Phil's Blog

Shades of Optimism

2011-03-01T12:04:00.000-08:00

I was sitting on the back patio playing Scrabble with a couple of my Colombian colleagues. Yes, there is a Spanish version, and it’s humbling, very humbling. We play by the light of a single bare light bulb next to the laundry sink. It’s the same bulb used by Hector the tiny gecko as a hunting tool. Hector perches lightly, often upside down on the ceiling, next to the light waiting for nocturnal insects to be drawn just a little too close. That evening we were startled by the arrival of a big green katydid-like insect, which flew over our table and landed on the wall above the sink. Hector immediately went into high alert and scrambled down the wall to confront what he hoped would be his next meal. Ever the optimist, he was still eyeballing his prey and mulling strategies when I went to bed an hour later.

I last wrote about our work with the community of Buenos Aires seeking return to their farms on the Las Pavas land. When I am sitting in meetings with Misael and other community leaders I sense the same kind of determined optimism displayed by Hector the gecko. They are patient and focused. The community has been working on obtaining title to land since 1998. They have been evicted twice, first by hired paramilitaries in 2003, then again by riot police in 2009. The federal government threw out it’s own documents regarding the repossession process in 2010 for lack of a departmental signature. The courts have been sitting on the case for years. Last year when I visited the plantation, I witnessed rain forest being bulldozed and burned as creeks and swamps were being blocked or drained. This year I personally counted more than 100,000 small palms in the plantation nursery and saw an area of newly planted palm estimated to cover more than a 1,000 acres.

So, why the optimism? First of all, I have to say that I really think that these people are carried by their Christian faith in its deepest and best sense. Their members come from five different churches, four Protestant and one Catholic. They meet, they pray together, and then they get to work. Through their patience and tenacity they have learned from their mistakes and are making careful, well-considered decisions. They have learned how to work with multiple allies outside the community on both the national and international level.

In returning this year, I had the feeling that the process is finally moving to some kind of resolution. Several factors offer hope to the community. With a new federal administration in place in Colombia, new leadership has been named in the departments overseeing the Las Pavas dispute. The INCODER office which declared its land title process dead last year has re-opened the case, and is reconsidering it along with another office from the Ministry of Agriculture. There is a new top judge in the federal system who is viewed as more likely to require timely action in cases such as Las Pavas.

The community itself has been preparing very carefully for a non-violent re-entry into the property. (Think long-term lunch counter action or bus action á la the 1960’s Civil Rights movement in the US.) They have not named a date, but they have been getting national and international attention via radio and newspaper interviews. I was involved in planning and implementation of visits to six embassies in Bogotá last week, including the US, France, and Britain to raise international consciousness. All this appears to be making the Colombian government nervous and anxious to find a resolution.

Moreover, the palm oil companies involved in the conflict have had a couple of awkward moments recently. On Friday, February 18, a day after my colleagues and I left the community following a nonviolence training, two civilians and eight armed men dressed in police uniforms entered the community asserting they had an arrest order for one of the community leaders. That person was luckily out of town. All the men were unknown except for one civilian, Mario Marmol, a former paramilitary leader who has been harassing community members in the recent past. No identification was presented. Neither was a warrant. In the following days it was confirmed that there had been no warrant issued, and that the paramilitary leader now works for one of the palm oil companies. Then on February 19 the national press announced a federal corruption scandal related to hundreds of thousand of dollars in rural development money targeted at small farmers. The money had instead been received by twenty-two government officials and agribusiness owners, several of whom belonged to the family owning Daabon Organic, including the patriarch and president of the company. Though not directly related to the Las Pavas dispute, it will be tough for Daabon to continue its pleas of ignorance and innocence.

The Las Pavas families see their struggle for land rights as bigger than their own particular dispute. If there is a ruling in their favor it would likely constitute a powerful precedent regarding land reform and tenure in Colombia. My hope is that our own state department will pay closer attention to Colombia’s inability to implement its own policies and meet its stated goals for helping its internally displaced refugees. We have been sending millions of dollars a year to Colombia based on dubious evidence that they are making a good faith effort and progress in those areas. I am finally beginning to feel optimistic myself.

Some of what I think I understand

2011-02-20T17:14:00.000-08:00

When I visit Buenos Aires I am usually housed with Misael Payares, the president of the association. He is pictured here with his grandchildren (clockwise from top left) Maicol, Malbi, Cheila, and Juan Manuel.

The children are being raised by Misael and his wife Edith because their mother is in Bogota where she could find work. The father not around. The oldest daughter of Misael lives in Washington DC. Their youngest, Shelly, lives with them and helps with the kids. Two sons live in the village. Another adult daughter who is mentally ill, plus deaf and mute, lives with them and walks backwards around the family compound most of the day avoiding all human interaction.

