Back in Bog...

A full 7 years after starting this blog, I am back in Bogotá. I wanted to reactivate this blog in order to be able to read about what I had done all those years ago...

Lowell Sun Article

Her 'moral imperative': Stand up for justice and rights in Colombia

By Bridget Scrimenti, bscrimenti@lowellsun.co

Article Last Updated: 01/14/2008 11:31:00 AM EST

They planned to harvest cocoa beans.

About eight men, women and children were going to work in the fields. Some even started a seven-hour hike into Colombia's countryside.

But their attempt to gather food came to a sudden and violent end.

The families were viciously attacked and killed by men yielding machetes.

"They killed eight people, three of whom were children, with machetes," said Janice Gallagher. "For me as a U.S. citizen -- if I could do anything to stop that from happening again, I felt a moral imperative to do so."

The murders prompted Gallagher, 30, to spend the past year as a human-rights activist in Colombia, working for the nonprofit and interfaith organization, Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Click here to read the rest of the article

returned.

I landed almost two weeks ago in Boston, and am finally writing what I guess is my last official blog. I was prompted, finally, to do this because I wanted to let people know about the NPR program On-Point, which today discussed the drug war. I called in, and talked really briefly about Colombian human rights at the very end of the show - I am the last caller. The show is interesting, in that it takes as a given the failure of the drug war, and mulls over some interesting alternatives:

For a list of NPR stations that broadcast the program with the time that it will be re-broadcast (most stations will have it sometime this evening) go to:
http://www.wbur.org/syndication/?program=On-Point

To download the podcast, or listen to it on-line, go to: http://www.npr.org/templates/rss/podcast.php?id=510053 - Today's program is not uploaded yet, but should be soon!

Janice goes back to school...
Transition times are inherently tough: changes of job, friends, home and language can each be taxing, and all together it feels like I am ripping up some pretty delicate roots right now that I carefully laid this year in Colombia- though returning to the US feels like returning to some old growth forest support as well.

This transition has been particularly strange for me, as I landed and immediately had to throw myself into brushing up on my high school math and learning arcane vocabulary in preparation for the GRE: the graduate school entrance exams. I am applying to PhD programs for next fall in Political Science in order to continue to study NGOs, human rights, and particularly the Colombian road to peace, and to try and answer some of the many questions that I have generated this year.

Unlike my last blog, I will not try to make larger meaning of what my entire experience meant here - perhaps that will come later. But I did want to share some of the images and snapshots of my life from the past couple of months:

Return to Promisión:
After being away for an average of ten years, this September about 25 former residents of the small village of Promisión, located several hours drive and a five-hour walk from the city of Medellín, made their first ventures back to the land and homes they had left beinhd. They had been forced to leave when paramilitary violence claimed the lives of several members of their community. It was made clear to them that if they stayed on their land, they too would suffer the same fate. Most of the residents had fled to the outskirts of Medellín, where they encountered violence and poverty. Despite the fact that there is little left of their former houses, almost all of the families that were forced to leave now want to return to their land. One resident explained to me that she had already lost one son to the violence of the displacement slums outside of Medellín, and even if it was still dangerous in La Promisión, it was worth the risk to return.

The local and regional government officials have been cautiously supportive of the return: the land officially belongs to the families, and after much work on the part of the ACA (the Peasant Association of Antioquia) they now have the documentation to prove it. Local government officials have given money for the reconstruction of homes, and there is hope that they will have electricity by January. There have not been reports lately of paramilitary presence in the community, but the community is carefully waiting to see whether it is indeed safe to return. FOR accompanied this first "preparatory visit" to the land, where the residents concentrated on clearing paths to the community and planting some subsistence crops so that when they return, they will have something to eat. It has taken me a while to post these pictures partially because I got very ill after spending this week in houses with no running water, toilets, beds, or mosquito nets. That said, it was a privilege to be with people whose perseverance in finding a better life for their families brought them to this place.

Clothes hang outside one of the houses that the community hopes to return to live in.

A woman in the "city," a five-hour walk from the community, peers out her window at the campesinios walking with all their belongings on their backs to Promisión.

Below, a group of Medellín residents protest the lack of public services (electricity, drinking water, plumbing) available in Medellín's poorer neighborhoods where displaced personas are concentrated. This rally, which is conceptualized as a carnival in celebration of resistance, was organized by the "Red Juvenil," or Youth Network, of Medellín, one of the groups FOR accompanies.



