THEY WILL NOT WIPE OUT THE SEED

[Exerpt from The Heart of the War in Colombia, by Constanza Ardila Galvis, Latin America Bureau (Research & Action) Ltd., 1998. Also published by CedaVida in Colombia as Guerreros Ciegos: El conflicto armado en Colombia, 1998.]

My first displacement of many was terrible. I lost my friends, my companeros and without them life meant nothing. I was never attached to material things and saw death as a respite. If I die, I thought, they should buy me a coffin and sing a Julio Jaramillo song and if they can't then they should put me in a black plastic bag and throw me into a hole. In spite of these feelings I began to move around to escape death. I was in two towns before coming to where I live now and the army found me in both places. I had to hide, run away, leave everything and start again. The hatred against those who persecute and murder us kept me in the struggle. I didn't stop going to funerals, although they tried to convince me not to go and I repeated, "there will be others and they will not wipe out the seed."

When I had nowhere else to hide, I crossed the country to Cesar to begin a new empty life, far away from everyone. I'd gone back to my husband and together we migrated to find new opportunities. We rented a tenement room. The children were still very small. The owner wouldn't let them out of the room to play in the corridors or the patio and they only left the room to go to school. I began to lose my mind, imprisoned between those four filthy walls and I vented my anger, exacerbated by my powerlessness, onto the children.

My nights were tortuous. I barely slept and I watched as thieves killed people by the drug addicts' small shacks behind the tenement. They hung them, strangled them, knifed them and I was helpless faced with so many deaths. Each night I felt a different torment and understood the fear I'd been so proud of not feeling. I was so frightened I asked myself if blood or fear ran through my veins and if my brain existed or if it had been replaced by fear. I thought I had managed fear in such a way that we were old friends and therefore I would never feel its symptoms. During those nights, I asked myself: will they kill me? Will I survive this confine- ment? Will I overcome this misery? At that time I was more afraid than in all my years in the clandestine struggle.

From then on, I could describe all of the symptoms of fear, I'm reliving them now as I tell you about my life,' she said and for the first time her eyes filled with tears.

She remembered how her throat had closed and her neck tensed, her womb went numb and her arm hurt intensely, her sphincters relaxed, her pupils dilated and her lips, exhausted and dry, gave her away each time one of the neigh- bourhood addicts passed by. Laura had been born into a neighbourhood where you grow up giving instead of receiving and this place devastated her. Mad- ness showed in her eyes, revealing an unmanageable rage, her hands trembled and when she saw someone murdered, she fought with her husband and with herself:

"They're giving him a thrashing, they're going to kill him!" she'd shout.

"Yes they are," would be Manolo's response.

"Is it possible that no one will intervene?"

"It is."

"But everyone who lives here can hear his screams. Are they all deaf?"

"No, they're used to it."

"We should do something!"

"We can't."

"Yes we can! It would be enough to go and point a gun at them."

"They would report us."

"I can't stand it!"

"Try to stand it."

These conversations drove her mad and she poured her frustration over the children. When they didn't obey, she felt powerless again and destroyed anything within her reach. She broke things over the children's heads, hands, shoulders and legs.

'When these symptoms became routine, Manolo took me to the doctor. My physical pains, my fits and my bursts of rage were diagnosed as a step towards madness. I was more frightened of myself than of others and decided I had to get better, whatever it took. I left, found another room and went by the party's office to offer my services. I would take no more nonsense nor obey blindly. I signed up to a housing programme and participated in a land occupation. To deal with my apathy, I built a hut with planks and plastic sheeting. I began to accept I wouldn't go back to my land and I should rebuild my life. They evicted us a number of times, until our obstinacy forced the owners to negotiate with the housing cooperative. They legalised the occupation by buying the land cheap. There were no services, public transport didn't reach us and the heat under the plastic sheeting was unbearable.

