Fulvia Chungana says she still carries the stench of the man who raped her nearly 30 years ago.

She was barely 24 years old and living in a poor village in Colombia’s western Cauca province when the civil war reached her doorstep.

A member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or Farc), a leftist rebel group, entered her home while she was cooking.

“I remember how he stank when he put a knife to my throat as he raped me,” Chungana said, her words dripping with rage. “Like the date of my birthday, I’ll never forget it.”

Chungana, who was four months pregnant with her second child at the time, caught syphilis from her attacker. She told no one other than the doctors who treated her.

“I would hide the medicine in the walls of the wooden house,” she said, tears forming in her eyes. “If my partner saw it, he might guess what happened to me.”

The young family fled to Popayán, a nearby city, where she was unable to find work and struggled to adjust to city life. “That’s when my life fell further apart,” she said. “I’m a campesina, what do I know about the city?” Her relationship soon disintegrated, leaving her to care for two young children alone.

Fulvia Chungana hopes that a special peace tribunal will allow Colombia to come to terms with the atrocities of war. Photograph: Joe Parkin Daniels/The Guardian

To this day, Chungana – who now works with a foundation supporting survivors of sexual abuse – has no idea why she was targeted, nor does she know if her attacker is free or even alive. But she can glimpse the possibility of closure thanks to a peace deal that the Colombian government reached with the Farc in late 2016.

Q&A Why did Colombia need a peace process? Show Conflict Colombia has experienced one of the longest internal conflicts in history. It started in the 1960s following a turbulent period known as 'la violencia'. On the one hand, the Colombian government fought to maintain order and stability, seeking to protect the interests of its citizens and the legitimacy of the state.

On the other, there were guerilla groups – like Farc and ELN – who said they were fighting for the poor and social justice. And then paramilitary groups emerged, claiming they were reacting to the threats from the guerillas while taking justice into their own hands. Impact More than seven million people were uprooted from their homes and driven to cities fearing for their lives. At least two hundred thousand people lost their lives. Numerous human rights violations were committed. Hundreds of people were forcibly recruited and taken far into the Colombian jungle to fight. More than 8,000 cases of child recruitment were recorded. Overall, there have been more than eight million victims, due to the conflict. One out of every five Colombians has been directly affected.

Peace process

After talks lasting more than four years, a peace treaty was signed with Farc in November 2016 effectively bringing the conflict to an end. Key to the agreement are deals on rural development, political participation, illicit drugs and reparations for victims. Farc has given up all of their weapons (verified by the UN) and transitioned into a political party with a voice in the political process. With less money tied up in defence, the country's spending priorities should now be switching to education, health, infrastructure, the economy and the environment. But some are yet to experience 'peace'. Scars are deep. Reconciliation, reintegration and access to opportunities take time. President Juan Manuel Santos is due to stand down in 2018 and some election campaigning has stoked concerns over the peace deal.

That deal formally ended 52 years of civil war that killed 260,000 and left 7 million displaced. One of its provisions is a special peace tribunal (or JEP) that will allow victims and survivors to have their day in court – albeit with reduced penalties for the perpetrators, who can avoid sentences in traditional prisons if they confess their crimes.

Sexual violence was widespread during the Colombian conflict, but amid massacres and mass kidnappings it tended to be ignored or met with impunity. Between 1985 and 2016 alone, 15,076 people were victims of sexual violence during the armed conflict, according to a report by the National Centre of Historical Memory, and 91% of them were women.

Impunity rates for sexual crimes exceed 90%, but the hope for survivors is that the JEP will open the space to correct that troubling statistic.

“The JEP is the closest we will have to justice, and to some guarantee that it won’t happen again,” Chungana said. “Unless people tell the truth about what happened, we’re doomed to see it happen all over again.”

In August, about 2,000 documented cases of sexual violence were brought before the tribunal. Seven hundred cases were brought by the Network of Women Victims and Professionals, the foundation Chungana works with.

“Here is our confidence and our truth because we trust you,” Yolanda Perea, a representative from another national victims’ group told the court as she stifled her tears. “If Colombia had the trust to bring us [to this tribunal], it is because you are going to give us back some truth and hope that the war took away from us.”

All sides of the conflict committed acts of sexual violence.

Farc members would force female members to have abortions if pregnant, so as not to burden their war effort.

State-aligned paramilitaries, long considered the bloodthirstiest of Colombia’s myriad armed groups, routinely used rape as a weapon of war and means of establishing control of territory.

One challenge for human rights groups and Colombia’s authorities is to map the extent of a phenomenon that has been shrouded in silence for generations.

In Mapiripán, a remote riverside outpost at the foot of the country’s sprawling eastern plains, a group of women met recently in a rented hotel room to learn about their rights.

The town has been a byword for atrocity since July 1997, when a paramilitary death squad arrived looking for Farc members. Over several days, they beheaded and butchered anyone they suspected of collaborating with the rebels, dumping dozens of victims in the river. Women were raped, survivors say, though cases were never reported to authorities.

Doctors of the World (or MDM), a French NGO, ran the workshop in Mapiripán and two other conflict-ridden regions, with funding from the British embassy in Colombia. Their findings will be brought before the JEP.

Sandra Milena Martínez, a nurse specialising in sexual violence at the workshop, said that victims who speak out still face the threat of retaliation.

“There are still armed groups around here,” said Martínez: dissident Farc members who chose not to lay down their weapons and criminal gangs with paramilitary origins. “And this is a small town – the husbands of these women will know where they are, and they will talk to other people.”

Despite the widespread fear, Adriana, a survivor of the massacre who was abused by her husband for several years, says that seeing cases brought before the JEP could instigate a sea change in her community. “If women are brave enough to talk about the trauma across the country, that makes me feel it can happen here,” she said. “If Colombia is at peace, now is the time that people should feel able to talk. That’s why I’m here and that’s what I will tell the people in my community.”

Survivors who bring cases to the JEP will be granted special guarantees of sensitivity, in order to ensure they are not putting themselves in further risk, officials have said.

One survivor whose case has been brought to the JEP is Angela María Escobar, the director of the Network of Women Victims and Professionals.

Angela María Escobar was raped in 2000. She now runs a foundation to support other survivors of sexual violence Photograph: Joe Parkin Daniels/The Guardian

Escobar was gang-raped by three members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (or AUC), a paramilitary group, who arrived in the tourist town of Guatape in September 2000, searching for Farc collaborators.

Escobar’s life changed when she refused the advances of some AUC members in a nightclub one evening. “I offended their manliness, their machismo,” she said. “For that, they destroyed me.”

Forced to flee, Escobar bounced between nearby towns, eventually landing in Medellín, Colombia’s second city where she lived on the streets, falling into sex work to survive. “It’s a miracle I’m still alive,” she said. “I would steal, take drugs, and bury my feelings.”

Now, having got her life back on track, Escobar works with Chungana and other women to build a nationwide network of victims – a term she prefers to survivor. “Everything that happened to us happened on the state’s watch,” she said. “If we don’t use the word ‘victim’ we are absolving the state of its responsibility.”