Finding, Remembering, Accompanying, Colombia.

A photo essay by a U.S. delegate to the CEDECOL Peace Commission.

M. R. Georgevich

Essay Itinerary. [Chapter descriptions. Hyperlinks below link to online version.*]

Preface: I. May 31: II. May 31: III. June 1:

Who, what, where, whyand what next. The delegation receives a crash course history and sociopolitical primer. Learning about the CEDECOL Peace Commission, accompaniment, and El Garzal at Justapaz and MENCOLDES. The delegation travels through the Magdalena Medio towards El Garzal, and meets Pastor Salvador; human rights violations documented against him and the village. We arrive in El Garzal, worship with the Foursquare Churchand then must accompany Pastor Salvador out with us. Explanation of the threat to Colombian Protestant churches and leaders. Soacha. We witness the aftermath of forced displacements, and the response of CEDECOL Peace Commission affiliates.

IV. June 1-2:

V: June 5:

VI: June 3, 7: Barrancabermeja; the U.S. Embassy. Where paramilitaries come from, U.S. involvement, and the call from Colombia. VII: Epilogue: A personal reflection in three parts on accompanying, remembering, and (re)finding Colombia; stories from the entire trip. A Colombian last word.

Copyright 2013 M. R. Georgevich All rights reserved. *Adapted for print; all photos and live hyperlinks [green text] also available at: accompanyingcolombia.wordpress.com Contact: accompanyingcolombia@gmail.com

CONTENTS
Preface: I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. Colombia calling La paz no es solo el silencio de los fusiles Acompaar The road to El Garzal Tengo una bandera plantada en mi corazn Voces Ocultas Redeem your taxes Acompaar, recordar, reencontrar i. [Acompaar] ii. [Recordar] iii. [Reencontrar] Epilogue: Sin Palabras 78 85 96 101 1 4 9 13 25 40 60

From May 30 to June 9, 2013, a delegation of clergy and lay leaders from the Central Atlantic and Connecticut Conferences of the United Church of Christ traveled through Colombia, accompanied by Global Ministries missionary Michael Joseph. The Connecticut and Central Atlantic Conferences participate in a Partnership with Colombia that also includes the Disciples of Christ(in collaboration with the UCC via Global Ministries), the Mennonite organization of Justapaz in Colombia (as well as others), and the Peace Commission of the Evangelical Council of Colombia (CEDECOL). The 2013 delegation was organized in the U.S. by Charlie Pillsbury with Michael Joseph in Colombia. Christians often speak of the power of Christ to disturb. As well as inspired, our delegation was left disturbed and so stirred into action.

Crossing into South America over the Colombian coastline at sunset, May 30, 2013. The language is painfully clich, but Colombia really is a jewel from above: vast tracts of undeveloped emerald green bordered by an azure Caribbean coastline.

The United Church of Christ historically participates with other denominations in the annual Days of Prayer and Action for Peace in Colombia, which includes lobbying for responsible policy and resource allocation there: Colombia is one of the U.S.s top aid recipients year after year. Our delegations experiences in Colombia powerfully illustrate the societal realities and individual lives behind the policy planks of the 2013 petition addressed to the U.S. government. Materials prepared by the UCC and the Mennonite Central Committee for the Days of Prayer and Action are the best starting point for comprehensive background on Colombia and the official advocacy positions of those institutions.

Unless otherwise noted, the words and captioned images on this blog are exclusively the personal reflections of just one (non-clergy) member of the 2013 delegation. They are not meant to represent the views of any of the institutions referencedhere or abroadnor serve as an official account of the 2013 trip or speak for any of the other delegation members, either individually or as a group. Our experience of witness was too richand complicatedto be completely reflected in the solo series of personal essays that follow.

Its easy for the North American church to fall into the habit of listening for cries for help from abroad. What the UCC is actually hearing from Colombia is a steadfast call for accompaniment, and, accountability. (Even Global Ministries missionary Michael Josephs blog is titled, Colombia Calling.) This call for accompaniment is directed towards a denomination that speaks of partnership; that pays taxes to a federal government with massive presence on their ground; that is their mirrored counterpart in faith, stated values, and the spirit of many congregations under one banner. This is our call.

And here the word accompanimentthe term preferred in Colombia in lieu of help of aid in social services parlancematters. Accompanying Colombia means not just meeting face to face, but walking side by side with powerful, organized local leaders who made it clear to our delegation time and time again that they are prepared to lead on strategy, and only ask of us what we feel is realistically in our capacity to deliver.

June 6, 2013. A passing rain shower over Bogot, seen from Cerro de Monserrate.

The delegations wider mission was to begin a collective re-imagination of what a Partnership with Colombia might look like. In Colombia I witnessed two powerful forms of accompaniment: relational, and institutional. Relational accompaniment can mean personality-driven, leader to leader connection. This is the compelling origin story of the Partnership of Colombia: two UCC Conference ministers cultivated a strong relationship with CEDECOL Peace Commission co-founder Ricardo Esquivia, and have continued to advocate with and for him into retirement. 2

Relational accompaniment also includes sister congregation programs, and the camaraderie and pastoral support of in-person delegations like our own. These specific relationships and programs are vitally important in establishing connection across all kinds of borders.

Institution to institution accompaniment is power; it concretizes the relationship and grows sustainability and wider inclusion. (And words like institutionalization, concretize, and sustainability dont have to be red flags for office, staff, or the dread obligatory monthly committee meetingwe can surely organize more creatively than that.) Stateside, mass UCC participation in the annual Days of Prayer and Action for Colombia is institutional accompanimentand this October, the body of the UCC stood with CEDECOL when 84 leaders at the Connecticut Conference fall assembly signed a letter to advocate for Peace Commission co-founder Ricardo Esquivia in his latest struggle. In Colombia, when our American delegation gained access to meetings and information that was not readily accessible by our Colombian partners, that was institutional accompaniment. And our presence in accompanying a tiny village under threat of forced displacement was a tacit commitment by the United Church of Christespecially after the events that unfolded as a consequence of our visit.

In areas of Colombia beyond the reach of the state, both illegal armed actors and churches committed to peace have stepped forward to fill the vacuum. The CEDECOL Peace Commission has found and claimed its rightful place in ground war for peace. To accompany in earnest our sister churches in their radical works and hopeto keep any promises madewe will need to roust and assess ourselves as a denominational partner: what is our capacity?

ransformed aid to Colombia in support of peace, not war. This should support peace accord implementation, address the needs of victims of violence, and feature aid for safe, sustainable return of land and other durable solutions for internally displaced persons and refugees.
[Days of Prayer and Action for Colombia petition, 2013]

We advocate for U.S. policy that champions:

Driving back and forth through Bogot, May 31, 2013.

The delegations first full day in Colombia was spent in a marathon crash course on the nations civic, economic, social, and military history1 in recent years. We spent the day in Bogot shuttling between conference rooms at three Peace Commission affiliated organizations: CEPALC, Justapaz, and MENCOLDES. It was like trying to drink from a fire hose.

Justapaz, our delegations institutional home base in Colombia.

On site at CEPALC.

CEPALC (Centro Popular Para America Latina de Comunicacin) is an ecumenical institute founded in 1978 by Amparo Beltrn Acosta to work with poor communities, women, and children, especially around communication issues. Her husband and co-director, Flix A. Posada Roja, started off our sobering primer on the last 30 years of Colombian history. Posada argues that in Colombia, the motor of violence is not poverty, but inequality. He gave us estimates that 10% of the wealthiest make 50% of the wealth; the bottom 10% make just 0.6%. In 1986, 2.5% of all landowners owned 36% of the land; that number has since increased to 53%. The poverty level in rural areas reaches 85%. Gang, guerrilla, and paramilitary2 recruitment are fueled by massive unemployment and the social and economic fallout of mass displacements.

Amparo Beltrn Acosta and Flix A. Posada Roja of CEPALC. Michael Joseph translates.

A family farm on contested land in Bolvar Department, Magdalena Medio region.

In 2012, Colombia and the U.S. entered into a free trade agreement; Posada explained that the only winners so far have been large agro-industriesoften internationally held, and/or the same ones suspected of contracting paramilitary to force peasant farmers off their land when they wont be bought out. (Their own employees arent much safer: from 2000 to 2010, over half of all trade unionist murders in the world happened in Colombia, even though less than 5% of the national workforce is unionized.) With the market opened and U.S. imports arriving duty-free and subsidized back home, Colombian farmers are priced out in their own market and on the losing side here: a year since the agreement began, Colombian exports to the U.S. are up 3%; U.S. exports to Colombia are up 22%.

U.S. policy initiatives have had a particularly wide footprint.

Under Plan Colombia, farmers of coca (and others, inadvertently) have had their crops fumigated from above, but havent always been the recipient of the resources necessary to re-purpose their land towards crop substitution as originally promised. Drug producers are just moving in deeper to plant their crop, some into protected forest areas, and someforciblyinto land already home to small family farms.

Groups of campesinos (from the Spanish campofield; a campesino is one who farms) have begun their own growing collectives to support the production and marketing of non-coca crop. The pastor we would meet in El GarzalSalvador Alcntarais also the vice president of one such group in the Magdalena Medio region, the Association of Alternative Producers of Simit (ASPROAS). Over the years, he has assisted family farmers in his community in switching from the cultivation of plantains to cocao, which turns two to three times as much profit. This is a high-risk venturePastor Salvador has faced death threats from illegal armed actors invested in the drug trade and palm oil industry for nearly ten years now.

Rincn del Lago neighborhood, Ciudadela Sucre, Soacha. Soacha is home to more displaced persons than any other city in Colombia.

When Plan Colombia was approved by Congress in 2000, it was hailed as an attempt to simultaneously shore up a government under siege and target the supply side of the U.S. war against drugs. The original Plan Colombia proposed by the Colombian government emphasized economic development and social priorities. What was finally approved skewed massively towards military aidwhich is well-documented to have trickled its way down to paramilitary groups operating illegally on behalf of the Colombian military.

In fact, a study published in 2011 took an empirical look at the blowback effect of U.S. military aid on paramilitary violence. In the period 1988-2005, military aid increased by an average of 92% each year. Each increase of 92% was associated with 138% more paramilitary attacks in military base regions, relative to non-base regionsas well as decreased voter participation during election years in these areas. As former ambassador Ambassador Robert White described it:

If you read the original Plan Colombia, not the one that was written in Washington but the original Plan Colombia, theres no mention of military drives against the FARC rebels. Quite the contrary. (President Pastrana) says the FARC is part of the history of Colombia and a historical phenomenon, he says, and they must be treated as Colombians... [Colombians] come and ask for bread and you (America) give them stones.

This war will continue to be fought on the ground by civil society and must begin anew with urgencynot taper offafter any outcome of the current negotiations with FARC in Havana, or possible future talks with ELN. Colombia is a critical laboratory for the theory that peace cannot result from military force alonein fact, justice may be its only hope. President Juan Manuel Santos acknowledged as much in his remarks to the legislature on July 20 of this yearColombia's Independence Day: Peace is not solely the silence of the guns.

Whatever the net merits of U.S. military support have been in helping to stabilize government control in a time of civil war, it is clear that, moving forward, it is not sufficient to win the war for peace.

La paz no es solo el silencio de los fusiles.

Children in El Garzal, a community under threat of displacement by illegal armed actors.

The U.S. State Department has a basic survey similar to what we received available online; the Library of Congress has a considerably more extensive one (well-indexed for reference purposes).
2

The terms guerrilla, and paramilitary refer to specific categories of illegal armed actors in Colombia (they are distinguished by the Colombian government from criminal gangs by their claims of ideology-driven leadership.) For a broader crash course on players in Colombias violent modern history (including US interventions), start here.

he active participation of victims of violence and civil society in the peace process. Peace must be built from the ground up as well as negotiated from the top down. The engagement of every sector of societyincluding victims associations, displaced communities, civil society organizations, religious communities, and labor unionsis necessary to construct a just and sustainable peace.
[Days of Prayer and Action for Colombia petition, 2013]

We advocate for U.S. policy that champions:

Courtyard between Justapaz and MENCOLDES.

According to our organizer and leader Charlie Pillsbury, the 2013 delegations stated mission was:

The Evangelical1 Council of Colombia (CEDECOL) represents approximately 70% of Colombias Evangelical, Protestant and Anabaptist Christian population.2 The CEDECOL Peace Commission was founded to provide relief and hope to the victims of violence and forced displacement in Colombia, and to work proactively with educational programs designed to help churches and communities make themselves over into peace sanctuaries.

to gain insight into and first-hand experience of the work of the Peace Commission of the Evangelical Council of Colombia, the main partner of the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) through Global Ministries in Colombia.

The founding of the peace commission 23 years ago was driven by grim necessity, not theology; the commission also documents political violence against Colombian Protestant churches. Its yearly reportsA Prophetic Callare used as a resource by the U.S. government in preparing its own regular audit of religious freedom in Colombia. Peace Commission members believe there is a critical role for churches in Colombias recovery, and work in concrete terms to increase the capacity of churches to work for peace.

Jenny Neme, Director of Justapaz and Peace Commissioner; Michael Joseph, Global Ministries missionary to the Peace Commission; Pablo Moreno, Rector of the Baptist University and Seminary in Cali and National Coordinator of the Peace Commission. Meeting hosted by MENCOLDES. On the whiteboard are notes on the Commissions Biblical Basis of Peace School, an ecumenical adult ed program to educate potential peace leaders on church-state relations, economic systems, and political advocacy.

One does not provide, give, or even serve, but accompanies. Counseling is psycho-social accompaniment. Legal aid is legal accompaniment. And the CEDECOL Peace Commission provides very literal accompaniment to selected communities under threat of violence and forced displacement. The community of El Garzal in Colombias Magdalena Medio region is one of these sitesand one which we had been asked to accompany ourselves, as a delegation of witness to their struggle and to the work of the Peace Commission.

