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
martes, 22 de noviembre de 2011
miércoles, 9 de noviembre de 2011
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.
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.
miércoles, 19 de octubre de 2011
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.
(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.
martes, 27 de septiembre de 2011
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.
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.
viernes, 23 de septiembre de 2011
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.
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.
miércoles, 7 de septiembre de 2011
Que Bonita es esta Vida
The first week of August, I met Jon in Medellin (8 hours by bus from Apartado) to accompany the ACA (see website under “online resources”) to Cauca. Cauca is a department in Southern Colombia which, according to many of my internet blasts that particular week, seemed to be up in flames with FARC attacks. Before we got on the road (beautiful and Pan-Americanly paved) we had a night in Medellin where we stayed with friends from the RED Juvenil(see website under “online resources”). The RED Juvenil blew my mind with their space (terrace over-looking city, office of murals and posters of body art, direct actions and pretty magazines and pamphlets for my viewing pleasure; their work and their passion). Over the accompaniment ACA would also wiggle its way into my heart. Jon and I strolled city streets and ate city food and wore city clothes. I was pretty giddy.
ACA is based in Medeliln, but is made for campesinos. At the bus station I accompanied her to the bathroom. I had to show her how to turn on the faucet. How to dispense the soap. She said she felt “dumb.” I told her I washed my clothes in the clean water of the pila once. She laughed and said there was no way that was true- that would be “really dumb.”
Then we went to Santander de Quilichao on our way to the indigenous community of Guabito where we were to accompany the end few days of a two week documentary film festival. Santander was a typical Latin American town with a central plaza and flowers and people strolling and heat that wasn’t so hot. Santander had a gigantic Saman tree on a park with which I made a pending date for someday. In the 20K between Santander and Guabito there were three military checkpoints. In Guabito, we slept on the floor of a school. We were back in the campo (although, the campo just 20k off the PanAmerican has things like fridges and cookies- hurrah!). The festival was the first annual in honor of Rodolfo Maya, an indeginous Nasa murdered last fall and a member of the school for media within the community. People came from many communities- indigenous and campesino, academic and international- to participate in the festival. The documentaries covered community resistance to everything from the Fair Trade Agreement and multinationals to mines and racism within the country, from the medias representation of the war to capitalism and neoliberalism, social conflict, dams, palm oil and land. So much resistance to so much violence. During the two week festival 6 people were killed within a couple miles of the site where we were. There was a photo exhibition. The pictures were hung up on the school wall in such a fashion that children played hopscotch next to a picture of a non-detinated mine and woman carried candles next to a rifle shell in a stalk of sugar cane.
Before we had a place to sleep a young woman from Uraba said, “we look like a bunch of displaced people, standing around here with our bags and looking for a place to rest.” Everyone laughed. Later when people were introducing themselves and sharing their struggles she spoke so eloquently over the microphone:
“Every time we left our house there would be another dead person on the path. My mom would say, ‘I’m going to the market,’ and we wouldn’t know if she would come back. I was ten when we displaced in 1997. When the paramilitaries came, they burned everything and killed everyone. My mom and I made it out on the last bus. 500 of us from the zone came to Medellin. I will never forget when I got there and the media was representing the massacre. The TV said it was a battle between the FARC and state forces. But I was there and the people they killed were not guerrilleros. They were campesinos. They were my family and my friends and my neighbors. That’s why I want to work in alternative media. I want the true story to be told.”
A U.S. anthropologist who works in Guatemala talked about the indigenous resistance there and I was transported back to those communities. Looking into those eyes and remembering those stories.
As people spoke, I wrote. Story after story of death and displacement. Story after story of defeat turning the defeated into a Phoenix of resistance. Defeat transforming into purpose. In the end everyone called their projects, “projects for life.” There could be no better cause.
After the festival ended there was a memorial for Rodolfo. They created the spine of his life out of flowers and sticks and foods and candles. People spoke about him in the candlelight. His wife and mother made me cry. How hard it is for communities in resistance to lose their leaders. For mothers to lose their children. For wives to lose their husbands. After the memorial there was a graduation from the media school. Rodolfo’s six year old daughter accepted his diploma.
And after the graduation there was a dance because, like my grandma always says when she reflects on those who have died before her, “life is for the living.”
To get back to Santander we sat on the top of a bus which looked like something out of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test- painted all sorts of colors and full to the brim with double the capacity of passangers on top of leftover food from the festival, sound equipment, tents and garbage cans reaking of chicha. The sun was out and the lowlands of cauca looked like the Midwest. For a moment I thought the sugarcane could be corn. That I could be hitch-hiking home from a summer music festival.
In Santander I lay on the ground under the Saman as the sun went down. It was an ecosystem all its own at that hour, with the birds coming in for the night. Its sprawling branches completely blanketed me from the sky and it was just through the highest tiniest twigs that I could see the moon coming up in the half-lit sky. I felt its roots cradling me under the ground and I felt so at peace. As we were walking to the bus terminal Jon said: “It’s hard to believe there is so much violence here.”
I puked the first half of the busride through the bluegreen Andes from Medellin back to Apartado. Eventually I insisted on practically sitting on the driver’s lap in order to be in the front seat. He was not into it, but eventually gave into my requests. It is in situations like this that my “I’m a gringo, I’m crazy, make me happy” card is so very handy. Once in the front seat and led nauseated, I reflected on the amazing organization of the Nasa communities in Cauca. I felt inspired.
I got home just in time for 15 ex-FOR volunteers to come for a reunion in La Union. The town was overtaken by gringos. The group was amazing and wonderful and the town was bursting at the seams to see them and talk to them. Even Soila was in rare form, modeling underwear from the second story of her half torn-down home. In an unfortunate incident, juice was made for said group with unfiltered water and every last one of us fell ill. The morning they were to go down one of them came to the house and said in Spanish, “My poo came out like hot chocolate this morning- anyone want some?” Oh, expat-stomachworm-campo humor.
After being left alone multiple times in the community over the last six weeks, I feel I have bonded well with my neighbors. I have reached a point of tasty marination in the pot of community dynamics. I now have cookies and milk offered to me. I have friends who come over to play late night cards. I feel like I am getting to know people.
And then, just like that, I hear a crazy story about a neighbor I thought I knew so well. It was about the time he was almost shot at point blank range. And I thought of Cristina Garcia who wrote, “We only hold partial knowledge of each other. We are lucky to get a shred of the dark exploding whole.”
One night while playing hide and seek in our house a little boy fell asleep between the mattresses in the extra bedroom. In the morning he woke us up trying to get out of the house.
When the light went out for five days straight, I eventually ran out of candles. Pure darkness.
A baby was born in the late night storm. I donated medical tape for the umbilical cord and held the youngest human being I have ever held in my life.
I have taken to running on the soccer field in the pouring rain.
Emily and I have officially learned how to wash clothes. Chemicals are key. After multiple test runs (ahem, five months of washing) a neighbor smelled my pants and said, “now that’s a miracle.” In related news of neighbors feeling comfortable enough to tell the truth, I bleached the backpack I wore on the camino after a boy helped me carry it up the hill and then confessed it smelled, “like ass” and could used to be washed.
After 5 seconds of deshelling corn with a ten pound wooden masher, I have a blister. It will probably scar because my skin can’t heal in the tropics. I say this while staring at a scar on the back of my hand that I got in the tropics of Guatemala in 2003- from a wound no deeper than a paper cut.
We have taken some walks. We walked across a canyon to buy cheese from a neighbor. We walked into the jungle to gather flowers for the ExVolunteers. We walked up to see the water tanks. Riverbeds and jungle vines. Overviews and slippery mud. In the jungle I feel so alive, perhaps because everything else is. It is good to go out and walk. Remind ourselves that we actually live in the jungle, it’s just that they machete streets one and two and keep the grass low in the town. Just on the otherside of the soccer field, you run into the wall of a wild tropical jungle. And I do love trees.
The garden is still flourishing, although our tobacco and tomato plants have a worm the size of a horse eating away. The squash is taking over the yard, but providing fruit so we are cool with it. Emily and I have also taken to tanning in the garden- an activity that may be considered dando papaya. This could have a literal meaning if anyone brings it up, as the papaya tree is also right there.
Martin spent his last week on the guitar. He went house to house to sing this vallenato hit. It rang out in La Union day and night for a week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQWrN4ETI2A
I moved into Martin’s room. There are rats and bats. I got knee deep in chlorine and reorganized the furniture. I am still adjusting and still waking up really early. I like seeing the pale pinks in the sunrise give way to the mauves and then the blues.
Elisabeth arrived. We had a welcome party with flowers and bunuelos and chocolate and dancing. Now she is adjusting to life here. Aren’t we all. All the time.
The day they buried the body, I went up to the kiosk alone. I could see the cementary far below me in the distance. I was writing after the funeral party retreated and while a few neighbors stayed to finish the burial. I wrote to the sound of them pounding in nails. I heard dirt hitting the coffin. And men laughing as they rested from their work.
I have never lived in a small town. I am finding it interesting.
When the tropical storms come, the thunder comes rolling down the mountain so loud and so hard and I just wish there was a way to describe it. It is awesome.
While Jeff Buckley sang, I wrote about how there was nowhere else I am supposed to be. About how people everywhere think we are different, but really we are all just one extension of each other through space and time. In that moment I felt both as through I were always meant to be here and that I will never recover from it. Looking back through my journal I realize that same evening I missed my 10 year highschool reunion. Oh, the places you’ll go. Eventually during my writing hour Jeff Buckley’s Grace transitioned to Paul Simon’s Graceland. These are the days of miracles and wonder.
In other news:
Please take the time to send in the photo and letter for our Land you Love campaign, which I posted earlier today.
Also, some recent press can not go without note. Both The Washington Post article (far) below as well as the wikileaks documents links were forwarded to me. Much of the wikileaks have to do with the (still pending) investigation into the 2005 masacre. For those of you who are interested and have faster internet connection than I do, please forward me those you think are of note.
Wikileaks:
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA1918.html2005-03-01 MASSACRE OF 13 PERSONS IN URABA AREA
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA1999.html
2005-03-02 PEACE COMMUNITY COMMISSION FINDS NO THIRD MASSACRE SITE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA2156.html
2005-03-04 REINSERTED GUERRILLA CLAIMS FARC RESPONSIBLE FOR MASSACRE IN URABA REGION
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA2348.html
2005-03-10 PBI REPRESENTATIVES CONFIRM PEACE COMMUNITY WILL NOT SPEAK TO FISCALIA INVESTIGATORS
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA2619.html
2005-03-18 AMBASSADOR MEETS WITH PEACE COMMUNITY ABOUT URABA MASSACRE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA2674.html
2005-03-22 GOC OFFICIALS DISCUSS URABA MASSACRE CASE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/04/05BOGOTA3361.html
2005-04-12 INTERNATIONAL DELEGATION VISITS SAN JOSE DE APARTADO
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/04/05BOGOTA3843.html
2005-04-21 FISCALIA CONTINUES ITS INVESTIGATION INTO URABA MASSACRE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/05/05BOGOTA4973.html
2005-05-24 PEACE COMMUNITY CONTINUES PUBLIC RELATIONS OUTREACH
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/02/10BOGOTA233.html
2010-02-12 2005 MASSACRE TRIAL DELAYED AGAIN, DEFENDANTS WILL NOT BE RELEASED
Washington Post Article:
U.S. aid implicated in abuses of power in Colombia
By Karen DeYoung and Claudia J. Duque, Published: August 20
The Obama administration often cites Colombia’s thriving democracy as proof that U.S. assistance, know-how and commitment can turn around a potentially failed state under terrorist siege.
The country’s U.S.-funded counterinsurgency campaign against a Marxist rebel group — and the civilian and military coordination behind it — are viewed as so successful that it has become a model for strategy in Afghanistan.
But new revelations in long-running political scandals under former president Alvaro Uribe, a close U.S. ally throughout his eight-year tenure, have implicated American aid, and possibly U.S. officials, in egregious abuses of power and illegal actions by the Colombian government under the guise of fighting terrorism and drug smuggling.
American cash, equipment and training, supplied to elite units of the Colombian intelligence service over the past decade to help smash cocaine-trafficking rings, were used to carry out spying operations and smear campaigns against Supreme Court justices, Uribe’s political opponents and civil society groups, according to law enforcement documents obtained by The Washington Post and interviews with prosecutors and former Colombian intelligence officials.
The revelations are part of a widening investigation by the Colombian attorney general’s office against the Department of Administrative Security, or DAS. Six former high-ranking intelligence officials have confessed to crimes, and more than a dozen other agency operatives are on trial. Several of Uribe’s closest aides have come under scrutiny, and Uribe is under investigation by a special legislative commission.
U.S. officials have denied knowledge of or involvement in illegal acts committed by the DAS, and Colombian prosecutors have not alleged any American collaboration. But the story of what the DAS did with much of the U.S. aid it received is a cautionary tale of unintended consequences. Just as in Afghanistan and other countries where the United States is intensely focused on winning counterterrorism allies, some recipients of aid to Colombia clearly diverted it to their own political agendas.
For more than a decade, under three administrations, Colombia has been Washington’s closest friend in Latin America and the biggest recipient of military and economic assistance — $6 billion during Uribe’s 2002-10 presidency. The annual total has fallen only slightly during the Obama administration, to just over a half-billion dollars in combined aid this year.
Although significant gains were made against the rebels and drug-trafficking groups, former high-ranking intelligence agents say the DAS under Uribe emphasized political targets over insurgents and drug lords. The steady flow of new revelations has continued to taint Colombia’s reputation, even as a government led by Uribe’s successor and former defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, has pledged to replace the DAS with a new intelligence agency this fall.
Prosecutors say the Uribe government wanted to “neutralize” the Supreme Court because its investigative magistrates were unraveling ties between presidential allies in the Colombian congress and drug-trafficking paramilitary groups. Basing their case on thousands of pages of DAS documents and the testimony of nine top former DAS officials, the prosecutors say the agency was directed by the president’s office to collect the banking records of magistrates, follow their families, bug their offices and analyze their court rulings.
“All the activity mounted against us — following us, intercepting our telephones — had one central purpose, to intimidate us,” said Ivan Velasquez, the court’s lead investigative magistrate and a primary target of the DAS surveillance.
Gustavo Sierra, the imprisoned former DAS chief of analysis, who reviewed intelligence briefs that were sent to the presidency, said that targeting the court “was the priority” for the DAS under Uribe.
“They hardly ever gave orders against narco-trafficking or guerrillas,” Sierra said in an interview.
Resources and guidance
Some of those charged or under investigation have described the importance of U.S. intelligence resources and guidance, and say they regularly briefed embassy “liaison” officials on their intelligence-gathering activities. “We were organized through the American Embassy,” said William Romero, who ran the DAS’s network of informants and oversaw infiltration of the Supreme Court. Like many of the top DAS officials in jail or facing charges, he received CIA training. Some were given scholarships to complete coursework on intelligence-gathering at American universities.
Romero, who has accepted a plea agreement from prosecutors in exchange for his cooperation, said in an interview that DAS units depended on U.S.-supplied computers, wiretapping devices, cameras and mobile phone interception systems, as well as rent for safe houses and petty cash for gasoline. “We could have operated” without U.S. assistance, he said, “but not with the same effectiveness.”
One unit dependent on CIA aid, according to the testimony of former DAS officials in depositions, was the National and International Observations Group.
Set up to root out ties between foreign operatives and Colombian guerrillas, it turned its attention to the Supreme Court after magistrates began investigating the president’s cousin, then-Sen. Mario Uribe, said a former director, German Ospina, in a deposition to prosecutors. The orders came “from the presidency; they wanted immediate results,” Ospina told prosecutors.
Another unit that operated for eight months in 2005, the Group to Analyze Terrorist Organization Media, assembled dossiers on labor leaders, broke into their offices and videotaped union activists. The United States provided equipment and tens of thousands of dollars, according to an internal DAS report, and the unit’s members regularly met with an embassy official they remembered as “Chris Sullivan.”
“When we were advancing on certain activities, he would go to see how we were advancing,” Jose Gabriel Jimenez, a former analyst in the unit, said during a court hearing.
The CIA declined to comment on any specific allegations or the description of its relationship with the DAS provided by Colombian officials. “The three letters CIA get thrown into the mix on a lot of things, and by a lot of people. That doesn’t mean that allegations about the agency are anything more than that,” said a U.S. intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
As initial DAS revelations emerged in the Colombian media during late summer 2009, then-U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield called an embassy-wide meeting and asked which U.S. agencies represented were working with the DAS, according to a secret State Department cable released by WikiLeaks. Representatives from eight agencies raised their hands — including the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. All agencies, Brownfield reported in the Sept. 9 cable, “reaffirmed that they had no knowledge of or connection to the illegal activity and agreed to continue reducing their exposure to the agency.”
