I ended up staying in the community and/or Apartadó for almost an extra two weeks in order to accompany my teammate AJ while she made daily visits to the hospital for injections to
treat leptospirosis, typhoid fever and bacteria. AJ has been in Colombia since mid-November, about two weeks longer than I have, but has spent nearly the entire time in the community. She appears to be on the mend, and is now on vacation in the US, but her sickness was a reminder that simply surviving in the community is a major task. Mayra, who arrived just over a month and a half ago and has been in the community for just a month, now also has leptospirosis.(here are the women of FOR representing at AJ's bedside. That is an iv of leptospirosis-typhoidfever-fighting-rehydrating-stuff in her arm)
Political Violence:
When I first got here and started to read about the almost never-ending violence in Colombia, and to talk with those most affected by this violence, the mothers of the disappeared, people who have had to flee their homes, I often thought: well, at least the US doesn’t have this level of violence. This was reflected in my father’s column he wrote about my work here, where he commented that though there had been some mud-slinging in the Hilary Clinton Senate reelection campaign, a least no one is physically harmed.
When I read Stephen Dudley’s book “Walking Ghosts,” which details the genocide conducted in the 1990s against the leftist political party “Unidad Popular,” or Popular Unity, in which over 3,000 members, organizers and politicians were killed, what struck me was that when the genocide started, the party didn’t notice what was happening, because political violence has become so common. Can you imagine in the US it going “under the radar” that 10s then 100s of, say, Green Party members are being killed?
It is an easy, and I think almost natural, gut reaction to think that something must be wrong with Colombia and maybe even Colombians, that this violence is so rampant. It feels like the value on human life has been degraded so thoroughly that there must be something broken in the social fabric of the country.
But then...you dig a little deeper, read a couple articles, and turns out that this source of this violence, those who literally contracted killings, sold arms, provided trainings to these killers, are Americans. The most recent revelations indicate that two American companies,
Drummond and Chiquita, are behind much of the violence. Chiquita, formerly known as United Fruit Company, is implicated specifically in Urabá, the area where San José de Apartadó is located. They are accused of paying to have union leaders disappeared, and directly paying off the paramilitary groups to do their bidding. So, though our soil goes largely untouched in terms of political violence, we are effectively exporting it.Reflections on Virginia Tech
Almost a month ago I started this blog entry contrasting the violence in Colombia to that in the United States, and talking about how the US, while peaceful overall, has actually introduced and escalated much of the violence in Colombia and in other parts of the world, so that why we don’t have to see it on a daily basis, we have participated in it nonetheless. And then, just as I was about to post it, I heard about the tragic Virginia Tech massacre, and decided to wait.
In Colombia, there is a war that causes the staggering violence, so even though there is no end in sight to the violence here, it does feel like it at least has a logic. That there is political pressure that can be mounted to end the violence, that systems of accountability can be designed by strengthening institutions - somehow makes it feel ultimately surmountable. The Virginia Tech massacre feels scarier in some ways because it is not clear how or if the causes can be addressed.
Ultimately, though, the violence in these two places does feel linked to me. To me, US policy both actively and passively promotes violence, and exacerbates already difficult situations. Would the Virginia Tech massacre have happened if we had strict gun laws which prohibited the gunman from attaining those guns? Maybe, but his easy access to so many weapons and ammo certainly facilitated the carnage. Would Colombians still be engaged in a civil war without the US government funding and training one side? And without Americans’ consumption of cocaine, which gives money to both sides of the conflict? Probably, but again the levels of violence and the loss of human life would certainly not be as devastating.