Edith and Shelly team up to do household management. Clothes are washed in the river next to the house. That's Edith at the laundry plank. All other water is hauled from the river in five-gallon containers for bathing, cooking, dishwashing, drinking, and bucket-flushing the toilet. Drinking water is boiled. Bathing is done in the river or in the tiled bathroom with a pan of cold water.

The picture here shows part of their kitchen, the nicest I have seen in Buenos Aires. The range hasn’t worked for several years. They have a refrigerator and a TV with local channels.

Meals of preference in Buenos Aires would start with hot soup, then move to rice, yucca, maybe an in-season vegetable, a variety of sweet cold drinks, and some kind of meat, often fish, as in this photo. Lots of fruit is eaten, mostly as juice or between meals. I can’t name most of them.

Edith makes the kids school uniforms from scratch. Here, Shelly is prepping Malbi’s hair for school. The picture doesn't do justice to the fully pleated skirt.

The compound is comprised of two small houses with tin roofs and cement floors separated by a huge kitchen/dining area with thatch roof and dirt floor. Dogs, chickens, and Felipe the grumpy parrot are always underfoot in that area. The tortoise corral is there, too. A six by three foot area with eighteen-inch high walls holds six to ten tortoises waiting to become stew. I’m pretty sure it is illegal to hunt them. The foot and tail section I ate last week wasn’t too bad, but I really was not enthusiastic about the boiled tortoise egg.

Travel in and out of the community happens via about 12 miles of dirt road and 8 miles of cow path on motorcycles in the 4-month dry season. During the rainy season and for all heavy items, things come in on the river. This year the rain season lasted a month longer and ended with a big flood in December which had two to three feet of water in most houses for about a month. Most of the seasons crop were lost, and there is a serious food shortage for small farm families in much of the region. You can see the water damage on the wall behind the shoulder of my co-volunteer, Gladys, in this photo.

Last year I visited and wrote about why we have been accompanying the one hundred-plus families of Buenos Aires, Santander, Colombia. They have been organized into an agricultural “association’ for more than ten years, and have been working to gain titles to about 6,000 acres of farm, forest and wetlands through a federal program called Las Pavas. A federal law passed in 1994 allowed the transfer of title of abandoned agricultural tracts into parcels no bigger than 150 acres. In June 2006, INCODER the federal office overseeing this program sent two officials who spent four days evaluating and confirming the community’s eligibility and the development they had completed to that date. The preliminary response was that everything looked good. Two years later a relative of the former owner sold the property to a palm oil consortium after running the community off the land with paramilitary thugs. INCODER, which had been sitting on it’s own report said nothing. Early in 2009 the families re-entered the property in an attempt to create a legal presence. There were a flurry of contradicting judicial and municipal orders sent out, and on July 14, 2009 the community was again evicted, this time by a squad of riot police.

That is the short, sanitized, simplistic summary of what happened up to the point CPT got involved with accompanying these folks. Since then, the have been receiving help from several Colombian and international groups regarding legal issues, community development, food security, and human rights advocacy. One of the hot-button talking points for this conflict has been that fact that one of the members of the palm oil consortium, Daabon Organics, was supplying palm oil to the fair trade international beauty and cosmetic retailer, The Body Shop. Mission statements of both Daabon and The Body Shop contradict the manner in which the land was acquired and the manner in which it is being developed. While Daabon denies this vehemently, The Body Shop participated in a jointly sponsored commission with Christian Aid last year, and as a result stopped purchasing from Daabon. The commission report was exhaustive and is a good read if you want to understand how deeply complicated the Las Pavas conflict is.

Things are reaching a crucial point as the community plans another entry into the property in an attempt to force the judicial system and INCODER to quit stalling make ruling. In my next and final reflection for this year’s trip I will try to flesh out some of the complex moral, legal, and theological layers we are trying to wade through.

I encourage you to visit Daabon’s website to get an idea of their declared philosophy in preparation for the next reflection. http://www.daabon.com/usa/ourphilosophy.html

Also, the Las Pavas community is featured in this short, excellent video. Three communities are profiled, Buenos Aires is the second.
http://www.cpt.org/cptnet/2011/02/14/colombia-video-%E2%80%9Cland-and-territory%E2%80%94-key-peace-colombia%E2%80%9D">

You'll need to copy and paste these addresses into your web browser as I haven't figured out the link option yet. Sorry.

Who is in charge?

