# Mi cuerpo es la verdad (Women & LGBTIQ+) — Digest

*Tomo 7 of the Colombian Truth Commission's (CEV) final report* Hay Futuro Si Hay Verdad *(2022): "Mi cuerpo es la verdad. Experiencias de mujeres y personas LGBTIQ+ en el conflicto armado." Director: Commissioner Alejandra Miller Restrepo; Grupo de Trabajo de Género, coordinated by Salomé Gómez Corrales. Dedicated to the late Commissioner María Ángela Salazar Murillo.*

## 1. Identity & purpose

This is the gender volume of the CEV's eleven-tome final report, mandated to "esclarecer las formas diferenciadas en las que el conflicto afectó a las mujeres" (clarify the differentiated ways the conflict affected women). It answers a demand from feminist and women-victims' organizations summarized in their slogan: **"Sin la voz de las mujeres la verdad no está completa"** (Without women's voice the truth is not complete). The tome is built in two halves with deliberately poetic titles: **"Mujeres: voces que defienden y cuidan la vida"** (Women: voices that defend and care for life) and **"La verdad es arcoíris"** (The truth is a rainbow) for LGBTIQ+ persons. It draws on ~10,864 women's testimonies and 408 LGBTIQ+ persons directly engaged, plus civil-society reports. Each half follows the same arc: *¿Qué pasó?* (what happened) → *¿Por qué pasó?* (why) → *¿Qué pasó con lo que pasó?* (impacts) → resistance → conclusions → recommendations.

## 2. Central thesis: the body as a territory of war; patriarchy ⇄ war

The interpretive key is **el patriarcado** (patriarchy) — defined as the oldest system of domination, the institutionalized rule of men (and hegemonic masculinity) over women, feminized men, and "others." The causal claim runs **both directions**: the conflict's impacts on women and LGBTIQ+ persons were disproportionate *because patriarchy pre-existed* in society and culture, while war itself *"becomes one of the clearest forms of expression"* of that system. Patriarchy is named not as backdrop but as a **source that explains the existence and persistence of the armed conflict itself**, intersecting with racism, colonialism and classism.

The title encodes the thesis: **"mi cuerpo es la verdad"** — the body (especially women's and gender-non-conforming bodies) was made a **territorio de guerra** and a **botín de guerra** (spoil/booty of war). Drawing on Rita Segato and Constitutional Court Auto 092/2008, the report argues sexual violence targets the **"centro de gravedad del edificio social"** (center of gravity of the social edifice): because women sustain the *condiciones de humanidad* (minimum conditions of humane life — care, food, the social fabric), attacking them is a way to dominate communities and control territory. The slogan that closes the LGBTIQ+ half is **"El cuerpo, primer territorio de paz"** (The body, the first territory of peace).

## 3. Structure

- **Part I — Women** (~pp. 27–348): war/territory/women; sexual & reproductive violence and responsibilities; women in prostitution; women expelled from politics; women inside the war (combatants); *¿Por qué pasó?* (patriarchy: continuum of violences, warrior masculinities, state neglect); impacts; coping (*afrontamientos*); resistance, *juntanza* & peacebuilding; persistence factors; conclusions; recommendations.
- **Part II — LGBTIQ+ ("La verdad es arcoíris,"** ~pp. 349–582): victims' voices; historical approach; six illustrative territorial *situaciones*; differentiated persecution patterns by armed actor; *los porqués* (colonial inheritance, sociocultural, institutional/political factors); impacts; *afrontamientos*; "Cuerpos disidentes que resisten" (dissident bodies that resist); conclusions; recommendations.
- **Glosario** (~pp. 583–598) with the Gender Working Group's coined and adopted definitions, including the 15 modalities of sexual violence.

## 4. Typology of gendered & sexual violence (with mechanisms)

The Commission treats sexual violence as **crímenes de guerra y de lesa humanidad** (war crimes and crimes against humanity), used not to "satisfy desire" but as a **weapon** — to intimidate, degrade, *aleccionar* (teach a lesson), control women's/LGBTIQ+ bodies, punish other combatants through family ties, and impose a sexual order. Fifteen catalogued **modalities** (from the Gender Working Group's *Guía de abordaje*):

- **Violación** (rape) and **violación colectiva** (gang rape); **amenaza de violación** (threat of rape).
- **Acoso sexual** (harassment); **trata con fines de explotación sexual** (sex trafficking); **esclavitud sexual** (sexual slavery — ownership over a person for sexual use/exchange).
- **Desnudez forzada** (forced nudity, incl. forced dancing/parading naked); **obligación de presenciar / realizar actos sexuales** (forced witnessing / performing of sexual acts).
- **Mutilación de órganos sexuales** (mutilation of sexual organs, ante- or post-mortem — ablation, castration); documented as breast-cutting, **empalamiento** (impalement), insertion of objects, *descuartizamiento* (dismemberment).
- **Reproductive violence (violencia reproductiva)** — violation of reproductive autonomy: **anticoncepción/esterilización forzada** (forced contraception/sterilization — central *inside guerrilla ranks*, where motherhood was the **commanders' prerogative**, *"potestad de los comandantes"*); **aborto forzado** (forced abortion); **embarazo forzado** (forced pregnancy — sometimes to force *mestizaje* and harm an ethnic people, or to "perpetuate presence" in a territory, e.g., Hernán Giraldo Serna systematically impregnating girls under 14); **tortura durante el embarazo**; **maternidad o crianza forzada** (forced motherhood/child-rearing of children born of rape, incl. denial of legal abortion).
- **Forced labor / domestic servitude** — women (and LGBTIQ+ people) forced into cooking, laundry, nursing the wounded, and sexual service to ranks (e.g., Leidy, a Black nurse held ~5 years).
- **Femicide / transfeminicide**, **control of bodies and gender expression** (dress codes, forced haircuts), and **"limpieza social"** (social cleansing — see §6) against women in prostitution and LGBTIQ+ persons.

Mechanism throughout: violence often **public and exemplary** (massacres like El Salado and Mapiripán were "privileged spaces" for public sexual violence as a terror strategy); women punished as suspected enemy allies — branded *guerrilleras* by paramilitaries/forces, or *paramilitares/colaboradoras* by guerrillas.

## 5. Statistics & data (figures; under-registration)

- **Women heard:** 10,864 women in in-depth/individual interviews and life-stories; **68.53%** of women victims who spoke with the CEV were *campesinas* (peasant women).
- **Forced displacement:** **4,025,910 women — 50.1%** of all displaced persons.
- **Sexual violence (Registro Único de Víctimas, RUV):** ≥**32,446** victims of crimes against sexual liberty/integrity, of whom **92.5%** women and girls; the RUV registered **12,497** paramilitary sexual-violence events.
- **CEV's own corpus:** 1,294 sexual-violence events / 1,154 victims across 979 testimonies; **89.5%** women, **10.5%** men. Most affected: girls and young women **12–28**.
- **Under-registration (subregistro):** sexual and especially reproductive violence is "la violencia más olvidada y silenciada" — driven by shame, stigma, fear/threats, victim-blaming, normalization, weak state judicial presence, and the fact that *"ningún actor admite haber violado"* (no actor admits to raping). Emblematic gap: Hernán Giraldo's conviction recognized **9 victims**; an investigator documented **200+**.
- **LGBTIQ+:** **5,360** persons in the RUV; CEV engaged **408**, documented **369 victims / 709 violent events**; 64.2% men, 35.8% women; most violences occurred in childhood/adolescence/youth.

## 6. LGBTIQ+ specific findings (prejudice violence, "limpieza social", heteronormative control)

The Commission adopts **"persecución"** (persecution) as a sociological category and **"violencias por prejuicio"** (prejudice-based violence) — not "homophobia" — for attacks on people **"en razón de sus orientaciones sexuales e identidades y expresiones de género no normativas"** (because of their non-normative sexual orientations and gender identities/expressions). Armed actors persecuted LGBTIQ+ people to (a) **control populations** by imposing a "correct" **heteronormative/cisnormative** moral order, and (b) **win legitimacy** with a citizenry that saw them as *"indeseables"* (undesirables).

Forms (by frequency): **amenaza** (threat, 37%), **desplazamiento forzado** (33.6%), **exilio** (19%), **violencia sexual** (14%), **tortura**, **homicidio**, **desaparición forzada**, **reclutamiento de menores**, **esclavitud**. Cross-cutting practices: **"limpieza social"** (social cleansing — extermination of those deemed socially harmful, LGBTIQ+ people lumped with sex workers, drug users, "ladrones," often named in *panfletos*); **sexual violence as "correctivo"** ("to make you a real woman/man"); **pedagogía del terror** (exemplary public punishment as a "bad example for children"); control of gender expression and public space (banned long hair, earrings, nails; police *batidas* of bars/parks); forced labor/humiliation; and mutilation/feminicide of trans women.

