The line of women walking towards the border stretched on and on before me. Most wore black, for mourning, with orange scarves and ribbons, for resistance. In front a group of indigenous women, carrying their ‘bastones de mando’ (ceremonial staffs of authority), led the march. When they reached the bridge between Colombia and Ecuador they lifted these bastones and formed another bridge, a human bridge of sisterhood, through which they welcomed the Ecuadoran women that had come to join us under the slogan “militarism = violence”.  Over 5,000 women came together for the international day against violence against women, November 25, 2008, to protest the many forms of violence that militarism inflicts on women, and to highlight the seriousness of these along both sides of the border. To do so they peacefully shut down the largest crossing between these two countries for over an hour.

The violence near the border has been particularly bad lately (from several ‘rearmed’ paramilitary groups, both of the guerilla groups, and various official armed forces), and thousands have been forced to flee over the border into Ecuador. This displacement is tied to and aggravates other violence, such as forced prostitution (both physically and economically), rape, hunger, and forced recruitment.
  
The Ruta Pacifica de Mujeres (Women’s Peaceful Way) and the Organizacion Femenina Popular (Grassroots Women’s Organization) organized this act of sisterhood to be with the women in the region. The Ruta’s ongoing slogan has been that women’s bodies are not spoils of war. Instead the women of the Ruta use their own bodies to interrupt this dynamic by putting their bodies in the way, in acts of peaceful resistance. The Ruta is a pacifist feminist organization that creates new languages and social practices that not only oppose militarism, but also walk them down new ‘ways’ to peace. They use symbol and ritual to exorcise fear, cleanse, restore, disarm the armed, and weave threads of connection.
  
Another Ruta slogan is ‘Las Mujeres PazHaremos’, which is a play on words that means both ‘we as women will pass’, and ‘we as women will make peace’. By passing through war zones, the Ruta lays down new ways to peace. Women came from all across Colombia to participate, some traveling on buses for up to four days straight. These buses kept meeting up along the way to form a caravan of eventually over 50 buses. Some 3,000 local women gathered to meet them – many of whom had never been part of a political action before.
  
The women of the Ruta break the twisted ties of militarism’s violence by crossing them with threads of connection. Let us weave with them.
 
Published in the Spring 2008 issue

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