It seems it is something that happened a long time ago; but it is not. Through the corridor of her memories we get back to 2009, a hard time, when shortages and the need to survive were imposed. Claudia Quintero remembers that harsh time as the basis of what her life project is: to prevent sexual slavery and human trafficking; to rescue and look after victims. Just as if this were not enough, she has also started educating citizenship, the media and authorities about one of the most cruel and unknown violence expressions in these last times. She has got energy for that and even more; that is why she became a symbol against human trafficking. However it was not easy to get there.
By: Nelly Valbuena
English version: Nicolás Dousdebès
The recognized activist and Colombian human rights defender got to Quito, Ecuador, last July the 13th 2018 in a flash trip, just like all her trips, to dictate a conference to my Public Opinion students, in the Communication career at the Salesian Polytechnic University, (El Girón - Quito Campus) about “Media coverage on Human Trafficking, Child and Teen Labor or Sexual exploitation and Prostitution”.
Her visit also matched a quite hard time in our family: two relatives went missing, during 23 days. In this case, Claudia helped not only by alerting authorities at the Ecuadorian – Colombian border but also by spreading this fact through her nets and by helping us see some invisible elements that many did not want or were not able to see, in messages, videos and some of the victims’ gestures which are typical in Human Trafficking cases. Majo and Sofi were safe and sound rescued, as far as this is possible (in Organos, Piura – Perú), because they were actually victims of this hideous crime. Fortunately, due to the family, society and media concern and actions, we were able to save them before it was too late.
Back to Popayán, she kept doing her work, coordinating workshops, writing documents, filing reports on behalf of the victims and visiting authorities in order to raise awareness; she met, among others, The Gender Patrol (Patrulla de Género) and the Colombian Diversity Table (Mesa de Diversidad de Colombia).
Amid all her duties, on Wednesday July the 18th, she attended an interview at NTN24 about the situation of Venezuelan women in Colombia. Since the forced migration exodus started (from Venezuela to Colombia, Ecuador and other regional countries), due to the inner situation in their origin country, thousands of them are being victimized into Human Trafficking and Prostitution networks.
As a matter of fact, “at least 6500 immigrant Venezuelan women, aged between 18 and 25 years old, have been forced to sexual work in Colombia”, according to the Women District Secretary and the Women and Gender Equity Observatory in Bogotá.
It is for them that Claudia asked an urgent humanitarian intervention. At the same time she launched a direct message to everyone: “Venezuela must be concerned for those women who are fleeing their land because of their extreme need. They are an easy target for the international Human Trafficking networks. First of all, there is a stereotype according to which Venezuelan women are the prettiest and most attractive. This is why, in the so called sex black market, they have been caught and they have not been given other opportunities”.
Claudia Quintero, the Anne Frank Corporation director, is a life referent within this issue in Colombia. This gives her enough moral authority to state that “prostitution is a work which only offers violence”, and also that “women must comply with tokens which are the people they have to be sold to. If they ever want to go out with a third person, who is not a token in the brothel, they have to pay a fine to the pimp. There are people in Colombia making good profit out of the Venezuelan women bodies. We ask the Colombian government to intervene”. She also reported that they were not received by the United Nations Organization (UN) nor by the Human Rights Interamerican Commission. She had brought the case to both institutions.
On Saturday July the 21th, when I wrote to remind her she had to send some pictures to me, she already was in Bogotá. She had decided to stay there in order to say good bye to President Juan Manuel Santos and thank him, as a survivor, “for his fight to give us peace”.
That is what she wrote on her Twitter account on Sunday the 22th, when she went back to the south of the country. Actually, one of the happiest days in the life of this woman was September the 26th 2016, when she saw Juan Manuel Santos and Rodrigo Londoño (the former FARC boss) signing a Peace Agreement: “I was so happy that day because of peace, just like when I gave birth to my children. And I was alive to live that moment”. Claudia was one of those thousands of victims the old Colombian conflict generated.
