The Butterflies of Buenaventura (Part 1): A Woman’s Courage

Photo: David Sulewski

David Sulewski, together with his wife Tibrine da Fonesca, works with MCC in Quito, Ecuador, coordinating the Refugee Project, a ministry of the Mennonite Church in Quito to refugees, the majority of whom are fleeing from the armed conflict in Colombia. This post was taken from their personal blog, Gathering Peace and is the first in a series. 

Part 2

Twice a week we receive refugees at the church to sit down in the safe, confidential space of our office to hear their stories and see how we can help. One after another they recount the traumatic events that uprooted them from their homes. The stories are hard to hear. Sometimes, all we can do is listen and try to console.

One day recently a woman stepped through the church gate with two young children in tow. We sat down to talk in our office upstairs while her children played outside. She began by telling us that they had crossed the border into Ecuador just the other week. Her teenage son, who narrowly escaped an attempt on his life, was laying low at his aunt’s house in Colombia, waiting for the right moment to rejoin them in Quito.

We asked her where she was from. Buenaventura, she responded. We hear regularly stories of death and escape from that part of Colombia. Over time, I am learning the geography of Colombia’s conflict through the refugees’ stories. Meeting more and more refugees from Buenaventura, this point on the map began to grow brighter like a luminous star in a constellation of sorrow.

In 2013 alone, about 13,000 out of a population of 290,000 reported being forcibly displaced from Buenaventura. Until today, the flow shows no signs of stopping.

Though the conflict is spread throughout the country, violence is concentrated disproportionately in some parts more than others, Buenaventura being one of the most violent cities, and affects greatest the marginalized, namely Afro-Colombians, indigenous peoples, women and children. Buenaventura is notorious for the alarmingly high rate of gender-based sexual violence aimed purposefully, like an instrument of war, at women and children.

Why so much violence in Buenaventura?

The strategic position of Buenaventura as Colombia’s principal port on the Pacific coast attracts illegal armed groups that fight for control over this resource-rich region and conduit for trafficking arms and drugs. Some right-wing paramilitaries demobilized in 2003 opted to form these criminal organizations terrorizing Buenaventura today, rather than integrating back into society. These groups, present both in impoverished urban areas and rural barrios, recruit children, extort businesses, displace families from their homes, and disappear their victims in macabre, horrific ways.

In abandoned shacks on the water’s edge they dismember their victims, often alive, and throw the body parts in the ocean or in common, unmarked graves. People call them casas de pique, slaughter houses.

The first time I heard about these casas de pique was from this very woman from Buenaventura who came to us for help.

One day, members of one of the armed groups kidnapped her son. She knew immediately where they would take him, to the casa de pique in her neighborhood. She ran straight there, burst into the shack and saw her son strapped to the butcher’s block.

At this point in her story, emotions overwhelmed her. She was without words. Sinking her head into her folded arms on the table, she sobbed. As we sought to console her, we remembered that earlier she had said that her son was alive, hiding at his aunt’s house in another city. Nothing more needed to be said; our imagination reached the story’s improbable conclusion.

Hers is a story of unspeakable horror, but also of an incredible act of courageous love and liberation that only a mother’s unconquerable, instinctual love can commit. Somehow, that day, mother and son emerged from that death house alive.

She did not let the violence take her son, as it has so many youth. Her story and the stories of other refugees from Buenaventura formed an image in my mind of a place both of excessive violence and powerful resistance to the city’s destructive forces.

In Buenaventura, there are many women in particular who are shaping the resistance to this painful reality.  Last year, the prestigious Nansen Award from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which honors extraordinary service to refugees, went to a group of brave, spirited women of Buenaventura who help victims of violence, displacement and sexual violence to reclaim their lives and dignity. They call themselves Mariposas de Alas Nuevas Construyendo Futuro, Butterflies with New Wings Building a Future.

Tibrine shared this inspiring story in a bulletin we distribute to people while they wait their turn on interview days. Another woman from Buenaventura, reading the story, told us she knew the Mariposas and asked us, “When are they coming to Quito? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could come and visit us?”

It would be very wonderful, we agreed. We wrote an email to the Mariposas, explaining who we are and what we do in the Refugee Project, and invited them to come to Quito to give workshops with refugee women. We received a positive reply from one of the Mariposas named Mari* who in turn invited us first to come visit them to not only see what they do, but also get a sense of the spirit that gives them new wings to fly toward a better future they themselves are building: a Buenaventura free of violence against women and children.

We happily accepted the invitation and in the end I was able to go to Buenaventura last month to spend three transformative days with the Butterflies. In the next few posts, I will share some stories from my visit with the amazing Butterflies of Buenaventura.

*All names in this series have been changed.