Resistance Under Pressure: the Colombian Peace Community of San José de Apartadó
The South American country is being terrorized by brutal paramilitaries. A small community has consistently practised nonviolence—now they have received death threats again.
Nature is loud. Unknown animal sounds resound from the darkness as I work on the veranda in the evening. Everything seems so peaceful while the Comunidad de Paz reports the presence of armed people near their private properties La Roncona and La Holandecita. This is exactly where our small women's delegation from Europe is staying—Sabine Lichtenfels, Andrea Phoebe Regelmann, Katharina Müller and I—in the first house after the entrance gate.
Outside our terrace, the lavish abundance of nature. Lush greenery, with the occasional free-roaming horse or chicken on the lawn. There is a latent threat in the air, but not to our lives. The threatened people of the community have learned to live with the daily danger. They occasionally come to visit us, still have a sense of humor, and radiate from within. They have been friends with my fellow travelers from the partner community Tamera in southern Portugal for 19 years. Our presence and reporting on them gives them protection, because the murderers cover up their crimes and attack when no international witness is looking.
Colombia is in utter chaos. The more I hear and read about what is happening here, the more I immerse myself in books about the country, the more perplexed, confused, and disillusioned I remain. According to The System of the Bird: Colombia, a Laboratory of Barbarity by Guido Piccoli, "Violence has not left Colombia since the war of independence against the Spanish." In Colombia, "there is always room for everyone, but equally the possibility of killing each other to no end."
Piccoli writes:
Don Gonzalo was not only a good person, he was also a hard worker. He got up at dawn and went to the mountains of Norcasia to cut down trees. One morning, his sister did not bring him his lunch, as she did every day. When Gonzalo came home, he found her dead, tied to a post. They had raped her. In the courtyard lay the decapitated bodies of his two brothers, while the bodies of their parents were lying in the hallway of the house. The only one still alive was the youngest brother. Before he died in his arms, he was able to tell him that the bandits were responsible for the massacre. From that day on, Don Gonzales decided to cut off the heads of bandits.
I can't say who the bandits are here. Paramilitaries, military, guerrillas. The state, the police, the public prosecutor's office. According to the law and the Constitution, the country is a democracy. In practice, hardly anyone understands how it works, and criminals enjoy complete impunity. During a riot in 1948 in the capital Bogotá, after the socialist politician and lawyer Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was murdered, "in one neighborhood in the center of the city, police distributed weapons to the demonstrators. In other neighbourhoods, they shot at them with rifles"
Initially, both the Colombians and American diplomats believed that Gaitán was assassinated by the Conservative Party, but after a few years, the opinion emerged that this was the first plot organized by the CIA, which had only been founded seven months earlier, to curb the spread of communism in the U.S. sphere of influence. Even the world-famous author Gabriel García Márquez supported this theory, because he was in the area on the day of the assassination and saw a conspicuous, unusual man, but no authority investigated this murder further and the FBI refused to open its archives "for security reasons."
Violence in Colombia only got worse from there. People were being sawed in half, had their eyes gouged out, had body parts cut off—all while they were still alive. Then the bodies were dumped in some villages. The terror was intended to force entire communities to leave their land.
The beneficiaries were the country's oligarchs, large landowners, and North American corporations:
The paramilitaries in Colombia are the armed wing of the elites, supported by or interwoven with all state authorities, at all levels of government and in all social classes. They were formed with the help of the Colombian army, several Colombian and U.S. intelligence services, and mercenaries. Paramilitarism is a strategic project and an integral part of the state. The paramilitaries play a central role in enforcing a capitalist neoliberal economic and social model with enormous profit margins.
All of this happened a long time ago. A peace agreement was signed in 2016, and a truth commission was set up as a result. The current left-wing government of Gustavo Petro is working to implement these milestones in Colombian history and is committed to the vision of "total peace." And here I am, surrounded by tropical abundance, struggling against a feeling of hopelessness as I realize how deeply violence and murder have shaped the lives of every person I talk to, and especially how murder and torture are still widespread. Most of the guerrillas have been demobilised, while the paramilitaries are stronger than before.
On March 18, 2024, President Petro visited the nearby town of "Apartadó and spoke—for the first time for a president—words of recognition and reparation for the Comunidad de Paz. The next day, the paramilitary responded—at least that is how the Comunidad De Paz understands it: 30-year-old Nalleley, mother of three, and 14-year-old Edinson were brutally murdered." The Urabá region, where the peace community is located, is under the control of the Gulf Clan, the most powerful criminal syndicate in Colombia. It emerged from right-wing paramilitaries and now, perfidiously, has renamed itself the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia after Gaitán in order to give itself a political coloring.
On our porch, over coffee and buñuelos, various members of the Peace Village describe how it felt when they lost family members in massacres by paramilitaries. They take an empty bowl in their hands to illustrate the inner emptiness that this leaves in them. And now comes the part that makes this place so special: They do not react like Don Gonzales and want revenge, and they no longer allow themselves to be driven out, uprooted in dignity, to beg for work in the cities. Since 1997, they have declared their neutrality, practiced organic farming for their own sustenance, exemplified nonviolence, and thus practiced the only possible form of resistance, namely collective resistance against war, expulsion, and exploitation. The integrity of these people is incredible.
"Their profound and courageous stance of nonviolence, ethical integrity, reconciliation, and community building, despite suffering unending attacks and massacres, has turned them into an important reference and role model for many other resisting grassroots communities in Colombia," writes Martin Winiecki from Tamera, who has also visited them several times.
I am learning a lot here. Above all, about the great fight against the system of exploitation, which always takes place on a small scale, especially in our minds. And the people here, with all the threats and the very simple life on the brink of poverty, seem more alive and, paradoxically, more radiant than my European friends. An excess of prosperity and the lack of a purpose in life seem to me more and more like enemies of vitality. On the outside, neoliberalism is destroying the Earth and on the inside, it is destroying our souls.
Amid the huge plants, the free-roaming animals, the women, men, and children who move around on foot or by horse and mule to reach their lands up in the mountains, where there is still no civilization, I feel closer to life than ever. My soul, buried by our consumer world, suddenly breathes life here, as if a layer of dust has been blown away. And it is precisely from this "civilization" that the Comunidad de Paz protects its land, protecting it and itself from the grip of the mega-machine.
"What's happening in Colombia of course isn't an isolated phenomenon," Winiecki writes. "It's part of an intensifying global clash: empire versus communities, capitalism versus Earth, patriarchy versus Life. This clash plays out in the ever more heartbreaking genocide in Gaza, the accelerating climate breakdown, the rise of far-right authoritarianism and fascism, and more. For life to succeed, we need unbreakable solidarity, recognizing that all struggles are connected, and we also need the power of vision that enables us to create living alternatives."
