Colombia: May 2007 (Opon)

Report of the Christian Peacemaker Teams delegation to Colombia
May 23 to June 5, 2007
by Mark Powell

From the concrete water tower in La Florida you can see clearly out to the lake that stretches like a dark mirror to the far horizon. Five us sit here, reclined or flat on our backs beneath a milky full moon that keeps slipping free from reefs of drifting clouds. Stewart, one our guides on this Christian Peacemaker Team delegation, smokes and speaks in a low voice not unlike the tumbling of a dryer. We are talking about service, our place and complicity in and with the world, about walking out the call of liberation theology.
“It isn’t so much liberation theology,” Stewart says, “as liberating theology.”
He takes a pull on his cigarette, a bright pin-prick in the steel gray night. Below us, we can hear the rest of our delegation beneath mosquito nets and tents in an open air school, abandoned now, laughing and talking. To the south of the school is thick bush, maculate and impossibly green. To the north is a string of five or six government pre-fab houses, ugly blocks—“crematoriums,” we will hear them called—standing all but empty and facing a rising river. A soccer field is overgrown, waist deep with vegetation, two old net poles rising like nothing so much as metaphor for what is happening here and to once thriving communities all along the Opón River. Thanks to the work of paramilitaries, La Florida is in her dotage, experiencing perhaps her last evolution: a final vanishing that promises nothing so much as permanence.
Hours earlier we waded ashore through ankle deep mud that sucked at our boots. Now the school falls quiet; everyone else is sleeping, and into the hush comes the low thrum of night sound. Tree frog, Whippoorwill—nameless or unnamed. The day’s heat is beginning to fold into itself, a coolness that has been absent for days. The question arises: why is it we have come to Colombia?
Stewart takes another drag.
“There’s a saying usually attributed to an Aboriginal woman,” he tells us. “‘If you have come here to help me; please leave. But if your liberation is tied up with mine; we can walk together.’”
*
A week prior our ten person delegation landed in Bogotá, walking through customs and out into the thin air of high altitude where Nils, our other CPT guide, waited for us. For four days we listened to experts on labor, trade, human rights, and farming; we visited a shantytown of internally displaced persons, attended a rally for education funding, and a music school where former combatants now work together with underprivileged children.
I lingered a long time over that word—underprivileged—for by the standards of North America all of Colombia seems materially impoverished. Impoverished, abandoned, exploited—there is no end to the adjectives. But what we came to learn is that while Colombia is suffering from the two-headed dragon of economic colonialism and internal violence, her people are anything but bereft of hope. Which is not, of course, to say that they aren’t lacking other things.
Colombia is a land of great inequality, a country where 10% of the population possesses 56% of the wealth; where two Colombians are worth in excess of 4.7 billion US dollars while 22 million survive on less than two dollars a day. 3,200 individuals own 53% of the land while 3.2 million farmers scratch out a living on 8% of the land. Poverty is endemic. Though the government claims “only” 45% of the population live in absolute poverty, independent sources cite a figure around 65%. Exploitation of natural resources by Multinational Corporations (MNCs) is both draining Colombia’s wealth and fueling her violence. Chevron and Texaco have signed contracts for natural gas exploration that are expected to garner over a billion dollars; Colombia’s take is around 100 million. Occidental Oil pays the Colombian government thirty cents on every dollar of profit. For every ton of coal that the Billington Corporation extracts 90% of the wealth leaves the country.
But even worse than the unfettered greed of MNCs is their alleged—and sometimes confirmed—complicity with paramilitaries. Chiquita has been fined four million dollars for paying paras. Drummond mining and Coca-Cola are both facing civil suits. Dole has been accused of paying groups listed by the US State Department as terrorist organizations. Meanwhile, violence continues as government and paramilitary troops fight FARC and ELN guerillas for control of land rich in bio-diversity, displacing some three million Colombians—more than anywhere save Sudan—who have fled the fighting for the urban slums that ring Bogotá and every other Colombian city.
*
Many of these internally displaced persons, or IDPs as they are called, live in Cazuca, a shantytown on the southern periphery of Bogotá, with a population swollen to around 1.5 million. We go there on a Friday afternoon, driving in along the narrow dirt road that turns to mud when the rains come. The houses are rickety red brick dwellings topped with corrugated tin and water tanks. They cling to the rolling hillsides that stretch in all directions, and if one squints just enough it is possible to imagine the stair-step houses of some sea-side Italian village. But we are a long way from the Mediterranean. Here, there is no sewer. Dogs roam, mangy and emaciated, showing slats of ribs as they scrounge through the trash scattered along the roadside. But the real worries are the paramilitaries. With officers often trained at the School of the Americas under the auspices of the US government, they move at night, practicing a particularly insidious form of “social cleansing,” rounding up—and often executing—teenagers for offenses as grave as dancing or breaking curfew.
None of this, however, seems to have broken the spirits of the children and teachers at Creciendo Juntos, a school and service provider for displaced people. Located in a block building that smells faintly of vinegar, we sit on benches and meet the children of Cazuca. Brenda tells us of her hopes of becoming a veterinarian and buying a house for her mother. Diego seems bent on learning the names of everyone in my family. They are beautiful children, happy, it seems, in a world where 900 of their peers have been executed in the last nine years. The school offers programs on dance, music, art, debate, sex education, sports, and fighting domestic violence. There is a small library and a few computers and, just below the school on a plane of cracked asphalt, a soccer court. It is there the children lead us and, just as it begins to rain, we begin to play, young and old, Colombian and North American, kicking the wet ball and laughing while dogs roam and people begin to congregate beneath the awning of a shop. Then it is time to go and our delegation bustles into a van. Halfway out we encounter a hill too steep to climb and all unload to walk to the top of the hill where we reload. The poor of Cazuca watch us somewhat disinterestedly before turning back to their lives. We leave the slum, an act as simple as breathing for us, and seemingly impossible for them.
*
The displaced, the violence, exploitation, and attendant poverty—none of these should be viewed as disconnected circumstance. That is the lesson of our meetings over the next few days. The day after visiting Cazuca we sit in a room on the second floor of a music school in downtown Bogotá. Our guest, who I will call Felix, is almost two hours late now. He arrives a few minutes later, brushing rain from his sleeves and apologizing for a delayed flight. He sits at the table then launches into a startlingly absorbing and learned discourse on the history of trade and human rights in Colombia, a history Felix lived first hand.
Felix spent five years never sleeping in the same bed twice; any detectable routine might lead to his death. So forgive him if his hands tend to shake while he speaks. Torture, threats to his family, and a life under constant strain have a way of affecting even the most resilient of humans. But Felix’s story is not just personal; his story is the story of Colombia, of the interconnected web between the government, paramilitaries, guerillas, and MNCs that has made a colony of Colombia’s land and resources, and a disposable resource of her bravest people. War has been raging in Colombia since 1948 and the story of Felix and many other groups over the next few days is simple in concept, though dense in detail: war continues because war is profitable.
The US government’s claim that conflict in Colombia is a drug war is not so much naïve as self-serving. This is not a drug war; this is a war financed by drugs. And it is in the nexus of big-money drug-fighting that the interests, and pocketbooks, of several interests converge. Since 2000, the US has been funded the Colombian government’s fight against guerillas through Plan Colombia. To the tune of around 600 million dollars, about three-quarters of which is military aid, Plan Colombia is meant to pump money into the fight against narco-traffickers. But what happens when the Colombian government, as continues to be revealed, turns out to be working in concert with paramilitaries, some of the Western hemispheres worst human rights abusers? Are we indirectly funding the displacement of innocent campesinos while buttressing the frighteningly autocratic regime of Uribe? And what of the role of the Free Trade Agreement (or TLC) that is being pushed by both the Bush and Uribe administrations? The lesson of countless experts we meet is clear: all lines meet at a common point. This should not be taken as talk of some grand conspiracy theory. Adam Smith’s invisible hand is alone enough to account for events in Colombia. It isn’t, then, about cabals or overarching schemes; it’s about money.
Poor farmers, or campesinos, are steadily being driven from their land by paramilitaries. The campesinos then flee to urban areas where their lives of self-sufficient subsistence farming are replaced by lives of poverty and abandonment by their government. Meanwhile, their land falls into the hands of large land owners who swoop in to consolidate small farms into large holdings that are then used for cattle ranching or the growing of African palm oil or exotic fruits. But why replace food security—the ability of a nation to grow their own food—with cash crops useful primarily as exports? The answer is the Free Trade Agreement. In exchange for the right to dump excess US grains, thus driving down the price of locally grown grains, Colombia will export African Palm and exotic fruits to the US. These are the terms of the agreement. The results, should the agreement pass, will be riches for the already rich, thus heightening inequality. While things on the ground are never quite so cut and dried, the displacements do have a specific economic purpose: to open up farms to rich landowners who will then replace subsistence crops with cash crops to be exported to the US. Displacements and accompanying privatization of industries is good for both the rich and for MNCs, both of whom have been tied to funding paramilitaries. After five days in Bogotá, we leave for Barrancabermeja where we will meet the campesinos fighting against these forces.
*
Stepping off the plane onto the tarmac in Barrancabermeja is like walking into a sheer wall of heat. There is an oppressiveness to the humidity that seems to drips, slowing movement so that every motion has the slow submarine grace of underwater life. There are lizards and bugs and everywhere there are motorcycle taxis zig-zagging up and down the streets, their drivers in safety orange vests with license tag numbers printed in dark letters. At night it rains. We spend the next two days visiting community, campesino, and womens’ health and rights organizations before departing for the communities along the Opon River.
Our canoe is arrow-like. Perhaps forty feet long, it slides out of the port and into the mud-colored river. The port is a ragged place, the docks a patchwork of cross timbers; swirls of gasoline rainbow the surface. But soon we see only the green of the countryside, the occasional thatch hut or government prefab, now and then pastures of cows grazing or sleeping in the thick heat. Over the next three days we will visit three communities and a number of individual homes. We will hear tales of quiet heroism—the man who drove away the guerillas by sheer force of righteous anger—and stories of terrible sadness. We will meet Maria, a child orphaned by the violence who will sit in the shade of her grandparents’ house blowing bubbles, seemingly innocent to the forces conspiring to end the only way of life she knows. We will be served breakfast in la Florida by a woman who, that very day, is leaving behind her life in the Campo for the uncertainty of the city. We healthy well-fed North Americans will eat before our hosts eat. We will sleep beneath nets and slap bugs, deliver a birthday cake, and play with children; We will lie awake in the heat and pulse of a thunderstorm; we will lug our boots everywhere we go—all the while trying to make sense of how someone far way in Bogotá or Washington might deem such a remarkable and generous people expendable to what a trade representative at the US Embassy will term “market forces.”
Back in Barrancabermeja, a little wiser now, a little sadder, too, we give the Colombian people a chance to send a message to the US and Canadian governments. We unfurl a long banner on a busy street and ask those passing by to write a message. Soon, our banner is filled messages of hope and defiance demanding an end to Plan Colombia and the passage of the Free Trade Agreement. The mood is almost festive, but it is not without tension. It is clear that many Colombians are afraid, afraid of expressing themselves, afraid of being seen with us, afraid of the future.
*
The day before the public action we take a bus tour of Barrancabermeja with a host I will call Mario. We visit a squatters’ village and the poverty is unlike anything most of us have ever seen. The land is bare and baked to dust by a blistering sun. The houses are ramshackle collections of boards held together with scavenged nails and hope. A child sits in the dust, attended only by a flies, while inside a daycare center a woman tells a harrowing story of being shot in the leg before being forced to flee the Campo. A child cries. The heat is unbearable. There is no aid here; there are ants. In place of medicine there is a ravine full of open sewage. The woman thanks us for visiting. Outside a crowd gathers, begging for Tylenol or whatever pills we have in our pockets.
To what extent is our liberation tied up with theirs?
Back on the bus, riding again through the streets of downtown Barranca, our host Mario seems reflective. We pass a soccer stadium that looks like an old dog track.
“Please don’t faint in the face of this struggle,” Mario tells us.
We pass a club for workers of Ecopetrol, the national oil company. It looks like a run down carnival with its rusty rides and large pool. There is the ubiquitous razor-wire fence, and we are reminded of how important it is in Colombia to keep certain people out. We cross the Magdellena River and Mario tells us that a lot of bodies have floated down this river, more bodies than I like to think about. A heavy truck rolls by, the back crowded with soldiers in fatigues and carrying MP-5 rifles. Mario watches them then, for just a moment, puts his head in his hands.
“It’s been said we are a violent, rebellious people,” he says, looking up. He watches the soldiers roll out of sight, pausing, measuring his words. “But we aren’t rebellious,” he says. “We just have a sense of justice.”