Here, the ACA participates in an international tribunal on displacement. At the tribunal, held in Colombia's Senate, international judges condemned the Colombian government's role in causing people to have to leave their land, and asked for the Colombian government, multinational corporations, and the governments of developed nations to cease the actions which have caused displacement. Further, they asked the Colombian state to bring to justice those that have caused the displacement of about four million Colombians - nearly 10% of the population.

Walking for Human Rights
There is a common form of protest which feels distinctively, if not uniquely, Colombian called a caminata, or walk. This October I did my second caminata with the Peace Community of San José de Partadó: we walked from 8am until the late afternoon (about 18 miles) in order to commemorate the community leaders and the friends of the community that had been killed recently, mostly by paramilitary forces. Many residents of the community couldn't come because of the torrential downpours and subsequent rising of the river, but several hundred of us, including a large number of representatives from the neighboring indigenous community crossed the high rivers on horseback, and came together to walk to the small city of Apartadó. We convened at the bus terminal, where two of the four killings occurred: the killings were allegedly carried out in full daylight by paramilitaries while the police turned their back. The marchers then held a memorial service for the victims in the middle of the day in the center of this busy market and terminal, presumably in full view of the same police and paramilitary members that had caused the deaths of their friends.

The picture below is of a community leader attaching flowers to the fence of this bus terminal in memorium of a friend of the community who was killed at the terminal this past July.













On the left, the banner reads "No more killing by the paramilitaries. No more killing by the public forces (police, military). No more killings by the guerrilla." On the right, children from the community pile into one of the buses that accompanied the caminata to get out of the rain and rest their feet.

One of the boys from the Community looks out the window of the bus on the road from the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó on the way to the small city of Apartadó.

Fútbol and Beer:
I finally went to a Colombian soccer game. Colombia is turning heads by performing better than almost anyone expected in the preliminary round of the two-year long competition for a spot in the next World Cup. I saw the second half of the Colombia-Venezuela game, which Colombia won 1-0, and learned the only three expressions one needs to intelligently reflect on a Colombian soccer game, none of which I feel comfortable putting into print here. Here, a giant beer tarp is released on top of fans.


...and this is the Central Plaza in Bogotá at sunset.

What's Next?
My future plans are uncertain as of now - I will spend until the end of January based out of Boston, where the generosity of friends and family have given me a place to say and a warm welcome. I plan to finish applying to graduate school, and to do some organizing for the upcoming Colombian Conscientious Objectors' visit to the US, and the American Youth Delegation to Colombia - which hopes to bring American youth involved in Conscientious Objection or resistance to the war to Colombia. I will be sending emails out about these upcoming events.

I hope to be back in Bogotá in late January for a vacation, and to perhaps continue work I have begun in Colombia during April and May. I will be posting to this blog again in the near future. Thanks so much to all of you who have accompanied me on my journey this year. Please do be in touch: janicekgallagher@yahoo.com

Por fin!

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.

Vivo!

Where to start? I have not given up on this blog...I have simply been on the roller coaster that is life in Colombia. After a month in the community, a blissful and busy couple weeks visiting friends and family in the US, a week in the CAMPO accompanying a group of campesinos returning to their land after almost 10 years away (and, consequently, returning to a place with no drinking water, mattresses, walls per se, mosquito nets...) and a full week in bed drenched in sweat and shaking with a combination of bacteria, parasites and amoebas pecking at my insides (during which I completed three decades of life and on my Big Day my body went into full rejection mode and made the Big Event of my Big Day crawling from bed to the living room, and falling asleep during Scrabble) I AM OK! Thanks everyone has sent me get-better wishes. They have been received and seem to be being heeded by the sickness Gods and Goddesses after much debate. I am behind on all work and play after vacationing, accompanying, and sickness, but will write again in the next couple days. with pictures. promise.

muddy

I am gifted with many strenghts, I suppose, but remarkable in just a few. I am a getting dirty superstar, as I was reminded yet again this week as I slipped and slid through the Urabá mud. I got to accompany in the campo this week - the thing most like what I imagined I would be doing in Colombia. This week I accompanied one of the weekly community work days, where about 50 community members transformed into human lawnmowers, machete-ing down about 25 acres of brush in an afternoon (so that grass could grown, and the community´s animals could graze). And despite my efforts to clean myself in the river, I came home with mud from feet to face. And I ran down the mountain from La Unión to La Holandita, trying to prove that all my hard-won Appalachian Trail-hiking skills hadn´t dissipated. With the help of an old mop transformed into hiking pole, I didn´t fall...but rather glided, squished and stomped my way through the high rivers and muddy downhills. I found mud inside my ear.

