Militancy, destruction, and resistance of women in the Patriotic Union

Abstract

This article proposes a brief overview with a critical analysis of the history of women in the Unión Patriótica. It is the product of a historical investigation that covered a period of 26 years between 1984 and 2010. It proposes to identify the role of women in the regional consolidation of the Unión Patriótica, demonstrating its determining role in the expansion of the political movement, thus, it examines the scenarios of representation and political action of women and how these represented a threat to the power bloc. On this basis, it divides the destruction of the UP into genocidal cycles and analyses gendered practices by resorting to a broad interpretation of genocide, away from the location of the state as the sole actor, exposing a range of sectors that constituted the perpetrator bloc and that constantly (re)organized themselves to destroy women’s socio-political work. Finally, some practices of female resistance that emerged from a mixture of spontaneous and conscious actions to confront the strategies of the perpetrating bloc are presented, which consolidated the struggle for truth, justice, reparation, and peacebuilding.