Her name is Fatima Muriel Silva. She was born and raised in Putumayo, one of the regions hardest hit by violence in Colombia. She is recognized as a "natural leader" and directs 65 women's organizations that, in the territory, seek to protect each other and claim the rights and security that the State is not providing them. Fatima speaks:
Being a Putumayense, woman, daughter, mother, teacher, departmental education supervisor; having traveled the entire department; knowing the culture and geography of its 13 municipalities; having shared all the pain, the feminization of poverty, militarization in the face of the vulnerability of women, children and communities in the middle of armed conflict: these led me to look for organizations and leaders who were also thinking about the serious situation the communities were going through.
In one of my trips to the municipality of San Miguel, San Carlos village, five taxis were incinerated along with their occupants, school doors were marked with different sizes of gunshots, murdered women were laying on the ground with their genitalia and breasts completely destroyed. And a sense of fear that could be seen in the eyes of the children, of the teachers. The trip made me think we were at war, even if our then president Uribe said otherwise.
