GREEN LETTER FROM COLOMBIA No. 61, August 25th 2003 "You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." (Jeannette Rankin, first woman elected to US Congress, 1917) (quote taken from Smallholder Magazine, Canada) *********** Five months since the last Green Letter, and a long journey in between - to the United States of America, invited by a gardening contact. Then on to Ireland for Mary's trial where the jury found it impossilbe to convict her as a criminal for damaging a US warplane, in spite of the judge's insistence. Nearly all the newspapers kept very quiet about this somewhat astonishing victory. Five weeks in America in the States of Maine and Massachussetts, green and rural to an amazing degree. I travelled with my 18 year old daughter Katie and we saw more trees than we'd ever seen in the Colombian forests. Whatever the US do abroad, they certainly look after themselves, their environment and their wildlife at home... squirrels running up lampposts, a deer walking past the kitchen window, a porcupine crossing the road, beaver dams, and trees, trees, everywhere. But in Boston town, piles of sleeping bodies of homeless people huddled in the doorways with night temperatures below freezing point .. we could have been in Bogota, especially as Spanish was often the main language we'd hear in the markets, amongst airport staff, on the buses.. In the quiet suburbs of Massachussetts, it was hard to imagine that a faraway nation was being invaded and slaughtered by these seemingly peaceloving people who are the world's most wellbehaved drivers .. but who seem to be labouring under a deep insecurity regarding their identity as the whole country was festooned with a forest of flags hanging outside every house, as if there was some doubt this was in fact America? A friend in the peace movement said she had displayed an anti-war sign in her car window, but that the threats coming from other drivers became so dangerous, she had to take it down. And one day after Iraq was invaded, we were shocked to see in monster capital letters in a shop window this message: CUBA NOW BUSH PLEASE Scary country. Scary because it seems so tranquil and beautiful. Exquisite wooden houses, immaculate gardens ... we didn't actually see any people in the streets, as no-one walks in America: our Southern-tuned eyes were used to seeing milling crowds of noisy laughing shouting people filling every inch of urban space night and day in Colombian towns ... here in America, not a soul. And definitely not a dog. Dogs are not allowed out .. nor presumably are children, as we never saw any. But we did see many horrificly obese people, who simply took our breath, as well as their own, away. People who could hardly walk. In Ireland, obesity is also a huge problem, but in America, it is off the scale. Used to the bony, wiry peasants of the South, we simply stared stunned at one another. Something has gone radically wrong in this country, to put it mildly. We went to the meetings of peace groups, spoke about Colombia, were moved by the age group of those attending .. up to 90 years of age; moved by their hopeless battle, by their determination and caring, and by the dreadful climate in which they have to function. In the end, the sense of unreality was too much for us, the bored, stiflingly cocooned lifestyles juxtaposed against the wreckage going on in Iraq. We got very depressed and were glad finally to get on even the tightly packed, cramped American aeroplanes run by badtempered staff, and to arrive, dazed, at Shannon airport where we were met by Mary who had obtained a special waiver of her bail conditions to be there at all. Whilst sitting chatting with us, she was greeted by a tall policeman in a very civil manner. "That's the detective who arrested me," she grinned when he'd passed by. *********** "The environment issue is more ominous than that of peace and war." - Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector (taken from New Leaves of the Vegan Movement for Compassionate Living) Ireland, where no wilderness is left, where the suicide rate, road fatalities, drug-taking and the number of children smoking soar each year, and where the country is now so Europeanized that anything 'Irish' is encapsulated in phoney facades for the tourist trade .. but where you can still laugh and speak your truth and get an honest response, where everyone openly shares their horror of the invasion of Iraq and where people are still refreshingly conspiratorial in their anti-Establishment, anti-authority attitudes. But oh! how I missed the raw day-to-day need to scrabble in the earth to produce our own vibrant free food, to awaken without the sound and smell of diesel engines in the harbour, to sleep without the constant accompaniment of public electric lighting. I helped my daughter Becky get rid of yet more unwanted possessions in preparation for her final take-off from Europe in our renovated wooden sailing boat, I started yet another vegetable garden ... and then homesickness for the mountains overcame me and forced me back to the dreadful airports and the insanity of air travel, back once again to where life is always people-sized, to a place for some reason we call the Third World, the only world where I feel like a human being. *********** The lovely lady in her 40s who came to sit next to me on the spacious Avianca plane in Miami immediately started chatting to me. As I roused myself out of my travel-induced stupour, I realized with a shock that she was the first person who had spoken to me on that long journey, discounting the hostile barked orders of endless airport officials or the begrudging air attendants who evidently believe vegetarians eat turkeys ... The panpipe music and relaxed atmosphere told me I had arrived. This was Colombia already. Within minutes, my lady companion had told me her lifestory. She said she lived in America because she couldn't stand Colombian men's attitudes to women and had found herself a North American husband through a marriage agency... And then, there we were, in the welcome hustle and bustle of Bogota airport, and my unhappy voyage into the smooth cool North was over. WHY WE ARE HERE (excerpt, by Robert Arthur Lewis, distributed at the WTO Seattle protests) What we want, money no longer recognizes Like the vitality of Nature, the integrity of work. We don't want cheaper wood, we want living trees. We don't want engineered fruit, We want to see and smell the fruit growing in our neighbourhoods. ... We are here to defend and honour What is real, natural, human and basic, against the rising tide of greed. We are here by the insistence of spirit And the authority of Nature.. I had by now been travelling for four days, with two nights spent 'sleeping' in airports and one on a Colombian bus. As I stepped down to the absolute silence of a fresh morning in the mountains I call home, I was assailed by the strong scent of wild mint and I breathed in the utterly pure air with something akin to shock: this was the first real air I'd breathed for weeks. Oh, the joy of feet, however weak and wobbly. A five hour walk ahead of me, I didn't care. The sun was just coming up and I never met a soul. Halfway home, I sat on rocks in a stream, drinking the pure water and wondering, still stunned, where I'd been and why ... an attempt to raise my voice against the latest round of wars, one more voice amongst a billion ignored voices. Now I had to heal, to remember what life is about. Feet in cold water, feet walking long country miles, feet slipping and sliding on mud. An exhausted body falling, rising, resting, continuing. Home, a riot of flowers and animal fragrances, a glut of produce to give away, an overgrown, luscious garden, delicious real work ahead. But first, sleep, long sleep, awakening only to the sound of rabbits (very noisy creatures in case you didn't know!), goats, chickens, hundreds of squeaking guinea pigs (our compost makers), the crackling of the kitchen wood-stove ... And a new baby. My daughter Alice's 2-month old son, not a replacement for my murdered grandson Tris, but certainly a sign that Life insists on continuing, despite all the horror and death. Alice, 'widowed' at 16 when her Colombian boyfriend Javier was killed alongside Tris, is now with a local farming lad and at 20 is an utterly delighted young mother. She is also having to fight strongly against the nonsensical local customs and taboos surrounding baby-rearing that people shower upon her. Some examples:- * You can't sit a baby up because its cheeks will get big and hang down. * You mustn't let a baby look up at the ceiling because it will get cross-eyed - so you have to paint its nose to make it look down! * A woman who has a period must not lift the baby as he will start to grunt (!?). * You must keep a hat on the baby at all times because all the diseases around will enter through the hole in his head. * It's good for a baby to sweat (i.e. overdress it!). * When a baby has hiccups, you should put a bit of wet cotton-wool on its forehead and they will go away. * And the worst of all: People bind their babies up tightly so that they can't move. This is supposed to make them strong because they kick and struggle to get out! (Oh, mercy be!) A Day in the Life of Colombia Report of a not-so-unusual journey by Ned. I decided to travel the many hours from Popayan to our farm on rough mountain roads on our small motorbike. It was a pity the army chose that morning to send 130 men to the paramo (high cold plains in the mountains) to attack the guerrilla there... When I approached the invisible 'border' between Army and guerrilla territory, there were about 20 lorries and buses waiting. They had heard lots of shooting further on and had turned back and warned everyone. They were all waiting for a vehicle to come from the other direction to say that it was alright to go on. But after three or four hours of freezing rain and hunger, nothing at all had come. I said to everyone that we should all proceed in convoy and nothing could happen to us that way, but everyone seemed to be having a good time squeezing into a tiny wooden shack where a lady was serving black coffee. I was soaked even through my plastic cape, shivering, so I blew on the fire, and helped her to make and serve the nonstop coffee and collect the money and everyone was laughing and joking and taking the piss out of each other, including out of me, very good-humouredly. And then we cooked up a load of potatoes that a lorry driver contributed and distributed them free. Eventually, two minibuses decided they'd dare to proceed and test the water and I went with them. First, we found chatty guerrilleros in woollen ponchos at the wooden shack where Jenny once stayed the night. They said they'd heard the battle but didn't know what was happening as it was further along, but thought it was probably over now and to go on if we wanted to. They'd heard a helicopter come and go. Then we reached a more formal guerrillero stop point where they looked at my papers and then said, yes, there was no problem now as the army were going and it was all over. I left them casually searching the buses. Further on, I saw loads of plastic bags and rubbish scattered around by the Army, then, over a distace of a mile or two, there were all the soldiers walking along in twos and threes towards the nearest country town, Leticia. The soldiers didn't seem to have anyone in charge and didn't know whether to let me and the other vehicles by or not. I was the first to approach and when they stopped me, I asked politely if it was normal policy to leave their rubbish lying around? He answered, 'How are we going to start picking up rubbish after all THAT?' I didn't ask him 'after all WHAT?' None of them looked very happy. Another lot sent me back a few yards in a hateful officious way and said we'd all have to wait until all the soldiers had reached Leticia on foot, which would have been hours. Then some others stopped me and accused me of taking information to the guerrilla because they kept seeing me ride up and down. I don't think they believed this themselves, they just wanted to pick on someone. They were all tired and scared and taking refuge in being aggressive. Local people said the helicopter that came must have been to take away the dead and injured. When the soldiers who had said we couldn't proceed eventually took a short cut through some fields, we all immediately took the law into our own hands and accelerated and overtook them on the road. I was told later by soldiers in Belen, the nearest village to our farm, that the radio had claimed they'd killed eight guerrilleros, but lost one of their own. Later the radio said it was 3 guerrilla fighters and no mention of a soldier. But everyone knows who runs the radio and that it is not reliable. Nobody could explain why the army was so unorganized and unprotected and why so many of them couldn't stop 5 guerrilleros from charging 20,000 pesos (about 6 dollars) to let the cattle lorries go by, which apparently was the big crime that caused the army attack. Later still, I met guerrilleros and local people who all expressed sympathy for the young soldiers and how they are conscripted and used mercilessly by the government. *********** Not so gentle Indians We have always considered the Indian tribe who are our farming neighbours a polite and gentle people. But one day, in answer to the question 'are you married?', one of their numnbr who was working with us for the day casually told the following horrific tale of how their internal 'justice' system works. He said he used to have a wife, but that she ran off with another man. For this, both she and her lover were tied up by the tribe, stripped, and beaten by everyone with sticks upon their bare backsides until they were bleeding. Later on, the pair renewed their relationship. And the punishment was repeated. Health Info. Request The regular visits of local people needing to be stitched up after work accidents, or seeking cures for all manner of unpleasant local ailments does not abate. Added to this, we now have in our minds the trauma of what Alice went through, at the time of her baby's birth, at the hands of Popayan doctors when she got into trouble with a prolonged labour and could no longer handle the birth at home. All of which has forced us to take seriously our own education in medical matters, as no amount of protestations of ignorance can stop the locally created myth that we are wizards and witch-doctors, given that the girls' and Ned's careful stitchings-up of people have worked perfectly, as have our herbal and dietary cures and Anne's accidental midwifery. We did not seek this fame or this profession, but would now like to ask for the following help from anyone who could oblige: to watch out for simple home and