Just Another Prisoner

Our friend Anne's constant delving into the Colombian 'legal' system in her crusade to get some kind of retribution for our murdered boys, has caused her to come across many other cases of heartbreaking injustice. Here she reports on just one of them:

"The case of Gerardo Ariza Alvarez is all too common in Colombia. He is 26, an ordinary young man from a poor background and has just been condemned to seven years in a high security jail for 'rebellion,' that is, for being a member of the FARC guerrilla force. But he never was. His brother Ismael was, however, and he once left a bag with guns in it at Gerardo's flat in Bogota without telling him. Then Ismael was arrested, turned in by an informant, and Gerardo came home later that day to find his flat had been ransacked, by thieves he thought.

Later the security police arrived and arrested him. His brother took full responsibility and was sentenced to 4 years in jail and will therefore be out before Gerardo, who got seven years because he didn't 'confess'. Ismael told the judge many times that his brother had nothing to do with the FARC, but Colombian judges have quotas to fill these days: as many guerrillas as possible must be condemned whether they are guerrillas or not, because the President, Alvaro Uribe thinks that the more people killed and jailed, the quicker 'peace' will come to this desperate country - 'the peace of the grave' as the saying goes here. The present climate has created paranoia amongst judges that they'll be seen as guerrilla collaborators if they free people wrongly accused of sedition. And of course, Uribe has to fulfil his quota to George Bush, or he won't get his pocket money.

I have just been to visit Gerardo at the inhumane 'high security' jail of Combita, his first visit in five months - he is unusual in that he isn't a member of a large extended family and so no-one visits him. At first I couldn't understand his relative cheerfulness considering the awful news he' d just received of his long sentence. But as we talked in the roasting temperature of high-altitude sunshine during my brief visit, I began to realize why he didn't feel as depressed or as furious as I was feeling: he is surrounded day and night by men who've been sentenced to 30, 40, 50, 60 years in there - that would give you a different perspective on time inside alright. And his conditions have been so bad for so long that he was just grateful to get a two-hour visit.

Why am I sure he is innocent? Firstly because captured FARC guerrillas say they are FARC guerrillas, they don't plead innocent as they consider time spent in prison as an inevitable and honourable part of the struggle. Also all the other prisoners who know Gerardo say he is innocent - conversations about fellow prisoners' reasons for being inside are very frank, sometimes even admiring, as in: 'Do you see such and such over there? Well, he hijacked that plane/kidnapped that president's brother/killed that politician.' There is no pretence about their own innocence or anyone else's.

Gerardo's case will be appealed of course, but that could take a year and at best would only lead to a lighter sentence. His lawyer is from a collective who don't charge fees but what is needed is pressure from outside for justice in cases like this: if anyone reading this has experience in this area, I would be really glad to hear about it. In Colombia, the illegal and immoral practices that are being passed off as law are seriously on the increase. Gerardo is only one victim amongst tens of thousands, but he just happens to be one that I know. The situation is creating deep despair and anger amongst ordinary people and no-one knows what to do. The corrupt state legal system reacts with violence against its critics, so people just give up. I am trying not to sink into the same despair, so this letter is really an S.O.S."

A Horror Story from the 'Other Side'

Anne received the following account from a very reliable source - a radical priest. A man from an area invaded by paramilitary soldiers ('paras ') had his house taken over by them, and their leader used his phone all the time. The phone was a bit rickety and you could hear what the person on the other end was saying. The man heard this leader talk to the local army chief who said: 'I need six 'positives' by tomorrow,' and the para leader said 'OK'. The man was worried about what this meant and dared to ask. The leader said, 'He needs six dead paramilitaries as he has to turn in reports of so many dead paras per month.' This is to prove to US and EU liberals that the rightwing Colombian government is doing something about the paramilitary forces - which they are: they encourage them.

The horrified man said, 'Surely you're not going to kill your own?' and the leader answered: 'Yeah, sure, no problem - what we usually do is kill some of the latest arrivals as they've only come for the money anyway.' This refers to poor campesinos who join anything and anyone just for a wage.

A few days later, there was a report of 'Six Dead Paras'.

..And Another

The new recruits for the army battalions that are going into the hardcore Guerrilla areas are very unlikely to get out alive. They have to sign a contract that says if they are killed, their families will not be informed. Then there will be no compensation for their deaths. They are given a biggish lump sum to make this 'palatable'. Many families ask what happened to their sons who don't come back and some are told 'they deserted to the guerrilla forces'.

Anne writes: this is all so extreme, it sounds made-up, but these stories were told to me quietly in a non-dramatic way that made them sound credible. It puts our own tragedy into proportion..

..And a Heartening PS

Some areas of the countryside become deserted through people fleeing when the paramilitaries come in. A lady from Tame, Arauca, told how her region was run more or less decently by the guerrilla forces for countless years. Then two years ago, the paramilitaries took over, along with the army. Now bodies of 'collaborators' appear by the dozen on the streets. This woman has lost uncles, aunts and cousins. Her father, an old man, lives there on his farm. He heard he was on the paramilitary death list. So he went to the Army HQ and said, 'Right, I know I'm on your list, so if you want to kill me, then kill me here and now as I am not going anywhere, this is my home.' Strangely, he has been left alone. That was a year ago.

What Ordinary Colombians Think of Their President

Taxi drivers are not noted for their revolutionary or leftwing opinions, yet here is an anecdote from Anne reporting on the conversation with her driver on the way home from her prison visit:

Taxi-driver: "We've the worst reputation in the world for being guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug-traffickers, thieves, but this is the worst ever."

"What?" I asked, thinking he was telling me a joke.

"Uribe offering to send Colombian troops to Iraq of course!"

He was really upset about it and said he hoped that if the Iraqis blew up something in Colombia in retaliation, that they would choose Uribe's palace.

To get this kind of anti-Uribe diatribe unsolicited from a taxi driver is really unusual: they would normally sound you out first to see what 'colour' you were.

The President and the Pig

This IS a Colombian joke presently doing the rounds:

The President of Colombia and his chauffeur are driving along a country road when suddenly they run over a pig, killing it instantly.

Uribe says to his chauffeur: go into the farm and explain what happened.

One hour later, the chauffeur comes out reeling, with a cigar in one hand, a bottle of wine in the other and his clothes in disarray.

"Whatever happened?" asks the President.

"Well, the farmer gave me the wine, his wife gave me the cigar and his beautiful daughter made love to me passionately."

"Good God, what on earth did you say to them?"

"I just said, 'I am the President's chauffeur and I've just killed the pig.'"

Another Angle on Colombia

Recently a member of our community became so difficult, we sent him away. He is now back with us and tells this story of yet 'another Colombia' :

"Dear Everyone: I'm a 57 year old somewhat mad Scotsman . I found myself working recently in a mental hospital cum farm in the province of Santander, Northern Colombia. The organizers were all very right wing conservative Catholics and along with the noises of bedlam in the background, the religious atmosphere was somewhat intense .. The founder of the clinic taught that anybody who proposed or practised birth control was a political agent of Europe come to subvert the purity of the Catholic faith through their 'birth control missionaries'. I was informed without any batting of eyelids that overpopulation doesn't exist and that war, disease and famine 'would suffice' to maintain the population in check. It was also implied and occasionally directly stated that the difference between rich and poor does not exist, though I read one article by their founder which oddly enough gave a brilliant analysis of Colombia's problems in terms of class conflict, but instead of coming to some socialist conclusion about the need for revolution talked of the need for the regeneration of the bourgeoisie through the mysteries of the Catholic Mass.

The women who ran the place would have nothing to do with women's liberation because it would curtail the power of the priests, but one woman, a communist turned Catholic, did give a huge snort of derision at somebody reading the passage in Genesis about Eve being formed from Adam's rib.

Proudly displayed on their wall was a large picture of the 'House of the Inquisition' in Cartagena. At night, standing on the balcony in the middle of a thunderstorm, lightning flashing all around, the picture of the Inquisition being lit up and in the background a mixture of the murmur of voices reciting the liturgy, the occasional screams of some of the inmates and somebody playing "When the Saints Go Marching In" on an electronic organ.. I started to wonder what century I was in and thought it was time to go home." Alex

A Truly Green Revolution

"Ere long, the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil. No community where every member possesses the art can ever be the victim of oppression in any of its forms. Such a community will be alike independent of crowned kings, money kings and land kings."
Abraham Lincoln

Our community has been invited to take part in what we consider one of the most significant projects to arise recently in Colombia: in the North there is a peasant community in San Jose de Apartado who set themselves up as 'neutral territory', sick to death of all the killings in the very dirty civil war, and the way that both guerrilla and paramilitary forces use local peasant communities as servants and storekeepers, murdering wantonly when it suits them.

President Uribe has had it in for this group ever since his time as Governor of Antioquia, the province where San Jose is situated: Uribe was a founder of the paramilitary movement and did not appreciate the local peasants resisting - over 150 of them were killed for it. Now he has come out with one of his diatribes, saying the people of the San Jose 'Peace Community' are guerrilla supporters as they won't let the army into their area.

Through contacts who have known of our work in the countryside for many years, we were invited to attend a meeting to discuss the setting up of a peasant 'University'. Anne went along and has this to report:

16th June 2004: I spent a few hours with two campesinos (peasant farmers) from San Jose this morning talking about the 'University' idea. It is very interesting and we should definitely get involved. They are quite radical, anti-capitalist, and are trying to get together a loose organization of people's leaders from all over the country, with no offices or overheads, to do courses with the aim of getting people to become self-sufficient in food. The first course will be in August and they have asked us to teach theatre in the evenings, and also I said I would be most interested in taking over the menu while I was there to make sure they eat decent food (the Colombian diet of all classes is unbelievably bad: well, so is the Irish.). They were delighted and said I must make a list of the things I'd like brought from their farms or even planted ahead of time for the event! I told them I didn 't want anything to do with anything technical or theoretical and they liked that. They have deliberately chosen for the course an area where there is no electricity so there will be fewer distractions.

20th June 2004: Today I went for a meeting with a radical priest and four peasant activists about their 'country University'. I came out of it with a splitting headache because of the amount of information delivered - not just about the actual course but about Colombia, the war, the planet.

Their idea is to gather 20 community leaders for one month from 'resistance communities' who all agree that the only way to resist the war and outside interference is to grow and eat their own food without chemicals. This is preparation for serious war: many of these communities already suffer frequent blockades by the army and paras to starve them out. There were so many horror stories.the leaders of a black community in the Choco would like to learn about how to dry foodstuffs that they can keep in a sack so that they can grab it and run into the jungle at a moment's notice when the paras appear, so that they don't starve so quickly.

There were moments of laughter too, as when one man read a list of chemicals he wanted to make some kind of supposedly harmless anti-bug sprays, and Gloria Cuartas, one of the leading women, said the Army would love to confiscate that, and I said, 'Yeah, great, another bomb-making workshop by an Irishwoman'. (The reference here is to the three Irishmen accused of making bombs for the FARC - now all Irish in Colombia are considered dodgy characters).

The hamlet where the course is to take place is in difficult territory, the local peasant from there said we must not hang around in Apartado, the capital, as the army and paras are there. Gloria, who is a plucky tiny thing, said, 'All the more reason to make our presence felt.' I agreed, but then they said that two foreign aid workers were lifted there and expelled and that everywhere foreigners are being chucked out of Colombia for going into war zones, so that is obviously partly what my most recent visa hassles were about.

I was a bit worried at the beginning of the meeting that it was all going to be pseudo-'technical' and dry, but Javier, the priest, and Gloria are very much against that. I said please could we spend the minimum of time each day talking theory and the maximum in action and this met with agreement. Then Gloria said we must have workshops about men and women's roles in the resistance. She's great crack. I said we'd need therapeutic groups about the problems that arise and make people leave communities, and this was agreed for each evening.

There was a lot of talk about 'planification' which seemed to mean where will we build the compost heaps. I said that if we have a whole group of leaders there for a month, what an opportunity to brainwash them about humanure and could we please build compost-toilets first! This was agreed upon, to my surprise. They would also like our girls to go and sing there - but take note, girls, it's very hot, being only 800 metres above sea level. Throughout the meeting, the 'Atlantis experience' was mentioned again and again as something near-holy. How the hell am I going to live up to that?!

Singing for the Green Revolution

18-year-old Katie's Story:

"Cecilia, a friend of ours who works as a teacher in a small village far up in the mountains of the Province of Cauca (South Colombia) called El Meson, had bought one of our CDs some time back. I remember once she asked me if she could teach our songs to her students and of course I said Yes. Months later, she invited me to go and sing in El Meson .. Cecilia uses our songs in her classes as 'environmental and social education'. Our CD was also played on the local radio station.

When I went there and sang, I couldn't believe that everyone knew all the songs from beginning to end! Sometimes I would just play the guitar while they sang, and I can't explain what that feels like. In between songs, people would ask all sorts of questions, so I ended up telling them everything about our lifestyle and all our history in Colombia. Sometimes I felt strange because they treated me as if I was some sort of Goddess. A man said, "You are one of the best things that have happened to us. You have filled us with hope and opened our eyes." And they all said, over and over again: "Please come back."

I was told before going there that in that village every time a stranger went there, it would rain. I paid little attention to this, but from the minute the bus arrived, it started raining. well, a little more than rain, there were hail stones, continuous lightning and thunder; a bolt of lightning struck very near the house I was staying in and exploded a transformer and the electricity went off (it was night time). It continued raining for a couple of hours and the people waited for me in a school room until it stopped and they could bring the sound system. I couldn't believe these people were gathered specially to listen to me. They had no microphone stand, so two kids held the microphones for me while singing loudly in my ear with me, and telling me which song to sing next.

Then after the singing came the autographs. I don't really see the point in this, but they seem to and wouldn't let me go until I had written something for each child, not to mention taking a photo of me with each of them too.

All I can say is it's lovely to know that people have really listened to what we say and taken it in, and if it fills them with hope and helps them in any way, I'm glad because that's our purpose. - Love, Katie"

Song by Katie: (translation)

"A Brief History of Man"

You used to run, barefoot and naked through the jungle
With tussled hair blowing in the breeze, singing.

You had the fresh winds and pure water

And all that you needed from the natural world-
Happiness and freedom, an ideal world..


Then one day, this wasn't enough for you.
You wanted more.  You wanted to prove

That you were Superior ..

And you began to kill, to destroy
Everything around you.

(Chorus)

But look now, my brother
What has become of you

And look where you are headed

Just stop for one moment and think:
Is this what you want to do?

Now I see you, so tense and rigid
With your short well-groomed hair

Well-dressed and perfumed

Going to your office in your car
And there you imprison yourself all day long
To sit at your computer .

You have forgotten what Life is
You have forgotten your Dreams

You think only of work and money

You have no freedom, little happiness
You have forgotten your natural world.

(Repeat Chorus)

As a result of Katie's singing visit, 16 teachers from that mountain village school travelled the almost two day journey to our farm. They were from a tribe of Indians called the 'Paez'. Here is Ned's account of their visit:

"Cecilia brought the teachers from the agro-ecological school where she works, officially to 'learn about organic gardening'. They finished building a sugar-cane press for us, fixed our strimmer, cleared up all the garden paths, brought horse manure from the higher fields on horse-back! and had lots of fun. I concentrated on making them nice food as I think that is one thing I can teach them: how to eat vegetables, as they already know how to grow them and have an organic garden and compost heap. They brought their children and their own cook, who announced she wasn't going to do any cooking as she's having a break! They play music and are teaching us the Colombian folk dance called the 'cumbia'. We are putting on one of our plays for them. Their witch doctor is here as well. Most of them are content to sleep on the main room floor in a long line and refuse my offer of separate beds.

They say they had the guerrilla in their area and then the paras for a while and got sick of the killing and their boys being attracted by carrying a gun and going with them, so they got together and politely asked the guerrilla and paras to keep away, which they have done!

PS: I was crossing the footbridge over the river and saw two of our local Indian kids throwing something very solemnly into the water: their used-up school exercise books. I asked them why they didn't use them to light the fire and they said, 'If you do that, you'll never learn to read and write.' I went on my way a little wiser." Ned

Extract from a note from Cecilia who brought the Indian teachers to us:

"Dear Jenny, The people I work with have a wonderfully open mentality and are disposed to learn how to live better, and from all the comments I've heard since we came to your farm, I know that they have reflected a great deal on your way of life, the way you work the earth and treat the animals, your art and attitude to Nature. This pleases me greatly as I love to be able, through knowing your community, to show the possibility of a better quality of life .

My own family carry on blindly unfortunately, slaves to the concept of 'comfort', trapped in materialism and consumerism, their only goal to collect a load of professional titles and to live in a superficial, empty world. It's their decision. I am so glad I met you all and through you found the true value of life. With all my love, Cecilia."

What an incredible irony that a group of Europeans, who historically stole from the 'Indians' of South America their natural way of life, should now be seen as messengers to bring it back to them, wading through the Coca Cola bottles and degraded lifestyles to do so..

Killing Animals

"..animals shall not be measured by Man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

Henry Beston, quoted in the vegan magazine 'New Leaves'

My daughter Alice fights staunchly on our farm to combat hateful attitudes towards animals wherever she meets them. Unfortunately, this fierce caring sometimes brings out the worst in macho attitudes: her Colombian father-in-law, for example, boasts of how he used to skin sheep alive . Alice reports that Colombians always say to her: 'God gave us the animals to eat,' whereupon she retorts: 'No, he put them here for us to care for them.' To which they answer: 'Ah well, then, it's the work of the Devil in us that makes us kill them.' I doubt if we've actually made a convert to vegetarianism yet, but the way we live with and love and don't kill our domestic animals certainly makes an impression and people always comment on it with awe. For us, there is no separation between how humans treat animals and how we treat one another.

"Mankind's true moral test consists of its attitudes towards those who are at its mercy: animals."

Milan Kundera (a Czech writer)

"If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian."

Paul and Linda McCartney

Killing People:

A Personal Introduction to the War in Iraq

"We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, affliction or infamy. We kill when, because it is easier, we countenance or pretend to approve of atrophied social, political, educational and religious institutions instead of resolutely combating them."

Hermann Hesse

"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."

Abraham Lincoln

A friend called Kate in England has sent me this account of her own introduction to the anti-war movement:

"I honestly can't tell you what it did to me to sit a few metres from the runway at Fairford having to watch helplessly while one after another B52 took off over my head with cluster bombs hanging off the underneath like bunches of grapes, so close I thought I must almost be able to reach up and touch them.

"During the protest, we used to go into the local pub to defrost from time to time and there was a TV there showing 'live' the bombs being dropped on people in Iraq - then just a little turn of the head and we could watch out of the window the bombers climbing up and over the village carrying the bombs, it was really indescribable.

"I never slept for weeks. One hundred and twenty two fully bomb-laden flights.. and nothing we could do to stop them. I had a recurring nightmare for months after Fairford and still do sometimes. I am walking away from my house when I hear a bomber closing in. My kids are inside and I start to run towards the house to reach them. I don't get there in time and the house explodes into a huge pile of bricks and flames in front of me and I'm deafened. I dig by hand for my kids and eventually I start to find body parts.

"In my nightmare, sometimes I am an Afghani mother . and sometimes an Iraqi.

"I'm no fantasist and I'm not naïve, but I really do believe that all of us who are trying to change will win. Just a case of keeping each other afloat when the going gets rough.. Lots of love, Kate."

"See, I believe in the power of the people. I truly do. I do."

George Bush 6th March 2001

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."

Abraham Lincoln

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and thus clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

H. L. Mencken

"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other in order that the people may require a leader."

Plato

"There may still be two superpowers on the Planet: the US and world public opinion."

New York Times

These Green Letters from Colombia are compiled by Jenny James and appear erratically every few weeks or months.

We are contactable by email: jennyjames@softhome.net.

Our website is: http://www.afan.org.uk where you can read all back copies of the Green Letters.

Books about our community are available on: http://www.deunantbooks.com.

And for news of our 'Peace Boat' project go to: http://www.thesupplydepot.co.uk/AtlantisAdventure.html.

The Atlantis girls ' CD of environmental, peace and social songs - mainly in Spanish but with a written literal translation into English - is available by writing to Jenny above.

Jenny and her daughter Louise are at present visiting political and personal contacts all over the British Isles and are available for talks - and singing - about Colombia.

These Green Letters are compiled and edited by Jenny James,
Address: Comunidad Atlantis, Belen, Huila, Colombia, S. America

Books about the Community's history, activities and attitudes since 1970 available from: www.deunantbooks.com

News of our campaign sailing boat: www.thesupplydepot.co.uk/AtlantisAdventure.html

Contact address in Ireland: Atlantis, Con's Boatyard, Baltimore, Co. Cork

Friendly astrology service to help fund our work: write to Anne Barr, atlantisastrology@hotmail.com (no fixed fee - by donation)

Very beautiful CD (mainly in Spanish but written English translation provided) of socially-committed songs written and produced by young girls of the community, available from: Louise, louisejames@eircom.net or by writing to Louise at: 336a Blarney St., Cork, Ireland

The Green Letters contain news of the environmental, political and social campaigning activities of the Atlantis Community and are a direct source of information on the situation in Colombia. They form a linked narrative but can be read separately. Correspondence is always welcomed and answered promptly.

This Green Letter deals mainly with the activities and tragedies of the endangered Peasant Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado in the paramilitary-infested North of Colombia, with which we have become deeply involved.

Colombian President Uribe 'legalizes' his Armed Assassins

"There is a particularly revolting circus going on in Bogota at the moment, that of the 'peace' process with the paramilitaries. I ended up accidentally in the Plaza de Bolivar the other day, just as the paramilitary chiefs were speaking in the Congress: I didn't realize what was going on and simply saw a big protest of lots of country-looking people and plunged in to see what it was about. They all had posters saying 'Up with Peace' and other such politically correct slogans. There were thousands of them, but they looked too posh for campesinos (peasant farmers) and all were wearing the same new white T-shirt like a uniform and had new white posh banners. I wondered who was paying for all this. The atmosphere was unfriendly and I had to push myself to ask someone what the protest was all about.

