Mujeres indígenas, crónicas de corajes, violencias y olvido

Abstract

In recent years, the problem of violence against women has become highly relevant worldwide and multiple cases of different forms of violence come to the public every day. However, when talking about violence against women, a very specific context is thought of for a limited group of the population, without considering another group of women who live within different contexts and who have another way of understanding the world, facing the same conditions, without knowing how to raise their voices and overcome fear.

As women, indigenous people are subjected to the same types of violence as all Colombian women, but, as members of an ethnic community, their violence is justified differently, they are more invisibilized, and are subject to another type of exclusion that adds to existing ones, both inside and outside their peoples. Even worse, within their communities and in the country, because of their ethnic status, the violence and discrimination that end up justified under the argument of cultural differences, which invisibilises and perpetuates the following generations the same customs, causing the increased cycle of violence and vulnerability of indigenous women, victims in a microcontext (indigenous communities) and also suffering from the violence generated in a macrocontext (Colombia).

The experiences and events faced by Colombian indigenous women for several years, such as discrimination, abuses of power, forgetfulness, massacres, the loss of loved ones and their culture, have made them victims and have suffered closely the consequences that the armed conflict in Colombia has left them. But the low visibility of their victim status is one of the factors that have not allowed their stories to be recorded and their problems addressed.