herbal cures in magazines, natural-cure health journals, or from your own experience and post to us at: Atlantis, Telecom, Belen, Huila, Colombia, or email the info. to: atlantiscommune@hotmail.com. Also if anyone is willing to send thread, needles, local anaesthetic or any helpful creams and lotions, we would be most grateful. And if anyone has practical experience in midwifery (we don't care about university degrees, only common sense and experience) we would be relieved to correspond over what went wrong with Alice's birthing and how we might handle such eventualities ourselves in the future. Expensive professional advice and treatment, often erroneous and hatefully deleivered, is not an option in these parts. Worrying news The latest news to arrive from Anne - who of all things has been called by people in Bogota working for the World Bank to do their astrology charts! - is that the identity of the man who helped us in many ways in the aftermath of our boys' murders, has now been discovered by the corrupt gang of guerrilla militiamen responsible for so many deaths in the area we were displaced from in 1999, and his life is in danger. A 15-year-old nephew of his has already been killed by the same gang. Anne was also warned that she is in danger. This news has to be left as a cliffhanger, as Anne is still away, and we know no further information at the moment. The reason Anne had to leave the farm this time was that she received a call from the DAS (Colombian Security Police) who wanted to ask one or two questions... like why we express opposition to the United States and to Colombian Government policy ... She answered well, but we are mentally ever ready for the fact that one day it may no longer be possible to live in Colombia. But the Music continues.. On a lighter note, our musical band of girls have now completed their first CD of social, political, environmental and anti-war songs. It is very good indeed. If anyone is interested in receiving a copy, in spite of all but two songs being in Spanish, please write to us. (Long term helpers and friends will automatically receive a copy) Goodbye and love to everyone, Jenny James When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water.... And for a time, I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. Wendell Berry PS All previous Green Letters are available here: GREEN LETTER FROM COLOMBIA No. 62, 23rd November, 2003 Rare Good News from Colombia It took me several days to believe it. How could this happen? In the middle of the most rightwing government that has ruled Colombia since we moved here 15 years ago, local and provincial elections for mayors and regional governors threw up previously unheard-of results: Luis Eduardo Garzón (affectionately known in this country as 'Lucho' which happens to mean in Spanish 'I fight'), the most leftwing candidate in Colombia, recently head of the Trade Union movement and someone we know and supported in his doomed campaign to become President, has been elected MAYOR OF BOGOTA, the most important public leadership post after the Presidency. For decades, nearly every leftwing leader, whether Presidential candidate, simple local councillor or militant trades unionist has been assassinated. Yet somehow Lucho has been allowed to slip through the net ... for now. Not only that, but two other important provinces, including Cauca, the one I'm writing from, have elected radical men as their governors, and there are similar swings in many lower offices. Paramilitary-loving President Uribe must be feeling sick as a parrot, especially as at the same time his attempt to get an even tighter stranglehold on the country through a phoney Referendum, has failed completely in spite of massive media propaganda in its favour. One shudders to think what revenge will now be taken - not only by Uribe, but by his bosom pal, one George Bush, whom he supported in the recent Iraqi slaughter, regardless of the fact that practically no-one else in Colombia did. We watch, worried and astonished as new tides wash over South America ... Chavez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, revolution in Bolivia, indigenous uprisings in Ecuador ... it doesn't seem very likely that Mr. Bush will let this tide come in without attempting one of his braindead operations.... 'Joke' heard on Colombian radio: In 2002, Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden. Uribe approved. Osama was not found. In 2003, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq to find Saddam Hussein who was hiding Osama bin Laden. Uribe approved. Neither were found. In 2004, Bush ordered the invasion of Cuba as Castro was hiding Osama and Saddam. Uribe approved. None of them were found. In 2005, Bush ordered the invasion of Venezuela as Chavez was hiding O.B.L., Saddam and Castro. Uribe approved. They were not found. In 2006, Bush ordered the invasion of Colombia because it had been proved that O.B.L., Saddam Hussein, Castro and Chavez were all being hidden by Manuel Marulanda (ageing head of the FARC revolutionary guerrilla army). Uribe approved... But this is hardly a joke. American soldiers are already here and it may not take till 2006.... ****** Army invades El Congreso (where we live) At a local level, this civil war swings between the tragic and the comic. The first thing I noticed, travelling from our small town centre across the mountains by bus to our farm, about 8 hours away, was that in the high cold wet paramo, checkpoints usually manned by young guerrilla soldiers had been taken over by the Army, who searched everyone, then gave a long lecture urging everyone to collaborate with them. I watched carefully as all the local campesinos studiously held their faces expressionless and nodded in seeming agreement, scrambling back on to the rickety old bus as soon as they were allowed to.... Then on to home, where instead of the usual Indians and peasants at the local shop cum bar (just a wooden shack), Army lads were lounging about. This is a daily occurrence in Colombia. The Army make a big show of taking over a wellknown guerrilla area, like ours. They go in, blow a few trumpets, make a few speeches ... and then one morning we found our fences broken down, crops trampled and wrappings from junk foods scattered all around. Further investigations revealed that a very large number of soldiers had passed by in the night, exiting the area. Quite why they bothered to break our fences remains a mystery, given that we have perfectly good gates just a few yards away ... They also broke down the door of the shack of a neighbour of ours who lives in the hills, breaking the padlock, smashing his clay fireplace to bits, breaking and stealing many other items, from nail scissors to spoons. In another settlement nearby, the army searched a house when only a young girl was present and were rude to her. Our Ned collected up the rubbish the soldiers left on our farm and took it to the Army command post in Belen, the nearest village an hour and a half away by motorbike, and complained about the soldiers' behaviour. The Captain in charge took it very seriously and said, 'this is why people don't support us'. He was very polite and agreed that this was very bad behaviour and he was going to 'investigate' it. The times they are a'changin' ... a public-opinion-conscious Army! Pity the guerrilla haven't caught up with the concept, then we might have a proper revolution instead of the endless, pointless slaughter of the poorest peasants and soldiers. ****** Follow-Up on Murder of our Young Ones Recently in a 2 month stay in Bogota, our 'legal lady' Anne, who has constantly chased the State Attorney's Office since our two lads were murdered by FARC militia in July 2000, did a further investigation of the investigators. Two of the murdering gang are in prison, charged not only with killing our boys, but also with the kidnapping of 3 Colombians who managed to escape after 5 months' captivity, walk 7 days through the hills with one can of tuna fish between them, arriving at a small village police station, where for several hours the policeman refused to believe their story, thinking they were playing some wierd practical joke. Anne reports (please fasten seat-belts for a strange ride): "The ridiculously overworked female attorney in charge of our case was not at first friendly towards me when I asked what had been done to advance our case in the past months. To my horror, I discovered very little had been done at all, in fact the case had gone backwards with the killers now having the chance to be tried simply for belonging to the FARC, which in practice means serving 2 or 3 years in prison, which apart from the injustice of it, would put our group in a lot of danger as they would very likely seek us out to exact revenge for getting them put away in the first place (most families of victims would never dare). "I asked why they weren't being tried for kidnap and was told that the escapees were too scared to testify, a common problem here where state protection of witnesses is often a macabre joke and many 'protected' witnesses get killed. So I took it upon myself to find these three people and try to persuade them to give evidence. "This unexpectedly proved very easy to do, as one of them, an ex-Army man, turned out to be friends with the son-in-law of a witch (an honoured profession in Colombia) I'd recently been introduced to ... At this point, I entered into yet another lesson on the never-ending layers within Colombian society. "First of all, the witch, from a manifestly rightwing background, on hearing of my connection to the three Irishmen in jail on trumped-up charges of helping train the FARC, without a word to me launched into a long magic spell to help them get out... this involved tying up little bits of paper with their names on them in endless amounts of red thread and submerging them in a bottle of honey and herbs along with the names of several army generals in charge of the case against them .... "Then the witch's army son-in-law invited his friend, the ex-army man who'd been kidnapped by the same gang of militiamen who ended our boys' young lives, to come and meet me. After I had talked to him, he agreed readily to testify against them. And then these two men who would be considered ultra-rightwing here in Colombia, proceeded to tell me passionately that Osama Ben Laden impressed them as a simple man who cares for his people. They liked the way he lives simply in the mountains, whilst Bush is obviously out just to rob and kill. They both abhorred the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and are outraged by the US robbery of the resources of Colombia. They also gave out about the corruption in the Army here and the laziness of the generals who don't want to win the war... "And then the ex-kidnappee, ex-Army man, not knowing of my connection to the 3 Irishmen in jail, exploded about 'foreigners like those effing Irishmen who come to train the FARC.' I said, 'please don't say that, they're friends of mine and there's no proof whatsoever against them', whereupon he immediately softened and apologized... "After a few days in Bogota, I managed to get in touch with X, a campesino friend who used to live in the same area from which we were displaced by the FARC in 1999. The murder of our boys in that area the following year was the final straw for X. Over the years, he had watched the coming to power of a local militia gang who used their position as part of the FARC to extort, rob and kill wantonly. By the time they murdered our lads, they had killed at least another 14 people ... and many more since, including several dear friends of ours. "At one time a guerrilla supporter when the local commander was decent, X had had enough and bravely offered to help us to bring the killers to justice. He approached me one day shortly after the killings when I was in Icononzo with two of our young girls, Louise and Laura, giving out leaflets encouraging local people to break the stranglehold of silence that gives murderers so much power here. We were being watched by members of the local militia, but they could do nothing that day to stop us as the army were billeted there at the time. This kind of direct action is almost unheard-of in Colombia and causes people to shake their heads in horror as it breaks the silence which paralyzes this country. "His help has been like a shining light of hope to us in all the darkness, confusion and paranoia of these last years. Without him we could not have 2 of the 6 killers in prison (and one dead). He regularly risks his and his large family's lives to bring justice to his region. His only ambition is to be able to farm there in peace and that the grip of fear that makes neighbours afraid to talk to one another be lifted. He doesn't want to join the non-stop stream of refugees who regularly leave their farms and then live in misery in and around the big cities, alienated from all that they know. "For two years, he has managed to help us secretly. And then his luck ran out. His 17 year old nephew took part in a mission locally and, although disguised, was recognized. A few days later, several masked men appeared at the entrance of the boy's house. His girlfriend told him not to go out, but, overconfident, he did. The masked men pretended to be paramilitaries (i.e. the deadly enemies of the guerrilla force) and said they were looking for the group who were fighting against the guerrilla, to offer them support. "He fell into the trap and told them what they wanted to know. Then one of the men unmasked himself. The boy recognized him as a local FARC militiaman and had time to say, 'Oh my god, what have I done?' before being shot in the head. "Attending the funeral, X was followed and almost caught by militia on motorbikes, barely escaping into a secure house from whence they called the police ... who did nothing. They could not return to their farm and now live in hiding. "X's solution to this predicament is to join the paramilitaries. I argued with him that this is suicide, as well as politically abhorrent. But he has tried to work with the inefficient, bureaucracy-ridden Colombian army whose leaders only make a move or take a risk when there is the chance to capture some well-known guerrilla commander, whose arrest will assure them a rise through the ranks and a fat bonus ... not shared with the ordinary soldiers and civilians who take the most risks. And thus we had our first direct experience of what sends revolutionary-minded peasants into the arms of the rightwing paramilitary murder gangs. "This story no doubt sounds lurid and unreal to Northern ears, but it is only one of hundreds occurring daily in Colombia. "Back in the rarefied atmosphere of the posh legal offices of the Government, I managed to move on the case for our boys. By securing the declarations of the men kidnapped by the same gang, an arrest warrant has at last been issued for another one of their number still at large, as during the man's kidnap, he overheard them boasting of how they killed our beloved Tristan and Javier, 18 years old at the time. "However, a further glitch was to come. The three witnesses almost did not testify because they saw their names and addresses and telephone numbers in the case papers - papers that are handed to the defense lawyers, which means that the killers could take revenge by threatening or killing the witnesses' families. We know this is a real possibility because we have already lost two old friends who were forced to drink poison by the murderers in revenge for helping us. Tristan and Javier had visited their house just hours before their violent deaths. I was outraged to be told that their murders were being treated as suicides, but I was not permitted to do anything as I am not a relative, and their own relatives, desperately poor, wouldn't be able to afford the bus fare to town to protest, let alone to push matters further. "When I talked to the attorney lady about this obviously dangerous practice of showing witnesses' addresses and telephone numbers to the defense, she said that usually she advises people to give false data! And she promised to delete this dangerous information so that my new friends could testify." ****** Louise's Dream One morning, my daughter Louise told me a dream she had just had: "The world is ending. There is chaos and catastrophe everywhere. I am with a small group of my family and friends in a city and there are huge machines destroying every construction in sight. They are huge Robots which are taking over the world and their main objective is to exterminate all humanbeings and their homes. "We are all running through a big shopping centre which is collapsing behind us. We all think we are going to die as we come out into a road where there is even more chaos, but then I remember an escape route. I call to my group of family and friends and show them the way down a narrow back street which takes us to a poorer-looking part of the city, and then under a scruffy-looking hedgerow. On the other side is a path which leads to a patch of beautiful land, our land, and we all know we are safe from all the Robot-machines as they only look for people in cities. "We are in a little paradise with a huge pond in the middle, loads of greenery and the most beautiful-looking horses with very long hair and tails beside the pond. We all sit in a circle and start planning how to organize our lives. Some puppies come out of the bushes and we are delighted to have them. We feel safe and peaceful and that is the end of the dream." ****** Hope in Strange Places The following is taken from the lovely 'Smallholders Magazine', Alberta, Ontario, Canada: A few years ago at the Seattle Special Olympics, nine participants, all physically or mentally disabled, assembled at the starting line for the 100-yard dash. At the sound of the gun, they all started out, not exactly in a dash, but with a relish to run the race. But one little boy stumbled on the asphalt, tumbled over a couple of times, and began to cry. The other eight heard him, slowed down and looked back. Then they all turned around and went back, every one of them. One girl with Down's Syndrome bent down and kissed him and said, 'This will help it get better'. Then all nine linked arms and walked together to the finishing line. Everyone in the stadium stood up, and the cheering went on for several minutes. ****** Last word "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all." John Keynes (1883-1946) Taken from 'New Internationalist' Magazine ****** I haven't written much about Things Green in this Green Letter. That is because, in terms of peaceful productiveness and good neighbourliness, everything is running extremely well in our region, and, for the moment, the forests there are secure. Our farm feeds all of us three excellent meals a day ... and that includes our girls doing musical work in the town of Popayan. We send sacks of food to them every week with a local milkman. They have just launched their first environmental and peace CD, 'Semillas de Paz' (Seeds of Peace) which is mainly in Spanish of course. It is being remade in Ireland and will soon be on sale there c/o Becky Garcia, atlantisfoundation@eircom.net. We are unable to send it direct to friends abroad from here because of the totally absurd postal costs in Colombia but everyone who has helped us over the years with our Green campaign will receive a copy (plus English rendering) in the coming weeks, posted from Ireland. I would like to end by sending thanks to Dr. Rosita Arvigo of Ixchel Traditional Healers Community in Belize, Central America, for sending us her two books on 'Rainforest Remedies' and wish her success in her great efforts to rescue this knowledge in conjunction with the aged healers she works with. With love to all friends and readers, - correspondence welcomed and promptly answered - Jenny James, Atlantis Ecological Settlement, Belen, Huila, Colombia, South America email: atlantiscommune@hotmail.com website: www.afan.org.uk PS "My portion is not large indeed, But then how much do we really need? For Nature's calls are few - In this the art of living lies: To want no more than may suffice, And make just that much do." (Taken from a cloth embroidered by an 11 year old girl, May 1896) Thankyou friends at Smallholders' Magazine. GREEN LETTER FROM COLOMBIA No. 63, 26th January 2004 "I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living." Lin Yutang ******* Most of this Green Letter is written by Becky, mother of Tristan who was murdered in Colombia in 2000. She is at present staying on our mountain farm in the South of Colombia. She writes: "This is the second time I have visited the Atlantis settlement in Belen, Huila. The first time was 2 years ago, when I was fighting the Colombian Government and the British Embassy who saw fit to kidnap my youngest son Brendan after the death of my eldest son Tristan and hand him over to my estranged husband who did not even know the boy. I have never seen him since. "But life moves on and I have been working on our old wooden sailing boat in Ireland for the last three years, restoring her and using a lot of my shock, horror and dread at what happened to Tristan and his friend Javier, both aged 18 at the time. I needed to keep my feet on the ground and use my body and energy in something that could absorb me fully as I was frightened of going very dead or totally mad. "At the end of 2003, I decided I needed to be with everyone at home on our farm in Colombia to recharge my batteries over the European winter months, as we are now faced with a huge project: of joining the 'Flotilla of Hope' in the Pacific Ocean, a campaign run by Australians concerned at their government's cruel and hypocritical treatment of refugees, and which requires boats to sail to an isolated prison island. Also we intend to join another more dangerous action concerning the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. "I want to tell you about the Atlantis settlement. To reach our farm, you travel on a bumpy open-sided bus on dirt tracks - there is only one service per week on Sundays, market day. Our farm is at the very end of the line, after that there are just the mountains of Purace National Park. Once off the bus, you have to walk about 30 minutes and cross over a swinging bridge spanning a very fast, wide, rock-strewn river. When I was last here, this bridge was just a couple of rotting planks and a wire; now it is a little more substantial. "Two years ago, as you entered our land, there was just an empty field. Now it is full of banana palms, sugar cane, potatoes, giant cultivated blackberries and the many local root crops we depend on, which seldom have English names. "At the top of the field, you come to an archway of flowers which leads to our communal house. Just before you enter, there is a small grave covered in growing flowers where Tristan and Javier lie. "You pass through the floral archway into a lovely flower garden surrounding our large wooden house. Inside there are 7 bedrooms, all different shapes and sizes; a large kitchen and a common room that is used for music practice, dancing, movement classes, group therapy sessions and for the new baby to play in. "We start the day at 5.0 a.m. but it is not light till 6.0 a.m. As my own internal clock is still operating on European time (6 hours ahead), I am the earliest riser. I light the fire and start up the kitchen. All the food we eat is from the garden, and from the goats who give us milk. Preparing breakfast and dinner is an energetic, busy, communal job - no packets, tins or easy food here. Eating only organic home-grown veg. makes your body feel slimmer and your skin feel clean and smooth. "After breakfast, the busy morning changes gear: it is time for outside work, a good three hours out in the veryÿlarge garden, some of which is on a slope, the rest on flattish land. The garden slopes down to a mountain stream and is surrounded by banana palms. An amazing amount of food comes out of it daily, carrots, beetroot, greens, salads, onions, cauliflower, parsley, rocket, cabbage, spinach, Chinese vegetables and much more, including local fruits. "I have been planting maize, which shows its head in 3 days and is ready to eat in 4 months, growing in that time to well above the height of the tallest man. All the work is very physical and hard-going, but incredibly satisfying. "At midday, those that are not too tired prepare lunch and those that are exhausted do gentler 'office jobs' or collapse in a hammock, two of which swing in the rabbit run and give a wonderful insight into the incredibly active and varied life of dozens of rabbits who live completely naturally, except that their food is brought to them in big sackfulls. We keep them as lovely friends and for the compost they make, we don't eat any of our animals. "I am writing to you in our front garden where there is a year-round riot of colour from an ever-blooming flower garden, a delight for the eyes and soul. Also a lemon tree and tree tomato trees all around as well as 'ordinary' tomatoes, difficult to grow because of the blight that descends from the surrounding forests. In one day here, the early morning can be very nippy indeed, reaching too hot to work in by midday, with rain, sun, breeze, cloud - an ever-changing sky as different weathers sweep up the river valley or down from the mountains. I have fairly dark skin yet got badly sunburnt here, but the magic healing properties of aloe vera sorted that out immediately. This wonderful plant grows abundantly here, and is free, in stark contrast to the 8 euro watered down variety you get in Ireland. THEATRE FOR THE INDIANS "Just before I came to Colombia this time, the local Guambiano Indian community had asked for us to put on a theatre show for them, and I was quickly co-opted into the performance. Myself and my half-sister Louise did Irish dancing, and then I was in a dancing clown show, nerve-wracking as we only had two days to invent, practice and perfect the acts. But great fun. "We use the 'packaging' of the fun part of our theatre to enclose our environmental messages which are mainly contained in my sisters' exquisitely delivered green, peace, social and political songs. However the immediate 'environment' of the Indians' communal house was quite shocking to us: first the 'stage' we were expected to perform on was a series of muddy uneven planks hurriedly and unsafely erected and not even nailed down. Our resourceful professional dancer Louise, however, on seeing it simply said, 'Oh don't worry, I've danced on worse than this.' Eventually though, after rather a lot of pushing from us girls, the guambianos were prevailed upon to put in a few nails and take down a balustrade to give us a better space. "We had been promised a changing room for the 6 women and one man forming our theatre grup. Dark despair and deep annoyance as we arrived to discover a dirty, mud-floored, foul-smelling shack with no coverings for the window holes or doorway and row upon row of large chunks of slaughtered cow hanging on hooks in the rafters above us. "Jenny went immediately on strike. Luckily, she has a good relationship with the female leader of the indians, a lovely bright, suitably bossy woman who gets things done, and fast. The mud hut was cleared of debris, bricks, ash, fire wood, and slaughtered animals, and drapes were hastily hung, much to the disappointment of the dozens of indians happily crowding round to watch us change. "The next battle came over the absurdly earsplitting ugly music blaring out over the loudspeakers, a tragic comment on the decadence of the indians' natural culture and their taking on of the general awfulness of mainstream Colombian values. A fight ensued with a visiting male guambiano leader who when he wasn't beating dogs half to death, was intent upon taking us over completely in the most outrageously arrogant manner - the tribe is utterly male-dominated in spite of there being a female leader locally. It took all the persistence of angel-faced but iron-willed Louise to insist that our own CD of meaningful songs should provide the background for our show. "We were then informed that we had to perform later than arranged as the CATHOLIC PRIEST had not arrived to say MASS. Jenny pointed in horror at one of the indians' own posters encouraging them to keep their ancient culture and said out loud to those standing around: 'How is accepting the religion of the colonialists keeping to your traditions?!' Maria Antonia, their leader, smiled wryly and said, 'Yes, there are many of our tribal leaders who would agree with that comment.' She added words which indicated that they have more or less decided to pay lip service to Catholicism in order to receive various government handouts available to them (which in turn then further ruin their tradition of self-reliance). "During our show, more than half the guambiano population (several hundred of whom had bussed into the area from another settlement for the occasion), stayed behind their communal house out of sight of the stage squatting around an open air fire consuming large quantities of meat. One single toilet served for this vast population. It was perched on the edge of a muddy slope and preceded by a ditch you had to jump over surrounded by barbd wire. To end the morning, Jenny got caught in the wire and I had the delightful job of extricating it from her flesh, leaving a hole in her arm. "The best part of the outing was when we had all packed up and were running home in the tropical rain declaiming in loud (English!) voices the usual 'never again' and planning to build a decent theatre on our own farm.... "I was quite distressed by my romantic ideas of maltreated, sweet native indians coming to such a muddy end. The truth is they are mostly lethargic, never smile, are terribly interbred in an attempt to keep their communities intact, and really very uninspiring, except for one or two bright souls who are our good friends." ******* Quote taken from an old issue of 'Organic Gardening' magazine: "Our way of life: ... we will be exchanging the grand achievements of large-scale technological society for modest accomplishments on a more human scale. We will once again be a part of mankind's great journey, no longer set apart from it and seeking to manipulate it like technological gods. We will regain a degree of stability that will permit the deepening of culture and the enrichment of lives lived simply. Above all, we will have the comfort of knowing that our relationship with the environment is sustainable, and that the earth is a true home to us." ******* MORE ON INDIANS Becky continues: "Two years ago when I was visiting the leaders of the FARC guerrilla force in the demilitarized zone, to talk about the murder of our boys by their low-ranking militia, Anne and myself met a woman who was there as representative for the many indigenous tribes around Colombia. She was making loud complaints about the violence some of her people had suffered at the hands of the FARC. "A strong and fearless woman, we re-met her on the plane on the way out of the Zone. She had problems with her ticket and we lent her money to sort it out. She was very grateful and paid it back to us as soon as we got back to Bogota. She came to our flat there and met several more of our people. She asked lots of questions about our interpersonal relationships, whether we had our babies at home, how we dealt with violence and disagreements, and we were very open with her and told her anything she wanted to know. "She sat in a long yellow dress with long flowing hair and beautiful skin, we all sat on the floor and it was a very interesting evening. And then we asked her some questions about the indian tribes and what they get up to, and soon we were transfixed in horror as she told us in a very matter-of-fact way what they do to their own women if they are found sleeping with a man other than the one they had married. "They take the woman and tie her up in the middle of a public square, strip her naked and tie her legs apart. Then they shove a pole or sharp instrument up inside her until she bleeds, sometimes to death. They do this in front of the other women who all let it happen. No punishment for the man one notes. "Anne and I looked at each other with shivers going through our bodies. Then we said, 'So, not many women ever go off with other men then?' 'Oh, yes they do,' replied the indian woman, and the punishment always follows.' She showed no shock or protest against the custom and spoke coolly about it. We told her what we felt and thought and she could see our horror, but she was firm and her attitude was 'that is just what we do.' ******* RELUCTANT WHITE WITCH DOCTORS Our unsought fame as local country doctors keeps spreading and all we can do is rise to the donated role. One day before Christmas, 22 year old Louise had to rush off on the motor-scooter to sew up the leg of a young man in a nearby community, slashed by machete in one of the very frequent work accidents that occur here. This time, she came back somewhat worried, as when she injected local anaesthetic, the wound recommenced bleeding profusely and would not stop for some time, and we are left wondering whether anaesthetic has this property, to prevent coagulation of the blood? If any medically knowledgeable souls read this and know the answer, please tell us. Next morning, Lou was still worried enough to prepare herself to go out and visit the young man again to see if he was healing well, but she was prevented from doing this by a further more pressing emergency: we were called out to the wife of a friend who was in late pregnancy, had fallen, and labour had been brought on but was going badly. Becky and Louise rushed off to respond to the call. Here is what Becky reports: "We met up with the woman who was walking from her own farm in the hills to a shack they have on the roadside. She was accompanied by her husband, a grown-up daughter and a female cousin. "She had been in labour for the previous three days, was 43 years old but looked about 60 and not in a condition to be having more babies. She had been told four babies ago not to have any more, as it was dangerous for her, but her husband would not agree to her being sterilized. This was to be her twelfth baby. "On meeting her on the pathway, we heard that her waters had just broken and that she was having contractions very close together. We laid her out on the planks of one of the local bridges over the river and I gave her an internal examination on the spot in case the baby was about to be born But despite having been in labour so long, she had not dilated at all. So we continued up to the road and all sat in the little wooden shack. It was very small indeed, just a tiny single bed and one small table inside. When tropical rains fell, six of us could only just squeeze into it "Louise and I were able to talk freely to one another in English, a blessing as we had to let each other know what we thought of what we had landed ourselves in. We broke into the kitchen of the nextdoor neighbour's larger shack, as the shed we were in had none. The absentee owner is a friend of ours and we knew he would not mind. Then we had to make beds, clean up and generally sort everything out, as the woman had not eaten or drunk anything for 24 hours. Her husband had gone off during the previous days on a booze-up. "Lou and I found ourselves doing practically everything while the grown up daughter sat reading our Spanish verson of 'Where There is No Doctor.' We started to feel a little aggressive and pushy and soon got everyone to move and work, the husband cutting wood, the grown daughter making drinks and food and the cousin picking herbs to bring on contractions. "Poor Louise was still feeling ill from the day before when she had to travel far to help the young man who had cut his leg open. But we stayed about 8 hours with the lady, though we could see that without conventional drugs, she was in big trouble. Her cervix was not dilating and despite all our efforts to get her to take lots of liquid, she had gone too long without fluids and was now very weak indeed. "I was personally horrified at the coldness from her husband. He would hardly look at his wife when they sat next to each other. He was still suffering from a hangover. The woman had put up with this man for years, and so it was hard to feel sorry for her either. Over all, there was a feeling from all the family members of total uninterest in each other. "We sent notes home to our farm about 30 minutes away with one of the woman's youngest boys to ask for food, blankets, towels, warm clothes for us and many other items as there was nothing in the shack at all. I know these people are poor, but there is a really given-up almost spoilt attitude from them. "Louise and I were worried for the safety of the baby and mother. We discussed it with the mum and dad and said we thought they should go to hospital but the mother said, 'No, please don't send me, they treat you so badly there' and they also charge so much that the local people cannot afford it. We respected her plea but we knew that in the end, she would have to make that journey if she wanted to survive. We had been with her from 8.0 a.m. and it was now early evening, so we did a swap with Julie, 14 and Laura, 18, two sisters in our community, and they then did the night shift. "They helped all they could throughout the night, but in the early morning had to send the woman on her way to hospital The surrounding circumstances and background, not to mention the terrible family relationships, all made a home birth impossible. We eventually heard that another day and night later, the baby was finally born, and that mother and child were infected and still in hospital." ******* They survived, but once again we would like to ask that people with specialized knowledge in midwifery and first aid share their experiences with us, and that anyone who is in a position to, help by sending us local anaesthetic, surgical sewing needles and thread, plus medicines that can be used to speed up labour, as we are often faced with these emergencies. Thank you. NEWS IN BRIEF Earth Tremors One day, Becky sat above our farm on the hillside in the still air amongst the ferns. Suddenly she noticed that all the plants around her were moving, as if there were a slight breeze. But there was none. Somewhat spooked, she came home. Next day we heard of the terrible earthquake in Iran and many local people reported feeling tremors, even here in Colombia. FALSE ARRESTS The Colombian Government has a great new way of 'winning' the war against the FARC: they have threatened their own military commanders with demotion or dismissal if they don't 'produce results.' So results they are producing: indiscriminate killings, and roundups of 'guerrilla sympathizers.' Near here in a little town called La Argentina, six well known local men, including the ex-mayor, have all been jailed for being 'guerrilla helpers'. Everyone locally knows it is rubbish. Getting them legal help costs millions of pesos. So they have been in jail for months on end. It is happening all over Colombia, just so that President Uribe can boast he is 'winning the war' and get a lucrative pat on the back from Mr. Bush. A DIFFERENT KIND OF DEATH I was moved recently to hear of the death of an old man locally, brother of a friend of ours. He hadn't been seen for about 10 days, so his brother went up to his farm to see him. He was lying dead in the potato field, with a potato still clasped in one hand, ready to plant it. In a country like Colombia, this is a very beautiful death indeed. OUR GIRLS SONGS GO TO THE PRESIDENT The lady lawyer who did so much for us in the aftermath of our boys' death and who has remained a loving friend ever since, was so moved by the girls' songs for Colombia that she sent copies of the CD to her bosses, who just happen to be the President and Vice-President of Colombia. And on that note I will end, with love to all our helpers, supporters and correspondents. Anyone interested in either visiting or joining our farming project in Colombia or boat project in Ireland, please write to: Jenny James, Atlantis Ecological Community, Belen, Huila, Colombia email:atlantiscommune@hotmail.com website: www.afan.org.uk PS. "The future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination." John Schaar "Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." Arundhati Roy GREEN LETTER No. 64 19th April 2004 I apologize in advance for the unusual length of this Green Letter, but I feel that for anyone interested in the incredibly complicated situation in Colombia, this material, already vastly condensed, just has to be aired. Nearly four years after the murders of our two 18 year old boys, Tristan and Javier, our 'urban representative' Anne has embarked on a new and rocky climb into the obscure fortress of the Colombian legal system having made the shocking discovery that the case had actually gone backwards and that the only two of the murderers who are actually in prison might even be released 'for lack of evidence.' Our determined efforts not to be bullied or dispirited by the extraordinary threats and obstacles strewn in the path of anyone who tries to get justice in Colombia are taking us ever deeper into a mindboggling labryrinth. In daily emails from Bogota, Anne struggles to make sense of the latest logic-shattering information she has been delivered, whilst we struggle to make sense of what she is reporting to us and to provide some solidity, advice and support with our reactions. I will now try and bridge the gap between the Northern and Southern worlds by attempting to describe some of what Anne has discovered. "It's the action that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no results." Gandhi The first news that hit us was that Gonzalo, the steely FARC commander who ordered the deaths of our boys, had been arrested several months ago when he went to Bogota for a medical operation and someone 'grassed' on him - the Government offers huge monetary rewards on TV to anyone who gives information leading to the capture of high ranking guerrilla fighters. Yet when Anne offered herself to the Public Prosecutor in Bogota as someone able to testify against Gonzalo, astonishingly she was told that it was 'impossible to find him', that they didn't know what prison he was in! Needless to say, Anne is not one to take No for an answer, especially when confronted with such outrageous nonsense, but to date her indignant enquiries have borne no fruit. Then there is the question of the murder by poisoning of Julio and Baudelina, peasant foster parents of Tristan's half brother, the last people Tristan and Javier visited before they were killed. This old couple had been helping us with information about the murderers and in spite of our pleas to them that they should leave the region as they were in obvious danger, their rural rootedness made them stay stubbornly on their lovely coffee farm, and for this they died. Their case was officially declared a double 'suicide' and when we discovered this outrageous cover-up, Anne was told she couldn't protest as she was not a blood relative. She is equally not accepting this ruling but is struggling to find a way round it. The next big jolt was when we were informed that we had to engage a private lawyer - this after four years of believing that the Government was automatically seeing the case through to its conclusion and being constantly assured that the Public Prosecutor's office were working diligently on it. As leftwing foreigners having suffered the ultimate tragedy at the hands of the supposedly leftwing guerrilla militia, trying to get justice for our slaughtered loved ones under an extreme rightwing, US controlled, pro-paramilitary government, one could be forgiven for expecting just a little interest or cooperation in the prosecution of the murderers of our young ones. Instead of which, we meet obstruction at every turn, and as Anne always declares at every opportunity to any official she comes up against .. if Europeans with the mental, emotional, political and practical resources and experience that we have meet with brick walls at every turn, how can simple peasants ever hope to get even a foot in the door? Our experience is showing us why one is only