Colombia becomes the first Latin American country to ban female genital mutilation

Image by author using Canva pro.Nine days remained — just nine days before the deadline expired, the bill died, and years of work would have to begin again from scratch. But on June 10, 2026, the Colombian Senate finally voted and gave its approval, making Colombia the first country in Latin America to prohibit female genital mutilation (FGM). Bill 440 of 2025, known as “Niñas sin Ablación” (“Girls Without Ablation”), is a law that was not born in a legislative office, but rather, within the communities that needed it most.
On March 22, 2007, three newborn girls from the Emberá Chamí community died from an infection after being subjected to genital mutilation. It was the first documented case to reach official records, though it is believed it was not the first to occur.
Since then, Colombia has remained the only country in Latin America to officially acknowledge that female genital mutilation is still practiced within its borders. Rather than that acknowledgment being a source of shame, it allowed the state to begin taking action and helped place the eradication of FGM on the global Sustainable Development Goals agenda — but twenty years later, without a law to support those efforts, recognition alone was not enough to protect anyone.
Female genital mutilation (referred to in some communities as a “healing,” “correction,” or “operation”) involves the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia without any medical justification. In Colombia, it is performed on girls ranging from 17 days to 12 years of age. According to international health organizations, the consequences are permanent: hemorrhaging, chronic infections, childbirth complications, psychological trauma, behavioral disorders, anxiety, depression and, in the most severe cases, death.
A law born from survivors, driven by numbers
Official figures reveal only part of the picture. The state typically learns of cases when girls arrive at hospitals suffering complications, but many affected communities are located hours away from the nearest healthcare facility. What is recorded is always less than what actually occurs.
Even so, the available data is enough to demonstrate the scale of the problem. Colombia’s Ministry of Health reported 91 cases in 2023 and 54 in 2024, though no consolidated national registry exists since many occur in remote communities without access to the healthcare system. Between 2020 and 2025, the National Institute of Health documented 204 cases, 177 of them involving Indigenous girls, primarily in the departments of Risaralda and Chocó.
In the municipality of Pueblo Rico alone, 46 cases were recorded between 2013 and 2014: 32 involving infants under one year old and 11 involving children between one and two years old. Data from Colombia’s National Indigenous Organization, corroborated by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), indicates that two out of every three Emberá women have undergone genital mutilation. Authorities have also identified cases among Afro-Colombian, Raizal, Palenquero, and migrant communities.
We are not talking about adults. We are talking, overwhelmingly, about babies.
It was precisely this reality that pushed Emberá women themselves — many of them survivors — to stop waiting and begin building solutions from within their communities. The bill grew out of years of dialogue with affected communities that were asking for concrete tools to protect their daughters.
Its approach is not punitive, a deliberate choice. Criminalizing grandmothers and traditional birth attendants would only discourage families from taking girls to the hospital when complications arise. More children would die, not fewer.
The law establishes an interinstitutional committee made up of government agencies, the Colombian Family Welfare Institute (ICBF), civil society organizations, and representatives from the affected communities themselves. It creates care pathways, mandatory healthcare protocols, stronger data collection systems, and an intercultural approach that recognizes the complexity of the issue without using it as an excuse for inaction.
Alejandrina Guasorna: A survivor’s testimony
In an interview with El Pais, Alejandrina Guasorna remembers when she was 74 years old and her sister confirmed what rumors had long suggested: on the day she was born, someone removed her clitoris. A razor blade, a heated nail, a closed room, and then silence.
No one had ever told her. Not her mother, nor any of the women in her Emberá community in Pueblo Rico, Risaralda. She grew up unaware, lived her life unaware, and even became a midwife without knowing, helping bring other girls into the world who may have suffered the same fate.
What weighs most heavily in her story is not the moment she cannot remember; it is everything she does remember: the girls who died, the hemorrhages, the infections, the tiny bodies that could not survive.
Then came the most devastating sentence of all: “They brought dead girls all the time. We thought it was normal.” It was not ignorance. It was an entire community conditioned over generations not to see, not to speak; to bury its daughters and move on.
Guasorna challenges one of the most common arguments used to justify inaction: this is not an ancient, immutable tradition. Unlike in some African countries, it is not always carried out by traditional midwives. Rather, it is a practice passed down through generations, in marginalized communities with limited access to education and little state presence, where no one explained that what was being done to their bodies was neither normal nor necessary.
The road that almost ended before it began
The approval of the law was far from easy. The bill passed two debates in the House of Representatives in 2025 and was later unanimously approved by the Senate’s First Committee. Yet for weeks, the final debate, the only remaining step, was buried at positions 12 or 13 on the legislative agenda, behind issues such as school vouchers and transportation subsidies.
The deadline was June 20. The presidential runoff election was scheduled for June 21. Few politicians wanted to complicate matters.
That the vote happened at all, given Colombia’s political climate, is no small detail. It is the result of years of pressure from women who had nothing to gain politically but everything to gain personally.
Female genital mutilation is practiced in at least 94 countries and affects more than 230 million girls and women worldwide. Of those 94 countries where the practice has been documented, only 59 have laws that specifically address it, with most of those laws concentrated in Africa, Europe, and North America.
Until the passing of this historic bill, Latin America had none.
Leandra Becerra, Equality Now’s legal advisor for Latin America, summarized the significance of the moment after the bill’s approval: “This achievement is the culmination of years of coordinated work by survivors, activists, and lawmakers. The challenge now is ensuring that the law is implemented effectively, with sustained political will and adequate resources, so that no girl in Colombia is ever subjected to female genital mutilation again.
President Gustavo Petro must still formally sign the legislation into law, but the hardest part has already happened. Colombia has decided that female genital mutilation can no longer continue.