It took me several days to believe it. How could this happen? In the middle of the most rightwing government that has ruled Colombia since we moved here 15 years ago, local and provincial elections for mayors and regional governors threw up previously unheard-of results: Luis Eduardo Garzón (affectionately known in this country as 'Lucho' which happens to mean in Spanish 'I fight'), the most leftwing candidate in Colombia, recently head of the Trade Union movement and someone we know and supported in his doomed campaign to become President, has been elected MAYOR OF BOGOTA, the most important public leadership post after the Presidency.
For decades, nearly every leftwing leader, whether Presidential candidate, simple local councillor or militant trades unionist has been assassinated. Yet somehow Lucho has been allowed to slip through the net ... for now.
Not only that, but two other important provinces, including Cauca, the one I'm writing from, have elected radical men as their governors, and there are similar swings in many lower offices. Paramilitary-loving President Uribe must be feeling sick as a parrot, especially as at the same time his attempt to get an even tighter stranglehold on the country through a phoney Referendum, has failed completely in spite of massive media propaganda in its favour. One shudders to think what revenge will now be taken - not only by Uribe, but by his bosom pal, one George Bush, whom he supported in the recent Iraqi slaughter, regardless of the fact that practically no-one else in Colombia did.
We watch, worried and astonished as new tides wash over South America ... Chavez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, revolution in Bolivia, indigenous uprisings in Ecuador ... it doesn't seem very likely that Mr. Bush will let this tide come in without attempting one of his braindead operations....
'Joke' heard on Colombian radio:
In 2002, Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden. Uribe approved. Osama was not found.
In 2003, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq to find Saddam Hussein who was hiding Osama bin Laden. Uribe approved. Neither were found.
In 2004, Bush ordered the invasion of Cuba as Castro was hiding Osama and Saddam. Uribe approved. None of them were found.
In 2005, Bush ordered the invasion of Venezuela as Chavez was hiding O.B.L., Saddam and Castro. Uribe approved. They were not found.
In 2006, Bush ordered the invasion of Colombia because it had been proved that O.B.L., Saddam Hussein, Castro and Chavez were all being hidden by Manuel Marulanda (ageing head of the FARC revolutionary guerrilla army). Uribe approved...
But this is hardly a joke. American soldiers are already here and it may not
take till 2006....
At a local level, this civil war swings between the tragic and the comic. The first thing I noticed, travelling from our small town centre across the mountains by bus to our farm, about 8 hours away, was that in the high cold wet paramo, checkpoints usually manned by young guerrilla soldiers had been taken over by the Army, who searched everyone, then gave a long lecture urging everyone to collaborate with them. I watched carefully as all the local campesinos studiously held their faces expressionless and nodded in seeming agreement, scrambling back on to the rickety old bus as soon as they were allowed to.... Then on to home, where instead of the usual Indians and peasants at the local shop cum bar (just a wooden shack), Army lads were lounging about.
This is a daily occurrence in Colombia. The Army make a big show of taking over a wellknown guerrilla area, like ours. They go in, blow a few trumpets, make a few speeches ... and then one morning we found our fences broken down, crops trampled and wrappings from junk foods scattered all around. Further investigations revealed that a very large number of soldiers had passed by in the night, exiting the area. Quite why they bothered to break our fences remains a mystery, given that we have perfectly good gates just a few yards away ...
They also broke down the door of the shack of a neighbour of ours who lives in the hills, breaking the padlock, smashing his clay fireplace to bits, breaking and stealing many other items, from nail scissors to spoons. In another settlement nearby, the army searched a house when only a young girl was present and were rude to her.
Our Ned collected up the rubbish the soldiers left on our farm and took it to the Army command post in Belen, the nearest village an hour and a half away by motorbike, and complained about the soldiers' behaviour. The Captain in charge took it very seriously and said, 'this is why people don't support us'. He was very polite and agreed that this was very bad behaviour and he was going to 'investigate' it.
The times they are a'changin' ... a public-opinion-conscious Army! Pity the
guerrilla haven't caught up with the concept, then we might have a proper
revolution instead of the endless, pointless slaughter of the poorest peasants
and soldiers.
Recently in a 2 month stay in Bogota, our 'legal lady' Anne, who has constantly chased the State Attorney's Office since our two lads were murdered by FARC militia in July 2000, did a further investigation of the investigators.
Two of the murdering gang are in prison, charged not only with killing our boys, but also with the kidnapping of 3 Colombians who managed to escape after 5 months' captivity, walk 7 days through the hills with one can of tuna fish between them, arriving at a small village police station, where for several hours the policeman refused to believe their story, thinking they were playing some wierd practical joke.
