A banging on the door echoed throughout the house.

It was a Sunday morning in January 2021, in Tibú, a municipality in the Colombian department of Norte de Santander, near the Venezuelan border.

“We heard the knocking, and I looked at my husband,” said Mar*. “We weren’t expecting anyone, and we were surprised at such insistent, forceful knocking.”

Mar’s husband, Jaime*, opened the door and found six men in civilian clothes with long guns in their hands. The men identified themselves as members of the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN) guerrillas and asked for Mar. They demanded that she come out of the house, as they had a message for her.

“I was terrified, but I looked at my husband and then at my son and thought, ‘No, I have to go out, it’s worse if they break in,’” Mar explained.

On her way out, she was met with hostile stares. One of the men — the leader of the group — stepped forward and addressed her. He accused her of being an army informant and told her that they were there because they had orders to kill her.

Mar did not know how to respond to the accusations. Some of the men entered the house, grabbing Jaime, while others held Mar tightly by the arm and took her to the patio of the house.

“It all happened very quickly, they didn’t give us time to say anything, to defend myself against what they were accusing me of,” she recalls.

The attackers locked Mar and Jaime’s young son and the other adults in the house. Their issue was not with them.

Then the men began to beat Mar and Jaime. Their screams drew the attention of the neighbors, who came to the house to see what was going on. When they found the ELN members, they asked what they were doing. Mar’s family was well known in the neighborhood and had no problems with anyone. As the minutes passed, more people came and confronted the guerrillas, asking them to leave Mar and her family alone.

The ELN men gave in. To this day, Mar still doesn’t understand why — maybe because there were too many witnesses; maybe because they didn’t want to antagonize the community.

Although they spared her life, the men warned Mar to stay in town so she could answer to the group in case they came back for her. Mar and her family became prisoners in their own home. And her ordeal was just beginning.

Mar was not the only woman to be targeted by armed groups in Tibú as an informant. Between 2020 and 2021, more than a dozen women were killed, others disappeared, and many more were threatened and displaced after guerrillas operating in the department uncovered a plan by security forces to use women to infiltrate their ranks.

SEE ALSO: Femicides in Tibú, Colombia: Cocaine, Gunmen, and a Never-Ending War

The authorities’ tactics put many women, most of them vulnerable, in the guerrillas’ sights. However, from the outset, the security forces have denied responsibility for the recruitment of the women, and all the institutions that were supposed to protect and support them in the face of guerrilla threats have failed them.

Mar and Jaime moved to Tibú from their home in Venezuela in 2015, fleeing the economic collapse of their country. They both quickly found employment. Jaime worked as a day laborer on nearby farms, and Mar took on various jobs, like cleaning her neighbors’ houses or taking care of children.

As the months passed, they adapted to life in Tibú. They began to get to know their neighbors and made friends. They also realized that day-to-day life in Tibú was marked by the presence of armed groups.

Tibú has been one of the municipalities most affected by the armed conflict in Colombia. Since the 1970s, armed groups have been present in the area. First it was the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC), then the ELN and the People’s Liberation Army (Ejército Popular de Liberación – EPL), and finally, the Catatumbo Bloc of the paramilitary group known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidos de Colombia – AUC). 

The 2016 signing of the peace agreement with the FARC sparked hope that the government could break the cycles of violence in Catatumbo. Instead, the ELN grew in strength, and the 33rd Front, a FARC dissident group, established a presence in the area. Today, these groups act as a parallel government, patrolling the municipality’s streets, imposing curfews, and punishing drug users, thieves, and anyone who disrespects them. The militias — clandestine networks of guerrilla collaborators — surveil the urban centers and everything that happens around them. The guerrillas also forbid the community to interact with public forces, and monitor any interactions between them — especially for women.

“You try to stay away from people [linked to the groups] for your own good. Over there, everyone knows each other and everyone knows who is who,” said Mar.

Despite the shadow of the armed groups hanging over the area, Mar and Jaime tried to live their lives normally. They made an effort not to bother anyone, not to get into trouble — especially with the armed actors.

“We rarely went out, and if we went out it was to Cúcuta to run our errands and then back again,” Mar said. 

But in October 2020, everything changed.

