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Columbia
IPF
Local Partner: The Peace Community of San Jose de
Apartado
IPF Project: Memorial to murdered community leaders & their families
Background
In
collaboration with FoR Colombia, in 2006 IPF funded a memorial to the
community leaders and their families massacred in 2005 by Columbian
paramilitaries.
San Jose de Apartado is a small town in the northwest of Colombia, near the gulf of Uraba. Farmers settled there in the 1960s and 1970s and since then the community has participated in cooperative agricultural and communal living. In March of 1997, the Community responded to the escalating violence and extrajudicial killings of community leaders by declaring themselves a Peace Community, with the support of the region's Catholic Bishop, and committing to:
- Farm in cooperative work groups
- Denounce the injustice and impunity of war crimes
- Not participate in the war in direct or indirect form, nor carry weapons
- Not manipulate or give information to any of the parties involved in armed conflict
The
Peace Community has a special role among the diverse communities
throughout Colombia that nonviolently resist political and physical
violence. More than others, the community has staked its survival on
the conscience of the international community by being visible and
seeking expressions of conscience when threats or attacks occur. Since
its founding, the community has suffered over 160 deaths.
On February 21, 2005, a community founder and 7 other San Jose peace community members were brutally massacred, according to witnesses from the community, by army soldiers. Since that time, the presence of both military and paramilitary in the area has risen and the need for international support and attention has become increasingly critical.
Slowly,
small
Colombian human rights and solidarity organizations have been
joined by a growing number of national and international peace and
justice groups. For the first seven months of 2005, more than $70
million of military aid for Colombia was put on hold, as the State
Department was, due to the February massacre, not prepared to certify
that Colombia met the law's human rights conditions. While the aid was
eventually released days before Colombia's president met with President
Bush, this delay represented growing concern by the State Department
and human rights groups regarding cases reportedly involving direct
violations by the Colombian Army. This growing attention, coupled with
Inter-American Court measures passed in the year 2000 and requiring the
Colombian government to take whatever steps necessary to protect the
lives and personal integrity of the Peace Community members,
contributes to the strength and continued existence of San Jose de
Apartado.
Nobel Peace Prize Nomination for San Jose de Apartado
The American Friends Service Committee has nominated two Colombian groups for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their "extraordinary commitment to nonviolence in the midst of that country's 50-year-old conflict, and their exemplification of organized efforts by many Colombians to end that conflict justly."
One of the two nominees is the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado. The community, which declared its nonviolent position in 1997, has been supported since 2002 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) through its permanent Colombia Peace Presence.
The community says:
"The sense of memory in the community is something that goes deep in us and our principles because this memory is founded on the search to construct to a community of dignity and solidarity. The memorial allows us to remember our former members and from them learn about the society that they wanted to construct, and for which they were killed. "The memorial becomes something intrinsic in our daily live. With it we do not lose our sense of community, and in it we remember our hope for justice. It is the motor of our common life. "We thank IPF for the national and international support to our process and know that many will be united in this construction of the memorial and the dignity it brings our struggle"
