wfn.org | [PCUSANEWS] Presbyterians prepare to make peace in Colombia

[PCUSA NEWS <PCUSA.NEWS@ECUNET.ORG>]

Note #8732 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

05263
May 17, 2005

Becoming 'prayer-warriors'

Presbyterians prepare for peacemaking campaign in Colombia

by Alexa Smith

CHICAGO - Marilyn White is spending the first month of her summer vacation in
Colombia. She is scheduled to leave the United States on May 31 and to stay
in Colombia until July 6, along with her friend and Spanish teacher, Jane
Moore.

	She's got goals.

	She wants to live inside the Presbyterian Church of Colombia, be part
of its spiritual and community life. And she wants to test "accompaniment" as
a form of active non-violent resistance: The idea is that, when U.S. citizens
stick by threatened Colombian church, union and human rights leaders,
violence is discouraged.

	She also wants to show skeptics that it is possible to go to Colombia
and return unharmed.

	"People in the U.S. ... tend to look at international issues one at a
time, and since 9/11, the focus has been on the Middle East," White says in
an interview in an un-air-conditioned conference center here. The unseasonal
heat is not unlike that in Barranquilla, a steamy Caribbean city on
Colombia's north coast where the PCC is headquartered. "People are not paying
much attention to Latin America now.

	"I find that most people aren't thinking about Colombia. And if they
do, they think it isn't a place to go. They think it is too dangerous. And
that's one thing I hope to accomplish: Show them it is possible to go to
Colombia and come back."

	U.S. Christians have already done so this year, as part of the
accompaniment program begun by the General Assembly Council (GAC) in December
and coordinated by the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship (PPF), a pacifist group
with a history of proactive non-violence. (For information, email Charles
Spring at bunch@stanfordalumni.org).

	White says being a pacifist doesn't mean being passive.

	At the moment, at least two Colombian church leaders are living with
death threats. The Rev. Jesus Goez of Cartagena packed up his household and
went into hiding in March after unnamed thugs beat up his 15-year-old son and
warned the pastor that his coffin was ready. The PCC general secretary, the
Rev. Milton Mejia, has lived with threats off and on for years: Two weeks
ago, he got a quiet one, a warning him to be careful.

	One church volunteer is in jail on charges that the government hasn't
proved; legal charges against another were dropped in April after a lengthy
investigation. But both know that the end of their legal problems isn't a
guarantee of safety from the clandestine right-wing groups who oppose human
rights work and who exact a deadly punishment outside the justice system.

	"It's a chance to learn more about accompaniment, which is still a
frontier of peacemaking," White says. "It (accompaniment) began to emerge in
the 1980s in Central America ... but this is a new form. This is accompanying
a church. It is a community. But not a town. We're not there to protect
individuals as much as to be with the church, and I think, lend some pastoral
support."

	This accompaniment model is still emerging, according to Charles
Spring, a Presbyterian from Washington, DC, who spent a year in Colombia with
the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a Chicago-based pacifist group that works to
deter violence by standing between the combatants.

	"Here (the PCUSA-PCC program), the accompaniers take their cues every
day directly from the church there," says Spring, who is training
Presbyterian volunteers. "Other (accompanying) groups certainly consult the
locals, but then they make their own calls, which is more detached, more
autonomous. With other groups, the locals serve as advisors. This groups
works for them directly."

	CPT keeps a house permanently staffed in Barrancabermeja, a volatile
city in north central Colombia, and another crew in an apartment along the
Opon River, another intense conflict zone. International Peace Brigade, a
British group, accompanies organizations, often sticking with threatened top
leaders. The rationale is: If the leader dies, the organization often
crumbles.

	Witness for Peace, born out of violence in Central America in recent
decades, primarily sends delegations to get eyewitness accounts of terror in
Colombia and returns them to the United States to lobby for changes in U.S.
policy in Colombia, such as cuts in military support and increases in
development aid.

	The Presbyterian push is more nuanced, although it includes aspects
of all of the above. Some days, accompaniers are sent to threatened
organizations, like ANDESCOL, the displaced peoples' advocacy group. Other
days, they listen to stories from some of Colombia's three million internally
displaced poor, forced off their land by violence. They file reports. They
return home and speak to congregations, presbyteries, community groups and
Congressional leaders.

	"I see it, sort of, like joining the church there, being a member for
a time," says White, who has been learning Spanish over the past year. "When
I listen to Milton Mejia speak, I think that he has a huge pastoral burden.
There is so much suffering, so much struggle. Our task is to visit with them
and to bring hope, so they know they are not alone. We can share in the
work."

	
	Of the 16 Presbyterians trained in non-violent action, most are
retired folks able to spend at least a month in Barranquilla, according to
Spring. The majority hail from Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, the stomping
grounds of Rick Ufford-Chase of Tucson, AZ, the PC(USA)'s activist General
Assembly moderator, who cut his political teeth on U.S.-Mexican border
issues.

	That's probably not a coincidence.

	"A favorite question of Rick's is: 'How do we as people of faith live
responsibly in this global economy?'" says 64-year-old Erik Mason of
Westminster Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe, NM, a retired U.S. army officer
who was recruited by PPF to serve on the March accompaniment team.

	It is no surprise to Mason that poor farmers grow cocaine to meet
U.S. demand when they can't compete with predatory multinational corporations
to market their corn, rice and beans. "What are they supposed to do?" he
asks.

	Both Mason and White have history of traveling in Central America
through church channels. White, in fact, is a Presbyterian activist who spent
six months in a minimum-security Texas prison for trespassing on the grounds
of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC) at Fort
Benning, GA, formerly called the School of the Americas.

	White, a retired IBM computer programmer, was fined $5,000 for civil
disobedience at the combat training facility, which is said to have trained
Central American military officers in extortion, execution and torture. The
Department of Defense says the curriculum has been changed.

	Not all the accompaniers are activists.

	Moore says she's accustomed to "the two-thirds" world, having served
as a missionary in Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea. "It feels pretty natural
to go," she says, adding that traveling with a Witness for Peace delegation
to Colombia last winter deepened her interest. "And I know Spanish," she
says. "What's the point in knowing it if I don't use it in some way?"

	Phil Gates, who admits he's no activist, says seeing a photo of a
traumatized, young Colombian girl in Presbyterians Today magazine moved him
deeply. When he read that the PCC was seeking accompaniers, it felt like a
call. He was relieved that he could do something. "Now I'm a prayer-warrior,"
he says. "I pray every day. And when I saw that picture ... it was the symbol
of all of the things wrong with Colombia. It was a no-brainer, a non-issue,
about whether I should go."

	He leaves in late June to "stand with my sisters and brothers
experiencing harassment and intimidation in Colombia."

	PPF's Anne Barstow, who coordinates the travelers' schedules, says:
"Things have gotten worse in Colombia since we started the project. In
Barranquilla, there are more threats to more people. And from what I hear
about Colombia in general ... there are massacres. It's not good in Choco,
there are thousands coming out again. And on the eastern border, there's
fighting going on with the FARC (anti-government revolutionaries) and the
(pro-government) paramilitaries. ...

	"Yes, it's getting worse."

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