A little extra

Today I have a guest blogger. Her name is Patricia Cuellar; she is a beautiful and smart lady who has written a very interesting piece on how she feels about being Colombian. As a missionary, I feel honoured to be able to share with you this essay written by a native of the country where I serve.

Just in case you´re wondering, yes, she´s my wife but in this part of the world (where we are called chauvinistic, and machistas and who knows what else, our wives --well, one each of course-- don´t surrender their surnames when they marry; some of them do take the husband´s, some others just add the husband´s name and some others sometimes do and sometimes don´t...)

Were it not for...

By Patricia Cuellar

April 9, 2008

To be a Colombian from inside is something quite different to be Colombian abroad, but both circumstances are intimately related. I am 44 years old now, and I can´t remember one single day that I haven’t lived under the threat and sometimes even the reality of our internal war. When I was younger I yearned to see those spectacular places of the Colombian geography I hear about and I could not because my parents said those places were dangerous: the jungles of the east, the endless plains, the little towns along the Magdalena River, Cauca, Antioquia, the Atlantic coast, the Pacific coast... and I could name many more. This has not changed much in these last 60 years since the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, the political leader who personified hope for Colombia then, a hope based on an ideology.

Only now I understand the real dimension of what I learnt in my Geography lectures at school: “Colombia is in a privileged geographical situation, in the top corner of South America, the only country in the subcontinent washed by two oceans”. But privileged for what? I ask. Five hundred years ago, this was the place where the Spanish empire accumulated all the treasures plundered from Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia itself, and where the ships were loaded for their dangerous raid to European ports, therefore places like Cartagena were systematically attacked by the British, Dutch and so on, in order to steal the treasures from the ones that stole them from us... so you see:pillage and war since then. What did all that mean? It meant fortresses and castles, but also weaknesses that just as those castles, are still standing 500 years later. The forts are just tourist attractions, but those weaknesses, the conflict, the violence and the injustice prevail just the same. Privileged for what? So that along those two huge coasts so rich in fishing, fishermen can starve and sink in poverty, privileged to export the terrible drug that is so happily consumed in the rich world, privileged for weapons to easily get into the country to feed the black market that thrives in war. That’s when we understand this is not just a Colombian problem. There are and there have been so many hands constantly meddling into this problem, that once you are into it –and however good humanitarian reasons you may have had-- you cannot come now and say “it’s their problem”

This cannot be seen as a simple internal problem when there are so many external expressions that constantly remind us that we are pariahs of world society, when people abroad hear us say “I am Colombian” and do not mention my delicious coffee, or my beautiful emeralds, but cocaine and marihuana; this cannot be seen as just an internal problem when my husband is told to shut up or not to write just because of his nationality or --even worse-- because he’s married to a Colombian; this is not just an internal problem when there are countries in Latin America that would not give me a visa unless I have a US visa... and that’s not to mention other visas. To go abroad or to visit some consulates to get a Visa, as a Colombian I have to be prepared to be looked at with suspicion, to be abused verbally, to bear the eternal sensation that there is something wrong with me even though my own conscience is right.

Recently I had a nightmare: I was in a plane, heading for a European country, and we made a stopover in a country for which I only had a transit visa. As my mother and sisters lived there, I went to visit them, but then I realized that as my visa did not allow that I was an illegal alien. In my anguish I tried to explain what was going on, but “the law is the law”... how many Colombians have not seen their relatives for so many years because of this?

I had a nightmare, but with Martin Luther King, today I have a dream. I dream of not being told to shut up just because I am Colombian; I dream of a country where there is no hunger; I dream of a country that is not peppered with landmines that little children take for toys and are left maimed for life; I dream of a time when I can go to visit my brothers and sisters wherever in Colombia or in South America or in Europe or anywhere; I dream of a country where poor peasants don’t have to beg for a few coins in the corners just because he was evicted form his little plot; I dream of a time when we are not seen with suspicion, I dream of a time when there is no shame at all in saying “I am Colombian”, I dream of a country where there is justice, but specially forgiveness; I dream of a deep transformation that goes beyond the social dimension, that goes from the individual to the collective, from the material to the spiritual; I dream of a country that is capable of finding true hope in Christ. Is it possible that I dream of a Colombia full of God’s Kingdom?

Were it not for the knowledge that my real citizenship is not of this world, that my nationality is in the Kingdom of God, the kingdom of salvation, of love, and true peace and acceptance, I would feel offended for the way in which we Colombians are seen and for what others say about us and I could not have understood that the important thing for me is not that I am Colombian, but I am a daughter of God in the midst of a society of pariahs where we live the shame and the burden of having been born in the “most privileged country of South America”.