ever met with a shrug of hopelessness from any ordinary Colombian when the subject of attempting to get justice from the 'legal system' for any atrocity comes up. Many friends of Anne's in Bogota tried to help her find a good lawyer who would be willing to take on our case. One woman, a lawyer herself, rang around various NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) dealing with legal matters, but as all of them are leftwing, they refused to take on a case which meant prosecuting guerrilla militia. As Anne wrote, "I need a lawyer to get my hands on the case papers and see what the Defence of the murderers has been up to, and also to re-open the unspeakable horror of Julio and Baudelina's murders so easily ignored by the Fiscalia (Public Prosecutor). The fact that they are relegated to a file on a dusty shelf because they were 'only' old campesinos (peasant farmers) gets to me more than I can say.' I suggested that Anne go for advice to the family of Ingrid Betancourt, a leftwing presidential candidate in the last Colombian elections who was kidnapped by the FARC and has been in custody ever since. Anne reports that she met a woman involved in the campaign to free Ingrid and that she was extremely helpful and rang several people who might be able to help on the legal level, as well as pushing the Fiscalia. She spent 40 minutes on the phone ringing lawyers and Human Rights and government people and introducing Anne to them on the phone. For all such favours, Anne does astrological charts for people. Later Anne discovered that the attitude of the Fiscalia towards her had improved. And eventually she found an excellent independent leftwing lawyer willing to take on the case against the killers and as we have no money is willing to do the work for as many astrology charts as he wants for all his friends and family! (Try picturing that with a London barrister..!) Meanwhile, a former neighbour of ours in the area where our boys were slaughtered, who has been helping us incognito from the very beginning, and who used to be aligned with the Communist Party, but has now turned away in disgust (many of his friends and neighbours were murdered by the same gang), has gone over to the Paramilitaries. We have watched the process of this man's swing to 'the enemy' going on for several years now, at first in shock and disbelief, later with reluctant comprehension, as we experienced first of all the FARC renege on all promises to control the trigger-happy elements of their militia, not just in our region but all over Colombia, then observed how our friend put his trust in the Colombian Army, finally turning from their utter inefficiency and lack of will to bring justice to the countryside, and walking into the arms of the paramilitaries. Thus we have now seen with our own eyes how the growth of this rightwing peasant army occurs and are rendered mute as far as any political moralizing is concerned as we have failed to detect any discernible difference between their activities and those of the FARC in the area where tragedy attacked our tribe. One day Anne met our helper, who not only has been risking his life and that of his family for three years now to bring justice to us and other victims in his area, but has already had a young nephew murdered for giving information. They met at the Fiscal's office to see about protection for him and his sons in exchange for testifying. The Fiscal had said she was interested in all he had seen and would evaluate what it was 'worth' to the case and how much danger it would put him in! BUT the witness has to testify first, sign the testimony, which is then and forever part of the case and available to the Defence, i.e. to the murderers and the large well-armed Guerrilla Army behind them! .. before being told whether or not he 'qualifies' for protection. Anne writes: "I exploded and said it was all mad, that we'd leave and that X couldn't possibly take the risk. Then the Fiscal did a Colombian U-turn and said that she could 'guarantee' protection. I said she had to get resettlement elsewhere for the whole family who are in terrible danger." The Fiscal's attitude to our witness had at first been hateful: that he is a professional informer only out for the money. Anne writes: "When we trouped into her office, at first the atmosphere was tense because he felt angry as she was trying on the professional lawyer bit, making everything seem impossible and complicated. He listened politely then asked her to listen to him and gave one of his eloquent speeches about how he and his family couldn't bear any more killings and intimidation from the FARC, all they want to do is farm peacefully and the money has nothing to do with it except inasmuch as they need to eat as they cannot now work on their farms due to having worked with the Army to get two of the murderers into jail. He never attacked her directly but he sure shut her up." "The Fiscal is criminally careless: an old man had been testifying, obviously on behalf of the Guerrilla, that 'nothing ever happens in Hoya Grande (where the murders took place) and that it was all talk.' To which she answered very aptly 'Ah, so that's alright then, I'll take all my friends there and we'll have a party as it's so safe'. The old fellow had the decency to blush. BUT then, unbelievably, the Fiscal gave him a letter to take to the one man who could act as a witness to our boys being tied up and taken away by the FARC, begging him to come forward and testify. I told her she had ruined any chance that the witness would ever speak up by giving the letter to such an untrustworthy messenger, not to mention most likely signing his death warrant. And THEN I had to explain to her why it was dangerous, she's that thick. Urban Colombians are totally out of touch with the situation of the poor in the countryside. As one person from Hoya Grande said to me, 'If they established a military base here, then we might be able to testify!'" (This was a sarcastic political joke as Hoya Grande is a tiny hamlet in the middle of a mountainous notorious guerrilla area where the Army rarely dare tread.) Anne's utter frustration at getting any kind of efficient action from the Colombian State agencies led her eventually to discover a body called the Comision de Juristas where she spoke to two very good women lawyers. They want our case to go to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and they would do all the legal advisory work. It would be a case against the Colombian State itself, not against the FARC. It is a very long-term project, taking anything from two to four years and the idea is to denounce the fact that justice is very hard to come by in Colombia! Anne writes: "They are really enthusiastic about taking on our case because it shows the fact that the Fiscalia (Public Prosecutor) doesn't do anything even when the case is against its supposed enemy, the FARC Guerrilla army. They said I shouldn't tell anyone I'm doing it as it's dangerous to take cases against the State! And also that the FARC would be angry that a case involving them goes international as it means the Fiscalia will be more likely to seriously prosecute them." Commenting on this, Anne writes: "Of course, the keeping quiet bit is impossible. I have so far told everyone I know except the Fiscal and I will tell her eventually as in the end the case is not so much against her personally as against the System itself As for 'danger from the State,' I think the greatest danger is the brain-damage caused by the mind-boggling madness of it all." Anne has a long list of 'homework' to prepare for our case to go on to the next stage, which is to send it to the international court in Washington. She was told that the advantages of taking this course of action are 1) that it immediately makes the Colombian institutions move a bit faster and 2) that it's one more drop in the ocean of what needs to be done to heave Colombia out of its present morass. Anne also reports that this group of lawyers passionately agreed when she commented that something has to be done from a leftwing perspective about the fact that the FARC do not control their own lower ranks. The same lawyers confirmed what we already knew regarding 'Government protection schemes' for witnesses: namely, that they are entirely unreliable, in fact she was told by her own male lawyer that 'most people end up more endangered under 'protection' than without it.' Anne comments: 'There is a general feeling off him and off the Comision women that they are relieved to find a case like ours where someone is willing to speak out. Whatever the reason, they show a lot of interest. I asked our new lawyer if cases taken to the international court have any effect in Colombia, and he said it is one of the few things that do have an effect. The first case taken to them was that of those awful chainsaw massacres in Trujillo several years ago when the state would do nothing in spite of well over a hundred people being killed horribly by the paras. The victims' families got 'compensation' eventually.' I asked Anne why she thought the State is so obstructive and inefficient in what should be an utterly straightforward case like ours. Her reply: "I don't think the state acts like this because they want endless massacres, in fact I don't think there is any deep meaningful 'why' in all this mess. I think it is just the usual Colombian mess, exacerbated by cushy lazy people in comfortable jobs, very well paid and with plenty of security as long as they don't do too well in an investigation against the Government or the Paras. I think it is as low as that. I wish I could believe in some kind of political plot to it all, but I don't. I would also say that one of the main things is deep mistrust and intrigues between all the different sections of the law. They all hate each other and don't cooperate.' ************* BECKY'S DREAMS ABOUT TRISTAN (Becky is Tristan's mother) Three days after getting home from Colombia in February, I dream I am desperately looking for Tristan. I go frantically through a town looking in bars, cafes and public places. I can't find him but keep finding blonde girls with long hair (Louise, Alice and Katie, my half-sisters). After getting very exhausted, I eventually let it sink in, that he is dead. Then the night my mum, Jenny, came from Colombia to Ireland to join me, I awoke at 3 a.m. with violent womb pains. I never normally get such pains. I stayed awake for over two hours. The next morning, the first of Anne's letters about the murder case came through. The night before that, I had the following dream about Tris: I am in a huge house doing the washing up, the sink is overflowing with things to be cleaned. Everything is covered with beetroot (blood). My arms are covered right up to my elbows in the same red beetroot juice . Then I am looking for Tristan. I find him in a tent, he is about 12 years old and he can't get up as he is being violently sick, and is puking up 'beetroot'. I tell him to move further down the tent which is like a long dark tunnel. I get in with him and put a sleeping bag over us for protection and wrap my body around him. He lays his head on my shoulder and I tell him I will never leave him. ************* Last year, a new baby boy was born into our family, to Alice, Tristan's aunt, now aged 20. Baby Jack often looks a lot like Tris. Louise describes a hair-raising incident which occurred with the baby recently: "I was sorting out every last detail of my room and had a huge pile of photos on a low shelf. The baby (10 months old) came and started messing with them but in a calm way, so I just let him. After a minute or two, he came crawling very fast to the other side of the room to me. He was laughing very loud and had a photo in his hand. He stretched his arm out as if to show me the photo. When I saw it, my hair stood on end. It was the one of Tristan and Javier's skeletons in the dark cave pit where they were found, which the Fiscalia had given us. I swear there must have been about 50 photos to choose from and lots of other papers and bits and pieces, and I always put that photo at the bottom of the pile as I hate looking at it.. What all this means I don't know, but I don't believe it was just a coincidence. I hugged the baby and cried and he stayed very still for half a minute, before going back to the pile of photos. Maybe the baby is simply psychic and has started to show it without even knowing what he is doing, who knows." ************* AND A STORY FROM KATIE (18) Louise and I were staying at a friend's house in Cali. She has a little boy of 5. One day she started talking about him and said he was a bit 'weird' - that since he could speak he keeps talking about his 'family in the mountains'. He says he has another family and has names for each of his relatives. These names are no way Colombian and sound more like German to me. Where could a little boy who has never been out of Colombia get these names? One day he said he had just come back from Mexico, visiting his 'family'. He said he had been to 'el Parque de los Chinos' - the Park of the Chinese. His family laughed at him, but then a friend of theirs who had been in Mexico recently said, 'the boy is not so crazy, there is a Parque de los Chinos in Mexico.' The family say there is no way the little boy could know about this park, which not even they knew existed. Since the boy was four, he has had this obsession for blonde women, not girls, but fully grown women. One day a blonde lady was passing and he said, 'This is the woman of my dreams.' He is frightened of black people. In Cali over half the population is black, they are the norm in that very hot town!.... I do not know what to believe, but it gave me the shivers to meet and hear about this little boy. JULIE'S TALE (Julie was 14 at the time of this event) "It was February 9th. I was coming home to the farm from Belen when from a distance I saw some soldiers lying on the grass. When I got closer, one of them stopped me and asked the usual questions, Where are you going and Why do you live here. I answered all his questions and he told me they were looking for a boy who had been kidnapped and that incidentally they had found a 'spy'. "I didn't know what he was talking about and they let me go on. But when I got to Mario's house (Mario is Alice's partner, father of baby Jack mentioned above), I got a fright, there were around 40 soldiers there, and a lot of our neighbours too. And I saw Eber (a local man) sitting in the dog's bed with a frightened face on him. I politely asked Mario's father what the hell was going on, but he tried to hush me up. Then Mario told me that the Army had arrived at the local coop. store and were checking everyone out and Eber ran away into the bush and tried to get away, but the soldiers