Many hearts, many hands

 Andrea* arrived at our door with her three year old daughter Carmita in early January.  Unlike most others who are arriving from Mexico, she came to the San Antonio Greyhound bus station from Cleveland, OH, frantic to check on her husband and seven-year-old son being held in detention just west of San Antonio.  Andrea had traveled to the US a year ago from Guatemala seeking asylum and was staying with her brother in Cleveland awaiting news from her husband Carlos who had delayed his departure.  ICE had called her in Ohio to tell her to come and claim her son whose detention had exceeded the 21 day limit. Now she needed legal advice and emotional support as she feared her son would be separated from her husband, and that he would be deported back to Guatemala where they fled gang violence six months ago.

The San Antonio community has formed a model network of organizations to support the thousands of asylum seekers like Andrea and Carlos who pass through their city each year.  Each organization provides a unique set of services needed by those fleeing violence in their home country.  As soon as Andrea arrived at the bus station, she was approached by a volunteer in a blue vest speaking Spanish who identified herself and asked if there was anything she could do to help. These volunteers are the gateway to other organizations that provide overnight accommodations, clothing, healthcare, assistance buying bus tickets, food, legal advice and long-term assistance when immigrants stay.  San Antonio Mennonite Church where we  volunteer provides overnight accommodations both short and long term in their hospitality house La Casa de Marta y Maria.  This is where we met Andrea that first day.  At the height of this ministry, the Mennonite church provided shelter for up to 300 immigrants per night.  This has dropped to 2-15 per night in 2020 and is now handled by La Casa

Typically, the La Casa Coordinator gets a call from the Interfaith Welcome Coalition (IWC) or blue vests as I call them, whose volunteers  greet immigrants in the bus station to inquire about their needs.  The San Antonio bus station is often immigrants first real stop since crossing the US Mexico border. When the bus tickets require an overnight stay in San Antonio, we pick up the immigrants, feed them and provide a clean and safe space to sleep before sending them on their way the next morning.  In 2019, 32,379 immigrants passed through San Antonio and the IWC provided 25,000 backpacks filled with clothing and food, found shelter for  22,000 and served 85,000 meals through their food bank (interfaithwelcomecoalition.org 2/2020).  IWC has nearly 1000 volunteers who greet and serve the immigrants as they exit nearby US ICE Detention Centers or come straight from the Mexico border.  In Andrea’s case, we hosted her for two months.

Andrea was also connected that first day with the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. Raices is a nonprofit organization based in Texas that provides legal services for immigrants and Andrea needed legal help with her son and husband who had been in the area Detention Center for six months. As of 2018, Raices was the largest legal aid group of its kind in Texas with 130 employees.  They also have a presence at the bus station in order to answer questions about the immigrants’ legal status and to connect them with legal services locally and around the country.  Since the paperwork for asylum seekers is complex and difficult to decipher, Raices provides education and referrals as well as low cost or free legal services for asylum seekers in building their case to stay in the US.  For many seekers, this legal process involves months and even years of paperwork and legal work that would be impossible to complete successfully on their own.

The Migrant Immigration Center for Human Rights also provides legal services but primarily to those in US ICE Detention Centers like Karnes that held Andrea’s husband and son.  The Migrant Center provides free and low-cost legal services to detained, low-income immigrants facing removal from the United States at the third largest adult detention center in the U.S., the South Texas Detention Complex located an hour outside of San Antonio. With a bed capacity of nearly 2000, this is the third largest detention center in the US.  An asylum seeker from Somalia put it this way, “In this [detention] facility everything is hard if you don’t have a lawyer… [They] don’t respect you if you don’t have a lawyer.”

Andrea also utilized Catholic Charities, another key part of the immigrant support network. In San Antonio, among the many services they provide to the poor and vulnerable population is monetary assistance to purchase bus tickets for those heading to places like Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and Cleveland as Andrea would be if reunited with her husband and son.  Many of the asylum seekers have been traveling from 3 months to a year before reaching the US.  Upon arrival, they often have nothing left but the clothing on their backs.  To make it the final leg of their journey, requires an additional $200-$300 per traveler for the bus ticket.  Catholic Charities provides this help and sends them on their way.

This impressive immigration support network requires fulltime professional staffs, millions of dollars in donations and thousands of volunteers each year.  It has been a pleasure and a challenge to be one small part of this welcoming network during our two months in San Antonio.  Even better was the opportunity to accompany Andrea and her daughter to the bus station for the reunion with her husband and son when they finally arrived from the Detention Center.   The tears of joy flowed freely from all of us who witnessed this miracle of family reunion.