Circled and underlined at the top of my notes from our meetings that first day is the word acompaar to accompany. In our group reflection later that day on the informational sessions, I raised what a remarkable deviation this is from the American social services lexicon: where American providers use the words help, assistance, or aid, in Colombia, they use the noun accompaniment.

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Accompaniment is walking side by side; it is also a powerful weapon for peace. The sign we would later view at the town green at El Garzal reads, in translation,

Welcome to the community of El Garzal, a Peace Territory. We are 100 families. The organizations that accompany us3 are: SWISSAID, PDPMM, ADAM, FUPAD, ECAP, PEACEWATCH, ASPROAS, APROCASUR, AGROMISBOL.

BIENVENIDOS A CORREGIMIENTO EL GARZALTERRITORIO DE PAZ

Twenty four hours after I had started underlining acompaar in my notes, we landed in the tiny town of El Garzal.

It serves as introduction, and as documentation of highly sophisticated, wide-reaching community leadership. It also serves as a warning: We are recognized, we are organized, we are here, and the world is watching.

Pablo Moreno addresses the Foursquare Church of El Garzal.

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The Catholic Church still dominates Colombia, as it does South America. The Roman Catholic Bishops Conference estimates that 90 percent of the population is Catholic, while the Colombian Evangelical Council (CEDECOL) states that approximately 15 percent of the population is Protestant. Catholicism was the official state religion from colonial times until the constitution was revised in 1991, which recognized and granted other faiths equal protection and status as well.

Evangelical used as a label in South America does not always have the same connotations as it does in the U.S.; it can also be used as an umbrella term for all Protestants in general, including mainline denominations. (Indeed, it was the term preferred by Martin Luther to describe his original Protestant reform movement.)

SWISSAID Swiss Aid PDPMM Magdalena Medio Peace and Development Program ADAM Areas for Municipal-Level Alternative Development Program FUPAD Pan American Development Foundation ECAP Christian Peacemaker Teams PEACEWATCH Peace Watch Switzerland ASPROAS Association of Alternative Producers of Simit APROCASUR Association of Producers of Cacao AGROMISBOL Southern Bolvar Agricultural-Mining Federation
3

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To accompanyand bear witness ofEl Garzal, you must descend into the heat of the rural Magdalena Medio region where no U.S. government employee is permitted to go. From Bogot we flew into its port anchor, Barrancabermeja, and from the airport we went straight down to the River Magdalena.

The delegation traveled though the Magdalena Medio region via river from Barrancabermeja (south) to our final destination of El Garzal in the municipality of Simiti (north).

El Garzal is in the municipality of Simit in Bolvar Department, in a region where campesinos are under threat by paramilitaries, and large agro-industrial oil palm plantationsa lucrative export business. According to Pierre Shantz of Christian Peacemaker Teams, Colombia, Several municipalities have over 75% of the land planted in palm. As described by the World Bank, Magdalena Medio is one of the poorest and most violent areas of Colombia and a microcosm of the actors and issues underlying Colombias armed conflict with guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, with the army battling for control while the civilian population struggles to survive. The region contains great natural and productive wealth with unequal access.

Arable land is so valuable in Colombia that even just farming a small family plot can be as hazardous as sitting on a goldmine, if youve got the wrong kind of neighbors. And there are a lot of the wrong kind of neighbors in the Magdalena Medio. Guerillas, paramilitaries, and corporations have all forcibly displaced entire communities.

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Sheltered waiting area, Cormagdalena port, Barrancabermeja.

Chalupa drivers wait for their fares. Chalupas are speedy, flat bottomed boats used to connect the small communities along the Rio Magdalena. We would travel two hours by chalupa to the tiny town of Vijagual, where we would meet up with Pastor Salvador of El Garzals Foursquare Church. After an interview at a Christian radio station there, we would then take a motored long boat across the river and through the swamps to land as close as we could to the road to El Garzal.

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The windshield of a chalupa doubles as an entrance and exit. Recent heavy rains had swelled the river with floating debris that drivers must weave through artfully, or risk jamming the propeller.

AMBULANCIA - HOSPITAL LOCAL SAN PABLO. The closest medical care to El Garzal, and over an hour away by river.

Vast undeveloped stretches of the river bracket the small settlements.

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Overlooking the docks at Vijagual.

Slipping into the dock at Vijagual, seen from the chalupa window. Young men fishing next to our slip, while a member of the Colombian state police looks on. There were also two Colombian military transport boats tied up and soldiers on site when we arrived; they make periodic security stops at towns along the river. The young children who ran down to the dock (while we sat and waited for the police to finish interviewing our missionary about our itinerary) announced our presence to their friends by calling out, rico! rico!rich, rich.

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Entering Vijagual.

The DJ who interviewed our delegation at Christian radio station Bendicin Stereo. He is smiling because we laughed when we heard him address his listeners: So, what are these gringos doing here in Vijagual?

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Sound engineer, Bendicin Stereo.

One of the owners of Bendicin Stereo.

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Midday traffic, Vijagual.

Produce market, Vijagual.

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El hijo con el mico. I had self-studied Spanish for only a month by the time we arrived, and none of the rural Colombians we met spoke English. On the way out of Vijagual, a man watching our delegation pass by noticed I had fallen behind photographing dogs, horses, and birds. He called out: Do you want to photograph my son (hijo)?

I came over, but only saw a young daughter (hija) on his porch. I photographed her furrowing her brow at me. He emphatically tried to convince me to come into the house, waving me into a dark entryway as the rest of the delegation continued back to the dock. His eyes were soft and expressed excitement about what he was offering, but I was reluctant to separate myself further from the group to enter a private home. Pastor Salvador had met us in Vijagual before the radio interview, and he noticed I was rapidly getting left behind while I haltingly explained to my would-be host: Im sorry, I cant go in the house, my friends are going to our boat, can your son come here? He walked back to us to confer with the man and then asked me, Do you want to go in the house? We ducked in and through to a back porchwhere I first learned the Spanish word for monkey (mico), which I had mistaken for the word for son (hijo). The rest of the delegation spilled in to join in the delight.

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La hija on the porch beforehand. Unimpressed by my Spanish comprehension skills.

The family across the street heard all the commotion the Americans were making over the monkey, so they brought out their monkey for us too.

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Moments later, the daughter from the first family ran over and plunked down a giant tortoise for us to photograph as well.

Loading up to depart Vijagual via canoe. This canoe would fit our delegation of 13 Americans and Colombians (and all of our luggage), as well as Pastor Salvador, our boat driver, and the sound engineer and a young boy from the radio station, who came along just for the ride to drop us off.

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The story of El Garzal is at once frustrating, heartbreaking, inspiring. It is a site where, in the words of a social worker from Justapaz who accompanied us in, the church has made a real difference, via the head of its Foursquare Church, Pastor Salvador, in cooperation with other powerful community leaders:

He serves the whole community, not just his church.

Case 76: Death Threat. April 15, 2000. Pastor Salvador Alcntara confronted some men who were part of paramilitary groups when he saw them taking a young man down the street. He asked them why they were taking them, and their response was to verbally abuse and threaten him. The young man was later executed. This happened when the paramilitaries were just beginning their activity in Simit, Bolvar.

The human rights violations documented against Salvador and his family are a case study in crisis escalation, and a compelling narrative arc of what it means for a community to defy forced displacement by reaching out beyond its borders in a powerful show of strength. Here, the incidents as reported by the CEDECOL Peace Commission:

Case 77: Death Threat. October 27, 2003. Pastor Salvador Alcntara sought out Manuel Barreto, a large landowner and leader of paramilitary groups, near the hospital in Simit to talk with him. Manuel Barreto was in a car with some paramilitaries when the passed by the pastor and his friend at his friends house. The pastor asked him about the commentaries that were circulating that said that the paramilitaries were present there [in El Garzal] because the people have to be displaced. The pastor asked him, is it true? Barreto affirmed the statement, saying, all this territory is mine. I have 500 rifles to regain this land. He proposed to the pastor that he could give him some land so the pastor could stop being a bother. The pastor took offense and explained that he was not looking for personal favors, instead he sought to protect the communitys welfare [emphasis mine]. Manuel Barreto asked, Do you also want to fight? He said that in January he would visit the community and he didnt want to see a single person or family in El Garzal. The Magdalena River takes everything that is put in it. All the people in Garzal are guerillas.1 Case 78: Death Threat. January 15, 2004. Manuel Barreto, the large landowner in this area, found out that Pastor Salvador Alcntara was working with international accompaniment and organizing the community to demand the residents rights to the land in Garzal. Pastor Salvador received a call from a known paramilitary. He was warned that his situation was critical and that there was an order out to kill him.

Case 59: Death Threat. June 27, 2009, August 8, 2009. Pastor Salvador Jos Alcntara Rivera. Salvador has received death threats from paramilitaries, and recently a death threat against Salvador was made public in the town of Vijagual, where a hit man had been paid to go and kill him. On August 8, 2009, a group of men armed with rifles, dressed in black and with long range weapons, stationed themselves across from Salvadors house all night A member of the Alcntara family arrived home at 11pm that night, and was searched by the group. They registered his presence, and asked him where he came from, and where Salvador was located. The group identified themselves as guerrilla, however, their uniforms and their weapons made the family think that they were a paramilitary group. Just that day, Salvador Alcntara happened to not be in Garzal. He and other community leaders were leading the legal actions and political advocacy work aimed at the custody, protection, and vindication of the right to land and territory and the right to the sustainable use of natural resources of the 300 farming families that live in Garzal. These rights, however, have been fundamentally violated by a company that grows palm oil, and by different state agencies on the local and regional level.

Case 83: Death Threat. September 1, 2007. The Army called Pastor Salvador Alcntara to ask him to identify two paramilitaries that they had captured. The pastor explained, I didnt go. I understood that it was a set up to get me into trouble with the paras. The Army is complicit. That afternoon the Army freed the two people it had captured. A few days later, the pastor was at a community meeting in El Garzal and a group of people, some on horse and four on foot, passed by. Then, the pastor saw that the Army showed up. He thought that maybe it was to provide accompaniment to the international organizations that were accompanying the meeting, but then the Army proceeded to arrest two of the people walking in the group (who accompanied the men on horseback). Later they found out that the people were drug traffickers, accompanied by paramilitary guards. At that time, there were rumors circulating that said the pastor was a rat [informant] for the army. The pastor looked for the person that was spreading the rumor about his links to the army; the man was dressed as a civilian, but he was a known paramilitary. The paramilitary said that he was spreading the rumor because the pastor wanted to take land away from the person that threatened him, a landowner with large extensions of land with palm oil plantations.

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Case 99: Death Threat, Forced Displacement. December 9, 2011. Salvador Jos Alcntara Rivera, 52, is married to Nidia Alian and they have four daughters. Salvador is a pastor in the Foursquare Church in addition to being a leader of a rural community, the president of the Community Council of the community of El Garzal and the vice-president of ASPROAS the Association of Alternative Farmers of Simit. Salvador was allegedly threatened by members of the Los Urabeos neoparamilitary group and forced to leave Simit, Bolvar along with his family on December 9, 2011. Two days earlier, the pastor received a phone call notifying him that men had been heard discussing plans to kill him. The caller also mentioned that armed men wearing ski masks had been asking for him. As such, he left the Magdalena Medio region in the company of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT). The events occurred the day after a national and international verification commission had been held with representatives from churches, civil society, the diplomatic community and the government. During the meeting, testimony was heard on the communitys situation, with a particular focus on land rights. Salvador had previously received threats from neo-paramilitary groups on several occasions.

Pastor Salvador Jos Alcntara Rivera leads our US-Colombian delegation from Vijagual into El Garzal.

On June 1, 2013, Pastor Salvador met us at Vijagual, and accompanied our delegation of United Church of Christ representatives and CEDECOL Peace Commission associates across the Rio Magdalena and through the swamplands that lead into El Garzal. For the previous few evenings, motorcyclists had sped up and down the tiny hamlets dirt road late at night, upsetting the dogs and livestock. The identity of these individuals is not known.
1

In modern-day Colombia, to label ones opponent a guerrilla is not merely the equivalent of accusing someone of being a Communist sympathizer in 1950s America; it is also a slur that can mark someone for (presumed state-sanctioned) assassination. Human rights leaders, academics, politicians, journalists, union leaders, and entire churches have been labeled guerrilla sympathizers by everyone from paramiltaries to more conservative political foes; Flix Posada at CEPALC referred to this practice as Satanizing the opposition.

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rotection for human rights defenders and rural communities now and after peace is negotiated so as to protect the civilian populations still caught in the crossfire, especially the most vulnerableIndigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, women and children, and farmers in rural areas. [Days of Prayer and Action for Colombia petition, 2013]

We advocate for U.S. policy that champions:

El Garzal relative to Vijagual (lower right). Simiti is off to the west. Coca leaf (precursor to cocaine) cultivations are located west and southwest outside the communities of El Garzal and Nueva Esperanza; surrounding swamp areas are used for the transport of arms and drugs. One of El Garzals close neighbors is a property called Sucumbeza, home to an airstrip alleged to have been associated with an Escobar affiliate until a 1989 government raid cleared it out; in 1999, the guerrilla group ELN then landed a hijacked Avianca plane there. [Map courtesy of cpt.org.]

The waters were still swollen high around the terrain from heavy rains, so after crossing the river we crept through flooded swamps in our long wooden canoe in order to land as close as possible to the road to El Garzal. We enjoyed the sensation of a slight breeze in the open boat, scanning the trees and grasses for exotic birds as we gently glided past partially-submerged fence posts.

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El Garzal means, The Heron, for the birds that gravitate there as a mating site. It is located in what are now federally-protected wetlandsa recent legal distinction we would learn about at a meeting with Colombias land title agency later that week. It is part of an elegant attempt at a government solution to their title battles in civil court with the Barreto family.1

View of another canoe like ours during the river crossing towards the swamp area around El Garzal.

