Liza Smith's blog

August 24. It was a routine recruitment appointment in Medellín, meaning that young men with a pre-assigned number showed up to resolve their military status. A number of them arrived with a certificate of exemption — in this case, they were students and according to Colombian law should be allowed to continue studying instead of fulfilling their military service.

Irregularities and illegalities in the process of recruitment for compulsory military service are still frequent on a daily basis in Colombia.

This is a picture of the land I love. It is a piece of land in Colorado where I’ve gone every summer for the last quarter-century — most of my life — and I would be devastated if it were taken away from me.

In Colombia, many people also have a deep relationship to their land. It is where they grow their food, it is a place of memories, family, community, and spiritual traditions.

But more than five million people in Colombia have been forced to leave the land that is most dear to them. In this year alone, 15 leaders who were struggling to have their lands returned to them have been assassinated.

Foristas in front of the new La Union library

What does it mean to be connected to a place that is not your own, to people who are strange and different from you, to a way of life that will never be yours?

We pondered these questions over the last two weeks with a group of former FOR volunteers who “returned” to Colombia.

When Jesús Emilio Tuberquia, leader of the San José Peace Community, was in the United States in April, he talked about the systematic attempts by the Colombian State to destroy his community. “They have used every means of violence, and it has occurred under all the presidents” since the community began in 1997, he said.

After some 900 violations against the San José community, including more than 160 murders committed by the army or their paramilitary allies, there have only been convictions in two cases.

by Jon Patberg, current Accompaniment Team Member in Colombia

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

“I was in my bed when an explosion rocked our house.” FOR Colombia Peace Team member Isaac Beachy tells of combat on the edge of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, and analyzes how the Colombian military reported on it. Meanwhile, community kids carry on in a party. Filmed on October 30, 2010. Watch the video here.

I haven’t been looking at the photos about Haiti. I haven’t been reading the news or listening to the radio for hours, either. Maybe I get enough death from Colombia in my inbox every day. Maybe I question what good listening to those stories will do, as I sit and work from my kitchen table in rainy Oakland. Maybe my body and heart know that I don’t need to see the photos of people mobbing a plane arriving with water, to understand that the devastation is huge.

By William R. Northrup

This is the tenth day of my immersion into the Colombian society as part of the FOR two-week delegation. I’m sure you would find the work of those here for this organization, advocating for peace and justice, impressive. Colombia, while exceptionally impressive in many ways, is a complex, difficult society with a multi-faceted, tragic configuration to its struggles that takes time to understand, to appreciate, and to love. Clearly the staff here and the volunteers have arrived at this valuable place and are effecting modest, peaceful changes. Many people are thankful for the FOR presence and depend on the FOR staff to accompany them when they feel threatened by the military, which continually harasses, threatens, apprehends, and worse in a seemingly willy-nilly fashion.