A free trade agreement cometh

Alright, Obama is about to submit the Colombia free trade agreement to Congress who is about to approve it and I don't have a lot of time right now, so I'm just going to list six reasons I think the free trade agreement would be a terrible idea. If you want a fuller argument, it shouldn't hard to find with a little google searching.

1. A peace community leader recently predicted that the free trade agreement would be the worst thing to happen to Colombia in the last 500 years.
2. Colombia can easily produce enough food for all its people. It doesn't make sense environmentally or economically for them to buy corn, meat, or milk that has flown thousands of miles.
3. Clinton on the Free Trade pact he signed with Haiti: "It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas , but it has not worked. It was a mistake. . . . I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."
4. In 2010, 51 labor unionists were killed; the same number killed in 2008 when Obama vowed to oppose the free trade agreement due to unprecedented violence against organized labor.
5. The free trade agreement is based on an economic philosophy that believes that small rural farmers, such as those who I lived with the peace community, are enefficient and should not exist in a well functioning economy.
6. Chiqutia Brands has plead guilty to paying both guerrilla and paramilitary groups for "security services". The free trade agreement would exacerbate this dynamic as it invites more multinational corporations into a context where the armed groups and their services are still very present.
   

For those of you not so word inclined, here is a venn diagram:

Please get involved with the state-side movement to stop this trade agreement.

Rosa's life in photos

I convinced Rosa (a nice, but not real name), one of my neighbors and peace community member, to let me follow her around for a day and take a picture about once an hour. As a result, I give you a window into an average day for a Colombian campesino woman.

The Struggle Sucks

I’ve been in Bogota now for a month with my own apartment, an office job, and beer. So granted, I feel very distanced from the peace community. Recently while walking along a Bogota street and talking with Liza, a fellow FOR worker, I realized one of the very important things my time in the peace community taught me. My time in the peace community was not easy. I always enjoyed it on a very deep level and many times on a surface, smiley level, but the last word I would apply to my time there is easy. The knowledge that multiple armed groups walk through the jungle around you, the constant possibility of nearby combat, and the ever present hostility of military on the road or path to the village, among other things, made it so that a part of me was happy to be leaving that zone and life. The community’s efforts to continue to live in the zone I have left and resist/survive the physical, economic and psychological pressures is the ‘struggle’ I speak of in my blog title.

On one hand, I was more vulnerable to the pressures of living in the peace community because I didn’t grow up building the defenses for that context. But overall, I think it was way easier for me because I always knew it was temporary. I had the powerful psychological tool of option, of being able to leave if I wanted. After being in the community for 10 months and experiencing my own times of depression, exhaustion and grief I can better understand, on an emotional level, that ‘the struggle’ of those that live in the peace community is, well…. a struggle. It’s hard, often painful, and necessitates an incredibly high level of commitment and personal attachment to carry it through.

A leader of the peace community would often say that those who struggle for a bit are good, and those who struggle for a long time are very good, but what is really necessary are people who struggle for their whole lives (which he has done). I feel like I barely made it through 10 months of being with a struggle, let alone in it. I cannot imagine a whole life of struggle.

When I first wrote the title to this blog I had no idea what a struggle meant. Before, to me, a struggle was an exciting story full of graffiti, marches, people power, powerful Spanish protest songs and was victorious. For this, struggling or being with a struggle seemed like an adventure to me. So often we hear of the successes, power and glory of peoples’ struggles that we are being distanced from how much struggling sucks. Now fully understanding the emotional and often physical cost of being in a struggle, I see it’s not something you do for fun. Deep commitment to a cause, often because the cause is your own well-being, is the only way someone, knowing what they’re in for, decides they want to fight, to resist, to struggle.

And for your viewing pleasure, a funny picture.