Halfway through the disorienting swampland, the driver sensed some concern about how long we had been threading through the ersatz waterways and how much further we still had to go. Im lost, he deadpanned through a translator. Welcome to Cartagena, he declared. We finally pulled up to a lip of solid shoreline, beginning to wilt in the close jungle air and already starting to draw a cloud of the mosquitoes for which the village is infamous.

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The beginning of the road into El Garzal.

Many of the family farms in El Garzal are adorned with bright flowers.

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LA PROPIA. (Propia denotes something that is ones own.) The pastors flatbed truck and the delegations means of transportation through the extensive farmland. I wedged into the cab with the driver along with a representative of Justapaz, and the other 11 members of the delegation sat and stood in the back. The road is really a built-up flood wall in many places that is traditionally traversed via motorcycle or horses and burros. The truck leaves deep ruts in the mud, and is often not safe to use at all. (Conditions lookedand feltquite alarming from my seat, but I told myself our driver, the pastors son-in-law, had probably been doing this his entire adult life and I shouldnt worry. We later learned the truck had been obtained two months earlier.)

We only slid off into a ditch once, as we crept along through muddy potholes. It was an excellent opportunity to practice constructing joking Spanish sentences such as, I am going to walk now, I really like burros and I want that horse over there.

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Cafe tinto con pollo on the pastors porch. Colombian chickens are unusually welcoming.

Town green.

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After the delegation had settled in over coffee and lunch, we got back into the truck and were driven down to a clearing which serves as soccer field, grazing ground, and town green. A large turnout of men, women and children of all ages was already assembling a circle of chairs. (With some apology, we were informed that attendance would have been even greater if the recent rain had not rendered certain areas impassable.) Pastor Salvador addressed the crowd on the purpose of the delegation:

He turned around to address the delegation:

In contested rural areas like El Garzal, clergy are de facto human rights leaderseven if initially reluctant to step down from the pulpit, beyond their training, into that role.

In the first half of 2013 alone, 37 human rights defenders have been murdered in Colombia, many of whom were advocating on behalf of communities struggling for land rights.

They all bring different resources in accompaniment. Your presence has allowed us to be here and be alive.

As ones who minister to communities umprotected by the reach of the state, they are forced into the public sphere to address the suffering of their parishioners.

June 1, 2013 meeting. Opening prayer.

30

June 1, 2013 meeting. Crowd at El Garzal.

June 1, 2013 meeting. Pastor Salvador runs the meeting.

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The meeting was also attended by a delegation of campesinos from the small farming community of El Guayabo, located northeast from El Garzal across the river (marked on map). A few months earlier they had sought out Pastor Salvadors help in organizing themselves against their own land title threat. 24 families have tended their land there since 1985 (a total of 60 families live off the land in the community). Two years ago, a young stranger suddenly appeared and claimed he had just inherited the right to all of their property.

Not hermanas (sisters) but amigas.

32

One of the pastors sons-in-law gave us a tour of his farm after the meeting. Pastor Salvador and his wife Nidia have four daughters; he jokes, Im the father-in-law of the entire village.

Getting ready to depart for the pastors house for the evening.

33

Community organizers in the U.S. speak of recognition; a casual reader of the New Testament will recall that power is measured not by wealth or station or the size of your army, but by how seriously you are taken by your enemies. In Colombia, guerrillas and paramilitaries recognize religious leaders as powerful actors who pose a dangerous threat to their authority and the status quo of the rule of force. Besides the support of land restitution, the U.S. State Department lists the following sins that have painted targets on the backs of known victimized church leaders: This religious persecution is not based on religion. In the opinion of the U.S. government,

A 2012 report by one religious freedom watch group estimates that 20-30 church leaders are assassinated each year, and 200 churches have been forcibly closed.

opposing the forced recruitment of minors, promoting human rights, assisting internally displaced persons, and discouraging coca cultivation.

It has a chilling effect on the freedom of worship all the same.

crimes against religious group leaders [in 2012] were motivated not by religious beliefs but by a desire to disrupt human rights work, such as advocacy on behalf of the displaced population or other vulnerable groups, or helping vulnerable groups with land claims.

What is it like to be a church under threat by armed actors, beyond the obvious fears for the life of the pastor? Once again, documentation tells an unforgettable story. The Peace Commissions 2008 report of human rights violations against Protestant churches and leaders aggregated a brief summary of the so-called collective victim incidents documented that year, which are typical: Armed groups interrupted worship to read death threats. They offered money to rape the girls in the church and threatened to rape them themselves. Illegal armed groups ordered churches to close, silenced and displaced pastors, and planted landmines around a church.

In many corners of Colombia, to assemble openly for worship is a public act of courage. There are El Garzals repeating across the country, rural and urban.

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Sunday, June 2, 2013. A leader of the Foursquare Church congregation who also represents the area at the level of the municipality of Simit. Jos led the service that morning, while the pastor sat in the back until it was time for his sermon.

Music ministry. This duo sang with a fierce urgency I had not witnessed before in a worship service.

35

Another song, led by a cantor and sang by the entire congregation.

A staffer from Bogot told me why the Foursquare Church of El Garzal was special to her: It reminds me of my own church: small, but so many children. She also explained to our delegation the phenomena of dual accompaniment: trips into El Garzal have buoyed her in her own work as well.

36

In his spiritual tradition, the place of the pastor is in the pulpit, not in the local, national, and international advocacy he has been forced to seek out in order to protect the lives and livelihood of his congregation. Throughout his personal narrative of how he was pushed and pulled into this unlikely service, he repeatedly told us,

Pastor Salvador sat up with the delegation late into the night before Sundays service, describing the history of land dispute and threat in El Garzal.

But in the end, he kept capitulating. And he has confessed that even a reluctant servant becomes a lifelong one:

I kept saying no to God.

Defending human rights in Colombia is a way of life; it is a collective project that one must take hold of with body and soul in order to bring about change. Once you start there is no going back because once you take that first step you are no longer responsible just for yourself, but rather for the entire community.

June 1, 2013. 10pm.

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Sunday, June 2, 2013. Pastor Salvador sings a final hymn alongside the congregation. [ Care Goodstal-Spinks]

To witness is to volunteer to be jarred awake, to forfeit the protective skin of harmless generalities and secondhand accounts. Narrative feels inadequate to describe the unexpected heartbreak of the departure from El Garzal. Here, an abridged documentation of my own:

On Sunday morning we joined the Foursquare Church in joyful communion and song. Members of the delegation shared with the congregation on the road to Emmaus. Pastor Salvador preached on the faithful remnant.2 Afterwards, a meeting was called for the community only, while the delegation was sat down to lunch. We were informed that fortune had changed and credible news of an imminent threat had arrived just before the service. Members of the Barreto family were witnessed hosting members of the Urabeos on their property thirty minutes away by boat. This time, CPT was away from their home base in Barrancabermeja and not immediately available to escort Pastor Salvador to safety. After lunch he packed a bag and we accompanied him out of El Garzal.3 Our hearts burned within us. We cannot help but speak of what we have seen and heard.

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June 2, 2013. The children of the Foursquare Church perform a song with the refrain, Tengo una bandera plantada en mi coraznthere is a flag planted in my heart.

The Colombian government reserves the right to grant right of use of federally protected areas; this right of use can be assigned to specific individuals, and even passed down as an inheritance. (It cannot be sold or borrowed against.) A committee with representatives from both the community and the state will be created to regulate and govern the responsible use of the land by the campesinos. Right of use will not be extended to associates of illegal armed actors, regardless of prior title claims.
2

At our meeting later that week at the Bogot headquarters of Colombias land title agency (INCODER), we learned that the land El Garzal sits on will be legitimately reclassified as federally-protected wetlands, which legally cannot be titled in Colombia. INCODERs authority supersedes that of private individuals and civil court judges. By making the land a federal property that cannot be privately owned by anyoneneither the farmers of El Garzal, nor the members of the Barreto clan the dispute will no longer be bogged down in the red tape (and often, corruption) of the local courts.
1

A decision was made that Nidia and other family members would remain behind in El Garzal until Tuesday, when Christian Peacemaker Teams was able to arrive to accompany the community and evacuate her out along with one daughter and a grandson. It was the assessment of Pastor Salvador and the Colombian partners that only Salvador himself was in imminent danger, not his family; this is a common dynamic in threats againstand assassinations ofcivilian leaders.
3

You have spoken arrogantly against me, says the Lord.Yet you ask, What have we said against you? You have said, It is futile to serve God. What do we gain by carrying out his requirements and going about like mourners before the Lord Almighty? But now we call the arrogant blessed. Certainly evildoers prosper, and even when they put God to the test, they get away with it. Then those who feared the Lord talked with each other, and the Lord listened and heard. A scroll of remembrance was written in his presence concerning those who feared the Lord and honored his name. On the day when I act, says the Lord Almighty, they [the faithful remnant] will be my treasured possession. I will spare them, just as a father has compassion and spares his son who serves him. And you will again see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not. (Malachi 3:13-18)

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Three days later, back in Bogot and still heavy with our witness in the Magdalena Medio, the delgation viewed sites where CEDECOL Peace Commission affiliates work with the multi-generational victims of forced displacement. Organized communities targeted by armed actorslike the farmers of El Garzalcommonly assert that they would rather die on their own land than flee. The fate that these campesinos deem worse than death is displacement to a place like Soacha.

The road from first world neighborhoods of Bogot to third world neighborhoods of Soacha (rising up in the distance) is only about two hours long in traffic. As in most developed nations, the employed urban poor work service jobs and have some access to media and advertising; they know exactly how the rich live. The rich do not witness how the poor live.

Colombia has the highest number of internally displaced citizens in the world.1 They ring the major cities in hellish shantytownslabeled invasiones by the traditionally housedwhere they struggle to survive, much less maintain their sense of dignity and identity. In addition to facing inhuman levels of poverty, social stigma, and identity death, forcibly displaced persons in these settlements have merely traded one brand of violent threat for another. 40

We met this forcibly displaced campesino in the Los Pinos neighborhood of Altos de Cazuc in Soacha. He stands here on the path above his precarious housing; a narrow trickle of raw sewage ran down nearby. He did not flee his family farm until he had been shot in the leg and three of his daughters had been murdered as a direct result of his involvement a land dispute. He walks his grandchildren to a childrens soup kitchenLos Pinos Comedorevery afternoon. On some days the swelling in his bad leg is severe enough that he has difficulty getting around the hilly terrain, even with his cane. These residents have virtually no access to routine medical care.

Soacha is ranked #1 in Colombia for the highest number of residents who came there after being internally displaced; it is additionally ranked #4 in the number of its own residents it displaces due to violence. Gangs and paramilitary control wide swaths of these encampments, filling the vacuum that government has been unableor unwillingto occupy. They battle each other in the open over territory and conduct drug deals in public. (Even the precarious geography of these settlements fuels violence: one aid worker explained that when recent flooding created mudslides in Soacha, fighting intensified as armed groups contested the new parameters of a shifted landscape.) We were informed that street combatants currently fall into four main categories: active paramilitaries; demobilized paramilitaries who have disbanded from their units but have gone on to organize BACRIM (criminal bands); so-called neo-paramilitaries: members of former paramilitary groups that were demobilized who have stayed together in similar structures with similar objectives rather than retire or join BACRIM or common street gangs; and ordinary street gangswhich are becoming more organized, and reaching out for alliances with paramilitary affiliates in a bid to conduct business more openly.2

These armed actors routinely target boys for coerced recruitment as early as 9 and 10 years old.

They are powerful enough to frame themselves as a quasi-government; the police in Soacha entrench themselves in a literal bunker. 41

The police station in Soacha. A former military encampment, until residents asked for them to withdraw since soldiers stationed there were worsening social ills by taking advantage of vulnerable youth.

We arrived in Soacha during a social cleansing period; five people had already been assassinated in the previous seven days. These come in seasons, one of our Bogot partners explained in a low voice, briefly taking over for a local director after an exterior door was closed for privacy. A target list of social undesirables (suspected homosexuals, addicts, prostitutes, petty criminals, the HIV positive, etc.) is posted beforehand around town. An early curfew is publicized as well, enforceable by murder; it makes no difference if a victim is returning from a job or schooling. In a city that churned through seven different mayors just from 2010 to 2012, these bloody purges are imagined by armed actors to legitimize their presence: they frame themselves as powerful authorities protecting and serving the common good of a community abandoned by the government. As in remote rural areas of Colombia, civil societynot the stateis the first, and sometimes only, line of defense against oblivion and death.

If Soacha is the city with highest population of displaced persons in Colombia, the true numbers are even higher, since government agencies render them invisibleand deny them access to servicesby systematically under-counting them. It has largely been left to non-governmental organizations to provide not just relief, but recognition. On our day in Soacha, we visited two such professional service sites affiliated with the CEDECOL Peace Commission.

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James Baldwin wrote, in a memoir on race and civil rights,

The level of material deprivation in Soacha is so appalling that any agency could be forgiven for focusing solely on immediate physical needs. However, the Peace Commission affiliated programs we witnessed are clearly informed by an understanding that peace at the societal level is built only on the possibility of dignity for the whole individual.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

In the U.S., community organizing programs with an interfaith, relational bent emphasize the goal of establishing personal connection in the course of individual and public meetings.

From our first day in Bogot, a striking number of advocates matter-of-factly disclosed to us that they came to their work after a childhood spent hearing the stories of displacement from parents or grandparents. I began trying to see, when I could, that we asked the people we met how they came to their vocation.3 At Los Pinos Comedor, a childrens soup kitchen that fronts a multi-service agency in the Los Pinos section of Soachas neighborhood of Altos de Cazuc, I asked the director:

Why do you travel two hours each way to Soacha, when there are so many poor people right in the slums of Bogot who need help?