Six illustrative **situaciones**: (1) **Montes de María** — AUC + Policía, 2000–2008; (2) **Urabá antioqueño** — FARC-EP + paramilitaries, 1989–2013; (3) **Arauca lesbians** — FARC-EP, 2004–2016; (4) **Cali trans women** — Policía Nacional, 1980s–90s; (5) **Tumaco Afro LGBTIQ+** — post-demobilization paramilitaries, 2008–2016; (6) **Caquetá** — FARC-EP + paramilitaries, 1996–2008.

## 7. Responsibility attribution across armed actors

- **Paramilitaries (AUC and post-demobilization groups) — the principal perpetrators** of forced displacement and of the **cruelest** sexual violence (marked by *sevicia*, extreme cruelty), used as a deliberate terror mechanism; peak 1999–2001. Toward LGBTIQ+ persons, their logic was primarily **aniquilación** (annihilation): selective homicides, disappearances, *limpiezas sociales*.
- **Guerrillas (FARC-EP, ELN) — the second actor.** FARC-EP imposed **forced contraception and abortion inside the ranks**; sexual violence characterized as *"descontrolada y sin castigo"* despite statutes mandating punishment. Toward LGBTIQ+ people the FARC-EP logic was **instrumentalización or aniquilación** (use for war labor/intelligence, or annihilate), doctrinally tied to "moral revolucionaria." ELN documented for forced "marriages" and reproductive control.
- **Fuerza pública (Ejército, then Policía) — responsible by action and by omission.** Not the largest perpetrators of sexual violence, but documented; the CNMH places the security-forces peak at **2006–2014** — *rising as the conflict de-escalated*, linked to the Seguridad Democrática troop surges. The **Policía Nacional** dominated **arbitrary detentions**, raids on LGBTIQ+ public space, and station/patrol rape, at times in **connivencia** with paramilitary "limpieza" squads (e.g., a 1986 Procuraduría finding in Cali).
- **The State** also bears responsibility for **desprotección** (neglect — selective, military-only presence), barriers to justice and reparation (Jineth Bedoya forced to retell her rape twelve times; only 0.8% of women victims achieved land restitution), revictimization, and protecting companies that displaced communities. The Mapiripán massacre led to the Colombian state's condemnation by the **Inter-American system (2005)**.

## 8. Resistance, organization & peacebuilding by women and LGBTIQ+ persons

**Women.** Resistance is framed as *"en las mujeres reposa la fuerza de la comunidad."* Coined terms: **afrontamientos** (coping/confronting strategies), **juntanza** (coming-together / collective solidarity), and the reconstruction of the **tejido social** (social fabric). **La maternidad como hecho político** (motherhood as a political act) animates the *buscadoras* (women searching for the disappeared — Fabiola Lalinde's *Operación Sirirí*) and the **Mafapo** mothers of the *falsos positivos*. A dense organizational network is named — **Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres**, **Red Nacional de Mujeres**, **Anmucic**, **ANUC** women, **OFP**, **IMP**, **ASOM**, **Asfaddes** — anchored to the slogan **"las mujeres no queremos ser pactadas, sino pactantes"** (we don't want to be negotiated-over, but to be negotiators). They drove the **Subcomisión de Género** at the Havana talks (2014), embedding gender into the Final Accord. **Cultural resistance**: *cantaoras* singing **alabaos** and **chigualos** for the disappeared; **costureros de memoria** (memory sewing circles) where the needle becomes "a doctor."

**LGBTIQ+.** Resistance is theorized through the body ("no se tiene cuerpo: se es cuerpo") in the **"Cuerpos disidentes"** chapter: **Cuerpos re(existentes)** (visibly inhabiting the non-normative body); **Cuerpo que des(arma) el género** (the body that dis-arms gender — "el cuerpo trans es territorio de paz"); **Cuerpos que amaron sin clóset** (loving openly); **Cuerpos de arte** (*reinados*, *bullerengue*, the first Caribbean LGBTIQ+ museum of the conflict); **Cuerpos que maternaron y paternaron** (incl. *madres trans* sheltering displaced youth); **El cuerpo que calló y re-tornó** (fleeing-and-returning as resistance); and **Cuerpos que construyen paz** (from Planeta Paz to the Havana gender subcommission). Named groups: **Caribe Afirmativo, Colombia Diversa, Santamaría Fundación, Fundación GAAT, Planeta Paz, LGBTI por la Paz**.