*Names and all identifying information have been changed to protect the family involved.

In the beginning

It has been a little over two weeks since Julie and I arrived in San Antonio, and I have been feeling as if I’m being thrown around by a cultural tornado.  Mostly in a good way.  We came here as volunteers to help with tasks at the Casa de Maria y Marta.  We have our own room upstairs and share a bathroom downstairs.  Immigrants being transitioned from the border to final destinations in the US are dropped at the Greyhound station downtown.  We provide overnight shelter for various of those families.  We’ll give you more details about that process in a later blog.  My goal for this post is to describe some of the local context.

To start, when I was five years old, Walt Disney introduced me to Davy Crockett, my first hero.  I have sobered up on Davy since then, but now, oddly, live a mile and a half from the Alamo, where he died.

We walk for exercise on the San Antonio River Walk which we can access just three blocks from our house.  It runs the length of the city, beautifully green where we start on the south side and lined with brightly lit restaurants and bars through the city center.  When we returned home last week walking down another street, we passed a home with a large basket of grapefruit outside their gate with a sign reading, “Free. Take some.”  Inside the fence was a tall tree with hundreds of beautiful fruit.  They were delicious.

The San Antonio Mennonite Church (SAMC), which owns La Casa, occupies an old building going through major remodeling and repair that makes my Columbus Mennonite Church Facilities Commission role look like a Caribbean vacation cruise.  They have one part-time pastor, and, as far as I can tell, no regular custodial staff.  Even while this renovation is going on they offer office space to three other non-profit groups, including Conjunto.  The word conjunto describes a Tejano accordion style of music.  Mondays and Thursdays there is an open mic workshop from 3 PM till nine PM.  Saturdays three or four teachers are giving accordion lessons, and students are sitting in the hallways warming up or practicing.  Check this link.  Is this what your church sounds like?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCjLTXVCd1s

Helping with the remodeling has me well-acquainted with the local Home Depot.  As far as I can tell, all the staff are bi-lingual.  At HEB, the giant Texan grocery chain, at least 25% of the bread section is tortillas, which is to say, there is no specific Hispanic food section.

The Catholic gentleman, Rodollfo, who started the conjunto program a couple years ago has started to attend SAMC and has become so moved by the immigration work of the church that he is donating his family “ranchito” or small farm to the church. For the last couple decades it had been rented out to a pig farmer who accumulated two old mobile homes, three RVs, and massive piles of junk.  The mobile homes are currently temporary housing for two families from Central America, and the church is seeking funding to upgrade the water, sewer, electrical infrastructure.  The land has been in Rodolfo’s family since 1778.

One last cultural tornado image.  Jordi was a tall, thirteen year-old Angolan boy who loves basketball and LeBron James.  We had been looking at Google Maps on my laptop, and he asked if he could show me something on YouTube.  So, I was sitting on the sofa with this kid who had been in the US three days, who speaks a local Angolan language, French, and a little bit of Spanish, and we were watching a Britain’s Got Talent video of two British boys singing an amazing anti-bullying rap song.  A very special moment.

Buried airplanes and land titles

I’ve written before about the land titling disputes that are so central to much of our accompaniment work here in Colombia.  I think, too, that it’s important to name it as not solely a Colombian problem.  When Julie and I bought our land in southern Ohio, the title had to be cleansed of a problem from the 1800s.  When we were in Guatemala, Mennonite Central Committee facilitated the purchase of a big piece of land for a group of returning refugees that turned out to have five separate titles registered at the courthouse.

Here in Colombia a large tract of land in the Magdelena River valley that was part of a government railroad project was divided up between a small group of business families in 1921. Manuel Enrique Barreto’s grandfather was one of those.  Agreements were signed, but no deeds were ever registered.  The land was essentially vacant until the 1970’s when peasant farmers began to move into the area and clear small parcels for their families. 

Barreto himself arrived in the early 1980s to start a ranch claiming he owned all the land in the area.  Turned out he didn’t want to develop a cattle ranch so much as an airstrip and a cocaine processing lab.  He and his paramilitary supporters told their neighbors they could stay on their farms as long as they kept quiet about it.  Some of the neighbors actually worked for Barreto as carpenters and ag laborers, and some were present when Pablo Escobar, the renowned drug lord showed up for a visit.

Since that time there have been two decades of threats, murders, and court cases over who actually has legal right to the properties, with the federal court siding with the campesinos a few years back.  The actual delivery of titles has yet to happen.  That’s why we keep coming back here.

Fast forward to a big windstorm that knocked down a great number of big trees in the area in late August last year.  One of those trees fell in a jungle area a hundred yards or so from some open pasture and not far from where you can make out the drainage ditch that ran alongside Barreto’s airstrip.  It wasn’t until January this year that someone happened to be walking through that overgrown area and noticed a metal tube sticking out of the bottom of the uprooted stump.  Then they noticed other pieces of metal in the ground.  It was a small airplane, buried.

I have to insert here that as a guy who thinks he knows a lot about trees, I am astonished at how fast trees grow in this kind of ecosystem.  The tree that fell is roughly two feet in diameter.  A tree that size in in the US Midwest would be a maybe a hundred to a hundred-twenty years old.  Here, more like thirty.

In my previous post I was referring to what happened next.  News of the plane was not shared openly, but on March 1, the day I arrived in Barranca, four men were discovered working at digging up the plane at the behest of someone they called El Patron with the intent of removing it.  They were told to stop by the community and calls were made to various authorities and to us as a group who has provided security for this community for many years.  Two of us arrived on March 3 and visited the burial site with several community members.  The government had brought in a platoon of soldiers by helicopter to secure the site the previous afternoon.  Other contacts told us that a federal crime scene investigation team would be arriving the next week.  We took lots of photos for evidence, in case the team of investigators didn’t show up.  On our second day at the site there was a journalist from a Colombian news channel who showed up.  Subsequently, both he and the army have published articles naming the plane as linked to narcotrafficking.

As of this writing, more than two weeks later the investigation team has not showed up.  The soldiers also left after about a week, but there has been relatively open communication between the army’s commanding officer and the community contacts.  We are hopeful that if El Patron’s crew returns, the army would be back quickly also.  Additionally, the UN Human Rights Commission in Bogota contacted community leaders just yesterday to say they have assurances at the federal level that the site will be investigated, too.

For the community, this airplane brings back painful memories and a fear that this El Patron character is someone connected with the narcotrafficking history of the area, and who wants to keep this piece of evidence out of federal hands.  Community members fear they will be blamed for making this a public.  We are paying special attention to this fear and trying to be as present and supportive as possible.

Aluminum on the jungle floor

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Let’s review.  I have been spending a month or so in Colombia working with Christian Peacemaker Teams for ten years in a row now.  We are “unarmed body guards” whose presence alongside people whose lives are disrupted by threats of violence helps to lower that threat.  Our office is in the oil town of Barrancabermeja.  We work primarily in the agricultural region north of the city along the River Magdalena or up in the foothills of the mountains with mining communities.

I arrived a week ago.  The trip down was amazing for the networking accidentally accomplished. It  began when I met a man from Guatemala City after we both got off the flight from Columbus and ended up having lunch together.  Then I spent nearly an hour weaving through the customs line in Bogota chatting with a man who was being sent down to the US embassy to work for four months in the USAID office.  Later that night I found a safe, comfortable bench to spend six hours snoozing as I waited for my 6 AM flight to Barranca.  A couple about my age sat down next to me.  I did some visual stereo-typing and decided to identify myself to them as a member of the Mennonite Church.  So were they.  They had worked in Costa Rica in the 1970s, and, of course, after playing the Mennonite game for a while, we identified some relationships we had in common.  They were down to consult on a Bible translation project for indigenous people here in Colombia.  We spent the night together there in the waiting area, sleeping badly. 

After getting to Barranca, this first week has turned out to be one of the most interesting and complicated since I started coming in 2008.  At this point, I can’t tell you exactly where we are working.  The specific incident involves small farms, jungle, buried two-person airplanes, the army, the national human rights office, and narco traffickers.  Ironically, I watched the Tom Cruise movie “American Made” on my flight to Bogota, and while it is factually mushy in several areas, the hidden, rural airstrip depicted on Cruise’s first run to Colombia is exactly what I am talking about.  The abandoned airstrip we are actually dealing with here hasn’t been used in 30 years and was controlled by Pablo Escobar’s branch of the Colombian drug cartel.  The discovery of these planes has triggered an attempt by someone to remove the evidence.  

Add to this the fact that this Sunday Colombia holds its Senate elections.  In Barranca, a city where literally half the people travel by motorcycle, sometimes a family of four on one bike, and motorcycle taxis are common, things change on election day when only one person is allowed on a motorcycle from 6 AM to 6 PM.  Alcohol sales will stop on Saturday night and resume again on Monday.  It’s going to be a very interesting weekend. 

This picture of me with Pepo the goat is posted for my goat farmer friends, Ivan and Nina. He wanted his ears scratched as much as any dog I have ever known.