El Grito: the Cry of the Colombian
People
By Jim Harney
I generally don't stand behind
a podium. I usually walk around, but I was told that that they want
to record it for posterity's sake.
I want to begin by saying how honored I am to be here. How honored
I am to be with this community. How honored I am to be with human beings
who are willing to risk. Let me move on the risk. Risk!
When I say risk, I am basically talking about the risk of coming together
and being in community. That is dangerous business. For people
who have taken it seriously throughout the years it has meant their lives
to come together in community. Because in the world that we are living
in right now there is an almost total violation of any aspect of
community. It stands almost diametrically opposed to community.
The title of the talk is El Grito: the Cry of the Colombian People.
And the El Grito, the clamor, the cry of people throughout the world is getting
louder and louder. And because people aren't risking, aren't coming
together in community, that cry is absolutely muffled, if heard at all, simply
because the kind of world we live in prioritizes the market. All that
matters is the market, and as long as that is the priority in the world we
live in, as long as as that is what defines us, as long as that is what enables
us to stand tall, we are in trouble.
And the trouble continues as long as all of us remain separate. So
when I see you all here altogether, making a deliberate decision to be in
community I say the battle is half won. Because in community we're in a position
where we can redefine who we are and juxtapose ourselves to the hidden hand
of the market. The hidden hand of the market is what always defines
what goes on in the world. Leave it to the invisible hand of
the market, keep the state out of everything and things will be okay we're
told. And the hidden hand of the market has a clenched fist and it's
pummeling billions of human beings throughout the planet at this present
moment.
When I was sitting on the pew trying to get enough guts to come up here and
to share a few reflections with you, a torrent of energy moved thought me,
a torrent of memory: running with Salvadorans in the mountains; five-hundred
pound bombs going off; shaking the hands of Bishop Oscar Anulfo Romero, he
was a bishop who was murdered in El Salvador in 1980; running with human
beings who were at his funeral; hiding with people in the mountains in Guatemala,
who were running for the decade of the eighties from a military force that
was bent on extirpating them, wiping them out, and the brutality was so enormous,
so enormous, so enormous that the Truth Commission of the UN said that the
United States was "complicit with genocide."
So with all that memory I see it as a challenge to storytell, because we're
all storytellers and the story that we tell get much more interesting, much
more exciting, when we expand and try to deal with the hurt that we're facing
in the world. And right now there is lots of hurt. And for the
first time in decades, we as a nation are dealing with an enormous amount
of hurt, we're practically in trauma, and rightly so, when six thousand human
beings perish within a matter of seconds.
So it is an amazing opportunity to be in community and to look one another
in the eye and with this new consciousness to try to coin language to deal
with it, to grapple with it, to ask hard questions. What does it mean to
be here in community? How does it push our imagination? How does
El Grito, the cry of humanity enter into our discourse? Enter into
how ability to imagine a different world?
And one of the reasons that I ended up going to Colombia is I wanted to be
in the thick of the terror. You say: well he's a pretty masochistic
old bloat. But when you're with the people on the bottom, when you're
with human beings suffering, no matter where it be, whether it be in this
community, whether it be in New York at the present moment, whether it be
in Cincinnati when human beings were out in the streets rioting because human
beings were murdered simply because of their color, something profound happens.
And I had to watch that in Bogota, Colombia, wondering what in God's name
is going on in Cincinnati. And at the same time living in a gated world
in Bogota where blocks are cordoned off, you can't even get into the place
without going through security guards: this is the world we live in.
Some would say that it is a product of globalization, the predominance of
the market spreading all around the world where there are economic meltdowns
going in Asian, in Mexico, in Argentina, in Brazil, in Europe, in Russia,
everything is falling apart economically. And people are hurting.
And human beings have died because they are coining language, a politics
and when I talk about politics, I'm talking about a very real spirituality
that runs right through our bodies. It sparks the imaginative capabilities
to stand right smack in the middle of horror and deal with it, not run from
it, not hide from it. Do that, and gosh, we can stand high, we can
stand tall.
And I was with people in Colombia doing that, with Afro Colombians up in
the northern part of the country. What an amazing experience to go into a
paradise, a six hour boat ride and not encounter another boat coming down
the river. All of a sudden getting off a boat in the Cacarica Basin
and coming into this small community called "Nuevo Dia" - New Day - people
using language to kind of focus where they want to go with their lives, where
they want to go as a community. And children coming up to me and greeting
me, and laughing and playing with me. I felt that I knew the children
for years. And a whole bunch of them accompany me to a hut where I
was going to stay the night. And I stay with four internationalists
who were there to provide some kind of security for a thousand Afro
Colombians. Afro Colombians make up ten million of thirty-three million
people in Colombia. As a people they are the ones who are hurt the
worst as a result of forced migration, being uprooted from their homes by
paramilitaries.