2011-02-10T10:43:00.000-08:00

I wrote about the roads last week. I couldn’t figure how they could ship or receive commercial goods in these towns. It turns out the four-hour truck ride was the fast way in. The river system is how the communities are linked together in the South Bolivar Magdalena region. Commerce depends on them. In some ways, security depends on them. As we know, the roads are mostly terrible to non-existent. The rivers are slower, but dependable mostly excepting big floods and the dry season affecting the tributaries. These photos show the biggest kind of freight carrying boat that can get to the town of Puerto Coca and the off loading process. Two guys and a plank.

Over the past 25 years revolutionary guerilla groups and private military forces (paramilitaries) moved through the region and set up outposts. Cocaine processors and traffickers set up small labs and airstrips out in the middle of the large areas of subsistence farming. National defense forces moved in sporadically to clean things up, partially funded, of course, by my tax dollars. According to organizations like Human Rights Watch the guerilla presence has subsided, while the paramilitaries, which were disbanded with much fanfare in 2007, appear to have simply restructured themselves into organized crime units in rural areas called “bandas”. In 2009, 80 members of congress, nearly all from then President Uribe’s party, were under investigation for or charged with having links to these groups. That is 35% of the congress. The newly elected president Santos is from the same party. Politicians are known for showing up in these rural areas only before elections.

That first trip out in the truck was to accompany people from the small towns of Agua Fria, Puerto Coca, and Coco Tiquisio holding a memorial service commemorating the kidnapping and murders of 4 young men in 2004. The two of the men had been seen being lead away by national security forces. Their bodies were found a few days later, buried in a riverbank. The army denies responsibility and, incredibly, the case has yet to go to trial. A ruling is expected in the next few weeks as to whether the case can proceed. One of the persons we were accompanying is the young lawyer representing the families of the deceased. The persons killed were working one of the many small gold mines in the area. It is suspected they were killed because the local mine operators were beginning to organize themselves to prevent multi-national mining companies from gaining access to their land. One hopeful sign of community solidarity was the fact that the service was conducted jointly by two Protestant pastors and a Catholic priest. Normally the Catholic/Protestant divide doesn’t permit such public cooperation. I have a huge amount of respect for the Catholic priest, Father Rafael.

The following day I sat in on a meeting in Puerto Coca. Typically a busy little port town, it was unusually quiet. Fourteen families had moved away since the beginning of December. Rumors were that bandas were demanding protection money, and threatening some individuals. Following a Mass, Father Rafael and another community organizer met with fifteen community members. The goal was to call meeting with what we might refer to as county commissioners to demand that there be some kind of police security provided. Pretty simple. The question was who would go around explain the idea to the rest of the community and try to get them to come. Jorge, the organizer, agreed to talk with the commissioners, and five people volunteered to visit the other families. Several other were simply too afraid participate. One woman said she would join the organizing process only after she saw that they could get people together and the commissioner would actually show up. I’d love to be at that meeting.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure… roads, potable water, health clinics, police officers, speedy trials, etc. These things are lacking in Puerto Coca. You can of course get Coca Cola and Direct TV. We mostly take our infrastructure for granted in the US except when we have to pay taxes. The disparity in infrastructure development in Colombia is fundamental in understanding the levels of social injustice in here.

Ticket to ride

2011-01-31T19:05:00.000-08:00

Eloy and I were on the curb at 5 AM hoping to catch one of the hundreds of Barranca’s taxis. Apparently it was too early for them, so we decided to take one of the pirate motorcycle taxis that had been beeping at us. At 5:30 we were on the three-hour mini bus ride to Aguachica where we had breakfast and met two men who were representing other NGOs. They were part of our accompaniment responsibility.

Then it was a 45 minute taxi ride to La Gloria on the banks of the river Magdalena. (I recommend following this trip on Google Earth for fun, though La Gloria is marked in the wrong place. Look for the little town to the west right on the river.) In the Gloria we boarded a small “chalupa”, much like the one pictured here, to another river town about an hour away called Rio Viejo.

Victor was waiting for us with his 1999 Toyota Land Cruiser with the flatbed and wooden sideboards. This turned out to be three hours on the worst road I had ever been on. And I have been on some nasty roads both in the states and in Guatemala. This road had never been surfaced with anything. Pot holes reached 4 ft across and a foot deep. Bridges, and there were many, were mostly high cement obstacles that you had to figure out how you to get on on top of so you could cross. The bridge surface was usually 6 to 8 inches above the road approach. There had been huge rains in December this year that caused lots of mudslides, and cut the approaches to the bridges, so once your were on the bridge, only half of the road might be there on the other side to meet you. I was riding in the cab with driver and tried to ask in an off-hand way, “So, is the road usually like this?” He matched my off-hand manner, “Oh no, it’s pretty good these days. You should see it when it rains. I got stuck one time in the rainy season, and it took five days to get me out.” The word they use to describe this rode is carretera, the same one used for the main four-lane highway into Bogota.