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Marias answer was not one of remembrance, but of being sought out, seeking, and finding. She had been working in accompanying Mennonite church leaders across Colombia, and then one day an indigenous family showed up in her office in Bogot with a simple plea:

It was a life-altering moment:

Come to Soacha and see how we live.

I witnessed their needs, saw families very alone, and others afraid to go to them. In Bogot, its easier to get people to go to serve those in need. In Soacha, the church runs projects that serve those who feel abandoned by the state...we are here to plant the seeds of love, hope, and solidarity.

The comedor serves malnourished children, a decision made though a community meeting with neighborhood mothers who were consulted beforehand on their needs and ideas. Many of their mothers are single heads of households and underemployed as cleaners, or go to markets to hunt for scraps or to beg. Approximately 60 children are fed lunch each day. For many children, it is their only complete meal of the day.

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Mothers of the children who are served volunteer to take on most of the daily meal preparation, and participate in other programs at the comedor as well.

The beginnings of a clothing bank on the second floor. It seemed to mostly be neckties at the time of our visit.

45

Beyond childhood hunger relief, the professionals at Los Pinos Comedor task themselves with addressing three areas of assistance to the community, as outlined by the director: Tutoring is provided to the children, and trauma recovery groups for entire families are scheduled four times per week. There is intentional focus on building peace from the ground up, from community-wide campaigns like Pan y Paz (Bread and Peace) to working with parents on family violence, since, as it was put to us,

Psychological recovery, rebuilding the social fabric, and emergency humanitarian aid.

Peace is an urgent social program in Soacha.

Three armed groups currently war for control of the Los Pinos neighborhood.

Rooftop garden area at Los Pinos Comedor. The programs goal is for each participating family to have a garden at home, and to also assist in tending the community rooftop garden, which is a source of food for the kitchen and seedlings.

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We asked the director about her own self-care in a stressful and dangerous work area. The Anabaptist network runs training on self-care, and there is also a psycho- social organization that provides accompaniment to nonprofit workers. In addition, she meets with a group of aid providers at her home church once a week. We asked her when she has time to go to church. She smiled at the question. I worship 6 days a week. (She works at the comedor every day but Saturday.)

Children enrolled in the psycho-social accompaniment programs plant their own plants, labeled by name. They are asked to pray for peace when they tend to them, and if the plant dies, the director jokingly scolds them, You must not have prayed hard enough for peace.

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The mural at the rooftop garden. Painted by the children, and representing their hopes, dreams, and things they have seen on television (there is a tall mast ship under the boards). The tree is central for a reason. The organization can occasionally fund field trips to rural areas for the children. Childrens rooftop gardening activities are an integral part of the professional psycho-social accompaniment programs at the comedor: They feel the plants and put their hands in the dirt, and then they will start to talk about their trauma.

Maria clarified the mission of Los Pinos Comedor and associated programs like it in Soacha:

Staff of the comedor are members of a Soacha Roundtable Working Group, a monthly conference of international, local, and state organizations serving the area that was started in 2009. They conduct a political analysis of the ever-changing power dynamics of the neighborhood, and make sure they are not duplicating each others efforts.

We dont want to replace the government. Our goal is to teach the community how to announce, and denounce.

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Rincn del Lago.

We ended our day at Creciendo JuntosRising Togetherin the Rincn del Lago barrio of Soachas community of Sucre. It is another Mennonite initiative affiliated with the CEDECOL Peace Commission to provide professional services in education, community building, and psycho-social accompaniment at the neighborhood level. They are currently open only half time due to a lack of resources, but have grown to serve 150 children from ages 5 to 17 as well as their families. As with the mothers of Los Pinos Comedor, over the last twelve years of operation the residents of the community it servesincluding ten local youthhave grown into assuming key leadership roles.

Girls outside Creciendo Juntos, on site for training as camp counselors for younger children on an upcoming retreat out of Soacha.

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Given the wide age range served, programs at Creciendo Juntos range from play therapy for the youngest, to workshops on sexual and reproductive rights for high schoolers, but

all offerings are designed with the agenda of teaching non-violence.

The play therapy room at Creciendo Juntos. ALEGRIA - VIDA - IGUALDAD PAZ joy, life, equality, peace.

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The tutoring library at Creciendo Juntos.

We were briefly joined by five high schoolers who arrived for an afterschool activity: A. is 14 years old. She would like to be an obstetrician. M. is 14. She has been attending the program since the age of 5. Her hobbies are listening to music and dancing. She doesnt know what she wants to be yet. D. is 15 and has been at the project for two months; her classmates asked her to join them, and she usually did nothing on Saturdays. She would like a medical and legal career in criminal justice. I want to be a forensic pathologist, she qualified, but I also want to study law. G. is 14. She would like to study to be a pediatrician. And B. is 15. She is in the 10th grade, and hopes to be a car mechanic.

It is virtually impossible to go from Soachas public schools to university: students cant compete with the expensively-prepared middle class and wealthy applicants who fill the slots at the nearby, sliding scale, state- funded schools. That leaves less competitive private collegeswhich are impossibly expensive.

I asked the staff if they could recall anyone in their program going on to college; they recalled a single student who was sponsored by a European visitor to their site.

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Programs for older children are especially designed to focus on personal development as well as peace. In addition to computer science, sports, music, and dance offerings, Creciendo Juntos also boasts a small recording studio. Some of the young adult programs are built from hip hop and urban culture, including break-dancing and graffiti art; Creciendo Juntos has worked with Justapaz to bring in a hip hop artist from Bogota to work with their youth, and recently organized an evening peace concert that drew 300 participants and also included urban dance and graffiti art demonstrations. Even though youth from different neighborhoods were in attendancea potential tinderbox for conflictthe evening passed peacefully, and there was a reported dip in youth violence in the area afterwards. They hope to secure funding for another event like it on September 21 of this year, the UN International Day of Peace.

arts and music are presented as alternatives to violence.

A recording booth at Creciendo Juntos. The walls are insulated with egg cartons.

Like students everywhere, the children of Creciendo Juntos gravitate towards art and music; however,they also possess a keen social and political consciousness urgently in search of an outlet. A workshop on public policy was recently heldby special request of the youth leaders there. And even their chosen music programming is more than it may seem at first glance: in the impoverished south of Bogota, hip hop has had a history as the protest music of the young since it was introduced from the U.S. in the 1980s.

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We were informed that the artists that operate out of Creciendo Juntos call themselves Voces OcultasHidden Voices:

One umbrella group for the hip hop artists of Soachaand the name of the recent hip hop concert for peaceis Diplomcia PoticaPoetic Diplomacy.

They announce, and denounce.

On June 29, Voces Ocultas departed from the margins of Soacha into the heart of Bogot for a CD release party in the historic Candelaria district.

This summer, Voces Ocultas released their first official video on YouTube, XXI Siglo (21 Century). It features hip hop and dance grounded in the landscape of the neighborhood. The young artists and spectators featured are ebullientand powerful.

The youth here use hip hop in a positive way. It is a way for them to describe what they see around them in their neighborhoods, and they use it to make proposals.

Soacha is a city of youth. The percentage of people we saw out on the streets under the age of thirty was startlingly high.

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Soachas schools are so overcrowded that children are split into two shifts. The streets fill with uniformed students in both directions at the midday change of shift.

Schools are no refuge from the hardship and violence of the city outside. The school across the street from Los Pinos Comedor was recently invaded by an armed group that demanded all of the snacks set aside for the childrenmany of whom dont have adequate daily food available at home.

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At Creciendo Juntos, a member of our delegation struggled to understand the factors behind Soachas blistering level of violence:

Lets say Im a teenage boy in Soacha. What am I thinking? What am I feeling? Am I angry? Am I depressed? The director looked nonplussed. No, theyre just regular children. But in Soacha, around ages 11 and 12, boys families begin receiving terrifying invitations along with promises of food and other basicsfrom rival armed groups. (We drove past a large and modernand visibly gang-controlledgrocery store on the way out; photographing it or making eye contact from the van was strongly discouraged).

Creciendo Juntos can offer emergency relocation assistance in these cases, but few families can bear to be displaced from yet another community.

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T T

hen the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you? he King will reply, Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.
[Matthew 25:37-40]

At least in the U.S., the poor do not individually think of themselves as the least of these. In fact, outside of the context of powerful political action they do not often even personally identify as the poor. In Soacha, according to one program leader, few Colombians they encounter who have suffered internal displacement will call themselves displaced persons: The families in our programs will say, We live here for economic or family reasons. Only five or six have said, We are in Soacha because we were displaced.

A second floor patio in Soacha. Even the meanest residential areas are dotted with potted plants and flowering bushes. They are cultivated as a reminder of home, and of former identities tied to the mastery of land.

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The Peace Commission affiliates we visited in Soacha dont just offer prayers and short-term poverty relief to these victims of violence; theirs is not a hand-out ministry. Staffersguided by residentsare challenging themselves to design programming that accompanies some of the most disenfranchised people in the world in reclaiming the power and agency necessary to define their own identities in the public sphere anew. If inequalitynot povertyis the ultimate motor of war, then the rural and urban churches of CEDECOL are playing the long game for peace.

Former campesinos displaced from communities like El Garzal into places like Soacha by force are victims of violence three times over. Most obvious is the literal violence of displacement by armed actors to the dangerous urban slums that are no refuge. Next comes what medical anthropologist Paul Farmer, among others, would term the structural violence of being rendered invisible and blocked from access to critical services at the level of the state. Finally, there is the trauma of identity displacement/death and its severe accompanying stigma in the social arenaa despicable form of violence in its own right.4

A student looks out onto the building that houses Creciendo Juntos (center; red door). Creciendo Juntos is located on the second floor; the blue banner is for a new Mennonite church plant in Rincn del Lago opened on the first floor. The Mennonites founded Creciendo Juntos to serve the community twelve years ago; a church was not added until two years agoafter community members requested one.

Reports from 2009-2011 list Colombia trailing just behind Sudan in the official number of displaced persons, until they finally surpassed the war-ravaged African nation in 2012 with nearly 5 million230,000 of whom were displaced just that year. For more background on why this number is still increasing even as more of the guerrilla conflict has been pacified in recent years, see this (pointedly titled) article from 2009: If Colombia Is Winning Its War, Why the Fleeing?
1

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To add to any confusion: the labels neo-paramilitary and BACRIM are often used interchangably; an explanation of the politics and legal implications of whether or how the two are distinguished by the state (and the consequences for their victims) would require a separate essay.
2

As a church-based delegation, even many of our secular meetings felt like they took on a pastoral feel behind closed doors. One Colombian leader told us by way of introduction, You are messengers of peaceI share this vocation with you. I am a follower of Christ; it is a clandestine vocation of mine. At our pre-meeting for a visit by a politician active on one of the legislative peace committees, we worked on a list of questions and advocacy points that focused on policy and the agencies we had already visited. I added towards the end, If we have any time left, someone should ask him if he has a personal story behind why he does this work. A delegation member made sure we asked, and the private conversation that resulted was one of the most memorable of our trip.
3

Some Colombians share the same essentialist view of their unfashionable (and proximate) poor that we do ours. In the search for reason and comfort within the status quo they are viewed, whether with open contempt or self-conscious benevolence, as having done, or been, something that must justify their current situation. One horror of the misfortune of stigmatized poverty is that it becomes a forcedand enforced exile into the status of other, even if nothing else has changed. It is a mutable externality that even polite society insists on casting as an intrinsic identity tell, forever displacing and invalidating everything that was otherwise visible the day before.

We arrived in Soacha with hearts still full from our visit with the people of El Garzal. I naively asked one of the program directors on what grounds it was possible for victimized campesinos to be stigmatized.
4

Both hard and soft manifestations of socioeconomic stigma illustrate how stigma is policed, and the broader societal function it serves. This existential stigma is the death of social/occupational identity mobility, even in cultures that claim to worship at the altar of meritocracy. Any threat of being addressed by or perceived as the peeror worseof a (so-named) uppity member of an underclass is personalized on a primal level as potential status humiliation. (Even the possibility requires as a response any sabotage necessaryfrom genteel, plausibly-deniable innuendo all the way to bloody violence.) Outside of athletics and the arts, Cinderella stories are relatively uncommon: to quote or promote a lower status individual as authoritative is not just stripped of the usual pleasures of namedropping but unthinkable, reinforcing invisibility and cementing class immobility. (Obvious inferiors areat bestpermitted to be cast as our beloved, salt-of-the-earth experts on folk wisdom.)

In circles where overt prejudice is itself stigmatized (here and abroad), progressive, feel-good bigotry is couched in the language of low expectations, and poor choices that simply must have been made (or not made) at some point, to explain away the misfortune of situational or generational poverty in every single case, individual or group. (This cuts along tribal lines, obviously. For instance, even in the aftermath of drug addiction or other ill-advised behaviorswhere choice and bad decisions really do come into playthe temporarily fallen children of privilege do not suffer global identity spoilage. Unlike those born into lower status, if recovered they simply return to the fold with a gritty back-story, sometimes even to the fatted calf of a memoir deal. These inspiring narratives are of course framed as proof that redemption and reintegration is always within grasp, with sufficient effort and fitness. The children of the poor who suffer just the same for the same behaviors are permanently sectioned offoften literally convictedas drug addicts paying the predictable price for their choices, with the generous allowance that maybe no one ever taught them any better.)

At our finest, the adult brain makes it difficult to admit to ourselves when we are totally mistaken about something weve fixed as realityespecially implicitly, or with what feels like magnanimityand to then radically overhaul our thought habits accordingly. (This also makes it difficult to combat the internalization

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of spoiled identity and powerlessness by groups and individuals who have been targeted for stigma for years, or generations.) The best of us are subconsciouslyfearfullyprimed to keep the poor (or at least those who are not the poor de jour; we must always set aside some kinds of poor people we can claim to love as Christ commands, of course) down, instead of helping them back onto the playing field. We are born with both a hardwired need to be correct in our automatic perceptions, and the primitive urge for some knowable order to any grave inequality in our immediate contexts. At least the Pilgrims with their immutable elect conceded that they themselves were not God-like enough to determine for certain who was permanently marked to be in or outside the gates, or why.

