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Here's the first of several reports from Barrancabermeja. This came out today in LA Progressive.
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 June 14, 2011 By Diane Lefer 

Colombian Conflict: Three Young Women in the Crossfire

 “When I was three years old, the
  army bombed my village,” the girl told me. She was sixteen, which meant the
bombing happened in 1998.

 “You’re from Santo Domingo?” I had
protested that very bombing in demonstrations in front of the Los Angeles
headquarters of Occidental Petroleum. The Colombian Air Force, intent on killing
guerrillas who threatened Oxy’s operations, had relied on inaccurate information
provided by the US. At least 17 civilians were killed and many others injured.
Now I was talking to one of the survivors. “You were so young,” I said. “Do you
  remember?”

 “A little,” said María Fernanda. “I
remember my father lifting me onto his back. Like this, I crouched holding his
shoulders. And I remember the sounds, the shells coming through the palm
trees.”

 We met in Barrancabermeja, Colombia
where I was offering writing workshops and she was performing in the First
International Theatre Festival for Peace which from May 20-30 brought us
together with 400 artists and community members from different regions of
Colombia and from 14 countries around the world, everyone committed to social
justice.

 Actress and activist Silvana Gariboldi from Argentina was impressed to see so many men involved. “In my country, it’s only women in the social movements.” I was impressed by the young man wearing a T-shirt denouncing the physical and mental abuse of women, and by  the fact that many of Colombia’s broad-based programs for justice and human  rights are focusing efforts today on the status of  women.

 Red Juvenil (Youth Network) of  Medellín, for example, well known for encouraging young people to declare  themselves conscientious objectors, has just initiated a three-year campaign  linking women’s issues to all other campaigns. With a call to “Disobey and  resist all forms of domination!”, the Network is organizing women (and men) to
oppose not just militarism, racism, and economic exploitation but also machismo,
seeing the evils as interconnected.

 Women are not the only ones to  suffer in six decades of armed conflict in Colombia but they, along with the children, have borne the brunt of displacement as some five million Colombians have been violently driven from their homes. Even where families remain intact,  years of terror and trauma and social disorganization contribute to violence in
the home and have limited opportunities for  girls.

 When I read Ingrid Betancourt’s memoir, Even Silence Has an End, about her years held captive by FARC guerrillas, it was clear she has no sympathy for their movement, but she  couldn’t help but note the number of young girls in the guerrilla ranks who
chose the FARC seeing it as better than prostitution, the only other option they
thought open to them.

I thought of that in Barrancabermeja when I met 12-year-old Julieth. According to her teacher, she is the outstanding student in her entire rural school system. She is also outgoing,  friendly and popular with everyone in town–including the classmates, some
younger than herself, who one after another have turned to prostitution. Julieth
is determined that will not be her life but I can’t help but worry. In her community, education goes only through middle school. Even if she finds a way to move to a city for high school, how will she support herself? Where will she live? What will she eat?

In my writing workshop Julieth invented a new consumer product: magnificient magical shoes, very pretty and very cheap. Any girl who wears them starts to think of love and not of money.  She becomes incapable of selling her body.

Hermelinda ran away rather than accept the future that had been chosen for her. This teenager from the indigenous Sicuane community grew up on the resguardo (reservation). In 2003, he army came looking for guerrillas and gave people 30 minutes to get out or be killed. During the same military action, soldiers raped and killed indigenous people in settlements nearby.

 “We lived somewhere for two years, then somewhere else for a year and a half,” Hermelinda  said. Her education was interrupted until her people were able to return home. But then her family decided to marry her off.

 “Girls get married at eleven or twelve years. At thirteen they have babies,”she told me. “I said  no.”

Hermelinda took refuge with a staff member at the school where she wanted to continue her studies.

The festival drew participants from Canada and Chile and Cuba and France and Germany and Israel and Italy and Venezuela. Many came from Mexico, including theatre scholar Rocío Galicia who has been studying the narratives now coming out of the US-Mexico border areas plagued by violence. When asked who she thinks is murdering hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, she offered her opinion: Impunity made the  killings multiply. “People saw they can do it and get away with it.” Now there
are many different motives, different killers.“Because of impunity, the femicide has taken on a life of its own.”