I get into the hut; somebody looks at me and says we're in a state of emergency
right now. I breathe deep. I listen. Paramilitaries may
come into the village. Let me give you an idea of what I mean when
I say paramilitaries. They are linked with the Colombian army, have
been linked with the Colombian army for a long while.
The whole idea of having paramilitaries in Colombia emanated from the United
States: War College people from the Pentagon going down in 1963 and urged
the Colombian military to cultivate paramilitaries in the countryside so
that they can wipe out people who began to think and to make stands, to try
to organize, deal with the systemic injustice that was plaguing the
people.
The same kind of thing that went on in Argentina with the help of the United
States. The US brought Argentines into Honduras and then trained people
in Honduras how to disappear people. The Argentines were experts at
it, because fifteen thousand people perished in Argentina in the late seventies,
early eighties. They went into El Salvador, worked with the Salvadoran
Army in disappearing people. And this is the kind of world that most
of the poor in Latin America have to deal with. They take it as a mode
of being. It's part of their being to deal with it as a people.
So the notion of solidarity for the poor is a matter of life or death.
So a Salvadoran woman comes up to the United States and joins a group of
North Americans, forgive me for talking about two words in Spanish, one of
them is the verb form SER and it means part of ones being, and then there
is another verb form ESTAR, it means to be also, but it means that I was
over here, I was over there, I'm always changing. So the Salvadoran
woman looks at me and says we have to deal with the notion of solidarity
and view it as part of our being, so it isn't hear today and gone tomorrow
its part of SER.
Rest assured that the forces we're dealing with in terms of the economy and
that are prioritized in our own country and around the world, is to crush
any sense of being in solidarity with human beings. Because the market
as we know it cannot tolerate a people of hope. Hope and the market
don't go well together. That's why they murdered Oscar Anulfo Romero
in Central America, they murdered six Jesuits, they murdered thousands of
human beings throughout Central America to allow the market to flourish.
So in Central America people are saying that they are hurting even more than
during war years. And the same system that oppresses the poor of Central
America is now trying to be imposed on the people of Colombia.
I ended up going to an amazing town to witness the terror. And when
someone came to Bogota and said that they were opening up an office in
Berrancabermeja, an oil-port town in the middle of the country, I looked
at them and started to breath deep because I was going to be going there.
Paramilitaries practically control the entire town of four hundred thousand
people. Breathing deep, I finally ended up going to the town. And always
questioning myself how am I going to use my cameras? How am I going
to move in the streets? How am I going to take photographs with death
squad people everywhere, and I don't even know who they are? And people
dying daily in that town. As a town Berrancabermeja was the epitome,
the example of civil society. And when I talk about civil society I'm
talking about human beings standing together as a community of informed people,
nourishing a spirituality that links them with the earth, and with the ability
to speak publicly as a people. Colombians are doing that in Berrancabemeja,
an oil port town, the largest oil port in the entire country, it refines
most of the oil. The people who work at Ecopetro, the state owned oil
company were able to organize and the paramilitaries came and most of the
organizers left for fear of their lives.
So I walked around the town of Berranca and I talked with faith
communities. And what do they have to deal with? They have
to deal with trauma. Because they're seeing people in their own communities
murdered. And it isn't as though when someone dies and the whole community
comes together. No, when someone dies, it's as though nothing
happened. And someone looks at me and asks why is that no one is coming
together to stand up and say something. Because of impunity.
The word impunity is a word everybody uses in Latin America. It is
a word that came out Argentina. Because Generals would go about murdering
people. And as the carnage was so intense in Argentina, David Rockefeller
saying the economy in Argentina hasn't been better.
Impunity in Central America: military people able to kill everybody and never
be brought to trial. In Guatemala the same way. It's part of
life. So no one goes to the police when something tragic happens to
them, because they know it is pointless. And in the thick of it, and
this is the mystery of it all, it brings home to me as a community of people
concerned about creating a beloved community where we can be present to one
another, Beauty flowers. Life flowers. When we jump into the
tension between death and life the best in all of us comes about. The
best touches our flesh, and God don't we all need it to touch our flesh because
we're all going around with a hell of a lot of tension. And when
it touches our flesh we're in a much better place to look at the world in
a different light.
So in Beranca, this oil port town, on a monthly basis some communities meet
with psychiatrists and they deal with trauma. I worked in a women's
trauma center. And as a collective in this trauma center we had a
psychologist who worked us because of a tragedy that occurred. I could
immediately relate to what my Colombian friends were going through.
