Women Behind the Gun

Her qualifications for the beauty contest were perfect. Luisa Maria Mateus was 21, had a shapely figure, a brilliant smile and a murder charge pending against her.

Police say Mateus was a paid assassin fresh from a hit when they caught her last year. Just hours before her arrest, authorities say, Mateus and another woman strolled into a Bogota restaurant, shot two businessmen at a table, then calmly walked out.

Mateus is now awaiting trial here at El Buen Pastor prison, the largest women’s detention center in Colombia. In September, she made headlines when her cellblock made her its finalist for the prison beauty pageant. (She lost to a convicted thief.)

More than just providing tabloid fodder about babes behind bars, Mateus’ femme fatale looks literally put a face on a new problem confronting Colombian police and society: a rise in female criminality as the nation’s overall crime rate is falling dramatically.

A two-year government crackdown on violence in this war-racked country has produced impressive gains. The homicide rate, though still high, has dropped. Kidnappings have also decreased. President Alvaro Uribe, who has put a premium on restoring law and order, enjoys approval ratings that would make any U.S. politician envious.

Yet hidden in the general good news is an alarming increase in the number of crimes committed by women, an upsurge that worries sociologists and criminologists. At the same time that many Colombian women are making inroads in traditionally male-dominated professions, from education to law to politics, some of their sisters are bringing down the gender barrier in crime by becoming murderers, robbers and drug dealers.

“Unfortunately, this is the other side of the coin of equality,” said Florence Thomas, a scholar in women’s studies at the National University of Colombia.

From January to mid-November 2004, the number of women arrested in homicide cases was up 27% compared with the same period in 2003, according to official figures. For assault and battery, there was an increase of 14%; for drug-related offenses, 18%; for illegal possession, manufacture and trafficking of guns and munitions, also 18%.

Experts ascribe the trend to persistent poverty and the pervasive effects of a civil war that has racked Colombia for the last 40 years, uprooting thousands of families, killing husbands and fathers and driving women to desperate measures.

“Women have arrived at a [new] level of stress,” said Miguel Hernandez, a lawyer and former professor of criminology who has studied the phenomenon of rising female criminality. “Colombian women are smart, they work hard, they’re good mothers. But when somebody is without means, she has to find a way to feed her children.”

“There are more and more widows and more displaced women,” said Susie Bermudez, who teaches history and anthropology at Los Andes University here in the capital. “Unemployment has not dropped as the president promised, and there are many health issues afflicting women. Poverty has, above all, a woman’s face.”

That poverty is a dispiriting combination of hunger, illness and squalor that, according to a 2002 ranking by the World Bank, put Colombia in a league with some African nations in terms of per-capita income. The agency reported that strides against economic and social misery during the 1980s had been virtually wiped out by the end of the ‘90s, when continued violence and a stubborn recession pushed more than half the population of 44 million below the poverty line.

Today, minimum wage is about $120 a month -- for those lucky enough to have jobs. Hundreds of thousands of women are not. Many of them are natives of the countryside who have been expelled from their land by the bloody conflict and fled to the cities, where they languish unskilled and neglected by the cash-strapped state.

Hernandez traces the upswing in female criminal behavior to 2000, about the time the number of people displaced by the war began to crest. The figure peaked in 2002, when 400,000 Colombians were forced from their homes after government peace talks with Marxist rebels collapsed and the war between the guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups intensified.

The paramilitary fighters have since taken steps toward demobilizing, but the rebels refuse to resume negotiations.

In the last four years, according to government statistics, 1.3 million people have been uprooted. Only Sudan and Congo have more displaced people, human rights groups say.

The majority of Colombia’s displaced are women, many of whose husbands and sons were killed or stayed behind to fight, experts say.

Sometimes the uprooted women are themselves former members of paramilitary or guerrilla groups. The leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, says that 30% of its rebel force is female.

At El Buen Pastor prison, the most notorious inmate is Nayibe Rojas Valderrama, or “Sonia,” a top FARC leader who was captured in February by U.S.-trained Colombian commandos. Rojas Valderrama is allegedly linked to the organization’s cocaine trade and is so powerful that the rebels have posted a reward for anyone who breaks her out of jail. The paramilitary groups have offered the same to anyone who kills her.

Women desert from paramilitary and rebel groups such as the FARC at a higher rate than men. But if such a woman flees to the city and then finds herself without a job or marketable skills, she may feel she has no choice but to resort to crime to support herself and her children, Hernandez said.

“She arrives and what does she know how to do?” he said. “To kill.”

Typically, he said, women caught up in crime start by selling their bodies, especially if they are young. Through prostitution, they fall in with bands of petty criminals and graduate to small-time thievery, drug deliveries or serving as a scout or driver for a gang of robbers. The crimes then can escalate into armed operations and assaults.

Even for women who have not participated in the civil conflict, the relentless exposure to bloodshed and strife may push them toward antisocial behavior. Many women have been victims of political and personal violence, including rape, and some may be driven to imitate or lash out against what scholars identify as an increased machismo and chauvinism among men during times of war.

“We are still a country of violent men,” Thomas said. But now, some women are swayed by “the erroneous idea that what’s best for a woman is to act like a man” -- to meet violence with violence.

Stella Juajibioy is a sweet-faced inmate at El Buen Pastor who spent nearly two years plotting her revenge against an abusive, fugitive husband. When she finally hunted him down, Juajibioy lured him back home and stabbed him 65 times.

“My vengeance was very big,” Juajibioy, 29, said calmly during a jailhouse interview. During their last two years together, she said, Jose had beaten her, stolen her money to support his drug and alcohol habit and mistreated their children.

On the last day of 1998, Juajibioy says, her husband kicked their infant son in a rage, killing him. Jose fled, and Stella -- so distraught she refused to bury the baby for days -- began methodically tracking him down.

She found him in a faraway town in May 2000 and traveled for two days by boat and bus to get there. She cajoled Jose into returning home on the pretext of wanting to reunite.

Four days later, “I shut the door and said, ‘I’m going to make you pay for what you’ve done,’ ” then stabbed him as he begged for forgiveness, Juajibioy said.

The police did not catch up to Juajibioy until the spring of 2002. She is now serving a 26-year sentence, without regret for what she did.

“If someone does something to your family, you have to take care of it yourself,” she said. “The law doesn’t do anything.”

Whether the state will do anything to help alleviate the poverty and the social conditions underlying the increase in female criminality is another question.

The government’s campaign against rebel and paramilitary groups has diverted millions of dollars from social welfare programs to the security budget, critics say. Though some international aid agencies and nonprofit organizations seek to fill the gap, the need is overwhelming. The state provides meager assistance to the displaced, and women seeking job training or other institutional support come away empty-handed.

“In the cities there are many women begging, many women [who are] victims of violence, many women alone because their husbands have been killed, women who are their families’ sole support,” said Vivola Gomez, a psychologist at Los Andes University. “Women carry a great load of the war in this country.”

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Special correspondent Toby Muse contributed to this report.