Colombians know about  impunity.

 “We’re still waiting for justice in Arauca,” said María Fernanda as she told me about the little girl who was raped and killed by soldiers who then killed the witnesses, her two little brothers. Only one of the men believed to be involved was ever charged and even he has not been tried because the judge, a woman who was assigned to hear the case, was assassinated.  (There are many women judges in Colombia; some say it’s because the job is too dangerous and men don’t want it.) “At the site of the burial, people came
carrying photos of 200 people who were killed by the army and there I saw the photo of my older brother.”

To explain what happened to him she had to go back to the bombing of Santo Domingo. “After that, we spent eight years as displaced people in the town of Filipinas. We got three months of assistance, just basically for food, and we weren’t used to being in a
town instead of the countryside. If we had for rent, we didn’t have for food, if we had for food, we didn’t have for clothing.” Two of her brothers crossed the border into Venezuela looking for work and were killed there by persons unknown.  As for her older brother, “He had gone to a farm and asked if there were landmines on the property because he wanted to go down to the river to fish.”

She explained that landmines are planted throughout the area by the FARC “Now and then an army dog will sniff one out but there’s no campaign to get rid of them and we don’t really want that. If the mines are  removed, the FARC will plant new ones and we might not know where. Right now, we walk on the highway or you can walk where the cows walk to be safe.”

Or, you do what her brother did, and ask around about the existence of mines because the guerrillas usually warn people. But the fact that FARC guerrillas communicate with local civilians makes noncombatants suspect.

 “The Army heard him talking about mines. They came for him and took him and two others away barefoot and killed them.”

For civilians in the conflict zone, it’s equally dangerous to talk to the police or the Colombian  army. “Seven girls were killed for talking to soldiers or flirting with them.
For this it was believed they were passing information,”she told me. “When the army is around I don’t leave the house even to go to the store. If there’s no toilet paper in the house, well, I just splash water on myself. You can’t go out.”

But she does go out at night, braving car bombs and dodging bullets in order to participate, as does Hermelinda, in a theatre program for youth sponsored by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Through the program, young people work and play together,  dismantling cultural barriers, reinforcing respect for human rights,
specifically training youth to take a stand against gender-based discrimination and violence.

María Fernanda dreams of becoming “a professor or lawyer or someone who can help people but I’d also like to be a singer who sings about peace.” With her surviving family members, she has now returned to Santo Domingo but they no longer own their old farm.  “It’s very hard. But I have to be strong. If my mother has to cope with their
having murdered three of her sons, the oldest, the ones that most helped her, we
the others have to be capable.”

I am haunted by these girls and by the role that we in the US have played–and still play–in their lives. The US has poured billions into military support for Colombia, ostensibly
to fight the war on drugs (and now repeats the same misguided policy in Mexico).
Germany has taken a different approach: the German federally owned enterprise
GIZ (Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) helped support the theatre
festival as part of its ongoing work with Cercapaz, an organization dedicated to
strengthening civil society and developing nonviolent conflict-resolution strategies for government and community in the interest of sustainable development and peace.

 “The fundamental problem isn’t the narcotraffic,” insisted speaker Carlos Lozano, director of the leftwing weekly, Voz. “It’s the hunger and misery.”

Not to mention that, as he pointed out, the Colombian government spends six times as much money on a soldier as on the education of a student. Students like María Fernanda,  Hermelinda, Julieth.

In the meantime President Obama has abandoned a campaign pledge and thrown his support behind the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia which will only exacerbate conditions of  inequality. He relied on agreements with Colombian president Santos that human rights would be respected and community leaders protected but little more than a week after I returned to Los Angeles, I received word that Ana Fabricia Córdoba
was assassinated in Medellín. She had continued, after the murders of both her activist husband and her son, to work on behalf of displaced families who wished to return to their land. Because of repeated death threats, she had requested protection from the government. She got none.

Julieth and Hermelinda and María Fernanda persevere, preparing themselves intellectually, ethically, and psychologically for an uncertain future.

