Taking a stand in Colombia

Blog day two Colombia

I didn’t expect to kiss my favourite Skechers goodbye in Colombia but then I didn’t expect to get sucked into a mud flat in a mangrove swamp area on an island just west of the Colombian port city of Buenaventura on Sunday morning.

I am here to see the kind of work that the money people put in the Trocaire box each Lent pays for. This year we are concentrating on the 26 million people worldwide who no longer have a home because of conflict and war. Colombia has almost four million people in this situation.

We were visiting the home of Marcellina, a 44 year old mother of seven who had been pushed from her island home into the city to make a living. The reason she left was because of the armed struggle between right and left wing in Colombia, this endless conflict that has brought a living hell to so many people. Locals say, in hushed tones to make sure no one who shouldn’t be listening can hear, that narco traficante, the export of cocaine, has fuelled much of this conflict. Also that the government plans to create huge new infrastructure projects means it’s not so keen on having some of the millions of exiles return to their original land.

Marcellina is taking a legal case to reclaim her ancestral lands.

Marcellina is taking a stand though – she is claiming her right to her ancestral lands. As an Afro-Colombian, whose ancestors were forced into Colombia in chains, she’s determined that she will raise her family on the Pacific coast where she grew up, and not in the city slum that they are supposed to call home. Jesuit Refugee Services a group Trocaire supports, is helping her family with their legal case. As she walks with us along the mangroves to show us how she gathers periwinkles, I realised why she was in wellies and said a mental goodbye to my shoes. It was worth it though, to meet the type of resilient people who have everything stacked against them but who refuse to back down.

In the afternoon, in the rural community of El Gloria, we met Dona Luiz, who had witnessed the massacre of four members of her family by FARC guerillas, including her pregnant sister who was viciously tortured. As we spoke she said we were standing over the mass graves of many people who had been ‘disappeared’ by Colombian death squads. She hastened to add that she wasn’t the only victim. In anger and in pain, Dona Luiz helped to set up a group of women who had lost a family member to this conflict. Mothers for Life Standing up for Human Rights (whose national leader was assassinated just last December in an attempt to silence the group) is comprised of incredibly brave women determined that the world doesn’t forget what it means to be bereaved and pushed out of your home and off your lands by war.

Justina a young man of Afro-Colombian descent, has nightmares since the paramilitaries hired special death squads to assassinate him and his family after he broke a curfew. This was imposed on those who lived on the river to facilitate the smuggling of drugs along the waterways at night. He needed psychological counselling after escaping the clutches of armed groups who felt they had to kill him because he witnessed the deliberate murder of his cousin when their tiny craft was rammed by paramilitaries. He had gone on the river in his little boat to get medicine for his wife and was caught breaking the curfew.

The sheer horror of what many of these people went through is difficult to describe. Colombia is a complex country but the culture of silence that surrounds its problems, all related to drugs, power, land and war cannot continue if it is ever to improve.

Today we head for Buga, a rural area near Cali to meet more people who have been internally exiled. Stay tuned.