San José de Apartadó: Lessons from Colombia’s Peace Community
San José de Apartadó: Lessons from Colombia’s Peace Community
Written by Chris Courtheyn
Wednesday, 15 April 2015 08:04
On March 23rd, the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó celebrated its 18 year anniversary. This community of campesinos , located in the war-torn northwestern Urabá region of Colombia, refuses collaboration with any of country’s armed groups, including guerrilla, paramilitary, and State forces.
The celebration followed February’s annual commemoration pilgrimage to the villages of Mulatos and La Resbolosa, where eight people, including Community leader Luis Eduardo Guerra and three children, were massacred in a joint military and paramilitary operation in February 2005. These two anniversaries testify to San José’s amazing resistance to war over18 years, in which they have committed to constructing peace through collective farming, autonomy, and solidarity. I first visited the Peace Community in 2008 as a Fellowship of Reconciliation Peace Presence accompanier. To honor their 18th anniversary, I wish to share a series of lessons about social change that I have learned from them over the past seven years.*
Lesson 1) The experience of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó unmasks the modern State.
Since 1997, the Peace Community has demanded the right to live as campesinos without the presence or control of armed groups.
One might imagine that such a community of 1,300 farmers wanting to live nonviolently and with autonomy by expelling guerrillas and paramilitaries — that the government claims to combat — would be welcomed by the Colombian State, even if this also means the retreat of its own military forces, since such a retreat would reflect a step towards peace. However, the State’s reaction has been the opposite, as illustrated by 186 assassinations of civilians attributed to army soldiers and paramilitaries over the past 18 years, in addition to 24 killings the Community attributes to guerrilla groups.
The violence in San José de Apartadó is linked with the region’s abundant natural resources — water and mineral reserves — targeted for extraction. Private and public corporations that profit from such exploitation covet these resources, but in the process, they destroy the land and forcibly displace the people that live there through armed intimidation. Such processes have occurred in many parts of Colombia and the world: nearby areas in Chocó and Córdoba where black and campesino communities were displaced in the 1990s have been transformed into mass oil palm plantations and the Urrá hydroelectric dam, respectively. The majority of human rights violations in Colombia today are committed in zones of mining and oil extraction.
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/5282-san-jose-de-apartado-lessons-from-colombias-peace-community