"I remained unenlightened when I was told gruffly it was 'for peace', so I moved on down the street through barriers of riot police and I began to meet people I know carrying cardboard coffins and with banners saying: 'paramilitary assassins' and 'Uribe legalizes murderers' and they explained to me that the suspicious crowd were a 'rent-a-para-supporter' mob.

"Then I met Eduardo Umana's father (Note: Umana was a famous human rights lawyer murdered by the rightwing) - a frail old man carrying a cardboard coffin and shouting at the police and fighting them to be let in to the Congress building. He eventually did get in, with Manuel Cepeda's son (Note: Cepeda was the editor of Voz, the excellent Communist weekly in Colombia, likewise assassinated by the paramilitaries), and they were both ejected when they went up to where the paramilitary chiefs were giving speeches, and called them murderers.

"Later I saw bits of the speeches on television: it was nauseatingly violent and made me squirm with embarrassment to see these brutish killers saying they were 'sorry' - one even managed to cry! - for all the massacres and murders. But none of them were going to jail, all of them were absolutely confident and arrogant and a lot of politicians were supporting them.

"The radical MP Gustavo Petro gave an excellent speech about inviting chainsaw murderers to come and threaten the country from the Parliament, and why don't we just invite all the car thieves and common criminals from the streets too? Apparently all the main roads from the City centre to the airport were closed down during the morning rush hour to let the paramilitary caravan through safely. This is surreal even by Colombian standards.

"I met a woman who is making a documentary about the Palacio de Justicia massacre in the 80s. She named a list of politicians and army generals who ordered the killings at that time who are now supporting the paramilitaries. None of the cases of the 'disappeared' have ever been brought to justice, though the families of the upper class judges and magistrates who were killed have been given compensation - but not the ordinary workers' families.

"Another indication of the way this government is going is that our lawyer friend M. who has helped us with legal advice ever since our boys were killed, came to see me at 7.0 a.m. fuming as she had had a public showdown at an office meeting the night before: she is now leaving her posh job at the Vice-Presidency because her boss, a well-known female politician, wants to use the office and its resources, which are supposed to be for teaching people how to take action against State corruption, to help get Uribe re-elected by using their public meetings all over the country to do campaign work for him.."

Gardens on the Moon

". and no man but feels more of a man in the world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep, and that is a very handsome property."
Charles Dudley Warner, both quotes taken from Organic Gardening Magazine, USA

"I have just been to a strange lunar landscape in the South of Bogota. It is a very large high hill of pure white pottery clay, with lots of goats, sheep, cows, dogs and chickens there. The people belong to a small community of ex-brickmakers who can't make bricks any more because the coal slag they used to fire the kilns was giving the whole area bronchitis. So amongst the strange land shapes caused by their quarrying for clay are dozens of big, old, beautiful round brick kilns that no-one knows what to do with. Some of the people, now workless and hungry, are sufficiently desperate and have enough faith in miracles to plant gardens in the hard white clay. These gardens are tragic to behold and they want and need to garden seriously. A man I know who works with housing projects was asked to help them, and he rang me and off we went for a hike around the moon.

The place is like a strange mediaeval village looking down on Bogota, just a steep climb away from the main thoroughfare; there are no roads, only muddy tracks. Within minutes of getting there, we were surrounded by people wanting to know how to make compost. I felt like running away, just at the sight of the dry desert they live in, but I said I would help and this made them all very happy. So I set them some homework: to collect all their organic waste into a kiln and find a good source of horse manure (apparently there is one nearby). Then we went to see a local administrator and got promised the delivery of all the grass cut in the public parks and some wire for fencing, and some guinea pigs to live in the kiln to help make rapid compost.

Then the local social worker, a lovely lively lady, took me to the social centre where she tries to keep the local kids off drugs with music and dance workshops. I gave her one of the girls' CDs and in her car later she played it and cried from the first song. I was a bit worried about the driving.. She looked at the picture of the girls on the front and said, 'I'd love to meet them but I suppose they wouldn't come to a place like this?' so I explained a bit about how our kids were brought up in the jungle without schooling and working on the gardens and how we have always done free theatre in rural areas and she cried some more (luckily we were parked by then). I explained that Katie would come any time but she would need her fare paid as we have no income and she said she would try to raise this.

Anyway, if we ever get displaced again, there are some brick-kilns on the Moon where we could live.." Anne Barr

My land, your land,

is no-one's land,

by god given briefly

to the gardener's loving hands

till they rejoin the clay.

                     Brian Quail, Scottish anti-nuclear campaigner

Gardening , Cooking & Compost Course for The Peace Community of San Jose

Anne Barr and 19 year old singer-composer Katie, - now our travelling compost-makers and vegetarian cookery advisors - recently accepted an invitation to participate in the first session of the 'Peasant University' set up by the people of San Jose de Apartado in Uraba, Northern Colombia, one of the worst areas for paramilitary violence. Anne spent 23 days there, Katie a shorter time because of duties back home in the South. When Anne returned, she sent us the following report:

"First I want to write about some of the people I met there as almost every one of them was worth meeting. Most were practically illiterate, but all incredibly brave people, as community leaders have to be here in Colombia.

One lad from the Wiwa tribe of La Guajira was a real pain to start with, talking such rubbish for the first few days that I became sure his tribe had sent him so they could get a rest from him! However, when I finally got fed up with the rules of politeness and told him to stop waffling, he took it well and did come out with some gems: such as the fact that his tribe have successfully kept out the multinational mafia who want to dam up their rivers, by using the magic of the tribal elders to bring about flash floods at the right moment to wash away the heavy machinery.. This has worked several times now, according to him!

A girl at the gathering, 23 years old and looking like a Barbie doll, had rescued several of her community in Santander from death at the hands of the paramilitaries simply by using her very sharp tongue and her courage. Each time someone is taken away, she goes to confront the paras, the Army, or the guerrilla. Her stories are hair-raising, and she has been so successful that she now cannot leave her house without foreign accompaniment. This is provided by an organization called Peace Brigades International: they accompany anyone who has to walk or go by bus anywhere outside the village. Her community, after many massacres perpetrated by all sides in the civil war, have built up agreements to leave civilians out of it. Like everyone else, she says the guerrilla are the ones who most respect these agreements, which seem to work:

1. Because people insist on respect and don't back down;

2. through the presence of foreign witnesses and international pressure

3. and because the communities involved say they will move out en masse if the armed forces move in. Disgustingly, this terrifies the Army as it leaves them in the rural areas to fight the guerrillas with no human shields in the way.

Incidentally, one day while I was talking to the 'class', some guerrilleros passed by, stopped to listen for a while, and carried on their way..

A 72 year old man from a squatters' settlement in Medellin worked and walked alongside us all as if he were in his 20s. He told horrific stories about the army killing many people in his community to try to get them to move on. They are all refugees from the countryside.

Some of the most heartbreaking stories were not about people but about the earth destroyed by US aerial spraying of glyphosate (Monsanto's 'Roundup Ready'). A Paez Indian from the Alta Naya in Cauca said that after an aerial spraying 4 years ago, the land still won't produce a blade of grass, so it's not just 'Roundup' that is being used, but something much more lethal. A woman from Caqueta who runs an organic chocolate factory co-op had her cacao trees sprayed and killed and the land rendered useless. Experts say it will take ten years to recover. Cacao trees do not look like coca plants even from the air!

I never really felt like I was doing or accomplishing anything with my 'course', yet to them it was a whole new world. I explained and talked about compost toilets and the organizers got me buckets, and I got several nice simple showers built and a guinea-pig run (this small voracious animal is one of the best compost-making animals in existence!) All I could see was how far they had to go until it was no longer their instinct to chuck rubbish, until they would look at horse manure and go ooh! instead of yuk! and until they wouldn't be quietly horrified when I suggested building a compost loo - as I was noisily horrified about them flushing their bodily wastes downstream; also to reach a point when they would become sensitive to the smoky stoves that are giving them lung cancer and consider the modern innovation of a chimney-pipe! The wonderful thing about being seen as a 'teacher' is that one can really go on about this kind of thing and be listened to - for the time the class lasts anyway!

In the latter days of the course, I read out your 'Message from a European', Jenny, (a piece written in our first year in Colombia contrasting the value of the simplicity of rural life with the emptiness of the 'civilized' rich countries). It was received with a quality of silence and attention that was totally unique in the whole course. Everyone wanted a copy and the organizers got me enough photocopies to give around. I told the leaders that you want to come and take part and they obviously found this too much to believe and could barely respond. They can't really believe that people want to help them I think.

I managed to train a couple of people to help me put on our comedy about 'Ecotourism' which went down very well. Then because people obviously felt sort of inferior after the kind of brash confidence that comes out of me onstage (covering the fact I didn't sleep the night before for stage-fright!), I offered to take on anyone who was willing and make up a play in the morning and put it on that night so that they would see that it is not impossible to do theatre. Ten people volunteered, including two wonderful gringa girls (from Peace Brigades International) who were amongst those who laughed most at the Ecotourism play. I got everyone to make up a play and we practiced it at lunch time and at 5 p.m. and then we put it on. It was hilarious though somewhat chaotic, and ended in a dance which we got the audience to join in with. Several men wouldn't dance and actually ran away and got really slagged off for it. It was very funny. This was my last day in the community, and next day they all insisted on walking halfway to San Jose with me, which I found embarrassing, then I had to say goodbye to each person individually. I was quite glad to get away after that.

At the end of the course, there had been an embarrassing 'evaluation' when all the community leaders attending invited me separately to go to their communities in various parts of Colombia; they asked really humbly, as if they were scared I would not accept. And several people apologized for being careless about rubbish and waste and a few said that the best advertisement for vegetarianism was meeting Katie, whose main contribution was her singing and the simplicity of her 'being'. She sang every night and at other times whenever anyone asked her to. She worked at the cacao planting and in the kitchen, she talked about her upbringing in the mountains and jungle and about the death of the boys. And she enchanted everyone."

Tragedy Hits San Jose

The fallout in the media from this tragedy is incredibly poisonous, with attempts to say the explosion was caused by a 'home-made bomb'. However, the young boy who is injured never lost consciousness and was able to describe all that happened. He saw the grenade fall at the feet of the girl who died first - she had found it and picked it up, not knowing what it was. Most of her body was destroyed but even still she talked and lived for a few hours. He saw his mother a few feet away being thrown up into the air. She landed hard and it was the knock and the shock of seeing her son who she thought was dead that killed her as she had no injuries to her vital organs: she suffered some kind of attack, lost consciousness, never regained it and died two days later. The boy said he tried to talk to her to say he was alive but couldn't speak. He was thrown up into the air too but he says factually, in that way that Colombians naturally weave magic and material reality into their way of thinking, that as he was about to land with a thump, "two boys he didn't know caught him and let him down gently and then disappeared"...

Luis, the father, had to fight off the army who wanted to put him in prison while his wife was dying, saying he had a bomb-making laboratory in his house and that that was what the 'peasant university course' was about. This was all put out on the radio and made me so furious that I wrote a letter to the radio station, thinking I'd be the only one who'd feel secure enough to sign it. Then I read it to one of the women from Caqueta and she wanted to be in on it, then another lad heard us, and then another and another, until the whole group wrote the letter together. It was very moving, thanks to the Colombians, and very clear, thanks to me because as you know Colombians care more for poetry than logic! The community council loved it and are sending it around the world.

Luis managed to stay out of prison thanks to the opportune arrival of the Peace Brigades, whose accompaniment idea really does work, though even so, two men were murdered by paramilitaries on the road from San Jose to Apartado in the three weeks I was there (see Appendix at end). The Peace Brigades have a rule that they must only be observers and not express an opinion about anything, so it must be very boring for them at times. The majority I met (about 15 of them) are admirable, live in very basic conditions and do very long walks over some very bad paths. The locals say that this foreign presence is essential to the success of their refusal to have the police or army in their area. Evidently this right of refusal is backed up legally so now the community refuse to have anything to do with the Fiscalia (Public Prosecutor's office) too as so many people who have made statements against the army have been quickly killed for it.

Santos, the Vice President of Colombia, came to visit the community after the bomb explosion to 'help make peace' and the community leaders refused to allow his army bodyguards to take their guns to the meeting and so they disarmed, very unwillingly. What Santos actually accomplished was the further endangerment of the community leaders as he brought with him the heads of the local paramilitaries cum army barracks for the 'dialogue', and now these killers can put faces to the best known names there, so that many lives have probably been shortened. Up until now, the community have had a policy of never naming leaders but saying they are all leaders, which is true in a sense as every man, woman or child you meet there will tell you that they would rather die than accept the army amongst them as it would rob them and their dead of their dignity to have to accept amongst them the killers of their friends and family. After this meeting, the threats from the local paramilitary-controlled radio got worse and worse.

The whole idea of this settlement was originally facilitated by a bishop who was later killed by the paramilitaries. Now they have some young nuns amongst them and one of these young women was the only blight upon my horizon (once I'd brought the salt levels in the food under control, plus had some stone paths built through the mud, made a few nice showers and got the late-night radio maniacs under control!). I ended up having to be quite rude to her as she kept trying to get me into their falsely jolly religious meeting at night. This is the new face of 'evangelical' Catholicism - fun and games, then prayers. I had to tell her I found it all false and aggressive. That shut her up. Her companions, two lovely young women, came to me later and said that they had had the same differences with her attitudes. To my amazement, these women wanted their astrology charts done and mostly wanted to know about men and relationships, so hopefully I have helped them towards hell and damnation. It is obvious that the local people simply use this religious connection as they are a real shield against the paramilitary killers and have at times helped to avoid massacres. However, god save us from religion. What saved me was not god but many of the other community leaders, especially the Indians who had no time for the nuns either and I ended up in another house with them having music and dance sessions during the prayer meetings, and more and more people came to join our gang instead!

One of the Indians, from the Kuanamo tribe near the Sierra Nevada heard on the radio that his cousin, the tribal leader, had just been killed by the same band of paramilitaries that the Government is having 'peace talks' with - 'Monologues of Peace' as the peasants cynically call them, as for them to be 'dialogues', there would have to be two separate parties."

~ End of Green Letter 67 ~

From Anne Barr:

Below is a translation of the moving and terrifying statement sent out by the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, Colombia, on the 6th of August 2004. It clearly shows the collaboration that takes place between the Army and the paramilitaries in the region of Uraba, against a community of unarmed, extremely poor, and extremely brave and determined campesinos who have decided that they would prefer to die than be once again chased off their lands by para/military threats and murders. Their greatest 'crime' in a country ruled by the fear of murder and massacre has been to refuse to continue being the cannon fodder that feeds this war.

I was at the Campesino University mentioned in this statement, from the 31st July till the 20th August, working with campesinos and Indians from all over Colombia who live in similar "communities of resistance". We made compost and food-gardens as food self-sufficiency has become a necessity in the face of frequent food blockades. I discovered a side of Colombia I hadn't seen in 15 years of living here, a small, bright but fragile spark of hope in the midst of so much suffering and cruelty, a gathering of people who have finally overcome the fear that has allowed the killers and bullies to keep a stranglehold on the country. We heard on local paramilitary-run radio that we were probably teaching bomb-making....

Translation by Jenny James.

THE KILLINGS CONTINUE

The following day, 24th July, Mr. Wilmar Durango sent two letters to the Community, in which he accused the leaders and their friends of working with the guerrilla and of having planned assassinations....

On 30th July at 6 p.m. in the suburb of Mangolo, situated at the exit of Apartado on the road to San Jose, 54 year old LEONEL SANCHEZ OSPINA was murdered as he came down from San Jose in his van.
SANCHEZ OSPINA's job was to transport and sell drinking water in bags in San Jose. A group of paramilitaries dressed in civilian clothing and carrying guns made him get down from his truck. Then they took him to one side of the road and assassinated him. .

On 31st July, paramilitaries threatened the person who transports the fuel for the electricity generator which is used in the Peasant University course which is at present taking place. The paramilitaries said that the fuel was for the guerrilla. On the same day, about 2.0 p.m., at the Army checkpoint of la Balsa, Army soldiers asked for the same man, saying that they had information that he worked for the guerrrillas.

On 2nd August about midday, a group of paramilitaries gathered various people from San Jose together at the Transport Terminal and told them they were going to recommence a blockade against 'that damned Community', that they hadn't managed to destroy it yet but now they were going to find out just how long they could hold out if all supplies were stopped. They also said that they had pinpointed the leaders and that all that remained was to decide whether they would kill them in San Jose or elsewhere. They threatened the people by saying that as they could kill their leaders, they could destabilize the community and thus take over San Jose and therefore they shouldn't be surprised by the deaths that were occurring, nor the ones to come.

On 3rd August around 7.0 p.m., JOAQUIN RODRIGUEZ DAVID was murdered in the suburb of San Fernando de Apartado by paramilitaries in civilian clothing and carrying guns. RODRIGUEZ DAVID lived in Victoria, a village situated between Apartado and San Jose, where he had a shop. When they killed him, they said that this was the beginning of what they had promised.

On 6th August at approximately 8 .0 a.m., the paramilitaries sent a message with the driver of a public vehicle to the driver of a lorry carrying wood who was in San Jose, that he had to take the wood to them. If he did not do this, they would go to San Jose for the wood themselves and kill him. They also threatened the rest of the tradesmen who work in San Jose.

Without any doubt, acts of assassination are being carried out against our Community and the murders confirm the threats delivered. A blockade of our community and a plan to exterminate its leaders and their companions has recommenced, announced by paramilitaries and confirmed by the Army. Here we see clearly the cynicism and absurdity of the 'peace talks' between two parties who have always worked hand-in-hand: the paramilitaries and the State; the so-called Truce - all these acts are simply a smoke-screen to take attention away from the killings the communities are being subjected to; indeed our very existence is at stake. They are trying to put an end to us, murder us, and once again they have started with the people who do business with our community in order to cause a fresh blockade.

We ask for national and international solidarity to demand from the Government respect for the development of our Peace Community and that the killings and extermination of our leaders and companions cease. The experiment we have begun with our Peasant University which we are taking to many communities is a sign that we are not going to give in, not even when faced with death, threats and arrests following absurd frame-ups. We will remain firm in our principles of truth, openness, justice, solidarity, and in our opposition to impunity. We know that the generosity of so many people, organizations and communities will be a tremendous support and bring the light of hope to carry on firmly.

Death cannot prevail on the life-positive paths we are treading.

SAN JOSE DE APARTADO COMMUNITY OF PEACE
6th August 2004
COMUNIDAD DE PAZ DE SAN JOSE DE APARTADO

"Earth's bank account is overdrawn.

Those few of us worldwide who employ organic methods are the only depositors. Our bank has suffered a flood of counterfeit currency. As a result, we face bankruptcy. We must all become depositors and repay our debt with interest."
(Organic Gardening Magazine, USA, Reader's Letter, July 1976)

"Capitalist production disturbs the circulation of matter between man and soil, that is, prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates conditions necessary to the lasting fertility of the soil."
Karl Marx, 1867

"The earth willingly teaches righteousness to those who can learn: the better she is served, the more good things she gives in return."
Xenophon in 'Oeconomicus', ca. 400 B.C.

Moon Gardens

In the last Green Letter we told of how our 'Bogota Rep.' Anne Barr had made contact with a community of the poorest of the poor who are trying to scrape a living on a clay mountain 'moonscape' overlooking the polluted city. Much of Anne's activity this last month has gone into helping them to get the waste materials needed to make compost in order to revivify the dry compacted desert under their feet sufficiently to grow some food. Here we reproduce excerpts from some of her many reports on the tangle of redtape she has had to wade through to move, not just the mountains of organic waste produced by the City every day, but the often well-meaning but hopelessly out of touch bureaucrats sitting on it..

8th Sept. .. Yesterday I went to see the local Mayor about the 'Moon Gardens'. I wanted some fencing wire and an appointment with the rubbish collecting company so they could deliver us all the grass cuttings from that part of the city. I also went to the Botanical Gardens and have been promised lots of the little plants they throw on their compost heap when they weed their huge herb garden. I found out from a down-to-earth friend I have who works there that they are supposed during the last eight months to have made food gardens with the help of money from Bogota City Hall but all they have done, according to my friend is 'make stupid plans on those useless computers and haven't planted a seed and how do they think that those damned machines are going to solve hunger?!'

When I heard that the Botanical Gardens has been reprimanded by Bogota's leftwing mayor, Lucho Garzon, for being behind schedule, I felt braver and decided to push for a few lorry-loads of earth and some seeds and fruit trees too for good measure, and got an immediate 'yes' from the Boss of the Gardens.

Every move costs hours of meetings, and behind that the waste of money, time, energy and people caused by even the best-willed politicians and bureaucracy, then occasionally the fresh air of a woman like Nubia, a completely practical little social worker who said simply: 'I will work with you on this.'

11th September . yesterday I had my first work meeting with the ex-brickmakers of the Moon gardens who want to grow food on their dry hill of pottery clay. The social workers who help this community had done a good job of putting up posters and telling all and sundry to come, but a local funeral coincided, so I started with about 15 of the most determined, all women except for one. Yesterday I went again to the Botanical Gardens and an old man who's worked there for 30 years spent ages with me collecting about 30 different kinds of herbs and explaining the uses of the ones that were new to me. Then the social workers came with a car which we filled up with the cuttings, and off we went to the Moon.

It is cold and windy up there and where the grass is worn off the earth, it is as hard as concrete. We walked around to look at various possible sites to start a garden and chose an area below a cliff where in a previous effort the local people had clubbed together to BUY earth at 80,000 pesos a lorry load, but it was just fine dust and did nothing to create fertility. A woman had planted strawberries inside the little brick enclosures that used to be kilns and we shared the half a dozen there were. We went to look at the local horse stables - horses that are used to pull the carts of the local recyclers amongst the heavy Bogota traffic; these produce two sacks of horse manure a day and we organized ways to get it up the long steep hill.

Most of the people are rubbish recyclers but have no tools to dig with as when the kilns were closed down and they got very poor, they sold all the tools they had. So as we are forced into starting no-dig gardens, I had asked them to bring lots of newspaper and cardboard and we soaked it with water and covered the grass with thick layers of it, weighed it down with broken bricks and some grass and horse manure and then sat back on our heels to consider the fact that all the bureaucratic promises of getting the city's grass clippings delivered to us had come to nothing. I have now sent a message to the Vice-Mayor of Bogota to complain about this. I have also secured a promise of a few lorry loads of earth from the botanical gardens and a social worker got the promise of a lorry. The two social workers are excellent, they work seven days a week and are strict but very friendly with the people.

We distributed the herb cuttings and the spinach roots and onion ends I had saved from my own kitchen and talked about how to re-sprout them and organized the jobs for the next few days. It was a bit like organizing a flock of chickens as they all talk at once so we had to lay down some 'European' ground rules such as: One at a time, Shut Up and Listen and Don't nick the plant cuttings but wait till they're given to you. However, I was delighted at their enthusiasm, as I hadn't expected so much.

I will go back in a few days to see how they have treated the herb plants and to start on the fencing as they are gathering poles. All bureaucratic promises of wire have come to nothing but I am determined to keep going.

15th Sept.. I have just come back from a few hours' Moon gardening, though I'm sure the Moon is more fertile.

I went with piles of paper to lay down and we did a bit of gathering of what compost materials there are, but there were very few of the group there as it was a weekday, so mostly I walked around the area. It is a Hobbitland, all funny corners, higgledy-piggledy houses built out of bricks and what the people find on the streets. Very nice as there are no cars. But I end up feeling like taking up arms against the Powers that Be, seeing the poverty there. One of the older leaders took me to her hidden, meandering, flower-bedecked, very poor house and gave me coffee while her husband, a man in his 60s talked, full of fire and bitterness. When their kilns were closed down, there were a million promises (all from Antanas Mockus' crew, the previous mayor so beloved of Liberals and Green Europeans who don't know Colombia): nothing materialized and the people literally have no food, so naturally the young ones turn to crime. You can see in the people that they are all workers and hate being idle. The women used to make bricks too, many of the kilns belong to women. The day the kilns were closed, over 60 riot police arrived, making out that it was a guerrilla-run community, which unfortunately they are not as they could do with that kind of strict organizing to keep the hooligans amongst them under control.

They asked me if I, as a foreigner, could talk to anyone in Lucho's (the Mayor's) office as they have great faith in him. I said we would get a letter together - hardly anyone here can write - and I would make sure it got read and see what we can do.

21st September.Very Complicated Compost

After really looking at and feeling out the sterility of the land (I can't say 'soil' as there isn't any) on the South Bogota Moon, I thought I'd try ringing some "experts", so I looked through my address book and saw that I had the home number of X who is like the guru of organic gardening here. I knew him years ago when he used to head a big posh organization where I used to go begging for eco-materials for the schools in Caqueta. He is a very nice man, even though he chain-smokes, and he remembered me and immediately invited me to his house. We had breakfast in the large scruffy garden. Not a food plant in sight. His lovely natural wife and big sons were lovely too, utter friendliness all around.

Then we got down to business. I described the situation in the 'Moon' area, the poverty the people have been forced into, their hopes to make their land work for them. He did not take it in. This damn country needs to go on an intensive course in Listening. He started going on about all the things that people can do that cost Money, like buying complicated compost starters being sold here by PRIESTS, or buying calcium and phosphorous. I kept pulling him up and reminding him that if these people have 1,000 pesos (1/3 of a euro), it is a big deal, but this did not sink in. I got heavier and heavier in my description of their poverty, it began to get to him, but like a train that has always been on the same track, there was no turning or stopping him. As he got more affected by my protests and by the obvious unhappiness coming off me - I was often on the brink of tears as I talked - he got more determined to block out the reality of what I was saying. He was genuinely upset when I rejected all his complicated compost recipes saying that they would put people off ever doing any gardening, and I kept asking him questions like who would give me some wire and how can I get the damn grass cuttings that are wasting all over the city transported up there. I tried to explain to him why I just needed practical, cost-free solutions and what we have done ourselves with gardens over the decades, but the ears and what was behind them just did not work that way.

He rushed off and got me posters of his lovely paintings - the costs of producing each one of which would have bought the wire needed for each household to make a little garden. He was genuinely nice in the midst of all this, but suffers from a kind of social-class-induced madness that can only be cured by sending him to live on the streets for a few years.

I made my excuses and escaped and came home to find M, our lawyer friend, waiting for me - she had had some personal bumps and was really upset. I told her of my morning and couldn't stop crying and said that the only thing that surprises me about Colombia is that there are not more people in the Guerrilla force as 80% of the country has a deep need to revolt against the kind of thing I had just experienced. That really got to her as she knows it's true, as she has worked in a government 'anti-corruption' unit - for a corrupt boss. She let me explete, then gave me 50,000 pesos to buy wire for the gardens and offered me the use of her (second) car to take grass cuttings up to the Moon. Then I gave her some therapy and she went off calmer and rosier.

Then my friend Gloria who works for the Mayor came in, and she got an earful too and has promised to help me get a letter to Lucho and get the Moon community put on some kind of emergency rating to get them help. But did I mention that I hate posh, poncey, piddley, pickety, nickety, stupid expensive theories of how to make compost, especially when they are expounded by people with delicate white hands and clean nails with a maid in the kitchen cooking up meat? Middle-class Colombia is full of them.

"Dark with Power, we remain the invaders of our land, leaving deserts where
forests were, Scars where there were Hills.
On the mountains, on the rivers, on the cities, on the farmlands,
We lay weighted hands, our breath potent with the death of all things." 
                                                         Wendell Berry

22nd September . Despair as yesterday I found that of all the people in the Moon settlement who haven't enough food, only four or five are willing to do the work to grow some. In a way, it is better to work with a small enthusiastic team, but the whole urban degenerate wait-for-handouts attitude got to me. However, we decided to make one very good little garden to show the rest. The women who do want to get on with it are lovely, tough, strong little Indians, very desperate, but willing to put their despair into struggling with that barren mountain. My lawyer friend is taking me to a meeting there this afternoon. It will be good for her education.

25th September..I went to look at tons of potential compost at one of the food markets. I can't believe that it is so easy to get loads of compost materials and get the transport to move it, all the local mayors have lorries that they seem to be very willing to lend for this kind of thing. I think no-one has done it before because they have no faith in compost magic and have been taught that it is Difficult, Complicated and Dangerous. So I want to prove them all wrong by making a mountain of the stuff up on the Moon. I have arranged for a lorry to pick up a few tons of vegetable waste from this market place to leave my gardening group with an enormous pile of compost cooking..

4th October.I am poking my nose into what really happens to the thousands of tons of vegetable waste that daily get dumped in Bogota. I went to the market place where I have arranged that the people separate their organic waste from the plastic so that we can use it. The woman in charge showed me around, she was very positive and wants to do something constructive with the waste. They produce of lot and there are 18 other market places that produce a lot more.

The idea of recycling has been talked about here for several years, but nothing has been done, except for a few complicated worm-projects. Everyone in the city wears posh, clean, detergent-stinking, bleached white clothes, they poison their houses with chemicals in the name of cleanliness, cover their bodies with poisonous chemicals in the name of 'beauty', yet feel OK about driving through rubbish-filled streets and stinking filthy rivers. The Vice Mayor of Bogota had me choking when he asked, don't I think Bogota is beautiful?! It is the third most polluted city in South America.Vegetable waste is considered dangerous and dirty and recycling has to be so complicated and 'scientific' that it becomes impossible.

However, I preach the faith I have in compost, in how easy it is to make, how clean and wonderful it is, I communicate about the potential magic in bags of grass clippings and when I tell people that I cry when I have to pass vegetable peelings on the street and can't take them home. all this gets to people and inspires them and makes it seem possible, and they really want a solution but there are no leaders to take them there, so it looks like I've got a job.

After visiting the market-place, I went to a Moon garden meeting as another huge crowd of women want to join in as they feel inspired by what I've done with the few hard-core ladies I've been working with. Them feeling inspired is tragic, as it means they are extremely hard-up for inspiration and it must just be the fact that I go there at all that is inspiring as we have achieved f.all in my eyes. But one of the hard-core ladies made an impassioned speech saying that the grass has died back with no digging, thanks to the paper and cardboard and weeds we covered it with and that she feels really good recycling all her waste and having a project that has real meaning. I felt stunned and very moved, as I feel I have mainly spent my time phoning and cursing bureaucrats.

These women are the poorest of the poor but are used to physical work because of their former occupation as brickmakers, they are like city peasants in some respects. I threw open the idea of them coming to our farm in the South of Colombia in small groups to learn. There was much enthusiasm, but no ideas of where to get the bus fares from, except that my lawyer woman-friend is going to ask one of her millionaire lovers to help.

7th October 2004 . slept badly worrying about dumping a lorry-load of quite smelly 'rubbish' on the Moon people's doorstep, got up at 5.0 a.m. and went looking for leaves to disguise the smelly veg. with, found an unlimited amount, rang the lorry-man who came with the rubbish which was now twice as smelly after getting drenched by the downpours last night and we loaded a pile of freshly-cut branches on top and then headed for the hills.

I was particularly nervous because the old lady whose land we are starting work on phoned me to say that a man who owns some of the neighbouring land had decided to get into compost-making as a business after hearing about us and had brought up several lorry loads so smelly that everyone called the police. I went to see this project and it turned out to be dung and body bits from the leather tanning factories, the latter a poisonous and morally unacceptable additive. The problem of smell was dealt with by covering it with sawdust.

As I arrived in the lorry, two women came to guide us up the hill and en route we collected many bags of horse poo from a stables. When we arrived and began unloading, everyone was delighted and said I should have brought even more as they want to make a lot of compost. We had a lovely day making huge heaps, fencing, getting fed too much food, sitting knitting in the sun when I got too tired, listening to about 16 women getting excited about compost-making as they worked knee-deep in 'rubbish'..

     "One Acre composted is worth acres three,
       At Harvest thy barns shall declare it to thee."   Thomas Tusser, 1558

8th October 2004 ..I have got myself into the centre of a whole whirl of energy here that keeps growing, as the 'posh' part of my Bogota network of contacts has now got involved, for example, when I got home last night, several people of the 'office variety' had phoned to ask how the compost-making went (because I talk about it constantly everywhere I go!), the Vice Mayor of Bogota wants to visit Moon mountain next week to see what we are doing, a friend's husband wants me to apply to the office that donates to good causes, goods purchased with the ill-gotten gains of narco-money, several market places want their rubbish collected and recycled, and my lawyer woman-friend just came unexpectedly to talk about setting up a Foundation dedicated to this work, the Botanical Gardens wants the 200 trees they've donated collected tomorrow, and astrological clients at the President's office have said they will organize a collection to pay for the Moon women's fares to visit our farm in the South, four or five at a time. I would like the Vice-Mayor to come when we are actually sorting out compost material so that he can see what that involves!

And now the Moon ladies have asked me to help them make the area into a kind of reserve or park as the city bureaucrats want to turf them out, with the excuse that the terrain is dangerously unstable (probably true, but probably curable with tree-planting), but I don't want it turned into the official sterile, expensive, posh version of a park, as the people would be paid little for their land and would end up living in even worse conditions elsewhere. I have asked for an interview with the office that decides such things. The Moon women say they aren't even allowed into offices as their clothes aren't posh enough - actually mine are even scruffier, but my attitude carries me through!

9th October .. I have just spent the afternoon in the little Moon garden which is now beginning to look like a garden, the market refuse is steaming away, so we covered two big beds of it with topsoil and planted some potatoes, peas and butter beans that we cadged off the local shopman..

"I was raised in the north of Canada in old rolling mountains.surrounded by nature and was the main caretaker of my mother's compost. I understand about compost, it is mystical. It is matter transformed and getting transformed into more matter right in front of you. It is like a time machine, as you see one element getting changed into another and its future just below it, which it will soon be changed into. It is dark and energy-filled. In the end, everything from A to Z comes from, is made of and will end up as star-dust. So compost makes sense."

Excerpt from a letter from a Canadian correspondent called Ralph

"A petition presented to the Sicilian Parliament in 1742 said, 'Agriculture is generally self-regulating and needs no more than the hard work of farmers. But when government tries to interfere, the result is complete confusion. Expenses increase all around, the normal pattern of farming is overthrown, many people go bankrupt and give up altogether."

Taken from Organic Gardening Magazine, USA

The Cold Winds of Progress

"I am a 49 year old woman born in the West of Ireland. When I was a young girl, up until the age of 12, we were self-sufficient on our farm. We grew all our own huge variety of vegetables. We had lots of fruit like black currants, apples, plums, gooseberries and cherries. Oats were sown for our large flock of about 50 hens. My father took our wheat to a local man who used to grind it into flour for our wholemeal bread. We also sold a large quantity of wheat and potatoes. We made our own butter and drank the delicious buttermilk. There were lots of geese and ducks and turkeys on the farm, and all the food grown was organic then. To buy luxuries like tea and sugar, we brought our eggs to the local shop and came away with our purchases, plus some money left over. My mother made our clothes on her hand-powered sewing machine. The turf for the winter fires was cut in the bog. This was how all the farming community lived at that time. It was rare indeed for anyone to go to a doctor; children were born at home and breastfed.

I remember clearly the day the cold wind of 'progress' came to our farm. We were all down the field picking potatoes when this man came through the gate. I felt an intense dislike for him as he tried picking his way through the field without dirtying his shiny black shoes. This was the Agricultural Adviser, who went around to all the farms advising the farmers to move with the times, telling them of the great prosperity to come by growing acres of particular crops for the factory which had just opened five miles from our village. Soon we were using chemical fertilizer instead of natural manure. I remember many a winter's night, the kitchen floor covered in Brussels sprouts and us children having to sort through them and throw away the larger and smaller ones as they all had to be of a particular size. My father wept many a tear of despair, but already he was in it too deep and kept hoping all the false promises of the Agricultural Adviser would come true. Like others, my father never realized at that time that these Advisers, the factory owners and the chemical companies were all 'working' together to fool the farmers by enticing them away from their independent self-sufficient way of life. This was the beginning of the hellish road of 'progress' and the birth of the modern factory farm in our village."

Annie's farm is now abandoned, except for the fields rented out to chemical-spraying cattle farmers who, under EEC rules, are forced to poison nettles with herbicides in order to qualify for grants. Evidently the EEC has never heard of the extremely high nutrient value of nettles.

Country Vegetables    by Eleanor Farjeon

The country vegetables scorn
To lie about in shops.
They stand upright as they were born
In neatly-patterned crops.

And when you want your dinner, you
Don't buy it from a shelf,
You find a lettuce fresh with dew
And pull it for yourself.

You pick an apronful of peas
And shell them on the spot,
You cut a cabbage if you please
To pop into the pot.

The folk who their potatoes buy
From sacks before they sup
Miss half the fun those folks enjoy
Who dig potatoes up.

More About San Jose Peace Community

To follow up on our reports in the last Green Letter about the 'Peasant University' held at San Jose Peace Community in the paramilitary-infested North of Colombia, here is another piece that Anne sent out to us during her time there:

"The 'University' is a very basic gathering of wooden houses, a school, a dining hall and four awful toilet/showers. The 25 participants live in a new wooden house, in uncomfortable bunk beds, several people snore, the floor is made of mud, the mosquitoes have really big teeth, there is MUD everywhere, the kitchen has no chimney, the wood stove has only 2 rings, the toxic level of salt in the food was beyond any scale hitherto known to man or woman, 'greens' is a word unheard of.

"From the moment I got here, I wanted to leave, the group leaders are grumpy, mainly because they are stressed by their position and don't know how to handle things well. When I talk to them or suggest things, however, they are friendly, appreciative and cooperative. Then two minutes later, they are grumpy again. They remind me of dealing with FARC officials, that kind of serious slightly snooty vibe of men-with-a-mission. Most of the people who've come to learn are good crack, all peasants and Indians. The Indians have the nicest vibe, though the campesinos are more fun.

"There were two days of introductions. These were heart-rending, scary and inspiring. All these people come from communities that have suffered terribly from the army and paramilitaries. No-one here differentiates between the two. One man told of going to his house through the woods and meeting the army who said they were going to kill him because he was a Guerrilla on his way to a house nearby full of guerrillas. They were referring to his house full of his children. He said, "Kill me, but leave my kids alone." They told him to shut up, he heard shots, then a soldier came out of the trees carrying the man's little girl, eight years old, shot in the side. Then the soldiers backed down and got the girl to hospital, but she died. This is just one story amongst dozens. The man cried as he spoke.

"When the grumpy leaders talk about what they want the 'University' to be, I love them and feel inspired enough to forget about the mud, the salt and the toilets for a few minutes. This is a small area, an island where they allow no police or army in and it is surrounded by paramilitary areas. We are in a muddy clearing in the midst of lots of forest. The Guerrilla passed through yesterday as I was giving a class on making compost. Katie and I gathered leaves, kitchen compost and horse-poo to show people how to make it. Now this might seem so simple that it is an insult to people's intelligence, but it's not, most of these people really don't know anything about anything - the first day we spent gathering and burying rubbish and had to explain to them in detail why it is bad to burn plastic. Anyway, we fenced a reasonable area with split bamboo and big stones, made compost enclosures, and it seems there will be a garden! I felt better here after that.

"During the introductory talks, the organizers said they'd been offered help from conventional Universities and NGOs, but had refused as they want total independence. Food self-sufficiency is their aim. They allow no-one to sell alcoholic drink in the area.

"We spent one boring day putting up a shelter and putting earth into little plastic bags for cacao (cocoa) seedlings, which is the local cash crop. I accepted the boredom temporarily as these people are putting a lot of time and energy to get this event together. This is supposed to be an 'agro-alimentary' course, but I don't know where they think the 'aliment' bit is supposed to appear from as the kitchen is a hell-hole and the first day I arrived the women (local volunteers) were chopping onions with one pen-knife and one machete and I got a grump from the organizers when I said I'd help in the kitchen when there were chopping boards and knives. Anyway, I've made bits of food, we now have two knives and more coming, and Katie made a sauté which they all love. I will add a bit each day to relieve the regulation Colombian rice, beans and eggs (there is no meat at all here thank goodness). They grow their own beans and plantains - it is very rich land, no wonder the paramilitaries are after it.

"Having Katie here was wonderful, as what better way of preaching the simple healthy country life, and her singing has been food for my soul and for many other people's too. We had a long session last night which was very appreciated. There are lots of great hard-working kids here and a very rotund black teacher. I am very glad to be here in spite of the large difficulties - the mud and the hellish kitchen are just representative of a very macho approach to life. But they've agreed to a path-making team, so the mud situation should improve. After I moaned a lot, the salt level has dropped to near-acceptable levels and they have sent to buy vegetables.

Aftermath of the San Jose bombing tragedy

Here is a follow-up report from Anne on the accidental Army grenade explosion mentioned in the last Green Letter:

"I spent two days in Medellin in the hospital with the young boy who was damaged by the bomb and with his father, Luis Eduardo. Seeing the effects of war at such close quarters was heart-rending. However, the boy, Andres, showed no self-pity and neither did his father. They both talk with intense clarity about all that happened, about losing the mother and the other girl, who was 16, and they are 100% admirable in all of it.

"When I first got there, the doctors were saying that the boy would lose the lower half of one leg because the extremely deep wounds were infected and would become gangrenous. However, that prognosis changed after they worked for many hours to clean the wounds. I couldn't say enough about the excellence of the medical care at this free public hospital, the humanity of all concerned and the communicativeness of the doctors and nurses. They let me in and out as I wished at any hour though they told me it was against the rules as I'm not 'family', but they did it for the 'poor boy'. The lady I was lodged with, the rich friend of a friend here in Bogota, did a clothes, books and toys collection for me and I went on day 2 to the hospital with a sack of lovely gifts and when I got home late that night, found another sackload so had to go back to the hospital again. I did massages for Andres and the other kids there and generally became a Florence Nightingale, which as you all know is not my usual way, but there wasn't much choice."

Cultural Catastrophe

A friend in London, after reading about our work with campesinos, wrote to us about the awfulness of peasants having so lost touch with their roots that we have to teach them to make compost, something which never ceases to amaze us though we work daily with this irony. Here is what Anne had to say in answer:

"The extremely invasive and aggressive virus that is Western 'culture', spread by TV and the media in general is very effective and has managed to cause amnesia very rapidly. Poor, simple country folk are generally open and trusting and have been made to feel inferior, so there is a tendency to try and imitate the rich, posh, 'successful', 'better', 'more cultured' 'first' world.

"However, the same people are now getting over all that, as it has become obvious where it leads, i.e. to spiritual and material poverty. In this, the Indians are the leaders, because although they eat white rubbish and chuck their refuse around, they have preserved something that all the compost-making, rubbish-separation and organic-vegetable-eating in the world will not create, which is an unquestioned sense of community, so strong that we have no vocabulary for it. In spite of 500 years of unimaginable violence, they have never lost the basic harmonious 'hum' they have with the earth and each other. Not that I would like to be an Indian, definitely not, as their cultural attitudes are so different and they often bore me stiff with their lecturing about what the elders say and they are so chauvinist. But in spite of all that, they have retained something that is respected and admired by most Colombians.

"Recently, 70,000 Indians marched for four days along the PanAmerican highway to protest against the US 'Free Trade Agreement'. The media tried to belittle what was happening, but at the end when the march entered the big city of Cali, the whole town came out to cheer and play music, and even the shallow newspaper reporters were visibly moved and affected. It was more a show of real people power than any kind of protest on specific points as their position is that they reject everything about the present regime.