Puerto Rico Tiquisio, where we ended up for the night, is a town of several thousand people, and I was baffled as to how commerce could survive on a road like that. It turns out it also has river access to Rio Viejo, but it’s a six hour trip so we had taken the quick way in. The next morning we headed out to another small town for the scheduled meetings. We started in a “flota” (photo) and landed in Puerto Coca an hour later where Victor was waiting for us with the Land Cruiser. This was a mystery to me, but I was trying to stay in my listening mode. We got in the back of the little truck, all 20 of us, and proceeded down a road even more primitive than the previous day. The developed parts were literal cow paths through pastures. No bridges that day. We drove through three rivers, at least four small streams, and a thirty-foot mud hole. On the way out later that day I was too scared to stay in the truck with so many people as it scrambled a five foot embankment.

My point in this reflection is that the transportation buffet that I experienced was really a small and easily understood part of the trip. I was overwhelmed by the number of challenges facing the community. I was humbled by the fact that the community seemed to be perfectly happy with some of the things I saw as problems.

Several farmers during the two days of meetings that they raised corn as one of their crops. I hadn’t seen any cornfields at all on the way in. I know cornfields when I see them. I grew up around them, and saw them all over the mountainsides in Guatemala, as well. On the trip out in the back of the truck I made of point of looking for them, and, sure enough, there they were. Another lesson. If I hadn’t even noticed the crop I was familiar with, how much else had I missed, crops or otherwise?

Tomorrow, I head out for another accompaniment. My next reflection will focus more specifically on justice issues confronting rural Colombians.

PS - If you are interested, Google Earth can help you follow my trip as far as Puerto Rico Tiquisio. La Gloria is mismarked. It is to the west and right on the river, but the rest are correct. The satellite views give you a good idea of the vast river and lake systems.

Older white males

2011-01-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

I rode the city buses everywhere when we lived in Guatemala City. For a while I was thinking I could blend in with the local folks by dressing casual Guatemalan, not speaking English, and generally trying to look like I knew what I was doing. One day I was at the front of the bus standing in the packed center aisle and happened to look toward the back of the bus. There was a young man’s head, almost certainly an American, looking at me over the top of every other head on the bus. It was like seeing myself in the mirror, and it was apparent that we were both about as inconspicuous as palm trees on the North Pole.

It’s pretty much the same when I come to Colombia, and it raises on of the moral dilemmas of being an older white male member of the team. When we make our visits to the folks we are accompanying, I am positive I am given credit for being wiser, wealthier, and more powerful than is really the case. People in South and Central America rarely get meet North Americans. And their views on the US can be pretty limited. The taxi driver who took me to the bus station in Bogota assured me that he knew quite a bit about the US. He said he watched lots of movies. I didn’t say it, but that’s what is usually the problem.

If I am sitting in a community meeting with another CPTer who happens to be a small Colombian woman, it is critical that I do everything I can to empower her in that process. That usually means I should shut up and keep listening. And most of you know that’s not my strong suit. And, too, it is important to remember that CPT's role is most simply to keep levels of violence down so that the local folks can do their own work. So, tomorrow when I head out for a couple days of listening sessions in a little town called Tiquisio, you can be praying for my patience and my listening skills.

On being flexible

2010-02-22T16:07:00.000-08:00

I picked my emergency passport this morning. A small triumph in what has been test of patience over the several days. Things started to unravel following the public action we did on Ash Wednesday in front of the INCODER offices.

Several CPT teams members and some community members from Las Pavas and Garzal arrived in Bogota about 5:30 AM after an overnight trip via chartered bus. We had some time to clean up, eat breakfast, and meet with other CPTers already in Bogota to finalize plans for the action. We had planned to leave our personal belongings at the church, but there was a miscommunication and backpacks got loaded back on to the bus. In my case, it was everything I had brought to Colombia, because I was going to remain in Bogota for meetings till my flight on Monday.

Our driver, Mauricio, who has driven for the team several years, dropped us in front of INCODER and left to clean up the bus. He was to return and pick us up about 11 AM, but didn’t show. The team was to return to Barranca about 2 PM after lunch. We waited all afternoon puzzled and worried. I ended up heading to the home of the MCC friends who were hosting me.

Thursday morning I returned to the church and learned that Mauricio had been held up by two well-dressed men posing as potential clients interested in renting the bus for another group. He was drugged and didn’t wake till late in the evening and was finally able to talk his way free. The bus and its contents remain missing. Since another CPTer (Eloy) and I had lost passports we needed to go to the police station to testify when Mauricio filed his official report. That took about 4 ½ hours. They were four chairs in the waiting room, and the police said that sitting on the curb outside was a security risk. Eloy and I managed to make to the embassy with our documentation in time to only make an appointment for the following day.

