Empowerment and resistance of displaced women victims of the Colombian armed conflict in the Pinar del Río neighborhood (Barranquilla)

Abstract

The Colombian armed conflict has left 33,000 people displaced in 2019 alone. This research focuses on the specific risks of the conflict based on gender: violence, sexual exploitation or abuse, enslavement to carry out domestic work, recruitment of children at an early age. Through an ethnography, a series of impacts are observed that have to do with the invisibility of women in their organizational processes. Conflict violence is also found to be a form of colonialism of power, relegating them to the lowest link in the social chain. Exfoliated from a palimpsest of marginalities: racism (many of them are Afro or indigenous), aporophobia, machismo, periphery, they also have the difficulty of being recognized as a subject of law in order to benefit from public policies. We highlight their struggles to become political actors.