BOGOTA (TrustLaw) – When gynaecologist Lilliam Fondeur recently wrote about the plight of a pregnant teenager diagnosed with acute leukaemia in her column in the Dominican Republic’s El Nacional newspaper, little did she know it would revive debate about the country’s blanket ban on abortion and stir public support in favour of the young girl.

Following a change to the constitution in 2010, abortion in the Dominican Republic is banned under any circumstances, even when the mother’s health or life is in danger.

In recent weeks, Fondeur and local women’s rights groups have been campaigning for the 16-year-old girl, who is around 10 weeks pregnant, to undergo potentially life-saving chemotherapy to treat the cancer.

Fondeur tells me rounds of chemotherapy will severely affect, and possibly kill the foetus, which would be regarded as a crime under the country’s stringent abortion laws.

“The treatment will very likely deform the foetus. The young girl should be able to get an abortion as well as the treatment. But doctors in the public health system are afraid to carry out the procedure because it’s unconstitutional,” Fondeur said by telephone from Santo Domingo.

The case of the girl, known as Esperancita, has dominated national headlines over the last week, and there has been an outpouring of support on social media networks for the girl and her mother, who’s been “begging” the ministry of health to authorise the treatment her daughter quickly needs, Fondeur says.

Following mounting public pressure and after several weeks of delay, Esperancita finally underwent chemotherapy on Tuesday, according to local press reports.

“The hospital said it has started the treatment but it’s not clear whether this has really happened. The facts of the case have all been covered up. The doctors should have started treating the young girl earlier. Why the delay?” Foudeur said.

“We hope the case of this girl serves as a symbol to show that the life of a mother must always come first,” she added.

For Fondeur, Esperancita’s case also highlights social inequality in the Dominican Republic, in a country where one in three people live in poverty.

“It’s also a symbol of the plight of poor, young mothers who have to use the public health system. With money, rich women can buy abortions but poor mothers simply don’t have that choice.”

Women who can afford to pay for an abortion can find private doctors willing to perform the procedure and they can also travel abroad, often to the United States to have an abortion there, Fondeur said.

The Dominican Republic’s influential Catholic Church along with a powerful Conservative lobby in Congress, are factors behind the country’s stringent abortion laws, Fondeur says.

Rights group Amnesty International says that in countries where abortion is totally banned, the rates of maternal mortality rise because doctors are unable or are too afraid to provide life-saving treatment when it can affect a pregnancy, even when it’s the only way to save a mother’s life.

The Dominican Republic is not the only country with stringent abortion laws in Central America.

Nicaragua and El Salvador have also forbidden abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, foetal malformation, or if the life of the mother or foetus is in danger.

Picture caption: A man sits near a monument as pigeons fly above in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, March 1, 2007. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

If David Darg’s award-winning documentary, “Baseball in the time of Cholera”, gets even a fraction of the 100 million hits the Kony video received, there could soon be a lot more people demanding action on Haiti’s epidemic.

Darg’s hard-hitting film aims to heap public pressure on the United Nations to take responsibility for the outbreak which began in October 2010 and continues today.

It says Nepalese troops from the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti brought the disease to the Caribbean nation.

The epidemic has claimed more than 7,200 lives and infected over half a million Haitians - some five percent of the pop­u­la­tion – accord­ing to figures from the Haitian government.

Several scientific studies, including a June 2011 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, say U.N. troops were the likely cause of the outbreak.

Darg tells me he hopes the documentary, co-directed by Bryn Mooser, will be a viral success like Kony 2012.

The Kony campaign, which called for the capture of the fugitive leader of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army, attracted massive support on Twitter and Facebook as well as celebrity backing after going viral in March.

Darg’s aim is to generate enough public pressure against the United Nations for it to accept responsibility for the cholera epidemic and provide clean water and sanitation for Haitians.

“It’s a violation of the U.N.’s policy on the environment and human rights. They are completely at fault. They’ve basically brushed the cholera outbreak aside and blamed it on the Haitians,” says the filmmaker and aid worker.

Last May, a U.N. led commission concluded that while the cholera bacteria did not originate “from the native environs of Haiti”, the outbreak was “not the fault of, or delib­er­ate action of, a group or indi­vid­ual”.

SCANDAL

Darg arrived in Haiti immediately after the January 2010 earthquake to help in the relief effort following the disaster.

While in Haiti, he came across the country’s only junior league baseball team, set up by 16-year-old Joseph Alvyns.

