URGENT ACTION- paramilitaries threaten peace community in La Esperanza

Hey Everyone,
You may recall from my blog that I was in La Esperanza a few weeks ago, accompanying the Peace  Community there. This was part of the three international accompaniment organizations that work with the Peace Community (PBI of England, Palomas of Italy and FOR of the USA) rotating through the village in response to hightened threats from illegal armed paramilitary groups.

U.S. CITIZENS: FOR released an Urgent Action Letter this week, in response to what is happening in La Esperanza. Please take a few moments to politically support the Peace Community, which has been under severe paramilitary threat since mid-November, by signing this letter. It only takes a few seconds and the letter was written, in part, by yours truly. Click here to sign the letter to the U.S. Ambassador in Colombia and support the Peace Community in their resistance to militant oppression. 

NOT A U.S. CITIZEN, BUT STILL LOVE GINA, HER WORK and the FOR COLOMBIA PROGRAM? Below is a copy of the letter to U.S. Ambassador Michael McKinley, for all you amazing friends of mine who are not US citizens, but would be willing to send a similar letter via e-mail to your ambassador in Colombia.

Thanks for supporting me and my work, thanks on behalf of FOR's Colombia program team, and thank you for supporting the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado in their peaceful struggle this holiday season,
Gina
Dear Ambassador McKinley,

I am writing to express my concern about recent paramilitary threats and actions against the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó in northwest Colombia.

On two separate occasions in the final weeks of November, armed men self-identified as paramilitaries entered the village of La Esperanza, where several Peace Community members live. These illegal armed groups met with village members, demanded future collaboration, ordered the closure of the village’s two stores and began limiting the amount of food residents can bring up to their families from town.  In addition to being inside village limits, many paramilitaries are present in the surrounding area, operating checkpoints along the paths. On November 22, paramilitary and guerrilla gunmen reportedly engaged in intensive combat nearby.

The recent incursion of paramilitary groups is only the latest example of the violence the Peace Community has suffered over the past year. Since March 2011, paramilitary and other illegal armed groups have killed 12 civilians from the San José area and continue to threaten the Peace Community with target lists of those to be murdered next, despite heavy military and police presence.

Paramilitaries, collaborating with the Colombian military, have been involved in the majority of the 195 deaths the Peace Community has suffered since its founding in 1997. In response to such violence, only a few low-ranking army men and paramilitaries have been tried and convicted. Given the history of paramilitary and state-sponsored violence, ongoing impunity and U.S. financial support to the Colombian army, this recent surge in presence is certain to put the civilians of La Esperanza in danger of violence.

I respectfully urge you to:

* Contact Colombian government officials about the paramilitary groups' continued operations, contrary to the assertion that they effectively demobilized in 2006. It is the state’s responsibility to dismantle all paramilitary structures.

* Contact the 17th Brigade to reiterate your concern for the safety of Peace Community members and other civilians living in La Esperanza. Remind the brigade of their responsibility to protect the Peace Community in accordance with the community’s principles of nonviolence and non-involvement in the armed conflict, and the protective measures issued by the Inter-American Human Rights Court.

I look forward to hearing back from you on your actions to protect the Peace Community and other civilians affected by the armed conflict. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

Sincerely,
(Your Name)

Are you for FOR?

PLEASE click here and help our Campaign:
15 years of resistance, 10 years of presence, Every Single Day.

Alright everyone, here's the deal- FOR's Colombia program is kicking off a fundraiser that will run through March of 2012.

This amazing opportunity for you to support peace in Colombia is in celebration of two major anniversaries coming up this spring:
1.) The Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado will be celebrating 15 years of peaceful resistance to militant repression and
2.) The Fellowship of Reconciliation will be celebrating 10 years as full-time accompaniers to these inspiring human rights defenders.
Could there be a better cause for which to donate your hard-earned cash?
I thought not.

But wait, there’s more! Not only are your FORistas on the ground committed to working for Peace in Colombia and around the world, they are also quite creative and artistic. As you will note on the donation website, gifts are included for donations of 50 dollars or more... gifts designed by current FOR volunteers just like me!

"And what," you may ask, "will $50 do for FOR?" Great question! 50 dollars will support one human rights accompanier for one day in the Peace Community. With some quick math we can see that a mere $350 will support a FOR volunteer for an entire week! $1,000 will support a FOR volunteer for an entire month! And (gasp!) $12,000 will support a FOR volunteer to protect the Peace Community for an entire year! Talk about bang for your buck!

As you see on the lovely FOR-volunteer-designed website, you also have the opportunity to donate “in honor” of someone. Here are some thoughts on that cool feature:
1. You could donate in my honor, which would be amazing, since I will actually directly serve the Peace Community due to your donation.
2. You could donate in honor of a loved one as a holiday gift or a birthday gift or a “hey, thinking of you so I sent a donation to support peace in Colombia” gift…
3. You could donate in honor of all grass-roots communities working around the world for a more just and peaceful existence.

Thank you in advance for visiting ImforFOR.org, where all this information is presented with pretty colors and graphics.

And THANK YOU in advance for donating to support me, FOR’s accompaniment work, the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado and PEACE IN COLOMBIA.

Have a wonderful Holiday Season,
Gina

City Lights

From the plane I say goodbye to Uraba’s lush green mountainous and hello to Medellin’s brown river and tall buildings. While waiting for my plane transfer, I eat lunch in the terminal. There is table service and a waitress dressed stylishly in hoop earrings and high heels. The news blaring from four TV’s at once talks of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” and I realize I forgot about Thanksgiving. The news talks of relations between countries and elections and protests. I realize that all of a sudden I will be up on the news. On politics. On the world. I forgot what it was like to have a TV in front of me. Commercials. Anchors. I forgot so many things. Did I lose them? Will I find them?

Another time up into the air and back down and I land in a familiar city. Welcome to Bogota in its nightlight splendor. For the first time in months I feel chilled. Cold, actually. For the first time in months I am cold. I arrive to an empty apartment and look out over the city to the distant hills as every other FOR volunteer has done upon leaving the campo for the capital metropolis and I feel so very strange. My body has made the transition from rural war zone to one of the biggest cities in Latin America, but my mind has a long ways to go. Just as I start shaking (Cold? Confusion? Too many thoughts all at once?), I look down to see a letter left by my roommate and posted mail with my name on it from the states. Birthday cards and presents from my mom and my Grandma. All of a sudden I will be connected to my family again. And I sit down and I read the cards over and over. And then I think about how I’d had my morning coffee in La Union. I think about my friends that left me in Apartado and waved goodbye to my taxi. I think about Emily… How will I readjust to life without Emily? Then I take my first hot shower in 8 months.

In the night, in a half-sleep/half-identify the campo noise outside your window state I think to myself, “what a strange noise for the rain to make” and then I wake up to car horns. I wake from dreams of the community with a vallenato song in my head, but I listen to Bob Dylan over coffee. It rains at night here too, but the apartment building is tall and I don’t hear it intensely on my roof. Mostly I know it rained because I hear cars splashing through puddles on the pavement. Isaac and I go for breakfast. We eat pastries full of ricotta cheese and spinach while our co-workers in La Union take off on an accompaniment in response to emergencies La Esperanza. Isaac goes to work, but I get a few “adjustment” days which works out fine, because one of my dearest friends is visiting from Holland. And because I have not seen my friends in Bogota for months.

Slumber parties with Lisa and Diwy and Luna are just what the doctor ordered. Lisa works, Luna goes to day-care and then Diwy and I have nothing to do but everything we want. Diwy and I walk city streets and shop for needed items in my new city life. We eat delicious foods, which are ten times as delicious for me because I have been eating the same thing for 8 months. In the grocer I smell guava and immediately think of the tree outside our house. I smell it, but I can’t find it anywhere. Eventually I find it. It’s packaged in plastic. Together we try and adjust to Bogota’s altitude and together we laugh at our failure to do so. We go to Isaac’s goodbye dinner and eat curries. We catch up on life and love and future plans and current adventures. We laugh a lot.

Diwy decides we “need to get out of the city” and, amazingly, after 24 hours of being here, I agree. We road trip to Villa de Leyva, a small colonial Colombian tourist town three hours outside of the capital in pastoral Boyacá. We stroll the central plaza and take photos of ourselves. We drink beer and laugh and loiter in shops, trying on clothes we never buy. We café hop and drink coffees and chocolates and teas. We try and hike a “half hour hike” but it takes us 3 hours because we literally can not breathe in the altitude. We arrive at the summit just in time for a thunderstorm and Diwy pops up her umbrella. We eat artisan pastries in the rain on top of a mountain and then nearly die sliding back down the slick mossy rock in the rain. We’d had great plans to hike to beautiful pastoral waterfalls and lakes, but in the name of oxygen decide to meander cobbled streets instead. People do not understand my Caribbean vernacular. They do understand Diwy’s crystal clear Guatemalan accent. She does most of the negotiating.

Diwy watched me culture shock and let me talk around in circles confused about life. She walked arm in arm with me under the same umbrella and made me laugh talking about all things relevant and what becomes of us through the choices we make. We talked a lot about Colombia. And the world. And travel. And our expat lives. And how in our current society people feel so worldly. And then Diwy said, “People in the first world feel like they are so connected, and they are. They are so connected without knowing what they are connected to.” I was so thankful to have Diwy.

Back in Bogota I unpack my bags and set up my room. I look around and try to adjust to the idea that this is home. I straighten my hair for the first time since Emily chopped it all off our first month in the campo (sans comb) and am impressed with her straight-lined cut. I try to come to terms with the fact that my days are complete without talking to the same people I talked to everyday in the community. I take naps and try to pull myself out of campo time in order to go out dancing. Diwy, Jon and I go out dancing. We dance vallenato and salsa and reggaeton. We bar hop through city lights. I dream about the community. I try on every sweater I own and thank the weather because I love sweaters. Jon and I walk through Bogota’s central plaza and shop for a hammock. I revel in my love for Latin American plazas on Sundays. I buy a colorful umbrella. We buy tropical flowers off the street to put in our home. The kind of tropical flowers that a week ago, I could have picked myself. We get a bright blue hammock for the living room and some Christmas lights to get into the December groove. Jon and I cook good food and watch American movies from comfortable couches. A helicopter flies low and my heart pounds- some internalized physical reaction even though my mind knows that this helicopter is not out to bomb anyone. I waste a river’s worth of water every time I get into the hot shower. It is just that good.