Friday morning the embassy informed me that I had everything I needed to receive my emergency passport that day. That was the good news. The bad news was that, for the first time ever, the global network for issuing the passport I needed was down. Several hours later, it was clear that no passport would be issued till Monday. Then there were a couple trips to the airport to get my ticket changed. They needed proof that I had been robbed so I didn’t have to pay the fee for changing flights.

I’m sharing all this only because I don’t want to have to tell it a gazillion times when I get back. It wasn’t traumatic for me personally, just a nuisance. Mauricio is safe. My valuable belongings were mostly old, like my iPod and the camera I bought used from my son several years ago. I did have to spring for another set of clothes so I could wash things. Most of the clothes I brought with me, as you know, came from a thrift store somewhere. I will miss my nice camping sandals and the new raincoat I bought this summer. And I am temporarily without any pictures to share with you, also, because the CD with my files from this month in Colombia are still in the bus somewhere. I’ll get my file copied and sent up with the next CPTer heading north.

Thanks for the support and prayers.

The politics of palm oil

2010-02-06T19:10:00.000-08:00

I got back from Las Pavas on Thursday. In the middle of the night the diarrhea hit. That gave me an excuse to miss the media workshop on Friday and try to rest up. Guess how easy it is to take a nap in a concrete building when the temperature outside is 106 degrees. Today, Saturday, I am much improved. The temperature dropped at least ten degrees, thank God, since we had a six hour team meeting. Tomorrow I head up the river again, this time for Garzal.

Las Pavas is a river community of farmers who, over a period of years, had been living on and working several thousand acres of lowing lying land in the Magdalena River Valley. Remember that the Magdalena is the Colombia’s equivalent of our Mississippi except that it flows north. This community was participating in a government program to reclaim abandoned land. They had passed the initial steps and were told their titles were “in the works”, so to speak, when the uncle of the previous owner sold the land to a British palm oil producer, Daabon. The previous owner was actually the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, who was killed in 1994.

CPT got involved with Las Pavas just prior to their being evicted by the national police. They now live in the little town of Buenos Aires, pictured above, that adjoins Las Pavas. We have been accompanying the community and working to draw international attention to their situation ever since. Part of our strategy has been to focus on one of Daabon’s biggest customers, a chic, socially responsible cosmetics company. That company, The Body Shop, began in the late seventies as one of the first companies to use a “fair trade” model. They have been very successful using big posters of the poor farmers in the world who are benefiting from their business. CPT has organized public actions in Chicago and London which have made The Body Shop very uncomfortable. See the following link for more details on CPT’s history with Las Pavas, http://www.cpt.org/work/colombia/actions.

My role on the visit was to hear stories first hand and to see what was happening with the development of the land by Daabon. The man pictured here is Efrain, an incredible historian, storyteller and song writer. I spent about three hours learning about the history of Las Pavas. He is nearly blind, and when he writes his eyes need to be about six inches from the page. Our second day there, my CPT partner Gladys and I went on a motorcycle tour of the former farmlands, now a palm oil plantation in progress. It was grim. The Magdalena river valley is a huge network of lakes, swamps, and channels that flood seasonally. The Las Pavas community was planting cacao (chocolate), plantains, and other cash crops in higher areas and leaving areas of forest specifically for timber. Lakes, rivers and streams provide water and fish. What I saw was several thousand acres of forest totally cleared. Stream channels and swamps were being filled. It is wetland destruction on a huge scale. We actually got to take photos of bulldozers clearing trees, piling them up and burning them. The photo below is of Gladys and our motorcycle chauffeurs posed on one of the trees taken down.

There is a judicial process. We know of another community that has been in the same kind of judicial process for 8 years. CPT and several other human rights organizations, national and international, are working to see that this doesn’t happen to the people of Las Pavas.

Government Sponsored Hurricanes

2010-01-24T18:10:00.000-08:00

Thursday, my first full day back at the CPT office, I attended a funeral mass. The deceased had been shot two days earlier as he slept in his hammock outside his small house in Villa Dignidad. He was part of an estimated 200 families that had invaded a vacant piece of land over the last four months. It is located on the outskirts of Barrancabermeja and just 10 minutes by taxi from our CPT office. Since mid December the landowner had been threatening evictions and tension was rising. It is not clear who committed the murder. Later that afternoon we were told by another human rights organization that some kind of agreement had been reached to allow an orderly relocation of the families.

We were called early Friday morning to come to the community the following morning. Apparently an agreement had not been reached. We arrived to find the entrance roads guarded and the perimeter surrounded by over a hundred members of the national police in full riot gear. A large contingent of the community was meeting in the center of a main street. We were there to help to keep things from getting out of hand.