I want to come back and say it is a gift to be here. It is a gift to
be here. It is a gift first of all to have someone listen to me.
And we all need someone to listen to us. Generally, those who travel
throughout the majority world, and when I say the "majority world'.
I use it instead of saying the third world because the third world is a phrase
that means absolutely nothing, it doesn't help us come to grips with
anything. The majority world, a world that incapsules most of humanity
who are suffering, when people travel into that part of the world whether
it be in our own country or in other parts of the world something amazing
happens. And when we come back into our own culture it is very difficult
to talk about it, because people can't comprehend what it is all about.
Since the 11th of September I've noticed openings that I never
dreamt would ever be possible in terms of being able to talk about the
commonality of hurt. All of a sudden language, stories are in a much
better place to be listed to. In my family, all of my brothers in laws
it was understood that religion, politics you don't talk about, and for years
they've loathed my politics. I went to a weeding not to long ago and
I walk into the kitchen and What's the subject that is going to be talked
about, and my partners Nancy says to me, now Jim, just listen and low and
behold they started talking about the 11th. They started
talking about the 11th. And they even listened to me talk
about the 11th. I never dreamt that it would ever take
place.
The people of Colombia at this moment in time, prior to the 11th
held the front burner as the foreign policy issue, and in that part of the
world there are people celebrating; there are people reciting poetry, people
singing, there are even small radio stations out in the middle of nowhere
as in the case of Cacarica. Between songs a disk jockey would say:
"Cacarica El mundo de los excluidos y para los excludios." - A world of the
excluded and for the excluded of the world.
Exclusion is a word that I've heard so often over the last decade.
During the eighties and seventies I never heard the word. It's much
more intense for a human being to experience. Much more intense than
poverty. Because when you're talking about exclusion you're basically
saying you don't count, you're invisible, and you don't exist. And
because they don't exist in a certain part of the world it has been defined
that they don't exist you can dump thousands and thousands of poison over
them. It makes no difference at all what they eat, what they drink
and what happens to them.
Just think of a community like Portland when it started to deal with Monsanto's
using Roundup, that the chemical, the poison they use in Colombia to eliminate
coca crops. And they used it in Portland to eliminate weeds on the
sidewalks and the people were up in arms. So much so that the city
stopped using it. A wonderful accomplishment for the people of
Portland. But what an impoverishment of imagination not to extend that
criticism to US foreign policy going on in Colombia. I think that is
the challenge open to all of us. And I think that is the challenge
open to all of us to develop the skills, the imaginative capabilities, and
I think your all coming here today is part of that process of learning how
to learn how to deal with that. And I want to celebrate that with you.
I'm not sure how I'm doing with time.
Lese, talked about a camera. And I never believed that I would ever
be carrying a camera. I carried a camera with me when I went to witness
the terror in Colombia. And I want to say that on the other side of
the terror there are human beings dealing with it. So I don't want
to leave you with as though it's all terror. I loved the country.
My second time there since 1973 when I first went there. A young ordained
Catholic priest just out of the Seminary and walking around the streets and
asking people what did they think of Camilo Torres? Camilo Torres was
a sociologist-priest who shook everybody up in the country by going into
the mountains. He decided to struggle with a weapon in hand against
the government in that country. He was later killed. Thirty years
later I ended up coming back and going to Putumayo, it's where US foreign
policy focuses all of its aid for the most part, training advisors.
We kick two million dollars a day into that county. Very little of
it goes to education, very little goes to the juridical system, very little
goes to helping people come with alternative crops to coca.
And I ended up going to an indigenous community called La Isla. And
a mother showed me her baby covered with sores from head to foot. And
another woman showed me another baby covered with sores, and then says the
pediatrician says that he is not sure that was due to the poison. But
lesions on the other child were definitely lesions were the result of the
Monsanto poison. And I was with Witness for Peace at the time.
It was a two-week stay. Witness for Peace was able to get a hundred
people together to move all around that country, people representing different
faith communities throughout the US. I was one of the finest two weeks
that I had spent in many, many a year. Just the ability, the whole
notion of developing a community, learning how to trust one another, learning
how to speak one another in a caring sensitive way, learning as a community
how to process stuff. So the night after I saw that young child,
Christiana, was here name, we ended up going to a process group, every night
there was process. And when I was thinking of going I was thinking
of process, and I said to them if there is no process I'm not interested
in any of this. So we processed it, everybody talked about what impacted
them during the day. I say looking at Christina, taking her photograph
was the hardest part of the day for me. I started talking and I burst
into tears, and I wailed. And I felt so embarrassed. Tears pouring
down my eyes, because not only seeing Christina, I got flashbacks. When you
see trauma it kicks trauma off everywhere. We're human beings who cherish
memory. And memory is a big part of who we are and where we go and
what we do, and what we say in our lives. And when I saw that child
a whole torrent of memory gushed out and it landed on Geronimo, I wailed
more. Geronimo, I met in Southern Chiapas, the poorest state of Mexico
that borders Guatemala, there is a war going on there now. I went to
the community of Acteal where forty-five human beings, most women and children,
were murdered by paramilitaries. You'll always hear paramilitaries.