"As for the Colombian peasants, they are worse off than the Indians in some ways, and better off in others: worse off in the sense that they are more divided into nuclear families and have no real cultural roots, better off in that they are more dynamic, less prejudiced, and much more fun. Sometimes it is a nightmare just to look at the cultural amnesia and irreparable damage caused by the epidemic that is our culture, and to see how long and hard the climb back to better values will be. But the fun, humility, dignity, intelligence, bravery, music, dancing, appreciation, jokes, piss-taking, perception of what is real and what is crap, the political consciousness, the fresh air, clean water, forests, monkeys, lack of cars, no shops, birdsong.. all make our work in the countryside with the peasants superior to any other way of life we have known."

"Half of our misery and weakness derives from the fact that we have broken with the soil and that we have allowed the roots that bound us to the earth to rot. We have become detached from the earth, we have abandoned her. And a man who abandons nature has begun to abandon himself."

Pierre van Paassen, quoted in Organic Gardening Magazine, USA

News Distortion

Anne writes: I have just had a pink fit because I watched the midday news and saw a long report on the HUGE indigenous march that is going on, about 65,000 Guambiano and Paez Indians marching to Cali. After much crap reporting about their food and camping arrangements, they finally got around to asking what the march is about. I happen to know what that march is about as one of the main Paez leaders was at the campesino 'University' in Uraba and had to leave early to organize the march. It is about Free Trade Agreements and vindictive laws coming in to put Indian land up for grabs, especially by the USA, and it is about army, paramilitary and police abuse of their communities. But the TV managed to say it was against the guerrilla! though they did mention one Indian leader who was killed by 'unknown' killers - and I happen to know this was the work of the army/paramilitaries as the victim was the cousin of another man at the course. I know I should be cynical and hardened by now, but I just hate the media so much!

However, the main newspaper did carry this report, Sept. 13th 2004, under the heading: "Paramilitary Presence near Exit of Indigenous March".

Some 100 hooded men arrived in the area, well armed and dressed in Army uniform. They established themselves in three farms, two of them belonging to the multinational Carton Colombia.

This latter company was owned by Michael Smurfit, one of the richest men in Ireland.

By day we work. At night, the horrors suffered by our boys who were murdered come back to haunt us. During the time Anne had to read through the legal papers for the court case, she produced the following nightmare:

"I experienced the constant repetition of the following situation: an armed man, a guerrillero, had a gun pointed at my head and said he was going to kill me because I'd accidentally entered his area. I tried to talk him out of it. He seemed to listen and then he'd start threatening again. Each time, I'd go through a long period of imagining very clearly what the bullet impact would feel like, then he'd back off. I'd feel relieved for a moment and then he'd start again. It was like the visual version of a stuck record. I was woken up out of it by a dog barking. Then I went back to sleep and dreamt about it all again, but at a distance: I was telling it to you and saying that in a way I had asked for the dream as I wanted to re-live what our boys had felt."

And recently, Anne had the following dream: "I dreamt that I was with Tristan and Javier, we were all kidnapped and scared. The killers were there. I couldn't speak or protest, I was too scared even to make a noise though I don't remember what the threats were that made me like this. I heard a killer get a gun ready. I saw Tristan lying there already bashed-up and tortured-looking, then the killer put the gun to Tristan's head. I couldn't scream or move but just had to wait for the click and to see his brains scattering. Then the killer put a gun to Javier's head and I managed to make a noise that woke me up."

Regular Green Letter readers will remember that an old peasant couple, Julio and Baudelina, who were the close friends Tristan and Javier were visiting just before they were murdered, were eventually also killed by being forced to drink poison, for helping us with information. Recently, Anne wrote this note to us: "I was driving in a poor area of Bogota, when I realized we were near the house of Baudelina's sister. It was the third anniversary of their death and this fact had been haunting me all day and the night before. So I asked the social worker I was driving with to take me to their house. There was no-one in, so I left a note inside the iron railings, pinned down by a stone, with my telephone number, saying that my heart still breaks when I think of them and I have not stopped insisting that their case be treated as the double murder that it was instead of as the suicide it was criminally made out to be."

On a Lighter Note - CD News

Producing a CD of our girls' social and environmental songs has proved itself to be an endless source of fertility (if not funds, as we give most of them away!). A man in Bogota who works with kids who are drug-addicts said he loved Louise's anti-drug-taking rap on the CD and says he uses it and the catch phrases in it in his talks. A social worker told Anne that she plays the CD to everyone who gets into her car. And a peasant-leader from the 'campesino University' said that the first thing he does when he starts a compost class is play Louise's song "Yo soy la Tierra" - 'I am Mother Earth', as it says everything that he wants to teach.."I speak to you from the soil, from the sky and from the depths of the oceans, you don't hear my lament, nor my voice in the wind. Like an evil spell, you have transformed my paradise into infernal chaos. You cover my body with cement, you fill my lungs with pollution, you drill holes in my chest and wage wars in my heart. You cover my face with rubbish, you fill my eyes with tears, you fill my veins with poison and my soul with despair, and in my womb which once was fertile, you sow only destruction. You cover me with barriers, frontiers and walls, you have destroyed your own future. In me you could have sown and harvested your dreams, but no, you try to change me. You come to me as a visitor and soon you will die, but I will go on forever."

There are Fairies at the Bottom of our Garden

Ned reports from our farm in the mountains of Southern Colombia:

"A few days ago, I saw some plaits in the mane of the big frisky foal in our field. I wondered how Alice had managed to get close enough to do this, as it's not tamed. I asked her and she said she didn't do them and can't get near it, and anyway, it would never stand still for anyone. Mario (her Colombian husband) says it's the pixies, they like to ride horses and then decorate their hair.

Not entirely satisfied with this explanation, I mentioned the plaits to a Guambiano Indian to see if he had any explanation. With a serious face, he told me the same story: that he had often come across the plaits the pixies leave on the horses after they've been galloping them around.."

In the hope of being able to offer Ned some plausible explanation to this mystery, and having discarded my own attempt to visualize an erratic whirlwind blowing a horse's mane first one way, then the other (especially as there is never any wind where we live), I asked my 23 year old daughter, Louise, who grew up in Colombia what she made of this and she told me that throughout their childhood, the children had often seen these plaits on the horses and that the campesinos always told them the same thing. It was the pixies.

Seeds Please!

I am kneeling and planting
I am making fertile
I am putting some of myself
back in the soil
Soon enough
sweet black mother of our food
you will have the rest..              

Marge Piercy, "Living in the Open"

For all our projects in Colombia, both urban and rural, we need seeds and as the gardening season has now ended in the Northern Hemisphere, we would be most grateful to receive any unwanted leftover packets or half-packets! Because of the levels we work at, i.e. high up, we can use any seeds planted as far North as Canada, but can't grow crops planted in the Southern States of America. What we most need are simple veg. such as beetroot, cabbage, carrot, and parsnip.

Our postal address is: Atlantis, Telecom, Belen, Huila, Colombia

Correspondence is welcome and promptly answered - write to: jennyjames@softhome.net

All previous Green Letters can be read on www.afan.org.uk

P.S. In case anyone finds any part of this Letter, or anything on the TV news tonight, upsetting, don't worry, we're in good hands..

"The future will be better tomorrow." George Bush

"I'm the commander in chief, see. I don't need to explain. I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting part about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." GWB

The Green Letters form a running account of the many political and environmental activities of Atlantis Eco-Community in Colombia.

"Compassion for the suffering of others is not weakness. Acting from compassion when those around you do not takes more courage and strength of character than going along with everyone else's cruelty." - Norm Phelps, quoted in 'New Leaves', magazine of the Movement for Compassionate Living

Although passionately concerned with war and injustice wherever it occurs, we want to begin this Green Letter with a reminder that the most horrific slaughter the human race is engaged in on a daily basis is not in Iraq or Darfur, but all around us, under our noses, a massive slaughter that rarely touches our consciousness....

Letter from a friend, Des, in London:

"I remember well the first time I stopped eating meat. It was in Birmingham in 1976. I had a job with a builder repairing some walls in a slaughter house. I spent about two days there ..

"The first thing I noticed was the fear in the animals' eyes. Those poor creatures, sheep, pigs and cattle knew they were in a death house and could see what was happening to those animals in the front of the queue. They all cowered in corners whenever the main slaughterman appeared with his long knives hanging from his belt. He laughed and joked about them as he selected the ones to be killed.

"I remember seeing one sheep which would not go quietly and watched as this devil grabbed it by the legs and threw it over the fence into the killing area. The poor animal must have had its legs broken. I watched in horror as he pressed the bolt gun against shivering cows and dispatched them. They fell with a heavy thud to the ground. It was awful seeing the life go out of these harmless, innocent animals.

"Pigs were supposedly stunned and then thrown into a vat of boiling water to have the hair scalded off. I could see that not all of them were properly stunned and they must have suffered horribly. All the while, pop music was blasting out from the speakers around the place as the workers cut up the newly dead animals. As soon as they fell, cows were strung up with chains around their hind legs and they moved along to the first knifeman. He would slash down their fronts and drag out the stomachs and all the intestines. All the messy guts were put into containers on wheels and hauled away. Nothing was wasted.

"Next a man with a chainsaw would cut off the heads. Were all the animals dead while this was happening? I hoped so. At the other end of the line, the carcasses were cut up into manageable pieces and then plastic-wrapped ready for the supermarket shelves. Some of the men offered me offcuts. I wanted to vomit."

Borne by the wholeness of Nature,                          
Woven into the web of life,
We are kin to all that lives.
And what we call Wilderness
Is the ancient home,
Where our own cradle stood.

But the endless wilderness
Of late is broken,
Torn to islets against whose shores
Relentlessly the breakers
Of all consuming humanity beat.

While the web of life and wilderness fade,
We dare set limits of what may remain.
Yet deep in our souls we feel with pain
The wrong we do to Earth and life,
And that the beating breakers
Our own beings break.

Wilderness wakens in unsung brave hearts,
Kind hands of old and young firmly join
To shield our wild siblings and Mother Earth,
To protect ourselves from ourselves.

In Colombia, our work with the endangered peasant 'Peace Communities' and their 'Universities of Resistance' continues and deepens. We begin with a synopsis from Anne to clarify exactly what this movement is about:

"We are creating a 'Universidad de Resistencia' amongst ethnic (S. American 'Indian'), black and peasant communities from all over Colombia. The word 'University' conjures up something very formal but our University has no walls, offices, salaries, diplomas or fees. All courses take place in remote communities which are under constant attack from all sides in the armed conflict and all the 'students' are community leaders committed to pacifist resistance and whose people have rejected the presence of any armed soldiers, paramilitaries or guerrilla in their territories.

"This has led to many massacres and revenge killings of the peasant leaders, yet these communities are determined to continue in spite of the high price exacted for refusing to take part in the war.