One morning, when Mar was picking up her motorcycle from the garage, the mechanic, Rafael, approached her to offer her money in exchange for information about members of the FARC or ELN dissidents. The offer took Mar by surprise. She felt uncomfortable and frightened by Rafael’s offer, and without answering him, she left the workshop in a hurry.  

Rafael was not actually a mechanic, but allegedly worked with the security forces to identify women and recruit them to provide information about the guerrillas to the police and army intelligence.

On the way home, Mar and Jaime decided not to take the motorcycle back to the supposed mechanic, to avoid rumors in town. They knew that sharing information about armed groups was bad business, and that somehow the groups would find out.

“In Tibú, no one has secrets. The militias know everything,” she explained.

But Rafael did not give up. Two months later, in December, he showed up at Mar’s house with an envelope full of money and offered her a fixed salary if she started sharing information about certain guerrillas operating in the area.

“He took out his phone and started showing me photos,” Mar said. They were photos of ELN leaders and dissidents. Rafael told her that she only “had to call him” if she saw any of these guerrillas.

Again, Mar refused Rafael’s offer. She needed the money, but she was not willing to take such a big risk with the guerrillas. Rafael was not pleased with her refusal and, before leaving, he threatened her, saying if she told anyone what he had said, he would tell the authorities that she was a guerrilla collaborator.

Mar was in shock, as was her husband. Fearful that their neighbors might say something, they decided to leave town for a few days, to avoid both Rafael and generating rumors. But the precautions were useless, Mar recalled bitterly. The damage was done.

Rafael’s attempt to recruit Mar was part of a larger plan by the security forces — police and army — to use women from Tibú to obtain information on the movements of guerrilla commanders.

It all began in August 2020, when security forces recruited seven women to infiltrate the guerrillas in the area. In exchange, they were promised a salary and a long-term work contract with the government. The women they recruited shared a similar profile, according to international cooperation sources, local officials, and female residents of Tibú, who spoke to InSight Crime on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

All of them were young, conventionally pretty women, who were unemployed and either without family members in the area or with small children, two members of the international aid community who have worked with the civilian population in Catatumbo for years told InSight Crime. Both have received testimonies of these cases, but asked not to be quoted because they were not authorized to speak about them.

In addition, the women in this first group were Venezuelan migrants who had crossed the border to escape poverty, insecurity, and political instability, making them more vulnerable to the offers made by security forces.  

On the surface, the job was simple: they were to collect information about the guerrillas’ movements in the town and share it with the intelligence forces. Some women established relationships with members of the groups as the gateway. Others sought employment in places the guerrillas frequented, such as pool halls or bars in the town’s rural areas.

By December 2020, the women had managed to infiltrate the guerrillas and were holding up their end of the bargain, members of the international cooperation agency told InSight Crime.

Meanwhile, the army and police continued to recruit more women, almost all with the same profile. They were asked to keep their eyes and ears open and to inform them if they saw anything related to the guerrillas.

People close to the cases of the informants, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons, confirmed that the main goal was to obtain information on drug trafficking and commanders’ locations and cell phones to help carry out operations against high-value targets.

This was not the first time the Colombian army used civilian women as informants. According to the Truth Commission, during Colombia’s decades of armed conflict, security forces have used women — many of them mothers, migrants, and sex workers — as informants. 

SEE ALSO: Women and Organized Crime in Latin America: Beyond Victims and Victimizers

Illegal armed groups also used this same tactic. According to traditional gender roles in Colombia, women were believed to generate less suspicion than men and go more easily unnoticed, making them valuable for intelligence tasks.

But in Tibú things got out of control. Several sources who spoke to InSight Crime between 2021 and 2023 confirmed that the initial group of seven women was discovered by the armed groups. 

One person with first-hand knowledge of the cases told InSight Crime that in December 2020, a member of the guerrillas found text messages between one of the women and a member of the security forces. That woman, who was romantically involved with the guerrilla, managed to alert the other women of the imminent danger they were in, but it was too late for her. To this day, her whereabouts are unknown, and it is presumed that she was murdered.

The international agency representatives told InSight Crime that the group of seven women were given precise instructions on what to do in case they were discovered: They could turn to the Catholic Church, but not to the authorities. The same sources confirmed that while some of the women in this group managed to flee with the help of the church, others were killed by the guerrillas or are still missing.