It is a phrase that everybody knows there. Here, often times people
will say what do you mean by paramilitaries. No one has to ask that
question in Latin America, and especially in Acteal. When I walked
into that community I took a photograph of a young boy, five-years old, with
four fingers cut off, with a bullet wound in his elbow, and to save his arm
they had to cut the fingers off. And shortly before going to Acteal
and browsing around San Cristobal I like to spend time in bookstores.
I am a professional browser and I came up with a book by some liberation
theologians. It was on the notion of sacrifice and what that is about
and idolatry. And they took that notion of idolatry and sacrifice,
and much to their credit and their creative imagining they were able to plunk
right in the thick of economic discourse, economic conversation and then
they were able to say that most of humankind are being sacrificed in order
to allow the market to function. Because at that moment I was in Chiapas,
months earlier on Wall Street people were in jubilation popping champaign
bottles because of the bonuses, because of the market, because of the profits
that were soaring to the North. And in Acteal massacre, it happened
three days before Christmas. But yet, I considered it an amazing community
in a dirt-floor hut church as they reclaimed it a year later a hundred people
walked into it. This is where people were on a fast. And to sit
in that church and to hear people talking about slavery. This is what
they talked about as they reclaimed the church. They had to do away
with slavery. They were considered almost like slaves, non-beings,
and non-persons in Mexico for years. And then, having to deal with
the debt, canceling the debt that hung over them, it meant so much violence
in their communities. Now when I talk about Acteal, Central America,
Colombia and what happened on the 11th in New York and DC it is
all part of the same package. It is human suffering, it is our own
suffering, it's the suffering of our neighbors, it's the suffering of children
going into schools trying to make sense out of it, it's the kind of suffering
that my partner sees when she walks into a school and sees kids off the wall,
can concentrate. She sees a kid walk into a principal's office and
wreck the place. It's all part of the same package.
And when we deal with that package. I don't have too many guarantees
these days. But let me tell you this, I'll guarantee one thing and I'll put
my money on it, what little I have, and what I will put my money on is that
you deal with that package, when you walk out of here you are going to be
alive, you're going to celebrate, your going to feel something running through
your bodies that you've never felt before.
I'm going to close with a couple of words from this incredible woman in the
backdrop, the backwater of El Salvador shared with me years ago. As
she shared it, I could hear five hundred pound bombs going off, and
see A-37 jets that my country sent down to El Salvador, and we were in a
dirt floor hut and those who could read shared some scripture with about
five people, one of them a mother breast feeding her baby and the A-37 jets
came in, they move like lightening dropping bombs. And the advantage,
people would say to me about the jets is that when they drop the bombs they're
not accurate. The disadvantage is they catch you by surprise, and by
God they do. And then the woman brought me out of the hut, and as the
bombs were going off in the valley she pointed to the planes coming in and
she said they come from a part of the world where people believe in a God
of death. We believe in a God of the living, and when you believe in
the God of the living, she said you end up doing things that you never dreamt
yourself capable of doing. And that woman in point of fact actually
saved my life one time when I was leaving. It was an area where you
had to be snuck into and you had to be snuck out and if you got picked up
by the military you were in trouble. And I ended up surrounded by seventy
military people and having to talk to a Coronal. I was on a bus hoping
that they wouldn't notice me with another North American coming out of the
area. The military stopped the bus and a soldier pointed the finger
at us and said get off. And as I approached the front of the bus my
legs started to give out. I started to panic. I lost almost all
control of my body. And all I could think about was going before some
military official, in the middle of the nowhere being interrogated.
And as I was about to get off the bus, I had less than thirty seconds to
pull it together and something remarkable happened. I remember the
words of the peasant woman: believe in a God of the Living and you can do
things that you never dreamt yourself capable of doings. All of a sudden
I felt that I owned the place, all of a sudden a surge of energy swelled
my body. I told my story…to make a long story short I was able
to get out alive. I would just ask us to pause for just a moment and
think of the words of that peasant woman in the middle of no where, who has
no power, doesn't exist, is less than human simply because she has nothing
and doesn't belong to the market. Thank you.