Brownfield, in subsequent meetings with Uribe and other officials, urged the government to get out in front of the disclosures and warned that they could compromise the U.S.-Colombia partnership.
“If another DAS scandal erupted, our Plan B was to terminate all association with DAS. Immediately,” Brownfield reported telling Francisco Santos, Uribe’s vice president, and DAS Director Felipe Munoz on Sept. 16, 2009.
Still, the relationship continued for an additional seven months. In April 2010, Brownfield announced that all U.S. funds previously directed to the DAS would henceforth go to Colombia’s national police. Today, the 51-year-old DAS, with 6,000 employees, multiple roles and an annual budget of $220 million, still limps along. But Munoz has been under investigation, as have four other former DAS directors.
Uribe, speaking through his lawyer, Jaime Granados, declined a request for an interview. But the former president has denied that he oversaw illegal activities and said officials from his government were being persecuted politically. Four of his top aides are under investigation, and his chief of staff, Bernardo Moreno, is jailed and awaiting trial on conspiracy and other charges.
Years of trouble
Interviews with former U.S. officials and evidence surfacing in the DAS investigation show that the agency has for years committed serious crimes, a propensity for illegal actions not unknown to embassy officials.
The first DAS director in Uribe’s presidency, Jorge Noguera — whom the U.S. Embassy in 2005 considered “pro-U.S. and an honest technocrat” and recommended to be a member of Interpol for Latin America, according to WikiLeaks cables — is on trial and accused of having helped hit men assassinate union activists. Last year, prosecutors accused another former DAS director of having helped plan the 1989 assassination of front-running presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galan.
Myles Frechette, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 1994 to 1997, said that even in his tenure American officials believed that DAS units were tainted by corruption and linked to traffickers. But he said the embassy needed a partner to develop intelligence on drug smugglers and guerrillas.
“All the people who worked with me at the embassy said to me, ‘You can’t really trust the DAS,’ ” said Frechette. adding that he thinks the DAS has some of the hallmarks of a criminal enterprise.
Several senior U.S. diplomats posted to the embassy in more recent years said they had no knowledge that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies were involved in DAS dirty tricks, but all said it would not surprise them.
“There were concerns about some kinds of activities, but also a need in the name of U.S. interests to preserve the relationship,” said one diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I’m reasonably confident our support was correct.”
Duque is a freelance journalist based in Bogota, Colombia. Correspondent Juan Forero, also based in Bogota, contributed to this report.
© The Washington Post Company
ACA is based in Medeliln, but is made for campesinos. At the bus station I accompanied her to the bathroom. I had to show her how to turn on the faucet. How to dispense the soap. She said she felt “dumb.” I told her I washed my clothes in the clean water of the pila once. She laughed and said there was no way that was true- that would be “really dumb.”
Then we went to Santander de Quilichao on our way to the indigenous community of Guabito where we were to accompany the end few days of a two week documentary film festival. Santander was a typical Latin American town with a central plaza and flowers and people strolling and heat that wasn’t so hot. Santander had a gigantic Saman tree on a park with which I made a pending date for someday. In the 20K between Santander and Guabito there were three military checkpoints. In Guabito, we slept on the floor of a school. We were back in the campo (although, the campo just 20k off the PanAmerican has things like fridges and cookies- hurrah!). The festival was the first annual in honor of Rodolfo Maya, an indeginous Nasa murdered last fall and a member of the school for media within the community. People came from many communities- indigenous and campesino, academic and international- to participate in the festival. The documentaries covered community resistance to everything from the Fair Trade Agreement and multinationals to mines and racism within the country, from the medias representation of the war to capitalism and neoliberalism, social conflict, dams, palm oil and land. So much resistance to so much violence. During the two week festival 6 people were killed within a couple miles of the site where we were. There was a photo exhibition. The pictures were hung up on the school wall in such a fashion that children played hopscotch next to a picture of a non-detinated mine and woman carried candles next to a rifle shell in a stalk of sugar cane.
Before we had a place to sleep a young woman from Uraba said, “we look like a bunch of displaced people, standing around here with our bags and looking for a place to rest.” Everyone laughed. Later when people were introducing themselves and sharing their struggles she spoke so eloquently over the microphone:
“Every time we left our house there would be another dead person on the path. My mom would say, ‘I’m going to the market,’ and we wouldn’t know if she would come back. I was ten when we displaced in 1997. When the paramilitaries came, they burned everything and killed everyone. My mom and I made it out on the last bus. 500 of us from the zone came to Medellin. I will never forget when I got there and the media was representing the massacre. The TV said it was a battle between the FARC and state forces. But I was there and the people they killed were not guerrilleros. They were campesinos. They were my family and my friends and my neighbors. That’s why I want to work in alternative media. I want the true story to be told.”
A U.S. anthropologist who works in Guatemala talked about the indigenous resistance there and I was transported back to those communities. Looking into those eyes and remembering those stories.
As people spoke, I wrote. Story after story of death and displacement. Story after story of defeat turning the defeated into a Phoenix of resistance. Defeat transforming into purpose. In the end everyone called their projects, “projects for life.” There could be no better cause.
After the festival ended there was a memorial for Rodolfo. They created the spine of his life out of flowers and sticks and foods and candles. People spoke about him in the candlelight. His wife and mother made me cry. How hard it is for communities in resistance to lose their leaders. For mothers to lose their children. For wives to lose their husbands. After the memorial there was a graduation from the media school. Rodolfo’s six year old daughter accepted his diploma.
And after the graduation there was a dance because, like my grandma always says when she reflects on those who have died before her, “life is for the living.”
To get back to Santander we sat on the top of a bus which looked like something out of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test- painted all sorts of colors and full to the brim with double the capacity of passangers on top of leftover food from the festival, sound equipment, tents and garbage cans reaking of chicha. The sun was out and the lowlands of cauca looked like the Midwest. For a moment I thought the sugarcane could be corn. That I could be hitch-hiking home from a summer music festival.
In Santander I lay on the ground under the Saman as the sun went down. It was an ecosystem all its own at that hour, with the birds coming in for the night. Its sprawling branches completely blanketed me from the sky and it was just through the highest tiniest twigs that I could see the moon coming up in the half-lit sky. I felt its roots cradling me under the ground and I felt so at peace. As we were walking to the bus terminal Jon said: “It’s hard to believe there is so much violence here.”
I puked the first half of the busride through the bluegreen Andes from Medellin back to Apartado. Eventually I insisted on practically sitting on the driver’s lap in order to be in the front seat. He was not into it, but eventually gave into my requests. It is in situations like this that my “I’m a gringo, I’m crazy, make me happy” card is so very handy. Once in the front seat and led nauseated, I reflected on the amazing organization of the Nasa communities in Cauca. I felt inspired.
I got home just in time for 15 ex-FOR volunteers to come for a reunion in La Union. The town was overtaken by gringos. The group was amazing and wonderful and the town was bursting at the seams to see them and talk to them. Even Soila was in rare form, modeling underwear from the second story of her half torn-down home. In an unfortunate incident, juice was made for said group with unfiltered water and every last one of us fell ill. The morning they were to go down one of them came to the house and said in Spanish, “My poo came out like hot chocolate this morning- anyone want some?” Oh, expat-stomachworm-campo humor.
After being left alone multiple times in the community over the last six weeks, I feel I have bonded well with my neighbors. I have reached a point of tasty marination in the pot of community dynamics. I now have cookies and milk offered to me. I have friends who come over to play late night cards. I feel like I am getting to know people.
And then, just like that, I hear a crazy story about a neighbor I thought I knew so well. It was about the time he was almost shot at point blank range. And I thought of Cristina Garcia who wrote, “We only hold partial knowledge of each other. We are lucky to get a shred of the dark exploding whole.”
One night while playing hide and seek in our house a little boy fell asleep between the mattresses in the extra bedroom. In the morning he woke us up trying to get out of the house.
When the light went out for five days straight, I eventually ran out of candles. Pure darkness.
A baby was born in the late night storm. I donated medical tape for the umbilical cord and held the youngest human being I have ever held in my life.
I have taken to running on the soccer field in the pouring rain.
Emily and I have officially learned how to wash clothes. Chemicals are key. After multiple test runs (ahem, five months of washing) a neighbor smelled my pants and said, “now that’s a miracle.” In related news of neighbors feeling comfortable enough to tell the truth, I bleached the backpack I wore on the camino after a boy helped me carry it up the hill and then confessed it smelled, “like ass” and could used to be washed.
After 5 seconds of deshelling corn with a ten pound wooden masher, I have a blister. It will probably scar because my skin can’t heal in the tropics. I say this while staring at a scar on the back of my hand that I got in the tropics of Guatemala in 2003- from a wound no deeper than a paper cut.
We have taken some walks. We walked across a canyon to buy cheese from a neighbor. We walked into the jungle to gather flowers for the ExVolunteers. We walked up to see the water tanks. Riverbeds and jungle vines. Overviews and slippery mud. In the jungle I feel so alive, perhaps because everything else is. It is good to go out and walk. Remind ourselves that we actually live in the jungle, it’s just that they machete streets one and two and keep the grass low in the town. Just on the otherside of the soccer field, you run into the wall of a wild tropical jungle. And I do love trees.
The garden is still flourishing, although our tobacco and tomato plants have a worm the size of a horse eating away. The squash is taking over the yard, but providing fruit so we are cool with it. Emily and I have also taken to tanning in the garden- an activity that may be considered dando papaya. This could have a literal meaning if anyone brings it up, as the papaya tree is also right there.
Martin spent his last week on the guitar. He went house to house to sing this vallenato hit. It rang out in La Union day and night for a week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQWrN4ETI2A
I moved into Martin’s room. There are rats and bats. I got knee deep in chlorine and reorganized the furniture. I am still adjusting and still waking up really early. I like seeing the pale pinks in the sunrise give way to the mauves and then the blues.
Elisabeth arrived. We had a welcome party with flowers and bunuelos and chocolate and dancing. Now she is adjusting to life here. Aren’t we all. All the time.
The day they buried the body, I went up to the kiosk alone. I could see the cementary far below me in the distance. I was writing after the funeral party retreated and while a few neighbors stayed to finish the burial. I wrote to the sound of them pounding in nails. I heard dirt hitting the coffin. And men laughing as they rested from their work.
I have never lived in a small town. I am finding it interesting.
When the tropical storms come, the thunder comes rolling down the mountain so loud and so hard and I just wish there was a way to describe it. It is awesome.
While Jeff Buckley sang, I wrote about how there was nowhere else I am supposed to be. About how people everywhere think we are different, but really we are all just one extension of each other through space and time. In that moment I felt both as through I were always meant to be here and that I will never recover from it. Looking back through my journal I realize that same evening I missed my 10 year highschool reunion. Oh, the places you’ll go. Eventually during my writing hour Jeff Buckley’s Grace transitioned to Paul Simon’s Graceland. These are the days of miracles and wonder.
In other news:
Please take the time to send in the photo and letter for our Land you Love campaign, which I posted earlier today.
Also, some recent press can not go without note. Both The Washington Post article (far) below as well as the wikileaks documents links were forwarded to me. Much of the wikileaks have to do with the (still pending) investigation into the 2005 masacre. For those of you who are interested and have faster internet connection than I do, please forward me those you think are of note.
Wikileaks:
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA1918.html2005-03-01 MASSACRE OF 13 PERSONS IN URABA AREA
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA1999.html
2005-03-02 PEACE COMMUNITY COMMISSION FINDS NO THIRD MASSACRE SITE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA2156.html
2005-03-04 REINSERTED GUERRILLA CLAIMS FARC RESPONSIBLE FOR MASSACRE IN URABA REGION
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA2348.html
2005-03-10 PBI REPRESENTATIVES CONFIRM PEACE COMMUNITY WILL NOT SPEAK TO FISCALIA INVESTIGATORS
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA2619.html
2005-03-18 AMBASSADOR MEETS WITH PEACE COMMUNITY ABOUT URABA MASSACRE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA2674.html
2005-03-22 GOC OFFICIALS DISCUSS URABA MASSACRE CASE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/04/05BOGOTA3361.html
2005-04-12 INTERNATIONAL DELEGATION VISITS SAN JOSE DE APARTADO
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/04/05BOGOTA3843.html
2005-04-21 FISCALIA CONTINUES ITS INVESTIGATION INTO URABA MASSACRE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/05/05BOGOTA4973.html
2005-05-24 PEACE COMMUNITY CONTINUES PUBLIC RELATIONS OUTREACH
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/02/10BOGOTA233.html
2010-02-12 2005 MASSACRE TRIAL DELAYED AGAIN, DEFENDANTS WILL NOT BE RELEASED
Washington Post Article:
U.S. aid implicated in abuses of power in Colombia
By Karen DeYoung and Claudia J. Duque, Published: August 20
The Obama administration often cites Colombia’s thriving democracy as proof that U.S. assistance, know-how and commitment can turn around a potentially failed state under terrorist siege.
The country’s U.S.-funded counterinsurgency campaign against a Marxist rebel group — and the civilian and military coordination behind it — are viewed as so successful that it has become a model for strategy in Afghanistan.
But new revelations in long-running political scandals under former president Alvaro Uribe, a close U.S. ally throughout his eight-year tenure, have implicated American aid, and possibly U.S. officials, in egregious abuses of power and illegal actions by the Colombian government under the guise of fighting terrorism and drug smuggling.
American cash, equipment and training, supplied to elite units of the Colombian intelligence service over the past decade to help smash cocaine-trafficking rings, were used to carry out spying operations and smear campaigns against Supreme Court justices, Uribe’s political opponents and civil society groups, according to law enforcement documents obtained by The Washington Post and interviews with prosecutors and former Colombian intelligence officials.
The revelations are part of a widening investigation by the Colombian attorney general’s office against the Department of Administrative Security, or DAS. Six former high-ranking intelligence officials have confessed to crimes, and more than a dozen other agency operatives are on trial. Several of Uribe’s closest aides have come under scrutiny, and Uribe is under investigation by a special legislative commission.
U.S. officials have denied knowledge of or involvement in illegal acts committed by the DAS, and Colombian prosecutors have not alleged any American collaboration. But the story of what the DAS did with much of the U.S. aid it received is a cautionary tale of unintended consequences. Just as in Afghanistan and other countries where the United States is intensely focused on winning counterterrorism allies, some recipients of aid to Colombia clearly diverted it to their own political agendas.
For more than a decade, under three administrations, Colombia has been Washington’s closest friend in Latin America and the biggest recipient of military and economic assistance — $6 billion during Uribe’s 2002-10 presidency. The annual total has fallen only slightly during the Obama administration, to just over a half-billion dollars in combined aid this year.
Although significant gains were made against the rebels and drug-trafficking groups, former high-ranking intelligence agents say the DAS under Uribe emphasized political targets over insurgents and drug lords. The steady flow of new revelations has continued to taint Colombia’s reputation, even as a government led by Uribe’s successor and former defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, has pledged to replace the DAS with a new intelligence agency this fall.
Prosecutors say the Uribe government wanted to “neutralize” the Supreme Court because its investigative magistrates were unraveling ties between presidential allies in the Colombian congress and drug-trafficking paramilitary groups. Basing their case on thousands of pages of DAS documents and the testimony of nine top former DAS officials, the prosecutors say the agency was directed by the president’s office to collect the banking records of magistrates, follow their families, bug their offices and analyze their court rulings.
“All the activity mounted against us — following us, intercepting our telephones — had one central purpose, to intimidate us,” said Ivan Velasquez, the court’s lead investigative magistrate and a primary target of the DAS surveillance.
Gustavo Sierra, the imprisoned former DAS chief of analysis, who reviewed intelligence briefs that were sent to the presidency, said that targeting the court “was the priority” for the DAS under Uribe.
“They hardly ever gave orders against narco-trafficking or guerrillas,” Sierra said in an interview.
Resources and guidance
Some of those charged or under investigation have described the importance of U.S. intelligence resources and guidance, and say they regularly briefed embassy “liaison” officials on their intelligence-gathering activities. “We were organized through the American Embassy,” said William Romero, who ran the DAS’s network of informants and oversaw infiltration of the Supreme Court. Like many of the top DAS officials in jail or facing charges, he received CIA training. Some were given scholarships to complete coursework on intelligence-gathering at American universities.
Romero, who has accepted a plea agreement from prosecutors in exchange for his cooperation, said in an interview that DAS units depended on U.S.-supplied computers, wiretapping devices, cameras and mobile phone interception systems, as well as rent for safe houses and petty cash for gasoline. “We could have operated” without U.S. assistance, he said, “but not with the same effectiveness.”
