On being flexible

I picked my emergency passport this morning. A small triumph in what has been test of patience over the several days. Things started to unravel following the public action we did on Ash Wednesday in front of the INCODER offices.

Several CPT teams members and some community members from Las Pavas and Garzal arrived in Bogota about 5:30 AM after an overnight trip via chartered bus. We had some time to clean up, eat breakfast, and meet with other CPTers already in Bogota to finalize plans for the action. We had planned to leave our personal belongings at the church, but there was a miscommunication and backpacks got loaded back on to the bus. In my case, it was everything I had brought to Colombia, because I was going to remain in Bogota for meetings till my flight on Monday.

Our driver, Mauricio, who has driven for the team several years, dropped us in front of INCODER and left to clean up the bus. He was to return and pick us up about 11 AM, but didn’t show. The team was to return to Barranca about 2 PM after lunch. We waited all afternoon puzzled and worried. I ended up heading to the home of the MCC friends who were hosting me.

Thursday morning I returned to the church and learned that Mauricio had been held up by two well-dressed men posing as potential clients interested in renting the bus for another group. He was drugged and didn’t wake till late in the evening and was finally able to talk his way free. The bus and its contents remain missing. Since another CPTer (Eloy) and I had lost passports we needed to go to the police station to testify when Mauricio filed his official report. That took about 4 ½ hours. They were four chairs in the waiting room, and the police said that sitting on the curb outside was a security risk. Eloy and I managed to make to the embassy with our documentation in time to only make an appointment for the following day.

Friday morning the embassy informed me that I had everything I needed to receive my emergency passport that day. That was the good news. The bad news was that, for the first time ever, the global network for issuing the passport I needed was down. Several hours later, it was clear that no passport would be issued till Monday. Then there were a couple trips to the airport to get my ticket changed. They needed proof that I had been robbed so I didn’t have to pay the fee for changing flights.

I’m sharing all this only because I don’t want to have to tell it a gazillion times when I get back. It wasn’t traumatic for me personally, just a nuisance. Mauricio is safe. My valuable belongings were mostly old, like my iPod and the camera I bought used from my son several years ago. I did have to spring for another set of clothes so I could wash things. Most of the clothes I brought with me, as you know, came from a thrift store somewhere. I will miss my nice camping sandals and the new raincoat I bought this summer. And I am temporarily without any pictures to share with you, also, because the CD with my files from this month in Colombia are still in the bus somewhere. I’ll get my file copied and sent up with the next CPTer heading north.

Thanks for the support and prayers.

The politics of palm oil

I got back from Las Pavas on Thursday. In the middle of the night the diarrhea hit. That gave me an excuse to miss the media workshop on Friday and try to rest up. Guess how easy it is to take a nap in a concrete building when the temperature outside is 106 degrees. Today, Saturday, I am much improved. The temperature dropped at least ten degrees, thank God, since we had a six hour team meeting. Tomorrow I head up the river again, this time for Garzal.


Las Pavas is a river community of farmers who, over a period of years, had been living on and working several thousand acres of lowing lying land in the Magdalena River Valley. Remember that the Magdalena is the Colombia’s equivalent of our Mississippi except that it flows north. This community was participating in a government program to reclaim abandoned land. They had passed the initial steps and were told their titles were “in the works”, so to speak, when the uncle of the previous owner sold the land to a British palm oil producer, Daabon. The previous owner was actually the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, who was killed in 1994.

CPT got involved with Las Pavas just prior to their being evicted by the national police. They now live in the little town of Buenos Aires, pictured above, that adjoins Las Pavas. We have been accompanying the community and working to draw international attention to their situation ever since. Part of our strategy has been to focus on one of Daabon’s biggest customers, a chic, socially responsible cosmetics company. That company, The Body Shop, began in the late seventies as one of the first companies to use a “fair trade” model. They have been very successful using big posters of the poor farmers in the world who are benefiting from their business. CPT has organized public actions in Chicago and London which have made The Body Shop very uncomfortable. See the following link for more details on CPT’s history with Las Pavas, http://www.cpt.org/work/colombia/actions.

My role on the visit was to hear stories first hand and to see what was happening with the development of the land by Daabon. The man pictured here is Efrain, an incredible historian, storyteller and song writer. I spent about three hours learning about the history of Las Pavas. He is nearly blind, and when he writes his eyes need to be about six inches from the page. Our second day there, my CPT partner Gladys and I went on a motorcycle tour of the former farmlands, now a palm oil plantation in progress. It was grim. The Magdalena river valley is a huge network of lakes, swamps, and channels that flood seasonally. The Las Pavas community was planting cacao (chocolate), plantains, and other cash crops in higher areas and leaving areas of forest specifically for timber. Lakes, rivers and streams provide water and fish. What I saw was several thousand acres of forest totally cleared. Stream channels and swamps were being filled. It is wetland destruction on a huge scale. We actually got to take photos of bulldozers clearing trees, piling them up and burning them. The photo below is of Gladys and our motorcycle chauffeurs posed on one of the trees taken down.


There is a judicial process. We know of another community that has been in the same kind of judicial process for 8 years. CPT and several other human rights organizations, national and international, are working to see that this doesn’t happen to the people of Las Pavas.

Government Sponsored Hurricanes

Thursday, my first full day back at the CPT office, I attended a funeral mass. The deceased had been shot two days earlier as he slept in his hammock outside his small house in Villa Dignidad. He was part of an estimated 200 families that had invaded a vacant piece of land over the last four months. It is located on the outskirts of Barrancabermeja and just 10 minutes by taxi from our CPT office. Since mid December the landowner had been threatening evictions and tension was rising. It is not clear who committed the murder. Later that afternoon we were told by another human rights organization that some kind of agreement had been reached to allow an orderly relocation of the families.


We were called early Friday morning to come to the community the following morning. Apparently an agreement had not been reached. We arrived to find the entrance roads guarded and the perimeter surrounded by over a hundred members of the national police in full riot gear. A large contingent of the community was meeting in the center of a main street. We were there to help to keep things from getting out of hand.

Many of you know that my youngest son, Kellen, has had some experience living in abandoned buildings over the last few years. I understand how that works, doing it one house at a time. I am still baffled as to how this group of folks got onto the land in the first place. It sounds like there may have been as many as 50 families that moved there in late September. These are extremely poor people who are out of work and can’t pay rent. We would call them homeless, except that these very poor folks with virtually no formal training had organized a leadership council, made a plan, and moved in. By January, as many as 50 of the total families would fit Colombia’s definition of “displaced” by the internal conflict, and that’s where this is such a complicated situation. Yes, the families have trespassed and have no legal right to build homes in Villa Dignidad. On the other hand, Colombian law requires that displaced persons be provided with a living space. One official I talked to estimated that in Barrancabermeja alone there are 700 displaced families.



Friday was long day. The temperature was in the high 90s. About half of the families had packed up or started to dismantle their houses by noon. The city was sending large trucks to help people collect and move the belongings, including most of the house. After several failed negotiations, and a show of force by the police, most of the others began to tear their houses down. Not all though. We talked with some who said, “Tell us where we are supposed to go. We have children, and we don’t know anyone here in Barranca. Where are we supposed to take these few things we own?” This is one of the tougher parts of being a CPTer. We can hopefully point those people to other organizations that are working on those issues, but we don’t provide direct aid. We left about 5:30 when things appeared to have calmed down. The police had moved back to their earlier positions and were promising not to act as long as people were leaving voluntarily.


Saturday morning Sandra and I returned to see how things had progressed. Ninety percent of the people had left. A significant group of displaced persons remained, and two women from social organizations who work with displaced persons were trying to sort things out for them. We walked around the loop we had walked the day before. My impression was that a huge storm had gone through. Maybe it had. A government sponsored storm.


In the photo below I am visiting with Julio, a displaced person. He had torn his house down the day prior, but no truck had been able to help him yet. He had spent the night there outside guarding the little that he had and waiting for a city truck that day. Julio had no idea where they could take his things. You will note that he is wearing a really nice baseball cap with an American flag and a bald eagle. I teased him about that. Then on our way out that afternoon a young woman yelled to me, the obvious gringo, “Tell your president to stop sending money to the military and send it to help our displaced people instead!”