On Wednesday the 25th 2018, she traveled to Cartagena to take part in an event for the World Journey against Human Trafficking. Her activism and the fight for human rights requires all her time and commitment. Just like she says: “This work is 24/7, with no schedule nor holidays; all my time is there to fulfill my mission”. She is happy with a little sleep and a lot to do.
Regarding the World Day against Human Trafficking, “the last report from the United Nations on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) alerts that in the world there are more than 500 international routes for Human Trafficking; and according to Bo Mathiasen, representative of this office in Colombia, this crime moves and slaves more than 700.000 human beings per year in the whole planet. Many people who were victims do not report anything because they feel ashamed or, in the case of those victims who have been exploited, they do not even want to admit nor report the abuse”
Claudia in the midst of her memory shadows
Claudia is a young afro-descendent woman. She has got an inner strength that overflows through her smile. There are people who believe her activist life is “easy”, because she is always traveling, offering speeches, directing workshops, in meetings, here and there. However, shallow people usually judges others lightly. Indeed, inside Claudia’s body and soul inhabits a long life full of intense experiences, so hard and painful that she confesses, with a little melancholy: “I feel as a young woman and I look young but I sometimes feel as though I had lived 80 years, for all I had to go through. I have endured 13 years of conflict and violence which are finally closed for me”.
Claudia Yurley Quintero Rolón was born 37 years ago. She came to this convulsive world at the “San Juan de Dios” hospital in Cucuta, a city placed at the border with Venezuela, on December the 3th 1980. Her birth happened under Jupiter’s influence. That might be the reason that explains how her enthusiasm does not have any limit. This Sagittarian was meant to face great fights among great tragedies, since she was a child.
Between 27th February and 27th April 1980, the rebel group ‘Movimiento Diecinueve de Abril (M-19)’ carried out the Dominican Republic Embassy occupation in Bogotá. This grabbed worldwide and media attention for 61 days. Claudia’s life was just beginning to take shape, maybe she was already supported by an original genetic identity. She was not aware but her life started being marked by the armed conflict revival which was then seen as something very far because during the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s war stage was only placed in the countryside and the Colombian mountainous region.
The country was then living under a severe regime. In 1978, President Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala had signed the Security Statute which gave judiciary police faculties to the military. Thus, the political clash climate became more intense including human rights violations and armed conflict. However this did not affect the ‘cocaine independent republics’ or the kidnapping business.
During the 80’s, war left in Colombian cities a drug trafficking stink which had even gotten the highest power circles generating political corruption as well as exile and death for thousands of innocent people from all sides. Many city youngsters went to the battlefield, some recruited by the Army while others saw in the guerrilla movement a response to social inequity. In addition, a lot of people got engaged in the drug trafficking armies and, very soon, in the paramilitary groups.
While war wounds got deeper in a country that gave birth to many generations that grew up having the armed conflict as a backstage in their lives, news broadcasts showed, in a grisly context, how many young people came back home in coffins, or the endless list of those who went missing while their relatives kept the pictures of their loved ones hung on their chest. The 80’s, the decade when Claudia was born, foresaw the huge pain that was about to come over her and the entire Colombia during the 90’s. This tragedy finally touched her directly as well as her two younger brothers and both of her parents.
In 1999, her father got a job in La Gabarra, a small town placed in the northern Santander state. There she witnessed the scariest times that any population had ever gone through in Colombia. A massacre, announced since the month of May, was getting closer by dreadful signs, displacements and crimes. All of this was later known as the “death path” in Tibú, one of the eleven Catatumbo’s villages in northern Colombia.
Paramilitary groups were then massively sowing terror in the population and controlling the drug trafficking business. Civilians were living under warlord’s rules; in other words, under oppression from every side. Silence was the only way to avoid death while life was hanging from a tiny thread in the whole region. On August 20th 1999 at night, six trucks loaded with paramilitary men got to La Gabarra; the next day, around 5 pm, the Colombian Army called off its troops which had been in the town since July. After 7 pm, electricity was cut off mysteriously. Then, three groups of armed men took possession of all the town entrances and exits. One of them burst into bars and brothels killing everyone; the second one moved towards the river and the third went to Puerto Madero; they all had axes to tear down the doors of the houses that had been previously signed.
