Well, my recuperation and getting back to this blog has taken longer than I planned. The good news is that I am finally healthy, except for a constant sniffle brought on by the mold lurking in all of the corners of my current abode, FOR’s house in La Unión. The other exciting news is that today I played soccer as a member of La Union´s team, and it was really fun. It´s been years, and with my hiking shoes slipping and sliding all over the place, I proudly played boot ball with the ladies of La Union. We won: 3-1 against the indigenous team from down the road.
I have less than a month left in Colombia, and feel like it is time to make Big Insightful Realizations...so bear with me. I feel like I don´t know much about how I will view this experience in retrospect - What I do know is that I am looking forward to having time to process this experience. That I leave here in awe of most of the people I have met – from my tireless co-workers who somehow keep their energy and determination up in spite of sickness, robberies, scarce resources and trying circumstances, to the Colombian activists we work with who manage to get up every day and push for structural change, peace and justice in a country where the only certainty is that working for these things will endanger your and your family’s safety. I leave this year with a stronger faith in the human spirit - with a conviction that we can’t help but struggle for a better world for our children and our neighbors.
I also leave with a deeper understanding of how US foreign policy, drug consumption and lack of awareness about what is going on in Colombia make people’s daily lives here harder. I read a darkly-titled book recenty, “More Terrible than Death,” by Robin Kirk, a former Human Rights Watch employee who spent over ten years in Colombia. She encapsulated, for me, the impact of the drug trade in Colombia: the profits from cocaine are “astronomical - $53 billion annually, calculated on the basis of the average US street price of $175 per gram of cocaine. That was five times the amount of foreign aid spent on the entire African continent” (Kirk, 240). That money fuels and arms both sides of the conflict, and makes the price that innocent civilians pay here astronomically higher.
Some other ruminations…
Continuing struggle in the community
After community leader Francisco Puerta was killed in May, we accompanied community leaders in a series of high-level meetings. I was nervous about how we and the community leaders would respond, interested in what the embassy and government officials would say, and honestly a little bit excited about meeting with high-level diplomats because I hoped they could really help the situation. After about ten meetings, most of this excitement, anxiety and interest wore off. The meetings were almost scripted, with everyone expressing concern but not committing to any action. After FOR was robbed in June, and another community Humanitarian Zone leader, Dairo Torres, was killed in July, we did other rounds of high-level meetings, visiting embssadors and Colombiam government officials. This time, I was tired of making the multitude of phone calls and emails necessary to set up these meetings. They hadn’t prevented Dairo’s murder, and I didn’t see what good they would do without a different strategy, or some more political capital. And then we had the meetings, replayed remarkably similar scripts many times with the same people. and maybe it made some difference. And maybe it didn’t.
To me, this is a little bit of what I’ve learned about working for peace amidst war. It is a grind in the way almost any job can become. What seems like it could never become routine or rote – like the reaction to the killing of a community leader – becomes routine because of necessity. The meetings are a vital part of keeping the community alive when seen as a whole, and the community has been having them for ten years and will keep having them indefinitely. The ability and energy it takes to keep up this struggle – from the grueling work of farming, to mourning leaders while orchestrating a political reaction to them – are incredible, and I have so much respect for the leaders who do this year in and year out.
Che’s gone...yup. For 40 years.
We had gone to a meeting on the morning of October 9th, and we returned to our
neighborhood restaurant for lunch. It is a small, cheap place about 3 blocks from the entrance of the Universidad Nacional. We heard papas (directly translated as potatoes but in this context small, homemade bombs that anarchist, hooded students and hooded other people like to throw at police) going off when we were several blocks away. We proceeded to the restaurant without thinking too much of it. While we were eating, we started to itch our eyes and tear up as the tear gas from the protest wafted into the restaurant. We finished up, walked home, and struggled to open our door as the tear gas flooded the first couple floors of the apartment.So...that’s the story. We went upstairs, didn’t wash our burning eyes (water makes the effects of tear gas worse), and tried to work in our apartment/office and ignore the constant bombing sounds and tear gas remnants.
A couple notes, though: First, like the boy I photographed earlier this year eating a sandwich right next to where the police confronted student protesters with high-powered water hoses, we did not stop our lunch or consider leaving the area, nor did we run to interview students about why they were protesting. This has now become fairly common for me and my office-mates, and I was more annoyed by the inconvenience of the tear gas and interruptions of the bomb sounds than curious about the roots of the social dissent. Second, when we did ask what was going on, we were told that the students were commemorating the 40th anniversary of Che’s death. Hmmm. OK. Not to diminish the importance of Che or his death, but it’s hard to imagine 1) how throwing homemade bombs at police could possibly accomplish anything, and how it is an appropriate commemoration of Che’s death. 2) It is hard to imagine why, exactly, the police find it necessary to confront the students. What are they fighting over? The students aren’t going to storm the city, and if they were, they could just go out another exit of the university. Why have both the police and the students chosen to stand at the main entrance of the university and throw small bombs, tear gas and water at each other? A Colombian friend we were with responded that it was tradition. That that’s simply what is done.
For me, that goes a long way in explaining the Colombian armed conflict. It has become simply what is done. Although at first, as with commemoration of Che’s death, it may have been about Big Ideas and actual questions about the equality of the distribution of wealth and democratic representation, it is now a tradition of war. For 40 years, the two sides have been fighting. It doesn’t seem like either side really thinks they can win, neither side is really interested in negotiating, so they keep fighting. In the meantime, the average Colombian pays a high price for this tradition, and the US – with its military aid, and more than anything with the money that it pours into Colombia through its consumption of cocaine – ensures that both sides are armed to the teeth.
Here´s what Robin Kirk, author of ¨More Terrible than Death, had to say about the causes of Colombia’s ongoing conflict, p.212:
In my notebooks, I have written down dozens of possible motives I have heard for Colombia’s war, none completely convincing. One farmer once said to me that the war was rich people’s way of grabbing poor people’s land. For him, the terror waged by the paramilitaries was an immense and nefarious real estate swindle, meant to force people from their farms, drive prices down, and grab land for agribusinesses. He described guerrillas as his only hope, since with their weapons they could resist these efforts by threatening and killing land speculators...A police major in the Colombian Antinarcotics Police told me that the blame lay with the drug traffickers. They wanted to control Colombia, to convert it into a narco-state tailored to their business needs...A noted Colombian economist and politician, Miguel Antonio Caro, once wrote that in reality, Colombia has no authentic political life, only ‘inherited hates’... The point of Colombia’s war eludes me.”
217: Writer Antonio Caballero once write that despite a war that intensifies each year, nothing actually happens: Nada de nada. Because of that, things worsen day by day. ‘The country aflame, rampant misery, the putrefaction of the political class, the disintegration of our institutions, the complete lack of security for our lives and possessions, flooding rivers, the proliferation of criminal mafias, the extinction of our wildlife, all are inevitable consequences of our stubborn conviction that here, nothing happens. The country comes apart in our fingers, over our heads, under our feet, because of us, precisely because we want nothing to happen, and when it happens, we deny it, saying ‘It’s over, it’s finished, ya pasó.’”
Now to go back up the mountain…I expect to be in Bogota sometime in the next week, and will write more then.
