Willie, maybe it is good that bannanas make you vomit....

It is old news that multi-national companies do not put human rights nor any kind of social welfare at the top of their list of priorities. However, the case of Chiquita struck me as one of the most blatant and undeniable cases of a company taking advantage of a situation, making a lot of money, and not seeming to register the horrible impact their actions had on Colombia.

Chiquita has had subsidiaries in Colombia since the 80´s, operating in the parts of the country most affected by paramilitarism, guerillas and drug trafficking. In 2007, a federal court in DC found Chiquita Brands guilty of making payuments to a federally recognized foriegn terrorist organization, the AUC (Aoutdefensas Unidas de Colombia--the umbrella paramilitary organization that was formed in 1997 and is responsible for collaborating with the Military on countless massacres around Colombia, including 2 that occurred in the Community, one in 2001 and the other in 2005)

Chiquita admitted to making payments to the AUC and was fined $25 million. However, Chiquita also made it clear that these payments were extortionary and did not result in any benfits to the company, aside from not being attacked for not making the payment.

In April 2010, the National Security Archive, a research institute at GWU, collaborated with the GWU Law school to collect and publish the newly declassified internal documents from the case. This group argues that these people show beyond a doubt that the payments were not simple exhtorition payments, but rather were mutually beneficial transactions and that Chiquita was actually hiring the AUC to run the company´s security.

The papers do paint a pretty bad picture for Chiquita, including hand written comments about the need for secrecy, the accounting tricks and even the direct comment that the Convivires were paid to provide security to a few of the banana plantations. (Convivires are the government-sanctioned security communities that were run by the AUC. Side note, former president Alaro Uribe, when he was govenor of Antioquia, fully supported these Convivires which are now known to have been involved directly in the Durg trade, arms trade and massacres)

It does bother me that the company seems to have been doing business with the AUC. But what might bothers me more is how the Chiquita managers talked about, and interacted with, the AUC as if they were just the Neighborhod Crime Watchers.

Anyway, read about it all in more detail and better writing here

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB340/index.htm

There once was a man who swallowed a Frog.....

I looked everywhere for another place to land my gaze. I mean, he was standing right in front of me, staring at me, eating the pancake and jam that I had brought, waiting for a response that I was sure he knew I would not be able to give. It infuriated me. We had come to the house for a simple visit with a nice old lady and her daughter and as soon as we entered the dirt floor kitchen, even before we could exchange social niceties with the host and explain the gifts we brought, this short man, shirt unbuttoned, cap sliding to one side, looked at us with eyes wide as half dollar pieces and shouted at me,

¨Have you heard the news! They are paying! They are paying! They are paying families who have lost children in the war! I’ve lost three!¨

To fully understand the complexity of such a statement, (beyond the horrible fact that someone lost 3 children to state violence) one has to be in on a few backstories. First, the payment the man is referring to is a sort of reparations that the Colombian Government is supposedly starting to pay for the several years in which it, in the name of stopping a guerilla insurgency in the Colombian countryside, blatantly allowed militias to kill farmers on the simple assumption that one can never know for sure who is a guerilla.

Second, after many years of death, violence and impunity at the hands of the Colombian State, the community decided that a massacre in 2005 was the last straw and they broke ties officially with all entities of the state. What’s more, since the community´s past is riddled with instances where military has made a list of people labeled as anti government, and therefore targets, there is intense skepticism and fear whenever the military asks for names and personal data. Thus, no member of the community can register for, nor accept, any assistance, monetary or otherwise, from any state agency; a significant commitment for people who barely have the money for diapers and even a bigger deal for this man who is diabetic and requires an operation he can neither afford nor get for free for being elderly.

To make this situation even more uncomfortable for me, my role in the community is a bit difficult to manage. Technically, I am a strictly neutral human rights observer, meaning that I am by no means a member of the community nor am I allowed to take part in any internal policy or action of the community. Moreover, my organization maintains relations with the all branches of the government. Needless to say, my comments and actions within the community are restricted. Nevertheless, I live here, I interact daily with the people, I bring them homemade pancakes and jam and I kiss their kids regardless of how much cow manure they played in earlier. My ¨technical¨ position in the community is often tossed aside and replaced with an attitude that screams ¨sure, you’re a foreigner and a part of a political organization, but c´mon…you see how things are! Commiserate! Bash the unfair rules! Tell me it is O.K. to bend them!