Years later, Salvatore Mancuso, the former ‘Bloque Catatumbo’ boss which was one of the paramilitary groups called ‘Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia’ (AUC), accepted his responsibility in the massacres that killed 123 people in that zone between 29th May and 21st August 1999.
Claudia’s father miraculously saved his life but went missing for a month. In the meantime, his family, in Cúcuta, suffered fear, anguish and the pain due to his absence. “Violence settled in our city with curfews while many of our friends and neighbors died on a daily basis. Since I was young I became a social leader but I endured different kinds of violence from armed groups that struggled among them to control that territory. I finally had to forcibly flee my region to Bogotá. I had been declared a military target so I had to leave my land if I wanted to save my life”.
In 2005 she was threatened by paramilitary groups (“Autodefensas”). In 2013 and 2014 she got intimidating messages through social networks. In spite of all, Claudia never kept quiet. Her direct and frank character makes her call things by their own name. In 2014, she was a forced migrant in Argentina because her life had been under threat. Then she replied to Enrique Peñalosa, current Bogota’s mayor, and she put him in his place. He had said: “I worked for two years as a blue collar worker, so blue collar that I was the only non-black man in all the construction site”
The immediate answer to Peñalosa’s racism came from Argentina: “Since I was a child I was called ‘Memin Pinguin’ (a black child comic’s character) at school because I was born in a zone where most part of people was of mestizo origin. Others called me ‘Kunta Kinte’ and avoided to touch me because they ‘got smeared in black color’. I had to conquer kids’ affection and work twice as hard to get my teachers’ respect. They did not even call me by my name: ‘let’s see the little black one, did she bring her homework?’ The little black one always did her homework, got good grades and she even was the second best graduated at high school. But this little black one was a rebel and she faced paramilitary groups recruiting youngsters. She became a human rights activist being chased and now, living in exile.
In Argentina I have gotten achievements that I never got in my country. I was the first black woman who presented a speech at the main congress of women-lawyer activists about Human-Trafficking and I have been awarded twice by the Republic’s Senate as a recognition to my work.
Enrique, I want you to give yourself the chance of knowing something about our afro, cultural, plural, social and sexual identity so you can start changing those paradigms”.
Claudia Quintero was one of the first AUC – Bloque Catatumbo’s victims who declared before the 2005 Justice and Peace Law which was promoted by Alvaro Uribe to demobilize paramilitary groups. “This was a failure, but at least provided some teachings to the country”, she says, being convinced that everything in life is a process.
She went on exile under the Alvaro Uribe’s government, when hundreds of human rights activists were persecuted. Once the peace talks started between president Santos and the FARC, she came back to Colombia. Then she promised herself to contribute to peace from her life experience. She aimed to include the Human Trafficking issue in the Peace Agreement. In order to make it, she moved to La Habana – Cuba.
Claudia meets Anne Frank
Her life has been marked by hard times, but the one that moves her has to do with the birth of the Anne Frank Corporation, in March 2009. It is the institution she leads since then. She remembers she began getting together with other women to get organized, while they shared some pasta and rice donated to them in Abastos, the biggest market in Bogotá.
“I lived in accommodations for women living under prostitution situation and drug consuming, along with people called ñeritos (homeless people in drug consumption situation); it is a disrespectful term but I mention it in a natural way because it is like that. I had to live with homeless people being myself a displaced person”.
People there used to see and experience labor exploitation because it was urgent to eat, work and live. “That is how prostitution turns up for women as well as sexual exploitation for girls in the streets. When you are a displaced, black, poor and young woman, the only thing the system offers you is selling your body. And this triggers other kinds of violence”.
