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Title: Colombia Impaled
Author: José Antonio Gutiérrez D.
Date: June 14, 2012
Language: en
Topics: Colombia, violence
Source: Retrieved on 22nd December 2021 from http://www.anarkismo.net/article/23133
Notes: Translated by Emily O’Sullivan

José Antonio Gutiérrez D.

Colombia Impaled

The brutal murder, torture and rape of Rosa Elvira Cely, in the middle

of Bogota’s National Park, has led to a justifiable wave of indignation

across the whole country. To the cry of ‘Not one more Rosa!’ thousands

of Bogotans met on 3 June at the site of the macabre crime to pay

tribute to this victim and to vehemently protest violence against women.

In this article I don’t want to go too in depth into this particular

crime, which unfortunately is only one more in a string of thousands of

abuses and feminicides that occur on a daily basis in Colombia. Nor do I

want to refer to the multiple negligences that contributed, by some

degree to the fatal ending of this story (the inadequate response of the

police to calls for help, negligence in medical treatment with the stab

wounds that ultimately led to death not being treated etc). What I want

to draw attention to is the hypocrisy of the Colombian media and elites

who today are horrified before the corpse of Rosa Elvira Cely, but who

systematically turn a blind eye to crimes of right wing paramilitaries

[1] which are a carbon copy of the impaling of Rosa Elvira Cely.

The practice of impaling, that is, forced penetration of the anus or

vagina of the victim with a stick that perforates the internal organs,

and at times exits through the mouth, is not a new act of sadism. In

fact, it’s a practice which has been used in Colombia since the start of

violence by conservatives in the mid 1940s in numerous villages and

rural areas, where the gangs of Chulavitas, Pajaros or paramilitaries

(as the private armies who serve landowners and political chiefs have

been called at different stages or in different areas) have displaced

and terrorised the population using sexual violence as a means of terror

and control. Impaling, just like other sadistic forms of aggression

against women (cutting breasts and pulling out the foetus from the womb,

for example), clearly show a continuation between the “chulavita”

violence of the 40s and the “paraca” [2] violence from the 90s to now.

Aggression towards women and children is seen in the paramilitary logic

as a means of humiliating and projecting complete, patriarchal, machista

and violent, control over communities they deem to be hostile to their

‘“State project” or to be allied with “subversion”. In the words of the

researcher Donny Meertens, sexual violence “was not tolerated as a

perverse individual act, but it was allowed as a systematic practice of

war, applicable only to a specific population.” [3]

Going back to impaling, there are plenty cases of women who, for having

been identified as lovers of guerillas, were raped, murdered and in many

cases impaled. Impaling, to give one example, was used in the El Salado

massacre, in Los Montes de María in 2000: at least one victim, Neivis

Arrieta, aged 18, was impaled because she was accused of being the lover

of a FARC-EP guerrilla [4]. According to Olga Amparo Sánchez, from the

Casa de la Mujer (Women’s Refuge), in Tumaco, at the moment, impaling is

being used as a systematic practice by paramilitaries and the same thing

is happening in a lot of other regions in the country [5].

Paramilitaries have also tortured homosexuals in the areas they control

and in their “social cleansing” campaigns [6].

The Colombian media, who are now tearing their hair out in horror at the

impaling of Cely, never got too outraged before when these practices

were being carried out by paramilitaries in “red zones” [7], often at

the hands of public forces. The media who were well informed while this

was happening in rural areas of Colombia since the start of the

paramilitary offensive in the ‘80s, never informed in such juicy detail,

like they did in the case of Cely, atrocities committed by the

paramilitary-army partnership [8]. Curiously, to understand the real

extent of such barbarity we’ve had to look to reports by Human Rights

groups or special publications specialised on the conflict such as

“Verdad Abierta”, or to the work of foreign journalists, like the now

celebrated Romeo Langlois. Colombian journalists, save for some

honourable exceptions – Hollman Morris chief amongst them – have chosen

not to research these topics; it could be because of mediocrity,

laziness, fear, self-censorship, fawning servility or complicity. I say

complicity, because the economic groups that maintain Colombian media

are directly linked with the economic sectors that have financed, armed

and stimulated the paramilitaries (mining interests, mafia bosses,

cattle-breeders, landowners, multinationals etc). In the end they are

all the same clique. At most, big media outlets lamented the “excesses”

of paramilitarism, always excusing it by saying it was an exaggerated

response to the “guerilla threat” – in doing so they are inverting

Colombian history and distorting the events [9]. In exceptional cases of

honesty, they have even applauded paramiltarism openly [10].

Paramilitary crimes have been silenced, trivialised, mystified, hidden,

ignored and excused when not lauded in the media, in this way they have

helped to make darker this “night and fog” under which paramilitarism

operates [11].

Of Javier Velasco, the only person arrested so far for the murder,

little more than him being a “common delinquent” has been said [12]. But

the practice of impaling is not just any form of sadism, but one that is

strictly associated with the spectre of paramilitarism in Colombia. It’s

a ritualised and learned torture with established rules. I’m not in any

doubt that the murderer of Rosa Elvira Cely has been linked to

paramilitarism, “social cleansing” gangs and the private armies the

right has at its disposal to erode the social fabric, to impose its

total control and its backward and conservative worldview[13] and to do

the dirty work the army can’t always do in the open. I’m under no

illusions either that this possible link will be neither investigated

nor studied because the Colombian media and the interest groups behind

it have never been interested in generating a real rejection of

paramilitarism in the public opinion [14]. It’s enough for them to take

a lukewarm public stance, condemn the “excesses” and the death of the

“innocent people” (collateral damage) while they reinforce the discourse

of “necessary evil”.