It was with this attitude that the man stood and stared at me munching on his pancake with a look that demanded a response. I hoped in vain that if I just didn’t accept his stare, then the story, and the expectations of some kind of response, would stop. But the room was thick with tension as everyone, recognizing how uncomfortable the situation was, was quiet with their eyes lowered to the floor. I began to panic look for an officially approved response I could dish out

The man was oblivious of the awkward silence he had created, an oblivion that is understandable knowing that he calls himself the frog Singer because he claims to be able to sing wit the voice of a frog he swallowed live. He paused for a good bite of pancake, and then, without finishing chewing, continued on about how badly he needed his surgery and how fortunate it was that the government was finally paying people for their passed losses, and how a soldier promised him that if he only gave him his personal data he could be registered with the health care system and get the operation for free. The entire time, I could only think about what I was going to say that would simultaneously commiserate, but not cross the line into suggesting he bend the rules.

Realizing I was not going to avoid the conversation, I stopped avoiding his stare, started tolerating the masticated food visible in his mouth, and started to listen. I quickly learned that, like many Colombian conversations, he actually needed me to say very little. Frog Singer happened to be a very sexist pig, I just happen to be the only man in the room and he just wanted to vent to someone he thought mattered. I let the man talk, nodded my head, grunted and old Frog Singer was content. So content, in fact, that he flowed right into another story, this one 45 minutes long, about the time he fell off a Cliff and survived.

That night I did not give any good advice nor did I gracefully escape long winded story forced my coworker to miss the news. I did, however, get yet another chance to chastise myself for getting missing the majority of a good story because I was so wrapped up in my own insecurities. People, especially Colombians, often are faced with situations much harder than I could ever understand. I clearly can not commiserate, nor should I every think I’m expected to. My role, rather, is to listen to the story, take it seriously and try to understand the depths of the dilemma discussed. If the person walks away feeling like someone truly heard their story, I´d consider my job ¨well-done.

Video: FOR´s work with conscientious objection

FOR in Colombia is not only focused on the Peace Community of San Jose. The team in Bogota has, among other projects, a focus on protecting and fighting for the rights of Colombian Conscientious objectors.

Colombian males have to pay one year of military service when they turn 18. In order to ensure that all 18 yr old males show up for service, there are military sweeps and checkpoints in many urban areas that ask young men as they pass by o show proof of their service. If they can not do so, and are over 18. they are taken to the base and signed up for service on the spot. There are some serious questions about the legal and moral issues behind such sweeps and, as is the case in any situation where people are pressured to do things, there is always the doubt that human and constitutional rights are not followed.

There is a law allowing for conscientious objection based on personal beliefs, however, the process of proving it is complicated, long, emotionally draining and monetarily out of the reach of lower class citizens. Whats more, while the young man is trying to get through the process of proving his beliefs, he is often separated from family, subjected to intense political pressure and made to feel guilty for not fulfilling his duty to his country.

FOR´s role in this is to work with Colombian organizations to support the young men both practically and emotionally so that they have the strength to follow through with their fight to exercise their right to conscientiously object.

Here is a short, subtitled, inverview with one of the young men resisting the obiligatory military service.

Demilitarize Your Life! from Fellowship of Reconciliation on Vimeo.

Sometimes it´s like talking to a dog about using a fork

The past 2 months since I wrote last has been full of meetings, trips and news that strike at the heart of human rights in the Community of Paz. Personally, it has been a time during which I finally settled in to life in La Union and really started feeling like I have a place here. Clearly, then, I should have been documenting it as it progressed. Sadly, I was not that judicious. As a result, I have decided that, rather than having one extremely long blog entry, I would break it up into several.

TODAY: January and February´s military meetings

1st half of January:

This period wasn’t the easiest for anyone on the team. It is right after the holidays, so those who didn’t go home are still reeling from the experience of Christmas alone and those who did go home are reeling from the shock of being back. Needless to say, January started off with a bang at new years and quickly tapered into something of a general lull for us all. To make matters worse, living in a very rural environment where the only extra-work activities include afternoon soccer, reading, thinking or talking, a person who doesn’t really like soccer and isn’t very good at talking ends up spending a lot of time alone, thinking. This can be great, but as we all know, Navel gazing, as I have grown up calling it, usually results in little more than spinning mental wheels trying get to the absolute root of all their problems, a generally impossible goal.

2nd half of January/First week of February:

Luckily, there was work (and, recently, amateur house planning) to pull me out of myself and into the world above.

Lately, work has been consumed by planning for and carryout meetings with the military, police and state-human rights departments. We do this twice a year every year, but this round was particularly important because January saw a wave of turn overs in the military and police ranks as well as a couple worrying occurrences in both Cordoba and Antioquia (I live in the latter but the community has members in the former) that we needed to mention to the state authorities. Before I get to the meetings themselves, there are a few things I have to clarify.