"Without funding from anyone, we have managed to hold the first month-long course in the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, Antioquia, in August 2004, attended by 30 leaders from eight communities from all corners of the country. The 'subjects' were food self-sufficiency and organic agriculture, compost making, natural pesticides, healthy cooking, and the philosophical aspects of resistance. There was also plenty of theatre, music and alcohol-free fun. It was a resounding success and the leaders who attended have now taught gardening and compost-making in their home communities.

"One of the reasons we were able to run such a course in the midst of the ever-worsening war is that we were constantly accompanied by volunteers from the Peace Brigades International and the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

"We have planned four courses in different parts of the country for the year 2005 covering, in addition to food production and the legal and philosophical aspects of the Resistance:

1. Education: as state education in Colombia bears little or no relevance to country people and their lives and goals, this course will be about evolving a new kind of education.

2. Health: Due to the ever-worsening civil war here, vast sections of Colombian country people now have no access to drugs - the Army and paramilitary forces won't let people take medicines to their communities as they say they are for the guerrilla army. (This is actually a means of pressuring people to leave their homelands and migrate to join the misery belts of refugees growing daily around the cities so that their land is up for grabs by the big landowners.) This course will teach people how to use natural remedies where possible, plus basic first aid techniques and midwifery.

These courses will be repeated in each of the far-flung communities to prevent centralization and to encourage and support people whose daily lives take place in the midst of a civil war raging around them.

"We can't solve the problems we have today by thinking the way we did when we created them."

Albert Einstein

Reporting from the latest of these peasant 'university' gatherings in San Jose, which lasted four days, Anne writes:

I got here very late last night after 23 hours on buses - there were many landslides on the main roads necessitating detours. At the night stop before the final leg of the journey to La Union, the country area where the course was to be held, I found myself sharing a room with a young woman and her lovely little one-year-old girl. The young woman was behaving somewhat strangely, didn't want to talk to me and was hiding behind her hair. I pushed myself to ask questions and it turned out she was on the run, having been lifted by the army last year, accused of being a guerrillera. She was forced to lie about her community, saying there were guerrilla-collaborators, by being beaten up by the army and threatened that they would take her baby away. Then they sent her to what the Government likes to call their 'Reinsertion' programme for ex-guerrilleros, which is actually just a house full of other girls, with no food supplied, so she got work selling trivia at traffic lights, stayed at it for six months, then bolted.

She is the cousin of the man whose family had been destroyed by that hand grenade in August (see last 2 Green Letters). He was there and very cool with her, as obviously she did betray her people. However, she had later retracted all she had been forced to say and made public declarations that she'd been under duress. I thought 'good for her' for making a run for it and sort of took her under my wing.

The next day as we were passing through the checkpoint between Apartado and San Jose, which is where the soldiers and paras are most aggressive and where many locals have been murdered, they started asking for identity cards. I could see she was ready to bolt for the forest as she was shaking and sweating, so I said loudly in front of the soldiers that her baby was looking poorly from all that darrhoea she'd been having, and said 'let's go and find a loo.' So we did, thus avoiding the ID check as we waited in the door of a nearby campesino house till the passengers were getting back into the jeeps. Later I heard her family have accepted her back and the community is getting her legal help.

The Gathering

Sleeping with Nuns

Tale of Two Bishops

One day, I walked into a fierce argument between one of the nuns and a big black Chocoano man. She was nearly in tears of rage about his accusation that San Jose is too radical and gave him a list of times when the bishop has not supported them and how he fondly calls the paramilitary chiefs his 'muchachitos' ('my little lads') and preaches forgiveness of their hideous crimes. In the end the big black man conceded that the bishop was making a big mistake.

Fare Problems

The Night of the Candles

I am crying just thinking about the power of this simple ceremony spent amongst a hundred brave people who have lost hundreds more of their friends and families, often in the most awful circumstances imaginable. Many of the local San Jose people I had known as happy, pushy, determined people began to list members of their families. One young lad of about 18, very shy but a good leader-to-be, had had his mother, father and sisters killed in front of him. Another told of how when he was 13, on a country path, his two uncles were shot in front of him, and he was beaten up by the Army. He told me later that his nightmares never stop.

The worst story of all was told by a man from Catatumbo near the Venezuelan border who told of two of his friends, leaders in their community, buried alive by the paramilitaries and how people were forced to stand and watch while the paras threw earth over them and laughed as they watched them wriggle and the earth move as they struggled before suffocating.

How can any of this be cured? I don't even want to believe that it is possible that human-beings could act like this. I talked of our boys of course, and also began to try and talk about how I felt on hearing what other people have gone through and lost and how much I respect their attitudes to keep fighting and not give up, but I could hardly speak for crying.

Afterwards lots of people came and sat around me and hugged me. It was really the first time that I have just felt upset, rather than mainly angry and guilty about our boys being killed. I couldn't stop crying silently for hours amongst the people, everyone just let me, no-one tried to stop me.

The Trujillo Massacres

In spite of many condemnations of the State and their responsibility for the massacres, the complicity of the Army, and the killing of witnesses, the government has done nothing about this festering evil at all, and the area is more narco than ever, full of coca fields and a private narco airstrip that the Army pretend they don't see. The small group of people fighting for justice also has to combat the attitudes of many neighbours who say 'forget it'. I have condensed what the girl told me a thousandfold and have not communicated a fraction of the horror of her story, the tortures and dismemberment of the victims. When she finished telling us all this during the first day when we were doing introductions, everyone in the group just wanted to go on to the next story. I objected, saying that one cannot listen to this kind of horror story and then just go on to the next one. One man, Juan, tried to push me to give up, saying we had no time. I said, tough luck, we'll make time, the others finally agreed with me, so I got each person to give the girl their reactions. She herself is a little dolly bird and not reactive emotionally, but others talked of their anger at nothing ever being done about anything and feeling overwhelmed by so many horror stories and not knowing what to do. Even Juan, after he got over his huff, talked very humanly about his fears and the impossibility of listening and taking it all in. It is understandable that everyone is scared of getting lost and bogged down in the morass of such big and impossible feelings, and this is where we will be able to help therapeutically if they let us, which I think after a little resistance, they will.

A young girl from the National University then instantly offered to be the group 'secretary', making a resume of our experiences. She is a little brown mouse-like creature, but very confident for her age. She made a quick resume of all we had said, left out all the important points, communicated the rest in heady university language designed to make massacres sound like picnics and thus drained the strength and meaning of anything that had been said. I was at explosion point and with an encouraging glance from the priest, Javier, who had obviously noticed this, I got up and said that that was a bit quick and superficial and then I talked properly about Trujillo and also about how we handle therapy amongst ourselves in our community. Then I offered the floor to the girl to answer, but she didn't accept, but Juan got up and talked of the massacres of his fellow trade unionists and we rescued the disaster a bit. Afterwards, the girl kept out of my way. I was quite happy with this arrangement as I was furious with her, as that kind of heady cutoffness is very violent. Yet she is just a green kid who's been taught to talk like that. No-one else at the group did, as they have escaped the curse of education generally and the lawyers amongst them are too aware to behave like that. But there is still a huge problem with words and the downplaying of all that has happened to these folk and millions more like them.

Para farce

We all stared at one another in shock and disgust. This was the man who heads the forces that have killed six members of just this one tiny group I was with that night. None of us knew what to say, until a young man finally broke the silence, saying that when his uncles were killed, he thought a lot about joining the guerrilla and getting revenge, but could see that in the long run, that would only bring more problems to his family, so he went to live in Medellin, but there he was called a guerrilla because he is from San Jose, and then his brother was killed, so he came back to work for peace within his community.

I cursed and swore and wished President Uribe and his hired killers the worst of bad luck. The 'mother' of this group, a beautiful Indian woman, whose first son was shot by the paras in one of the San Jose massacres, had turned to stone and couldn't utter a word. The next morning as I was leaving, she finally talked to me with tremendous passion and dignity and said that people had said to her when she had another baby after the murder of her eldest son, that that would replace the one killed, but that nothing could ever replace what they had taken from her, and she broke down crying. I sat with her and made her herb tea.

Thank you for reading this and editing it and sending it out to other people who will read it and feel something of the immense depth of evil and lies that is happening here in Colombia, against the most vulnerable of people. I think I would die quickly of cancer if I had to keep it all inside me. None of this ever comes out publicly in Colombia, where everyone is on serious overload already and has no space for more horrors. I always knew the State media lie, but never realized exactly to what degree. Anne

Visiting Prisons - A reflection of the complicated Rainbow that is Colombia

Here are Anne's accounts of her latest two prison visits:

Sept. 26th 2004: On arrival, I was welcomed by an ELN (National Liberation Army) airplane hijacker! . Gerardo, whom I had come to visit, had to wait until I arrived before being brought in to the visiting patio in handcuffs. When the cuffs were taken off, he greeted me like a friendly dog that hasn't seen anyone for months. He brought a pillow slip full of all kinds of fruit and granola and milk that his cell mates had helped him get together when they knew I was coming. We put two blankets on a bit of grass and sat in the sun for a while.

The atmosphere was very nice, it was the first long visit - 6 hours instead of two - since the prisoners' strike to demand extra visiting time, so there were lots of wives, babies and kids, happy couples under piles of blankets and a general air of picnic. First of all, Gerardo wanted to know how the girls are, and during the morning several guerrilleros who have met both Katie and Laura and heard the CD came over to ask about them and about relationships within the community: it seems we have a commune extension in Patio 5 of Combita prison! Gerardo has no family at all and when he phones me, he always asks about everyone and I tell him bits and pieces of gossip, and he obviously tells the rest of his fellow prisoners. As we chatted, I noticed as I had with Irish Jim a long time ago, that all the men who have been moved to Combita from La Modelo look much better physically, as they live outside, the air is good and the food is plain and simple.

Several guerrilleros came to ask me about our farm in Icononzo that was taken from us by the murdering FARC commander who eventually ordered the 'execution' of our boys. I had talked to Gerardo about this and had asked him to see if any of the FARC commanders in the prison can send word to their superiors to say our land must be left alone.

One man, from a defunct guerrilla group said to a FARC man that the FARC are creating a counter revolution not a revolution, and the FARC man conceded, saying: Yes, yes, 'muchos errores' - we have made many mistakes, and looking really embarrassed. An ELN man (from the National Liberation Army - the second largest guerrilla group in Colombia) said I should take the title deeds of the farm to a bank, take out a loan, not pay it back, and let the bank take the land. A clever idea, but I don't think I could go through with it! I thanked him for trying to help.

The head of the FARC group in this prison will be phoning me to see what he can do about our lost land - that'll be something interesting for the telephone tappers in the State Attorney's office to listen to, they must be bored since Jim stopped ringing me. The prisoners told me about the strike they had held, which included demands regarding grievances such as bad food, the fact that rich narcos can get three long visits a week as the prison Director is a friend of theirs and they pay him well, whereas ordinary prisoners were getting just one short visit every two weeks; also that they are given 1 toilet roll and 1 bar of soap once every 6 months! And they want the prison director sacked because he is a narco paramilitary - the prison guards agree with the strikers and want him sacked too, as he humiliates them to please the narc