Women, War & Peace

The War We Are Living

If you ask Colombia's city-dwellers and governing political class, they'll tell you the country's 40-year-old civil war is over. But "The War We Are Living" reveals the "other" Colombia, in rural areas far away from the capitol, where the war is all too real -- and now the battle is over gold. In Cauca, a mountainous region in Colombia's pacific southwest, two extraordinary Afro-Colombian women are fighting to hold onto the gold-rich land that has sustained their community through small-scale mining for centuries. Clemencia Carabali and Francia Marquez are part of a powerful network of female leaders, who found that in wartime women can organize more freely than men. As they defy paramilitary death threats and insist on staying on their land, Carabali and Marquez are standing up for a generation of Colombians who have been terrorized and forcibly displaced as a deliberate strategy of war. If they lose the battle, they and thousands of their neighbors will join Colombia's four million people -- most of them women and children -- who have been uprooted from their homes and livelihoods. Narrated by Alfre Woodard.