The last day in my workshop, Julieth wrote, “I’m afraid of not knowing how to face situations that shake my sense of self, my emotional security. The worst that could happen would be if bad circumstances knock down my dreams like coconuts from the trees. I couldn’t stand it if all my efforts turned out to be useless.”


 
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Received this earlier today from Carol Gomez of Casa de la Familia and the ImaginAction board:

Compas,
I'm reflecting this week on the effects and fears on how the Secure Communities program is already impacting the immigrant (Latino) communities I'm working with out here in LA (providing family therapy with families of color). Folks are expressing fears about driving, fears about seeking medical attention for their basic needs or calling the ambulance for medical emergencies for fear the family would get arrested (resulting in one elderly person's death)....all real effects I'm bearing witness too in the last few days/ and weeks prior to S-Comm and in general since anti-immigrant bills have been consistently introduced in the name of homeland "security".

I'm sadly also hearing directly from both sides -- a lot of anti-immigrant and racist internalizing among both black and Latino families I work with here in CA -- each side laying blame for economic conditions of the country of each other ..... while the real systemic/corporate/political culprits remain invisible nor held accountable.

Senseless black on brown/brown on black youth violence continues on the streets. And documented people's contempt for the undocumented is visceral - even within families.

Meanwhile, sexual-domestic violence remains silently and pervasively at the base, alongside racism and xenophobia -- the wielding of interpersonal power and control over those closest to us. Breaking spirits and bodies and creates fissures in our communities that continue to maintain silence and complicity on the matter.

We have a lot of community education and deconstructing work to do. We need to be constructing and connecting the jigsaw puzzle of these intersecting oppressions and violence -- so that people can see that our destructive actions toward each other stem from our blindness to a larger systemic oppression that permeates our consciousness and results in our loss of humanity :(

c~

> http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/immigration-initiative-may-put-domestic-violence-victims-risk-8993

Immigration initiative may put domestic violence victims at risk
March 3, 2011 | Marie C. Baca
Duffman/Wikimedia Commons California's participation in a federal immigration enforcement program may endanger undocumented victims of domestic violence, according to groups that work with abuse victims.
Last week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that all 58 California counties had been linked to the federal Secure Communities program. The program provides ICE agents with the fingerprints of individuals arrested by local authorities; the agents then use a national database to determine whether or not that individual is eligible for deportation.
Gov. Jerry Brown has consistently defended the program as an important tool for immigration enforcers. But others say the initiative puts undocumented victims of domestic violence at risk by discouraging them from reporting incidents to authorities.
Camille Hayes, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, said that victims of domestic violence are often arrested along with their abusers if law enforcement can't immediately determine who is the primary aggressor. Should a victim be identified as an illegal immigrant through the fingerprinting process during the arrest, the victim could be deported.
"Even in the best of circumstances, it is difficult for victims to reach out for help," Hayes said. "To erect an additional barrier in this process is completely unconscionable."
Hayes said that immigrant communities are already less likely to report domestic violence incidents because of language issues and a fear of investigation into their or a family member's immigration status. If the implementation of Secure Communities increases that fear, "victims may be more likely to stay with an abusive partner," she said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment.
Launched in late 2008, Secure Communities was the Obama administration's answer to the increasingly heated issue of immigration enforcement, and was characterized as a program that emphasized collaboration between federal and local authorities to capture the "worst of the worst" using sophisticated fingerprinting technology.
According to the state Department of Justice Criminal Justice Statistics Center, California law enforcement received 167,087 domestic violence-related calls for assistance in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available. Of these incidents, 67,702 involved a weapon.
California isn't the only state dealing with the issue. In Texas, an attorney at an immigrant law center set off a firestorm of controversy after telling Women's E-News that she no longer advises undocumented immigrants to contact police to report domestic violence incidents after the state adopted Secure Communities.
Much of the national debate over Secure Communities has centered on whether the immigrants being deported are individuals who have been convicted of a crime – the people the program was designed to catch. The Mercury News reported that the program has led to the deportation of 32,645 immigrants from California since spring 2009, but 8,933 of those individuals had not been convicted of a crime.
It is also unclear whether counties have the ability to opt out of the program. San Francisco and Santa Clara counties initially objected to participating in the program but were told they had no choice in the matter, according to the Mercury News.



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