Starting work mixes another world into the whirlwind. There is so much to do! A conference on laws for human rights defenders, a meeting with a group of conscientious objectors, conference calls with people in Austria and the states, planning publications and articles, meeting with other accompanying organizations and hearing about their work and partners, planning webinars, learning about massacres elsewhere in the country and the overall situation in Colombia. In Bogota conversations are so packed- they are jammed with so many themes and topics and everything is so beautifully put together. People are eloquent and they flow from one human rights issue to the next and activists are pumped and people talk fluidly about death and policy and corporations and protest. I know I can do that… I have done that… but right now I am used to conversing about yucca. And when someone says there is an Amnesty International urgent action for the town of La Esperanza in the Peace Community, I don’t just think about the need to respond to it, I actually see the faces of the people there. I think about things they have said to me. I think about the fact that I was there two weeks ago. Is that healthy? Effective? Normal? Inspiring? Scary? There are so very many things I do not know. And so many things that I have a feeling I knew one time but now seem to have lost. This is the first time I have culture shocked within the same country I currently live in. Weird. As in with all things transition or otherwise, there is something to be said for being gentle with oneself.

The rain has started to pour down on our office roof. The rain somehow brings me back to myself. In concretely happy news from my new amazing Bogota life, I am going to a free Calle 13 concert in a park tonight. I suppose his advice is as good as any… atrevete.

Gina turns 29 and then leaves the peace community in the war zone...

On November 23rd I woke up at 5AM to a decorated house. Charlotte and Elisabeth had snuck in during the night to decorate the house where I sleep with balloons and a fun little birthday game- they folded up a bunch of pieces of paper with suggestions of what people should give me for my birthday and pasted them to the wall. As my neighbors started to come by on their way to work, they were instructed to choose one. The gift suggestions were pretty great- flowers, hugs, dances, tell her how awesome she is, take a photo with her- and I felt pretty loved.

At 5:30 I took off with a couple of my pals to get wood for the stove we were making in order to cook hot chocolate and bunuelos for the entire town. Around the same time my amazing best friend turned cake-baker started whipping up birthday cakes in her cake-mixing bowl (made from a seed that hangs from the tree outside our house). I booted up, put on my ridiculous pink peace glasses, placed all of the flowers given to me in my hair, and threw a large woven basket over my shoulder. As the moon and stars gave way to the sun, we hiked up through the cacautera and down to the river in search of dry branches, passing my favorite view of the community along the way. We had a photo shoot at the river’s edge and walked down the sandbar in the middle of it. We posed with jungle leaves that dwarf a gringa, and on flat smooth slabs of river rock that allow the rapids to break against them, but never budge. We filled our basket with heavy macheted wood in the shape of thin sticks and we put tree trunks over our shoulders to be axed down back at home. The hour of my birth I was wading in a war zone jungle river… this thought crossed my mind. I wonder if my mother would have expected as much the day I was born. I chose river rocks to bring home as a birthday gift to myself.

In the campo, eggs are cracked on the birthday gal’s head. Sometimes. Actually, there were 6 birthdays the same week as mine, and I think I was the only one to get eggs cracked on my head. Four in total. Always a surprise, and always smelly. I showered three times, used nearly an entire bottle of shampoo and still couldn’t get rid of the stench. Most people got a kick out of my plastered, yoked hair. One laughing lady said to me, “Who did that to you?” I listed the names of the culprits. She said, “They haven’t done that to a FOR volunteer before.” “Really?” “Nope. They must really like you.” “Yeah. Clearly.”

By mid-morning the bouquet on the kitchen table had grown considerably and I had received far more hugs than a normal day. I made breakfast from the remaining eggs in the house (a defensive move) and then headed to a friend’s porch to make popsicles. While I had planned to take the day off of work, it just so happened that the Internet connection was out (surprise!) and thus Charlotte and Elisabeth decided to jump on the “why work when it’s Gina’s birthday” train. We went to the swimming hole. We walked further down the canyon than I ever had before and we swam under waterfalls. When it started to rain and the river started to rise, we shimmied back up the rocks and waded along the banks, criss-crossing as necessary to get back home.

It was afternoon and time to get serious about cooking. Cake decoration was in full force, and soon our kitchen was a bunuelo and chocolate factory- cheese grinding and flour kneading, deep oil frying, and wood stove burning. The cakes were decorated pink and blue and when she finished decorating them, she put them on top of my bed so the kids wouldn’t get at them. Not quite a foolproof plan… Sapa got to one cake… and then Sapa was nearly killed by a campesina baker (“10 hours of baking for the cat to lick the frosting!?!”). Thank God the cook has a good sense of humor. We chopped off the cat-eaten corner and then salvaged the rest.

The sun set with a golden hue and I thought I may be in one of the most beautiful places in the world to turn 29.

When the fried food went a wafting into the night sky, my neighbors came by. They wished me well and told me how wonderful I was. (I was never sure if these hugs and well-wishes came from them directly or if they had chosen said paper on the wall, but in the end it didn’t matter.) We ate bunuelos and listened to vallenato. Even though the community is in mourning and there was to be no dancing, they granted me one birthday dance (“she’ll dance alone anyway, so she may as well do it right”). It was vallenato. And amazing. The kids played with balloons and the adults talked and laughed and gorged on bunuelos. Those who stayed late got stuck in the rain and ended up staying really late- later than anyone has ever stayed over. Mostly I think they stayed because the company was good and the party was fun- afterall, the rain never hurt anyone.

I was supposed to get up the day after my birthday to pack and prepare to leave. I was supposed to finish working and say my goodbyes and prepare for the big city downtown. So I did. I packed and cleaned and organized my life into one bag. I finished up work and pulled documents off the computer. I walked through town and said goodbye. I did all of these things right on schedule, but in the end there were so many landslides that I couldn’t go anywhere.

I won a few extra days in the community and because they were unexpected they were oh so fun. Some people in the community are bad at goodbyes (if only they stuck around to see me try and say goodbye they would feel better about themselves) and so they left at 4 in the morning for the fields so that they wouldn’t have to say anything or see me go. I sure did love the looks on their faces when they saw me at lunch time: “What are you doing here?” “I simply couldn’t go with out saying goodbye…”

In my “extra” days in the community, I ran around laughing like a crazy gringa. I cartwheeled and wheelbarrowed and skipped from rock to rock through town. I walked jungle paths and crossed jungle streams. I bathed in jungle waterfalls and jumped in jungle pools. I pulled with all my might to get yucca out of the earth and lifted with all my might to carry a tree on my shoulder. I celebrated a friend’s birthday by eating masamora and I listened to my neighbors whistle. I listened to them rhythmically work their land, swinging a machete without a break for hours on end. I danced in the kiosks overlooking town and played with my favorite campo kids. I tanned next to drying cacao seeds on my friend’s roof and I disappeared behind huge green jungle leaves to protect myself from the Caribbean sun. I talked to a friend of mine in Bogota from atop a jungle mountain. I saw a poisonous snake, and then another and then another. I walked in the rain without changing my pace. I appreciated everything from the symmetry of the palm tree to papaya juice with a squeeze of lime.

I cried saying goodbye to the people I truly love and respect in La Union. Some of them cried too. One said, “It is better to laugh than cry.” So we did. And another said, “This is not a sad goodbye. You will come back. A sad goodbye is when your son leaves to fight in the jungle. That is a sad goodbye. That is a forever goodbye.” Knowing she was talking from experience, I wiped my eyes. Knowing I was crying from experience, she started to laugh.

My last sunrise in the community was clouded over. I took off across the plain and headed down the hill with my two best pals. We talked on the walk down- commenting on the path and the jungle and the memories we have of the places and people we passed. They accompanied me all the way to the city and I held their hands crossing the road and stopped them ahead of cars, just like they’d held my hand crossing rivers and stopped me ahead of prickly jungle thorn bushes. And over juice we talked about this. And we talked of other things good and honest and funny. And we talked about how lucky we are to be such good friends.

Then I got in a cab and I went to the airport and I waited in the waiting room for the plane. I waited with mud from the jeep still on my shoes and prickly jungle thorns from my hike still on my backpack. I looked out the window at the palm trees in the Caribbean sun and the mountains in the distance where my neighbors were just coming down from the fields for lunch. And then I boarded a plane for the capital.

No se Quien es mas Fuerte, la Vida o la Muerte.

The first time Ottoniel was hospitalized overnight in late July, everyone got pretty scared. As an integral community leader, he could tell stories spanning the entire process leading up to and including the creation of the Peace Community. As the single community carpenter he could look back and see that it was he who literally set foundations and built what is today the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado. It seemed his hospitalization came out of the blue. He was back the next day, though, and the “lung infection” seemed to be subsiding. I brought him marigolds from our garden and told them that they had committed to making him feel better. Later in the week his second wife came to ask us for remedies from our garden to make him a tea. And Emily and I brought him chamomile from town. He quit smoking, and I tried to as well in solidarity.

When we accompanied him to the hospital in August and saw the radiographs of his lungs, Emily and my suspicions were confirmed that this man did not have a minor “lung infection” as the local medics had been claiming for nearly a year. I also did not believe he had pneumonia. Or bronchitis. Or even some sort of tropical lung disease that I’d never heard of. I was pretty sure that this man had cancer. But Ottoniel was jovial and kind. He joked with us and thanked us for our visit.

The next day while I was accompanying his son in the jungle, he turned and asked me how I thought his father was. “He’s fighting,” I said. “He’s really strong,” his son said. “He’s really sick,” I said. But his son just kept saying, “He’s really strong.”

Once he was so weak he couldn’t climb the hill even on a horse, he stayed in LH. I saw him often, stopped to talk to him every time I went through. I asked him if there was anything from town that could make him happy. He said he really liked green apples. And I brought him one. Every time I went down.

At the end of October his granddaughter turned five years old. Emily and I were accompanying his son through the jungle again and asked him what he was going to do to celebrate the event. He turned to us and said, “the greatest gift my daughter has is that her parents are alive.”
Before he was so sick that he couldn’t talk I was lamenting to him how I hadn’t been out to see several of the peace community villages. He said to stop that because FOR was supposed to be in LU. That’s why we were asked to accompany. You are accompanying all the time, he said. La Union needs you, he told me.

Once he was hospitalized permanently I went to see him everytime I was in Apartadó. And he just got sicker and sicker and smaller and smaller and before long he couldn’t talk at all.
It had been five years since his son had been to town and his oldest daughter was nearly nine months pregnant, but all four of his kids put on their nicest clothes and paid the money to go down to town and see him in the hospital.

When he asked to see his mom in the first week of November, I started to cry. His siblings and his in-laws brought her down. They carried her across rivers and carried her across plains so that she could go and see her first born son die. She would see him die now as a full-grown man as she had seen multiple of her other full-grown sons die, shot in a massacre right in front of her, and how she had seen other of her children die, before they even had the chance to grow. The day she went to see him, she had to make the decision as whether or not to put him on life support.

