Facing destruction, rebuilding life: Gender and the internally displaced in Colombia

Abstract

Women are victims and survivors of displacement and uprooting in the first place as widows of rural violence, heads of household suddenly expelled toward the cities; in the second place as spouses, when the effects of violence and uprooting and the necessities of survival touch them differently from men; and in the third place as leaders whose experiences of participation and organization help them to forge new life projects, individual and collective, in the city. Forced migration flows are partly toward the capital, Bogotá, but more toward the intermediate cities near the areas of expulsion. By virtue of their size-large enough to guarantee a certain anonymity-and their proximity, these capital cities of the departments where expulsion occurs are the natural arrival points4 of the displaced. During the cruelest years of murders, massacres, disappearances, and bombardments in peasant zones, including the Atlantic coast, the displacement was of entire communities. In all regions, again including the Atlantic coast, the period of organized exodus was followed by one or more selective violent actions and therefore piecemeal arrivals by families that silently gravitated to relatives or acquaintances in the city. The different levels of collective identity, organization, and political consciousness have enormously influenced the role of women in these displacements, since these are the conditions that largely determine their possibilities of predicting and planning for displacement, resisting its psychological traumas, and facing the challenges of survival and the construction of a new life project.