Buying a Wayuu Bride - Sort Of

A column decorated with goat hides represents the dowries paid by young Wayuu men to their brides' families.

Before he can get married, a young man of the Wayuu indigenous people must give his bride's family a big dowry: Often 50 goats, necklaces, cattle, money and jewels.

In this matrilineal society, the valuables are supposed to go primarily to the family of the bride's mother, according to Bogotá's Museum of Regional Dress, which has a small exhibition on now about the practice.

The Museo de Trajes Regionales, located on Calle 10 
just above Plaza Bolivar, is one of 
La Candelaria's lesser-known museums.

The exhibition consists primarily of a column covered with goatskins representing the animals given by the groom. The young man generally must collect gifts from relatives and friends to amass a sufficient dowry. It's a controversial practice which persists mostly in rural areas of La Guajira.

Despite appearances, the museum's website denies that this represents a bride price, calling the payment rather the groom's 'appreciation of the prestige of the bride and her family.

"In no case is this a sale or trade of a human being," says the website.

Wayuu traditional dress.

Nevertheless, when I visited La Guajira years ago, Wayuu women told me they felt humiliated by the dowry, as tho they were being traded for livestock.

But the dowry is perpetuated across generations, since fathers insist that they be paid, to compensate them for the dowry they themselves paid their own wives' families.

The Wayuus' traditional territory was divided in two by the Colombian-Venezuelan border. While this certainly separated families, it also created a privilege for the Wayuu people, who usually can cross the border freely. Many Wayuu, particularly women, have become wealthy traders - and contrabanders.

The Guajira peninsula has a history of lawlessness, from contraband and pirates. Henri Charrière, the protagonist and author of Papillon, cohabited with Wayuu women while hiding out after escaping from Devil's Island.

The Wayuu divide themselves into clans, based on maternal descent, and these clans have historically

carried out murderous feuds. When paramilitary groups wrested control of the region from guerrillas in the mid-2000s, they sided with some clans against others, committing massacres and forcing people to flee to Venezuela.

The last few years, the Wayuu's always-dry territory has suffered a severe drought, killing many children. The situation has likely been worsened by coal mines, which have diverted streams and consume huge amounts of the region's scarce water.

And altho the Wayuu exhibition is small, the dress museum is worth visiting to see the regional and historical clothing worn by different groups of afro, indigenous and white Colombians.

Campesinos from Huila Department.

Guambiano Indigenous people from Huila Department.

A mask from an Amazonian indigenous tribe.

A view from the museum's interior.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The A.G. Eats His Anti-Abortion Words

Ordoñez eats his words. They must have tasted bitter. 

Colombia's arch-conservative Attorney General Alejandro Ordoñez may have taken his opposition to abortion rights just a bit too far for his own good.

Ordoñez, a staunch Catholic, is a fierce opponent of abortion. So he understandably disliked having to carry out a 2006 court decision permitting abortion in four cases: when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, when the pregnancy endangers the woman's life or when the fetus has a severe malformation.

So, Ordoñez and two of his assistants took measures which, according to pro-choice activists and a Colombian court, were intended to illegaly restrict women's rights to legal abortions and even contraception.

Ordoñez's office issued communiques declaring that the 'day after pill' was abortive, that an entire hospital could refuse to perform abortions based on conscientious objection (even tho the court decision gives that right only to individual doctors), and had described sexual rights education campaigns as 'pro-abortion campaigns.'

Abortion-rights supporters sued, the court agreed with them, and the other day Ordoñez and two of his assistants had to eat their words by retracting and rectifying their statements. (Ordoñez is appealing this latest court ruling.)

But Ordoñez's high profile humiliation appears to be producing much broader impact. In the days following it, there's been increasing talk of legalizing abortion on demand, which would put Colombia on the very forefront of abortion rights in Latin America. As another part of the court's ruling, the government is evaluating whether public health programs should cover the cost of misoprostol, an ulcer medicine which is widely used to induce abortions.

On Friday, Senate President Roy Barreras, a medical doctor, surprised many by saying "I have no doubt that interrupting a pregnancy is not a crime."

"The crime of abortion which is now in the penal code is not only antiquated and unjust, but highly improbable," he added.

Barreras claimed that it was medically impossible to prove whether an abortion had been deliberate or a spontaeneous miscarriage.

The fact that the abortion prohibition is a charade is made evident by a visit to the Santa Ana Church in Bogotá's Teusaquillo neighborhood. The church is surrounded by health clinics for pregnant women which are widely known to provide illegal abortions. (Google abortion in Bogotá and their names will come up on public forums.)

When the Constitutional Court decriminalized abortion in those narrow cases in 2006, it based its decision on Colombia's high rate of maternal mortality. But since then relatively few legal abortions have been performed, in part because of the strong stigma still attached abortion and in part because of obstacles created by Ordoñez and others like him.




By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Abortion Un-Rights in Colombia

A pro-choice protest.

In case anybody had any doubts about why so few legal abortions have been performed in Colombia, despite a six-year-old law legalizing the procedure in certain cases, Colombia's attorney general recently gave us the answer.

The story involves a woman from near Villavicencio who claimed that her pregnancy threatened her life according to doctors. That's one of the situations, along with rape, incest or a grave malformation of the fetus, when abortion is legal. The 24-year-old woman went to several local hospitals, but the doctors either demanded more proof that her pregnancy was life threatening or refused to perform the abortion by claiming concientious objection, according to news reports. The law gives a doctor a personal right to refuse to perform an abortion on grounds of conscience, but requires a hospital to find someone or another hospital to perform the procedure for a woman who has a right to abort.

The woman sought an order from a local court authorizing the abortion, but was refused.

Finally, she went to one of the many clandestine abortion clinics and ended her pregnancy there.

'I abort, you abort, we all keep quiet.'

Hers is a common story. A recent study by the Guttmacher Institute calculated that in 2008 some 400,000 abortions were performed in Colombia - of which only 322 were legal. Of those women who aborted illegaly, sometimes in dangerous, fly-by-night clinics, 132,000 suffered complications, according to the study. Of those, only 11 percent received the post-abortion treatment they were entitled to.

But this woman's story has a jarring postcript. Her appeal continued making its way up thru Colombia's court system, until the Constitutional Court ruled in her favor - that the Villavicencio hospitals had not carried out required tests to determine whether the pregnancy threatened the woman's health.

Then, court officials telephoned the woman, only to learn that she was no longer pregnant - and hadn't given birth, either. The unavoidable conclusion: she'd had an abortion.

Now, Alejandro Ordoñez, Colombia's very anti-abortion attorney general, has ordered a parliamentary commission to investigate the Constitutional Court judges for having failed to denounce the woman for aborting. In Ordoñez's view, two of the magistrates are accesories to the illegal abortion.

This is all despite the fact that the woman in all probability had a legal right to abort, but was denied her right by doctors and hospitals.

Ordoñez, in fact, wants to roll back Colombian women's very limited right to an abortion. That's a startling example of blindness by ideology. As the Guttmacher study showed, the existing abortion limits have done little to actually prevent abortions, instead making the procedure clandestine and dangerous.

Other studies demonstrate why the best way to reduce abortion isn't banning it, but educating people about constraception. Mind-blowingly, more than half, and perhaps as many as two-thirds, of all pregnancies in Colombia are unplanned. Reducing that number would do more than anything else to cut the number of abortions, legal or illegal, in Colombia. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours