To go to school, Clemencia Carabalí (La Balsa, Cauca, 55 years old) had to walk an hour and a half each way. At home, he did his homework by candlelight. Before going to bed, he washed his uniform and often dried it with a charcoal iron. The desire to emerge and contribute to her community encouraged her. “I wanted a profession and I was aware that it involved sacrifices,” says the winner of the 2019 National Prize for the Defense of Human Rights in Colombia, awarded by the Swedish Church and the Swedish non-profit organization Diakonia.
Her determination paid off: Carabalí is an industrial technologist and business administrator from the University of Santiago de Cali. She paid for her studies by working as a shoemaker and selling chontaduro and cassava cakes. In the seventh semester, she took a break to have her first child and returned to Cauca. There, he realized that his people’s food security was at risk and he set about organizing the community to reclaim the farms and produce what was needed, as his parents and grandparents had done.
Together, they discovered that most farms were tended by women because men left in search of money. Then they set up the “changed hands” system, which teamed up to collect crops and clean farms together. They applied this principle to other activities, such as washing clothes in the river: “There were five or six women and the one who finished first helped the other.
In 1997, they created the Municipal Women’s Committee, which later became the Buenos Aires Women’s Association. Their scope of action has expanded and today they are found in 10 municipalities in Cauca North and in three on the Pacific coast of Cauca (López de Micay, Guapi and Timbiquí). For five years it has been the Association of Afro-descendant Women of Northern Cauca (Asom Cauca), which has 230 members and of which Carabalí is president.
Their struggle aims to improve the living conditions and strengthen the organization of Afro-Colombian women, to defend their human and ethnic and territorial rights, as well as to eradicate the violence that has limited and made invisible their participation in society.
One of its first steps was an alliance with the Universidad del Valle to train in fruit processing and marketing. This is how orange wine and various jams and preserves were born. They also created an eight-month diploma course, the aim of which is to train them as agents of change in their communities. The organization suffered the ups and downs imposed by the armed conflict: it was displaced and the paramilitaries confiscated the headquarters it had rented in Buenos Aires. But today they have two of their own headquarters.
Due to her work and influence, Carabalí received threats, and in 2019 she suffered an attack from which she emerged unscathed. This forced him to go into exile in Spain and the United States, for months of discomfort. “I decided not to leave my territory, because living far from my family is not life. So, if they kill me, I will die on my land,” she says convinced.
Another success was making MerkAsom, a supermarket committed to food security and women’s economic advancement, a reality. He is at Santander de Quilichao and has just turned two years old. They proposed that it be more than a store, a place to learn and connect with other entrepreneurs.
In 2022, he received the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service from the National Center for American Scholars. In September 2022, she was sworn in as presidential adviser on women’s equality, a position from which she resigned a little over a year later, frustrated at not being able to do more.
He still has many fights ahead of him. One of them, he says, is to fight racism. “The most marginalized areas are those where ethnic, Afro and indigenous communities live. There are the worst health services, education and roads,” he emphasizes. For her, we must start by eliminating access barriers. “Bring these inequalities closer together so that we have better tools for professional and intellectual development. Racism will be overcome when people understand that we are human beings with the same abilities and, above all, the same rights.”
Carabalí dreams of creating a bank for women, focused on promoting their productive initiatives. And she also aspires to be a senator for the Historic Pact during the 2026 consultation. “I would like to be where the decisions are made.” So, maybe in the future, no other girl will have to walk three hours to school.
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