El Bogotazo

Even attempting to understand Colombia´s incredible history of violence is a major undertaking. After all these years here I have been unable to do so, but history helps to have little peeks into the mess and to get in hand at least a few more pieces of the puzzle. Today, April 9^th, is a special historical date for any Colombian worth his or her salt... let´s see why.

Today Colombia is remembering a particularly interesting and incredibly crucial day in her recent history: on April 9, 1948, Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, the man who has been this country´s most revered political leader of all times, was killed in Bogotá. Minutes later, his assassin was captured and lynched by a mob that very quickly got out of control and almost destroyed the city, in what has been called since “ The Bogotazo”... something like an attempt to depose the President, vent repressed anger, solve old animosities, and just steal as much as possible, all at the same time (see Paul Wolf´s article in English for a detailed account in http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/gaitan/gaitanbogotazo.htm).

Fidel Castro was in Bogotá at that time, trying to “help” Colombian and Latin American students gathered in a Pan American congress to protest against the presence of US Gral. Marshall, who was also visiting Colombia those days. When the violence erupted, Castro thought that the revolution had started and tried to organise the different groups he was in touch with and he knew were against the government (students, workers unions, even the police), but chaos and blind rage was just too much even for him, and the communist party in Colombia was too weak and divided and could not capitalise that “golden opportunity”... in Castro´s own words.

Violence in Colombia was not unheard of. The infamous “War of a thousand days” at the beginning of the XX century had set the tone for the relationships between the two main (and by then almost lonely) parties: Liberal and Conservative, which in turn were the heritage of the deep divide between the main two leaders of the revolt of Colombia against Spain a few decades before: Bolivar and Santander. Anyway... Gaitán, a Liberal, had divided the party a few years before and hence the President at the moment of his death was a Conservative, but it was evident by then that Gaitán would win the next elections by a massive landslide... but three bullets stopped him.

That day, 60 years ago, it started in Colombia a period known as “La Violencia” (The Violence), which says a lot if you think that you can call a certain period as “The” violence in such a violent country. The truth is that during those years (that officially ended in 1957... see below), an undefined but huge number of Colombians were brutally killed all over the country (although the slaughter in some areas was worse than in others; the countryside was notoriously dangerous, not so much the cities). Liberals killed Conservatives and vice versa, with great gusto and sadism. Everyone was suspicion, everyone was suspicious. As Conservatives were associated with the Catholic church (whereas Liberals were associated with the philosophical tradition of French “free-thinking”), religion found itself mixed into the cocktail, and the Colombian Christian church paid more than its share of blood and pain. Liberal crowds just saw religious ghosts everywhere and killed Christians because they were Christians, and Conservative mobs thought that if you were not a Catholic you were a Liberal, and therefore you had to be killed, of course.

In 1957, allegedly as a way to stop the violence that was bleeding the country to death, (and also to stop the dictator General Rojas Pinilla in his tracks, as he had turned into a popular political leader), the Liberal and Conservative parties signed an agreement (called, o surprise!, “The National Front”), in which they agreed to gentlemanly alternate at the helm of the government and have an equal number of MPs for 16 years. So, everyone was happy, except of course those who were neither Conservative nor Liberal or even those who belonged to those parties but were opposed to the National Front (including Gral. Pinilla´s followers). They saw their possibilities of democratic political expression thwarted and so decided to assume alternative roads to power and decided to fight for the transformation of the contry... that´s the moment in history that the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) were born (to speak of those still active), as well as the now defunct M-19 (the boisterous, flamboyant guerrilla that stole Bolivar´s sword, took hostages at the embassy of the Dominican Republic and the Supreme Court), as well as the many other guerrillas that mushroomed in those decades (the Popular Liberation Army, the Revolutionary Guevarist Army, Quintín Lame... and so on).

I think that in honour of historical truth, it has to be acknowledged that all these groups started denouncing and facing a real situation of injustice and wrong. They all started with good reasons for embracing a cause, and by people who sacrificially gave up their way of life and many of them even their actual lives in their attempt to create a better world, very much in accordance with the widespread idea that violence was the necessary catalyst for real, deep, long-lasting change.

Today Colombia commemorates another anniversary of Dr Gaitán´s death, and it still mourns tragically for that brilliant future that was not. Sadly, it was not the last time she would live such a terrible experience... but I´ll tell you about that another day.