Peralta, a former Political Director at SEIU sits down with Mayor of Jambaló, Emilse Paz Labio about her decades long work towards women’s rights and environmental justice.
How does one build resilience and power in the face of the daily existential threats?
It’s a question I posed to Lida Emilse Paz Labio, a indigenous and women’s rights activist and Mayor of Jambaló, a town in the southwestern region of Cauca, Colombia, and also one of the oldest indigenous territories in the country. For close to two decades, Paz Labio, of the Nasa ethic group, has participated in and led processes to expand women’s voices and power both regionally and as a national Indigenous representative in global dialogues on peace and the environment.
Paz Labio has also served as Zonal Coordinator of the Women’s Network of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca – ACIN. A survivor of the armed conflict, in which her partner was disappeared and one of her children murdered, she has also had multiple threats against her life for her commitment and work on behalf of her people.
As in many regions throughout the world marked by decades of conflict, Colombia holds a multitude of contradictions. Under the Total Peace Plan, the 2022 law passed by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, recent ceasefires between the government and armed guerillas, including the FARC and ELN, have stemmed a spike in political violence not seen since the 2016 peace and disarmament agreements. Yet at the same time, a lack of national enforcement capacity has resulted in greater competition and clashes with a growing number of rival armed groups over land and control of the illicit drug trade in the countryside and rural areas like Jambaló.
In spite of this chaos, Paz and the Nasa women have been community organizing for impact, building greater empowerment, political participation and women-led governance of territories in civil and indigenous lands.
Photo Credit: Codacop
I sat down with Paz Labio, to discuss her work, the origins of her passion and how she sticks around for the long fight for freedom.
MP: You’ve been organizing for close to two decades. What sparked your interest in this work?
LEPL: My parents were my first point of reference. My mother was involved in the Global Project (initiatives to support land rights, health care, education, and indigenous cultural preservation), and my father pushed me to play soccer and support the community teams, so I got my first exposure to building community in these spaces. But we didn’t have a lot of resources, so I started selling empanadas in the park and at the Plaza del mercado, where one also gets to know others and learn about their challenges and hopes for the community. It was through those relationships that I was hired by the Mayor’s office to support the social programs of the municipality and the Indigenous territory.
MP: You leaned into women-centered leadership development early on, why?
LEPL: I was interested in the issue of governance at a personal and societal level. Who rules in a family, a household, a relationship, a community? We’re in all these spaces, but the power imbalances were undeniable. As the first woman counselor of the CRIC (Regional Indigenous Counsel of the Cauca), we were also mediating very complicated situations. There were disputes over position, over who sets the agenda and exerts influence at the national level. We found resistance among some of the men but also very important allies.
MP: And this was during a period of extreme volatility and violence at large and particularly against women.
LEPL: The violence against our women has been documented as far back as the 13th century as a weapon of Spanish conquest but in recent history it became a major catalyst for organizing. In the 1970’s gang rapes by landowners on indigenous women was a regular occurance. Panties hanging on wires like a trophy the morning after a party was a common sight. And many women were also regularly being beaten by their husbands. As a result, you saw women committing suicide, leaving the community or joining an armed group just to get away. Supported by the Catholic church, the women who stayed began organizing meetings in their communities to educate the men and to demand changes in the law to make sexual violence a crime punishable by Indigenous authorities, which served as a deterrent. The work was difficult and took us years, but today these types of crimes have virtually been eradicated. And it was a major win for the Nasa women and an exertion of collective power that the women built on, joining other activists, Afro Colombians, peasant women, women from cities, which broadened our agenda to economics, to land rights, and the protection of the earth. And we shaped and legitimized this agenda in our community spaces, congresses, our assemblies.
MP: How did this women-led collective work show up in the 2016 peace agreement processes?
LEPL: As participants in the Truth Commission we had to make sure that these issues were addressed. The violence of the civil struggle had normalized violence against women. We had to say to the armed groups, why don’t you move your seat a little bit and make space at the table for women? We do not want to be slaves in your wars.
MP: Tell us about how the Nasa peoples see memory as an act of resistance.
LEPL: Well, we’ve always been here, right, since the creation of the world. Our women have been chieftains like la Gaitana, we’ve been coordinators of the guard, warriors fighting alongside Simon Bolivar. But those that write history have chosen to make us invisible. Life stories are very important because in each life story you see the potential of these women. When the 2016 peace agreement was made and the transitional justice system was installed, which included processes for truth, justice, reparations and measures for non-repetition of violence, one fundamental part of this process was remembering. The women insisted that to achieve justice and healing, we have to remember our history and the contributions of Indigenous women in our homes, in the resistance, in the recovery of land, in the liberation of mother earth. But as important, was making visible the damage that war has done to women. And so we organized throughout the Cauca region to collect these life stories and weave them into a living history that informs us as a community and also grounds us in our resilience and our power.
MP: Building on the theme of power, was community power and political power something that the women thought about building simultaneously or did the political gains and outcomes result from the community relationship building and organizing? In other words, was there an intention goal set at the beginning of this process that women would become leaders in the territorial and civic governments or was that a secondary goal?
LEPL: We knew we needed to do both. One of the primary strategies is attaining political power because we want to see the needs of women reflected in policies like education, in health care, economic issues. But this strategy must respond to another reality which is in the community. The policies are woven first by the women in the community and not from a political office. So the path is methodical, you legitimize policies in the community and then you build political power to validate and make them a reality. For example, we went from one school to seven in the territory. In health care, we never had a doctor’s office, only an auxiliary clinic. With political power we’ve built institutions with doctors and community health workers. It allowed us to build access roads into Jambaló where there were none. But for me, the mayorality was never a goal, it’s just a strategy, because the ultimate goal is the Plan of Life.
MP: What is the Plan of Life?
LEPL: It’s a comprehensive development plan built communally and with its distinct, indigenous approach, where the vision of where we want to go is the dreamed future for all the people and beings that inhabit the territory. We ask questions of ourselves. Who are we? Where are we headed? What are we doing on this planet? And we name it all, the good and bad. The bad includes our challenges and difficulties, like the recruitment of young people into armed groups, like narco trafficking. And the good comes out of developing ideas for transcending these challenges. It’s a life’s work. Issues like identity, connection to the earth’s elements and a holistic approach to the territory are all part of this plan.
MP: What did your power analysis tell you about what you were up against and how do the women think of strategic organizing in the context of this power analysis? Which stakeholders were important to bring into the process?
LEPL: We’re all born with inner power, and there are people who believe it and exert it. But we also know it’s important to have men in power who could be our allies as we organize because we have to lead for women but must also represent everyone. We’ve worked to create our own structures where we have power. For example, in the Women’s Program in each reservation; the Women’s Program (now called Tejido) in the ACIN (Association of Indigenous Councils in Northern Cauca) at the zonal level, in the CRIC (Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca) at the regional level, and as representatives in national discussions, there we also exert our power. But ultimately, it’s understood that under indigenous law, the community is the entity with the most power. The community is the one that is positioned to make demands and hold elected officials accountable and our organizing was based on that analysis.
MP: You and other Nasa women are now leaders in negotiations to rescue children- some as young as eleven years old- who have either been recruited or kidnapped into armed groups in the region.
LEPL: Yes, we’ve been pulled into some very complicated situations. Young people are being recruited at soccer games, outside of schools, with phony promises of a better life. They’re offered a cell phone and a gun that is sometimes bigger than their small bodies and a nice house that’s paid for through drug trafficking. The girls they recruit are sometimes promised the chance to go to university, but that never comes of course. In our negotiations, we lead with dialogue to avoid nasty confrontations. Sometimes we’ve been successful, sometimes the kids have just disappeared. It really is a larger question of economics for these kids and where they see their future. We need real jobs, we need partners in the private sector and most importantly a path to higher education, which for most kids is out of reach because of the high cost. In the peace agreement process, there was no training for ex-combatants on how to live in Colombia among civilians. It turns out that if you go out into the civilian population, no one will give you anything and you have to figure out how to get the two thousand pesos for a panela today and hustle in the streets to figure out what you will eat tomorrow.
MP: Do you feel fear when you’re face to face with armed captors?
LEPL: No, not at that moment. There is no fear, only the job you have in front of you and the courage to say that we’re not going to let ourselves be powerless anymore.
MP: Have there been other moments like this?
LEPL: When we were advertising a Remembrance tour (series of community gatherings to commemorate the lives of those lost in the struggle and to record the community’s living history), we realized the army was following us and tearing down our banners. But the women went back together and demanded that the army repost the banners on the territory. The women have also organized large marches where we challenge the armed actors and criminal gangs in defense of our territory and of our children. At times there have been tragic outcomes paid by the lives of activists like Carmelina Yuli Pavi (murdered attempting to rescue an abducted child). Some women do leave in the face of these threats and some stay.
MP: Are you hopeful? What keeps you going?
LEPL: Seeing and feeling the community exercising its strength as an organizer for change and the process of sustaining that work, the friendships that one builds in that process, gives me hope as does the international community that is also incredibly important as both witnesses and as allies. Caring for our planet is a primary cause of concern but also drives our determination. We know that the wars, the economic strife, the power imbalances, all of it affects the survival of our mother earth. And it’s collective work that we all must continue to undertake together.