The community work day took us high into the hills the day after the family decided not to put Ottoniel on life-support. I was removing cacao seeds with his sister when she suddenly sat down under a cacao tree with her machete at her side, set her head in her hands, looked out over the jungle landscape with La Union tucked away in a distant valley, and began to silently cry.
Ottoniel died at two in the morning and by six funeral arrangements were being made. The plan to bring up the body was being set. People were donating horses and mules to bring up the materials for the burial and people were volunteering to dig the grave and help haul up the body. In the United States, when someone dies, there are so many different people involved. There are so many processes and laws and rules and regulations. Accompanying through this death was very different. Emily and I went about trying to do what you do when people die- giving our condolences to the family, helping in whatever way we could to make the preparations for the funeral easier, agreeing to accompany the funeral procession up from San José.

The morning he died, the flowers his daughter planted in our garden the week Emily and I first arrived in La Union started to bloom.

The walk down to retrieve Ottoniel was so sunny- there was not a cloud in the sky- but there was a constant rain. It was one of the most beautiful walks I have experienced since being in the Peace Community. I kept thinking to myself, “it is so beautiful today.”We passed hordes of people walking up for the funeral and vigil. When we arrived and met the hearse in San Jose, the men attached his casket to a long log. They hung it from this log and two at a time took turns balancing the log on their shoulders and carrying him up the hill. And we walked in procession as his family and friends carried him up the hill. We walked behind them across the river and through the forests and across the fields and up the vertical hill, all the way home to the kiosk where the vigil was planned.

Because the body can’t be alone, the entire community stayed up all night for the vigil. They killed a cow and cooked it. The burned candles and talked. Some told jokes and some cried. And the night was clear, the first without rain in at least a month. There were candles in the kiosk. And a light fog. His daughter sat on a rock next to me, doubled over and cried on my lap. I rubbed her back and felt her tears falling down my legs.

I didn’t look at the body. Neither did his pregnant daughter or his distraught mother. In fact, none of the pregnant women were allowed to look at his body and neither were any of the individuals who suffer from “nightmares or nervousness,” but the great majority of the community did look. And several of them confirmed that when his family was hysterically crying at the casket his corpse also produced tears. His corpse was crying because they were so sad.

The sun came up to us playing cards and drinking coffee around his body. Planning for the burial, at first light the volunteers to dig his grave headed to the cemetery. I watched as his apprentice measured out and constructed the space for his casket to be put to rest. I watched the men rotate through, shoveling dirt in the hot sun. I watched his son, after a night of no sleep, dig his father’s grave.

By mid-afternoon it was confirmed that family travelling from Medellin would not make it up in time for the funeral, and thus the vigil was extended for another night to wait for them. The second night the group was considerably smaller. We sat in hammocks hung around the kiosk and listened to music quietly. At 3 AM I made potatoes. There was a thick fog and a biting wind, but it did not rain. Everyone was bundled in sweatshirts drinking coffee and trying to see eachother through the god. We shivered a lot. And stared at candles flickering in the kiosk. Walking back and forth from the kiosk to the house through the fog, it was hard not to think about the haunting.

My neighbors have walked all of the paths in this village a million times. They walk them a handful of times a day. Somehow seeing the funeral procession take off from the kiosk, I got the feeling that everything was happening in slow motion. That walk down and across the canyon on the day of the funeral seemed endless… down and up the ravine to the plot in the cementary. His children all made eye contact with me as they walked by and I couldn’t help but start to cry.
As the final preparations were being made, people wailed over his casket and cried silently in the distance. A letter was read. A song was sung. His son just kept doing things, fixing a shovel, re-running the hose for water. Three of his four kids were there, two girls and a boy. When they were going to close off the casket his older daughter fell wailing on her brother and sister. His son collapsed to one knee and all three of them buckled down on top of eachother and cried silently. I think this image will be in my mind forever. This image of pure grief. It seemed to go on and on and then she yelled out through the tears- “Daddy! Why WHY did you have to leave us!?” And their grief became my grief and it was like I just didn’t even know what to do.

Walking back from the cemetery alone, Emily and I both start to cry. Sleep-deprived and hungry and tired and emotionally exhausted we hugged in front of the library and tried to come up with an action plan. What are we supposed to do? Feeling so cracked out and lost and grief ridden as though all of the grief of the community was ours. All of the pain was ours. We decide to make some breakfast, sweep the floor of the kitchen and then go to bed. And that is exactly what we do. Because sometimes you just have to follow an action plan.

After a nap I go to visit his mother. She just stares straight ahead. She walks in circles around the kitchen looking for an egg she is holding in her hand. Nobody tells her, whether because they don’t notice or don’t want to break her thought pattern I’m unsure. I told her. I said, “the egg you are looking for is in your hand.” And she said, “you’re right.” She cracked it, put it in a bowl, and walked out of the kitchen to sit in a chair and stare straight ahead.

For the week and a half following Ottoniel’s burial, we prayed a novena in the kiosk each night. On the ninth night, on the last amen of the last prayer, without any wind blowing whatsoever, the candle went out on its own. His wife turned to me and said, “You see, he is telling us he doesn’t want us to mourn anymore.”

Since he died two weeks ago, nearly all of my conversations in the community have been centered around death. While sitting in her kitchen surrounded by geese, we came to the conclusion that neither of us knew if it was life or death that was strongest, but that as humans we need to be brave when facing both. The community is still in mourning, of course. I have been looking for strength in the cacaotera, looking out over a breezy point and reminding myself that it’s all gonna be ok. That it’s all going to be fine.

And then this weekend, two weeks to the day after his death, his daughter gave birth to a baby girl.

November has had me reflecting a lot on accompaniment. There is accompaniment in a professional sense. There is non-interference and observing from afar. So much of our work is based on analyzing this and making sure we are not crossing lines, that we are remaining distinct and distant. There is, as PBI puts in their slogan, the idea that we are only “creating the space for peace.” But what happens when professional becomes personal. When a friend’s father dies, son dies, brother dies. When your observation becomes your participation. When empathy makes the pain of those around you become your pain as well. When you realize that your relationships with the community are not only based in the professional, but rather in the very personal… they are based in love.

11/11

I quit smoking on November 7th. I am still in a state of permanent nic-fit, but doing better. My body has been pretty crazy all month, so confused about why it is doing this to itself. I had a headache for ten straight days. In the 103,842,476 degree heat, I put on a sweatshirt with the cold sweats. I fall asleep kicking in night and wake up at 2AM wanting to smoke. I chew gum like a rabid squirrel chews an acorn. People keep telling me I “didn’t look well” and for the first couple days I kept thinking I was going to vomit. I shake so much that people now impersonate me unable to drink a glass of water and laugh amongst themselves. But I am doing it. And I will make it. Addiction is a strange thing. The mind never ceases to amaze. There is now a sign on my wall that reads: Dear Gina, you no longer smoke, so find something else to do.

At 5AM when I accidentally broke the handle off of our prized campo espresso maker, Emily struggled to pour herself a cup of coffee in the dark without three degree burning herself. She sighed and said, “Mornings in the campo just got a little harder.”

Our accompaniment took us to another Peace Community village. This one makes our home like a bustling city center: individual ranches separated by mud paths and knee high fields of grass. It reminded me of some semblance of a tropical Montana at the turn of the century. A tropical River Runs Through It, if you will. Mountains and valleys and plains. And war.

The walk there took us straight up the hill behind our house, through thick jungles and vines and moss and mud and more mud and pits of mud that seems like quicksand and dried mud that you can walk on and bog mud and pond mud and mud that steals your boots and mud that sticks to your legs and mug that splatters onto your face. A jungle plant tipped towards me, thorned itself to my hat and pulled back, taking my cap with it. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. We saw our neighbor’s farms and small huts where they sleep in the jungle while they are away and working. Coming out of the jungle into the valley there was a rainbow. Our neighbor said, “Now we just have to follow that rainbow and at the end of it we will have arrived.”

We were hosted in a wooden house by a mutli-generational family of ten. We slept in high-hung hammocks under drying rice. On Sunday there was a birthday party and families came from the hills around the valley, some walking three hours to celebrate and have some social time. Their lives are mountain lives. The men played soccer in the pouring rain. The women cooked all day. When the cake came out so did the confetti. They call confetti hallelujah.
There was not any cell phone coverage and our satellite phone was having technical difficulties. Elisabeth and I whipped out our high-tech solar charger to try and amp the battery. We had a satellite phone balancing on a wooden plank, solar panels tempting the sun. We had out the manual and directions, we spoke rapidly in a foreign language, pleading with our little piece of gringo technology to work. In the background, on a different slab of wood, our hosts gutted a pig for lunch.

The soccer field is in the valley. The backdrop is of lush green mountains. I found myself thinking how hard it is to believe that people grow up here. That this is the field on which they learn to play soccer.

By candlelight, the family tells us of getting lost in the jungle, of ghosts and witches and these things that happen to them and why they are scared and when they are not. They talk between themselves and distinguish parts of the landscape around them with personal experience (“I was at the part of the hill where a few years ago you said you were scared of mines”; “I came out at the mouth of the river where we ran into the soldiers last week”; “It was in the rice field where Julian disappeared”). Listening to them made me feel like any time there are young men in a war zone, there is reason to be scared. Because war is not healthy for children, or other living things.

By candlelight they make us a map, drawing the mountains and rivers and streams and hills and valleys between our town and theirs. Elisabeth continuously asks what the pets are named and every time the matriarch says, “we haven’t registered them yet.” Her children take a less sarcastic approach, but it comes out with nearly the same tone: “The dog is called dog, the parrot is called parrot…” We laugh into the evening. Before going to bed they all agree, “it’s fun talking to you guys.”

We spend a few days in their company, eyeing the situation, learning about the problems. We listen to plantains falling into the hot oil and the dripping of water in the kitchen being pumped from the river beyond. The kids fish in the early morning. They milk the cows. They shuck corn and kill animals. They wash clothes in the river and sweat in the open fire kitchen. They work from dusk to dawn, all ten of them, all the time, just to sustain themselves on their farm in the valley.

Hiking back home we have a mule to carry our bags. We set a pace through the jungle. When the oranges fall from the tree I look up to see a man there. “Eat one,” he says. I do and I keep walking. If the oranges hadn’t fallen, I would’ve walked right under him. I think about how many people have seen me walking and not said a thing. We walk back through the same mud in the hot sun. Finally coming back down into the La Union, we pick up our familiar home path. We come out into the clearing, overlooking our thick jungle home with the Caribbean off in the distance. It’s postcard perfect. It’s paradise. As we come down the path into our cacaotera, Elisabeth and I stop. I ask her if it’s true we actually live here. I ask her if she can really believe it. This place is just so beautiful.