One unit dependent on CIA aid, according to the testimony of former DAS officials in depositions, was the National and International Observations Group.
Set up to root out ties between foreign operatives and Colombian guerrillas, it turned its attention to the Supreme Court after magistrates began investigating the president’s cousin, then-Sen. Mario Uribe, said a former director, German Ospina, in a deposition to prosecutors. The orders came “from the presidency; they wanted immediate results,” Ospina told prosecutors.
Another unit that operated for eight months in 2005, the Group to Analyze Terrorist Organization Media, assembled dossiers on labor leaders, broke into their offices and videotaped union activists. The United States provided equipment and tens of thousands of dollars, according to an internal DAS report, and the unit’s members regularly met with an embassy official they remembered as “Chris Sullivan.”
“When we were advancing on certain activities, he would go to see how we were advancing,” Jose Gabriel Jimenez, a former analyst in the unit, said during a court hearing.
The CIA declined to comment on any specific allegations or the description of its relationship with the DAS provided by Colombian officials. “The three letters CIA get thrown into the mix on a lot of things, and by a lot of people. That doesn’t mean that allegations about the agency are anything more than that,” said a U.S. intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
As initial DAS revelations emerged in the Colombian media during late summer 2009, then-U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield called an embassy-wide meeting and asked which U.S. agencies represented were working with the DAS, according to a secret State Department cable released by WikiLeaks. Representatives from eight agencies raised their hands — including the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. All agencies, Brownfield reported in the Sept. 9 cable, “reaffirmed that they had no knowledge of or connection to the illegal activity and agreed to continue reducing their exposure to the agency.”
Brownfield, in subsequent meetings with Uribe and other officials, urged the government to get out in front of the disclosures and warned that they could compromise the U.S.-Colombia partnership.
“If another DAS scandal erupted, our Plan B was to terminate all association with DAS. Immediately,” Brownfield reported telling Francisco Santos, Uribe’s vice president, and DAS Director Felipe Munoz on Sept. 16, 2009.
Still, the relationship continued for an additional seven months. In April 2010, Brownfield announced that all U.S. funds previously directed to the DAS would henceforth go to Colombia’s national police. Today, the 51-year-old DAS, with 6,000 employees, multiple roles and an annual budget of $220 million, still limps along. But Munoz has been under investigation, as have four other former DAS directors.
Uribe, speaking through his lawyer, Jaime Granados, declined a request for an interview. But the former president has denied that he oversaw illegal activities and said officials from his government were being persecuted politically. Four of his top aides are under investigation, and his chief of staff, Bernardo Moreno, is jailed and awaiting trial on conspiracy and other charges.
Years of trouble
Interviews with former U.S. officials and evidence surfacing in the DAS investigation show that the agency has for years committed serious crimes, a propensity for illegal actions not unknown to embassy officials.
The first DAS director in Uribe’s presidency, Jorge Noguera — whom the U.S. Embassy in 2005 considered “pro-U.S. and an honest technocrat” and recommended to be a member of Interpol for Latin America, according to WikiLeaks cables — is on trial and accused of having helped hit men assassinate union activists. Last year, prosecutors accused another former DAS director of having helped plan the 1989 assassination of front-running presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galan.
Myles Frechette, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 1994 to 1997, said that even in his tenure American officials believed that DAS units were tainted by corruption and linked to traffickers. But he said the embassy needed a partner to develop intelligence on drug smugglers and guerrillas.
“All the people who worked with me at the embassy said to me, ‘You can’t really trust the DAS,’ ” said Frechette. adding that he thinks the DAS has some of the hallmarks of a criminal enterprise.
Several senior U.S. diplomats posted to the embassy in more recent years said they had no knowledge that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies were involved in DAS dirty tricks, but all said it would not surprise them.
“There were concerns about some kinds of activities, but also a need in the name of U.S. interests to preserve the relationship,” said one diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I’m reasonably confident our support was correct.”
Duque is a freelance journalist based in Bogota, Colombia. Correspondent Juan Forero, also based in Bogota, contributed to this report.
© The Washington Post Company
LAND YOU LOVE call to action: Please send in a photo and support Colombians who are reclaiming their lands!
Please join FOR in supporting Colombians returning from displacement...
More than five million people in Colombia have been forced to leave the land that is most dear to them. In this year alone, 15 leaders who were struggling to have their lands returned to them have been assassinated.
From September 30 to October 4, the city of Cali, Colombia, will celebrate the National Congress on Land, Territory and Sovereignty, in which indigenous, Afro-Colombian, popular, social, and human rights organizations will work to liberate, decide, and legislate on the issues that Colombian society faces.
As international accompaniers of various social movements in Colombia -- many of which are taking part in the National Congress on Land, Territory and Sovereignty -- the Fellowship of Reconciliation believes that the Colombian government is not doing enough to protect the people who are reclaiming their lands.
We are asking you to show your support and solidarity by demanding that the state provide the necessary guarantees for these communities to exercise their legitimate right to return to or stay on their lands without putting their lives at risk.
During the month of September, help us flood the Colombian government and U.S. embassy with photos of the land you love and this message of hope: Every Colombian deserves to live without fear and with dignity on the land she or he loves.
How to participate
Copy and paste the Spanish version of the message below into an email of your own.
In the "To:" field, include both of the following email addresses:
Vice President: contactovicepresidencia@presidencia.gov.co
Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development: despachoministro@minagricultura.gov.co
In the "Cc:" field, include:
U.S. Ambassador to Colombia: AmbassadorB@state.gov
A copy to FOR: landyoulove@forusa.org
Attach a photo of the land you love.
Hit send!