It took me a few years to make friends, to trust anyone again and understand city people's characters. I yearned for the extended family of peasant activists: the comrades who risked their lives without protest, the smiles of the children with a guerrilla they admired, the families fighting for their neighbourhood and their party. The city activists didn't impress me. They were undisciplined, not as brave as our children and they ran like rabbits at the first sign of the intelli- gence services. They were more concerned about their jobs than the struggle and they didn't act unless they received privileges in return. No one sold the paper and they didn't pay the quota which I paid selling ice-creams, as I was unemployed. They didn't form brigades to go fly posting and, above all, they talked too much. I realised that without the work of the peasants supporting the party, they would be a long way from the positions they held and from the deals they made with the governors, mayors and corrupt officials.' Laura showed her irritation and her hostility was apparent in every phrase.

'My comrades were willing to die for their country and kill for it too. As good fighters, we dreamt of first class funerals as our country's heroes, like those we'd read about when we studied the lives of patriots or revolutionaries in other countries. When someone died and they had to be buried in a hole with rubbish and manure, we respected them neverthe- less. I know we all dreamt of being admired and of the day when the revolution would be victorious. Our dream was to see ourselves in the Central Square with party flags, smiles on our lips and singing the International. Our hearts needed nothing more than this comfort, to enable us to die happy for our country and our people.

As I'd been trained in rural areas I didn't really understand the labour struggle. The occupation of land for housing was the only thing which resembled my previous life and I remade my nest there. Finally there was light amid the darkness of my dementia. I worked for the women's movement and was able to share my life of displacement with others. In 1992, there was the biggest peasant exodus I'd seen.' Laura paused, her whole body ached.

They had a short break to stretch their tense bodies. On their return, Laura wasn't smiling and she didn't serve the snacks as usual. She sat down, straightened her skirt over her knees, took out a handkerchief, put it on the table and then she practically shouted:

'I'm going to go on, companeros. When I rejoined operations we had to support the families who arrived traumatised by the killings. The families would split up during the journey and the children were abandoned with relatives or friends in the evacuation. The conflict took on dimensions we could never have imagined. Not one newspaper told the truth - they wrote about the Patriotic Union finishing off the peace process. I thought, of course, how could the comrades in the mountains think these city types were going to understand and protect a movement of the poor? They don't know rich people's greed and arrogance. Even when they apologise they're disdainful and even when they're in an uncomfortable situation they're arrogant. One way or another, they get what they want. They blamed all the problems on the poor, but they never saw the magnitude of the genocide and the newspapers hid it. They said there were guerrillas in the Patriotic Union, the labour movement was infiltrated with subversives and the Communist Party obeyed the armed organisation's command, but while these discussions were going on, three thousand five hundred leaders were killed and they still ignored it. The paramilitary groups carried out the dirty work the army couldn't do and no one saw or heard anything. Only now, ten years later, are people beginning to ask themselves what happened then.

The best union leaders fell, councillors and deputies were murdered on the street, or in their own homes, or in the capital of the republic. Anyone who reported a murder was identified as a guerrilla in the guise of a democrat and if anyone spoke of peace and laying down arms, they were disloyal comrades and traitors to the working class. Those who fled, terrified by their brush with death, always felt guilty. If they were silent they were accomplices to the system and ended up being persecuted by their own people, because, as they said: the working class doesn't forgive. No one knew anything else but lies and you began to see everyone had two versions.' Everyone looked guilty, hearing Laura's words.

They knew this story. New leaders took the place of those who had fallen and, in a few days, they were being replaced because they had to leave or were killed. They knew the killing reached incalculable ferocity and the newspapers said nothing. They knew people were dis- placed from one city to another and many fell to the death squads who were paid handsomely for their murders by the narcotraffickers' alliance with members of the armed forces.

'They were paid three hundred thousand pesos for each victim. Families arrived from Santander, Bolivar, Antioquia and other departments. Some women cried for their dead husbands and others looked for the dis- appeared. The older children took on the running of the home, working in construction, badly paid, shamed by their ignorance and with revenge whispering in their chests. The smallest children forgot their father's face and showed signs of autism while others had terrible depressions or fits as if they were anticipating what their future would hold. No one knew what to do.

The bitter life stories I heard in those months introduced me to people who say they're on your side when all they want is to screw you. Such duplicity led me to suffer the worst crisis of my life, a crisis of conscience. I asked myself if I'd been right to believe in the war and the questions I never thought I'd confront haunted me. The doubts I never thought I'd have tormented me and made me change from a trusting activist to a demanding woman who didn't believe everything she was told.

