Colombia police used torture and sexual harassment to quell protests – Amnesty
Colombian police used sexual harassment, torture and forced nudity to target women and LGBTIQ+ people as they cracked down on a nationwide wave of protests in 2021, a report by Amnesty International has found.
National and anti-riot police units committed hundreds of acts of genderbased human rights violations in its response to protests, the Amnesty investigation revealed.
“Having documented 28 of these incidents in depth, it’s clear that gender-based violence was a tool of repression that the national police used to punish those who dared to speak out and protest,” Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary general, told the Guardian.
Amnesty’s report echoed investigations by local NGOs, including Temblores, a Bogotá-based human rights watchdog, which found that police officers explicitly told women that they should have stayed in the kitchen rather than voicing their political opinions in the streets. In some cases women were separated from male protesters, taken to dark buildings far from police centres, and raped by groups of policemen, Temblores found.
The catalyst for 2021’s national strike was a deeply unpopular tax reform but the movement ballooned after a heavy-handed police response to largely peaceful protests.
Police brutality sparked a wave of discontent which spread quickly to towns and cities from the Atlantic to the Andes and created a public opposition movement of a scale unprecedented in recent decades.
Despite the withdrawal of the tax reform, public unrest stretched on for months, fuelled by anger at the police’s use of live rounds to disperse crowds, the beating of protesters and the indiscriminate use of rubber bullets and teargas.
At least 38 civilian were killed by state forces – the majority by gunfire – according to the UN human rights office in Colombia.
Hundreds more were arbitrarily detained by security forces, who often fired teargas and rubber bullets in houses and businesses where their use is illegal, said Temblores, which contributed data to Amnesty’s report.
Police officers used the cover of night to seek retribution against protesters, abducting and beating them in their local neighbourhoods, said Lina Porras, a researcher at Temblores.
Gender-based violence scared people into staying at home but was also a manifestation of the police force’s conservative gender views, Porras added.
“These were not isolated incidents, this was a patriarchal institutional response from public security forces that sees women’s bodies as objects to discipline, a way to project power, and the object of sexual violence,” Porras says.
Amnesty received hundreds of reports of gender-based violence in major cities but only had the capacity to fully investigate 28.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg for sexual violence,” Callamard said. “We are not talking about a small number of incidents, we’re talking about a pattern.”
State forces also targeted AfroColombians and Indigenous communities, human rights advocates, LGBTIQ + people and journalists in reprisals for challenging social gender norms, Amnesty’s report concluded.
Despite calls from the UN and other international observers to guarantee that the culprits of the human rights abuses are made accountable, Colombia’s justice system has failed to sufficiently investigate the reports, Amnesty said.
Only one case, involving the rape of a young woman by two male police officers, has been brought to court, and it resulted in their suspension, not criminal charges. Many survivors of sexual violence did not file reports out of fear that it would lead to retribution from their victimisers.
Widespread police brutality during 2021’s national strike reinvigorated calls for an overhaul of Colombia’s security forces. Critics say security forces were formed to confront communist insurgencies and are poorly equipped
to manage delicate public order situations.
In 2019, a bean bag round fired from close range by anti-riot policekilled 18year-old Dilan Cruz, prompting national outrage.
“We need to overhaul the public forces and their military dynamic which sees protesters as the enemy within,” said Porras.
Gustavo Petro’s government is the first leftwing administration in Colombia’s history and has proposed two police reforms but they are in the initial phase of congressional debate.
“There needs to be a clear distinction drawn between a military operation and a police operation and frankly, the boundaries are very blurred if they exist at all,” said Callamard. “A security force that is almost exclusively repressive has no place in a democratic society and it needs to be reformed.”