We arrive home to our newest FOR co-worker, Carla, fresh off the jet from England. We watch her settle in. I think about how we adapt, all of us, wherever we are. The day Emily left for vacation, we shared one final cup of campo coffee at 5AM. 8 months together in the campo and then she walked down the hill and that was it. Everything changed, then changed again.
They finally took down the decrepit fence around the central kiosk, but I find myself still walking the long way around the park. I walk through the center of town as if it is still there, crossing where the openings in the fence were, not stepping where I haven’t before stepped. No matter how much I remove myself from my comfort zone, I am still such a creature of habit.

“You must be used to walking in the mud, otherwise that would itch you,” a neighbor says looking at my muddy legs. “If I were really used to walking in the mud, my boots would look more like yours,” I said. He looked down, confused. (His boots had no mud on them at all, even though we’d just walked the same path.)

I have learned about focus here in the community. While working, my neighbors only think about what they are doing. There is no multi-tasking, there is no zoning out. They focus on the movement of their machete, they think about the yucca they are pulling from the earth. This makes sense, of course, because if they don’t focus on what they are doing they could cut off their limbs, but still, it is a nice lesson. This is why they say there is time for everything- to work, to play, to talk, to think. And they really do this. They dedicate time to things and then they do them with their full attention dedicated to them. I want to learn to focus this way… as though my life and limbs depended on it.

I went up with him at 6AM to pull yucca from the earth. I walked a path I had not yet walked across a rushing river with huge flat boulders. I tried to keep his morning pace through banana fields and over jungle logs. Up on the slope where the yucca was planted we weren’t high enough for the Caribbean view or the overlook of the valley, we had only the view of more jungle slopes. For a moment, I had this feeling that the dense jungle went on forever and ever and ever. That where we were was all there was. Sometimes the jungle does seem that immense. Sometimes life does seem that intense.

Tropical jungle humidity ruins everything. All of my CDs now skip. I have taken to listening to the military radio channel (there isn’t much option with the reception in our zone). In the evenings, it bounces from romantic vallenatos to army propaganda to family shoutouts aimed at the soldiers in my backyard.

November was hot days without rain
November was many community member’s birthdays
November was mourning
It was the sudden unexpected relief of a thunderstorm at sunset
Hauling sugar cane and grinding sugarcane and cooking sugarcane in smoking machinery on the hill next to the cementary and then there is panela and then there is honey in caldron pots Bunuelos and hot chocolate
A baby stillborn, a baby buried in the backyard
Fog lying low in the valley between us and town
Slipping through a hole in the fence only to be attacked by ants on the underside of the wodden boards
Men walking out of waist high grass in beautifully brimmed hats woven in shades of browns and grays
Bombs and shots and the sounds of distant combats
Muddy footpaths between homes and snakes and tall grasses swaying in the wind
A river runs the valley, swelling with every rainstorm.
Swinging tandom in hammocks and laughing while my friend impersonates me
Dancing on top of a water tank at dawn
Trying not to punch my neighbors when they come day after day to bum cigarettes from me knowing full well I have quit smoking
The full moon calling me from bed and watching her fall in the darkness and then the half light behind the filo
A new mother is carried up in a hammock with her new born baby
A new mother’s father is carried up in a casket for his funeral
Walking in mango groves at dusk in a light rain
Hiking through thick jungle, knee deep mud and knee high grass
Oranges and guavas and coconuts, oh my!
Birthday cakes and candle lights and cracking cacao from its shells

I turn 29 years old tomorrow. A neighbor talks about how proud she is her son never went to war. He is my age. Here, kids my age didn’t grow up in the Peace Community. They are teaching their kids to do what they did as if it is normal, because now they are part of a neutral Peace Community. To the children it is as if that is how it has always been. I look at the men and women here aged 25 and older and I think: you really resisted. You really are changing your world for the better. You really do practice what you preach. Living in the war zone, I have realized it is hard not to go to war.

When she stopped by on her way home, I was reading by candlelight. She lit up all the spiders spinning webs in my bedframe and then looked at me quietly for a few minutes while I read. She said, “You could really live here with us.” I said, “I do really live here with you.” She said, “I mean for real. For your whole life.”

This morning I was invited to eat yet another birthday cake. He turns 17 today. His grandmother said, “he brought the light.” I assumed she meant this in a figurative way, as in- “he is the light of my life” but as we talked more I realized that she was talking about literal light. The same day her grandson was born, they wired the path from San Jose to La Union, giving the community electricity. He is the first resident of La Union to live his entire life with electricity. And he is 17.

All things outside the war zone seem so far away, but they are so close now. In less than 1 week, I will live in the Bogota. In one month I will be on vacation in the Minnesota snow. Right now, as I sweat through my shirt in the mid-day heat and listen to a light rain outside my window, it’s hard to believe that in a couple of days there will no longer be tropical heat or cows mooing outside my window. There won’t be fireflies above my bed or lizards on my wall. I will exchange mud for salsa shoes and military radio for my itunes library. From the country to the city… Oh! How we all adapt!

15 years of Sturggle, Ten Years of Presence, Every Single Day

Hey everyone! We are kicking off our fundraising campaign for FOR and the Peace Community's anniversaries this coming March. Have a look at the video and information we sent out this week and please consider donating to the campaign in my honor: https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2507/p/salsa/web/common/public/content?content_item_KEY=10609#top
Thanks,
G

In 2002, the first two FOR volunteers made the muddy trek up a mountainside to accompany the San José de Apartadó peace community -- a project of campesinos in northwestern Colombia who had declared themselves neutral five years earlier, committing to nonviolent resistance in the midst of war.

Watch video interviews of our Colombia peace presence volunteers from the past 10 years:
http://vimeo.com/32466287

In the 10 years since, more than 30 volunteers have been international observers as part of the Colombia Peace Presence, and spent a portion of their lives there -- amidst the heat, rain and intense green, with the sounds of helicopters above, waking to gun shots fired in the night, five river crossings away from the nearest city, without a refrigerator and with the incredible life stories of these campesinos who have much to teach us about war, nonviolence and the story of their resistance.

We are there because we believe in the peace community's struggle.

We believe that U.S. citizens must stand up and do something about what the United States is doing in our name, to other people's lands. We believe in accompaniment -- the power of regular people whose presence and political work protects others from death, displacement or exile.

We believe that nonviolence works. We know that the war machine is strong, and that words are our only weapon, but we also know that in these past 10 years, we have stood in the way of death to protect life.

Like any human relationship worth its salt, the last decade that FOR has spent with the community has been both full of hard times and highlighted with good.

When the paramilitaries imposed a food blockade on the road to the community, we accompanied leaders, ensuring that they and their food got across. We accompanied the return of people to their lands in the village of La Esperanza. We've climbed trees to get fruits in season and cheered at soccer games.

When the community got news that one of their leaders and seven others were massacred, we accompanied them to the site to find out what happened. Later we witnessed the transformation of Mulatos from a village known for that brutal massacre to a sacred site that symbolizes peace. When Don Gilberto lost his leg to a land mine, we were there to accompany the rescue mission, in the night, in the rain, down the hill so that he could safely get to a hospital. And each year we have celebrated Christmas, Easter and baptisms of the newly born alongside the community members.

We will be there next March to celebrate 15 years that San José de Apartadó has been nonviolently resisting in the midst of a brutal war. And we are committed to staying there as long as our presence is needed to keep them alive.

Please make a donation to continue to make our nonviolent work in San José de Apartadó possible.

To show our gratitude for your donation, for every gift of $50 and above we will send you a box of cards beautifully designed by one of our current volunteers.

And for those who donate $100 or more, we will send you a t-shirt, also designed by a current volunteer.

Join us in our celebration, and make a contribution today.

In solidarity,

The FOR Colombia Team: Gina, Emily, Elisabeth, Isaac, Jon, Liza, John and Susana

Solo el amor, con su ciencia, nos vuelve tan inocentes- Violetta Parra

The month of October kicked off with the Amigo Secreto dance. I failed to correctly guess who had me and sang a lackluster song in English as penance. The boy who I had correctly guessed me, leaving me a failure in both uncovering and keeping secrets. I was given a fuscia (and I do mean FUSCIA) skirt that reminds me of a Disney princess. Despite my fashion sense, I have been told by multiple neighbors that this skirt is in fact in style. The night of the dance everyone was out and about, dressed to the nines (except us, because we always are in our nasty FOR shirts). People came from other veredas to join in the festivities and when a neighbor invited me to ice cream I looked around to see none other than an icecream vendor (where the hell did he come from and can someone lock him up here). We danced well into the morning and I probably lost 15 pounds in sweat. To bed at 3 only to wake at 6 and head to our team retreat in Medellin.

It’s weird to leave the community and, just like that, arrive in Medellin. This is the first time I’ve been so close to a community of people that I can literally picture what any given person is doing at any given hour of the day. And at the same time, from far away in Medellin it’s like the LU reality couldn’t really exist. Our retreat was a success, full of work plans and work calendars and talking things through as a team and planning a fundraising campaign and listening to music and designing tshirts, playing fun games and generally enjoying having the whole team in one place. This only happens twice a year, so must be taken advantage of. I think my faovorite moment of the whole week was when Jon forgot the rules of charades and, during his Tony the Tiger interpretation, actually roared out loud. He really sounded like a tiger. And he scared the shit out of me.

Coco juice is delicious and I have no idea why my neighbors don’t make it daily. I have sort of decided that this should be a personal goal. They laugh at us “crazy gringos” because “coco is not for juice” but we gulp it down just the same. A blender can do amazing things. Multiple neighbors have taken to doing us the favor of macheting down coconuts until they look like a shaved egg. A work of art widdled with what could be a deadly weapon.

After baking the cake, she made homemade frosting in white and pink and blue. All of her kids and her husband sat around her while she decorated the cake for a neighbor’s 5th birthday. She delicately added curlycues and boxes to the white frosting while simultaneaously telling stories. She had her five kids aged 4 to 15 laughing so hard they were crying. She impersonated voices and reminded them of a time when bats took over the roof of a house. After her story had died down a bit her husband took a large drink of coffee. She surprised him with one last hysterical tidbit and he spit out his coffee all over me. So much laughter. So much love. Laughter and baked goods = success.

And sometimes things are just so hard. And the mind gets all shuffled up or concentrated on itself. And then I run in the downpour of the rain. Or cartwheel down the street to mix up my mind and take it off of itself. One day Emily and I did Richard Simmons reminiscent excersizes across the soccer field, jumping and flipping and kicking and looking like idiots just to get our minds off of everything. Then we sprinted up the mountain in our rubber boots. Later our neighbor said we brought her such joy, “playing on the soccer field like a pair of baby sheep.”

Emily said she’d “never be able to understand time without seasons” and in the constant tropical heat here, I have to agree. It’s hard to remember sometimes that it’s autumn in the north country with the apples and colors and pumpkin-pie and costumes. That Midwestern calendar that actually works by physical change in season and not by calendar dates. And it does affect how we think about time.

Despite me being the most obnoxious cheerleader possible at the soccer game, we lost in the semifinals.

