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.

My job in photos

I took a picture about once an hour for a day and made a slideshow to show more or less the day to day of accompaniment work.

Their best rifle is the media

"I was in my bed when an explosion rocked our house." I tell of combat on the edge of the Peace Community, and analyze how the military reported on it. Meanwhile, community kids carry on in a party. Filmed on October 30, 2010. If you'd rather read about this, look at the previous post.

Way too close combat

Two weeks ago it was 7:30am and I was in my bed when an explosion rocked our house. I decided to get out of bed. Heavy combat immediately ensued on the hill immediately adjacent to the village we live in including shots from rifles, AK-47s, M-60s (a type of machine gun) and occasional grenades. The combat on the “Hill of the Cross” (named after the cross placed as a memorial for six peace community leaders massacred by paramilitaries in 2000) between guerrilla and military forces continued for the next twenty minutes as I and my teammate scurried around making contact with community leaders, our team in Bogotá and Colombian military officials. While most of the gunfire and combat came from the far side of the hill, enough shots were fired from the side facing our house to induce wincing.

While I did not expect to be woken up by the war on this particular morning, the combat was not unexpected. For a while now the Colombian military has had an encampment on the other side of the Hill of the Cross. For the past four months the nearby military encampment has come up in conversations with peace community members, always accompanied by a worried prophesy that such a close guerrilla target would eventually bring combat and risk to the village. It was only three months ago that for these very reasons the community removed a trench the military had built much closer to the community on top of the Hill of the Cross. Thankfully, no community members were hurt in the combat, but it’s scary to think how much worse it could have been had the community not removed that trench.

The crazy part of this story though, is not that there was combat (we live in a war zone), it’s the news stories that came out the day after. Various regional radio stations reported the following: “In the military’s efforts to protect the peace community from ‘the terrorists’ a soldier was killed when he stepped on a mine near the peace community.” Rest assured that the military was the main, if not only, source of these news stories. The military’s report of the incident via the radio stations completely twists the truth of what happened to support three common discourses of the state.

These news stories paint a picture of the peace community and civil society as targeted by the guerrilla with the military as their sacrificing saviors. The military would have everyone believe that had it not been for their presence the guerrilla would have attacked the peace community. In reality it was the military encampment that drew the guerrilla attack that put us all at risk.

At the same time that they work to portray themselves as the protectors of the peace community, they simultaneously insinuate that the peace community is somehow responsible for the death of a soldier. Given the history of the state’s efforts to politically slander the peace community as being at best manipulated by the guerrilla, stating through radio broadcasts that the mine was near the peace community is enough to insinuate to the residents of this region that peace community members were involved in placing the mine.

Lastly, these news stories in their complete absence of any mention of combat or a guerrilla attack reflect the desire of the military to prove to Colombia and the international community that the war is over, the guerrilla has been defeated, and the massive militarization of civil society has worked. While the combat was happening we called an official of the Colombian military to remind them of our presence. As we were worrying about stray bullets this official tried to placate us by saying that we shouldn’t worry because the combat was happening for our safety and that it posed no risk to us. A day after the combat, we asked another military official for their report of what happened. After checking with a superior for what information he could give he reported, “There was an inconvenience with an armed group. But there’s nothing to be worried about. There were no deaths or injuries.” The military reported no deaths although it had already gone out that morning on several radio stations that a soldier had been killed after stepping on a mine. This clearly shows what the military is willing to report to the international community to maintain their discourse.

When I talked to some of my neighbors in the peace community about the news stories they responded with anger and frustration, but not with surprise. One of my neighbors in response to me venting about these blatant and twisting lies shrugged, “Well, that’s what they always do.” The news stories fit right in line with the discourse the military and state has used for the past several years nationally: that the military’s presence means security for the civilian population while at the same time accusing that civilian population (and especially human rights defenders) of being aligned with the guerrilla, all the while feeding the international community the idea that their work has succeeded in ending the war. The accusations and misinformation broadcast through mass media, which causes innumerable damage to the peace community and other human rights defenders, has become the new weaponry of the Colombian state to do away with those they stigmatize as the enemy. As one of my neighbors commented, “The radio is the military’s biggest rifle.”

My girlfriend and displacement

h#g-:;oh – That is all the text that Microsoft Word could recover from my wonderful blog entry after the electricity went out. It also happens to be what I said when I realized I had lost my blog entry. This information will most likely not change how you read this blog, but I just want everyone to know that I’m not happy about it. On with the blog…

Amanda, my girlfriend, recently came to visit. She’s lovely. For a time we were in and around Medellín, one of the largest cities in Colombia. While there we stayed in a cabaña at a homely, peaceful retreat center that is typically used by catholic monks on spiritual retreats. The retreat center and we were taken care of by Antonia, Pablo and their family (not their real names).

Amanda and I, while busying ourselves with stuff recently reunited couples do, found out the retreat center had a steam room (I guess Catholic monks find sweating together useful). Antonia asked Amanda and me if we wanted to join her and Pablo for a time in the steam room. So we spent some time soaking (and watching each other soak) in our own juices and chatting. There with our sweat flowing into the same drain Antonia and Pablo told us of how they had to leave their farm in southern Colombia after receiving threats from guerrillas and how they had been waiting two years with 30 other displaced families to be given a small parcel of land by the government.

I was glad that Amanda could hear some of Antonia and Pablo’s story (all the better in a steam room) because it gave a personal example of the reality of millions in Colombia. Many people now in the states are familiar that there’s an “issue” with displacement in Colombia. A few may even know that with 4 million Colombia has the second largest internally displaced population in the world (1st is Sudan). But I haven’t heard many people recognize that so many campesinos being forced of their land translates into a nationwide, highly illegal, informal agrarian counter-reform. Along with the pain it brings those it affects, displacement is dramatically changing who owns the land in Colombia.

In some cases folks flee their land due to threats from guerrilla, paramilitaries and/or militaries and other people take advantage of their absence to occupy their land. Recently however, a handful of large oil palm growers were subpoenaed by the attorney general’s office for contracting paramilitaries to forcefully displace small farmers to make space for their oil palms (palm oil is found in most supermarket products). Although the subpoenas are recent, this practice is not. For years, small farmers have struggled to return to their lands only to find it suddenly enveloped in large banana or oil palm plantations. Where I live there is a lot of concern that increasing violent pressure to displace will come to peace community members and other small farmers to make room for coal mines, oil palms, or large dams.

Its this horrible, terrible, overwhelmingly saddening and seemingly inevitable trend that makes the work of the peace community, whose principles of neutrality and solidarity prevent displacement, and the Association of Antioquian Farmers, who assist farmers returning to their land, (and our accompaniment of them) so important. Most of the peace community members I live with have displaced and returned to their land various times with the help of the rest of the community. The peace community however, continues to be affected by this agrarian counter-reform. The largest village in the peace community is itself a displacement site that people moved to in 2005 after the state put a police post in their previous village. They haven’t been able to return to that site unfortunately because the state (i.e. police and military) maintains a strong presence there (thus making holding principles of neutrality impossible).

Along with the pain and loss of desplacement we need to see it as an agrarian counter-reform. I hate agrarian counter-reform. It makes me fear the future of Colombian. What happens to the campesinos displace to a city economy and culture? Who owns the land once they leave? Who are the ones that will control Colombia's food supply? I hope that the efforts the peace community and many other communities and organizations can stem the tide a bit. I hope that FOR’s work can make it safer for them as they do so.

Here are a photos of my time with Amanda and just life in the peace community: