***Warning: This article contains explicit descriptions of sexual violence***
Fanny Escobar, a community leader in northwestern Colombia, says she has no more tears left.
"Listen to my voice," she tells me.
"While I speak, he betrays me and goes silent. But I'm not crying. I have no more tears left to cry."
Instead, when she is sad, her hands start shaking and she gets chills.
When Escobar finishes the story of what she has been through in her 57 years of living in this war-torn area called Uraba, she is as cold as ice.
She survived rape, death threats from guerrillas and paramilitary troops, was forced to move and live in displacement, had to overcome the murder of one biological child and several adopted ones, as well as her husband - who abused her when he came home drunk.
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She says that even cancer is a consequence of her war trauma: "All that pain, all that armor I had to wear, it destroyed me from the inside and took my breast.
"The cancer has metastasized. Now I can barely see in my right eye.
"I poisoned my own body with that pain, that anger. Today, cancer is my worst enemy."
What would you say to people who would say that her life story resembles a movie?
"You have indigenous women who have been raped seven or eight times, and who are still being raped in their own territory.
"My life story is nothing compared to what's happening there," says Escobar.
Escobar is a community leader, one of many in Colombia.
She runs an organization called Mujeres Del Panton, which fights for her community to have a voice, to prevent their children from turning to crime, to prevent abuse and to get justice when the abuse cannot be stopped.
Fani Escobar is again being threatened by gangs that see her leadership as a hindrance to their activities - groups linked to the same paramilitary organizations that have persecuted her for decades.
These are not empty threats: in 2020, 309 social community leaders were killed in Colombia, and another 40 of them in the first three months of 2021 alone, according to data from the local expert group Indepaz.
Escobar knows that soon she could become part of the statistics that make Colombia one of the most dangerous countries in the world for the fight for human rights.
"But I'm not afraid of death.
"I've always said I was born to die," she says.
"Like a macho man"
Escobar was born in La Guajira, a poor desert region in the north of Colombia, home to the Vayu indigenous people, but when she was a teenager her family had to move to Uraba, near the Panamanian border, in search of a better life.
Soon she was separated from her mother and the peasants in the Gulf of Urabe, at a time when the guerrillas of the People's Liberation Army (EPL in Colombia) controlled this area.
As dictated by Guahir custom, she was arranged to be married as a child (her father traded her for some kids) and she began farming, even though it was considered a man's job.
"I had to get up at 4 in the morning to milk, groom calves, I know how to castrate cattle, I learned all the jobs that had to be done.
"I even learned to ride without a saddle. Just like macho men do," she says.
But the fact that she felt as strong as a man, that she had the same rights and duties as men, was probably her biggest punishment, she says.
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"It follows you when you're heavy"
In the XNUMXs, the region was overrun by paramilitary groups, a counterinsurgency movement that killed more people than any other armed group during Colombia's war.
According to official court records, paramilitary troops - in collusion with the official armed forces and the private sector - took six million hectares of arable land from local farmers in Uraba.
"The paramilitary did what they wanted.
"And they were very ferocious," says Escobar, beginning to shake as he recounts one of the most traumatic moments of his life.
"Some men on horses said that my sister was very hot and that in 20 days they would come back and take her away," she says.
Escobar hid her sister and waited alone at home for the men to return.
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When they finally arrived, they asked her for water.
"In Guahira, we keep the water in large clay jars, so it's always cold.
"When I went to pick her up, two of them practically already entered the house and stood next to me," says Escobar.
"Five more entered through the back door. Then the man with the scarf around his neck laughed: 'Is this 'beraka'? [heavy woman in Colombian].
"Is this the strongest one?".
“I said, 'Good afternoon, gentlemen, how may I help you? My partner isn't there, and neither is the boss. They went to herd cattle," she says.
"And they told me: 'No, we don't need them. We need you, 'beraka'."
They knew that Escobar was alone.
They knew where every member of her family was.
They came to rape her.
"Their boss was the first to kiss and grope me.
"Then he threw me on the bed so the others could do whatever they wanted with me.
"They told me that because I'm so tough, such a 'beraka', I have to defend myself."
"They kicked me, hit me. Two of them did whatever they wanted to me... They were laughing."
"After so much nastiness, I didn't feel anything anymore.
"I felt like I was leaving my own body. It was as if I had moved somewhere else, so that I would no longer feel the pain."
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Escobar was pregnant at the time of the rape.
"All the time I was thinking about my unborn child. Kill me, but not my child.
"I remember that I 'came back' and persistently begged them not to kill my child. They put me at gunpoint. They were pushing the rifle into me and pulling it out.
"I felt like I was being beaten. I thought I was going to die, because they left me lying there," says Escobar.
Escobar had a miscarriage.
"They took revenge on me, they wanted to hurt me for life... and they succeeded," she says.
According to the Colombian Observatory of Memory and Conflict, an estimated 15.738 people were victims of sexual violence between 1958 and 2018.
Rape was, and still is, a weapon of war.
The suffering of Fani Escobar did not end there.
Years later, the paramilitary killed her husband "because he was a trade unionist" and later one of her sons "because he insisted that the truth about his father's death be revealed," she says.
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Silent resistance
Escobar starts shaking again and I suggest we take a break.
But she grabs their hands to calm them down and says, "No, let's go on."
"I get back on my feet, because fate and life are like that: sometimes when we fall, it's to get back up stronger," she says.
To make it all the more incredible, she says that in this way she can repay the people who raped and persecuted her for years.
"With forgiveness, it is easier to achieve change."
In 2013, a group of soldiers raped and killed three women on the street in Apartado, the largest town in Uraba.
As the days passed, it seemed that the crime would go unpunished, so Escobar and her neighbors began a series of demonstrations against the judicial authorities.
That's how her group was founded Mujeres Del Planton.
The organization is now present in five Colombian departments and has the support of several non-governmental organizations.
It follows the legacy of the Ruta Pasifika De Mijeres [Women's Peace Route], a protest movement of 2.000 women that represented a turning point in the country's resistance movement in the XNUMXs.
Unlike almost all Latin American countries, Colombia has never had a popular revolution.
It is often said that there is no tradition of protest there.
But in these areas there is a quiet resistance at work.
"Historically, Uraba has been a cradle of conflict, violence returned again and again, but it was also a center of resistance, especially of female leadership, because many women were widowed and saw that the fabric of their society was torn apart," says Irina Cuesta, a sociologist and researcher from the Ideje za mir foundation.
"Their collective actions are not reduced to street protests, they organize and solve all kinds of problems in the community: they manage access to water, schools, local roads," says Cuesta.
Today, Escobar and other Mujeres De Planton leaders are a force that threatens the interests of armed groups in the Apartado area.
"Do you see that sports field over there?" Escobar asks.
“It's an open-air drug market. They come every evening, handing packages to each other, to our children, to our neighbors' children, to our grandchildren."
"Gangs get kids hooked on drugs, they start by giving them a little and turn them into addicts and dealers.
"Then they kill them, because they took someone else's place, or because they give up and refuse to continue selling," says Escobar.
"And that's why we're taking to the streets and organizing a 'murga' [protest]... that's how we got them to shut down more than 10 drug sales locations," she says.
Community leaders end their criminal careers, says Escobar, and that's why the gangs take them to task and kill them.
Editor: Eva Ontiveros
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