“The ELN and the dissidents kill them because they feel infiltrated,” said one of the cooperation sources.

In addition to the international agency workers, some local officials and people close to the security forces, claim that at least one of the women did seek out the authorities who had recruited her and warned about the leak. She disappeared shortly after and her whereabouts, and who was behind her disappearance, are still unknown. “They [the security forces] are also murderers because they knew they were putting them in danger,” a local social leader told InSight Crime.

InSight Crime’s monitoring shows that the top leaders of both guerrillas — part of the targets of the security forces’ use of these women — remain at large.

The guerrillas decided that it was the people of Tibú who had to pay the consequences. InSight Crime has compiled testimonies that point to the forced disappearance of at least five women who collaborated with the security forces in the Catatumbo area since the beginning of 2021.

But the violence did not stop there. After discovering the women spies, the ELN and the dissidents began a campaign of assassinations of women they suspected of being informants, unleashing a wave of gender-based violence.

The ELN and the dissidents kill them because they feel infiltrated

International Cooperation source

Photos of the women accused of providing information to the security forces appeared in videos circulating in WhatsApp chains in Tibú. In the messages, the women were called “whores,” among other derogatory terms, to “justify” the calls for violence against them.

 “People said that they were asking for it: ‘She asked for it, and that’s why what happened to her happened,’” Mar recalled as she spoke of the women killed in Tibú.

The videos also had an additional purpose: to remind the women of Tibú that the armed groups decide who they can and cannot associate with, and that those who break their rules will be punished.

Kidnapped in Her Own Home

By January 2021, a month after the guerrillas found a list of informants, the ELN accused Mar of belonging to this group of women. After the first assault, she and her family were locked up for five days. They knew they were being watched by the guerrillas.

Mar said that she did not know how the group had found out about the visits from Rafael because she and her family had taken many precautions.

On the fifth day of being a prisoner in her own home, guerrilla members appeared again at her door. The ELN commander told Mar that her name and address had appeared on a contact list of female army and police informants, and that Rafael, her supposed mechanic, was actually an undercover agent who had been discovered.

They tortured her for hours. They asked her about other women and threatened to harm her family to get her to confess.

“He was [at my house] for almost two hours. Some of the questions he asked me he repeated to see if I was wrong about something or if I was telling him lies,” Mar said. Jaime was also tortured.  Hearing the screams, neighbors returned to confront the group. “The commander said that he had not killed anyone in my family yet because the neighbors testified that we were good people, we were a quiet, hardworking family.”

For the second time, Mar’s life was spared. But this time, the ELN gave her just 30 minutes to leave Tibú. In a matter of minutes, Mar and her family left the municipality, beset by fear, leaving everything she and her husband had built over the past five years. They fled to Cúcuta, the capital of Norte de Santander, hoping to find help from one of the state institutions.

Like Mar, many other women were also fleeing Tibú in the early months of 2021, frightened by threats from armed groups. Those who appeared in the videos and those who received visits from the guerrillas in their homes were quietly leaving the municipality with the help of local women leaders for the capital. 

In many cases, the women had no way to support themselves or any place to stay. Other women left Tibú with their own resources or with the help of social organizations. However, the advice and support from these organizations is limited.

In Cúcuta, Mar decided to report her experience to the authorities.

She appealed to various institutions to denounce the actions of the security forces and the guerrillas, but received no response. The Ombudsman’s Office, the Cúcuta Ombudsman’s Office, and other municipal secretariats closed their doors to her. Not a single office activated the established protection protocol or provided comprehensive attention to her and her family. Nor could she access the humanitarian aid that she was due as a displaced person, since no one took her statement and she was not officially recognized as a victim of the conflict.  

When asked about cases similar to Mar’s, several officials told InSight Crime of the major challenges they face in Cúcuta in attending to victims of the conflict, migrants, or asylum seekers, citing limited budgets and the need for formal complaints and cumbersome bureaucratic procedures.   

For Mar, living in Cúcuta was hard, so some time later and with no assurance of their safety, she and her family decided to return to Tibú.

“We waited for months to pass, and then we went back to Tibú to pick up our things because in Cúcuta we had nothing,” said Mar.