caught him. "Then they had gone to Mario's father's house. It was 7.0 p.m. and he was making supper. When he looked up at the door, there was a soldier standing there with his machine gun pointing at him. Mario's dad said Hello and the soldier asked him to sell him coffee and cheeses and to lend them a piece of rope. He lent them one. Then he heard someone calling him over and over again. He looked and saw Eber sitting there with his hands and feet tied up. Mario's father wanted to give him some food, but he wasn't allowed to. Some of the soldiers slept on the floor and they put Eber to sleep in the dogs' bed outside with just one blanket (nights are very cold in the mountains). "Next day everyone came to see what had happened and to try and talk the soldiers out of taking Eber away. I told a soldier that he had a wife and kids and had to look after them. The soldier replied that the day before when they got him, everybody acted like they didn't know him and if someone had said something then, they would have let him go and that now they believed the Guerrilla had sent all the people down to speak for him. "Eber's father asked me to talk to the soldiers because they have more respect for an Irish girl than a Colombian peasant woman. I felt a bit strange but I tried talking to them. But they were just so happy with themselves that they had caught someone and didn't want to listen to anything. The soldier who had caught him told me that he was going to retire after that as he would get paid loads for catching a Guerrilla. "Around 11 a.m., they took him to Belen walking (a very long way!) and just as they were about to leave, Eber came up to me and shook my hand and looked at me, tears were nearly coming out of his eyes, and he looked really scared. I knew he wanted me to say something to them, so I asked them where they were taking him to and when were they going to let him go? The soldier was very friendly and said they were going to phone the Fiscalia and if he had a record, he would be put in jail. "So they went to Belen. I felt really horrible because some of our neighbours were just laughing and talking rubbish. I felt the same the time Pacho was killed, the man I found dead in the road about two years ago. So I felt I had to do something. I talked to his family and they were all lazy about it and didn't want to do anything. I just wanted to talk to the army and make sure they treated him well and just so he knew he had our support. So I followed them to Belen and when I got there I talked to the Captain. He was very nice and said that they were going to let him go that night or the next day. I was allowed to talk to him and he thanked me for showing my face. I gave him a bollocking for getting himself into trouble and said anyway I agreed with the politics of the Guerrilla but I didn't like the way they stole cars and food. He accepted my criticism. "A few days later I went to Belen and the soldiers said they regretted letting him go because someone had told them he was a miliciano (Guerrilla militia man). I saw him later ad he told me that when they first got him, they wanted him to put on an Army uniform, but he refused because sometimes soldiers do that and then they shoot the person and say 'he was a Guerrillero'. Because he refused to wear their uniform, the sergeant beat him up.." ************* It is well known that the United States is paying huge sums of money to support the Colombian military under their 'Plan Colombia'. Whatever the crimes of the guerrilla armies, the civil war will never end until there is some kind of social justice in Colombia. And meanwhile people such as Tristan and Javier and tens of thousands like them caught up on both sides of the war will continue to die. I will end with a quote taken from Nexus magazine of November 2003, by an American, James McCanney: ".the rest of the world is advancing far beyond the US in consciousness and in progress as a human species. .as a civilian population, we have to grab hold of this country and turn it around because, literally, the whole rest of the world depends on it. We are at a stage right now that is equivalent to 1939 in Hitler's Germany. "They did not turn that country around, and if we don't turn this country around, we're going to be in a far bigger world problem than World War Two ever was.." Our email address is: atlantiscommune@hotmail.com , or atlantisfoundation@eircom.net Correspondence and questions are welcomed. I am at present in Ireland living on our sailing ship which is soon to take part in various political campaigns worldwide, and can be contacted or visited there. Jenny James, Atlantis Ecological Community, Baltimore, Co. Cork, Ireland. ~ End Green Letter 64 ~ GREEN LETTER FROM COLOMBIA No. 65, June 19th, 2004 Most of this Green Letter consists of reports from Anne Barr who for years has been fighting for justice for two members of our ecological community who were murdered in July, 2000. They were both 18. On being interviewed by a murderer's lawyer When we first settled in the wilds of Colombia in the 80s, whenever the question of Injustice came up, our peasant neighbours would always with utter conviction tell us that it was dangerous to report, sue or bear witness against anyone ever, however foul their crime. With our fresh European mindset, we would look quizzically at such neighbours and think perhaps that they just didn't understand how the law worked. But it was us who didn't understand. Nearly four years after two of our teenage boys were 'executed' - the grotesque term used by their killers - Anne is still undergoing a crash-course in Colombian 'justice'. The latest 'crash' was Anne being summoned to the Public Prosecutor's office (Fiscalia in Spanish) to be cross-questioned for five hours by the Defence lawyer of two of the gang of killers. Such a concept is bizarre enough, but here is what Anne reports of her 'interview': "At first the lawyer was hateful, attempting to trash all the information we had been given about the boys' deaths, which is of necessity 'hearsay'. He kept pressing to know who gave each bit of information - a very dangerous line of questioning for the many people who have risked their lives to help us. I told him that two of our witnesses are already dead because they tried to help - poisoned by the same gang. "As Defender of FARC prisoners, the lawyer was obviously leftwing, so I pressed the point that the gang of militiamen who had slaughtered our lads had terrorized the whole region where we used to live, had killed dozens of innocent people and had destroyed a previously very peaceful guerrilla-run area, done enormous political damage to the leftwing and to the credibility of the FARC especially during the failed Peace process, had been totally unrestrained by their leaders and had caused many local people to look to the army and the paramilitaries in desperation, and that all these atrocities had been committed under the banner of 'revolution'. "It was a risk to say all this in front of the Government Prosecutor where everything was being written down! but I saw no other way round the situation where the Defence lawyer was essentially insinuating that we were persecuting the guerrilla just because they are guerrillas and that his client was victim of our over-emotional reactions. "At one point, there was a coffee break when nothing was being written down, so I grabbed the opportunity to tell the Defence lawyer that he did not understand our perspective or our politics and that where I had spent yesterday (a Sunday) and all my Sundays in Bogota was in the guerrilla section of the high security wings of various prisons with the three Irishmen accused of being FARC trainers, and talking to many FARC commanders. I also asked him to help Gerardo, a young man who has been in jail for over a year falsely accused of being a guerrilla. I told him that throughout all the tragedy of our boys' murders, we were careful not to let the rightwing government use our personal devastation to foment more violence, but if this particular gang leader got out of jail he would be responsible for a lot more innocent people's deaths and would ruin whatever region he was sent to. I told him that we had always lived in 'red zones' (FARC-controlled areas) in the countryside even after all that had happened to us. "After this, he apologized and said it was just his job. But he is obviously very leftwing and seems to be genuinely convinced that Arnulfo (the head of the group who killed our boys) is innocent. He also seems to be a good lawyer which is very worrying as apart from the injustice, it would be dangerous for us if these killers are released, as they will be baying for our blood. Arnulfo and his brother are trying to say that the copy-book where they proudly wrote that on 9th July 2000 they had 'executed' two 'Irishmen' (Javier was a dark-skinned Colombian, Tristan was Irish) was forged and planted on them by the Army, though the handwriting tests show that it is definitely Arnulfo's writing. This is the only hard evidence we have so far, as obviously no peasant who saw the boys captured, tied up and dragged away dares to testify, much less anyone who saw them killed. "However, our main informer, X, is seriously considering coming out into the open as a witness as he has so little left to lose now that he is in so much danger that he cannot work on his farm any more. He can testify that Arnulfo was the local guerrilla commander for many years and that he, X, was at many meetings where Arnulfo openly threatened the local people when they tried to complain about killings and other bad treatment. However, our friend is not a witness to the killers actually taking the boys away. "At no point during my interrogation by the Defence lawyer was I allowed to ask any questions, or rather, he was not obliged to answer those I asked anyway, like: does he know the region we lived in, does he know how well run it used to be before the murdering gang arrived there and ruined everything? Does he know he is defending a psychopath who has only damaged the legitimacy of the armed struggle and will continue doing so? These questions were not written down as I wasn't supposed to ask them. "The Fiscal woman actually shot me glances of support and approval every time I turned my answers to his repetitive questions into semi-political speeches. After he asked me for the 89th time exactly who told me some bit of information, and I got tired of saying I couldn't put my sources at risk, I said I hoped to be able to satisfy his thirst for names just as soon as the witness protection programme had a new boss as the previous one was a dirty old man who spent his time running after his secretaries. This is a big scandal in the Fiscalia and this boss has been sacked, though obviously such petty misdemeanours are nothing in comparison to his real crimes such as many anti-army and anti-paramilitary witnesses getting killed before they could testify. "Both the Fiscal and the Defence lawyer thought me calling him a 'viejo verde' (dirty old man) was hilarious - I suppose laughing was a relief as the tension was very high. Things got a bit better after that. They also thought that it was very funny you, Jenny, writing that 'document' to Commander Gonzalo asking him to care for the birds and the trees on our farm when he came to bully us and throw us out! "After the interrogation, the Fiscal woman told me that Louise, a teenager at the time of the murders, had to come and testify. I did not like her tone and asked her did she realize how much work, risk and expense our investigations meant for us, all of which should have been taken on by the Fiscalia and not by us. I said Louise could come more quickly if they paid the fare. Of course no way will they do this, and we are forced to comply so as not to block the process. "On the way out of the office, I blacked out for a few seconds and almost fell on the floor, the guards got me to sit down and fetched me water and then I had to run into a loo to vomit. I felt shaken by all the s. I had taken into me. Then I went to find a woman lawyer friend now working in the anti-corruption department and we wrote a letter asking the Procuraduria (which oversees the correct behaviour of Govt. bodies) to invigilate the case as the Fiscalia has not made any advances in three and a half years and is not offering adequate witness protection. I was told only today that about a year ago, the murderers were almost set free as the time limit allowed for the Fiscalia to present proof against them had run out, and it was only the chance fact that their previous Defence lawyer resigned (through not being paid) before presenting a demand for their release that kept them behind bars at the time. This near-disaster about which we knew nothing was also prevented by the coincidence that just around that time, I managed to persuade a man who had been kidnapped by the same gang to testify, which kept them in jail another while." **************** Behind the scenes of the legal system. Louise, now 23, is biologically Tristan's aunt, but being only one year older than him, was brought up as his sister and close companion. She has been deeply involved in the case against his murderers from the beginning, travelling to the previously demilitarized zone to talk to top FARC commanders, confronting the murderers in jail, and now being cross-questioned by their Defence lawyer. Anne continues with a report of this second interview: "When Lou and I were in the queue to get into the Fiscalia, the man directly behind us was the defence lawyer, so we started on him immediately, giving him one of the girls' CDs of peace songs and social critique in an attempt to re-wash his brain as he has had it black-washed by the killers with their version of events as 'victims' of these mad reactionary foreign women. "Whilst still in the queue, the lawyer started to say how innocent Arnulfo is: Louise responded very clearly and passionately with tears in her eyes that she had lived in the region where Tris died all her childhood and knew what was what and no-one was going to pull the wool over her eyes. That shut him up for the moment, but he stuck to us like glue from there on. I said on the stairs up to the office that if the killers had ever said anything like 'oh my god, what a terrible mistake, what can we do?' we would never have gone to the State, as we wanted the whole case dealt with by the guerrilla themselves. It was only because they denied everything and kept killing more people that we had been forced to work with the Army and the Government. "Whilst waiting to see the Fiscalia, the lawyer came and sat near us, obviously fascinated by Louise. He is not wonderfully intelligent, but is dedicated to his work as a defence lawyer for political