## 9. Representative quotes

> **"las mujeres no queremos ser pactadas, sino pactantes."** — "We women do not want to be negotiated-over, but to be negotiators." *(women's first delegation, Havana table)*

> **"El cuerpo de la mujer era utilizado como un botín de guerra para tener hijos y… perpetuar las acciones criminales dentro del territorio."** — "Women's bodies were used as a spoil of war for breeding, to perpetuate the group's criminal presence in the territory." *(researcher Norma Vera, on Hernán Giraldo)*

> **"Como usted quiere ser mujer, pues vamos a hacerle lo que se les hace a las mujeres… Tenía 10 años."** — "Since you want to be a woman, we'll do to you what's done to women… I was 10." *(Soraida, trans woman, FARC-EP, Arauquita)*

> **"En un mundo que no gusta de la maricada, ser una persona LGBTIQ+ es, en sí mismo, una resistencia."** — "In a world that dislikes queerness, being an LGBTIQ+ person is, in itself, an act of resistance." *(Yamila)*

## 10. Recommendations + distinctive coined concepts

**Recommendations** (built from ~3,400 victim proposals), organized in three axes for each population:

*For women* — (A) **strengthen State capacity for gender equality / democracia paritaria**: a National Action Plan for **UNSC Resolution 1325**; electoral reform for ≥50% **paridad**; exclude sexual violence from the **fuero militar** (military jurisdiction); a JEP macro-case on sexual/reproductive violence; full application of Laws 1257/2008, 1448/2011, 1719/2014. (B) **Women's autonomy + integral reparation**: intersectional health care; recognize **"violencia reproductiva"** as a victimizing act (including for ex-combatants); guarantee voluntary abortion (Sentencia C-055/2022); **land titling in women's names**; the "ley de mujer rural." (C) **Cultural/social transformation**: education for gender equality; dismantle **masculinidades guerreras**; build **"pactos por la igualdad"** grounded in **el cuidado de la vida** (the ethics of caring for life).

*For LGBTIQ+ persons* — (A) **access to justice + memory**: differential investigation protocols; a JEP national macro-case on gender/sexuality-motivated and sexual/reproductive violence; two **memory museums**; fuerza-pública public acknowledgment; reform the Código Penal Militar. (B) **material equality**: amend **Constitution Art. 13** to bar discrimination by sexual orientation/gender identity; create a **Ministerio de la Igualdad**; restore the **Programa Nacional de VIH**; pass a **gender-identity law**; reform Ley 1482/2011; do not criminalize sex work. (C) **pacific coexistence**: anti-prejudice communication, pluralist curricula, protective environments for LGBTIQ+ children, and internationally monitored implementation — "un nuevo paradigma social."

**Distinctive coined / adopted concepts (glossary):**
- **Patriarcado** — historical system of domination organizing social hierarchy by sex/gender; determinant of the violences.
- **Contínuum de violencias** — the interconnection and persistence of violences across a woman's life: historical (slavery→present), private↔public, and peacetime↔wartime; **circular and bidirectional** (war victimization feeds later private-sphere violence "y viceversa").
- **Masculinidades guerreras / militarización de la masculinidad** — warrior masculinity; the war-rewarded model of "ser un verdadero hombre" common to paramilitaries, guerrillas and security forces; the report proposes **demilitarizing masculinity**.
- **Masculinidad hegemónica** — the dominant scheme of male power over women, homosexuals and minorities.
- **Heteronormatividad / cisnormatividad** — the power systems making heterosexuality and a cis sex-gender alignment "correct, desirable and obligatory."
- **Herencia colonial** — the colonial inheritance: the thesis that today's "traditional" homo/transphobia is a *modern, colonial* construct (Inquisition, imposed nuclear-monogamous-heterosexual family), not a pre-Columbian custom.
- **Violencias por prejuicio / persecución** — prejudice-based violence and persecution as the analytic frame for anti-LGBTIQ+ harms.
- **Limpieza social** — "social cleansing"; extermination of those deemed undesirable.
- **Violencia reproductiva** — violation of reproductive autonomy (forced contraception, abortion, sterilization, pregnancy, denial of abortion after rape).
- **Juntanza / afrontamientos** — collective solidarity / coping-and-confronting strategies.
- **Insurgentas** — self-naming of former women guerrillas (FARC-EP, M-19, EPL): armed womanhood as a *double transgression* of patriarchy.
- **Interseccionalidad / enfoque antirracista / empobrecimiento** — analytic lenses showing how race, class and gender compound the harm.
- **El cuerpo, primer territorio de paz** — the body as the first territory of peace.