Organizing women for combat: The experience of the FARC in the Colombian war

Abstract

The FARC, which used to be Colombia's main guerrilla force and is now in the midst of a peace process, was to a great extent a feminized group. This paper discusses why it recruited so many women, and why it recruited them as combatants. We suggest that only when the FARC adopted a highly hierarchical, self‐contained, and militaristic organizational blueprint did it get involved in the massive recruitment of women as combatants. We discuss the way in which organizational mechanisms and ideology interacted to produce such an outcome, and how this interaction marked both the organization and the trajectories of the women who joined it.

Contribution of Municipality-level Socio-Economic and Cultural Factors on Violence against Women in Colombia: Does Geographic Setting Matter?

“…Additionally, we found that some municipalities do not have an effective route of attention for women who have experienced violence, and if they exist, there is not a clear knowledge about them, and also public institutions are fragmented by the same presence of illegal groups. That is why the number of reports of violence may not reflect the actual number of these cases in every municipality, and why vulnerable groups like children and women might be suffering the most cases of aggression inside these illegal groups, as Sanín and Carranza (2017) sustain. In general, as Segato (2014) establishes, territories impacted by internal wars, are places where the burden goes in the majority of times over women and girls, especially in the form of sexual violence.…”

The unspoken red-line in Colombia: Gender reordering of women ex-combatants and the transformative peace agenda

“…Gutiérrez and Carranza (2017) concur that the expansion of the FARC-EP was behind the mass recruitment of women, but they emphasise that their ideology made it possible for women to enter on a more or less equal footing. According to the internal regulations of the FARC-EP from the 4th conference in 1970, women had the same rights as men and discrimination on the grounds of gender was strictly punished.…”

Women’s sexual and reproductive health in war and conflict: are we seeing the full picture?

“…We suggest that applying feminist perspectives on war to global health research concerning SRHR in wars can help draw our attention to how women’s bodies are at the centre of policies and violent struggles that have variously been described as a form population control [ 15 ]; genocide [ 16 ]; ethnic cleansing [ 17 ]; and as a weapon of war [ 18 ]. Furthermore, studies show that rebel groups monitor reproductive policies and relations between recruits, expecting recruits to retire upon pregnancy or marriage [ 19 , 20 ], impose abortions or contraceptive use on women [ 21 ] and enforce marriages between soldiers or between soldiers and local women [ 22 ]. Recent reports from Nigeria suggest that Boko Haram forcibly married and raped women and girls; in turn, the state military enforced abortions on women released from the non-state armed group [ 23 ].…”