"We can't continue sharing spaces with rapists."

Mayra Acunya eta Angela Ocampo. (Argazkia: La Directa)

Mayra Acgiovanni and Angela Ocampo, feminist activists from Cali (Colombia), turn around Europe to denounce the patriarchal violence experienced in their country’s national strike and create a network with other groups. Their personal trajectory and gender violence experienced in various Colombian social organizations led them to the creation of La Mandada Feminista, a group that fights for the defense of human rights and collaborates in the organizational processes of women in their region.

Why did La Mandada emerge?

Mayra Acgiovanni: When Angela and I met, we saw that we had broken the mixed organizations that we worked on and struggled for 20 years. We both had human rights experience and suffered gender-based violence within those spaces. We are talking about sexual, psychological and symbolic violence, and this also applies to political violence: our exclusion, not allowing ourselves to take part in certain actions. And in the end, what happened to many of us happened: we exiled ourselves from the very processes of social struggle in which we became a body. I was hurt, but Angela encouraged me to create a space to work from our experience, defending the human rights of women, trans and nonbinary people. In this sense, La Manada is born as a wager.

The Manada played an important role in defending human rights on the Colombian National Scale of 2021.

Ángela Ocampo: In the 2019 Social Explosion, Cali was a national crime laboratory, while still saying that we live in a permanent state terrorism situation. In addition, the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic has realized the pandemic that we have traditionally been defending women to the patriarchy: a violence that took place in the confinement that social isolation showed, that women, feminist people and the one we always live at home. This, coupled with fiscal and health reform, caused great social discontent and we went out into the street. The social violence we are experiencing has overflowed and was unprecedented in the history of strikes in Colombia. We covered mobilizations and concentration points, complaint handling, case management or support in the midst of attacks, among others.

"What happened to many of them happened to us: we exiled ourselves from the very processes of social struggle in which we became a body"

Was state violence applied differently to women's bodies?

A. H.: The figures are worrying: forced disappearance, extrajudicial police executions, abuse of force, illegal detentions, eye injuries, gender violence and sexual dissent. This had a huge influence. We were able to document and identify the manifestations of this patriarchal and racist police violence. A report that gathers the characteristics and conduct of the police shows the existence of a specific cruelty of the feminized and racialized bodies of Colombia. The Colombian police, which is part of the Government's Ministry of Defense, is better a police officer prepared for war, and in Colombia in particular, political thinking, critical thinking and political opposition have always been stigmatized and criminalized.

Why is the state violence suffered by the Colombian people colonial, especially the feminized and racist population?

A. H.: Firstly, in geopolitical terms, because the Colombian State serves the interests of foreign economic and political powers. We live in a colonial country, in a strategic territory for the foreign policy of the global north of the United States, and in a territory that serves to show the results in the indicators of the millennium goals related to international human rights policy in the field of human rights. In Colombia there is a great interest in international cooperation to support peace agreements or social movements. An agenda often prevails. For example, they say that poverty is shrinking, that inequality is increasing, and that gender equity is increasing; to prove it, they use the indicators to their liking. It is important to identify it, since these figures leaving Colombia do not show the profound inequality that still exists, and this, of course, maintains inequality.

On the other hand, it is colonial because it is a state violence, which is different in the case of male cis-heterosexual white and mestizo bodies, which suffer standardized violence (in Colombia, attacks, torture, disappearances, etc., are large judicial assemblies), and what is experienced by feminized and racialized bodies is different. That is not seen or spoken. It is a patriarchal and structural racist violence that combines the colony. It's prior to capitalism, where we find other kind of cruelty to the bodies of feminized people and racism. This differential treatment comes from this colonial wound, precisely, from the hierarchization of lives and beings: some are worth and some are not. There are bodies that are sexually tortured, as well as other forms of torture, and sexual violence is used as a social amendment and as a political sanction.

M. A. Here's another element: the economy and drug trafficking that keep the global north. We continue with this colonial wound. Many indigenous communities suffer strong violence paramilitar.No is only the gold that we were robbed of 500 years ago, colonial wounds continue to occur, there is exploitation and violence continues to be used to further exploit.