Many of you know that my youngest son, Kellen, has had some experience living in abandoned buildings over the last few years. I understand how that works, doing it one house at a time. I am still baffled as to how this group of folks got onto the land in the first place. It sounds like there may have been as many as 50 families that moved there in late September. These are extremely poor people who are out of work and can’t pay rent. We would call them homeless, except that these very poor folks with virtually no formal training had organized a leadership council, made a plan, and moved in. By January, as many as 50 of the total families would fit Colombia’s definition of “displaced” by the internal conflict, and that’s where this is such a complicated situation. Yes, the families have trespassed and have no legal right to build homes in Villa Dignidad. On the other hand, Colombian law requires that displaced persons be provided with a living space. One official I talked to estimated that in Barrancabermeja alone there are 700 displaced families.

Friday was long day. The temperature was in the high 90s. About half of the families had packed up or started to dismantle their houses by noon. The city was sending large trucks to help people collect and move the belongings, including most of the house. After several failed negotiations, and a show of force by the police, most of the others began to tear their houses down. Not all though. We talked with some who said, “Tell us where we are supposed to go. We have children, and we don’t know anyone here in Barranca. Where are we supposed to take these few things we own?” This is one of the tougher parts of being a CPTer. We can hopefully point those people to other organizations that are working on those issues, but we don’t provide direct aid. We left about 5:30 when things appeared to have calmed down. The police had moved back to their earlier positions and were promising not to act as long as people were leaving voluntarily.

Saturday morning Sandra and I returned to see how things had progressed. Ninety percent of the people had left. A significant group of displaced persons remained, and two women from social organizations who work with displaced persons were trying to sort things out for them. We walked around the loop we had walked the day before. My impression was that a huge storm had gone through. Maybe it had. A government sponsored storm.

In the photo below I am visiting with Julio, a displaced person. He had torn his house down the day prior, but no truck had been able to help him yet. He had spent the night there outside guarding the little that he had and waiting for a city truck that day. Julio had no idea where they could take his things. You will note that he is wearing a really nice baseball cap with an American flag and a bald eagle. I teased him about that. Then on our way out that afternoon a young woman yelled to me, the obvious gringo, “Tell your president to stop sending money to the military and send it to help our displaced people instead!”

Phil Turns Sixty

2009-06-07T17:05:00.000-07:00

Friday night, June the 5th, I celebrated the passing of my 60th birthday with friends at Common Ground. The actual May 26th date had arrived while I was accompanying Julie and her students in Guatemala. I did receive a firecracker salute and "tres leches" birthday cake that day, but the real party was celebrated this past weekend. On the way down to Logan on Friday, I had a song show up. That song, taught to the backup singers available at the party is the subject of the following video. Second lead is, Rita Preston. Third lead, Andrew Weiland. Fourth is my dear buddy Nick Weiland. Their verses are improved. This was the first and only take. Wish you all could have been there to join in.

Opón River trip

2009-01-11T16:19:00.000-08:00

On my trip up the Opón River with Stewart I met some really great folks. As many of you know I like hanging around with kids. The above photo was taken by the six-year-old brother of the other two kids in the photo. We were having a little digital camera session. After that, Noralba, the seven-year-old girl decided that I need a lesson in grapefruit picking. We used a big long pole, forked at the end to knock them down. Yorlan (4 yrs) is pictured here with some of the harvest. Afterwards we had grapefruit "limonada".

In the afternoon we went swimming in the river. I was a little worried about pirhanas. They told me they didn’t have any, but that the sting rays could be nasty. Wow, that made me feel better. Older cousin Jonathan was fishing with a throw net while we were there. It took several tries, but I finally got a photo gives you the feel. It was fun to watch. He was getting baitfish to use for line fishing later that night.

That evening we had supper with another family, and after supper Juan was working on weaving his own net while we visited. It looked absolutely perfect to me, all done free-hand.

One man’s noise pollution

2009-01-01T14:07:00.000-08:00

Put thirty people in room about the size of a three-car garage with concrete floors, and ceiling. Enter the song leader and the keyboard player, crank up the four-foot tall speakers and get to worshipping. Gladys and I had gone to this particular Sunday morning service because we had heard it wasn’t quite as loud as most of the protestant churches. It was still painful. In Guatemala, Julie and I once heard a retired missionary tell the story of a group who had approached him wanting financial help building a new church. “We have everything we need”, they said, “the land, the sound system, everything!” Colombian churches seem to be much the same.

