Colombian Women Quotes

You listen to me and you listen good, girl. I am a dark, twisted, and very fucked up man. Do you know what a sadist is? I don’t give her time to answer. “I enjoy inflicting pain on women. Now granted, I have access to women that enjoy that side of my dark psyche but you, little girl, are treading on very dangerous ground. You are awakening a monster. If you feed that monster, there will be no possibility of caging the beast.

Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a novel inspired by personal experience. Kidnapping was a reality for many Colombians until 2005 when the practice really began to decline. If they had not been kidnapped themselves, every Colombian knew someone who had experienced it: a friend, a family member, someone at work. There was once a girl like Petrona who worked as a live-in maid in my childhood house in Bogotá. Like Petrona she was forced into aiding in a kidnapping attempt against my sister and me, and like Petrona in the face of this impossible choice, she did not comply. I have thought of her throughout the years, along with all the women I have met who are stuck in hopeless situations in Colombia.

A few years back, I had a long session with a psychiatrist who was conducting a study on post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on reporters working in war zones. At one point, he asked me: “How many bodies have you seen in your lifetime?” Without thinking for too long, I replied: “I’m not sure exactly. I've seen quite a few mass graves in Africa and Bosnia, and I saw a well crammed full of corpses in East Timor, oh and then there was Rwanda and Goma...” After a short pause, he said to me calmly: “Do you think that's a normal response to that question?” He was right. It wasn't a normal response. Over the course of their lifetime, most people see the bodies of their parents, maybe their grandparents at a push. Nobody else would have responded to that question like I did. Apart from my fellow war reporters, of course. When I met Marco Lupis nearly twenty years ago, in September 1999, we were stood watching (fighting the natural urge to divert our gaze) as pale, maggot-ridden corpses, decomposed beyond recognition, were being dragged out of the well in East Timor. Naked bodies shorn of all dignity. When Marco wrote to ask me to write the foreword to this book and relive the experiences we shared together in Dili, I agreed without giving it a second thought because I understood that he too was struggling for normal responses. That he was hoping he would find some by writing this book. While reading it, I could see that Marco shares my obsession with understanding the world, my compulsion to recount the horrors I have seen and witnessed, and my need to overcome them and leave them behind. He wants to bring sense to the apparently senseless. Books like this are important. Books written by people who have done jobs like ours. It's not just about conveying - be it in the papers, on TV or on the radio - the atrocities committed by the very worst of humankind as they are happening; it’s about ensuring these atrocities are never forgotten. Because all too often, unforgivably, the people responsible go unpunished. And the thing they rely on most for their impunity is that, with the passing of time, people simply forget. There is a steady flow of information as we are bombarded every day with news of the latest massacre, terrorist attack or humanitarian crisis. The things that moved or outraged us yesterday are soon forgotten, washed away by today's tidal wave of fresh events. Instead they become a part of history, and as such should not be forgotten so quickly. When I read Marco's book, I discovered that the people who murdered our colleague Sander Thoenes in Dili, while he was simply doing his job like the rest of us, are still at large to this day. I read the thoughts and hopes of Ingrid Betancourt just twenty-four hours before she was abducted and taken to the depths of the Colombian jungle, where she would remain captive for six long years. I read that we know little or nothing about those responsible for the Cambodian genocide, whose millions of victims remain to this day without peace or justice. I learned these things because the written word cannot be destroyed. A written account of abuse, terror, violence or murder can be used to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice, even though this can be an extremely drawn-out process during and after times of war. It still torments me, for example, that so many Bosnian women who were raped have never got justice and every day face the prospect of their assailants passing them on the street. But if I follow in Marco's footsteps and write down the things I have witnessed in a book, people will no longer be able to plead ignorance. That is why we need books like this one.

Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle in

According to pre-Columbian legend, the Cihuateteos . . . were the spirits of pregnant women who died in childbirth. They immediately became warriors because they had died in battle--the struggle in life to produce "a new life for the empire." This deified the women's souls, since their spiritual role complemented that of the male warrior, who assisted the sun in its journey across the sky. The spirits of these females supposedly carried the sun from its midday zenith to the west, it's place of descent. The spirits of male warriors carried the sun from daybreak to its zenith. The grieving husbands were expected to safeguard the bodies of their deceased wives, becaise young warriors would mutilate and steal the middle finger from the left hand of a Cihueteteo as a talisman. These feared women were associated with bodies of water, the transformative element of the journey of death, and crossroads. They were believed to return to earth on five special days each year to torment children. Thus the legend ofmthe Llorona, the weeping woman, emerged from this ancient myth.

In 1990, the Colombian Ministry of Culture set up a system of itinerant libraries to take books to the inhabitants of distant rural regions. For this purpose, carrier book bags with capacious pockets were transported on donkeys’ backs up into the jungle and the sierra. Here the books were left for several weeks in the hands of a teacher or village elder who became, de facto, the librarian in charge. Most of the books were technical works, agricultural handbooks, collections of sewing patterns and the like, but a few literary works were also included. According to one librarian, the books were always safely accounted for. ‘I know of a single instance in which a book was not returned,’ she said. ‘We had taken, along with the usual practical titles, a Spanish translation of the Iliad. When the time came to exchange the book, the villagers refused to give it back. We decided to make them a present of it, but asked them why they wished to keep that particular title. They explained that Homer’s story reflected their own: it told of a war-torn country in which mad gods mix with men and women who never know exactly what the fighting is about, or when they will be happy, or why they will be killed.