Colombia’s Indigenous Nasa Women Resist

by Teo Ballvé for NACLA

“C’mon, muchachos, let’s go!” With this abrupt order, Celia Eumesa and a group of the Nasa Indigenous Guard under her command jumped into a van and drove off in hot pursuit of a handful of guerrillas that had just kidnapped some people from her community. Armed with no more than decorative staffs, which they carry to symbolize indigenous authority, they sped behind the guerrillas’ car with a caravan of 60 other Indigenous Guards trailing behind.

When they had inched close enough to the car, Celia told her driver to beep the horn to see if the men would pullover. When the guerrillas refused, she told her driver: “Punch it. We have to pass them.” As Celia’s van lurched forward, so did the guerrillas’. “More! More!” she yelled, and eventually they managed to pass the car.

When they reached a safe distance ahead of the guerrillas, she ordered the van parked sideways to block the dirt road. Celia figured that since she had a bigger van, and the road was flanked by thick brush on both sides, the rebels wouldn’t try to recklessly bust through the makeshift roadblock. She was right.

The Nasa people, who number around 300,000, are Colombia’s second-largest indigenous group, mostly concentrated in the departamento (province) of Cauca. Their traditional homeland in this southwestern part of the country has been wracked by some of the worst violence in the country’s 42-year civil war. The armed conflict pits the Communist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or FARC in its Spanish initials) and smaller leftist insurgent groups against the Colombian military and its right-wing paramilitary supporters.
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