There was a surprise dance when a little boy turned 4. It came outta nowhere. First there were children and cakes and balloons and then the sun went down and all the adults showed up and danced the night away. Dances are the only time it is appropriate to hug in this community and since I love dancing and hugging, they are pretty much my favorite activities ever. I win.

When a poisonous snake bit a neighbor’s dog, a group of guys went up to “find and kill it.” They can do this because after this particular snake bites it stays in one place for three or four days, “being mad”. I guessed that it was “mad” because it was low on venom, but they all assured me that this is actually the most dangerous time to get bitten by the snake. You would, “die at once.” And I said, “So you are going to look for the meanest snake at it’s angriest moment and hoping that you kill it before it bites you?” They laughed. Hilarious.

I have been waking up around 5am for a few months now. I get up and sit on the most beautifully constructed bench in La Union and drink my morning coffee. My morning coffee is strong. No sugar. No milk. (We don’t have the later anyway) and very different from the way that our neighbors drink their coffee (more aptly described sugar water, and often with milk). And sometimes he comes to sit next to me and share a cup of coffee. Everyone else knows better, so one day I ask him why he drinks my coffee when I know full well he doesn’t like it. “We all come into this life to suffer,” he says. I laugh, “That doesn’t mean you have to go out looking for bitter coffee- or any other additional reason to suffer.”

When her husband goes off to work the fields at another vereda for a month, she sleeps at her mother in law's house. In her mother in law's bed. She can’t sleep alone: “When I’m alone in a bed all I can do is think about the people I know who have died.”

About a half hour into a hike, it was obvious that neither of our guides had been to the destination for quite sometime. In fact, it seemed that nobody had walked this path in quite some time. Ahead of us a 40-something year old woman was literally macheting the vines out of the way to clear a path through the jungle. Somewhere in the second hour it was awknoledged that we were significantly lost and so the women started to whistle. This whole whistleing across canyons and actually finding eachother in the jungle is something I can't describe or even believe, even though I see it daily with my own eyes. Out from behind the caucao trees comes a boy to guide us to the path. He wasn’t gonna come up and meet us, because he "didn’t know who we were and nobody in this zone would respond to a whistle of someone they didn’t know," but then he heard our voices and felt safe and came out. The trip went without other incident, but on the way home I ran out of water and was grabbing limes and oranges and cacao to suck out the juice and keep me hidrated on the way home. We jumped over canyons and pulled ourselves up vines. After a trip walking through the jungle like that, my body felt so strong. And so exhaiusted at the same time.

We find a cd from 2007. ExFORistas listened to this same CD in this same house. A wrinkle in time.

Here the roofs are used for drying cacao seeds. They are also my new beach. Tanning on the roof has me hidden from peering children and is making some leeway on my FOR farmer’s tan.

Everyone warns that living here will change you. Here my thought
pattern itself seems to be different. I think about sunrises I dream of caucateras.

Caribbean style is much different that my flowing skirts and non-fitted shorts. In my 8th month in the community I finally decided to go by the “when in Rome” motto and buy some tight fitting jean shorts. They are ridiculously caribe and everyone besides myself and co-workers think they are very in style. When I let the little girls braid my hair and wear the jean shorts matched with my cacao secadora tan, I could practically pass for Paisa. Casi.

After climbing the hill through knee deep jungle mud we arrived at a clearing. We saw the troops, but were more interested in the views. When the camera came out, they dove into the bushes and it was as if they were never there. It is sometimes as if there are no armed actors at all, just beautiful views and beautiful people. But they are there always, hiding in the bushes.

My favorite walk is to the boca toma. It takes us through caucateras and up past gorgeous jungle overviews, across small rivers and wider ones. Passed mossy rock and hills of wild grass and wild flowers. Through thick jungles and vines and trees that look prehistoric or out of dreams. The last time Emily and I went she didn’t have her glasses on and went stumbling over rocks and vines.

Thoushands of hawks circling. THOUSANDS. Circling just at the level of the clouds where the storm was about to fall. A child asks his dad why they are having such a big meeting and his father responds, “I don’t know, but if I were a chicken I would hide under a log.”

Accompanying the community to their work days we see tham cut down all of the jungle so that their crops can grow. They hack through bees nests and they hack through snake houses and they hack down so much green that it is hard to believe in two weeks time they will have to do it all again. The rhythmic sound of the machete.

One neighbor comes late at night to tell jokes and another to teach tonguetwisters and couplet verses that have to do with the campo. Language in all of it’s beauty will always inspire me.

I accomplished my dream of riding on the back of a horse with a campesino. The picture in my mind in my mind was something out of Braveheart- romantic and fun. The reality was quite uncomfortable and I don’t think I’ll repeat it.

I was practically running home one evening, trying to beat the sunset, when it started to drizzle. I stopped in a point on the path where there is a slight break in the foliage and oen can look over the river rushing below. I saw the raindrops gain strength and for a moment I seemed to see millions of individual raindrops all falling individually. Millions of raindrops and then a split second later one continuous sheet of falling rain, like a wall before me and then on top of me.

Other images from the month of October:
The first week I was here our neighbor helped us plant her beautiful flowering bushes in our garden. This week the first one has blossomed flowers.
A baby horse stumbling by, not quite knowing how to walk
My neighbors write the vallenato lyrics out for me and then laugh when I sing them
Riding bareback down the street
Sitting in knee deep grass amoung army ants
listening to the rhythmic thwak of machetes clearing the jungle
Sitting in a neighbor’s kitchen talking about death while surrounded by geese
Listening to the quebrada below and the birds and bugs all around
Seeing our home town from afar, nestled in the mountains jungles
Watching half the town chase down a goose for dinner
The sun hidden behind clouds but we still feel it
the bomber plane hidden behind clouds, but we still hear it
At a FARC funeral there is a Colombian flag waiving
Carrying lena down through the caucatera with a neighbor
Balancing a tree trunk on my shoulder
Fog lying low over the filo de la cruz
A neighbor singing ranchera while saddling his horse
The oldest LU resident walking hunchbacked down the hill with a homemade cigar hanging out of his mouth,
camo and combat and falling in thornbushes,
walking through mango groves, and knee deep mud.
Soldiers on the march twenty feet away
Bomber planes overhead
Shots and machine gun fire
helicopters flying so low it alwost feels we could reach up and touch them
A friend gazing out over the hills before he goes to work
Walking through ten foot cana fields
Beautifully barked trees with camoflauged three inch spines growing off them
Sitting at the honey making machine, looking over the plateau, and listening to the rain come in while talking about life decisions with my neighbor
Deshelling beans and removing caucao seeds from the shells
Vericose veins and smoke billowing from kitches,
police requisas and baking cakes
bunuelos in the shapes of campo animals
Standing in the cacautera in the rain feeling the earth turn to a stream beneath my feet
Climbing avocado trees and caucao trees and climbing zapote trees and trees I don’t even know the names of and getting bitten by the bugs on these trees and
how things moves and how things change and how we are so good at adapting to them
Soila peering out from the second story of her house while balancing a jar on her head and putting her finger over her mouth as if to say, “shhhhhhhh, everything that happens in life is our little secret…”

The war zone unravels, layer by layer revealing itself to the observer. As do the histories of my neighbors, of everyone and of everything- layer by layer we are discovered.

And time here sometimes passes so quickly I lose track of the month and other times I am so caught in its swell. Only one month left and then i will bus to Bogota and arrive in the city and just like that i will wonder if this indeed ever did happen, or if it was just the most incredible dream.

Padre Javier Giraldo's response to U.S. gov. releasing funds to Colombian military- translated to English

Here is a translation of the letter from Fr. Javier Giraldo to U.S. Ambassador Peter McKinley, which I posted last month in its original Spanish.

(Translated by CSN volunteer translator, Eunice Gibson)

Bogotá, September 20, 2011


Your Excellency
PETER MICHAEL MCKINLEY
Ambassador of the United States of America in Colombia
Calle 24 Bis No. 48-50
BOGOTÁ, D.C.

With all due respect,

A few days ago the major news media reported the decision of your government to certify the practices of the government of Colombia as acceptable in the field of human rights, thus releasing military assistance for Colombia in the amount of 20 million dollars.

I would respectfully call your attention to the feelings that this decision arouses in the majorities who are unprotected, vulnerable, and victimized in this country, as well as in the organizations, groups and movements that are committed to the defense of the elementary rights of human beings.

It is logical to suppose that you have played a major role in this decision, since historically the diplomatic representation that you now exercise has had a determining effect, not just in the parameters of United States policy toward Colombia, but also in policies toward many other countries. Because of that, at this time permit me to point out many realities that perhaps you may be unaware of, and I also ask you earnestly that you inform President Obama of our shock and of our urgent petition that you reconsider this decision.

First of all, I think, personally, of the effect that this decision and that new military aid will have in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó. As you know very well, that Community has been the victim of more than a thousand crimes against humanity since it was created in 1997. This year, those criminal actions have increased. Paramilitary organizations, acting in close harmony with the Army and the Police, are using violence to expel those who own land in the area where the construction of a second dam, Urrá 2, is planned.

This year they have murdered more than 12 campesinos from the San José area and they continually go around exhibiting lists of more people to be murdered. They do this right next to military and police checkpoints, at the same time that they violate many other civil rights of the people and they advertise the total extermination of the Community. Yet President Santos does not trouble himself to respond at all, nor does he take any urgent measures in answer to the distressed outcries that we continually direct to his office.

You are well aware, your Excellency, that the constitutional petitions and the certified records from the Peace Community continue to be “voices crying in the wilderness”, without any answer. A number of high-ranking paramilitary leaders have confessed that they always acted with the approval and collaboration of all of the commanders of the 17th Brigade, which had enjoyed decades of United States military assistance, but none of them have been punished. The current commanders take part in the same immunity and impunity and the assistance from your government only reinforces their criminal activity.

I am also aware of many other dramatic situations in the most vulnerable areas, where suffering has increased enormously.

The communities of lower Atrato (Chocó Province), particularly those from Curvaradó and the Jiguamiandó, have been the victims of new strategies of dispossession and destruction. It is true that the Constitutional Court and the Attorney General’s Office have made juridical decisions to return their collective properties to them, but what effect does that have when the businessmen and paramilitaries who displaced them violently now count on the support of the government and its armed forces to invade their lands again and submit them to terrorism? It is a fact that the Constitutional Court has exhausted every juridical protection measure for these communities, but the government does not comply and shows no respect for them; instead, through its armed forces, it joins with the criminals to plunder them again. Don’t you believe, your Excellency, that the new military assistance from your government will make the armed forces feel strengthened and validated in their policies of support for the new confiscation?

