Breaking borders, breaking structures, breaking guns—through nonviolence, love, and the imagination

By Kristen Kuriga

Last night I dreamt I was in Colombia. I was walking down the street at night alone and the lighting was dim. A man with a machine gun came out from behind a building and forced me to the ground. He put his gun up to my head and I could hear him slowly pulling the trigger back. My heart was pounding as I lay with my face on the cold concrete. Am I going to die? Everything was in slow motion. As I heard the bullet coming out of the gun I grabbed the end with my hand and bent it. I stood up, took the gun from the man, and broke it with my hands. I threw the gun on the ground and walked down the dark street alone.

What I saw and felt of the conflict in Colombia is slowly drifting out of the background of my mind and into the foreground of my dreams. In the first days of my return I was filled with the joy and love of life that permeated the organizations we visited and the spirit of the conscientious objectors. I was and am inspired by what they have transformed this conflict into for themselves: empowerment, alternative vision, celebration of life, and standing up against injustice and fear. That with a gun to their temple, they choose to break the gun with their bare hands. That they believe it is possible to end violence with nonviolence.

And I realize that I also took from this delegation the way that violence and militarism creeps into our minds and our hearts, even when we are not aware of it. As I remember walking down the streets of Bogota and Medellin, certainly not alone, and especially not at night, I saw many men and women with guns. Yet they were police officers and military members, and for that reason, I think somewhere in me I accepted their right to carry a gun. I realize how easily we have accepted, and I have accepted, that in our culture those in authority have the right to threaten and to use violence as a means of keeping order. It took me back to the days following 9/11 in New York City. When I first entered the train station or walked through the financial district and saw men and women with machine guns and in riot gear, I was startled. I had never felt so frightened, so much like I was living in a war zone. And slowly I began to accept it. To see it as normal. This morning I realize the depth to which I have accepted violence as normal. How desensitized perhaps I have become to the constant war we are living in.

My visit to Colombia opened my eyes to the reality of armed conflict. For more than 60 years, Colombians have been fighting an internal war. Disappearances, assassinations, mass displacement of peoples, mass graves, curfews, and recruitment into military groups have become normalized. All that I have read about social and economic structures, globalization, conflict resolution, and peace and justice became real, became felt for me.

What is it like to be a youth in this world of violence, militarism, and war? On both sides of the delegation, Colombia and the U.S., we talked about how the social and economic structures of our specific contexts have attempted to dictate our options. In Colombia, as a youth from a “barrio popular,” the options you are given is to fulfill your mandatory service to the military and perhaps die or kill in the conflict between the state, paramilitary groups, and the FARC and ELN, to join the paramilitaries, the drug trade, or a guerilla group, or to be part of the masses of unemployed. For youth from poor communities in the U.S., especially communities of color, youth are presented with the options to join the military, to work a minimum wage job in the service sector, if you are “lucky enough” to get one, or to a join a gang and likely end up in the rapidly growing prison system. Are these real options?

Although the situation for youth on the surface seems so drastically different in Colombia and the U.S., we were able to see the parallels between these two contexts by sharing personal stories. Through the practice of council, each of the U.S. participants shared on the topic of “the experience of violence in your life,” with the opportunity for the Colombian delegates to relate their own experiences to these stories and mirror back to the group what they felt and heard. It was amazing to me that in the sharing of these personal stories, youth from both sides were able to see that not only was their experience personal, or even representative of the context of their own community, but is a reflection of the way in which global social, economic, political and military structures have impacted their options and lived experiences. It was clear that each person was an individual with a distinct story, but that the themes and experiences knew no boundaries and no borders.

As we left Medellin to return back to Bogota, Tanya and I fought back tears in saying goodbye to the members of the Red Juvenil who had shared so much story, art, and passion with us. Sandra eloquently shared something that moved me so deeply I was tempted to take out my tape recorder and ask her to say it all over again. But I remember it in my heart — she shared something like this:

“Do not cry for sadness because we are separating. Tears of sadness do not accomplish anything. Cry for joy because you have made friends here, you have made family. Know that we have made relationships, and so now we can talk to each other and visit one another. Know that to get to know each other, to build relationships, is to break borders.”

Breaking borders, breaking structures, breaking guns through nonviolence, love, and the imagination. Despite all of the obstacles and barriers to envisioning other possibilities, this delegation brought together youth who refuse to accept that these are the only options. That said, I want a different life for myself and for my community. I don’t accept your structures and your limitations. I realized the power of community and art to allow people not only to vision, but to live a different reality. Several times on the delegation we had the opportunity to discuss, what is a conscientious objector? Is it refusing to serve in the military? Is it refusing to participate in violence? Or as I heard from many of the men and women in Colombia, that being a conscientious objector is refusing to accept structures of injustice that have harmed me, my community, the earth, and all people. It also seemed that implied in choosing the life of a conscientious objector was the belief that all of this could change. These organizations, these youth, show that it is possible by living it.