FOR Partners
In January of 2005 the Colombia Peace Presence Team opened an office in Bogotá to support the accompaniment work in San José de Apartadó and also to support other nonviolent peace initiatives through periodic accompaniment, translation, publicity, and more. The CPP currently has two partner organizations:
Red Juvenil de Medellín (Youth Network of Medellín)
Asociación Campesina de Antioquia (Peasant Farmers Association of Antioquia — ACA)
The Medellin Youth Network is a youth organization that operates explicitly on principles of nonviolence.
Started in 1990 by young people who had lost loved ones to the armed conflict, the group trains youth in nonviolence and cooperative play, supports young men who refuse to serve with the police, military or illegal armed groups, and promotes respect for human rights and youth’s ideas in Colombian society. A core group of about 30 young people work out of the group’s office and gathering space, a large house not far from the city center. Another 150 youth organized into neighborhood and issue groups are regularly involved in their activities.
The Network’s first members came together for mutual support. They wanted to break the stigma that “youth” equaled “violence” by making their pacifist views public. Their first actions were instinctive responses to violence in the city and included processions from the poor hillside neighborhoods that ring the city, with music and theater that expressed the participants’ rejection of violence.
The heart of the Network’s mission is to encourage young people’s belief in the value of all human life, to work together to overcome fear, and to become empowered to live and espouse these values. Their conscientious objection project exemplifies this approach. Male Colombians graduating from secondary school are required to serve a year in the police or the army, and there is no provision for alternative service or refusal on grounds of conscience. Those who do refuse are barred from higher education and from many jobs. The Network provides support to conscientious objectors, in addition to publicizing the issue of conscientious objection in the media and on the street.
For a more detailed history of the Red, click here.
Asociación Campesina de Antioquia (Peasant Farmers Association of Antioquia — ACA)
The ACA works with displaced farmers and their families in Antioquia, many of whom have been forced to live in makeshift houses on the outskirts of Medellin where they have no access to basic services and where theres is no decent land for them to work. Many are forced to beg in the street to provide for their families. The ACA also works to put the problem of Antioquia in a national perspective: a team of filmmakers travels across Colombia making documentaries about rural, afro-Colombian and indigenous communitie who find themselves caught in the middle of Colombia’s war.