The base nature of this crime deserves the justified indignation of

anyone who has a bit of a heart. We are all Rosa, we should all

energetically denounce this crime. But the media and the elites who

control it are crying out in despair not at the crime itself but at the

fact that the impaling happened in a space outside of where it was

‘natural’ for it to happen: the setting of the armed conflict. They’re

horrified because the victim wasn’t a “faggot” or a “bleeding slut” who

slept with a guerilla. They’re crying our in horror because the impaling

took place in the National Park and not in a “red zone”, in a hamlet in

the middle of nowhere or in a pauperised neighbourhood. They’re

horrified because this barbarity happened, in Meerten’s words, outside

of the “specific population” in which people are normally victimised in

this way with the silent complicity of the media and the indifferent

view or even approval of the elites who continue to get rich from the

war and the logic of the appropriation of wealth through the violent

plunder and control of communities and territories. They were so

horrified at this, yet these same elites are those who will continue to

create “Javier Velascos” who impale, rape and dismember, those who

continue to support and form mercenary armies, and those who continue to

make “murder” the most prosperous industry in the lacerated Colombian

land. We shouldn’t forget about this side of the story for one minute.

[1] In Colombia, the term “paramilitaries” refers exclusively to right

wing private armies linked to the army and the elites. Left wing armed

groups are referred to only as guerrillas.

[2] “Paraca” is slang for paramilitaries.

[3] “Victims and Survivors of War in Colombia –Three Views of Gender

Relations” en “Violence in Colombia 1990–2000”, Ed. Charles Bergquist,

Ricardo Peñaranda, Gonzalo Sánchez, SR Books, 2001, p.154. The author

refers to the context of “Violence” in the 1940s and 50s, but we can

consider the conclusion equally valid for the paramilitary campaign from

the 1980s to present day.

[4]

www.eltiempo.com

[5]

www.bbc.co.uk

[6]

www.semana.com

[7] Areas of conflict.

[8] The paramilitary-army partnership is, according to Medicina Legal

reports, responsible for 78% of sexual crimes committed within the

context of the armed conflict – of which, the army is directly

responsible for 63%. This high number tells us this is a systematic and

recurrent practice. See memories from the forum “Why do we need a

criminal policy on sexual violence in Colombia?” (Noviembre 2011), p.6.

www.sismamujer.org

Even at that, it’s important to take account of the fact that these

official figures are, in all certainty, an underestimation of the real

figure, because of a tendency to downplay the abuses of public forces

and exaggerate the those of the insurgency (something common to most

official statistics), because of the low rates of people reporting the

crimes: according to a report by Defence of the People in 2008, 81.7% of

displaced people who are sexually abused never report these crimes.

These figures are consistent with an independent study, carried out in

2012 by Oxfam and the Women’s House in a representative sample of women,

in which 82% of those who admitted they were victims of sexual violence

didn’t make any official complaint (Ibid). According to another report,

about sexual violence in the district of Magdalena and in Montes de

María, they arrive at the conclusion that “Soldiers are by far the main

culprits, who commit these acts in ‘the “strategic context” of

territorial conquest and also in an “opportunistic” manner to get

“sexual satisfaction”, this “scorn towards women” inculcated among the

ranks(…) underlines this conduct.”

www.elespectador.com

[9] In reality, these guerrilla groups formed towards the end of the 40s

in response (as self-defence groups) to the abuses and crimes of

conservative factions (antecedents of modern paramilitaries) in the

Colombian countryside.

[10] See editorial from El Tiempo 30 July 1987.

[11] As proof of this, this week there was a paramilitary massacre of 5

people in the municipality of Remedios (Antioquia), which barely got

“coverage” with a feeble account of a miserable 120 words (3 June). This

wasn’t a massacre, but an “attack”, perpetrated not by terrorists but by

“unidentified people”. The media source reports that paramilitaries and

terrorists operate in the zone, leaving a doubt hanging in the air about

who carried out the massacre, even though everyone knows it was an

attack by paramilitaries: the massacre, in fact, took place in a local

community centre, social centres are often targets for paramilitary

activity which specialises in attacking any form of popular

organisation. El Espectador doesn’t dare denounce paramilitarism,

instead paramilitary actions are always perpetrated by “unidentified

people” – this is nothing but a means strengthening the mantel of “night

and fog” under which these mercenary armies of the right operate. This

contrasts sharply with the coverage of action by insurgents in this same

media outlet.

www.elespectador.com

[12]

www.semana.com

[13] Hired assassins often carry rosary beads and have a prayer on the

tip of their tongues.

[14] Proof of this is the distance and ambiguity in the form calls of

protest against paramilitaries in the daily national papers has taken

(as on the one who took place on March 6, 2008), which contrasts with

the enthusiasm shown every time there is a pronouncement against the

insurgency.