The men raped in the war, another drama of the conflict in Colombia

Not much is known about sexual violence against men in Colombia but the records say that there were more than 2,000 victims of this crime during the armed conflict that bled the country dry for more than half a century and that has not ended.

However, Joel Toscano, Omar Aguilar and Alberto Coneo They have begun to talk about what happened to them in the hope that this tragedy does not affect more people and that the guilty pay.

All three are part of a report that includes 82 of these cases and that was handed over to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP)who is asked to open a macro case that investigates sexual violence against men during the armed conflict.

With different words, the three agree in interviews with Efe that These abuses left indelible marks on them, but they mustered up their courage to talk about this crime that has “been made invisible.”

HORROR MOVIE

Aguilar defines what he experienced as “a horror movie” he didn’t talk about for 25 years for “fear, for fear of what they will say”. He was raped in 1992 by FARC guerrillas who controlled the agro-industrial region of Urabá, bordering Panama.

“The guerrillas arrived asking for my mother, who had gone to a medical appointment. The guerrillas put me in half of them”, account to Efe, and about twenty took him to a wooded part.

“That’s where it all started”remember. Several guerrillas raped him and he lost consciousness. “That started around ten in the morning and I woke up around five in the afternoon. As I could I got dressed and went back to my house. My mother had not arrived yet. I never told him what happened.”

Dimly remember that the guerrillas told him that they took him to that place “so that he learns to be a macho” and that “faggots deserve death, they deserve to be killed and to disappear.” Aguilar, who was 20 years old and today is 50, thought they were going to kill him.

But things did not stop there. They came back the following week and took him to a rancher’s farm.. “They did everything to the owner: they removed his nails, they removed his testicles, they cut off his ears, they stabbed him in the stomach with daggers and finally they shot him in the head, his head exploded, nothing was left”.

It was a way to intimidate them and they succeeded: “I went back to my house and with what we had on we moved.”

Now demands justice for a crime that was merciless, above all, with women but that also affected men.

HIDDEN DRAMA

The region of Catatumboon the border with Venezuela, continues to be a focus of the armed conflict due to the presence of the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and paramilitaries that control drug trafficking.

The first time that Tuscan experienced the horrors of rape was at the age of nine. It was the paramilitaries but at his young age “he didn’t know, he didn’t understand what had happened,” he tells Efe in Bogotá.

“I was a child and I kept quiet because the person who caused this situation was a family member who threatened me if I said what had happened. He was involved or was an accomplice of the paramilitaries”it says Tuscanwho does not consider returning to Catatumbo because “there are only bad memories there.”

Toscano was raped again, but this time it was ELN guerrillas. She closes her eyes and manages to remember: it happened when she was traveling in a friend’s truck; The ELN stopped them at a checkpoint and took them to a farm.

“They raped me and left me stranded. Then I found my friend, who had also been raped. I think that was the way in which the guerrillas demonstrated the power they had over the territory”it says.

the ordeal is over Tuscan He decided to leave his region and seek refuge in Bogotá, although he assures that “the rape thing is something that will never be erased.”

From his friend he later learned that He committed suicide because “he could not cope with the traumas left by the rape and other problems.”

BRUTALITY

The report delivered to the JEP also includes the case of Alberto Coneowho is part of the LGBTI community, raped by paramilitaries.

The sexual assault of which she was a victim happened in 1998 in the Caribbean Santa Marta.

“I think that if I had been heterosexual it would not have happened to me”, he says to Efe with a broken voice. She did not say anything to her family until in 2019, in a collective day of complaints of sexual violence against men, she decided to speak.

Until that moment coneo He defined himself as an “aggressive” person but after “sharing my testimony with many people has helped me take off that cross that I carried on my back.”

When he dared to speak, he learned that his nephew also went through the same thing, attacked by “another violent group different from the one that did it to me” that it almost left him blind, because they brutally beat him in the face; deaf, because a shot destroyed one of his ears, and almost mute, because they tied a wire around his neck and dragged him.

The rape not only left psychological marks on him, but like many others, he suffers from diseases that affect his colon and prostate. And he says: “I still don’t know if I can forgive those who spoiled my life”.

“One thing I can say is that what happened to me has not been buried but I try to continue my life, working and studying. The idea is to get over myself and move on and encourage other victims from the diverse community, heterosexuals and women to come forward if they were victims of sexual violence in the conflict”, she stresses.

________________________________

Source: Elcomercio

Deshawn