Marcha LGBT in Bogotá 2013. Some rights reserved.
It all starts with a love story in times of change. Of the many prisoners in the Colombian prison La Picota, this story touches on the life of Laura, a transgender woman, from the Santa Fe neighborhood in Bogotá, a city area where transgender women find themselves confined in a context of poverty and street-related practices for survival. Structural violence and criminalization result in high levels of incarceration of transgender women from Santa Fe. In La Picota Laura met Jaime, a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP). In prison, they came to love each other during the initial period of the peace talks in 2012.
In La Picota, the relationship between Laura and Jaime got the attention of other incarcerated FARC-EP members. Given that the vast majority of FARC-EP militants come from rural, religious and socially conservative backgrounds, they accused their comrade Jaime of being “a queer”. His love affair undermined their conception of hetero-normative revolutionary masculinity and they condemned him, labeled him a traitor and suggested that he should be expelled from the ranks of the FARC-EP. After receiving much abuse, Jaime requested the FARC-EP Secretariat’s intervention.
