Cristina Bautista Taquinas

The "Hilando Pensamiento" Movement got accredited by the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2019.

As a social worker, founder of an accredited women’s movement, having a seat on her community’s constituent assembly and governor of the Paez/Nasa community, in early 2019 she traveled to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues headquarters in New York to represent indigenous women. Her talk in this forum called attention to the hardships and violence indigenous peoples in Colombia were facing at the hands of FARC guerilla groups, as well as the inequalities and struggles women faced. At this event, she was internationally recognized as a representative of indigenous peoples.

In August 2019, two Paez/Nasa Native Guards were killed. In response to this murder of her people as well as the murder of many others, Cristina spoke out against the violence that has plagued her community for years.

On October 29, 2019, some Paez/Nasa Native Guards were patrolling an area of the reservation, Vereda La Luz, when they were alerted to the presence of an unknown vehicle carrying kidnapped individuals. The guards blocked the vehicle on the road and called for backup. Four more guards, Cristina, and another female Nasa governor answered their plea for help, and when they arrived, started to help free the kidnapped people trapped in the vehicle. Yet, this incident proved to be an attack by the FARC guerilla, as the hidden attackers then rained gunfire and grenades on the helpers, killing Cristina as well as four Native Guards, and injuring five more.

In 2018, she graduated with her degree in Social Work from the School of Social Work and Human Development of Universidad del Valle.

After her graduation in 2018, she returned home to the Paez/Nasa Tacueyo reservation in Toribio, Cauca and wanted to apply her social work studies in her community.

In 2017, she was granted a scholarship in the Human Rights Training Program for Indigenous Peoples of Latin America.

Cristina Bautista Taquinas (1977–2019) was a Colombian activist, community leader of the Paez/Nasa people of Colombia, and social worker. She dedicated her life to defending indigenous peoples' lands, and fighting for indigenous women's rights.

Cristina Bautista Taquinas was born in 1977 la vereda La Capilla in Corinto, a small town in Colombia’s Cauca department. She was the oldest of five siblings, and her childhood consisted of taking care of her younger siblings from the time she was six years old. While her parents worked to financially support her family, as a child she would take her siblings to daycare before school, cook, and do the laundry for her family.