With 30 cases documented and analysed in Pasto, Tumaco, Putumayo and southern Tolima, the report by Colombia Diversa entitled "Who's going to tell us?" calls on the Truth Commission to be the first of its kind in the world to tell, in depth and in the voice of the victims, what happened in the war, the differential impact of bias-based violence against LGBT people and how discrimination was a powerful weapon of war.

Click here to read the report

Bogotá, 14 October 2020

In the Colombian armed conflict, LGBT people were systematically targeted. It has not been a coincidence, it has not been random, it has not been merely accidental. On the contrary, it has been a systematic and organised practice that has provided valuable benefits to all armed actors - legal and illegal - in the conflict. This is because singling out, hierarchising and excluding difference has been at the heart of the Colombian war. This is why we at Colombia Diversa set ourselves the task of documenting cases in Pasto, Tumaco, Putumayo and southern Tolima, and to analyse other cases that occurred in Meta and Sucre, among other regions of the country, to be included in a report that will be delivered to the Truth Commission on Wednesday 14 October 2020, documenting a total of 30 cases of LGBT victims.

The aim of the report entitled Who's going to tell us? is to show and explain rigorously the characteristics of bias-based violence against LGBT people, a valuable concept for understanding and explaining more accurately and fairly crimes motivated by discrimination. In addition urges the Truth Commission to capture these stories and analyses in its final report, as this Commission is the only one in the world with an explicit mandate to shed light on the impact of the conflict on LGBT people.

"We hope and know that the Truth Commission will live up to this historic moment. No other commission in the world has rigorously collected the voices of LGBT victims. The Commission in Colombia has the opportunity to be the first and set a historic precedent not only for our country but for the whole world. This is all the more important when fundamentalist groups are seeking to roll back LGBT rights. The call is for the Commission to contribute a fundamental piece to the consolidation of the citizenship of these people and that starts with the recognition of the experiences they lived through in the war and the resistance that allowed them to move forward," he says. Lucía Baca, Colombia Diversa's Peace Coordinator and one of the creators of the document.

The bias-motivated violence is a category created by María Mercedes Gómez that refers to violent acts committed against someone for being or appearing to be something that the perpetrator considers demeaning or inferior, or for believing that they can instrumentalise them with impunity to further their interests. This discrimination is, sadly, a familiar issue for LGBT people who have had to endure exclusion, punishment, rejection and mockery against them since childhood. However, with the armed conflict, discrimination acquired nuances specific to the particular context in which they experienced such violence. This report acknowledges the insertion of bias-based violence in the Colombian war but also highlights its complexities, its own characteristics and, therefore, shows the causes of this violence and gives clear guidelines for its non-repetition.

The paper seeks to demonstrate that at the heart of the Colombian war was a prejudicial impulse to subordinate, instrumentalise or exclude LGBT people from society, taking advantage of the state's negligence in protecting them and the social complicity that legitimised or excused the crimes against them. For all these reasons, it is not enough for the Truth Commission to make a superficial analysis of this violence, but rather a rigorous analysis capable of unravelling this complexity, clarifying its causes, recognising it as an intrinsic part of the conflict and proposing serious recommendations for non-repetition is required.

Seeing this systematicity in the armed conflict, listening to the stories of LGBT victims and recognising the way in which they have resisted so much violence is an opportunity to take a step towards democratic reconciliation. The history of the war will not be complete without the voices of those who were persecuted for being or appearing LGBT. Nor will we know how to make reparations to these people, or what guarantees of non-repetition can be adopted, if no attention is paid to the practices and mechanisms of resistance of those who managed to survive the conflict and now - as if that were not enough - are also determined to make Colombia a better country. The victims have already taken the first step, telling their stories; now, as mentioned above, it is the turn of the Truth Commission to live up to this historic moment.