Personal Narrative of Helping Social Issues in Colombia

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Recommended: Women during war and conflict

Almost twenty years ago, Carlos Eduardo Jaramillo, a renowned Colombian historian and violentologist, insisted on the need to find the women hidden amidst the thick smoke of black gun-powder . Despite this warning, the recognition and reparation of female victims of the Colombian war are relatively new and remain far from being adequate. The Colombian government has postponed its obligation to implement gender-just and transformative reparations in order to face many other urgent issues, such as the provision of humanitarian assistance to the victims and the search for a peace agreement in the midst of continuing offensive military operations.
My hometown, Medellin (Colombia), is a city marked by violence. It’s a place of arrival for hundreds of internally displaced persons every month, the cradle of Colombian paramilitarism, and a witness to a growing wealthy class that shines against a background of economic and gender inequality. As a response to this context, I started to worry about human rights violations during my undergraduate studies in law. The law school I attended had a preference for banking and financial law, and for this reason it offered almost exclusively internship opportunities at companies and institutions in those fields. Nevertheless, my interest in understanding the effects of the Colombian war was by then so considerable, that I decided to apply on my own to several Human Rights NGOs.
I ultimately obtained an intern position at Corporación Región where, to my surprise, I was the only lawyer . I was in charge of giving Human Rights training workshops and of providing legal advice to victims of the armed conflict (mainly internally displaced persons). This first-hand experience with victims marked me profou...

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...t to seriously approach social movements activism. I also aspire to build a relationship with the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, for its interdisciplinary methodology; the Center for Global Initiatives, mainly for its “Visualizing Human Rights” project; and the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, for its broad data management resources. Above all, I hope to establish a fruitful relationship with the prestigious Institute for the Study of the Americas, especially in the frame of the UNC–Duke Consortium in Latin American & Caribbean Studies.

Works Cited

Carlos Eduardo Jaramillo Castillo, “Mujeres en guerra. Participación de las mujeres en los conflictos civiles”, in Magdala Velásquez Toro (coord.), Las mujeres en la historia de Colombia (t. II, pp. 359-386). Bogotá, Grupo Editorial Norma, Presidencia de la República de Colombia, 1995, p. 360.

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