by Stewart Vriesinga

[Note: This release is the first part of a two-part reflection to appear on CPTnet.  Those wishing to see the original longer blog entry from which the two releases are taken will find it at http://stewart-in-colombia.blogspot.com/2010/04/for-christ-who-has-not-risen.html]

CPTers Scott Nicholson and I, along with our Colombian partner organization CAHUCOPANA, spent Easter week hosting and leading a Colombian delegation that came to learn about the reality of oppressed rural communities in the northeastern part of the Antioquia department.

The trip began and ended in Puerto Berrío—a port on the Magdalena River that is home to the 14th Brigade, the notorious Calibío Battalion, and numerous paramilitary groups.  It is an area into which our friends from the Corporation for Coexistence and Peace in Northeast Antioquia (CAHUCOPANA) will not venture without international accompaniment.  A week earlier, two of my teammates had accompanied a teachers’ march in Puerto Berrío after paramilitaries assassinated a teacher and his spouse there.  Early on Sunday, 28 March, we began the long and bumpy eight-hour bus ride from Puerto Berrío followed by a one-and-a-half-hour hike up to the hamlet of Santa Marta, where we would stay until Thursday morning.

During our visit in Santa Marta, we learned of the threat that multinational mining corporations and other mega-projects presented to campesino farmers and artisanal miners.  Paramilitary and military extrajudicial killings, extortion and economic blockades are used to displace and dispossess the thousands of people who make their home and livelihoods on these lands—lands that the Colombian government has designated a Campesino Reserve, which should protect the local residents from economic and violent displacement.

CAHUCOPANA—a local grassroots human rights organization—was formed to protect the local population from mass displacement and extrajudicial killing.  In addition to paramilitary violence, troops from the Calibío Battalion of the Fourteenth Brigade have been assassinating campesinos and then presenting them as guerrilla soldiers killed in combat.  CAHUCOPANA and local residents have repeatedly denounced these atrocities, but these crimes remain unpunished.  Local residents who courageously testified against the state security forces live in constant fear that state forces themselves or their paramilitary allies will take retaliatory actions.

Yet, despite the risks, local residents are organizing under CAHUCOPANA to resist displacement and dispossession of their lands and to put an end to the extrajudicial killings and legal impunity for those who commit them.  CAHUCOPANA and these residents decided to accompany CPT and the national delegation back to Puerto Berrío to publicly denounce the extrajudicial killings of their community members in front of the headquarters of the Fourteenth Brigade.

The CPT delegation was invited to participate in Puerto Berrío’s Good Friday Mass.  The delegates were asked to present the fifth words spoken by Jesus during his crucifixion: “I thirst.”  Using theatre, song and words the delegation described the northeast Antioquia campesinos’ thirst for justice, and how Jesus, himself a campesino, continues to be crucified today.  The CAHUCOPANA folks, most of who had stayed back in the retreat centre to plan their own action for the following day, had watched the mass on television.  They met us with applause at the entrance to the retreat centre in which we were all staying.

Easter Saturday, the CPT delegation joined CAHUCOPANA members in front of the 14th Brigade to do a public action intended to end impunity and give meaning to the lives of the Brigades’ victims through their courageous public denunciation of the extrajudicial killings.  They referred to their public action as a “Gallery of Historical Memory.”  The victims’ names, along with the names of their killers, were read out.  With the reading of each name we shouted out “Presente!  Presente!  Presente!  ¿Hasta Cuando?  Hasta siempre!”  “Present!  Present!  Present!  Until when?  Forever!”

After the public action, delegates and members of the Colombia team accompanied CAHUCOPANA members out of Puerto Berrío— to Bogotá, Barrancabermeja, and to their home territory in the north-east of Antioquia where so many of their community members have already been crucified.  There they will remain, determined not give up their land to make way for any neo-liberal enterprise or mega-project as long as they have a spark of life in their bodies.