Those of us who try to work in the field of human rights can clearly see that the speeches about the de-activation of paramilitaries do not coincide with the truth. They want us to think that the paramilitary organizations that are very active these days are just gangs of common criminals, without any political objectives and with no relation to the armed forces or any other government agency or any members of the political class. But, your Excellency, why would it be that those organizations, with new names, are constantly sending threatening messages to social leaders and to defenders of human rights, using language that supports official policies? Have you not noticed, Mr. Ambassador McKinley, how many of those threats have been fulfilled implacably, with disappearances and extrajudicial executions, displacements and exiles, while, as always, the identity of the perpetrators of such crimes remains a mystery?

It concerns me profoundly, your Excellency, that the new military assistance from your government strengthens and provides new resources to the Army and the Police so that they can transgress, as they have been doing, the rules of international humanitarian law in the provinces of Cauca, Nariño, and Putumayo, especially in the campesino and indigenous areas. They refuse to recognize the areas of civilian population, involving people in the war against their will, using them as shields against their militant enemies, producing destruction of their crops and their houses and victimizing innocent people that they then try to pass off as combatants. All of this does not even count the violation of the rights of ethnic groups to be consulted about projects that affect them and destroy their habitat, their resources, their autonomy, and their very lives.

Not only the certification but also the military aid favors a government that in recent decades has perpetrated, systematically and continuously, from the highest government institutions, in one of the most horrendous crimes, those that have been known as “false positives”, or rather, execution of innocent citizens, most of them very poor, so as to dress them up as killed in combat and thus present an image of military triumph against armed or criminal organizations. They were paid large sums of money and received other rewards for those phony “results”.

You know very well, your Excellency, that this strategy has not been eradicated, that there are continual complaints of new cases, that even though the Attorney General’s Office has accounted for more than 3,500 victims, not one of the killers has yet met justice. You know that many of them remain in high command posts or, if they have retired, they enjoy enormous privileges. You know that this strategy has not turned out to be “isolated cases”, as the United Nations Investigator for Extrajudicial Executions criticized, but rather it involved almost all of the provinces in the country and all of the military brigades. Don’t you believe, Mr. Ambassador McKinley, that the renewed military assistance will fortify the criminality that is so deeply rooted in the armed forces, since there are thousands of these crimes not yet solved nor punished, giving free range to those who keep on committing them.

I suppose, your Excellency, that you did not know that the paramilitary strategy was recommended by the government of the United States in the Yarborough mission in February of 1962. The goal was to create mixed structures made up of both civilians and soldiers to carry out terrorist attacks that would not hurt the image of the government but which would destroy communist sympathizers. The Mission’s report establishes that. Don’t you believe, Mr. Ambassador, that that same strategy is being applied to identify the “BACRIM” in the media? Why, your Excellency, would the Ministry of Defense repeatedly refuse to turn over a copy of document EJC – 3-10, approved by Resolution 05 of the 1969 Armed Forces Command. The paramilitary groups known as “Self-Defense Forces” figure in that document, in the official organization chart. The Armed Forces have alleged in court proceedings that this document is still in effect, in spite of its being much more than 30 years old, which is the maximum legal limit for maintaining secret documents in Colombia.

I am also deeply worried, your Excellency, that the military assistance from your government, aid that the Colombian government wants to use in its own way in the so-called “Consolidation Areas”, will fortify those areas where there are thousands of unidentified graves, such as in the municipality of La Macarena in Meta Province. Up to now they have identified several hundred burials marked NN (unidentified) next to a military base. The bodies, according to the residents, have been buried in violation of all the legal regulations that require that the dead be identified and their remains turned over to their families, even those of combatants. Do you think, your Excellency, that it is fitting to certify, as a guarantor of human rights compliance, a government that maintains thousands of anonymous graves all over the country? Those graves reveal the magnitude of the systematic crime of forced disappearance of persons, which according to national and international agencies now affects more than 50,000 families.

By releasing the military assistance, and issuing the aforementioned certification, your government has mentioned the Victims’ Law as a sign of improvement with respect to human rights. Why not wait until that law is translated into concrete acts, and does not result in a new failure like the “Justice and Peace Law”? That only produced one real sentence in six years, while there have been more than a hundred thousand complaints of crimes. You know very well, your Excellency, that the only thing that the “Victims’ Law” has produced so far is the violent death of a lot of campesinos who have wanted to recover their land, since the law has not come up with any strategy for real eradication of paramilitarism and its close connection with the armed forces. Don’t you think, your Excellency, that sometimes people try to exorcize realities as terrifying as those in Colombia by passing laws that cannot possibly function in our real context? Do you sincerely believe, Mr. Ambassador McKinley, that a law like the “Victims’ Law” can function without a concomitant peace process and without a complete cleansing of the enormous corruption that affects our institutions? Do you believe, for exam-ple, your Excellency, that the administrative courts in the provinces, which have produced so many corrupt sentences over decades, are now going to oversee “with justice” the return of stolen land (as the Victims’ Law contemplates) without being purged fundamentally?

But the aforementioned certification and release of military assistance funds takes place in a moment in which the economic policy of this government is showing alarming signs of failure to recognize the most fundamental collective rights of the most vulnerable populations. The permits issued for mining exploitation to numerous transnational businesses have activated paramilitaries and armed conflict tremendously. They are leaving huge populations of poor people without any land or resources. The destruction of the environment and the destruction of indigenous, campesino and Afro-Colombian communities by these projects are leading to every kind of resistance. This means that the security of these companies and of their destructive projects is only effective with the protection of enormous contingents of paramilitaries secretly co-opted by the armed forces and by the government security agencies, which do not hesitate to murder the leaders of this resistance.

The murder of Father Reinel Restrepo, parish priest in Marmato, in Caldas Province last September 2 (2011) is one pathetic example of this. There is also the permanent genocide that is being carried out in Buenaventura, where the neighborhoods and the Community Councils around the port are being invaded by paramilitaries supported or tolerated by the armed forces. They cut people in pieces with horrifying cruelty throwing the body parts into the sea, if any of them dare to resist the megaproject for the new port. This included the expulsion of people living in the poorest areas and it includes the expropriation of the plots in the garbage dumps where these people, in the midst of their misery, have over decades tried to survive.

In order that a government can be evaluated in the light of the most elemental parameters of respect for human rights, and certified in that area, one fundamental point is justice. Nevertheless, as you know very well, your Excellency, in Colombia at present it is not possible to expect justice with respect to the crimes against humanity that have been perpetrated against people who are not part of the dominant political organizations or ideologies. Even though there have been a few exemplary sentences in recent months, what does that signify in the face of the millions of cases gathering dust for many years, sheltered by the systematic corruption and impunity? Does the “Victims’ Law”, by any chance, have some mechanism to correct the systems of corruption and impunity in the justice system, to protect the right to justice, even one meaningful part for the 99% of the victims affected by the proverbial impunity still in effect?

But equally serious is the terrifying systematization that judicial frame-ups have gained. The number of innocent people who are prosecuted and condemned is enormous, largely owing to the unconstitutional injection of the executive power into the justice system (“false judicial positives”) and, also in part to the political choices or interests of every kind on the part of judicial officials at every level. Just recently an Assistant Attorney General calculated that there are 5000 illegal arrests every year. Lawyers’ groups calculate the prisoners who have been deprived of their liberty arbitrarily at 7000. Do you believe, your Excellency, that a government that maintains that disastrous panorama of justice and attacks against liberty deserves a certification in human rights?

You will not be unaware, Mr. Ambassador McKinley, that the little that some communications media have exposed recently is enough to evaluate some governmental practices that have been going on for many years, and in which the then-President himself participated. These reveal a radical lack of recognition of the rights of the citizens. They include spying on political opponents, on the very judicial officials who were troublesome, on defenders of human rights and on journalists who had not been co-opted; the terrifying corruption that has characterized the electoral system and particularly the constitutional amendment allowing presidential re-election; the orientation of the intelligence agencies within parameters of real criminality; the corrupt cooptation of the Parliament; the control of elections by paramilitaries and drug traffickers; the deals between paramilitaries and politicians to change and control the government to advance their own interests, such as many other kinds of corruption that have put the government in the service of the most powerful and the most criminal, a situation that remains effective as long as the political class has not essentially changed its mechanisms for controlling the government.

It is very worrying, your Excellency, that you are unaware of so many things in advising your government to issue certifications and military assistance that can only result in greater violations of human rights. Perhaps you, Mr. Ambassador McKinley, are guided by what the mass communications media in Colombia report or what the very members of the political class are saying, they who have so lazily tolerated so many atrocities.

When did you verify, for example, that the atrocities perpetrated against the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó were denounced in any newspaper or mass media? Perhaps some have been reviewed in the daily El Colombiano , which occasionally slanders the Community by means of some of their columnists who are accustomed to lying. The right to objective information and the right to the truth, are not just rights that are not recognized, but that failure is the key to maintaining situations that are contrary to all morality and every principle of humanity. That is why I advise you, your Excellency, to be very careful about your sources of information.

Finally, I repeat my formal petition that you transmit to President Obama my moral rejection of his decision and my urgent request that he reconsider.

Respectfully,


Javier Giraldo Moreno, S.J.

Accompaniment is a Delicate Beast

When Isaac came from Bogotá for a week to work with us and visit his old stomping grounds of La Union, our normal routine changed. We talked about things happening far away from the peace community on the hill and we spent time hanging out in houses we rarely visit. We talked about how accompaniment is a delicate beast and how living in the community while simulatenously keeping a professional distance from the inhabitants makes for some fuzzy relationship lines One evening as the rain fell softly outside, Isaac blew our minds with magic card tricks on the hard wood floor of a neighbor’s house.

The U.S. government announced the intention to release more military funding to Colombia. We sat in smokey wood stove kitchens with mold hanging from the ceiling and had macro political conversations with famous human rights defenders who were visiting the communty in the wake of the news.

I had three days off which I spent (mostly sleeping) in Apartado. One evening at the PBI house we discussed a new local film produced in Urabá. It’s called Banaman and about a banana worker who has magical powers. Urabá could use a superhero.

September is the month of “love and friendship” in Colombia and the community plays a game called “amigo secreto,” where everyone picks the name of another and then sends them candy throughout the month. While gossip is pretty normal in this small town, during amigo secreto mum is the word. The idea is that everyone, through their own devices, figures out who has them. The first of October there is a big dance and everyone gives a gift to their amigo secreto. Sounds innocent enough. There is one catch: everyone has three guesses to figure out who has them and if you don’t guess correctly, you “pay the price” which is some embarrasing thing the community gives you to do. I have, of course, no idea who has me. I will probably be facing the music come Saturday.

Emily and I made a new bench. We keep telling everyone our carpentry skills are some of the greatest assets we bring to the community. Since many of our neighbors are unclear on exactly what it is we do, they are equally unsure of whether or not this is a joke. The bench is made from two used paint cans and a piece of wood delicately set on top of them. Sometimes the paint cans disappear. Sometimes kids run down the street with rainbow colored hands.

