COLOMBIA: In Colombia, Rape Now Being Prosecuted as Weapon of War

Amelia had spent years counseling a woman who was raped by a right-wing warlord and suffered an unwanted pregnancy. So when the woman called her for advice after the warlord threatened to return to take away the child, Amelia rushed to go see her.

The two women stayed up late discussing how to protect the child in an isolated farmhouse in Colombia's Antioquia Province. Suddenly, three masked gunmen burst into the house and warned Amelia to "stop messing in other people's business." The men then raped both women.

"They said I should take this as a warning," Amelia says, adding that the men had told her not to leave the house for three days. When she left, she told no one what had happened to her.

"I had insisted so much for other victims to report crimes, but I felt paralyzed by fear. I was too afraid to say anything," says Amelia, a nervous woman in her early 40s, who asked that her real name not be used. Suddenly she understood on a whole new level why the victims she'd counseled had resisted reporting their attacks.

In the conflicts in eastern Congo, Sudan's Darfur region, Serbia, and Rwanda, the widespread systematic raping of women has been well documented. In Colombia, however, the scale of rape and sexual violence as part of the four-decade-old conflict is largely unknown.

Local and national women's organizations say there are thousands of cases of sexual violence – by right-wing paramilitaries and leftist guerrillas – that go unreported by women too afraid to talk. But now, the groups are campaigning to make women aware of their rights as victims and to push prosecutors to question paramilitaries about sexual violence.

It seems to be working. In May 2007, there were only 12 cases of sexual violence filed with prosecutors appointed to carry out Colombia's special Justice and Peace Law. Today there are 228.

"The problem is not yet being seen in its full dimension," says Patricia Buriticá, who leads an NGO known as Women's Peace Initiative, which offers psychological and legal assistance to victims of sexual violence.

Sexual violence as a weapon of war

Sexual violence was a constant in every massacre carried out by paramilitary forces as they expanded their control throughout the country between 1997 and 2005, says Ms. Buriticá, who has travelled throughout Colombia interviewing women and survivors of massacres about the level of sexual violence. There are hundreds of stories of women being raped, sexually tortured, and mutilated before being killed.

Once they established control, the paramilitaries would often use village women as sex slaves. In one town in Cauca Province, there are so many children of paramilitary fighters that they are known locally as the "paraquitos" or "little paramilitaries." In Magdalena Province, warlord Hernán Girlado was known as "El Taladro" or "The Drill" and reportedly would summon a different woman each night. "A shop owner refused to send his wife to Giraldo and he was killed the next day," Buriticá says.