But the sound of life in urban Columbia has an added dimension. Julie had spoken to me about how different it is on the streets of Barranca in the evening compared to Guatemala City. Folks are out walking, sitting in front of their houses or having a beer at one of the many, many little stores and bars that are open into the evening hours. Recorded music, loud music, music for dancing is everywhere. Right now, New Year’s afternoon, our neighbors two doors down are sitting out in front of the house having a beer. (See photo above) You can see the speakers by the door, and I can hear the music still, a block away in the office, as I write this. The music filters in along with overlapping music from other houses in the neighborhood.

The piece of this that has really surprised and delighted me is the amount of singing along that happens with this recorded music. Last week, neighbors on one side of the street had their speakers going, and the folks across the street had a party singing along almost as loud as the speakers. This went on for more than an hour!

It is difficult for me to imagine my neighbors in the states having this much fun together in any place I’ve ever lived. Yeah, there is probably some risk of hearing loss, and as far as I am concerned, the churches are probably the worst culprits. Still, this is a country that enjoys its musical heritage and thrives on the company and playfulness of gathered friends. How sterile and lonely many of our US neighborhoods are in comparison.

When life give you oranges

2008-12-28T13:33:00.000-08:00

On our trip to Garzal, Pastor Salvador sent Phil and Gladys home with a half a feed sack of oranges that we helped pick from the tree in his yard. They are tough to peel and full of seeds, but really sweet and juicy. So, the above picture is how we process the juice here at the office out at the pila (washing place) on the back patio.

wine, wedding, and Beatles

2008-12-28T12:54:00.000-08:00

Thursday morning las Juanistas called to see if we wanted to get our wine blessed. The Sisters of John are the nuns that serve in the Catholic Church down the street, and are committed supporters of the work that we and other organizations are doing in Colombia. On December 26th there is a special mass to bless the wine for your New Year's party, and following is a little open house at the sister's for a few lucky radical folks, including us.

The mass was an amazing combination of unlikely visuals and sounds. First of all, not only had everyone brought there wine bottles up to the altar and set them in a row, there was also a section of the front pews roped off for the bride and groom! Weddings get slipped into whatever Mass is most convenient; you rarely have a separate wedding service. In the photo you can see in the right top corner, as Christmas star that was cycling through color combinations usually seen only in Las Vegas. The worship music was led by a terrific classical guitar player who was plugged in and cranked up. My musical brain started to get goosebumps when they started a praise song based on the Beatles', Hey Jude. Later they played another one based on the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The finale was when the communion elements were danced up the aisle from the back of the church by a young couple twirling and weaving and bobbing to a traditional rhythm. See photo.

Eventually, after we got the wine blessed, the couple married, and headed over to the house for some little disposable cups of wine and tasty sausages on toothpicks. There were nearly forty of us on plastic chairs lining the walls of a good-sized living room with all the locals singing songs friendship and hope for the future. It was a beautiful evening.

2008-12-25T20:03:00.000-08:00

Barrancabermeja and the big river
The city of Barrancabermeja (pop. 300,000 +/-) where the CPT offices are located sits on banks of the Magdalena river. It is a major petroleum processing center with huge refineries and storage tanks. Petroleum products are shipped out by truck and by huge barges going down river (north!) to the Caribbean coast. The Magelena is about 900 miles long, compared to Mississippi’s 2,300, but there is more annual rainfall here. In the area where we are working, the river valley is very wide and the river splits into a large interconnected network of channels that change from year to year and somewhat seasonally.

Because there are so few good roads along the valley, the river is a major public transportation route. If you are traveling any distance on the main river you will be traveling by “chalupa”, though not the Taco Bell kind. They are the equivalent of a mini-bus, carrying up to 25 passengers and their luggage, rocketing up and down the river to other larger towns where you pick up a canoe to reach the smaller villages along a tributary.

The canoes, of course were fascinating to Phil. They range from 20 ft or so to over 60 ft in length, and most are powered by outboard motors. They are basically three pieces of wood, the bottom and two sides, with a few small pieces locking things together at both ends. The idea of using a chain saw to cut out one single board 60 ft long and more than 3 ft wide for the bottom of these larger boats boggles my mind. This is what Julie and her group were riding in when they became hung-up in the weeds and mud.

Sunday, 12/21 Julie’s trip to “Quatro Bocas”
Julie and Stewart left at dawn for the Four Rivers community “Celebration of Life and Resistance to Oppression.” The young people’s organization, Legion de Afecta, requested CPT accompany this two day gathering in rural Colombia as the organization’s young leaders have received multiple death threats this year. Our international presence provides a degree of protection and credibility for the organization. It was a well-organized day of traditional and modern dance demonstrations, public speeches, traditional food, and rituals of healing for the campesinos who have suffered threats and assassinations in the 50 year long Civil War. The night time surge of mosquitoes was intense and Julie has a minimum 200 bites to show for it!

