced? Uprootedness and strategies of reconstruction

The differencial effects of gender along the whole process of displacement, concentrate in two important moments: one pertaining to the destruction of lives, goods and social relationships, and the other one to survival and rebuilding of life projects and of social networks at the place of arrival.

Destruction

Traditional peasant women, before being displaced, have tended to grow up in a cultural scheme of strict separation between the masculine and feminine spheres, and their mobility used to be very limited. Frequently, the links with the market and the monetary economy, information and formal institutions were an exclusive male domain, and even the contact with civic or communal organizations or entities were beyond their control. In other words, their lives were characterised by geographical and social isolation, and the limits of the world, of contact with society, were given by the male heads of households.

Being uprooted from this previous world meant the destruction of social identity in a much higher degree for women than for men, whose freedom, mobility, access to information and disposal of free time gave them access to a much wider geographical, social and political space. For many peasant women, their confrontation with violence was much of a surprise. They usually had relied upon the idea that there was no reason for the conflict to knock at their door. Then suddenly they lost their husbands or sons and their means of subsistence, which meant rupture with all that constituted their daily and familiar domestic life and primary relationships. These ruptures of social identity and social texture at the level of family and community, produce the sensation of being completely adrift, or as a woman of the Atlantic Coast expressed her feelings: like a ship without bay.

This gender contrast at the moment of destruction, presented here for the most traditional peasant women and men, becomes more complex when we take into account the increasing diversity of the Colombian rural population. Age and family life cycle, education, geographical mobility, social networks and occupational diversity (we found not only peasants but also displaced school teachers, truckdrivers, hairdressers, barmen and prostitutes) previous to displacement, they all influence the way traumatic experience is assimilated. Also particular circunstances and experiences like the possibility to prepare for leaving, provide more emotional resilience. And, for instance, a small capital collected through the selling of some animals or part of the crop, helps mitigate the first period of survival in the city. These previous experiences may blur sometimes, and to a certain extent, the sharpest gender contrasts, but altogether they remain unevenly distributed between men and women. So the baggage that the displaced take with them upon arrival in the city, remains gender-differentiated.

Survival and rebuilding life

In the urban environment, the strongest contrast between men and women originates in the opportunities that both have to join the labour market and assure their survival in one way or another. Men face much more unemployment after displacement than women. Most men worked previously with agriculture and livestock breeding, which are not very useful occupations in their new urban environment. But most women work both before and after displacement in the same activities, that is, domestic labour, which they now sell to others a a means of subsistence. Domestic service and street selling, barely considered work by men, now give to women a certain guarantee for surviving, no matter how precarious, which men lack. The phase of survival and rebuilding life, therefore, is more difficult for men, because it means a loss of their status as economic provider for the household. In contrast, women´s participation in the labour market and sometimes in communal organizations provides them with new elements for the reconstruction of identity and with a sociability that did not exist for them in the countryside, and in this sense they perceive a gain in autonomy after displacement.

Do the displaced women and men succeed in constructing a new life project in the urban environment? Even here, gender differences have to do with the traditional dichotomy of the public and the private. It is still very early in the process of urban transition, to ask the displaced about their life projects: their preoccupations are centered on the basic needs of survival: work (which also means dignity), and shelter (which also means belonging to a place). Very few displaced people make this dream reality within less than two or three years of displacement, and that is much more than the official one year for being considered a displaced person.

Finally, a life project is more than the satisfaction of inmediate needs: it comprends also reconstruction of social texture, and of autonomy and selfesteem, all related to the social identity of the displaced. Both women and men continue to perceive themselves as displaced persons, even after several years. But in there perspectives for the future, they diverge. Women, as we stated before, may develop more autonomous behaviour and may become sooner rooted tan men, precisely because of their survival responsabilities. We found a striking contrast between what we call the working woman and the institutional man, that is, the permanent visitor of governmental burocracies waiting for help, dreaming of return or resettlement, walking many miles daily in order to visit institutions, going across the city with no money for local transport and without seeing or assimilating the urban environment. They became dependent on public institutions. Women do not tend to think obsessively about return or resettling. They mobilise social networks to get work and education for her children. Their life project will be definitely urban.