Anne reports (please fasten seat-belts for a strange ride): "The ridiculously overworked female attorney in charge of our case was not at first friendly towards me when I asked what had been done to advance our case in the past months. To my horror, I discovered very little had been done at all, in fact the case had gone backwards with the killers now having the chance to be tried simply for belonging to the FARC, which in practice means serving 2 or 3 years in prison, which apart from the injustice of it, would put our group in a lot of danger as they would very likely seek us out to exact revenge for getting them put away in the first place (most families of victims would never dare).
"I asked why they weren't being tried for kidnap and was told that the escapees were too scared to testify, a common problem here where state protection of witnesses is often a macabre joke and many 'protected' witnesses get killed. So I took it upon myself to find these three people and try to persuade them to give evidence.
"This unexpectedly proved very easy to do, as one of them, an ex-Army man, turned out to be friends with the son-in-law of a witch (an honoured profession in Colombia) I'd recently been introduced to ... At this point, I entered into yet another lesson on the never-ending layers within Colombian society.
"First of all, the witch, from a manifestly rightwing background, on hearing of my connection to the three Irishmen in jail on trumped-up charges of helping train the FARC, without a word to me launched into a long magic spell to help them get out... this involved tying up little bits of paper with their names on them in endless amounts of red thread and submerging them in a bottle of honey and herbs along with the names of several army generals in charge of the case against them ....
"Then the witch's army son-in-law invited his friend, the ex-army man who'd been kidnapped by the same gang of militiamen who ended our boys' young lives, to come and meet me. After I had talked to him, he agreed readily to testify against them. And then these two men who would be considered ultra-rightwing here in Colombia, proceeded to tell me passionately that Osama Ben Laden impressed them as a simple man who cares for his people. They liked the way he lives simply in the mountains, whilst Bush is obviously out just to rob and kill. They both abhorred the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and are outraged by the US robbery of the resources of Colombia. They also gave out about the corruption in the Army here and the laziness of the generals who don't want to win the war...
"And then the ex-kidnappee, ex-Army man, not knowing of my connection to the 3 Irishmen in jail, exploded about 'foreigners like those effing Irishmen who come to train the FARC.' I said, 'please don't say that, they're friends of mine and there's no proof whatsoever against them', whereupon he immediately softened and apologized...
"After a few days in Bogota, I managed to get in touch with X, a campesino friend who used to live in the same area from which we were displaced by the FARC in 1999. The murder of our boys in that area the following year was the final straw for X. Over the years, he had watched the coming to power of a local militia gang who used their position as part of the FARC to extort, rob and kill wantonly. By the time they murdered our lads, they had killed at least another 14 people ... and many more since, including several dear friends of ours.
"At one time a guerrilla supporter when the local commander was decent, X had had enough and bravely offered to help us to bring the killers to justice. He approached me one day shortly after the killings when I was in Icononzo with two of our young girls, Louise and Laura, giving out leaflets encouraging local people to break the stranglehold of silence that gives murderers so much power here. We were being watched by members of the local militia, but they could do nothing that day to stop us as the army were billeted there at the time. This kind of direct action is almost unheard-of in Colombia and causes people to shake their heads in horror as it breaks the silence which paralyzes this country.
"His help has been like a shining light of hope to us in all the darkness, confusion and paranoia of these last years. Without him we could not have 2 of the 6 killers in prison (and one dead). He regularly risks his and his large family's lives to bring justice to his region. His only ambition is to be able to farm there in peace and that the grip of fear that makes neighbours afraid to talk to one another be lifted. He doesn't want to join the non-stop stream of refugees who regularly leave their farms and then live in misery in and around the big cities, alienated from all that they know.
"For two years, he has managed to help us secretly. And then his luck ran out. His 17 year old nephew took part in a mission locally and, although disguised, was recognized. A few days later, several masked men appeared at the entrance of the boy's house. His girlfriend told him not to go out, but, overconfident, he did. The masked men pretended to be paramilitaries (i.e. the deadly enemies of the guerrilla force) and said they were looking for the group who were fighting against the guerrilla, to offer them support.
"He fell into the trap and told them what they wanted to know. Then one of the men unmasked himself. The boy recognized him as a local FARC militiaman and had time to say, 'Oh my god, what have I done?' before being shot in the head.
"Attending the funeral, X was followed and almost caught by militia on motorbikes, barely escaping into a secure house from whence they called the police ... who did nothing. They could not return to their farm and now live in hiding.
"X's solution to this predicament is to join the paramilitaries. I argued with him that this is suicide, as well as politically abhorrent. But he has tried to work with the inefficient, bureaucracy-ridden Colombian army whose leaders only make a move or take a risk when there is the chance to capture some well-known guerrilla commander, whose arrest will assure them a rise through the ranks and a fat bonus ... not shared with the ordinary soldiers and civilians who take the most risks. And thus we had our first direct experience of what sends revolutionary-minded peasants into the arms of the rightwing paramilitary murder gangs.