Monday, 12/22 Phil’s trip to Garzal
Phil and Gladys left Monday morning for a visit to the villages of Garzal and Nueva Esperanza. CPT currently has five ongoing accompaniments. I had been unaware of the Garzal project. A very brief background is that a cocaine processing plant was set up a couple miles off the river in the early 80 on plantation land sold to a Mr. Barreta in the early 80s. The two communities adjoining the plantation were allowed to stay, even though campesinos rarel have an actual title to their property. In 1989 Barreta was arrested and sent to jail.

In the late 90s he disappeared from jail and the communities began to receive threats, telling them they should move off their land as it was being sold to an undisclosed party. The new pastor in town learned through the grapevine that it was Barreta by another name. Salvador, the pastor, tracked him down and asked if they might not negotiate. Barreta refused and added that he expected that the river would be willing to accept as many bodies might be thrown in. Threats continued, some directed personally at Salvador. He decided to stay to support the community. Tension has been escalating since 2001. In 2006 Savador met CPT members at a joint meeting of communities facing displacement. We have been accompanying them since early 2007, assisting in building legal and political networks for them and being present at meeting when the risk of assassination is higher. We try and check in with the community about once a month even if there is no official business.

So, Gladys and I went by chalupa to the port of Viajual and then by canoe to Garzal to Salvador’s home. It hot flat river bottom land, where the crops are plaintains, rice, cacao (photo on left) and beef cattle. There are all sorts of tropical fruits as well, of course, many of which I tasted for the first time. My teammate, Gladys, is Colombian and had a great time introducing me to different fruit. I could go on and on about food.

After a long interview/visit update with Salavador, we walked up the road and visited with the neighbors. There was an especially fun conversation with two older men at the home of Tomás, an 85 year old who is still farming plantains, coconuts, and cacao. He does bit of wholesale buying, as well, and the other gentleman was there to sell some of his cacao harvest. They talked openly about their frustration with the government’s inability to provide a process in which poorer people can get title to their land. It appears to them (and us) that land titles go to the highest paid attorney. There is hope though. There is a young lawyer that has been working on behalf of the communities for a little more than a year, and there is a new government program has been designed to provide land title access to campesinos.

Because the rainy season has recently ended, the mosquitos were not nearly the nuisance on our visit as they were for Julie. ¡Gracias a Dios! Salvador’s family was very kind, and fed us well. We had fun telling stories and singing together. We left the family on Tuesday morning and walked the road/path back down the river toward Nueva Esperanza. I should not here that it was hard for me to know exactly when one community started and the other began. They are small farms strung together along the road. We arrived on the banks of the Magdelena around noon and were back in Barranca for supper.

A footnote here is that these farmers are also struggling to compete with hybrid seed being essentially dumped in their markets by the US through the agricultural “free trade” agreement. Salvador stated specifically that he is hoping President Obama will consider altering those agreements to take the pressure off the poorer farmers.

Tuesday, 12/24 Opón man arrested
Christmas Eve day was supposed to be open for resting, cleaning up, and working on this kind of correspondence. Late in the morning we received a call from one of the families in the Opón River area where Julie has done most of her accompaniment in the past. A man had been arrested the day before, apparently without charge, and was being held here in Barrancabermeja awaiting arraignment. Since we knew his community well and the family somewhat, it was the sort of circumstance in which we can act as spokespersons in a limited way and, at least make sure that the rules are being followed.

It turned out to be a classic Opón situation in which the campesino gets stuck in the middle and takes the brunt consequences. Stewart and I were able to get in to visit “John” as he was waiting to be questioned. He said he had been working for a large plantation owner the day before when a group of armed men, whom he took to be guerillas, approached him, handed him an envelope and told him to deliver it to the plantation owner. He figured he didn’t have much choice, so the letter was delivered. For some reason, not only was the owner home, but so was a group of Colombia’s version of the FBI. It turns out the envelope held an extortion letter. John was arrested.

Guerillas (the FARC) in the countryside support themselves pirating oil, selling cocaine, and “taxing” the wealthier landowners. In this case, the landowner perhaps was avoiding a payment due. The police can say they arrested somebody. For the larger players, nothing has changed. For John and his family, everything has changed. John’s elderly parents live in his home with his wife and children. John brings in the only cash income. We know of another person arrested in this manner who is still jail waiting trial after three years.

We will continue to check in with John’s situation, but are feeling pretty depressed. Merry Christmas seems like a very cynical phrase right now.

A New Leaf

2008-02-18T18:52:00.000-08:00

The Chicago Five

Tomorrow Kellen turns 25, and my CPT friends go to court in Chicago for their arrests at Congressman Emanuel's office. Then Jonas turns 28 on Wednesday. I'm here in Guatemala trying to feel useful, and starting a blog. Things feel out of my control again.