I wondered whether those who hated arms and uniforms were right. Should I be working alongside those who maintained we lived in a culture of violence and we must build a culture of peace? Had I been wrong to love the war, to respect it, to implement It, to say it was the purpose of my life, that it ran through my veins and gave me life? Or had I been wrong to believe any intelligent and sentient person made war? No, damn it, no! Enraged, I protested that surviving and existing are worthy of the struggle also. Animals devour each other to defend the herd, the fish and the insects eat each other to survive as a species, therefore, I had not been mistaken all this time. But doubts returned every time I saw a mutilated hand, an orphaned child, a woman widowed at eighteen, or a pregnant mother whose child first opened his eyes when his father had just closed his forever. Humans are not animals - I repeated to myself - we are rational beings who know we can reason, who create and know we are creating, who destroy and know we are destroying, who kill and know we are killing. Our mind is capable of finding different solutions than those offered by nature.

I ran around trying to help anyway, and when I hadn't found a boarding school for a boy or a post as a domestic worker for a girl, another family would arrive, a worse case than the previous one. The party gave me new tasks and I carried them out, leaving my doubts to one side. But the deaths of my companeros in the city, whom I had finally learnt to love and respect, finished off my fighting spirit. In funeral after funeral I began reassess the phrase, "they will not wipe out the seed". It had become an empty phrase, faced with the contemptuous violence of those with power. Legal work won my heart, my resolution and my devotion.

Over time, I had regained my sanity and my fits of rage diminished until they disappeared. Working legally in peace projects was an effort for me, but I slowly got used to it. I'd still become desperate and my family bore the brunt of my outbursts. But I was moved by the displaced people who wrote with difficulty and made terrible spelling mistakes. They said they'd been to school, but they had rarely reached first grade of primary. The authorities asked for written proposals from peasants who had never read a book and they asked for documentation of forced displacement from people who had never before left their village. They were cast adrift in the chaos of the city. They'd never seen a transport terminal, a motorway, or an airport. To them, airplanes were huge birds which flew dead straight and which left behind a trail of smoke. They didn't know they could spend hours in a city getting from one place to another and that they should arrive on time to their meetings; they didn't think they had to dress differently to be respected. They ate food from the street which made them sick. They ran across the motorways and avenues, after they had waited for fifteen or twenty minutes for someone to let them pass, and they were terrified of dying like they'd seen dogs die on the country roads.

"Mother of God, what a city, oh, holy Virgin," they'd say, crossing themselves. Five hundred thousand inhabitants, two million inhabitants, seven million inhabitants. The buildings, the cathedrals, the shops, the warehouses, the bright street lights and roads and more roads. In them, the thunder of cars, bicycles, lorries, buses and crowds of people walking fast. No one could help them to find an address. They didn't use their hands to indicate how to get there, instead they said: "turn right for three blocks, then, turn left for five blocks, then, keep going to the roundabout, at the first traffic lights go straight on and then ask where number 4522 is". They don't understand traffic lights and they set off whether they were green, yellow or red. They take forever to get to a meeting and the authorities tell them to come back another day or send them on to another place. They steal from them, they tread on them, they push them, they don't let them on buses and many times they're left behind anxious and petrified at the bus stop. They lose the little money they have when they take the wrong bus and then they have to walk for miles. When they have a friend who has figured it out, they're told to take the one with the sign which reads: "Centre, Quiroga, San Rafael, Santa Maria, a green bus with yellow stripes, comadre, don't mix them up." But the buses rush past their eyes, without them being able to read even the first word. "This is worse than the war," they say a few days after their arrival, "how on earth did we think we could survive here when in the countryside the only problem was political violence."

The poor, such as ourselves, don't know that violence is born of ignorance and ignorance is born of the neglect the State has subjected us to because it doesn't consider us citizens, except at election time. They want us to be understanding when they say, "look companero, we have to forgive and find a new modus vivendi." "What's a modus vivendi, doctor?" "Well, it is the way of life here," "Oh, but I don't want to live in this chaos, doctor," "Think about it, you can't go back to your village."'