The stigma experienced by displaced persons in Soacha illustrates that it makes no difference if a change in socio-economic status happens overnight, at gunpoint. They are widely perceived as drug addicts, criminals, guerrillas, or otherwise inferior to the non-displaced. Some Colombians actually believe that forced displacement is longer a problem and that DPs are surely just the ordinary underclass, invading urban areas with their filthy shantytowns in search of government handouts and criminal mischief. (One upper middle class womana business owner in Bogotwas asked by a researcher for her opinion of the internally displaced; she replied, There are still displaced people? I thought that they all went back to the fields. Well, anyways, you cant believe what they say.) Some report being spat on by other urban residents, and many have found it impossible to find employment. It is not uncommon for displaced persons to lie about their status when seeking jobsthey conceal what they supposedly are in order to preserve high-stakes public spaces where they might still be visible as who they are.

Uncomfortable Christianity requires the courage to bear the humility required to see with clearer eyes not only what is but what always was, and to imagine what still must beat both the individual and the societal level. Compassion flatters the self; empathy terrifiesand demands a response. Here is the ominous promise of the kingdom of God on earth: justice and peace shall kiss. Christ was clear that the literal feeding of the hungry with loaves and fishes was never meant to be the main course. We are, after all, the faith that congratulates itself on having recognized that sometimes the rightful king rides in on an ass and wears a crown of thorns.

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 [Days of Prayer and Action for Colombia petition, 2013]

n independent truth commission and strong measures to ensure justice for severe human rights abuses by all parties to the conflict. Colombians deserve to know the full truth about those who implemented, ordered, financed and promoted the violence and violations of human rights and international humanitarian law against the civilian population, whether they be guerrillas, paramilitary forces, or the governments own security forces.

We advocate for U.S. policy that champions:

Sunday, June 2, 2013. The delegation, plus Pastor Salvador, closes in on the Cormagdalena port at Barrancabermeja via chalupa.

After departing El Garzal with Pastor Salvador on Sunday, we stayed overnight in the port city of Barrancabermeja (nickname: Barranca) before returning to Bogot Monday evening for the tour of Soacha, and meetings with U.S. and Colombian officials. Monday morning we joined Christian Peacemaker Teams Colombia (CPT) at their Barranca residence for a French toast breakfast prepared by an expat Quebecois our delegation leader imported in the maple syrup as promisedthat included CPTs own group of visiting delegates from abroad, who had signed up for an accompaniment visit to the community of Las Pavas.

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Sunday night, from the hotel balcony in Barrancabermeja. Over half of the other guests I saw were Colombians in the oil worker jumpsuits of mostly foreign-owned corporations.

The development of the troubled town of Barrancabermeja has been tightly braided with Colombias oil boom, a powerful union movement, and the horrific violence of the modern age. A socio-political tour of the town was arranged for the foreign delegates from both organizations in the afternoon with a local guide, while the CPT leaders and CEDECOL Peace Commission affliliates stayed back to conference with Pastor Salvador.

A chalupa view of the oil industry in Barranca. Ecopetrol is the Colombian national oil company. The majority of oil profits are exported out by other countries. Ecopetrol and the city itself were founded just a year apart, and grew hand in handas did the powerful labor movement that accompanied it. From 1995 to 2005, 95 labor leaders were killed by paramilitaries, presumably under contract. Barrancas sister city in the U.S. is Houston, Texas.

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Unnaturally bright green, opaque water at the Miramar Swamp near an Ecopetrol refinery. Pollution from the oil industry is so bad in some places that fish are born without bones.

Its debatable whether this depicts the hand of God cradling the world, or the hand of man clasping it in a death grip. Our guide said the river started out as a connecting and sustaining river of life; was transformed by man into a river of death (pollution, and a literal graveyard along its length through conflict zones); and Colombians are now trying to reclaim it for life again. He told us he wishes the history of the region from prehistory to modern dayscould be written from the perspective of the river.

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Christian Peacemaker Teams is an ecumenical organization, with its origin and theological roots in a challenge thrown down by Ron Sider in his address to the Mennonite World Conference in 1984. It was a call to arms, of sorts, to the traditional peace churches in developed nations:

Since 1986, Christian Peacemaker Teams staff and volunteers have strategically placed themselves in areas where human rights are under threat, as international witnesses andif requiredhuman shields for at-risk individuals and communities. CPT has accompanied El Garzal since 2007, as part of a local, national, and international effort that includes the CEDECOL Peace Commission. After the death threats began in the early 2000s, Pastor Salvador called a community meeting to discuss how to proceed. He was advised to flee with his family for safety. With the support of his wife Nidia, he decided he wanted to stay instead, and began persistently seeking out various accompaniment organizations to create a coalition effort to make this possible.

Those who have believed in peace through the sword have not hesitated to die. Proudly, courageously, they gave their lives. Again and again, they sacrificed bright futures to the tragic illusion that one more righteous crusade would bring peace in their time. For their loved ones, for justice, and for peace, they have laid down their lives by the millions.

hy do we pacifists think that our wayJesus wayto peace will be less costly? Unless we Mennonites and Brethren in Christ are ready to start to die by the thousands in dramatic vigorous new exploits for peace and justice, we should sadly confess that we really never meant what we said. We did, of course, in earlier times.But today we have grown soft and comfortable. We cling to our affluence and our respectability. nless we are ready to die developing new nonviolent attempts to reduce international conflict, we should confess that we never really meant the cross was an alternative to the sword.

Based on their mission philosophy and available resources as an organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams limits itself to requests for accompaniment, not requests for help: there must be established leadership and planning already present for CPT to step in. The Magdalena Medio communities accompanied by CPT are ones that have strongly committed to defy forced displacement together:

Christian Peacemaker Teams has had the Barrancabermeja outpost in Colombia since 2001. They chose the city because at the time it was vying neck to neck with Medelln (which was once the world capital of murder) as the most violent in Colombia, and was fast becoming the de facto capital of the paramilitary incursion into the Medio Magdalena region, where paras had already moved in to terrorize the surrounding countryside and smaller cities for years before making the final grab for Barrancabermeja.

These are communities that have said, If theyre going to kill us, then theyre going to kill us all.

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A CPT leader matter-of-factly summarized for us the situation on the ground in the year before their Colombian headquarters/residence was opened there:

Barranca had effectively been transferred from the misery of guerrilla control to paramilitary control.

By December 2000, [the paramilitaries] had full control of the city. There were two to three new bodies in the street every morning, and thousands were pushed out with door to door threats.

ASORVIMM is the Regional Association of Victims of State Crimes in the Magdalena Medio. The Colombian military has repeatedly been implicated in collaborating closely with paramilitary grouups in the battle against guerrilla forces like FARC and ELNresulting in a staggering number of civilian deaths and displacements. Human Rights Watch has called paramilitaries the sixth division of Colombias army.

The mass targeting of civilians for death or displacement in the course of battling a guerrilla insurgency is no aberration, nor peculiarly Colombian. It is intentional military strategy that has become standard operating procedure in asymmetrical warfare. Mao Tse-Tung famously wrote that the advantage of the guerrilla against the state is that

The conventional military response is to target the fish by draining away the water of civilians holding the guerrillas afloat (via aiding and abetting them, or mere pacified surrender), through mass depopulation in one form or another.

the guerrilla can always sink back into the peaceful population which is the sea in which the guerrilla swims like a fish.

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Monumento a Camilo Torres Restrepo in Barrancabermeja. Torres was a Catholic priest, a cousin of a president of Colombia, a founder of the sociology department at the National University in Bogotand finally, a famous early member of guerrilla group ELN, where he achieved martyr status when he was killed in his very first battle in 1966.

The park it sits in is sometimes called El Descabezadothe headless since paramilitaries shot the head off of the bust immediately after it was placed in 1996. The bust has been placed and replaced 5 times.

Our guide explained that the modern day view of Torres focuses on his legacy as an egalitarian thinker and sociologist, not as a combatant: Fifty years later, Colombians know it was an error for him to join the guerrillas, but we recognize that the spirit of the times was different then. At the time, guerrillas were seen as a genuine defender of the poor against injustice; the prevailing view now is that, since the death of Torres, the ideology of liberation has been long lost and these groups have since devolved into criminal gangs.

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In 1998, a powerful paramilitary group (avowed ideological foes of all guerrillas) which had already invaded surrounding rural areas closed in for a full-scale assault. Entire neighborhoods already under the thumb of ELN or FARCor perceived to bewere framed as guerrilla sympathizers and came under attack as such. Barrancas murder rate in 2000, as reported by Human Rights Watch, shot up to a total of 567 known homicides or 227 per 100,000 persons. (New York Citys homicide rate in 2012 was 5 per 100,000; Flint, Michigan topped the U.S. list that year at 61.98.) 2000 was the same year paramilitary general Carlos Castao was widely rumored to have toured a former ELN stronghold in Barranca fallen to paramilitary rule, promising he would beenjoying a cup of coffee in the city by New Years Day. As 2000 drew to a close, his soldiers sent the remaining residents a holiday greeting:

Barrancabermeja was the birthplace, and then the urban stronghold, of the guerrilla group ELN (National Liberation Army). Except for incursions by rival guerrilla group FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) into a minority of neighborhoods after 1990, ELN controlled most of Barrancabermeja at the neighborhood level from the 1970s on. A 30% unemployment rate helped fuel recruitmentas it eventually would for successor armed groups.

The paras framed themselves as the latest armed messiahs of the oppressed, for a population weary of guerrilla extortion and control. One teen combatant boasted to a reporter in 2001, The paramilitary army that openly invaded and ran Barrancabermeja with impunity was the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Its founder and chief at the time, Carlos Castao, granted a self-indulgent interview to a British reporter in 2002, who pressed him on the subject of the barbaric mass killings of civilians the AUC was becoming known for. Castaos response captures the Orwellian insanity of the conflict:

Christmas weekend and the new year will be pain and blood.

By the end of this year, we will have cleansed Barrancabermeja of all subversives. They dont stand a chance.

Look, I know that war begets war, violence begets violence, but I have only ever acted in selfdefense. We do not kill civilians. The guerrillas take off their uniforms when the fight is going against them. They hide among the civil population. A huge percentage of our troops are guerrilla deserters. They tell us who their former comrades were. We know who we are killing.

2000 was also the year the United States also approved Plan Colombiaa proposed 7.5 billion aid package with 80% going to the Colombian police and military to support their war against guerrillas and drug cartels. An AUC commander in the western province of Putumayoanother former FARC stronghold until the AUC began a similar assault also in 1998informed a Reuters reporter that the AUC strongly supported Plan Colombia. He suggested that his paramilitaries could spearhead efforts to flush out guerrillas in advance of the anticipated official military campaign, and then hand over the territory to the Colombian army. Before he founded the AUC, Carlos Castaoalong with his brothers Fidel and Vincenteran a paramilitary group named Los Pepes founded to target Pablo Escobar and his associates and operations. Recently declassified papers document evidence that members of the joint U.S.-Colombia Medellin Task Force also founded to bring down the Escobar cartel were working in cooperation with Los Pepes and the Castao brothers. A U.S. intelligence assessment written after Escobars assassination by the state in 1994 warned that going forward,

Fidel Castao is more ferocious than Escobar, has more military capability, and can count on fellow anti-guerrillas in the Colombian Army and the Colombian National Police. [emphasis mine]

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After Fidels death, Carlos ascended to leadership himself and eventually founded the AUC. (Vincente is alleged by some to have murdered Carlos in 2004, and remains at large as the suspected chief of a successor paramilitary group based in Barrancabermeja called guilas Negrasthe Black Eaglesformed after the AUC was officially dissolved by 2006.) The AUCwhich enjoyed extensive ties with politicians and judges during its reignwas given the opportunity by the Colombian government to demobilize itself from 2003 to 2006.

Successor groupslargely consisting of demobilized paramilitaries, and termed neo-paramilitaries or BACRIM (criminal gangs) depending whos talkinghave sprung up to fill the gap. As well as the Black Eagles, former members of the AUC also founded Los Urabeos, one of the largest and most notorious neo-paramilitary groups in Colombia today. During an armed shut-down of the town of Santa Marta that terrorized residents and business owners in 2012, they passed out leaflets thatof coursedeclared: Manuel Barreto has been named as having had close ties to the AUC by Julin Bolvar, a notorious former commander in the region who surrendered to authorities in exchange for a reduced sentencing deal offered during the demobilization. (Bolvar confessed to 45 counts of homicide against civilians, including union and human rights activists.) AUC successor Los Urabeos is the neo-paramilitary group now alleged to be working for the Barreto family to threaten Pastor Salvador and the community of El Garzal. In 2012, Human Rights Watch reported in their Annual Watch Summary for Colombia that, for these successor groups to the original paramilitaries, In May 2013, a non-profit in the Middle Magdalena region published a report that concluded that the Urabeos now control 60% of the neighborhoods in Barrancabermeja. They are alleged to have active and retired members of Colombias police and military among their ranks.

We are an army that fights for social demands and the dignity of our people.

Tolerance of the groups by public security force members is a main factor for their continued power. At least 180 police officers were jailed in 2011 because of alleged ties to successor groups.

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Young children in Barrancabermeja out walking connected by a rope, next to the bridge that was formerly viewed as separating the good, law abiding citizenry from the (literal) wrong side of the tracks, where people were stereotyped as supporters of armed insurgents and victimized by every single side in the conflict as a result. Most of the massacres occurred in this area, which includes 75% of the population.