prisoners and one can't really blame him for thinking the men are innocent given that the State is rounding up all and sundry - as long as they are poor and live in Red Zones - and shoving them into jail. He told us about a lot of people in Icononzo, where we used to live, being imprisoned wrongly, including a woman I knew well who has nothing to do with the Guerrilla. "I don't think any of what we said during the official interview really got through the curtain in his brain. It was only afterwards when he asked us to go for coffee and I took him to a friend's flat nearby that we really had time to get to him. Of course, he tried to keep everything stupid and superficial and had the usual 'sure-it's-alright-really' Colombian attitude: one is supposed to forgive and forget such enormous violence and join in the national state of deep denial that is going on, a whole country in a dark pit because the huge violations they commit daily on each other are not being dealt with on any level at all. "The lawyer said he had wanted to talk to me for months but had no means of contacting me (that's good news - the murderers and their mates still on the loose didn't know where I was!) and that he wanted to organize a meeting between us and Arnulfo in prison! According to the lawyer, by meeting with him we are supposed to 'limar asperezas' - 'smooth out differences'- this is just such a disgusting concept. He kept repeating a tape he'd memorized about 'forgiving and forgetting'. I said he'd got it wrong. It was about Truth, Punishment and Compensation. He was disappointed that we weren't buying the shallow solution. I still feel so violent about this attitude. But I agreed to go to meet the murderer in jail. "Louise managed to shut him up for a while by giving an excellent speech on why, if Arnulfo is innocent, was his reaction to the murders in the region under his command not one of: 'oh my god, what can we do? What on earth is going on here? Let's find the killers.' She said he is a leader in a political cause and should be a proper leader. I told the lawyer that I would be willing to work with him in helping people wrongly imprisoned but not to help killers who have only done damage to the social movement and even made peasants feel that the paramilitaries are a better option! I think he found it a bit shocking when I told him that this particular FARC band had even thrown the local peasants' Communist Party out of the region for complaining about guerrilla killings of innocents. We also told him about all our journeys throughout the years to talk with guerrilla commanders at the highest level regarding the murders. I think he was a bit out of his depth with us as we didn't quite fit in with his preconceived notions of ignorant foreigners accusing the FARC and he will almost certainly think a lot about what we said. "He took my telephone number, I have his. Now the question is: how to manage a meeting with the murderers without ending up frustrated at not being able to kill them! Although it is a possible beginning of what we wanted years ago - a more human way of dealing with it all face to face, without having to go through the cold boredom of corrupt bureaucracy, I don' t know how to handle it as the first image that comes to my mind is of torture instruments and a free hand to use them.. Beyond that, I am very glad of this new opening." - Anne **************** How to Get a Colombian Visa .. Colombian bureaucracy is an expensive nightmare. Recently Anne's visa ran out and she could no longer renew it through our 'Ecological Foundation' as we could show no movement of funds, as there weren't any. So as she absolutely has to stay in Bogota to shepherd our nigh-on impossible court case to its conclusion - a process that will take years - and needs to 'stay legal' to do this, after being threatened with deportation, she was eventually advised to apply for a special visa we'd never heard of before called a 'caso no previsto' which means literally 'an unforeseen case.' However, the lower echelons of the bureaucratic establishment don't like cases that don't fit into the usual boxes. Here is part of the very Colombian story of her recent skirmishes and battles in this department: "I went back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was almost immediately shouted at by the same man who had shouted at me the day before. He literally threw my passport back over the counter at me and said it was in too horrible a state to put a visa in. It is in the same state as it has been in for the last four visits during the last three months, i.e. a bit scruffy. When he took a breath, I mentioned this. I said I would be illegal the next day and a new clean Irish passport would take at least a month to obtain as there is no Irish Embassy in Colombia, and that I needed a 'salvo-conducto' - 'safe-conduct'- to bridge the gap. "He said he couldn't do anything about that. I said well, he would have to as I was staying there in the Ministry until someone sorted it out, and I said I wanted an interview with his boss. He said I couldn't have one. I said I had to have one. He waved me away to talk to a poor little security woman who has no power to decide anything. So I had to do a sit-down strike on her until she took my papers back to the offices off-stage. Most of this unfolding drama took place centre-stage in front of dozens of people waiting. "Meanwhile I gained some support from the visa lawyers I know there who said: stick it out, you're in the right. So I sat and waited and was accosted by four different officials who each came to tell me I had to leave the country/apply for a visa in Ecuador/buy an air ticket to Ireland, all efforts to unofficially deport me. I stayed very calm and said No, I was staying till someone sorted my situation out as I live here. The last one who tried the Ecuador number annoyed me and I asked was this an attempt to deport me illegally and if so, I would sue them. This must have been the right thing to say, as I was then finally taken to see the boss, accompanied by all four prefects who were going to tell the headmaster I was a bad girl. "Then I met the Boss. He was totally relaxed, scruffy, with longish red hair, a beard, blue eyes smiling and looking like he thought it was all ridiculous. I nearly burst into tears with relief. The three female officials (I'm afraid women are always the worst in these situations) started going through the rather enormous file they have on all my ups and downs and ins and outs. The boss didn't listen as they cross-examined me. So the women sort of wound down as no-one was getting excited about their interrogation of me, and when they finally left, the boss asked the remaining man how they could sort out my situation? "I talked about Tris and Javier's deaths and couldn't stop crying. They talked legalities and came to some not too legal way to give me a year's visa, though I do have to get a new passport as mine is evidently not pretty enough to put a Colombian visa into. Then the boss asked me how I keep myself in Bogota. Deciding not to bother with lies, I said that although I have no work-permit, I earn my keep as an astrologer.. Whereupon he immediately rang his mother to get his time of birth and I am to do his chart in a minute. Then he asked more about our community, and I gave him a copy of the social and political CD the girls have produced, which is, incidentally, also technically illegal as they don't have work permits either! The other man laughed as I took it out of my bag and said, 'You really are a 'caso no previsto' - an 'unforeseen case.' "Then (because of my two paper marriages for previous visas) he asked me how many Colombian men I'd 'gone through'. I asked were we on or off the record, because if we were 'off', I had a lot to say about Colombian men. That shut him up. "I then had a long wait while the man in the office who had shouted at me and who - oh sweet revenge - had to do the paperwork for the visa he didn 't want to give me, tried to mess me around, saying my photos were no good. I said, 'Sorry, that's what I look like' and that they had been taken in an official passport place. Then he asked angrily how long they were giving me. A year, I said. 'That's far too long', he said. A lot of people were listening and giggling as he is known to be hateful and treats everyone badly if he can get away with it. "Finally after hours I was given a Colombian travel document that is valid for one month but containing a visa that is valid for a year, and exactly on what basis I was given this visa none of the lawyers I was sitting chatting with could figure out, in fact the visa is evidently totally illegal . "And then they refused to give me back my passport as I can't have two travel documents . but I have to have it to get a new one as requested. So I did another brief sitdown strike and finally got it given back, and eventually walked out feeling triumphant, though leaving behind me a trail of people very pissed off with me.I'm sorry if all this comes across as mad. That's because it was. "And in the middle of all this, I talked for several fascinating hours with a lawyer who sees ghosts and knows all her past lives ." **************** A Tale of Two Cities - called Bogota For reasons unfathomable to me, several groups of Northern 'Greens', including Ecologist magazine have got hold of the idea that the unbearably polluted and traffic-ridden capital of Colombia, Bogota, is a 'model city.' This seems to be due to the self-advertising of two former Mayors, Antanas Mockus and Penalosa. Fed up with reading these glowing and totally unrealistic reports, I asked Anne, as someone who lives there, for her comments on this. She writes: "The small improvements to public spaces are a coverup that could only fool people who live their lives within the prettified part of Bogota, and of course there are many middle class ecologists who keep within those bounds. It was a relief for many well-off Bogotanos to have Mockus as mayor - someone who has a nice, alternative façade that satisfied guilty consciences but who in reality changed none of the deep inequalities of this city and indeed made some of them worse. For instance, he made it illegal to sell on the sidewalks: hundreds of thousands of poor people depend on this informal commerce to keep body and soul together. But Mockus, whose main aim was to rock no big boats in this city of inhumanly and unbelievably wide social and economic gaps and to stroke none of the fat cats up the wrong way, put the sellers of shoes laces and socks off the streets to keep the big chain stores happy. "As far as real ecology was concerned, he was happy for the last remaining wetlands to be built upon and willing to sacrifice a lot of the surrounding forest reserves to the gods of huge profits. Only the mobilization of local people stopped this. As for the wonderful clean new transport system: try travelling on it. It is always scarily packed full, and of the huge profits, so many millions per month that they do not fit in my head, most go to eight private investors. Four percent goes to the City but then the City must pay for the upkeep of the buses from that four percent. If you are a Neo-liberal, that is called good business practice. "Now if you would like to hear about a Mayor with balls, let us look at the new head of Bogota, Lucho Garzon: he is a trade unionist from a poor background, with no father and his mother cleaned houses for a living. The extreme right wing government led by Alvaro Uribe have labelled him the FARC mayor. This is no less than a death sentence in Colombia. "At the first formal meeting between Lucho and Uribe, Lucho's opening phrase was: 'Do you really think I represent the FARC?' Uribe, to whom honesty doesn't come naturally, was so taken aback he couldn't answer. This was not reported in the press - I heard it from someone who was there. For the record, Lucho has been just as straightforward with the FARC in expressing his disgust for many of their methods. "So as not to limit his administration to the tarted-up part of Bogota, Lucho has begun to move his office around all the poorer areas. Last weekend, he was in Ciudad Bolivar where there are over a million people who live far below the poverty line, an area where the army are said to be killing local people and blaming it on the FARC, just to 'prove' that an army base must be built there to protect the people. This information comes from the police! Almost everyone in Ciudad Bolivar voted for Lucho. "In the midst of all this, Lucho calls open meetings all over the city and mixes with people freely and without body guards. This is unheard of here and has his closest aides in a state of near nervous collapse. But as they say, he wouldn't be Lucho if he were surrounded by body guards. "At one of the most exclusive clubs recently, he suggested to the members that they do a 'humanitarian exchange' with people from the poor areas as a form of education .. They laughed and thought he was quite quaint." **************** Really Turning the City Green Anne has been asked to help lead urban farming projects for the very poor as we are known for our many years of experience in organic gardening and food production in the wilds of the Colombian countryside. Here is a report from her on one of the initial meetings: "I went to the botanical gardens where there was a really moving group meeting taking place with people from the barrios (slums) and desplazados (displaced persons - rural refugees fleeing violence in their regions), who have made gardens and communal eating places with help from no-one. It was all very basic but utterly admirable and very political. One chancer in a suit tried to say everyone had to get together to sell their produce; he was so different from everyone else. I got annoyed and said selling wasn't the point, but growing to eat was, that there is nothing more revolutionary than growing your own food, that vegetables are more powerful than bullets, and that's why the Neoliberals don't want this programme to work. I got cheered. There were a few boring technocrats and some of the no-foreign-plant-species-here fanatics, but most of the group were just really basic, radical, poor people. I have the addresses of the best ones and I will visit them some time. "One skinny man, a refugee from the Sur de Bolivar (paramilitary country) gave a brilliant speech about displaced people and the hatefulness of the Government's so-called 'Network of Solidarity' for not ever helping them. He is helping transform the grounds of the once-brilliant people's hospital San Juan de Dios, now closed down by Uribe, into gardens for the refugees. He is very poor, skinny and ill. Afterwards I gave him a bit of money and collected all the left-over packed sandwiches and juices