A Story from Colombia

Josué, Manuel, Hector, Rosita, Excelino, Miguel Angel, Sylvia, and Alejandro shared several things that forever bound them together. They lived along the Carare River in an area called La India, in the jungles of Magdalena Medio in the country of Colombia. They were campesinos, peasants. They considered themselves ordinary folk. And they faced an extraordinary challenge: How to survive the wicked violence of numerous armed groups that traversed their lands and demanded their allegiance.

In the late 1960s, the leftist-oriented guerrilla movement FARC “entered” the territories of these campesinos. Military response from the national government followed and escalated. Unable to impact or eliminate the influence of the guerrilla movements in the region, landowners privately financed, often in conjunction with the military, the “Paras,” the self-defense armed groups of vigilantes. Battles took place not just for the land and for the informal war taxes where the campesinos had made their home, but for their very allegiance…