CEJIL 30 Years: Jineth Bedoya Lima

Image: original art by Catalina Naranjo (IG @licopeno) 

BY RICARDO SILVA ROMERO ABOUT JINETH BEDOYA

My dear Jineth: nothing of what is happening in the world this week matters to me as much as telling you that what happened to you did indeed happen to you; yes, they did that first attack, against you and your mother, which no one wanted to investigate; they did deny you a security scheme, amid the haze of threats, because according to them you were not at risk; they did tell you that you had three days to live if you kept describing alliances between legal and illegal armies; they did set a trap for you in that nightmare jail because you were proving to all of us that it was not a jail but the country’s central crime office; they did point their guns at you and tie you up and kidnap you and torture you and rape you and leave you for dead on a highway on Thursday, May 25, 2000, while other lives continued going about on tiptoe so as not to wake up the Colombian State.

It is said that “the State is all of us”, in good faith, so that we do not forget that we are responsible, but it is more accurate to accept that “the State is them” not only because in a strict sense the State has been created to serve the individuals that together make a society, but because not on a few occasions our State, the Colombian one, has been a refuge and trench and business for a few. In a way, the history of Colombia – a succession of peace processes avenged around the corner by handfuls of peacekeepers – has been the lost pulse for a state that is not a boardroom armed to the teeth, an out-of-hand Frankenstein monster, but a guarantor of freedom and justice and inclusion throughout the territory: I am also ashamed, in short, of this ambiguous and unusual state that last Monday withdrew from the trial of your case in the I-A Court, as if losing it was not going to be a triumph.

The lawyer Viviana Krsticevic told El Tiempo that it was never expected that, after your irrefutable and indelible testimony at the hearing on Monday – where you said “I have believed that the word is the best way to transform pain”, “to see every day in my body the marks of sexual violence and torture, [this] does not permit me to close this cycle ”, “but I am not going to shut up”, – the Colombian State would make that decision with the calling of dangerous precedent that has not even been taken by “truly authoritarian governments like that of Fujimori in Peru, Ortega in Nicaragua or Maduro in Venezuela”: getting up from the table. But perhaps it is a typical gesture of a paradoxical State: the State of a society in which it has been common for women to lack, to ask for help from a world that is inviting it all the time to investigate, to vehemently demand a justice that only works against others.

My admired Jineth: nothing of what is happening in the world this week interests me as much as leaving for you in writing that I also realize that in these twenty-five years of journalism for democracy you have encountered an unprecedented value – a courage that is only yours – to embody the thousand and one struggles of those of us who are fed up with infamy: the struggles against sexist violence, against war, against inequality, against indifference, against stigma, against injustice, against tyranny, against censorship, against the State that shrugs its shoulders and sabotages the griefs it engenders. It always occurs to me to tell you that that Christmas in which we found ourselves together, in search of the last gifts, it seemed to me that you and your mother were a single silhouette of those who are redeeming us all in their path.

No hero wants to be one. But to see the two of you together is to understand the strange force that has prevented this country from ever self-imploding.

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