I sat in the shade of the cacao grove during the heat of the day, helping a neighbor slide the slippery seeds from the large yellow shells in the first step of what will eventually be chocolate.

The deaf girl comes to talk to me and show me her newest bruises. We sit on the new bench and I smile and nod and guess what she is saying while she enthusiastically nods yes or no. A neighbor leans against a rock and watches us without me noticing. After a minute he says, disbelieving, “Do you really understand her that well?” I say, “Clearly. She is speaking in English.” All three of us laugh.

A neighbor asks how I can handle living so far away from my family. He “misses his mom when he goes to work.” I laugh because his mom lives, literally, across the street. “I take her everywhere I go in my heart,” he says. I say, “that’s what I do too.” I suppose we will always miss the people we love, whether they are accross the street or across the continent.

When everyone is busy, they pass me the baby. I take the baby on strolls through the street and talk at him. Everyone expects his first word will be: hello.

My life here is so many things. It’s adventures with friends:
A friend hiking me high into a guava tree and instructing me as to which branches I need to “shake with all my might” so that we can make guave popsicles.

Two friends laughing as they throw rocks high into the branches of an orange tree, trying to get the fruit to fall, then walking toward me through the knee high grass of the orange grove, tossing peels as they go.

Hiking with through the jungle and accross the another river to buy cheese. Collecting riversmoothed rocks and drift wood to decorate my room. Sitting and watching the rapids and feeling the movement of the wáter outside my boots.

My life here is vallenato music:
I dance vallenato in the kitchen. I sing vallenato hits on the back of the jeep on the way down to town. When the electricity is out, I listen to neighbors sing vallento.

My life here is harvests:
Squash! The largest I have ever seen, was harvested from our garden. Guava! It’s guava season. Guava juice and guava bolis and guava dreams. I do love guava. One day my lunch consisted of mixing four seperate gifts: buñuelo, and an arepa covered in cheese and honey, all ingredients made with the loving hands of my neighbors. So delicious.

My life here is survival of the fittest:
I hear Sapa crunching the bones of mice and bats and lizards in the middle of the night.

The heat so hot that we escape to the posa for an hour to climb on mossy rocks and swim in the cool shaded wáter. The heat so hot we can not go on wihout bolis popsicles. The heat so hot I dip my head in the wáter tank to cool off.

My life here is admiration:
My 70 year old neighbor chopping wood with a machete. When someone asks her the favor of returning a horse to its neighbor, she replies: “As long as one is able, one should be of some use.” She stops the work she is doing and and she leads the horse up the hill.

A neighbor makes us a new garden fence from tree branches he expertly removes from his own backyard.

Her third baby missed her 20th birthday by two days. When she went into labor she didn’t mention it to anybody. She just sat quietly. When I heard people walking the streets and whispering at 4AM, I know she was giving birth. A couple hours later, Em and I went to visit her. She passed us her new baby. I asked her all about the experience. I asked her when she knew she was in labor: “Yesterday afternoon, when we were sitting talking ourside Angela’s house.” I asked her why she didn’t tell anyone: “And how would that help the process?” I asked her if it hurt: “Obviously.” I asked her if she screamed: “What good would that do?” I asked her if she punched her husband so he felt some of the pain: “Only a crazy woman would do that.” She is probably one of the cutest women alive.

My life here is so many things:
Chamomile tea and chameleons in my shower and popcorn with hot chocolate and thunder rolling down the mountain. Soldiers on the march and fighter planes buzzing overhead and Sapa curling herself up on my lap.

My life here is reflection on the beautiful:
The electricity goes out at midnight after a rainstorm, leaving the full moon to light up the sky. The rain is long gone, but the thunder still roars and the sky is so bright and the moon is so full of energy that I can not sleep. I sit in the moonlight flooding through my window and think of you.

Padre Javier Giraldo responds to the U.S. government's decision to release military aid to Colombia

September 20, 2011 Colombia Reports & Amnesty International: "Since 2000, the US has provided billions of dollars in military aid to Colombia, making it the largest recipient of US aid outside the Middle East and Afghanistan. But, despite 10 years and over $8 billion dollars of US assistance, Colombia has failed to reduce availability of cocaine and Colombia's human rights record remains deeply troubling. Despite this, the US continues ignore human rights abuses in order to continue sending military aid."

Heartbreaking news reached us in the community this week: the Obama administration has deemed Colombia, “compliant in human rights” and has decided to release 30 million dollars in military aid. Padre Javier Giraldo, a life-long Colombian human rights defender and avid supporter of the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, wrote this response in the form of a letter to the U.S. ambassador in Colombia, Peter McKenley. The letter outlines various reasons why this decision is dangerous for communities in peaceful resistance as well as civil society in Colombia and respectfully requests a prompt reconsideration of the decision. I spoke with Padre Javier a few days ago about the letter and he mentioned that there is already an English translation circulating as well. Unfortunately I have not gotten my hands on it yet, and thus am posting the version in Spanish below. A PdF version can be found here:
http://i2.kienyke.com.s3.amazonaws.com/SEPTIEMBRE2011/Carta%20a%20Embajador%20USA.pdf

Do feel free to pass it on.


Bogotá, septiembre 20 de 2011
Excelencia
PETER MICHAEL MCKENLEY
Embajador de los Estados Unidos de América en Colombia Calle 24 Bis No. 48‐50
BOGOTÁ, D. C.

De toda consideración.

Hace pocos días los medios masivos de información registraron la decisión de su Gobierno de certificar como aceptable el comportamiento del Gobierno colombiano en el campo de los Derechos Humanos y en consecuencia desbloquear una ayuda militar de 20 millones de dólares asignada a Colombia.

Quiero llamar respetuosamente su atención sobre los sentimientos que tal decisión suscita en las mayorías desprotegidas, vulnerables y vulneradas de este país y en las organizaciones, grupos y movimientos comprometidos con la defensa de los derechos elementales del ser humano.

Es lógico suponer que usted ha jugado un papel de capital importancia en esa decisión, ya que históricamente la representación diplomática que Usted ahora ejerce ha incidido de manera determinante, no sólo en los parámetros de la política de los Estados Unidos hacia Colombia, sino también en la de muchos otros países. Por ello, al tiempo que me permito señalarle muchas realidades que quizás usted no conoce, también le solicito de manera encarecida que le transmita al Presidente Obama nuestra conmoción y nuestra petición apremiante de reconsiderar tal deci‐ sión.

En lo primero que pienso, personalmente, es en el efecto que esa decisión y esa nueva ayuda militar va a tener en la Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó. Como Usted bien lo sabe, dicha Comunidad ha sido víctima de más de mil críme‐ nes de lesa humanidad desde su conformación en 1997. Este año ese accionar criminal se ha incrementado. Estructuras paramilitares que actúan en estrecha unidad con el Ejército y la Policía, quieren expulsar violentamente a quienes poseen tierras en el área donde se proyecta construir una segunda represa Urrá 2. Este año han asesinado a más de 12 campesinos del área de San José y continuamente exhiben listas de más gente para matar en inmediaciones de retenes militares y policiales, al tiempo que violan otros muchos derechos civiles de esa población y anuncian el exterminio total de la Comunidad, sin que el Presidente Santos se digne responder siquiera ni tomar medidas urgentes ante los clamores angustiosos que radicamos continuamente en su despacho. Usted bien conoce, Excelencia, los derechos de petición y las constancias de la Comunidad de Paz, que continúan siendo un “clamor en el desierto”, sin respuesta alguna. Varios líderes paramilitares de alto rango han confesado que ellos actuaron siempre con la aprobación y colaboración de todos los comandantes de la Brigada XVII, la cual ha gozado por décadas de ayuda mili‐ tar estadounidense, pero ninguno de ellos ha sido sancionado. Los actuales co‐ mandantes participan de la misma inmunidad e impunidad y la ayuda de su Gobierno sólo los fortalecerá en su accionar criminal.

También pienso en muchas otras situaciones dramáticas de los sectores más vulnerables, cuyos sufrimientos se han incrementado enormemente:

Las comunidades del bajo Atrato (Chocó), particularmente las del Curvaradó y el Jiguamiandó, han sido víctimas de nuevas estrategias de despojo y exterminio. Es cierto que la Corte Constitucional y la Fiscalía han tomado decisiones jurídicas pa‐ ra devolverles sus territorios colectivos, pero ¿qué efectividad tiene eso, cuando los empresarios y paramilitares que los desplazaron tan violentamente, ahora cuentan con el apoyo del Gobierno en su fuerza pública para invadirles nuevamente sus tierras y someterlos al terror? Es un hecho que la Corte Constitucional ha agotado las medidas jurídicas de protección para esas comunidades, pero el Gobierno no las acata ni las hace respetar sino que, a través de su fuerza pública, se une con los criminales para volverlos a despojar. ¿No cree, Excelencia, que la nueva ayuda mi‐ litar de su Gobierno, hará sentir a la fuerza pública más fortalecida y validada en sus políticas de apoyo al nuevo despojo?

Quienes trabajamos de alguna manera en el campo de los derechos humanos, percibimos con claridad que los discursos sobre una desactivación del paramilitarismo no corresponden a la verdad. Se quiere presentar a las estructuras paramilitares que actúan intensamente hoy en día, como agrupaciones de delincuencia común, sin objetivos políticos y sin relación con la fuerza pública ni con los demás poderes del Estado ni con la clase política. Pero, ¿por qué será, Excelencia, que dichas estructuras, con nuevos nombres, envían permanentemente mensajes amenazantes a los líderes sociales y a los defensores de derechos humanos, en un lenguaje de respaldo a las políticas oficiales? ¿No ha percibido, Señor Embajador McKenley, cómo muchas de esas amenazas se cumplen implacablemente en desapariciones y ejecuciones extrajudiciales, desplazamientos y exilios, quedando, como siempre, la autoría de tales crímenes en la penumbra?

Me angustia profundamente, Excelencia, que la nueva ayuda militar de su Gobierno fortalezca y le suministre nuevos recursos al Ejército y a la Policía para transgredir, como lo han venido haciendo, las normas del Derecho Internacional Humanitario en los departamentos de Cauca, Nariño y Putumayo, especialmente en las zonas indígenas y campesinas, desconociendo los espacios de la población civil; involucrándola en la guerra contra su voluntad; colocándolos como escudos contra sus enemigos bélicos; produciendo destrozos en sus viviendas y cultivos además de víctimas inocentes a quienes pretenden presentar falsamente como combatientes. Todo esto sin contar la violación de los derechos de los grupos étnicos a la consulta previa sobre proyectos que los afectan y destruyen su hábitat, sus recursos, su autonomía y sus mismas vidas.