Obviously, I am enjoying my time in the campo. Next up: a group of embassies are visiting the community this week as a response to all of the recent attacks in order to raise the profile of the situation there with the Colombian government. I am heading home to visit friend Nikki Tim´s new baby, Charlotte Jane, in a little over a week!! Internet access is sporadic here, but I will try to post some pictures soon.

off again...

Well, what to say. It has been quite a change in...everything...since I last posted about my wonderful vacation. There was another policeman killed by the guerrilla in the area near the community this month, and three days later, on July 13th, another community Humanitarian Zone leader named Dairo Torres was taken off a public tranport vehicle and killed by paramilitaries. Since then there has been a high level of paramilitary activity reported in the area. There have also been police checkpoints right outside the community, and some hard interactions with the police around the rights of the community. In the meantime, the investigation into the robbery has stalled. I am headed out there now for a couple weeks, and then will return to the US for a quick visit to spend time with my childhood best friend's new baby and drop in on my family.

There continues to be interesting and stimulating work to do here in Bogotá, but I am ready to be back in the community for a while. City life everywhere is a grind, I think, and I am longing to be outside without so much pollution and to sleep and rise with the sun, rather than the beeping of cell phones and computer alerts.

I finally wrote up the piece I did about my accompaniment of the ACA, the Antioquia Peasants Association, which I will paste part of here. Hope you are all well - send some postive energy/prayers Colombia's way if you're so inclined...

Constructing a Peasant Movement: How to grow worms to make healthy soil
By Me, Janice Gallagher

How can small, rural farmers respond to the forces of global trade and climate change?
How is a campesino (peasant) movement built amidst war and threats of displacement?
What does economic solidarity look like in rural Colombia?

These were some of the many questions that led the Antioquia Peasant Association (ACA) to organize a week-long combination conference /tour /exchange in June with the Archdiocese of Santa Fe de Antioquia, a neighboring municipality. The ACA has worked for two years with farmers from seven different communities in Eastern Antioquia, an area that has been especially hard-hit by guerrilla and paramilitary violence, to figure out how to provide for themselves and their families in the midst of war. Part of the ACA’s strategy for assisting these farmers is to bring them face to face with other farmers who have faced similar circumstances to discuss how they have moved forward. The Archdiocese of Santa Fe de Antioquia has worked with farmers for 11 years in 26 communities and during this trip the two groups explored their answers to these big questions.

“With the FTA [Free Trade Agreement between the U.S. and Colombia] everything will be harder, which makes our struggle for self-sufficiency all the more important.”

In an environment where it is already incredibly difficult for small farmers to make ends meet, the ACA and Archdiocese believe that the approval of the FTA currently before Congress would make the situation of these small farmers infinitely harder. Resisting the passage of the FTA has been central political work for both the ACA and the Archdiocese. Yet, as one of the 22 campesinos on this trip said, “We can spend millions of pesos and hours protesting the policies of the state, but we also need to focus on how to feed ourselves.”

So what does this mean for them? Rather than changing which crops are planted based on the whims of the international market, the organizations believe that campesinos should produce the food they need to feed their families. Basing what to produce on the price of the crop is dangerous because prices might be high one year for, say, coffee, and by the time the crop yields fruit, the price might be half of what it was – not even enough to cover the cost that it took to produce it. Instead, the campesinos from both organizations focus on how to produce the staple crops they need to feed their families from very small plots of land. With the space left over, they produce things to sell locally. One farm we saw had every other terrace filled with onions to sell at a local market, and the other terraces held rice, beans, cilantro, tomatoes, and a cabbage-like green.

This idea that farming should benefit the farmers may seem simple, but it is a revolution in the way most agriculture has been carried out in this country and others. An integral part of this idea is that farming needs to be done sustainably. In this part of Colombia, this means growing worms in vitamin-rich food scraps to aerate the soil, using pig feces inside of a giant long and skinny plastic bag with a pipe attached to produce energy for the stove in the house, and making organic fertilizer from things already on the farm, rather than using harsh, expensive imported chemicals.

[To read the rest of Janice’s letter from the field, click here.]