The girls of the Palmeras team take to one of the small football pitches in the central plaza in their clean, pressed strip. It might look like a modest, hastily arranged Sunday afternoon kickabout, but in Patio Bonito, the fact that the game is happening at all is a small miracle.
A few years ago, the plaza was a no-go zone, controlled by violent armed gangs and paramilitaries. But slowly the community has reclaimed the area, using football as one of its main weapons.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
The Palmeras was started by the Association of the Women of the River, a group set up by local women in 1992 to provide an alternative to violence, drugs and prostitution, after seeing their community decimated by rightwing paramilitaries.
"The [paramilitaries] started `social cleansing,'" says Olga Munera, a small wiry Colombian from the aid organization Ceudes, who started the association as a way of giving young women education, training and health and child care.
"Their favorite tactic was taking people to the edge of the river and shooting them in the head. Usually young people, for petty things like using drugs. The idea for the football teams started during those periods of massacres, as a symbolic way of creating peace."
Forty years of civil war between marxist rebels and rightwing paramilitaries and government forces in Colombia has created an estimated 3 million displaced people. Many of them head for the capital Bogota, most ending up in ghettos such as Patio Bonito, part of Tintale Central, a sprawl of makeshift houses, slums and squatted shacks south of the city, and home to 200,000 refugees.
At turns reviled and ignored by the authorities, the displaced, especially the young, are easy pickings for the various lawless factions of Colombia.
Cocaine farmers come looking for cheap and expendable labour to pick their crops; brothel owners from the city look for new girls.
And the young men and women provide a ready recruiting pool for both the leftwing Farc guerrillas and the rightwing paramilitaries.
The guerrillas, the paramilitaries and the crime gangs have traditionally been successful in attracting young people because they offer a kind of surrogate family to those with nothing. Munera realized that to help the young women, to give them an alternative, she needed to offer the same sense of being part of something.
Football provided that sense of belonging and there is now a well-attended local six-a-side tournament.
"Palmeras is our family," says Patrice Orjuela, a 20-year-old teacher and team regular. The trend has grown and there are now 30 women's football teams playing in Tintale Central.
At first the drug gangs and paramilitaries tried to infiltrate the tournament by setting up their own teams.
It is not unusual for the criminal elements in Colombia to manipulate football. Major clubs have been used for money laundering by the drug barons.
On the terraces, the "barras bravas" -- hooligan gangs who follow the big sides -- have been a rich recruitment ground for the guerrillas and paramilitaries. Munera adamantly kept them out.
"To be part of the teams the rules are simple. No drugs, no violence, no verbal abuse, just sport," she said.
And, just as importantly, to get a place on the Palmeras team, the women have to be in one of the association's training programs or helping educate others. The women are mostly trained to be hairdressers, nursery workers, beauticians and primary-school teachers.
"Kids won't do what's good for them without having something like football to attract them in the first place," says Javier, Munera's husband. "They accept the rules when they are playing football."
Being part of the team has transformed the lives of the young women in Patio Bonito. Ariella Aguirre, 25 and a beautician, arrived from the province of Quindio with her three brothers 10 years ago.
"It was a drastic change," she says. "I was too frightened to go outside the door until I joined the team."
The women, aged from 16 to 30, are fanatical about their sport, training every night to make the first team, playing friendly matches against the men to improve their game -- and occasionally winning.
The team endeavor, says Munera, gives the young women confidence and a sense of belonging that they lost when they became refugees.
Most families arrive in Patio Bonito with nothing, forced from their land by the war or by one or other criminal factions taking over their farms.
When the teams started playing, they only had rubble-filled sites to use as pitches. Olga embarrassed the city councillors into clearing the area and providing playing fields. It was part of a long, slow process of forcing through change in the area. Back then there were two open sewers running either side of Patio Bonito, remembers Olga.
"One was used to dump stolen cars and the other was used to dump the dead victims of the drug dealers," she said.
The families lived with no sanitation, no police and no authority or access to health care. Most of the children did not go to school; the nearest one was a mile away.
"To get there they had to go through an area where young girls were regularly raped," says Olga.
By organizing local councils and embarrassing the authorities to take notice of the area, the association has transformed Patio Bonito. The paramilitaries and the Farc have been largely driven out.
But there are still plenty of temptations. Every year, the coca producers still come to town with promises to pay the parents for the labor of their sons and daughters. "They targeted kids between nine and 12," says Munera. "Often, at the end of the season, they are killed because then the farmers don't have to pay them."
Sometimes the girls are recruited to work in the fields. But the biggest temptation is into prostitution.
"We've now got opportunities because the association got us studying and pushed us," says Aguirre. "Other women here didn't get the same chance."
The movement has grown, building its own school, creche, shop, advice center and offices.
The project gets funding from foreign groups such as British aid agency CAFOD, but the women do all the work themselves.
The growing power of the association has not gone unnoticed. In 1998, Munera was threatened by one of the local gang leaders.
"When the threats were made, the women started preparing weapons quietly in their homes -- homemade guns and knives and machetes," says her husband.
"When the gang members came into the shop to get Olga, the women all came out brandishing these weapons and circled around her. They shouted: `We are all Olga.'"
He laughs and shakes his head.
"Five armed gang members against 20 women; the mobsters fled," he said.
Violence is still a way of life in the area. As Sandra Angel, a 20-year-old nursery worker, points out: "We don't go out at night and especially not down towards the river where it gets dangerous."
Murder is still all too common. But at least the area is no longer controlled by gangs and paramilitaries.
Out on the playing field, the Palmeras take on their neighborhood rivals, Almendras, watched by a cheering crowd of young men and women. Gradually the women teams have won over the male fans.
"The place fills up when the spectators know that the women are playing," says Angel.
"They came down to watch us at first because men like to look at women," adds Orjuela. "But they were surprised because we often play better than the men."
Palmeras lose 3-1. The players come off the pitch exhausted but happy.
Orjuela smiles: "We are good winners and good losers."
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