"This story no doubt sounds lurid and unreal to Northern ears, but it is only one of hundreds occurring daily in Colombia.
"Back in the rarefied atmosphere of the posh legal offices of the Government, I managed to move on the case for our boys. By securing the declarations of the men kidnapped by the same gang, an arrest warrant has at last been issued for another one of their number still at large, as during the man's kidnap, he overheard them boasting of how they killed our beloved Tristan and Javier, 18 years old at the time.
"However, a further glitch was to come. The three witnesses almost did not testify because they saw their names and addresses and telephone numbers in the case papers - papers that are handed to the defense lawyers, which means that the killers could take revenge by threatening or killing the witnesses' families. We know this is a real possibility because we have already lost two old friends who were forced to drink poison by the murderers in revenge for helping us. Tristan and Javier had visited their house just hours before their violent deaths. I was outraged to be told that their murders were being treated as suicides, but I was not permitted to do anything as I am not a relative, and their own relatives, desperately poor, wouldn't be able to afford the bus fare to town to protest, let alone to push matters further.
"When I talked to the attorney lady about this obviously dangerous practice of
showing witnesses' addresses and telephone numbers to the defense, she said that
usually she advises people to give false data! And she promised to delete this
dangerous information so that my new friends could testify."
One morning, my daughter Louise told me a dream she had just had:
"The world is ending. There is chaos and catastrophe everywhere. I am with a small group of my family and friends in a city and there are huge machines destroying every construction in sight. They are huge Robots which are taking over the world and their main objective is to exterminate all humanbeings and their homes.
"We are all running through a big shopping centre which is collapsing behind us. We all think we are going to die as we come out into a road where there is even more chaos, but then I remember an escape route. I call to my group of family and friends and show them the way down a narrow back street which takes us to a poorer-looking part of the city, and then under a scruffy-looking hedgerow. On the other side is a path which leads to a patch of beautiful land, our land, and we all know we are safe from all the Robot-machines as they only look for people in cities.
"We are in a little paradise with a huge pond in the middle, loads of greenery
and the most beautiful-looking horses with very long hair and tails beside the
pond. We all sit in a circle and start planning how to organize our lives. Some
puppies come out of the bushes and we are delighted to have them. We feel safe
and peaceful and that is the end of the dream."
The following is taken from the lovely 'Smallholders Magazine', Alberta, Ontario, Canada:
A few years ago at the Seattle Special Olympics, nine participants, all physically or mentally disabled, assembled at the starting line for the 100-yard dash.
At the sound of the gun, they all started out, not exactly in a dash, but with a relish to run the race. But one little boy stumbled on the asphalt, tumbled over a couple of times, and began to cry.
The other eight heard him, slowed down and looked back. Then they all turned around and went back, every one of them. One girl with Down's Syndrome bent down and kissed him and said, 'This will help it get better'.
Then all nine linked arms and walked together to the finishing line.
Everyone in the stadium stood up, and the cheering went on for several minutes.
Last word "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for
the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
John Keynes (1883-1946)
Taken from 'New Internationalist' Magazine
I haven't written much about Things Green in this Green Letter. That is because, in terms of peaceful productiveness and good neighbourliness, everything is running extremely well in our region, and, for the moment, the forests there are secure. Our farm feeds all of us three excellent meals a day ... and that includes our girls doing musical work in the town of Popayan. We send sacks of food to them every week with a local milkman.
They have just launched their first environmental and peace CD, 'Semillas de Paz' (Seeds of Peace) which is mainly in Spanish of course. It is being remade in Ireland and will soon be on sale there c/o Becky Garcia, atlantisfoundation@eircom.net. We are unable to send it direct to friends abroad from here because of the totally absurd postal costs in Colombia but everyone who has helped us over the years with our Green campaign will receive a copy (plus English rendering) in the coming weeks, posted from Ireland.
I would like to end by sending thanks to Dr. Rosita Arvigo of Ixchel Traditional Healers Community in Belize, Central America, for sending us her two books on 'Rainforest Remedies' and wish her success in her great efforts to rescue this knowledge in conjunction with the aged healers she works with.
With love to all friends and readers, - correspondence welcomed and promptly
answered -
Jenny James,
Atlantis Ecological Settlement, Belen, Huila, Colombia, South America
email: atlantiscol@hotmail.com
website: www.afan.org.uk
PS "My portion is not large indeed, But then how much do we really need? For Nature's calls are few - In this the art of living lies: To want no more than may suffice, And make just that much do." (Taken from a cloth embroidered by an 11 year old girl, May 1896) Thankyou friends at Smallholders' Magazine.