Darg started filming Alvyns and his group of friends as they found joy and solace on the baseball pitch.

But filming took an abrupt turn when Alvyn’s mother suddenly died from cholera, exactly a year after the outbreak erupted.

“It was after her death that I took a step back and realised what a scandal it all was.  It was then the urgency kicked in to raise awareness about cholera and who was at fault in the documentary,” Darg says.

In perhaps one of the documentary’s most poignant scenes, Alvyns stands in a desolate cemetery next to the grave of his mother holding a single red carnation.

“She worked very hard for us. She loved us very much. She will stay in my heart forever,” the teenage boy says as silent tears roll down his cheeks.

Darg isn’t the only ones shining a spotlight on the United Nations’ role.

Last November, a Boston-based rights group, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti,filed claims against the United Nations on behalf of 5,000 cholera victims, demanding hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation and a public apology.

“There’s been no news at all about the legal case and no review. Lawyers are considering going through a national court in the U.S.,” Darg says.

The rights group says the United Nations failed to screen its peacekeepers for cholera and allowed untreated waste from a U.N. base in Haiti to be dumped into the country’s main river, contaminating it with the water-borne disease.

The majority of Haitians agree, Darg says.

“Ninety eight percent of people you ask in Haiti think the United Nations is to blame for the cholera outbreak,” he adds.

Members of U.S congress are also putting pressure on the United Nations.

In May, over 75 members signed a letter urging the U.S. government to call on the United Nations to take measures to address the epidemic by improving access to clean water and sanitation, a task estimated to cost up to $1.1 billion.

Meanwhile, Alvyns and thousands of other Haitians wait for some kind of justice and pray that the cholera doesn’t resurge as the hurricane season gets under way.

Thousands of woman and girls are sexually abused and raped every year in the Caribbean nation.

Although it was a widespread problem long before the January 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, sexual violence escalated after the disaster, women’s rights groups say.

But recently, Haitian women have found support by dialling the country’s first dedicated hotline for survivors of sexual violence and rape.

“Just having somebody answer the phone, talk you through what the next steps are, knowing that you won’t have to go through it alone, it puts people at ease and gives them strength. You can hear that by the time they hang up the phone,” said Elmita Residor, one of six trained phone operators working at the call centre in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince.

All the operators belong to women’s rights group Kofaviv, which was founded eight years ago by rape survivors.

It means callers can find someone at the end of the line who is empathetic and sensitive to their plight, not something that is too common among Haitian society in general, local rights groups say.

Set up in September 2011 by Digital Democracy, a New York-based non-governmental organisation that uses technology to promote human rights, the call centre has fielded nearly 2,000 calls so far.

Two months ago, the hotline started working around round the clock, allowing women and girls to get help at night and weekends, which is when assaults are more likely to happen. The call centre receives 10 to 60 calls a day.

“Most frequently callers are asking what can I do, where to go, and what to do after incidents of sexual violence and rape,” Emilie Reiser, head of Digital Democracy’s Haiti programme, told TrustLaw in a telephone interview from Port-au-Prince.

Sexual assaults continue to happen in makeshift camps where 390,0000 Haitians who lost their homes in the earthquake still live, crammed together with little privacy and security under tarpaulin and scrap metal.

KEY ADVICE

Reiser says operators emphasise the importance of getting medical care within 72 hours of a rape to prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/AIDS and unwanted pregnancy.

But the hotline has become more than just about helping survivors of sexual violence.

“It has grown with the type of calls, to cases of domestic violence and women asking about child support and child care,” Reiser said, adding that men also call the hotline seeking advice about violence in the home with their partners.

The hotline also aims to raise awareness among women about their rights in general.

“The aim is to increase information and address the information gap about women’s rights. Call centre staff provide basic education on women’s rights and legal recourse, and they connect survivors to free medical, legal and psychosocial services,” Reiser said.

The 572 hotline number is advertised on local television channels, on the radio and at police stations. It means women living outside the capital in rural areas can also seek help.

Haiti’s police officers often phone up as well to refer victims of sexual violence to Kofaviv for counselling.

Kofaviv says it deals with an average of around 40 rape cases a month. Its work also includes helping women file complaints with police and collecting women from police stations to get medical checks.

When authorities from the Dominican Republic raided several houses in a poor residential neighbourhood last year in the capital city Santo Domingo, they found 44 children crammed in rooms, some sitting on the floor, others huddled under beds, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

After the raid, 22 of the children were identified as victims of child trafficking, and this month two child traffickers received 15-year prison sentences for the smuggling, trafficking and labour exploitation of Haitian children after a historic trial.

It is the first time Haitian traffickers have been jailed in the Dominican Republic for trafficking children, IOM said in a statement.

“Parents were convinced their children were being taken for a better life in Santo Domingo and even to Miami,” IOM spokesperson Zoe Stopak-Behr told AlertNet, adding that all the money the children earned was taken by their traffickers.

IOM returned the children to their families in Haiti, and also provided technical support and training to local state prosecutors during the trial, she added.

“The Dominicans had been criticised for some time now for not bringing many trafficking cases to trial,” Stopak-Behr said.

“The conviction is extremely important for prevention. It shows that there is a penalty for trafficking and that the Dominican authorities are working. We hope it will have a preventative effect and help stop the constant flow of children into the Dominican Republic.”

POROUS BORDER

At least 2,000 Haitian children were trafficked across the porous and poorly controlled border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 2009, according to UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Haitian children are a frequent sight on the streets of Santo Domingo, and are often seen begging, shoe shining and washing car windscreens at traffic lights.

Thousands of Haitian child domestic servants – known in Haitian Creole as “restaveks” – are also thought to be working in the Dominican Republic, according to IOM.

UNPOL, the U.N. Police Division, says it has stepped up patrols along the 366 km (227 mile) border to combat child trafficking, a problem that worsened following the massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010, according to both UNICEF and IOM.

The disaster left hundreds of thousands of families homeless and pushed countless more Haitians into extreme poverty, forcing more families to send their children to Haiti’s wealthier Caribbean neighbour in search of work and a better life.

“The number of cases of child victims of trafficking identified has most certainly increased since the 2010 earthquake,” Stopak-Behr said.

“It’s impossible to determine whether this is due to an actual increase of human trafficking or just the result of greater attention and training on the subject,” she added.

(Editing by Julie Mollins)

Picture credit: An immigrant child from Haiti cleans the windshield of a car before asking for money on the streets of Santo Domingo, June 29, 2011. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

Over the past decade, a stepped-up government military offensive against Colombia’s two main rebel groups – the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) – has prompted growing numbers of guerrilla fighters to desert and lay down their arms.

On average, 10 fighters demobilise every day in Colombia.

Since 2003, nearly 55,000 combatants from illegal armed groups have given up their weapons, including some 30,000 fighters from right-wing paramilitary groups, who disarmed during a peace process with the previous government.

The Colombian government says helping former fighters to return to civilian life is a top priority.

It runs a reintegration programme that pays ex-fighters a monthly allowance of up to $270, providing they attend school and or university, free psychological counseling and vocational training schemes.

Colombia’s reintegration process is regarded as an important step towards reconciliation and reducing the high levels of violence caused by the country’s five decades of armed conflict.

But demobilised child soldiers and fighters – many of whom have spent an average of eight years in the ranks of illegal armed groups – face significant obstacles, Alejandro Eder, Colombia’s chief advisor on reintegration, tells me.

Eder says few Colombians are ready to forgive the atrocities committed by all parties to the conflict.

“In the Colombian case, you have 50 years of violence – of horrible violence. There’s been violence against civilians, internal displacements, kidnapping and massacres. Many Colombians aren’t too keen on forgiving the people who they identify as the main perpetrators of these crimes,” explains Eder, who heads the government reintegration programme.

“Achieving reconciliation is very hard, especially in a post-conflict situation like the Colombian one, where there’s still violence going on. Many people would rather have revenge. And sometimes revenge is much easier than forgiving, and it’s also much easier than giving someone a second chance,” Eder says.

JOBS HARD TO COME BY

With an unemployment rate at nearly 11 percent, finding a job is a difficult task for most Colombians. But it’s even harder for ex-fighters.

The average recruitment age for combatants is 16 years old, which means few have completed high school. Many find they have to go back to school before looking for work.

Sixty percent of the 40,000 or so former fighters who have joined the government reintegration programme are illiterate, while over half were sexually abused as children, Eder tells me.

Only 8,500 participants have found jobs in the formal sector over the past five years.

“The biggest challenge is getting these people economically integrated,” Eder says.

Former fighters face discrimination and are often stigmatised by Colombians and potential employers, who view them as hardened criminals who don’t deserve government help and a second chance.

“People in Colombia are still scared of demobilised persons, and they turn their backs on them,” Eder says. “The main challenge we have is breaking down the stigma that Colombians associate with the demobilised population.”

Under the reintegration programme, ex-fighters are entitled to receive government support and financial benefits for up to six and a half years.

The government provides one psychologist for every 100 ex-combatants, and counselling is on offer about twice a month to help heal the traumas of war.

But for some ex-fighters, the lack of jobs and temptation to earn more money working for criminal gangs means they end up re-arming.

The government estimates that between 10 to 15 percent of the 36,000 ex-combatants who have gone through its programme since 2003 are involved in crime or have been recycled back into the conflict.

NO PEACE WITHOUT FORGIVENESS

Eder emphasises that fighters who have committed crimes against humanity are not allowed to take part in the reintegration programme, but instead face prosecution.

Yet few paramilitary warlords have yet to be convicted of any crimes against humanity, and many families are still seeking justice for abuses and searching for the country’s 50,000 missing people.

Against this background, are Colombians ready to forgive?

“There’s unwillingness and there’s reluctance,” Eder says. “All Colombians, including myself, are in some way victims – directly or indirectly – of the violence. But if you’re unwilling to forgive then there’s never going to be peace.”

I ask Eder, a former investment banker, what he has learned as head of the reintegration programme  in the last two years.

It’s been “an eye-opening experience”, he says. “Some of the demobilised fighters who were forcibly recruited when they were eight years old, what fault did they have that they were stolen from their homes by the guerrillas and paramilitaries?”

“You start to understand their side of the story. You start to understand that the line between victim and victimiser isn’t black and white. It’s shades of grey,” he says.

Much is at stake, Eder believes. If Colombians aren’t willing to accept ex-combatants back into their communities and give them work, the prospect of peace will remain elusive.

“Colombians need to realise that, by giving these people a second chance, they are benefiting themselves. Why?  Because if we let them come back into society, Colombia will be a more peaceful society,” Eder explains.

“You can’t become an apologist for them – many of them have committed absolutely terrible crimes. But I think that if we want to build peace in Colombia, they need a second chance.”

PHOTO CREDIT: FARC rebels pose with an unidentified girl holding a weapon in southern Colombia in this undated photo confiscated by the police and released to media on Nov. 12, 2009. REUTERS/National Police/Handout

Acid attacks are on the rise in Colombia.

In the first four months of this year, 19 women have been attacked with acid in Colombia – more than during the same period in 2011.

Gloria Piamba, 26, is one of those victims.

As I wait on a street corner for Piamba to turn up on a recent drizzly day in a gritty residential neighourhood in central Bogota, she is an easy figure to spot.

Piamba emerges from a government-run women’s refuge with her head wrapped in a shawl and a young son in tow.

She wears a mask over her half-burned mouth, a tube up her nose to prevent it from concaving, and a patch over her disfigured left eye, which was left with partial vision.

We sit in a nearby café for several hours where she tells me with candour and clarity about her abusive relationship with her ex-boyfriend with whom she had a son.

The first thing Piamba does is to show me several photos.

“That was me. That’s what I looked like before,” says Piamba.

It’s a snapshot of a smiley and pretty woman of indigenous descent with long shiny black hair looking directly at the camera.

She tells me how her face, and life, changed forever one Christmas Eve two years ago.

She accuses her abusive ex-boyfriend of dousing her face with acid as she and her brother walked down a busy street in downtown Bogotá. However, he maintains his innocence.

During the five-month period from when she left him until the acid attack, Piamba had an ominous feeling that he would strike again.

“He stalked me. That day when he attacked me, he had been following me all day,” she says.

“He used to tell me, ‘If you’re not mine then you’re nobody else’s’.”

Piamba waited an hour at a hospital emergency ward before receiving any medical care.

The delay gave the acid ample time to devour her skin and reach deeper into the bone tissue, leaving her with third and fourth-degree burns.

“It felt like my skin, my face was falling off. My eyes were moving in and out like ping pong balls from the pain,” Piamba says.

Doctors and activists attribute many acid attacks to jealousy and revenge on the part of husbands, boyfriends and former lovers.

But there’s a glimmer of hope for Colombia’s acid victims.

Under Colombian law, acid attacks are defined as personal injury, a crime that carries a maximum six-year prison sentence, with criminals sometimes allowed to serve their jail sentences under house arrest.

The recent spate of attacks has prompted a group of lawmakers to introduce a bill that would result in tougher punishments of up to 20 years in prison for those convicted of carrying out acid attacks. It would also introduce stricter controls on the sale of acid and better medical care for acid victims.

Perhaps the most haunting part of my conversation with Piamba, aside from her seeing her almost unrecognizable deformed mouth, was when she told me about the reaction of her six-year-old son, who is half listening to our conversation as he plays with a straw.

I ask Piamba whether her son knows she blames his father for the attack.

“When my son saw me for the first time after the attack he told me, ‘Mummy, let’s kill this person who did this to you’. He said, ‘When I’m older and have a job, I’ll buy you special cream to heal your face’,” Piamba says, her voice cracking.

“At first I first told him I’d fallen over in the street but the psychologist encouraged me to tell the truth. I don’t want my son growing up with hatred so I’ve told him his father thought he was throwing cold water on my face but he made a mistake and it turned out to be hot water.”

Despite her strong spirit, Piamba tells me she has contemplated suicide, hitting rock bottom during a month long stay in hospital.

“The doctors told me to forget about the face I once had,” Piamba says, who has undergone five facial reconstructive surgeries so far. “Those words almost killed me. I thought about jumping off the 7^th floor of the hospital.”

Before the attack, Piamba scraped a living as a seamstress and street vendor selling drinks and snacks.

Her main concern now is getting a job to provide for her son and pay rent.

“Who’s going to give me a job looking like this?” she asks.

“And even if I get one, what employer will put up with me having to miss work because of medical appointments and time off for more surgery.”

On top of that, she can only stay at the women’s refuge where she is living with her son for up to four months. In several weeks time, she will have to find another place to live.

What keeps Piamba clinging on to hope and life? Her faith in God and her son, she says.

“I’m alive because of my son. I couldn’t bear to leave him alone.”

Photo credit: Acid victim Gloria Piamba photographed in Bogota, Colombia, May 2012. TRUSTLAW/Anstasia Moloney

What’s the biggest threat in Colombia?

Outsiders would probably say the armed conflict that has dragged   on for nearly five decades.

But for the country’s women, it’s the violence that takes place in homes, behind closed doors, Cristina Plazas, Colombia’s chief advisor on gender equality tells me.

“I understand that there are other enemies like paramilitary and guerrilla groups, drug trafficking and gangs,” Plazas said during a recent interview. “But really there’s no enemy greater than domestic violence.”

Plazas puts much of the blame on Colombia’s macho culture which tends to justify and condone violence against women.

There’s a prevailing attitude in much of Colombian society, even among some women, that violence against women somehow happens because it is a woman’s fault and because she deserved it.

“One of the main reasons behind violence against women in Colombia, and the rest of Latin America, is machismo. Some men think that to be a man they have to control women and believe women have to be at home looking after the children and doing the housework,” Plazas says.

Her office at the presidential palace in downtown Bogota is just four doors away from the president’s office -  its proximity perhaps recognition of the rising importance of women’s rights in a county where domestic and sexual violence is widespread and where nearly 20 percent of teenage girls aged between 15 and 19 are, or have been, pregnant.

A passionate advocate for raising awareness about women’s rights among lawmakers and the wider society, she explains how the Colombian government aims to reduce the rate of teenage pregnancies to 15 percent of teenage girls over the next three years.

She says lawmakers must understand that tackling violence against women and improving women’s rights cannot be pigeonholed as a separate or even minority issue.

“Don’t tell me it’s a minority issue when we (women) make up half of the country’s population,” Plazas says, recalling a conversation she once had with a male colleague, a former minister of mines.

“I introduced myself and he said, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong number’. I replied, ‘No, I’ve got the right number. I want to speak to you about how the mining boom is affecting women because it brings with it more prostitution and teenage pregnancies and how we can work together on these issues’.”

The minister was cooperative in the end, Plazas says.

Plazas and her team of 20 people work with government officials offering them advice on how to implement existing laws protecting women’s rights.

She says it’s a relentless exercise in lobbying lawmakers – from government ministers to judicial officials, to local mayors and governors in remote towns across Colombia.

“My job is about building up allies,” Plazas says.

Since taking the job nine months ago, Plazas has put the spotlight on domestic violence and the issue of women’s rights has become more visible in the national media.

But there’s a long way to go. Many cases of domestic violence in Colombia go unreported because women face threats and fear reprisals from their attackers.

And still too many Colombians believe a women is asking for trouble when she wears a short skirt and that it’s OK for a man to beat his wife and or girlfriend because she refuses sex and neglects the housework.

Photo caption: Performers from Pilobolus Dance Theatre rehearse in Bogota Sept. 22, 2010. REUTERS/John Vizcaino