Once in Tibú, all the threats she had received were on her mind, but she hoped that she could go unnoticed and that the ELN would leave her and her family in peace.

Her wishes were far from reality.

On the road between Cúcuta and Tibú there are clandestine checkpoints set up by FARC and ELN dissidents, who also have informants watching who enters and leaves the town. So when Mar and Jaime returned to their house to get some of their belongings, ELN members arrived within minutes to confront them.

“We made a serious mistake,” Mar said. “The same people who had threatened us showed up again, asking us what we were doing there and what we were looking for.”

The ELN members showed no mercy. “They pointed a gun at us. They hit my husband very hard. They hit me too. I thought I was going to die right there”.

Again, their neighbors showed up. Mar and her family knew they would not be left alive if they disobeyed the ELN’s warnings again, so they had no choice but to leave Tibú without what they had come for.

“They told us that if they ever saw us again, they would kill us,” she said.

They settled in Cúcuta, defeated, and depending on the support of their family. Their only consolation was that, outside of Tibú, the ELN would not bother them.

But they were wrong about that too. They began to receive threatening calls and text messages. Jaime was summoned to a meeting with the ELN, who threatened to declare him a target if he did not show up.

“The ELN was targeting him as a collaborator, as a police informant,” said Mar.

Mar and Jaime decided to ignore the group’s summons because after all they had been through, they knew that if he returned to Tibú, the ELN would kill him.

But disobeying ELN orders brought consequences.

They told us that if they ever saw us again, they would kill us

MAR

Even in Cúcuta, they felt persecuted and watched.  

The trauma of the events in Tibú began to take its toll on Mar. She felt alone and totally without support. None of the authorities had contacted her, even though she had filed complaints with several institutions during her first stay in the departmental capital.

With no other option and tired of living in fear, Mar and her family decided to return to Venezuela. They settled in a municipality near the Colombian border, hoping to rebuild their lives.

Dead End

Although Mar and her family were happy to return to their country, their joy was short-lived.

The tentacles of Colombian guerrillas have extended beyond the border for years. Venezuela has become a base of operations for ELN and FARC dissident factions, which operate with President Nicolás Maduro’s administration’s complicity.

Mar and her family’s sense of safety was interrupted when members of the ELN recognized her. Mar believes that her photo had been circulated within the group’s ranks along with a message declaring her a military target.

“Armed men, hooded, kidnapped me, beat me, threatened me. They said that they had been told that I was a military target, that they were checking my identity, and if I was the person they thought I was, they were going to kill me,” said Mar.

At one point, Mar began to think it was all her fault. She was so used to hearing in Tibú that when a woman was killed or tortured by the armed groups it was because “she had asked for it,” that she began to believe it.

Mar was kidnapped and held for two days near the trochas, or informal crossings, that connect Venezuela with the Metropolitan Area of Cúcuta, unable to tell her family and gripped by a fear that even she cannot describe today, almost three years after the event.

With the help of other hostages, Mar miraculously managed to escape. She was reunited with her family in Venezuela and moved back to stay with her relatives in Cúcuta, but she felt defeated.

It was around May 2022, and Mar had been struggling for more than a year with threats and pressure from the ELN. She had been tortured on multiple occasions, had been forced to flee her home and lose everything. At that moment, finding herself once again between a rock and a hard place, she decided to play her last card.

Among the women of Tibú who had left the municipality, there was a rumor that the now former Secretary of Victims of Norte de Santander, Cristian Andrés Llanos, was a trusted official and that he had managed to help other women who had been recruited by the security forces or threatened by the guerrillas. So she set out to seek help one last time.

A Light Comes On

Andrés recalls that Mar was waiting for him for hours outside his office and that, although the office had social workers and psychologists available to assist her, she refused to talk to anyone but him.

“When I saw her, she said to me, ‘Are you Andrés? Because I need to talk to you alone, only and exclusively with you,’” Andrés recalled. 

They went into his office to talk in private, and Mar told him in detail about her situation: the offers from the supposed mechanic, the false accusations, the torture to which the ELN subjected her, the kidnapping and displacements of which she and her family had been victims on several occasions.

Mar’s story reminded Andrés of 18 other women who had passed through his office between 2021 and 2022. The women reported that they had been recruited by members of the security forces, who asked them to infiltrate criminal groups operating in Tibú or give them information about what they saw in the town. They had then been threatened by the groups and displaced.

