six months since jhonny’s murder

The week after last time I wrote was a little bit calmer – I spent it working on the Coca-Cola campaign here in Bogotá and even managed to do a bit of writing for one of my PhD chapters (although no sooner had I finished than I saved an old version over it and had to write it all again – I blame the altitude). I also spent the day with one of the human rights defenders I got to know whilst I was here last time, who’s recently had a baby. We had a long discussion about the situation here and the ways it affects you emotionally – she’s had numerous death threats, including a funeral wreath delivered to her mother’s house, and told me about the first time someone she worked with was “disappeared”, when she was just 16, and the trauma of searching for him in hospital morgues and rubbish tips without finding his body, and how all the killings here are something she can’t get still can’t used to 20 years later, whether or not it’s someone she knows. It was good have an open conversation about that side of things, because often the immediacy of events doesn’t leave much time for that sort of discussion and I think I was more affected than I’d realised by finding myself at the funeral of another student within days of arriving in Colombia having left the last time just after the murder Jhonny Silva. It’s not something I ever want to get hardened to and whilst, so far, it’s not been anyone I know, the more time I spend here and the more people I get to know, the more likely it is that one day it will be.

Last Wednesday, 22nd March, was the six month anniversary of Jhonny’s murder and I was invited to Cali to take part in the assembly that had been organised by the university community. Whilst I was waiting for my flight in Bogotá airport I bumped into the lovely Euripedes, who some of you know (in which case he sends he says hello) – he’s a Coca-Cola worker and leader of the food-workers’ union Sinaltrainal in Baranquilla on Colombia’s Atlantic Coast (parts of which have been completely taken over by state-linked paramilitaries) and has also had death threats for the work the union are – not just “traditional” trade union activities but human rights work, popular education with around the problems of hunger and the practices of food and agriculture multinationals and projects to support communities’ sovereignty over their own food production and consumption. In Colombia, more people die from hunger than as result of the armed conflict and the dirty war being carried out against social organisations – although the two are linked, since the state terrorism is a way of dealing with resistance to an economic model that favours multinational corporations and rich Colombians over the needs of the majority of the Colombian population.

Under this system – which is being imposed on countries across the world in a process often referred to “globalisation” – as if it was somehow natural or inevitable – food (along with healthcare, education and so on) is seen as a business, not as a way of meeting people’s needs nor as an important part of culture. Locally-based, environmentally sustainable forms of food production and consumption are being pushed out of existence by competition from cheap (often processed and unhealthy) imports from abroad, whilst production in Colombia is increasingly controlled – from the seeds to the marketing of the final product – by multinational corporations and takes the form of megaprojects of crops for export, such as African palm oil, an important product for the fast-food industry. This is happening all over the world but in Colombia the paramilitaries displace entire peasant communities from their land in the service of this model. About 3% of peasants have been killed in numerous rural massacres, whilst the rest are displaced to settlements on the edges of the cities. The multinationals who take their place in food production often work with the paramilitaries to keep wages at a poverty level – this weekend Coca-Cola, Nestlé and Chiquita Brands are being tried by the People’s Permanent Tribunal for crimes against humanity, having been directly involved in the assassination and intimidation of unionised workers, in Nestlé’s case with the intimidation of workers who blew the whistle on the company’s repackaging of out-of-date milk imports which killed several children in the city of Medellín a few years ago.

I spent ten days in Cali, working on the campaign against impunity for the killing of Jhonny Silva. The lawyer for the case also travel to Cali for the assembly and reported on how the Attorney General’s office have changed the investigating officer 6 times over the last 6 months and talked about the various ways in which the legal system in Colombia works as a tool of state terrorism. We also heard from the Truth Commission which has been convened by the university community and human rights organisations to conduct an independent inquiry into Jhonny’s murder. The idea behind Truth Commissions is that they form an alternative justice process for judging state agents in situations of extreme violence where the state justice system is ineffective and that they act as a political tool by recovering refusing to let the state erase the historical memory of the violence and its victims. The People’s Permanent Tribunal serves a similar purpose. During my time in Cali, I met with members of the various organisations involved in the Commission and talked about how to carry the campaign forward, as well as with Jhonny’s parents, who have had several threats because of how outspoken they are being about his murder.

I also gave a report at the assembly about what we’d been doing in England – which was a bit nerve-wracking as, in typical Colombian style, I was only given a few minutes notice that I was going to have to speak in front of several hundred people. Still, people were pleased to hear about what we’d been doing and a rather high-profile few days followed on from that, during which I had to record interviews for TV and a for a documentary about our experiences on the day Jhonny was killed. Surprisingly, this was far more intimidating than public speaking– for some reason I was rendered completely incapable of saying “tear gas” in Spanish, so they had to re-take the interview several times, by which time everyone was laughing so much that none of us could speak. Yesterday (Thurs 30th), the university community organised a “Carnival for Life and Against Impunity” to commemorate six months since Jhonny’s murder and keep up the profile of the case. After so many interviews and the like, I wanted to lower my profile a bit – more because I’m here on a tourist visa than because I’m likely to become a target – but in the morning, when we were planting sunflowers in a garden of remembrance for Jhonny, his parents asked me to join them for the first part of the march before I went to the airport. Luckily, because it was a carnival, some of the students I’ve been working with were able to sort me out with bright pink Dame Edna Everidge glasses and a hat, which supposedly made me stand out a bit less!

Despite it being an exhausting few days in Cali, it was good to catch up with friends, some of whom I’d got quite close to last time I was here. I stayed some of the time with a friend who is a social movement leader in one of the city’s poorest barrios and a researcher for the Nunca Mas (Never Again) project, which documents all the human rights abuses in the country. We spent hours talking about theory, music, boys and what not, and even managed to spend a day swimming the river with her 8 year-old daughter and some of the students from the university. I also stayed with the family of one of the leaders of the university workers union – he has an armed escort (provided by the state to threatened trade unionist and others under an order from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights). It was a bit weird being driven around by two enormous men with guns in their belts – especially when one of them was very into his salsa and kept breaking into surprisingly high-pitched harmonies when his favourite tunes were played on the radio.

When I got back to Bogotá last night, it was to find that I had, in my absence, been cruelly evicted from my bed by a Spanish bloke and that the house, which has five beds and a few mattresses, was temporarily home to ten people from various European countries who are here for the tribunal into the food and agriculture multinationals this weekend. So it’s all a bit mad here at the moment. More in a few days/weeks…

police kill another student

It’s been a pretty hard couple of weeks but at least proving to be a good way to loose weight whilst still getting to eat nice food and all your various supportive emails have been much appreciated. It feels like months ago that I was in Madrid airport, struggling with a suitcase the size of John Prescott’s arse and a guitar that I’d decided to bring in a moment of extreme impracticality. Apparently the woman at check-in mistook me for a budding musician of international calibre because she upgraded me to business class so that I could take the guitar on as hand luggage, so I managed to get some work done on the plane and didn’t regret not doing as my sister did on a recent flight to Australia and passing the time by taking care of a virtual reality dog (I didn’t know technology had got that far but apparently they shit themselves and everything and you don’t have to quarantine them on arrival).

The night I arrived there was a bit of a party in the international solidarity house of the Red de Hermandad and Solidaridad con Colombia (Network of Friendship and Solidarity with Colombia) where I’m staying, as one of the previous residents was going back to Canada. He’d been accompanying a community in a rural region of the country where right-wing paramilitaries, who work closely with the state armed forces, are particularly active and one of the social leaders he’d been accompanying had been killed whilst he was there. I spend the first few days getting know Bogotá a bit and learning about all the various security measures to follow: stuff like not getting a taxi that’s waiting outside, what to do to if the police come and want to search the house and so on. There are two others staying here at the moment, apart the current coordinator of the house: Ana and Xavier who are both from Quebec. I’ve got a room to myself although it is the thoroughfare to the yard and to the only loo you can take a dump in (the security situation makes it a bit tricky to get a plumber in to sort out the other one) although fortunately, unlike virtual reality dogs, people here seem to just keep it in, so I’m relatively undisturbed. I’m getting on well with the others in the house – we all share food, socks and so on (so far we’ve all got beds to ourselves but when another 6 people get here for a people’s tribunal into human rights violations by Coca-Cola, Nestle and Chiquita Bananas then it might get even more communal).

The first weekend I went with Ana and Xavier to take a film projector to an urban agriculture and kids project in Cuidad Bolívar, a poor district on the edge of Bogotá, where the city sweeps suddenly uphill to join the mountains on its east side (not good walking terrain when you’re still getting used to the altitude). After watering the vegetables we watched Animal Farm with some of the local children, followed by a discussion about authoritarianism. One boy of about 5 wanted to know what my country was like and, when the animation at the start of the film showed pictures of English countryside and pubs I told him it was like that – so now I expect he thinks I come from a land ruled by pigs (no comment)… The next day I went for a walk in the centre of with the coordinator of the house: we visited the markets where just about everything from books to broken bicycles was on sale, and where other people try to scratch a living with talking parrots, as mime-artists or by writing poems and selling them to couples sitting on benches under the trees drinking the avena (a sort of oaty milk shake) or sugar cane water sold by the street vendors on the edge of the market.

After that, work began properly with SINALTRAINAL, the food workers union who called for an international boycott of Coca-Cola in 2003 after in response to Coke’s complicity assassinations, torture and threats against unionised workers inside its Colombian bottling plants. I met Martin Gil, the brother of Isidro Gil, who on 6th December 1996, was killed by paramilitaries inside the bottling plant where he worked. Martin is testifying in the forthcoming tribunal against Coca-Cola (although his employers sound like they want to sack him for having the weekend off work). He also used to work on the coca-cola bottling plant but had to leave as a result of death threats after his brother was killed and on 18 November 2000 Isidro’s wife, who had been campaigning for her husband’s killers to be brought to justice, was taken from her house and shot dead a few meters up the road. I’m working with SINALTRAINAL on the preparation of the tribunal, on the campaign against Coca-Cola within Colombia.

I had the chance to visit another great project on Wednesday when I had to go to the doctor because I was still having strange swellings as part of a nasty reaction to the tonsillitis I had before I left Bristol. The doctor here explained it a bit better than the one at home: apparently I had rheumatic fever (I think that’s the correct translation), which is potentially nasty because your body attacks your heart and kidneys in the mistaken belief that they are in fact streptococcal bacteria – it would have been unfortunate to come all the way to Colombia to die of a disease picked up in England (ironic in an Alannis Morrissette kind of a way) but, worry not, I’ve had a blood test and it’s all under control. The worst-case scenario now is another penicillin jab in the arse. Anyway, I had an interesting chat with the doctor about the project: they do psycho-social work with victims of political violence – many of whom will have been tortured, been bereaved of several family members and so on – providing psychological therapy and medical care, using a mixture of “Western” and natural medicines. The psychological methodology, instead of being based on the assumption that the society we live in basically ok and natural and that the individual should adjust to society, involves social critique as well.

Then on Wednesday afternoon, it all kicked off when the police’s notorious mobile anti-disturbance squadron (ESMAD) claimed another victim, 20-year-old Oscar Salas, who was injured during a student protest against the recently signed Free Trade Agreement between Colombia and the US that had been timed to coincide with international women’s day. According to testimonies and photos taken by a friend here, the police attacked the students with teargas (illegally fired directly at their bodies), dispersal grenades, glass bottles and pieces of bricks. During the foray, an round object, possibly a bullet, although the government’s line is that it was a marble from a slingshot or explosive thrown by one of the students (it’s far more likely to have been fired by the police, given their previous record), penetrated his skull and, lunchtime the following day, he had been declared brain dead.

The events that followed were depressingly reminiscent of my last few days here in September when, as part of a delegation to Colombian universities, I was present in the University of Valle during a student protest after which ESMAD entered the university and killed the chemistry student Jhonny Silva (in Jhonny’s case official post-mortem was certainly fabricated since he was said to have been killed earlier, at a time when we were present in the place where he died). After hearing that Oscar had died, I went with the coordinator of the house and a human rights defender to show support to Oscar’s family at the clinic where he was still clinically alive but on a life support machine so that his organs can be donated, which his family believe would have been his wish.

We spent some time with Oscar’s brother and with a friend with whom Oscar had worked at an independent radio station in the town where he grew up – we just talked quietly about Oscar and the human rights defender spoke to the family about what to do if they received threats for denouncing Oscar’s murder. I concerned they’d find it intrusive but our presence seemed to be appreciated. It’s hard to find the right words in that situation, even in a first language, but being there seemed to be enough. Later in the afternoon, there was an assembly at the university, where Oscar’s father and brother spoke powerfully about the need to campaign against impunity for Oscar’s killers, and to follow Oscar’s example by keeping up the struggle for peace against state terrorism and injustice. I was asked to speak behalf of Colombia Solidarity in the UK, since we’ve been working on human rights abuses against students and academics. This gave me the eeby-geebies a bit as there were several hundred people there, many of whom had already lost family and friends to state terrorism here, and who the hell was I, a recently-arrived PhD student from a country that’s giving military aid to Colombia, that they should listen to me. Still, it was important to show our solidarity and, even though I went off on one in a surprisingly un-English rant (well, I was surprised) it seemed to be well received.

The students then marched to the clinic for a candle-lit vigil, carrying flowers and covering their heads Zapatista style to say “we are all Oscar”, that Oscar’s murder is not an isolated case but part of a broader policy of state terror not only against students but against peasants, indigenous people, workers, human rights defenders and anyone protesting against the violent imposition of a neoliberal model of development in Colombia: the privatisation and commodification of public services, the forced displacement of rural communities in favour of agroindustrial megaprojects and the denial of basic rights to the population. Meanwhile, the students at the University of Valle were on strike in protest at the police’s murder of yet another student less then six months after Jhonny Silva was killed. Jhonny’s murderers still haven’t been brought to justice and the Attorney General’s Office have already changed the investigating officer three times.

Fifteen-year old Nicolas Neira was another young Colombian recently killed by ESMAD, who beat him to death during a march on 1st May last year. There was a protest march to the central square in Bogotá the day after Oscar died and Nicolas’s father was there, walking alone with a banner with a picture of his son lying dead on in. One of the students asked me to go and accompany him, so I walked with him holding the banner until we got to the place where Nicolas was killed. Then he stopped and climbed up on a bollard, “At this spot, three hundred and eleven days ago, seven thousand four hundred and sixty four hours ago, they killed my boy”. The crowd was silent whilst Nicolas’s father spoke of how the authorities hadn’t so much as made a public statement denouncing his son’s murder and how, like so many parents, he is still waiting for justice to be done.

Oscar’s funeral was held on Saturday. We followed his coffin, carried by his brother, father and friends, through the streets to the crematorium. Oscar was a poet as well as being involved in social organisations, and several of his friends read out poems they had written as a farewell to him. It’s was strange being at the funeral of someone you don’t know, wanting to cry for the situation and for yet another victim of Colombia’s dirty war but not wanted to be parasitic on the grief of the people who were close to him. Oscar’s dad recognised me and came over for a chat after Oscar’s coffin had been sealed inside an enormous concrete wall, and I ended up crying with him, which seemed more normal somehow. He asked me to ask you all to put pressure on the Colombian government to bring Oscar’s murder, and those of Jhonny and Nicolas to justice – there’s an urgent action on Oscar’s case at www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk and on the 22nd March there’ll be a more general one to coincide with the six month anniversary of Jhonny’s death. Please write if you get the chance.