First, it is important to understand the relationship between the government, including the military and police, and the Community. The history is complex and long as is any history that involves corruption, a 60 year rebellion, three armed groups, murders, drugs and impotent justice system. However, the short of it all is that in 2005 Luis Eduardo Guerra, one of the Community´s most important leaders, his family and several others were murdered in n the same morning in the area around Mulatos, a small village north east of where I live. Since then, despite the fact that several soldiers and commanders have admitted to the military’s involvement in the crime, none of them has ever been prosecuted, much less punished. As a result, the community decided that it could no longer trust the government, including its justice and military systems, to protect them and their rights and thus declared that they were officially and indefinitely rupturing relations.

This means that the Community does not want the government involved in their lives at all. No social services, no social aid and especially no military and police protection. While the guerilla facts DO present a real and serious danger to the community, the community believes that military presence only works to bring the fight closer and is not protective. Instead, they believe that the only way to really protect themselves is to separate themselves completely from the conflict, I .e. adopt a policy of strict pacifism and neutrality. The hope is that if they don’t get involved with any side, no other side will have any reason to attack. To deepen their security peacefully, the community works very hard at creating and strengthening international ties. Here, the idea is that having a large number of citizens of politically powerful countries advocating on the Community´s behalf, any incursion on their rights will be too politically costly for any actor.

This is where we and our meetings are useful. While meeting with brusque military men and listening to same government discourse repeatedly is fun, there are more important reasons for these meetings. One is to remind them that we are here, watching and recording human rights violations and that we are passing them on to higher political authorities life foreign embassies and Colombian government departments. Another, we make sure they are aware of the situation in the zone. Many of the higher ranked officials are disconnected with reality on the ground, and, moreover, many people are jumping on President Santo´s bandwagon declaring that the conflict is coming to an end. We try to clarify that, it is way too early to begin declaring victory, especially when we are still seeing so many violations on a regular basis. Finally, we meet to keep communication lines open and get their personal contact information that we use in cases of emergency.

Now, the summaries. Given the fact that we come from an anti- military stance that is very skeptical of recent assertions that things in Colombia have changed for the better, meetings with military and police are frustrating to say the least. We say that paramilitaries still exist, they say that paramilitaries are groups like firemen and paramedics; we say that the community is threatened and given the history, doesn’t trust the government; they merely repeat that they should go to the government. In general, the meetings feel like little more than a tennis match, each of us volleying back and forth our official discourses, neither appearing to gain any ground.

Meetings with the military are simultaneously exciting, elucidating and frustrating. Exciting because it is one of the few opportunities we have as accompaniers to really exercise our political power. Elucidating because each time we go through the process of refining agendas and analyzing what topics to discuss and how to discuss them, we get a deeper understanding of the subtleties and complexities of the relationship between the government and the community. Despite the power trip and the clarity these meetings lend, one can’t help but walk away from them feeling like nothing was truly accomplished. One can only hope that behind the official discourse, something of what we said, or maybe the mere fact that we are there watching, did sink in and will have an effect.

still truckin

this is not going to be long as I cant seem to get my USB to work and thus cant transfer the entries I have been working on for a while. Plus, while this excuse is a bit cliche, I have been honestly really busy ans January and Feb have been packed with meetings and delegations

But never theless, I wanted to drop in a let you all know that I am a live and kicking.

Blog posts to come:

Report on the round of meetings with the Military in Cordoba and Antioquia.

Description of the trip Im currently waiting to start on. Includes the trimontly asamblea, commnunity elections, commenoration of the 2005 masacre and the next instalment of the Farmer Unversity. It is really going to be an awesome experience.

Anyway, I will get to this soon.

Burning dolls in the Colombian countryside...

I am back in Colombia from a good week up at the farm. The transition back into work and life was a bit more difficult than I imagined. Up until the flight back to Colombia, I had never really been one to get homesick. While I continue to have the usual problems of fitting into a new community, my new year’s celebration this year went a long way toward bringing me back into the fold.
In Colombia, New Years is not just about ushering in the New Year, but saying goodbye to the old. In line with this custom, on Dec 30th they construct huge scare crow like bodies stuffed with old clothes, old newspapers and old mattress stuffing and then sow on a really old, eye-less, marked up cabbage patch doll head. That creepy looking mix between a man and a baby sits on the principle road where everyone who walks past says or does whatever they want to Mr. Old Year. (Many punched, spit or kicked...making it quite obvious that they weren’t to happy with Old Years performance)

The official party starts at around 3pm on the 31st when they slaughter bull and butcher the meat. For the first time in Colombia, I ate meat that wasn’t fried to a crisp. While this meat was certainly cooked way beyond done, it was actually broiled and cooked with herbs as well as a bit of oil. It was delicious. Dinner is served throughout the afternoon. I made the mistake of waiting for everyone to eat together, expecting someone to call me when dinner was served. In reality, the pot of meat is set out next to a pot of boiled yucca and a pot of buñuelos (cheese balls for my family) and people graze for the entire afternoon.
Then at 6pm the kids ´party starts and the adults, except for the unlucky young girls who are in charge of organizing the kids, get ready for the dance. The kids spend about an hour beating a piñata made of a garbage back full of candy until the room as to be cleared for the dance. These gigantic speakers (I have no idea how they carried these things up a hill for two hours) make up the sound system and, starting promptly at 8pm, start pumping out dance songs and doest stop for a full 48 hrs.
At around 9pm the dance starts and people file into the hall and pick partners at begin the marathon. It is incredible how they dance. First, it is absolutely out of the question for a girl to ask a guy, and it seems even more out of place when a girl actually seems happy to be asked. Basically the girls sit long the walls sulking until they are dragged onto the dance floor. Half of the dancers choose to dance a good distance from each other, with contact only between the hands. The other half and this becomes for as the night wears on and the crowd becomes younger and younger, dance as if they are trying to share clothes. Despite their attempts to meld to one another, the couple spends the extraordinarily long song never looking at each other, smiling or talking, and as soon as the dance is over, the couple parts as if they had abhorred every minute of being together. No thank you, no comments on the dance, no jokes.
This continues for a constant 15 hrs with a break only to set Mr Old Year on fire. This year, they forgot the gasoline so after several unsuccesful attempts to set wet cloth on fire, someone finally ran to their hose, go the bottle of used cooking oil they had been saving and drenched the doll and quickly got the blaze going. Everyone them bursts into a frenzy of hugs and kisses for about 15 minutes until the focus turns back to the dance which rages on until noon the next day. This year, my co workers and bet with several other of the community people that we could stay up dancing the entire 15 hours. Well, we did see the first light of the first day of 2011 and we beat out every one else in our betting group, but there was no way we were going to make it the last 5 hours until 12.
Anyway, I woke up at 1145 to hear the last two songs at which time i got up and started making breakfast, when one of the other dances popped into the house with a small pot of the soup. She said that we had made it farther than any other male FOR employee and so our reward was a bowl of soup a piece. Also she informed us that rather than sleep after a 15 hr dance marathon, everyone was making a trip down to the watering hole to swim.
This watering hole is amazing. It is a 30 walked down the mountain to one of the two streams that line La Union. Once toy reach the river, you walk for about 15 minutes downstream until you get to a small water fall that empties into a large hole that then flows into a larger water fall and a larger whole. All of this is surround by a wall of smooth, black rock face and tope with the greenest of jungle vegetation. It is a scene strait out of fern gully. We spent the whole afternoon, dozing on the rocks, sliding down the waterfalls, fighting the waterfalls and eating candies. Despite being more tired than I have been for a while, it was an incredibly good way to celebrate New Year ’s Day.
However, the holiday is not over, as we have yet to celebrate the New Year. Thus that night commenced another dance marathon that, luckily, only lasted until 4am. (I gathered people were happier about the Old Year leaving than the new Year coming). Then, of course, work starts for most the next day at 7am.

It was certainly a New Years I probably won’t, nor really want, to repeat. Not because it wasn’t fun (it was amazing) but more because I can barely walk today, and there is nothing worse that sore legs in a place that requires uphill mud walking not matter which direction you go.

In the end, I danced more than I have in my entire life, slept 7 hours in two days, ate some of the best tasting beef I’ve had, became a hell of a lot closer with some of the people in town and got to watch a huge doll burn as people joyously ran around kissing each other and bidding good riddance to Mr. old year.

Below are some pictures to make it all a little more clear...

the hike that kills...

I posted this originally a couple of weeks back. I had to make some changes and, I guess, didnt repost it until now.

So I recently came back from a 6 day accompaniment journey to a remote village called Mulatos about 16 miles to the north east of La Union. Mulatos is the site of the 2005 massacre in which community leader and ideologue, Luis Eduardo Guerra, his wife, his son an two other community members were murdered, dismembered and buried alongside the river by paramilitary groups. Since then, the village was vacated and has slowly re populated as people come back from displacement. In addition, the peace community has made Mulatos its future center of operations, both because of its memorial importance and because of its geographic centrality amongst the villages of the peace community.

Me and my teammate, Isaac, were to accompany the president of the peace community´s council first to the community villages in the department of Cordoba, where we were to meet up with other members, and then to Mulatos where we would join delegations from all of the villages that make up the peace community. In total, about 200 community members (along with about 30 people from a peace community in Portugal called Tamera, and several others from Israel, Palestine, Holland and Germany) gathered for the regular Assembly, during which, community leaders from the various regions would bring up problems in their regions and here about potential solutions. In addition, the community´s leaders, including those providing ideological and political direction from the cities, held workshops and lectures on topics ranging from community ideals, to sustainable agriculture and political aims. During these two days, the community ate together, (they slaughtered and butchered an entire cow…see the picture of the cow´s feet on the roof) sleeps together (in very tight arrangements) and plays together (mostly consisting of the swimming hole in the nearby river, joke sessions in the kitchen and campfires with music at night) In all, it was reminiscent of church summer camp, but for a bunch of largely non-religious peace activists.

As accompaniers and in accordance with the agreement FOR has with the community, Isaac and I are prohibited from directly participating in their internal meetings unless we are specifically invited. This means that during the day while the community members are meeting from 6am-6pm, Isaac and I had very little to do. We would meet with people during meals to get our own information about the status if the villages that are usually difficult to get a hold of, but largely, we sat around, read and watched the community interact. While at first the whole event did feel like summer camp that, from my point of view, promised to be pretty boring, I ended up appreciating being there more than I could have thought.

I started this job with, what I liked to think of as, a healthy dose of skepticism. Not only about the Colombian Conflict and the press surrounding it, but about everything...even the complete veracity of the peoples’ stories. It wasn’t that I didn’t think the stories occurred, or that I doubted the armed actors have committed several atrocities, or even that the government has done many things to completely destroy trust with the country´s rural population. Rather it was that I never really let the true gravity of such things, like witnessing a massacre that was orchestrated by the military you thought was protecting you, really sink in. As a result, I found myself focusing on things like the use of the word ´massacre´ and debating whether or not that was really appropriate...(really? was it a massacre or just a murder?) Or, I cynically focused on the feeling, which everyone was quietly talking about, that the members´ devotion to the founding ideals of the peace community were starting to falter as things in Colombia have been improving, albeit slowly. This always raised the question of what happens to the peace community when there is no longer the threat of violence to bind the people together? How can the community continue? In my mind, this painted a picture of a dying community with not much chance of lasting past this current generation.

My view of the community changed these past few days because I got to witness the community actually wrestling with them. I am not lying when I say that the hike is killer. It is 8-10 hrs of walking strait up and down mountains on trails covered in three feet of mud so sticky it is like cement if you let you foot rest for longer than 15 seconds, but so slippery that if you go too fast you´ll find yourself half-way down the hill you just spent 45 minutes trying to climb. Yet, despite all that, it was important enough to these people to be able to meet with fellow community members, exercise what it means to be a part of this peace community and to remind themselves that they are part of something larger than their fincas or families. There are some serious problems that led to some serious arguments that even resulted in serious departures from the community. While discordance is present in the community, harmony is not what makes this social experiment great...but rather the fact that people make serious sacrifices to work with others to achieve security a better political future.

I was really excited to see this happen and for the first time really felt that I was working alongside something truly exceptional.

To top that off, I was also able to talk to some of the community´s most highly regarded, and thus most highly physicall- threatened, leaders. Late into the night, we sat and listened as these leaders, whom are way too serious to ever exaggerate, told, in vivid detail, about the three massacres that have occurred over the past 15 years. They described paramilitary troops entering their communities, taking everyone from their homes, separating out a few leaders and executing them point blank in front of everyone, even children. Or they waded through the story of trying to resist or hide, but the paramilitaries broke down doors, fired at people as they ran or found people in their hiding spots. I don’t know how to relate the feeling to you, but something clicked that night. I had come to know these people in as community politicians, mothers and fathers like any other, never really thinking how unlike any other mother, father or politician their experiences make them.

It is still impossible for me to truly understand that horror, but what I did begin to understand that night was how horrifying it is to me that my mind, which has been exposed to article after article and movie after movie describing things as violent as the Rwandan Genocide, cannot process their experiences enough to develop the emotions that must have resulted from watching their neighbors get executed. It terrifying to me that the pain they suffered is so deep that I will never understand it. It is out of my league, like the expanse of outer-space or the rationalization of faith.

Now, when I think of the community and the Colombian context in which it exists, I still am skeptical about things like who’s to blame for what, or who is telling the truth or what news source is biased and how, but what I am not skeptical about is the complete and utter veracity of these people´s stories. As a result, I am much more confident that this community has the memory and the momentum to continue to work together to develop tools and activities that will hold the community together long after the violence as subsided.

I guess NOW I have a HEALTHY dose of skepticism.