They started to feel how harsh that system was, the one ruled by men. A world where women cannot denounce being raped because justice tells them: “you asked for it”. Claudia met one thousand faces of Human Trafficking and she got involved in this cause to fight against it and also in order to get prostitution abolished.
“I cannot say when I started talking about Human Trafficking and prostitution. The armed conflict made women victims of this and other types of violence. That is why we insist a lot in prevention and attention measures that ought to be taken”.
The day Anne Frank Corporation was inscribed as a survivors’ organization, she tells me while her face shrinks to avoid crying, “I remember my shoes were broken, we had to do a lot of activities to pay all the expenses for setting up our organization and that is something we never forget: where we come from”.
These women went through the conflict and displacement. They come from survival and resilience. They set themselves a goal, to rebuild social fabrics in thousands of women. Those broken by the armed conflict and gender violence. They started being seven, later twenty and now they are around eighty, including men. They do not work on a hierarchy basis but horizontally, through nets, in all Colombian regions.
Paramilitary groups demobilized in 2006 and became criminal bands. In the current post conflict moment, The Anne Frank Corporation has revealed that “nowadays, people disappearance due to Human Trafficking is ranked as the third most common crime in Colombia” .
Claudia explains what Human Trafficking is
Human trafficking is understood as a criminal act but not as gender violence. It is naturalized in the male sexist world, usually shaped by Human Trafficking consumers. This affects especially women forced into prostitution and sexual slavery.
Human Trafficking is still wrongly called “white slave trade”, but nowadays women from all human groups, ages and social classes are displaced and retained. “Police says they are investigating criminal nets but Human Trafficking is being suffered by women, children, teens, young people and some men for labor exploitation, sexual slavery, domestic forced work in houses and farms. In addition there are girls exploited in the streets as well as in mining or agricultural towns”. That is the reason why, in her speeches, she insists that it has to be considered as a serious violation against human rights and one of the worst types of gender based violence. “It would be the only way to draw attention to it, to give it a voice and a face”.
According to Legal Medicine in Colombia, the third cause of forced disappearance is Human Trafficking. Before this fact, Claudia wonders: “¿How do we look for a disappeared woman due to Human Trafficking; how do we determine what Human Trafficking is; when we have a girl who has gone missing, how do we know whether this has been caused by prostitution or Human Trafficking?”
Society, social networks, some media and even families blame this on the victim. “For instance, when they ask: ¿why did you go out with such a man or woman? ¿Why did you get convinced about working or going to another city or country? ¿Why didn’t you suspect something, how could you believe it”; or when they simply throw expressions like: “she went away on her own”, “she’s already of legal age and knows what she does”, “she’ll be back soon just as if nothing had happened”, that’s what happens for being naive and party-goer”, “if she were a woman of her house, none of this would have happened to her…”
Scolding victims makes Human Trafficking a shameful crime that paralyzes and silences them and their families. These are some of the reasons whereby victims do not fight, if they survive; they do not demand their rights. They do not show up because they want to keep hidden. They also fear to be located by their former exploiters.
¿How to fight against Human Trafficking?
There is a task for society. On one hand, Awareness has to be raised so we can be able to see beyond facts and suspect whenever a woman, an adolescent or a girl disappears ¿Who is behind this disappearance? This will help in the search and location process. On the other hand, it is also important for society to know this crime to get mobilized: “an indifferent society, silent and asleep, covers up criminals; but when they feel uncovered or visible, we are likely to prevent them from taking a victim out of the country and maybe, vanish forever”
From her experience, Claudia warns: “In the aftermath of a strong social campaign through the media and social networks, based on sustained information, we have seen how many girls or women have been abandoned on the streets or in cities or foreign countries, just when they were being carried from one place to another”.
Then she adds: “However, a lot of times we do not find them or we discover them dead. So the message to society has to be clear. We have to think that a life might have been cut off due to State inefficiency or simply because criminals are criminals all the time. I consider necessary to make clear that if there is social mobilization and the victim appears dead, we do not have to blame it on the mobilization; it is the criminal’s fault or it has been caused by the institutional lack of action when cases are dismissed and a lot of valuable time for rescue operations is wasted. Finally, criminal nets might have bonds with people inside State institutions”
Human Trafficking requires efforts and working through a net, on both national and international levels because human lives are at stake. Authorities must do their job, look for them until finding them, and families have to demand their rights tirelessly. “Those who hold power have to be bothered so that they go out looking for victims. First hours are crucial because victims can be traced before they cross borders and before they are taken into trafficking places where they are forced to become invisible. It is very important for people to make noise so that the State acts and criminals become visible and feel naked”
In Colombia, Claudia works in influencing processes between society and State through an interinstitutional commission; she does not neglect politics influencing because the State has to realize there is a strong civil society which is interested in an issue that affects the country and the whole world. She also works along the State and Police through a Gender Patrol that she trains with her speeches and experience. “It is an ant work” to create a culture that does not accept Human Trafficking and points at those Public Force members or institutions that live together with this crime or make a profit out of it.
In Colombia, several cases have been identified where Interpol and the Human Trafficking department were infiltrated by the ‘Clan del Golfo’. She highlights that institutions per – se (by themselves) are not criminal but there are corrupt public servants that have to be pointed at by their own names.
“When in some offices weird facts show up, we take a lot of care and look for international support. We also document cases and work using nets and alliances. It is a work involving risks, just like other jobs”
From victim to survivor
Women who have been Human Trafficking victims suffer multiple kinds of violence: familiar, gender based, sexual harassment, labor, among others. Many were damaged in the conflict or in displacements while others in those homes affected by war.
Society thinks violence happens in conflict zones and once women are displaced to cities, things change. “It is not like that; other things start happening to our bodies. We have got conflict victims women who are ill cancer or suffer obesity, depression and post traumatic disorders that prevent them from developing their life projects” .
In Claudia’s case, a therapeutic plan was set up to help her face war marks, threats, forced displacement, refugee situation, gender violence and racism. All of this got stuck in her body, soul and memory. She got overweight until 147 kg; but beyond this fact, she was a depressed woman feeling an endless sadness; she refused to get up from bed or take a shower; she wanted to die. She even tried to take her own life twice, she mistreated her children and partner as well as people surrounding her. Sha damaged the people she loved the most.
I was not insane but I was in a bad situation indeed. One day she wore two different shoes on her feet. When she got into a bus she noticed it and said to herself: “this has to change”. Then she decided to face her victim condition and hit the bottom of her nature tortured by so much pain. It was a quite hard process but she aimed to fulfill goals in order to become who she is. She found her true self and finally she was reborn as a survivor being currently the most important reference in Colombia regarding the fight against Human Trafficking.
“I weigh 70 Kg now but it was not a matter of coming into a capsule and go out like this. No, I got little achievements: every less kilogram, every fight, every conference, every report I wrote for FIPU (International Press Federation for the Peoples; acronym in Spanish), every carried out project, every term I passed at University and my degree as Multimedia Producer. Everything was a summary that created the life project I lead now”.
Everything concluded last year with a surgery to remove an eight-centimeter tumor “that had condensed all my (her) pain”. While she tells me about these facts she makes a pause, just as though she checked again all her suffering journey. She soon comes back euphorically to our conversation and almost yelling she says: “I am free! I am so free that I don’t care if I have to retake therapy. I’ll do it just as responsibly as I assume my job”
Being a deprived and displaced woman, she lost her land notion, the feeling of belonging to a place. One day she got to Popayán, the Cauca department capital, in southern Colombia and she felt part of that territory. Her land bond is there as a part of a triad along with her two children and her cause; all of this embedded in her heart. She travels all around the country and out of it. Anne Frank Corporation operates in Bogotá but she grabbed the exile keys to keep living. She finally chose a new place to live and shaped her own fate.
Link to the original story in Spanish / Historia original en español: