Doña Brígida: Fifty years of resistance On tiptoes María Brígida tries to reach the rolls of linen she keeps on the top shelf in her house; the one she is looking for falls onto the floor. With trembling hands and visibly nervous Brígida bends down to pick it up. She unrolls it in her humble yard, full of colourful wild flowers, because there is more light there. We feel dizzy when we see so much violence depicted on this cloth which is more than a metre wide. In one part, uniformed men are walking with guns, taking away men, women, and children who are bleeding. Brígida sighs, saying “It was very difficult to paint this”. In the painting she has depicted the infamous massacre of La Resbalosa and Mulatos, where the Colombian army and paramilitaries - some later found guilty and sentenced by the justice system - murdered and dismembered eight people in 2005. Brígida is a small smiling woman of sixty-eight who always wears her silver hair in two braids. She came to Urabá exactly half a century ago, in 1967, when these lands were pure jungle and rather mysterious. She settled in the mountains of San José de Apartadó and lived with the animals
in the middle of this impressive habitat, a true paradise if it had not been for the war that broke out soon after. In the 1970s she began to work on the banana plantations that were expanding throughout Urabá, but when she became aware of the labour exploitation - for example, they worked up to twenty hours a day but were only paid for ten - she joined the trade union and supported workers’ rights. As expected, the banana company fired her. Brígida has experienced great tragedies, she has mourned the death of 300 leaders in her community, she has lost a brother and a daughter and she has learned of massacre after massacre. Brígida has been painting since she was a little girl and maybe that’s how she keeps that genuine smile she always wears when we visit her. Her 600 paintings are a historical testimony of what happened, a tribute to the pain caused by the war and the hope that was born when the Peace Community was created. “We cannot forget the history and memory of our loved ones who have died because if we forget that, we are finished”.
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