"Political violence is not only the right-wing or the status quo over us, but also what people who we hope will be partners in the battlefield do"

And that violence has come within social organizations, as you mentioned. What did they do or what should they do in the face of the macho violence that occurs within the spaces of social struggle?

M. A. Firstly, breaking the silence. That is our very difficult and everyday feminist wager that crosses us all the women of the world. We in all spaces, in all the places we occupy, demonstrate that within the institutions on the left we are victims of gender and political violence and have survived. We base ourselves on each other, and that has to be explained. Because only in this way is it transformed, not so much at the individual level, but at the collective level. It is very important to put this at the centre: political violence is not only the right-wing or the status quo about us, but also that of the people who we hope will be our partners in the struggle. And when we make our cases visible, we'll see what's going on in other social organizations, also observing the violence that transactions and nonbinary ones experience. It was a great resistance, there were personal attacks. And, as we saw, women who are still in non-mixed organizations sometimes find it very difficult to mention them, they are afraid because in their organization they are experiencing violence or because violence is being covered.

A. H.: I would say that it is very important to have non-mixed areas so that we can talk about violence. If not, it won't. These non-mixed areas give way. If we do not, nobody will.

Have you been able to identify violence in social or left-wing organizations?

M. A. We conducted a study with a methodological approach from popular education, with women from 20 organizations, women from schools, farmers, women from armed groups or human rights defenders. Very varied area. We were able to identify three things: that in all these spaces all forms of gender-based violence occur, whether sexual, economic, psychological, symbolic, physical or spiritual; that in all of them there is a feminization of care tasks, that is, that we maintain the economy of custody of the Colombian left — we make coffee, we clean, we dirty the act — and that, still, we remain out of the places of power, that marginalize us. Another clear element we saw was that women who come to these spaces of power go through a process of masculinization of their leadership. This last point is very interesting.

"When we talk about justice, the first thing we have to do is talk to the person who has experienced violence, first we, our needs and our care."

In some progressive Colombian sectors, especially in rural areas, the term feminism is not accepted by ignorance or by adherence to white hegemonic feminism.

A. H.: In rural, indigenous, afro and peasant communities nothing happens that does not happen in leftist organizations. The machismo and sexism with which we are dealing are not taken into account. And it is not accepted that this fight, that of women, is a fight we have given. It is not that European feminists come to us to talk about that, but that we, the women of Abya Yala, have been fighting for 500 years. In addition, feminism is abundant. The Western white is a feminism and black, indigenous, community or popular feminism of Abya Yala. From there we started as La Mandada, who claims our history, our forms, our roots and a historical debt: gender justice or feminist justice. And language should not be a problem. If someone doesn't mean feminism, it's not important, it's important to address the violence we live as women.

We've seen more and more exercises in popular feminist justice: What do you think we should do in the face of aggression? What to do with the aggressors in our daily lives?

M. A. The experience has been created by a collective path of help, and the first thing to consider is that in the center there is a person who suffered violence, not aggrieved. When we talk about justice, the first thing we have to do is talk to the person who experienced the violence and then think about what path they're going to be. First we, our needs, our care. Feminist justice betting is very diverse, with court exercises, but I think the path of public complaint is very strong. But it is thought that it is an integral process, one of the steps of the monitoring process. Justice is a medium and not static, it is different for each case depending on each specific violence.

A. H.: The aggressors must be denounced, we cannot continue to fight with rapists or sexual assailants, sharing the space. This is not unimportant, it is a serious violation of human rights. It is an exercise of consistency with our defence of territory, life and dignity. So we have the patriarchal criminal justice that we have, which works for the most impoverished and racialized, but there are also forms of self-righteousness or feminist justice in which social punishment must be given at the level of aggression. We can't stand a rapist slap six, put one day on the strain, or denounce only as a rapist in public, this is not justice. A rape or sexual assault remains for life in the person who suffered it. This should be contextualized and worked on community processes so that aggressors do not continue to occupy positions of responsibility and have to pay and settle in a concrete way, taking as a reference the health needs of the victimized person.