Colombias paramilitaries came into existence via a perverse, desperate attempt by the state to create peace by opening up the market for war. In 1960, a government under siege made it legal for private citizens to create civil defense groups to protect personal or company property, pacify guerrillas, and provide support to the Colombian military. (Of course, from the beginning this freed corrupt land and business owners and/or those involved in the drug trade to create such defense groups for less civically-minded ventures, and they did so in droves.) By 1969, the law had expanded to permit the military to themselves to organize and arm civilian self defense units with weaponry formerly restricted for use by state armed forces, so that they might contribute to the reestablishment of normalcy. Militarized civilians were used to openly support combat missionsor to carry out separate unofficial operations.

By 1989, these paramilitary groups were routinely instrumentalized by narco-landowners to target government opponents of the drug trade. There were a total of 12,859 political killings just in the 1980sup from 1,053 in the 1970s. It was only when high-level state officialsrather than civiliansbegan to be targeted in large numbers that paramilitary units were officially outlawed. Paramilitary forces were created by law for the support of the Colombian militarywhich heavily armed and colluded with them in the name of creating peaceand were not formally outlawed by the Colombian government until 1989.

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Some of the visiting CPT delegates wore their blue accompaniment vests on the tour. ECAP is their Spanish acronym: Equipos Cristanos de Accin por la Paz.

Added to the mind-numbing complexity of Colombias conflict history is the inevitable fog of war. At a stop in a park in the neighborhood of El Campn, our local guide clustered us around a small, shaded monument for the victims of the May 16, 1998 Mothers Day Massacrea watershed event in the invasion of Barrancabermeja.

The assassinations and disappearances were executed by paramilitaries, but the accepted theory is that they were there at the behest of the Colombian military (which otherwise inexplicably lifted a roadblockwith flawless timing to allow a convoy of fifty obvious paras to enter that night, and then drive back out again past a military barracks with a cargo of screaming hostages marked for later death). Our guide surmised that the paras were supposed to target guerrillas but ultimately balked and rounded up unarmed civilians at a fundraising festival instead, in order to meet their expected body count.1

We gamely sought to grasp the unthinkable, dutifully scratching away at notebooks as we peppered him with questions:

After many patient replies he finally volleyed this back, a hint of good-natured exasperation outpacing the translation:

Why did the paras seek out the old man at his home, when everyone else was taken or killed in the park? Why did they grab the one woman? For what reason did they chose this park, this day? What motive?

How can we know why they doanything?

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The Barrancabermeja home site of Christian Peacemaker Teams Colombia (ECAP). The team deliberately located their headquarters in the wrong side of town, where human rights defenders were most vulnerable.

After breakfast and before the tour, a CPT member had read aloud to us from the Call from the Colombian Churches to the Churches in the North in Response to Bill Clintons Visit to Our Country. It was sent by the leaders of the Colombian Mennonite Church to their North American counterparts after the passage of the original Plan Colombia in 2000 and a subsequent visit by President Clinton. Nearly 13 years later, it reads like prophesy. This letter was no meek call for prayer, but a pointed challenge to action:

In reality, the government of the United States, using the tax-payers money, is supporting the Colombian government in what we consider to be a negative form. This means that the message arriving from the North to the Colombian people becomes a message of death and destruction. or that reason we are calling the churches in the North to redeem their taxes, on one hand by demanding that the U.S. government invests this money in life-producing projects, and on the other hand by redirecting part of their taxes towards a different project in your community or in the world that promotes abundant and dignified life, as our Lord Jesus Christ has commanded us.

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Cristo PetroleroOil Christ. No, really, thats the name Ecopetrol executives (very Catholic) gave this water filter with this sculpture built on top. It doesnt work. The level of pollution is too overwhelming. The locals suggest that Jesus is throwing his hands up in helpless despair.

Blowback from U.S. aid to the Colombian military has historically contributed to the anguish in Colombia, and on a moral level we are called to use our social and political capital as American citizens in response. The percentage of aid to Colombia earmarked for military and police forces has tilted downwards in recent years. The Leahy Amendment also makes the yearly renewal of direct aid to Colombian military units conditional on respect for human rights in its operationsbut the State Departments mandatory certification process in Colombia is not without its strong critics. At our meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Bogot, the Foreign Service officers we spoke with described a U.S. Department of Justice collaboration with the Colombian judiciary designed to increase capacity and accountability in the prosecution of human rights violations, and hopefully decrease the appallingly high impunity rate for these offenses. USAID has contributed work on a centralized database as well. Embassy staffers expressed confidence that promotions in the Colombian military now go to U.S. trained and vetted officers,2 and that human rights offenders are dead-ending, especially after recent changes of command.

o that when one member suffers, all of the members suffer as well.
[1 Corinthians 12:26]

Nonetheless, human rights violations have actually been trending upwards. Through our elected representatives, each year we have the option to accept, reject, or demand additional scrutiny of annual aid renewal requests. Our Colombian counterparts are asking us, as taxpayers, to strengthen U.S. monitoring of where funding is going. They pay the ultimate price of any U.S. intervention gone wrong; weve paid the literal price beforehand. 71

June 2, 2013. Magdalena Medio riverfront on the journey back from El Garzal to Barrancabermeja.

There is another pressing issue raised by our Colombian partners. International attention and aid come in their own seasons. One director explained that, with the commencement of the FARC talks in Havana as well as other signs of progress in the state struggle against guerilla war, international aid and support to Colombian civil society and relief organizations has been dropping. The perception is that a final resolution is nearingbut for many Colombians, a new story is just beginning. For some time now, the majority of human rights violations and displacements have been committed by paramilitary or those classified as neo-paramilitary/criminal gangs (BACRIM), not guerrillasand the situation is not improving:

With the Colombian government working in earnest towards land restitution, and land restitution the first item on the table at the Havana negotiations, there is also the perception that Colombias campesinos are progressing rapidly towards justice, safety, and resolution. Back in Bogot, we heard firsthand about the heroic legal work INCODER has recently engaged in on behalf of El Garzal and communities like it.

Removing guerilla armies like FARC and ELN from the equation more completely may create a vacuum that some say the paramilitary are poised to fill.

According to UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] estimatesthere were 137 mass displacements in 2012twice as many as in 2011in which over 9,000 families were forced out of their homes. Most of the mass displacements were caused by BACRIM groups.

Unfortunately, Colombian and international observers report that restitution efforts have actually increased the level of violence and threats from illegal armed actors. As a senior Colombian military officer was quoted in a May 2012 article entitled, The Expansion of the Empire of the Urabeos:

Their finances do not come exclusively from drug trafficking. We know for a fact that the land restitution law generated a lot of noiseat stake are thousands and thousands of hectares.

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 We accompanied Pastor Salvador out of El Garzal on the heels of a joyful legal victory: the governments return of paper land titles to 64 families in April 2013a humiliating blow to the Barreto familys fraudulent ownership claims.

Bogot graffiti.

When asked about the likelihood of transitioning military aid into peace and development aid if the negotiations in Havana (and any beyond) are successful, embassy staff allowed that

We were told that USAID in particular sees a major potential role for accompaniment from the international community around eventual truth commissions, reconciliation programs, and victims services.

its possible that success of the peace process will require a shift to redevelopment and reintegration.

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June 2, 2013. JESUS ES EL CAMINO Jesus is the way.

For the compassionate, outward-looking church, the pull for global advocacy comes relentlessly and from every direction; unlike in many other zones of suffering, the U.S. government already has a large sphere of influence on the ground in Colombiaboth military and civilian. At the U.S. embassy, the delegation was informed with some pride that the Bogot facility is one of the largest American embassies in the world:

nearly every single U.S. federal agency is represented here.

And that is where the advocacy possibilities for the American church are enlivening, and a little frightening: with presence and power comes relevancyand with relevancy comes responsibility. 74

We we fortunate to have the opportunity to meet with many U.S. and Colombian political, government, and NGO representatives back in Bogot. Id long since fallen into petition and letter campaign fatigue, doubting they even make it past the internsparticularly when directed at anyone but ones own elected officials. But at one meeting, we were not even settled into our chairs and properly introduced when a top leader sputtered at us with cheerful indignation about a stack of letters THIS thick the office had been barraged with from the U.S. They werent from us. Our delegation still has no idea which denomination or organization wrote them, but as a body from an American religious organization we were absolutely pegged as the culprits. The delegation was mock-scolded before and during the meeting:

This was no joke; we left the meeting with a sober and detailed recommendation to direct a letter-writing campaign up towards the proper pressure point.

I got all of your lettersstop sending them to us! We are not the problem on this issue. You need to sent them to [another destination].

El Garzal meeting. The El Guayabo delegation was aware that we had meetings scheduled later that week with Colombias land title authority and the US Embassy. Their spokesman addressed us: We ask those from abroad to look across the river! Please mention our concerns as well. We also ask that you write a letter to the Governor of Santander.

Another day, we had the opportunity to meet with someone out of the office, well after hours. We described an advocacy case in a different region that our Colombian partners had been trying to get an update on. A cell phone flipped open and a call was made to a counterpart in that area:

Im here with an American delegation..

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If the churches of CEDECOL were called to organize themselves into a civil society player in the war for peacea conflict-zone embodiment of the UCC slogan, God is still speakingtheir American partners might keep an ear out for a similar call to join them in solidarity. (As always, this will sound from Colombia as a call to coordinated action, not a call to impotent handwringing.) Investment means accountability. But it also means opportunity. The bad news is that the United States government is entrenched in Colombia; the good news is that the United States government is entrenched in Colombia.

At the Bogot embassy meeting, the representative for the office of the military attach wanted to claim his seat at the table. He briefed the delegation on how his own department was a full partner in the battle for peace and human rights in Colombia as well. Through its Global Peace Operations Initiative, the U.S. Department of State is funding an innovative program to, as he put it,

Much more attention-grabbing to our delegation was his report of U.S. Embassy ties to a novel new effort by Colombias National Protection Unit. Long faced with criticism that the same protection measures offered to urbanbased human rights actors under threat (bodyguards, armored cars, bulletproof vests) are of little utility to targets in remote rural communities (like Pastor Salvador), a pilot program has been developedfunded by USAID to protect these leaders by making whole communities less isolated, and easier to secure. Cell phone towers can be built; critical roads can be shored up so that they arent routinely rendered impassible by rain. We immediately asked what it would take to get a call made to put El Garzal under consideration. Given their existing level of organization, leadership, and outside supportfrom both NGOs and state agenciesthey would appear to be a model case. Our Colombian partners have since been trying to get El Garzal evaluated for the pilot program. In their most recent effort, Pastor Salvador accompanied a Bogot-based team to the American Embassy. Once again, he is actively pursuing what he needs to stand by his congregation and community. As of October 2013, the U.S. delegation has been informed by our Colombian partners that they have not been able to make any progress towards this goal. Its the least we can do. The churches of the North might claim their own seat at the table, if so called. We were informed that approval for the program right now is on a case by case basis.

get the military in Colombia in blue helmetswe recognize that military members may wish to demobilize as well [by transitioning into employment as international peacekeepers].

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June 2, 2013. Our driver and his wife prepare to take usU.C.C. and Colombianout of El Garzal to Barrancabermeja.

2 Its important to qualify this with a grim truism: no international partnerno matter how well-intentioned and meticulous can completely vet individuals abroad, nor always anticipate and control the final destination of large infusions of arms and cash into foreign markets. School of the Americas-trained generals in the Colombian military have been indicted for illegally arming and colluding with paramilitary groups, and laundering drug money; a list of other notorious graduates of the Fort Benning program from Colombias officer cadre can be found here. And in the past, USAID has inadvertently directed millions in grant money to palm oil companies in which paramilitariesnotorious for displacing campesinos in order to expand lucrative palm oil operationshave had controlling interests.

The false positives practice of grabbing civilianssometimes dressing them in guerrilla group uniforms before or after murdering thembecame horrifyingly routine in Colombia from the 1990s on forward. Job performance evaluations in the Colombian military were based on body counts. Underproducersand presumably those afraid of actual combatants began luring impoverished young men to their deaths with promises of employment and then reporting their bodies as guerrilla kills. One of the most infamous cases occurred in Soacha in 2008; a total of 22 young men from the community were abducted and murdered.

In 2003, when Manuel Barreto tells Pastor Salvador, Ive got 500 guns to remove the people of El Garzal from their land, its reasonable to assume that at least some of those guns have American fingerprints on them.

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Acompaar, to accompany.

1.
Shortly before the delegation left for Colombia, our U.S. organizer forwarded the entire group an email from our missionary: an invitation from EL Garzals Foursquare Church in anticipation of our presence in two Sundays. Would we provide a sermonjoint or solosince we were bringing along three clergy members? His suggestion was for a message of solidarity, love, and encouragement from their sisters and brothers of the U.S. in the UCC to this peasant community.

It wasnt my decision to make nor one I had experience with but I was queasy about dynamics. We were brothers and sisters in Christ; we would have been in country only two days. They had graciously extended the (predictable) offer themselves; we were total strangers parachuting in. I shared my unease with a couple friends in ministry:

They should be sermonizing us on the Gospels.

I wondered if a solution for my personal discomfortwhich reflected lifelong misgivings around outdated notions of missionmight lie in the Quaker-style reflection periods which substitute for a weekly sermon at my own church. I immediately alerted fellow delegation members from my congregation that I would be soliciting written greetings from our own members to bring to the Foursquare church. I sent out a separate response to our missionary: could I get an elevator pitch in writing on El Garzal?

Sunday morning outside the Foursquare Church before the morning service. Brandy the dog, one of two belonging to the pastors family, keeps cool on the concrete.

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My last-minute effort was also a reverse mission of sorts, which must begin before you even depart. Of course, we were a delegation, not a mission; we would add no value so easily quantifiable as building houses, digging wells, or providing medical services. This created difficulty in defining goals for participation and follow-up responsibilities. My travel expenses were covered by my congregation; I was given the means to accept the unlikely invitation before I even had to ask. In return, I felt duty-bound to create a sense that they were a body sending a representative, not just setting themselves up for the inevitable potluck slideshow of gorgeous children and crude povertyboth equally photogenicwith a brief Q&A afterwards.

Vijagual.

Vijagual.

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What would a Partnership with America mean? California? The bayou? And Westchester County? Of course, UCC and Global Ministries resources spell out that the relationshipthe power, respect, and mutuality that comes from specificityis the connection with the CEDECOL Peace Commission and its close affiliates.

I was ignorant about the partnership itself. As a low-profile lay member, I had never been involved in anything at the conference level. I had heard the nameThe Partnership with Colombiayears before. My knee-jerk reaction had been: what did that even mean, given a mind-bogglingly diverse and complicated nation like Colombia?

I also feared bringing home a sort of socio-political Mad Libsthe Latin American edition. I was the only member of the delegation who had never been, nor desired to be, on a church mission trip. I had no travel or academic exposure to Latin Americaat all. I was concerned that without a specificity rooted in some attempt at relationship, I might concoct a quickly-forgettable narrative of suffering, uplift, and outrage complicated by U.S. entanglement, where the blank space for Colombia could just as easily be filled in: Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador.

Colombia. (Not Nicaragua.)

Thirteen members of the small congregation participated. With less than a weeks notice, they emailed me letters, brief greetings, and prayers--favorite Biblical chestnuts, and ones they had written themselves. Its so us, I described the submissions to another member with prideevery entry as diverse, individualistic, and thoughtful as our membership. I could have identified who submitted what without ever looking at the names. The final product likely still sits in El Garzalwhere they were very pleased to accept ituntranslated. (There was no time to find someone to do this beforehand.)

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There were two scraps of Spanish in the entire thing. I had suggested that members introduce themselves the way they might in person. One woman included, apologetically, The other was the cover, blank except for a UCC stamp, the red comma, and the official motto that goes with it, translated:

I am 85 years old. When I was 18 I studied Spanish for two years and enjoyed it, but necesito practicar before I could write in it!

2.

Dios habla todaviaGod is still speaking.

Days later in El Garzal, I was offered the chance to join the clergy at the pulpit to read my introduction to the assembled booklet, as a preface for those who would follow. My submission had concluded with a telling of the Road to Emmaus story; it turned out that two of the three clergy members had independently prepared their own remarks on that passage as well. Michael would simultaneously translate for us all. The other American lay leader willing to participate (other than the delegation leader who delivered opening remarks in Spanish) would read a second entry, a prayer written by our music director:

ask your strength for the families of El Garzal, especially those who are gathered in Foursquare Church. Send your Spirit upon them that they may have courage and persistence as they seek to stay on their land and continue to claim it as their own. Provide for the needs of the families and give them joy in their lives. This I pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

O Holy One,

Sunday morning, Foursquare Church, El Garzal. U.S. delegates enter for joint worship.

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I took the mic that morning and started with the customary me llamo _______ introduction, followed by fair warning:

I explained that the letters submitted aspired solely towards the ancient tradition of one church greeting another, as

I read verbatim my explanation that the booklet was a response to their request for a sermon, from a congregation that shared on and wrestled with the weekly lectionary together instead of having anyone preach.

Yo no soy pastoraI am not a pastorso I apologize in advance if this gets rough.

we are still strangers. Our holiest mission right now is to greet you, to appreciate your hospitality, to listen and learn (more than speak), to pay attention to what you think we should witness, and to stand in communion and solidarity with you.

I kept talking anyway. In response to a troubling comment we had heard at Saturdays meeting and our experience thus far, I departed from the text into the immediate tense:

I went back on script, reading from the booklet again:

In the letter drafted in Connecticut, the future-tense ending of the closing line was a cordial, and I am looking forward to being in communion with you in El Garzal. Standing up in front of the church that morning, it was modified to the past: After all the other American participants had finished their greetings, a Foursquare leader took back the microphone to thank usand God:

t the meeting in the field yesterday, I heard a couple of people say things like, it is so good of you to come here, or, we are so lucky that you came here. But your leaders are so powerful and your faith is so strong, that you brought us here.

I notice that where Americans say help, or serve, or aid, in Colombia you say accompany. And we hope to walk side by side with you, in addition to this face to face meeting right now.

n the road to Emmaus, two friends walked along in despair. A stranger joins them in lively discussion. After they insist he join them for dinner and the bread is broken, they learn that their hearts have been burning because they were in the presence of Christ the entire time. I have often felt the presence of God through the presence and actions and words of others.

As well as peace, another ministry Shalom [United Church of Christ] holds highly is that of fellowship and hospitality.

and you have already accompanied me.

it is a good thing to hear from many voices.

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Created for booklet cover.

My Corinthian gift will never be the command of a pulpit. I cannot preach like Peter; I cant pray like Paul. Ive always held my sparse personal (as distinguished from philosophical) moments of feeling confronted withor assured of the absence ofthe great I AM so close and sacred that I do not testify, for or against. I knew going in to El Garzal that nothing I said that morning would linger, with anyone. My exact words will fade even from my own memory, but I will never forget the astonishment of every breath and space in between. My grain of sand to offer that particular day, my fearsome quota, was the journey in.

Ive wondered how the UCC might balance leader-to-leader and congregational relationships with the formidable civil society power of institution-to-institution accompaniment.

Our physical presence was the message delivered, and was not free of gravitas. My feet rooted down heavy to the concrete floor that morning. Ive thought often about what weIcommitted with regards to accompaniment, before we even opened our mouths.

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Sunday, June 2, 2013. 10am. Before morning worship.

The first (and only other) time Salvador was displaced from his home and flock was in December 2011.

Just one day after he brought in an international accompaniment delegationwhich included senior-level representation from the United Church of Christhe started receiving credible reports that men had been overheard discussing plans to murder him. Armed men, hiding behind balaclavas, were reported to be inquiring after his whereabouts .

That foreign accompaniment delegation was long gone by the time the threats escalatedthey learned of, but were not forced to witness, the consequences of their visit. Since June 2nd, Ive thought about what we promised with those twenty four hours in El Garzal far more often than is comfortable.

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Recordar, to remember.
1.

One of the UCC ministers who preached about the Road to Emmaus that Sunday in El Garzal noted that the disciples who finally recognize the presence of Christ after breaking bread together do not linger any further in Emmausthey abandon the table to hurry back to Jerusalem and spread word of what they have witnessed. Exactly two weeks later, I sat in the marble narthax of a perfect Yankee cake-topper of a church back in Connecticut. I was still ailing from an intestinal illness I picked up somewhere in the Magdalena Medio; doctors orders were for bed rest after bags of IV fluid the Friday before, but I wanted to be there just long enough to say hello. Everyone knew I had been to Colombia and it was my first Sunday back home.

It was comfortable routine until a second glance back into the church properwhat Congregationalists call sanctuarya little closer to 10 a.m. Someone had since flicked on the recessed lights. Now the grandlyelevated centerpiece of the pulpit was cleanly illuminated, empty. The artificial light popped the colors in the Tiffany window above: a gorgeous tableau of the first Sabbath service celebrated by the founders of the churchand colonyafter their landfall in 1638, the closest a Puritan-founded church ever gets to iconography.

Two tiers of windows were thrown open, circulating still-crisp summer air. Ushers and the regulars puttered around with flowers, programs, cookies. The crystal chandelier custom-designed for the church in 1961 was lit; a music director warmed up on one of only seven Fisk organs in the state.

Judy Sirota Rosenthal 2009

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Tour guides are trained to provide the hellish natural history behind the artists rendering:the original town green just outside the current sanctuary doors had also functioned as a grazing ground for livestockand a burial ground for often-shallow graves. This beloved scene of the tiny, unsheltered worship service was not wholly bowdlerized for the sake of aesthetics: Colony Governor Theophilus Eaton is depicted before the Reverend John Davenport with a musket not for pacifying the native population, but to hold the wolves at bay. The inscription at the lower left is 1 Kings 8:57:

The composition is inspired by a relatively obscure painting by Thomas Prichard Rossiter of that Sunday. Its the only Tiffany in the world known to portray a gunin a church that staunchly forbids even reenactment firearms from the sanctuary during full-dress colony commemorations.

The Lord our God be with us as he was with our fathers. Let him not leave us nor forsake us.

Saturday night, El Garzal. Members of the Foursquare congregation hang hammocks and nets in the church for members of the delegation.

I approached as soon as she walked in, feeling ridiculous about what I had to do. I blurted out, apropos of nothing.

My eyes stung before I realized why. I was gripped by an embarrassingly urgent need to catch the minister before I could excuse myself back to my sickbed.

I had disclosed to her what had happened in Colombia when I first got home. I was just reminding her of something we both already knew. 86

I just want you to know that your counterpart in El Garzal is missing from his pulpit right now, We had to evacuate him out. The church we worshipped with two weeks ago doesnt have their pastor this morning.

Sunday afternoon. U.C.C. delegates photograph undeveloped wetlands on the trip out of El Garzal.

The sermon at the colonys first Sabbath was on Matthews account of the temptation of Christ by Satan in the wilderness. Reverend Davenport had brought his followers from European exile, to Boston, to finally sail into the estuaries along the Connecticut shoreline to found what he called a new Jerusalem. He would build a reputation as the most strident of the Pilgrim spiritual leaders. That April Sunday he was already concerned for the future of the new settlement, but his fixation on this text was not some Hawthornian, buckle-hat moral panic. Davenports abiding fear for our founding colonists in this wilderness was that they mighteven with the best of intentionsuse their own powers for the wrong ends and pay dearly. He lifted up the passage as a cautionary tale to the faithful that acts which on their surface appear reasonable or even righteous are sometimes not what is asked of usand may even summon evil.

According to Davenport, wisdomand the awareness of possible consequencescomes only in slow increments, but we are obliged to press towards it without ceasing.

2.

Shortly before our departure to Colombia, I had asked our U.S. organizer to forward along a question I had for Michael about the appropriateness of bringing along small gifts for the Colombians we would meet. On a research trip to Russia many years ago, I had been advised it was de rigueur to bring along inexpensive but meaningful symbols of your hometown, university, nation, etc. for those who host or otherwise assist you in some way: I dont know if this is uniquely Russian, or considered the polite thing to do elsewhere as well.

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Farewell BBQ, June 8, 2013. Justapaz/MENCOLDES courtyard.

We got an enthusiastic go ahead, and the entire delegation packed items meant to stand for our congregations or conferences. There were mugs, lapel pins, a tiny commemorative plate, a purloined cross (the subject of much humor on our end), and a set of chubby salt and pepper shakers shaped like the Washington Monument and the Capitol.

Salvador sitting with us before the meeting on the green, starting to outline the 30-year story of the conflict over El Garzal. A hat given to him by our delegation rests on the table; he was already wearing a hat from the UCC Back Bay Mission that day (pictured).

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The most appreciated mementos by farevery timewere knitted scraps packed individually in tiny Ziploc bags. One of the clergy delegates serves a UCC congregation where, as the members of the prayer shawl ministry have aged, they have transitioned into knitting these more manageable pocket shawls instead. These were sent with prayer, and members had already committed to praying for their eventual recipients, whomever they might be. They were offered to the Colombian partners we met who had identified as religious, as well as to our missionary; a large number were also left behind for distribution to future victims of human rights violations interviewed for CEDECOLs annual documentation report. Whenever one came out, everything else hushed to a standstill.

Rincn del Lago, Soacha. With staffers of Creciendo Juntos in a long-unfinished construction site for a new facility.

Each was packaged with a slip of paper that explained the premisethe covenantleft behind: We already remember youeven before weve met.

3.
We cannot help but speak of what we have seen and heard, but remembrance is not enough.

In the course of research for these writings, I perused dozens of websites and personal blogs posted by others who have been taken into Soacha. It became almost mechanicaluntil I was stopped dead by a small image at the bottom of the personal page of a Mennonite in Canada.

It was a snapshot of the dignified, campesino grandfather we had spoken to on the path leading down to his illegal residence. He even appeared to be standing on the same ground, chin tilted in the same pose, framed from a similar angle to what I had captured myself. The air sucked out of my lungs.

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Many weeks later, when I wanted to study the photo again, I couldnt re-find the obscure blog it appeared on. I still havent. I did find yet another photograph of him in my searches, howeverfrom the group blog of a Canadian Mennonite delegation that went through Soacha a year and two months before we did. The elderly campesino looked grayer and more fragile to me by 2013, but a clergy delegate from that 2012 trip I contacted (who posted his own photo of him on his personal blog) confirms its the same individual, taken by a second member of his group; we each have been unable to forget the same agonizing story about him:

Altos de Cazuc, April 17, 2012. [colombialearningtour.blogspot.com]

Unless there is an additional personal blog out there by another member of that 2012 Mennonite delegation that the three of us are aware of, that means that we UCC delegates were at least the third foreign church group to encounter and flock around this man to take his photo in the last few years:

Altos de Cazuc, June 5, 2013.

Remembranceand documentation for the sake of documentationis not enough. 90

4.
For a witness surrounded, the last psychic defense available against despair and horror is agape, which will instinctually push back out against it at equal force. That self-protective swell of love is a bare start. The suffering we witnessed was cruel and non-redemptive. But it was not unmitigated.

[2 Peter 1:12-13]

Parallel to the political and social analysis we received that first full day were the narratives of the Colombians we met. These were more immediatelyinsistentlyaccessible. We shuffled back and forth between three different NGOs for nearly 10 hours, confined mostly to florescent-lit rooms that might as well have been in Boston as Bogot. But by dinner time, it was impossible to ignore how many family stories of displacement had been raised in the course of formal introductions.

Therefore I intend always to remind you of these qualities, though you know them and are established in the truth that you have. I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to stir you up by way of reminder.

These were urban, educated professionalsone or two generations removed from the watershed events and lost lives kept alive by the same oral tradition commanded throughout the Old Testament for stories of horror and salvation alike.

Starting the commute up to the dirt roads and illegal settlements of the Altos de Cazuc section of Soacha.

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the connection of faith and practice and love she witnessed practiced by its members in their own works.

One young NGO director with the Peace Commission matter-of-factly volunteered that both her parents and grandparents had been forcibly displaced from their homes. She grew up on her fathers narrative of displacement, and the subsequent humiliation of living with the lack of dignity in cities. Her very Catholic and socially engaged parents threw themselves into work for their new community in response. She herself had converted to the Mennonite faith as a young social worker, deeply impressed by

In the course of a different meeting later that afternoon, a senior academic on the Commission disclosed that he grew up hearing stories of displacement from his mother. His family was displaced in the 1950s, due to religious persecution of Protestants at the time. He grew up to study Colombian history at seminary. He was introduced to the academic lens on issues around displacement and violence, and progressed from there to the conviction that

An ordained Baptist, he began to engage in base church communities and to study liberation theology, urgently compelled to connect faith with action. They had been stirred up by way of reminder.

it is not sufficient to analyze; one must work for change.

5.

We are called to record, not to retread.

Paradoxically, memorypersonal, familial, institutionalseeks to simultaneously preserve and transform. Recursion that does not eventually resolve towards mastery curdles into sickness. Trauma without reconciliation is handed down through families as seamlessly as narrativeeven in an enforced absence of narrative.

May 31, 2013. Recess, Bogot. Schoolyard near CEPALC.

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When the situation in El Garzal unfolded that Sunday, Michael Joseph outlined a typical escalation ladder for us as we stood around waiting in the Pastors home. The spaces in between vary, but it often progresses from rumor; to harassment (motorbikes up and down the dirt roads in the community late at night, the killing of livestock); to threats passed along via third parties; to direct verbal or written threats; to in-person visits by armed individuals; tofinallycompleted acts of violence. The Colombians we met have many years of experience at puzzling out the devils calculus of when to evacuate in order to deescalate, and for how long. We saw evidence in El Garzal that even on the lower rungs, threats still have a devastating effect on those targeted. It re-traumatizes the traumatized.

Even just feinting brutality at those to whom violence has become intimately familiar ranks among the basest of human rights violations. The suffering that can be generated by armed actors with such a low barrier to entry is excruciating even in witness.

Terrorism as a word has been muddied and abused into uselessness but heres its bread and butter: you only need to torture or murder once, to open a door into the imagination that cant ever be completely shut again by survivors.

The pilgrimage up Cerro de Monserrate is not just to the church at its peak, but also to a view of Bogot as far as the eye can see. Colombias population is estimated at 45 million; the official population of its capital city is 8.3 million.

Its impossible not to worry about how the memories of atrocities experienced or witnessedby millions in Colombia, over and over since 1948might echo down the generations long after any silence of the guns.

6.
The miraculous healings sprinkled throughout the New Testament are light on follow-up of characters suddenly, bafflingly, no longer lepers, blind, or lameafter presumably years or a lifetime stunted by illness. The sick who are then the healed are unsatisfyingly reduced to plot points, when the more interestingand critical question is, what happens next?

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In one healing, Peter curtly commands a man (just as Christ himself once did another paralyzed person miraculously cured in order to prove a point): Jesus Christ heals you. Pick up and roll your mat. As far as the author (and reader) is concerned, his role has concluded; for the man who long laid crippled on that mat, the storyand need for healinghas just begun. The man does so and promptly disappears, having served his narrative purpose.

At our meeting at the U.S. Embassy, the discussion inevitably turned to the current peace talks in Havana, and their (hopefully anticipated) future third stage.

Colombians and international observers speak in terms of three key stages: the negotiations just to get to get FARC and the Colombian government to the official table and to agree upon the agenda (which occurred behind closed doors and initially in total secrecy); the actual process of negotiation; and then the implementation stage. One of the Foreign Service officers volunteered that in this third stage,

A member of the CEDECOL Peace Commission had explained as much the night before.

Peace Commission members are thinking as cautiously as everyone else about what may or may not come out of Havana, but on one point they are certain: in the third stage, the role of the churches will become even more urgent.

Any outcome is going to be polarizing, so churches and NGOs will play a critical role. Everyone [in Colombia] knows someone who has been victimized.

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They are the civil spaces where the rubber will meet the road, in terms of transitive, and restorative, justice efforts, for victims and perpetrators alike: Religious leaders will have much to offer, but they will also need accompaniment themselves.

Pastors will have to figure out how to pastor a former guerrilla who wants to join the congregation.

Bogot, near Justapaz.

As noted previously, CEDECOL has pioneered the use of participating member churches as an organized network for tracking and reporting human rights violations against Protestant leaders and congregants. As described to us by one leader on this project,

I asked what the typical background of a volunteer trained to conduct interviews is like. A number of them are women with advanced degrees; our partners also knew offhand of one interviewer who is a pastor, and another is a trained psychologist. Some of the interviewers in the program have themselves been victimized; they are perhaps seeking to re-master their own trauma. The leader we spoke to in Bogot reiterated the CEDECOL Peace Commissions perspective on this sober (and risky) calling, for their organization and for the victims alike:

Documentation helps to keep the memory alive, but we are also careful to observe best practices so reports can be used for political advocacy as well.

It is important to go beyond memory, to speak publicly.

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Reencontrar, to find again; to rediscover.

1.
The Colombian partners we met spoke frankly about the Sisyphean nature of the work at hand.

Even the metaphors they used expressed a characteristic realism. At the meeting on the town green in El Garzal, Pastor Salvador thanked us for our accompaniment by telling us, Less than a week later we were in Bogot, meeting with a legislator engaged in peace issues.

God will repay you, even with just a grain of sand.

He described what would be required for Colombian civil society to heal itself and function together again, after any outcome of the peace talks in Havana (or future attempts at mass demobilization): We will all have to place our own grain of sand into the processwe will all have to bring our own quota.

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2.
St. Augustine wrote,

The churches of the North arent being asked to bring much courage to the civilian war for peace in Colombia.

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.

Our individual partners on the groundto varying degrees, but all of them to be sureare the ones who have been called to make the quiet decision to risk their lives for what they believe in. Theyre the ones supplying the courage.

Saturday night, El Garzal. Michael Joseph and Pablo Moreno hang hammocks for the US- Colombian delegation in Pastor Salvadors family home.

The word anger is built on the lexical root ang. In its original Old Norse, when used to construct a verb it becomes to vex. But the root transformed to noun means, grief.

Our own quota to bringour grain of sand; our potential, uncomfortable seed-of-a-pearlmay be the righteous indignation, the grief that challenges and moves.

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3.
The Colombians understood not much more of my (childish attempts at) Spanish than I did their Spanish. It wasnt a language I had ever studied. I tried to teach myself as much as I could in the month before, but I hadnt spoken or heard enough to even accent words properly. Enthusiasm and four weeks of flash card drills only go so far. On-the-spot foreign word retrieval is a shrouded mystery in the novice; random swap-outs were routine in sentences of more than a few words.

Saturday afternoon, the first look at El Garzal.

In Barrancabermeja, we each exchanged what we all assumed was our final goodbye to Pastor Salvador before leaving to fly back to Bogot. (It wasnt. We would ultimately reencounter him and exchange two additional farewells in the days before we left Colombia.) I was anxious to get it right. There was an idling bus at the curb, a scheduled flight, a full crowd of Colombians and North Americans in the living room at the CPT residence, and, when I finally reached his side, no bilingual translator on hand to jump in if things got rough. Usted es muy brava, I had said to his wife Nidia back in El Garzal a day before, half-ashamed at how impotent and inadequate that felt at my turn to embrace her goodbye. You are very brave. Vamos a recordar siempre usted y su familia, I determined to assemble for Pastor Salvador a day later in Barrencabermeja, concentrating hard in the living room. We will always remember you and your family.

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What came out instead was,

I dearly wish I had understood any of Salvadors response. What I had actually said when I swapped out recordar with reencontrarif it was intelligible at all to native earswas, It was a far more serious, and painful, promise.

Vamos a reencontrar siempre usted y su familia.

We will always find you and your family again.

We are called to recall what we already know; to seek to witness and reencounterwith fresh eyesover and again; and to so be stirred to action.

The young swimmer at the dock in Vijagual who greeted us on our way in and out. Two days later, a local NGO leader in Barrancabermeja brought us back down to the Cormagdalena port we departed from and returned to in the trip to El Garzal the weekend before. We lined up along the sheltered benches bracketing the bobbing chalupas, waving at our former driver. Our guide had wanted to end the tour of his besieged town by bringing us back, full circle, to the Rio Magdalena. We [Colombians] have survived and surpassed the most violent years, he told us quietly, looking out over the water. Our society overcomes. We are like the river: tranquil, expansive, arms wide openit grabs you. He smiled to himself. Thats how we are.

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For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?

ikewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.
[Romans 8:24-26]

The liturgy of the hours does not expurgate verses of extreme anguish or blood thirst, no matter how disturbing. I avoided the longer services in the daily order and there were still times I felt trapped in my chair, choked with incense and listening to cadence after cadence about unmitigated agony and barbarism manmade and heaven-sent alike. Its tough going for a cautiously agnostic Catholic convert to the United Church of Christ.

The monks sit in two rows of six, facing each other in wooden benches across the width of the chapel, and sing the prescribed daily psalms back and forth for each other, line by line, in the same ritualized melodies passed down along the ages. At best, its hypnotic bordering on transcendent: the meterless rise and fall of tones, the unison punctuations of breath, the creak of the carved oak benches at each indicated bow.

Just before 2013 began, I spent five days in silent retreat at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York. Guests are hosted on an estate on the Hudson River by Episcopalian monks, and invited to join (or not) in any of the five services per day.

The monks believe that the psalms are the complete catalogue of every last experience and emotion known to humanity. There is grim consolation in the fact that immediately before the 23rd Psalm comes the 22nd ( My God, my God, why have you forsaken me)so unremarkable for the canon that the original verses open with this prosaic note: To the choirmaster: according to [the tune of] The Hind of the Dawn. A Psalm of David. There is nothing new under the sun is no mere truism; it is a deep solace across the ages, and across the nations.

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Benedicin Stereo, Vijagual.

Six months later, our delegation crowded outside of the recording booth at Benedicin Stereo in Vijagual. As we guessed at how to present ourselves on-air, a delegate from the Central Atlantic Conference wondered if we might sing a song. She had no takers, but her idea persisted into the evening when we planned our contribution to the service the next morning. That Sunday in front of the Foursquare Church, the American delegation sang the same communion song we sing in Spanish and English at my own congregation in the Connecticut Conference:

After a first few rounds, everyone present moved to join us.

The church leader acting as choirmaster in El Garzal that morning, a man named Samuel Mendoza, was as meticulous as our own music director with a new song. Before the service was closed he made the congregation run through it a few extra times to make sure they knew it by heart. Afterwards I told a fellow delegate from my home church we needed to ask him for a song in return, and we approached him together.

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Samuel Mendoza leading the congregation in song at the Foursquare Church in El Garzal, Sunday, June 2 2013.

I wanted an ensemble piece that was gringo-friendly and set to a simple melody, like the childrens song we heard. (Were one of those congregationsclapping happens, and I guessed whatever we ended up with might also appeal to the tambourine lobby.) What he insisted on sending us home with instead were the lyrics of a grave ballad he sung solo for the service. He explained the music it was set to was very Colombian and traditional. (Michael Joseph guesses the tune is a basic vallenato. Gabriel Garca Mrquez claims that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a 400-page vallenato.) Samuel promised to be right backhe would quickly excuse himself to write out all the words in time to catch us before our departure.

I scanned and emailed a copy of the small notebook page back to Michael in Colombia once I was back in the U.S. In the meantime, I put out a request for a local translator familiar with Spanish-language hymns. An American woman who replied had an uncle in Bogot, a senior pastor in Salvadors denomination, and he was willing to review it as well. She sat down with me to look it over for a first assessment, and expressed surprise: Wow. Im not seeing any of the traditional praise language Id expect in a Foursquare song.

The song Samuel chose to perform that Sunday, and then insisted on sending home with us, is titled Sin Palabrasliterally, Without Words, though it can also be translated from the Spanish as beyond words or, words are not enough. In its prosody and final reconciliation towards grace, it is a canonical psalm of lamentation. 103

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Sin Palabras
Performed and shared by Samuel Mendoza The Foursquare Church of El Garzal Bolvar Department, Colombia Verse #1 I come that you might pardon my sins, the times when Ive doubted that You are faithful; when my debt withered my being and I showed my frustration to Heaven.

[From translation versions by Michael Joseph and Abigail Palmer, 2013]

Verse #2 I come that you might forgive so many things that Ive said against You, my Lord. I weep as I sing this song, because I doubted that You are my firm rock.

How many times have I fought with you, kneeling there in my room; I could not find a reason for all the suffering in my path. How many times I disowned You until I wanted to die, thinking that You were far from me, Lord. I wanted to remove you from my heart; I even intended to return to my past without You. I never imagined that for my own good, that to strengthen me, You tested me as you did to Job.

I could no longer play my guitar; I didnt want to worship You with my song. I wanted to escape from all this lonesomeness, from this misery that is so sad and bitter. CHORUS: I thank You for teaching me, without words, the things I didnt know about You; about Your great love.

You wanted to make me a different man, A man more obedient and courageous; You wanted to grow here in my heart. I judged You because I did not know that You had my soul in Your hands; that You were always so close, my Lord. CHORUS:

I learned that we also win through difficulty. There is a hope that filled my heart.

A faith grew, a courage and a hope grew; I trust your word even more now, Good Shepherd.

I thank You for teaching me, without words, the things I didnt know about You; about Your great love.

I learned that we also win through difficulty. There is a hope that filled my heart.

A faith grew, a courage and a hope grew; I trust your word even more now, Good Shepherd.

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Samuel Mendoza performing Sin Palabras at the Foursquare Church of El Garzal, June 2, 2013.

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