Spread the word! Forward this email to your friends and family, "like" our Facebook page, write about it on your blog, and talk about it with your friends. Write to us at landyoulove@forusa.org if you have any questions.
Please send the Spanish message far below. First, one translated to English for all to read...
Our message, in English (for reading)
Subject line: For the protection of land
To Whom It May Concern:
My name is ____(your name)____ and I am from the United States. In the context of the National Congress on Land, Territory and Sovereignty and considering the current situation in Colombia, I am writing to express my deep concern about the safety of people in Colombia who are working to reclaim the land they have been displaced from. In the past year, 15 people who attempted to take back their lands were assassinated. I urge the Colombian government to guarantee the rights of these leaders and communities through truth, justice and comprehensive reparations as defined by the communities themselves and without an increase in militarization. I also hope that the Colombian government not only guarantees the physical security of these communities, but also the economic security by supporting the local economy that small farmers depend on.
I am attaching a photo of the land I love, representing my hope that every Colombian lives without fear and with dignity on the land he or she loves.
Sincerely,
____(your name)____
Our message, in Spanish (for copying and pasting)
Subject line: Por la protección de la tierra
Estimados Señores:
Yo soy ____(your name)____ de los Estados Unidos. En el marco del Congreso Nacional de Tierras, Territorios y Soberanías y por la situación actual del país, quiero manijfestar mi profunda preocupación por la situación de riesgo de la gente Colombiana quien está trabajando para reclamar sus tierras de las cuales ha sido desplazada. En lo que va de año han sido asesinados 15 líderes de procesos de restitución de tierras. Urgo a las autoridades colombianas garantizar condiciones de seguridad a líderes y comunidades atraves de un proceso de verdad, justicia y reparaciones integrales definidas por las comunidades mismas sin incrementar la militarización. Además para facilitar el retorno sugiero que contemplen proyectos productivos orientados al fortalecimiento de las pequeñas economías campesinas y garantías en materia de derechos en el campo colombiano.
En adjunto mando una foto de la tierra que camino yo para representar mi esperanza que cada Colombiano/a pueda vivir sin miedo y con dignidad en la tierra que el/ella camina.
Atentamente,
____(your name)____
More than five million people in Colombia have been forced to leave the land that is most dear to them. In this year alone, 15 leaders who were struggling to have their lands returned to them have been assassinated.
From September 30 to October 4, the city of Cali, Colombia, will celebrate the National Congress on Land, Territory and Sovereignty, in which indigenous, Afro-Colombian, popular, social, and human rights organizations will work to liberate, decide, and legislate on the issues that Colombian society faces.
As international accompaniers of various social movements in Colombia -- many of which are taking part in the National Congress on Land, Territory and Sovereignty -- the Fellowship of Reconciliation believes that the Colombian government is not doing enough to protect the people who are reclaiming their lands.
We are asking you to show your support and solidarity by demanding that the state provide the necessary guarantees for these communities to exercise their legitimate right to return to or stay on their lands without putting their lives at risk.
During the month of September, help us flood the Colombian government and U.S. embassy with photos of the land you love and this message of hope: Every Colombian deserves to live without fear and with dignity on the land she or he loves.
How to participate
Copy and paste the Spanish version of the message below into an email of your own.
In the "To:" field, include both of the following email addresses:
Vice President: contactovicepresidencia@presidencia.gov.co
Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development: despachoministro@minagricultura.gov.co
In the "Cc:" field, include:
U.S. Ambassador to Colombia: AmbassadorB@state.gov
A copy to FOR: landyoulove@forusa.org
Attach a photo of the land you love.
Hit send!
Spread the word! Forward this email to your friends and family, "like" our Facebook page, write about it on your blog, and talk about it with your friends. Write to us at landyoulove@forusa.org if you have any questions.
Please send the Spanish message far below. First, one translated to English for all to read...
Our message, in English (for reading)
Subject line: For the protection of land
To Whom It May Concern:
My name is ____(your name)____ and I am from the United States. In the context of the National Congress on Land, Territory and Sovereignty and considering the current situation in Colombia, I am writing to express my deep concern about the safety of people in Colombia who are working to reclaim the land they have been displaced from. In the past year, 15 people who attempted to take back their lands were assassinated. I urge the Colombian government to guarantee the rights of these leaders and communities through truth, justice and comprehensive reparations as defined by the communities themselves and without an increase in militarization. I also hope that the Colombian government not only guarantees the physical security of these communities, but also the economic security by supporting the local economy that small farmers depend on.
I am attaching a photo of the land I love, representing my hope that every Colombian lives without fear and with dignity on the land he or she loves.
Sincerely,
____(your name)____
Our message, in Spanish (for copying and pasting)
Subject line: Por la protección de la tierra
Estimados Señores:
Yo soy ____(your name)____ de los Estados Unidos. En el marco del Congreso Nacional de Tierras, Territorios y Soberanías y por la situación actual del país, quiero manijfestar mi profunda preocupación por la situación de riesgo de la gente Colombiana quien está trabajando para reclamar sus tierras de las cuales ha sido desplazada. En lo que va de año han sido asesinados 15 líderes de procesos de restitución de tierras. Urgo a las autoridades colombianas garantizar condiciones de seguridad a líderes y comunidades atraves de un proceso de verdad, justicia y reparaciones integrales definidas por las comunidades mismas sin incrementar la militarización. Además para facilitar el retorno sugiero que contemplen proyectos productivos orientados al fortalecimiento de las pequeñas economías campesinas y garantías en materia de derechos en el campo colombiano.
En adjunto mando una foto de la tierra que camino yo para representar mi esperanza que cada Colombiano/a pueda vivir sin miedo y con dignidad en la tierra que el/ella camina.
Atentamente,
____(your name)____
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