“They were fleeing because other women accused of being informants and infiltrating armed groups had been killed. Since they were already on a list, they had to leave the department,” said Andrés. However, when Andrés explained the protection protocol, which included providing a written statement, the women had panicked and decided not to make a declaration.

Andrés explained that, on previous occasions, he had already escalated the issue to other instances, but that before the competent authorities, not having any support, invalidated the complaints.

Upon hearing Mar’s story, Andrés told her that the only way he could help her was to activate the Secretariat of Victims’ protocol, which included providing a statement of the facts and then going to the Municipal Ombudsman, since it was a highly complex case.

Unlike the other women, Mar agreed to leave a written statement. So far, she is the only one who has done so.

With the statement, Andrés began to follow the state care protocol: he notified the Secretary of Government of the department, the police, the Ombudsman’s Office, the Ombudsman’s Office, the Municipal Ombudsman’s Office and the Attorney General of Norte de Santander.

However, there was no response.

“We transfer the case to all the institutions, and the state fails. It does not provide answers, it does not give guarantees, it does not provide protection. I go from office to office to talk to almost everyone. I tell them, ‘Come on, haven’t you read the news? Look at the number of femicides. We have a woman alive, a survivor, who escaped, we have to follow the protocol.’  The answers were very unconcerned,” Andrés recalled with frustration.

Sometimes the inadequate institutional responses can be explained by a lack of resources to deal with the volume of requests or internal bureaucracy of each of the institutions. But the events that unfolded after Andrés filed Mar’s statement in the system suggest that, in Mar’s case, a darker reason. 

Who Pays the Price?

The pressure on Mar and her family increased after she filed her complaint. She began to notice that when she left her house, she was being followed. After weeks of waiting for a response from the institutions, she could not take it anymore.

By October 2022, Mar and her family had been displaced again, fleeing from Norte de Santander to a municipality in the interior of the country with the help of Andrés, who by that time had resigned as the department’s Secretary of Victims but continued to work as a protection and human rights advisor with a foundation for victims of violence. 

But it wasn’t long before they felt watched and followed again.

“One day, out of the blue, my husband was making a doctor’s appointment for me at the hospital when men on motorcycles started chasing him,” Mar said. “We didn’t feel safe anywhere. Already declared a military target, we were sure that even if we hid, they would get us.”

Again, Mar decided to act. She went to the Municipal Ombudsman to file a complaint about the situation and recounting, once again, how she had been a victim of violence at the hands of the ELN in Norte de Santander.

She spoke of Rafael, of the offer to pass information from the armed groups to the army, the threats and torture by the ELN, the government’s role in all that she and her family had lived through.

Mar hoped that the state would not fail her again. It was not easy to recount her story over and over, let alone relive the painful scenes she had gone through. But on the other side of the table, she recalls, she was met with only a resounding silence and an icy stare.

The official who took her statement explained to her in a low voice that there were things it was better not to say out loud, and suggested that he modify some parts of his story. Why draw attention to herself? Why denounce what Rafael had done? It would not change what had happened.  

Mar stood up, indignant and worried.

What Mar did not know is that, in the municipality where she had taken refuge with her family, there is no registered ELN presence, and it is unlikely that the group would have chased her there.

“The ELN is not interested in those who left [Tibú]. But the security forces are. The biggest risks are from the security forces because it was a big operation,” one of the members of an international agency told InSight Crime.

This is consistent with testimonies from former members of the security forces and residents of Tibú who spoke to InSight Crime on condition of anonymity. All said that, to avoid drawing attention and escalating the issue, members of the security forces tried to intimidate the women, telling them they would denounce them — or any inhabitant of Tibú who wanted to denounce the recruitment — as guerrilla collaborators.

SEE ALSO: Violence Against Women: A Weapon for Criminals in Tibú, Colombia

Meanwhile, things were also getting harder for Andrés.

He told InSight Crime that since June 2022, a couple of months after he took Mar’s declaration and notified all the institutions that were supposed to provide her with protection, he began receiving threats by phone and text message.

“You son of a bitch. Keep pushing this topic of these women from Tibú, and we are going to kill you. You are messing with very powerful people who are willing to kill you and chop you up,” one of the messages said.

