Colombia has become the first country in Latin America where female genital mutilation (FGM) is now officially illegal. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
The law, passed unanimously by Colombia's Congress, is a milestone according to activists. It follows a long battle to eradicate the dangerous and often secretive procedure.
Carla Quiñonez's daughter was just six months old when the baby's great-grandmother subjected her to FGM. Quiñonez (not her real name) says when her grandmother returned the baby to her, she had a fever and was swollen and bleeding. The baby cried constantly.
"I confronted my grandmother, but she said it was normal and that I could not tell anyone," Quiñonez says.
The nearest health centre was a long journey away, so Quiñonez's mother, a midwife, tried to ease the baby's pain with medicinal plants. She also challenged Quiñonez's grandmother. But the older woman would not listen.
"She said that men make fun of women who have a clitoris," Quiñonez recalls.
FGM involves the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, as well as other injuries inflicted on those organs for non-medical reasons. It can cause medical complications, including haemorrhaging and infection, as well as complications later in life with periods and during childbirth. It can also make it difficult for a woman to experience sexual pleasure.
The World Health Organization says that around the world more than 230 million girls and women alive today have been cut, predominantly in Africa.
Quiñonez, 30, has been campaigning to eradicate the practice in Colombia, where it is still practised by members of her Emberá Indigenous community. Along with fellow activists and members of Colombia's Congress, she played a key role in the campaign which led to the ban.
She says it was only as she grew up that she realised what was secretly happening within her community.
"I always wondered why more girls than boys seemed to die shortly after birth. I remember a young cousin of mine whose birth was attended by my mother. She was born healthy, but died three days later. I asked my mother about it, and she told me the baby had died from 'jai', an ancestral illness," Quiñonez says.
Quiñonez now believes that girls who supposedly died from "jai" actually died from complications related to FGM.
Between 2020 and June 2026, 240 cases of FGM were recorded in Colombia. In the vast majority of instances, the girls were younger than six years old. But paediatrician Diana Ramos Mosquera says she believes this is just "the tip of the iceberg".
Working at San Jorge University Hospital in Pereira, a city in Colombia's north-west coffee-growing region, she says she's seen signs of scarring, burning and mutilation when examining girls who have come in with other medical conditions. She recalls one girl who arrived with her vaginal opening sealed shut, meaning she probably would not have been able to menstruate or have sexual intercourse when she reached adulthood.
"She had to undergo reconstructive surgery," Dr Ramos says.
She regards FGM as a form of sexual and gender-based violence with lifelong consequences, but says this must be addressed through education, and not just punishment.
"Some members of these communities genuinely believe they are doing no harm," she says.
With around 300,000 members, the Great Emberá Nation is one of Colombia's largest Indigenous communities, with populations also living in Ecuador and Panama. One theory about why members of the community practise FGM, when it's rarely seen elsewhere in Latin America, is that the practice arrived with enslaved people from African countries.