Tanto la certificación como la ayuda militar favorece a un Gobierno que ha perpetrado en las últimas décadas uno de los crímenes más horrendos, de forma sis‐ temática y continuada, desde las más altas instituciones del Estado, como son los llamados “falsos positivos”, o sea, ejecuciones de ciudadanos inocentes, en su mayoría muy pobres, para disfrazarlos de combatientes abatidos y así dar una imagen de triunfo militar sobre estructuras armadas o delincuenciales, pagando grandes sumas de dinero y otras recompensas por tales falsos “resultados”. Usted bien sa‐ be, Excelencia, que esa estrategia no se ha erradicado; que continuamente se denuncian nuevos casos; que si bien la Fiscalía ha contabilizado más de 3.500 víctimas, la justicia no ha tocado ni al 1% de los victimarios; que muchos de éstos permanecen en altos puestos de mando, o si ya se han retirado, gozan de enormes privilegios; que dicha estrategia no se ha manifestado en “casos aislados”, como lo denunció el Relator de la ONU para Ejecuciones Extrajudiciales, sino que ha involucrado a casi todos los departamentos del país y a todas las brigadas militares. ¿Cree Usted, Excelencia, que es desatinado pensar que muchos “resultados bélicos” que su Gobierno ha registrado como “éxitos” que merecen ser premiados con nuevas ayudas militares, son, en realidad, crímenes contra la humanidad, de los que la fuerza pública colombiana ha perpetrado por millares, con la anuencia o tolerancia de los demás poderes estatales? ¿No cree, Señor Embajador McKenley, que la nueva ayuda militar va a fortalecer esa criminalidad tan arraigada en la fuerza pública, puesto que hay millares de esos crímenes sin esclarecer ni sancionar, dando pie para que se sigan perpetrando?

Supongo, Excelencia, que Usted no ignora que la estrategia paramilitar fue recomendada por el Gobierno de los Estados Unidos en la Misión Yarborough en febrero de 1962, con el fin de configurar estructuras mixtas civiles/militares para realizar atentados terroristas que no dañaran la imagen del gobierno pero que destruyeran a los simpatizantes del comunismo, tal como lo establece el informe secreto de aquella Misión. ¿No cree, Señor Embajador, que esa misma estrategia se está aplicando para identificar mediáticamente a las “BACRIM”? ¿Por qué será, Excelencia, que el Ministerio de Defensa se ha negado reiterativamente a entregar copia del documento EJC‐ 3‐10, aprobado por la Resolución 05 de 1969 del Comando de las Fuerzas Armadas, en el cual figuran los grupos paramilitares de “Autodefensas” en el organigrama oficial, alegando ante los tribunales que ese documento aún está en vigencia, a pesar de haber pasado mucho más de 30 años, límite máximo legal en Colombia para que un documento pueda tenerse como “reservado”?

Me preocupa también profundamente, Excelencia, que la ayuda militar de su Gobierno, la que el Gobierno colombiano quiere destinar en forma privilegiada a las llamadas “Zonas de Consolidación”, vaya a fortalecer esas zonas donde hay milla‐ res de tumbas anónimas, como en el municipio de La Macarena, del departamento del Meta, donde hasta el momento se han identificado varios centenares de sepulturas de NN adosadas a una base militar, cuerpos que según los pobladores han sido enterrados con violación de todas las normas legales, que exigen identificar a los occisos y entregar los restos a sus familias, incluso los de los combatientes. ¿Cree, Excelencia, que es acertado certificar, como garante de los derechos huma‐ nos, a un Gobierno que mantiene millares de tumbas anónimas por todo el territorio nacional, que están revelando la magnitud del crimen sistemático de la desaparición forzada de personas, que según organismos nacionales e internacionales afecta actualmente a más de 50.000 familias?

Al desbloquear la ayuda militar y emitir la aludida certificación, su Gobierno ha mencionado la Ley de Víctimas, como signo de una mejoría en el respeto a los derechos humanos. ¿Por qué no esperar a que dicha ley se traduzca en hechos concretos, no sea que lleve a un nuevo fracaso como el de la “Ley de Justicia y Paz”, que sólo produjo una sentencia en firme en seis años, cuando han sido denunciados más de cien mil crímenes? Usted bien sabe, Excelencia, que lo único que ha producido hasta ahora la “Ley de Víctimas” es la muerte violenta de muchos campesinos que han querido recuperar sus tierras, ya que la ley no se ha proyectado en ninguna estrategia de erradicación real del paramilitarismo ni de sus estrechas relaciones con la fuerza pública. ¿No cree, Excelencia, que a veces se quiere exorcizar realidades tan aterradoras como la colombiana, con la emisión de leyes que no pueden funcionar en el contesto real? ¿Cree sinceramente, Señor Embajador Mc Kenley, que puede funcionar una ley, como la “Ley de Víctimas”, sin un proceso de paz concomitante y sin una depuración muy profunda de la enorme corrupción que afecta a nuestras instituciones? ¿Cree, por ejemplo, Excelencia, que los tribunales administrativos de los departamentos, los cuales han producido tantísimas senten‐ cias corruptas durante décadas, ahora van a dirimir “en justicia” la devolución de las tierras robadas (como lo contempla la Ley de Víctimas) sin que sean profunda‐ mente depurados?

Pero la mencionada certificación y desbloqueo de la ayuda militar se produce en un momento en que la política económica de este Gobierno está dando signos alarmantes de desconocimiento de los derechos colectivos más fundamentales de las poblaciones más vulnerables. Las licencias de explotación minera otorgadas a numerosas empresas transnacionales, han activado enormemente el paramilitaris‐ mo y el conflicto armado y están dejando sin tierras ni recursos a enormes pobla- ciones pobres. La destrucción del medio ambiente y la destrucción de comunidades indígenas, campesinas y afrodescendientes que dichos proyectos están produciendo, levantan resistencias de todo género y hacen que la seguridad de esas em‐ presas y de sus proyectos destructivos sólo sean viables con la escolta de enormes contingentes de paramilitares cooptados secretamente por la fuerza pública y los organismos de seguridad del Estado, para lo cual no dudan en asesinar a los líde‐ res de esas resistencias. El asesinato del Padre Reinel Restrepo, Párroco de Marma‐ to, departamento de Caldas, el pasado 2 de septiembre (2011) es una muestra paté‐ tica de esto. También lo es el genocidio permanente que se está perpetrando en Buenaventura, donde los barrios populares y los Consejos Comunitarios aledaños al puerto, están invadidos de paramilitares apoyados o tolerados por la fuerza pública, quienes descuartizan con crueldad aterradora, arrojando al mar sus restos, a quienes se atreven a resistir al megaproyecto del nuevo puerto, que implica la expulsión de los sectores más empobrecidos e incluso la expropiación de terrenos que en medio de su miseria ellos han creado durante décadas sobre basureros, para poder sobrevivir.

Para que un Gobierno pueda ser evaluado a la luz de los más elementales parámetros de respeto a los derechos humanos, y certificarlo en ese campo, un punto fundamental es la justicia. Sin embargo, como Usted bien lo sabe, Excelencia, en Colombia no es dable actualmente esperar justicia respecto a crímenes de lesa humanidad que han sido perpetrados contra no participantes en las estructuras o ideologías políticas dominantes. Si bien se han dado unas pocas sentencias ejemplares en los últimos meses, ¿qué significa eso frente a los millones de procesos que repe san desde hace muchos años, cobijados por la impunidad y la corrupción sistémica? ¿Tiene, acaso, la “Ley de Víctimas” algún mecanismo de corrección de las estructuras de impunidad y corrupción de la justicia, para proteger el derecho a la justicia, siquiera de una parte significativa del 99% de víctimas afectadas por la impunidad proverbial vigente? Pero igualmente grave es la sistematicidad aterra‐ dora que ha ganado el montaje judicial. La cantidad de inocentes que son juzgados y condenados es enorme, debido en gran parte a la intromisión inconstitucional del poder ejecutivo en la justicia (“falsos positivos judiciales”), y en parte a las opciones políticas o intereses de todo orden de los agentes judiciales de todos los niveles. Hace poco un Vice Fiscal General calculaba en 5000 las detenciones ilegales que se producen por año. Los grupos de abogados calculan en más de 7000 los prisioneros que han sido privados de su libertad arbitrariamente, por sus maneras de pensar o por sus actividades democráticas. ¿Cree, Excelencia, que un Gobierno que mantiene ese desastroso panorama de justicia y de atentados contra la libertad, merece una certificación en derechos humanos?

No ignorará Usted, Señor Embajador McKenley, que lo poco que han destapado recientemente algunos medios de comunicación es suficiente para evaluar unas prácticas estatales que llevan muchos años, y de las cuales participó el actual Presidente, que revelan un desconocimiento radical de los derechos ciudadanos, como los espionajes de opositores políticos, de los mismos agentes judiciales que resultan molestos, de los defensores de derechos humanos y de periodistas no cooptados; la corrupción tan aterradora que ha caracterizado el sistema electoral y particular‐ mente la modificación constitucional hacia la reelección presidencial; la orientación de los organismos de inteligencia dentro de unos parámetros de verdadera criminalidad; la cooptación corrupta del Parlamento; el control de las elecciones por el paramilitarismo y el narcotráfico; los pactos entre paramilitarismo y clase política para reformar y controlar el Estado en función de sus intereses, así como muchas otras formas de corrupción que han hecho funcionar el Estado en servicio de las clases más pudientes y delincuentes, situación que sigue vigente en la medida en que la clase política no ha variado en lo esencial en sus mecanismos de control del Estado.

Es muy preocupante, Excelencia, que Usted ignore tantas cosas al asesorar a su Gobierno para otorgar certificaciones y ayudas militares que sólo pueden redundar en mayor violación de los derechos humanos. Quizás Usted, Señor Embajador McKenley, se rige por lo que en Colombia informan los medios masivos de comunicación o los mismos integrantes de la clase política que ha tolerado de manera tan indolente tantas atrocidades. ¿Cuándo ha comprobado Usted, por ejemplo, que las atrocidades perpetradas contra la Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó, sean denunciadas en algún periódico o medio masivo de información? Quizás algunas han sido reseñadas en el diario El Colombiano, cuando le sirven de ocasión para calumniar a la Comunidad, a través de alguno de sus columnistas avezados en la mentira. El derecho a una información objetiva y el derecho a la verdad, no sólo son derechos desconocidos sino que son la clave para mantener situaciones que contradicen toda ética y todo principio de humanidad. Por ello le aconsejo, Excelencia, discernir muy bien sus fuentes de información.

Finalmente le reitero mi petición formal de que le transmita al Presidente Obama mi rechazo ético a su decisión y mi petición apremiante de que la reconsidere.

Respetuosamente,
Javier Giraldo Moreno, S. J.