The situation escalated rapidly. In July 2022, two armed men broke into his home in what appeared to be an ordinary burglary, but Andrés suspects they were looking for documents specific to Mar’s case.

“The only expensive things I had in my house were three televisions. There is no safe with money in it and in the end, the thieves didn’t even take the TVs,” Andrés said. “They tried to break in because of the possible sensitive information I had.”

In the next few months, Andres received more than five threats via text message to his personal phone and also to his official number. Although he filed complaints with the Attorney General’s Office and also requested support from the National Protection Unit, he never got a response.

Andrés claims that even his security detail was infiltrated. The threats told him personal facts or made references to his routines, things that only his security detail and those close to him could know. Andrés also denounced this, but the investigations have been superficial and have not yielded concrete results. 

When at the end of 2022, he again received a call from Mar asking for help, he helped her and her family to quietly leave the country. But this action brought him further trouble. Days after answering Mar’s call, Andrés and his family were again threatened with death. 

Then in January 2023, unidentified men broke into the home of the regional coordinator of the National Protection Unit, Erika Yañez, and stole a computer with the information of hundreds of protected persons and their families, including Mar and her family.

Andrés decided that the situation in Colombia was becoming too dangerous, and decided to leave the country for Europe and request political asylum with his family. However, his process has been delayed, and he fears having to return to Colombia, with no guarantee for his safety. 

Ongoing Harassment

Mar and her family’s lives were saved. They began the process of requesting asylum in a foreign country, and she is working to heal the wounds left by two years of violence and displacement. Like her, other women from Tibú have fled the country to rebuild their lives.

Meanwhile, armed groups continue to accuse women and village leaders of being informants.

InSight Crime spoke to residents of Tibú, who requested anonymity, who explained that even selling food to police officers can now result in a summons to face either of the two armed groups operating in the municipality.

Three years after the wave of femicides in Tibú attracted the attention of the national press, most of the cases remain unsolved, and violence by armed groups against the civilian population is on the rise. The Prosecutor’s Office, the institution in charge of investigating crimes in the municipality, has had no presence there since 2021. In addition, several officials have received threats from armed groups and have been unable to carry out their work.

The state protection protocols do not serve the women in Tibú or Norte de Santander. In some cases, pressure from the armed groups on officials prevents them from doing their duty. In others, the institutions are overwhelmed and unable to support the victims. In the last year, humanitarian organizations, which are often the first to assist victims of violence, have also been restricted by guerrilla orders, members of several of these organizations told InSight Crime.

In addition, the women leaders who once helped many women flee Tibú have also been threatened by the guerrillas, and their work in the territory drastically reduced as the groups also went after their families.

The Norte de Santander Police told InSight Crime that they do not recruit informants, in accordance with their policies. The National Protection Unit told InSight Crime that, although they are aware that personal belongings were stolen from an official’s home, it was a case of common theft. They also claimed they could not identify how the phone numbers given to Andrés and his bodyguards were leaked, and had rotated the security personnel assigned to him, and said that they do not have information or complaints regarding the messages sent to Mar by alleged UNP officials.

InSight Crime also requested comments from the Ombudsman’s Office, the Colombian National Police’s Criminal Investigation Directorate, the Cúcuta Metropolitan Police, the Colombian army, the Attorney General’s Office, and the Municipal Ombudsman’s Office of Cúcuta, but at the time of publication none of these entities had responded.

And yet, this chapter of Mar’s life is not over. Months after her departure from the country, alleged officials of the National Protection Unit have contacted her through unofficial channels. In the messages, they ask her to report to the offices of the institution in Cúcuta, apparently to provide her with protection measures. They have also tried to locate her through family members, but the questions do not go beyond wanting to find out where she is.

Although today she feels protected far from Tibú and has counselling, the thought of the violence she experienced and the certainty that nothing has changed in Tibú casts a shadow over Mar’s process.

She wanted to tell her story to make sure that, years later, the government institutions recognize their responsibility in the worst wave of gender violence that Tibú has seen in its recent history.

*The names of the protagonists have been changed to protect their identity.  

*This article was updated on May 27, 2024, to reflect the information provided by the National Protection Unit on May 22, 2024.