we'd been given at the meeting for him. I asked him for a telephone number, but he said he couldn't give it out as he gets threats. But once he found out that I was Irish and visit political prisoners like my three countrymen, he said we had a lot to talk about and gave it to me." Anne is at present investigating requests for us to become involved with these projects on a very large scale. We will have to make a big decision as it will involve a huge input of time, labour and our extremely stretched resources. More news in the next Green Letter on this. **************** Moving Colombia with Music Let us now return to the Southern Colombian countryside where our young girls are making waves with their music. Here is a report from Louise: "Semillas de Paz: Seeds of Peace, is the name of our first CD of songs about ecology, peace, anti-drugs, anti-war, anti-formal education, anti-money, and - why not - a couple of love songs. It was recorded simply in a good studio, all the excellent musicians playing for free because of their strong feelings for our message. "We made 1000 copies which we have been gradually selling, swapping, using as payment, and giving to special friends and helpers. The reception is more amazing than I could ever have imagined. The times when we sell our CDs most is after a singing show; people come up to us sometimes in tears because we are singing for Colombia, about the violence and the beauty, the deaths and the huge hope and potential to be a peaceful, multi-cultured country full of life, and many other issues which are important to the people here. We also sell it by asking the drivers of buses, the owners of restaurants and the people that pick us up when hitching, to play it. Nearly every time someone hears it, they buy one. "Recently in a distant mountain village called Balboa, my 18-year-old sister Katie and I sang for a big group of refugees. It was one of the most beautiful experiences we have had singing in years, no microphones, no stage, just us and them in an open field. We sang for ages, we talked too, we told them we had been displaced as well and that we had lost relatives we loved so much. We all knew what it felt like and no-one could understand each other better. They were from all different parts of Colombia, but had become one big family, all working together to build new little homes with a small bit of help from the government. "We saw mainly women working on the house-building, and tiny children too. I suppose a lot of their men had been killed. We got a friend to make a copy of our CD for each family and they were so grateful, I was embarrassed, and they promised us that if and when we return, they will know all our songs off by heart and would sing with us! I wanted to give them everything I had. If I had had my rucksack with me, I would have definitely given everything away and returned without it. At the end, they said we had given them the best gift ever: encouragement and 'animo' - heart or courage - and that the messages in our songs were very important to them. "We even gave a talk on vegetarianism and compost in the middle of it all; it was so relaxed, we felt totally at home with them. I will never forget them and we hope to go back there some day. "It is not only in Colombia that our CD has been heard, but in many other countries and I want to take this opportunity to thank all the people who have heard it and sent such beautiful, encouraging feedback. We hope to record another one soon, and also one in English. I send my love and gratitude to everyone who helped. Louise." **************** Advice for Babies.. Over now to our own farm, where 20 year old Alice lives with her new baby. Here she sends the latest list of Rules on Childrearing she has received from peasant women in the area: 1. Don't cut a baby's hair as it will never talk. 2. If a baby has hiccups, that is good as it means it is growing. 3. You should wrap newspaper around the baby's stomach to stop it getting sick. 4. Never uncover a baby's back, or it will die of cold. 5. Hit or whip a child when it falls or hurts itself so it learns not to do it again! **************** And an everyday story of Colombian Country Life from Julie, aged 15 "One day I met one of the soldiers who had caught Eber in the mountains you can see across from our farm (see last Green Letter for this story). He told me that that day, they were looking across the valley through binoculars and saw me walking up to our farm. I was dressed all in black and they were totally convinced I was a guerrilla soldier. One of them was saying: 'shoot, shoot!' but then they saw that I was female so they didn't shoot me. "I asked what would have happened to him if he had shot me, thinking he would have been put in jail. He said, 'Oh, nothing.' And he told me that once one of his companions killed a man by accident - the man was a house-guard, it was night-time and the man came running towards him and he shot him thinking he was a guerrilla. So they put a gun in the dead man's hand. He said they would have done the same with me. "Recently the army went to the country town of Leticia and killed a head of the guerrillas there. Nearby there were two Guambiano Indian girls, one of them was three months pregnant. The army raped them and then shot them, their brother was hiding and saw it all happen. Alice says that after killing them, they put uniforms on them and guns in their hands and said they were guerrillas. She says that day she was travelling in the milkman's van and on the radio they were saying that they had killed and captured lots of guerrillas." **************** These Green Letters, giving news of Colombian reality as directly experienced by members of the Atlantis Ecological Community are compiled by Jenny James, email: jennyjames@softhome.net . The full set of Green Letters dating back to 1995 can be viewed on: www.afan.org.uk Correspondence and inquiries welcomed either by email to Jenny or post to: Atlantis, Telecom, Belen, Huila, Colombia. Books on Atlantis Community available electronically at www.deunantbooks.com Information and photos of S.V. Atlantis Adventure, the community's campaigning sailing ship: www.thesupplydepot.co.uk/AtlantisAdventure.html Jenny and her daughter Louise are at the moment travelling in Ireland and England in connection with Bush's visit to Ireland and associated political campaigns, and are available for informal talks or meetings, or to hear Louise's songs. Write to email address above. How to make a big difference by staying small. The request to write an article on how a network of inspired local activities can bring about global change has thrown me into the pits of Despair, a despair which is, I am sure, shared by concerned and hurting people the world over. And that is just what They want: a passive, depressed population who have despaired of having any influence to change how the world is run and who therefore are not going to cause any trouble. Just as an authoritarian parent wants malleable, robotic children to carry out dutifully the Parental Plan. And that's the first good reason not to give in to political despair but to fight it with all the fierceness we'd muster to counteract a murderous intruder trying to snuff out our life-force. Despair is a dangerous Weapon of Mass Destruction deliberately wielded by our Rulers to keep the status quo chugging along nicely by destroying Hope, Initiative, Creativity and any attempt to organize an environment that is a joy to live in. Depression is what happens when we only consume and do not create, when we accept the Great Capitalist Con of buying ‘comfort' and ‘security' and give up self-reliance; when we settle for foodshops instead of fields and gardens where we can care for ourselves, when we swallow conventional Approved Medicine and all its dictates instead of finding real healing, when we fall for the massive lie of ‘education' instead of allowing our children true explorative learning, when we accept second-hand Religions instead of finding out for ourselves what we feel about the Universe, when we live in nuclear families instead of communal tribes and in privatized relationships instead of daring to experience real instinctual sexuality; when we use electrical everythings instead of our own muscle-power and bio-energy, when we buy and throw away instead of making and mending; when we switch on mind-numbing canned ‘entertainment' instead of raising our own voices, moving our own limbs, acting in our own theatre, telling each other our own dreams and fantasies. Around the age of eight, I noted that Everything was Wrong. Not just one or two bits and pieces here and there that needed improvement. No. Everything. So as soon as I could escape my mother's clutches, I determined to create my own world. I started having sex at 14, which is healthy, illegal and causes trouble, so that was obviously a good start. Then at 16, I walked out of Grammar School where I was doing ‘very well' in Their terms (whilst dying of hatred and misery inside). Another good move. Then I joined a planet- and personal-life saving movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and spent a decade in intensive direct action politics. And that was another good thing to do. But then in my mid twenties, I noticed I wanted to die. And my best friend, a German girl of 20, hung herself. Uh-oh, we were not changing the world and ourselves fast enough. So I swerved from going barmy about Vietnam and went into Reichian therapy, became a therapist and in 1970 set up a commune based on free peer-group self-help which we called Atlantis. A community which dived into exploring human nature by removing ourselves from all the usual distractions and rules: we started in a rabbit-warren of a squat in London, moved to a deserted Irish island and then finally to the mountains of Colombia, South America, where we still live. We have been self-sufficient in food for decades, thousands have passed through our doors, our relationships with local people are governed by exchange of goods and services, not by buying and selling, our organic gardening methods are there for all to see. Our animals are happy and loved and we do not eat them. Our children are free, talented and self-governing, politically aware and active, and never went to school. Our influence has spread far and wide, well beyond what might seem possible given the very small number of people who make up the core of our group. I am 62 and since childhood have never stopped causing trouble, and providing solutions. And encouraging others to do likewise. And yet when faced with the task of writing this article, I fell into the Pit of Despair. Normally in my mountain home, we do not have access to world news, except late and in dribs and drabs. But at present I have come to live on our commune's old sailing ship moored in Ireland, ready to take off on political campaigns around the world. And here I have daily access to news of the horrors being committed in Iraq by our murderously sanctimonious ‘leaders' Messrs. Bush and Blair. It requires superhuman effort not to fall into Despair when confronted with these monsters and the evil system that supports them. So half a century of constant activity to change the world They were trying to sell me seems like nothing, a mere piss in the wind. Assailed by the same despair millions of us felt over Afghanistan, Vietnam, Chile and all the long list of atrocities Western Man likes to call History. And then the request for two pages on How to Change the World …I shared the request with a woman friend, and quite naturally, we both fell into the Pit of Despair together. Well at least then there was company. That's a good start. She told me of her Despair and I told her she mustn't give in to it, whilst sinking ever deeper into my own. Until this morning, it got so bad I felt no incentive to move at all. Despair makes you want to curl up and do nothing and die and forget everything, especially articles on How to Change the World. This is a good time to turn oneself into a robotic Soldier of Faith in Humankind and be artificially Courageous. As you can't enjoy doing the things you normally like doing, it's a perfect time to do all those horrible tasks you have been putting off for so long and have a thoroughly and completely miserable time – there is nothing more depressing than trying to feel good when you don't: so in my case, I marched myself off to the computer to complete a long-neglected task of typing up for a friend an old article of mine. And I found it contained some magic words, sent by John Seymour, an organic gardening guru and campaigner: "I am only one. I can only do what one can do. But what one can do, I will do." And then my own words followed, written many moons ago, in a similar mood of despair over the felling of the rainforests and the murder of a friend: "Staying centred and therefore constructive is a huge part of The Work. Staying Small is the only way to be effective. If I cripple myself mourning the death of millions, I can do nothing about the death of one." ************ Judging by the massive reactions, the slanders, abuse, press campaigns and direct physical attacks our little community has received over the years from Western "First Worlders" and their Institutions over such issues as going to live in the jungle, letting our children be free, not sending them to school, not adhering to any religion, wearing simple mended clothes, living in simple shacks, opting out of the rat race in general and out of Europe in particular …. and by the massively positive reactions of South American peasants and Indians and middle and upper class people and even soldiers, police and guerrillas, all of whom, rich or poor, right or left wing still maintain something of the emotional honesty, mental openness and basic simplicity which "developed" societies flushed down their barbaric posh contaminating water-closets aeons ago, … it seems that the most revolutionary and direct way to change the world is by Living Differently. Now. Break all their rules: talk to each other, cry together, make a fuss. Don't consume, create. Don't swallow, puke. Don't hide behind drugs and alcohol: a clean environment starts with your own body. Form your own communities and self-help groups; make your own mistakes - don't copy theirs. Drop out of their systems and into your own lives. Break their chains by breaking your own. Create the world you want to live in, don't just moan at Them that they haven't created it. Protest, yes, but from the firm basis that you are already in the process of building the Other World that you know is possible. ************ A quote to end with, from Mr. Gandhi: "It's the action that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no results." With love from Jenny James.