04041
January 23, 2004

In the valley of the shadow

Colombian churchman fights to live well despite death threats

by Alexa Smith

Despite the fact that some individuals are facing death threats in Barranquilla — like the executive secretary of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia, Milton Mejia — hundreds of thousands of others are going about their daily business on the city's streets. For them, life is normal. Click here to view photos of life in Barranquilla.

He doesn’t feel that way every morning, like he used to, when death seemed to be silently stalking him, waiting patiently around the next corner. In those days, Mejia spent his waking hours — and sleepless nights — trying to elude it.

It isn’t that way anymore, but he still wonders how close death may be.

When the phone rings late at night he still jumps, his stomach leaping. When he runs his hand along the small of his 6-year-old son’s back, the boy pleading for one more sip of Coca-Cola before bed. When one of the shiny, thin motorcycles in Barranquilla’s swarming traffic accelerates and weaves through traffic, passing his blue Chevy on the driver’s side.

Milton Mejia stands in the garden outside his home, flowering with bougainvillea. Photos by Alexa Smith

Mejia hasn’t stopped signing human-rights declarations. Or moderating session meetings at Fourth Presbyterian Church. Or supply preaching at Barranquilla’s Ninth Church, where his wife, Adelaida Jimenez, is pastor. Or going to the synod office. Or working with families routed from their homes in Colombia’s turbulent countryside.

“You know, intellectually, this can happen,” says Mejia, the executive of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia and the public face of the Protestant synod that has taken firm stands on human rights. “But nobody thinks it will happen to them. Until it happens. ... And then you begin to think, ‘I don’t know who is waiting for me. I don’t know if someone is hiding around the corner.’ Something like this creates fear and panic.”

Death comes quickly here in Barranquilla. But usually not without warning — if you are the target. Here, killers are selective. Although bystanders die sometimes, too.

There are sidewalk shootings, doorstep murders, killings in the line at the airport. The best-executed murders are in traffic: A motorcyclist pulls alongside a moving car, and someone mounted behind the driver blasts away. Then the bike disappears while stunned bystanders gape at more of the bloodshed that ordinary Colombians fear and despise.

People are not shot dead every day. Some days seem practically normal.

In December, Barranquilla reported 67 homicides, a statistic that has rattled some of the denial here. Then three bombs exploded downtown, killing an 18-year-old girl and injuring 74 people, shocking the residents of Barranquilla, who pride themselves on living in Colombia’s safest city.

Never mind that it was in Barranquilla where FARC, the largest Colombian guerrilla group, planted a remote-control bomb meant to kill candidate Alvaro Uribe, now the country’s president. It flattened the tires on Uribe’s car and killed three fishermen who happened to be nearby.

In Barranquilla, there are no mountains where guerrillas can hide. Paramilitary patrols don’t stop cars, looking for matches between the names on their secret lists and the ID cards of the passengers.

Here, it is a more subtle war. Under the surface. Raising its ugly head for a brief, bloody second, leaving behind death and desperation, then going back underground.

Barranquilla is a seaport, a perpetually sunny city that in the winter months enjoys soft breezes from the Caribbean, relief from its usual sweltering heat. Sinewy, sun-bronzed men push rickety fruit carts through neighborhoods in the early morning, hawking fresh pineapples, oranges and avocados, their voices rising and falling in a sing-song melody, rolling with soft Spanish rrrrrrr’s. Women wear midriff-baring tops, spiked heels, tight jeans. The more affluent ones take the 2 ½-hour flight to Miami just to shop.

The city’s houses and shops are picturesque, white stucco against the ever-blue sky or bungalows painted in pale pastels, blues and peaches and yellows. Always with metal bars over the doors and windows to keep out burglars. The city has museums and universities and super-stores that rival Wal-Mart in size and sell everything from onions to baby shoes.

Yet it was here that a man, in November 2002, threatened to kill Mejia if he didn’t pay $4,000. Or kill his wife. Or his two small sons. Or all of them. The man said he was calling on behalf of one of Colombia’s paramilitaries, the illegal clandestine units that international human-rights groups blame for 70 percent of the atrocities against civilians — massacres, chainsaw mutilations, beheadings, castrations and rapes.

Barranquilla has largely been spared such random, macabre violence. Its practitioners prefer the isolation of the countryside. In the city, it’s the occasional bullet-riddled body found at some industrial site. Or a murder by a single, well-aimed shot out of nowhere.

Adelaida Jimenez speaks outside a synod meeting in Apartado.

Fear is the real weapon.

When Mejia said he didn’t have the eight million pesos the threatening caller demanded, the man said he could divert funds that the Presbyterian Church of Colombia uses to help farmers who have fled to Barranquilla, forced off their land by armed groups who have been at war for 40 years over land rich in oil or coca or suitable for development. The violence has displaced nearly five million Colombians, who depend on churches and relief agencies to help them survive. (See related story, “Men Overbored.”)

His meaning was as clear as the Barranquilla sky: Stop what you are doing.

The calls came late at night. Or very early in the morning. Police tapped Mejia’s phone and trapped the caller, a twentysomething son of a prominent Barranquilla family named Nicolas Alfonso Pezzano Bornacelly. The man was jailed, but months later, he walked away from the jail on a day pass that should never have been issued. The warden has been removed and is reportedly facing criminal charges.

Pezzano’s disappearance is troubling to Mejia and his wife, both 37-year-old ministers.

Where is he? Are he and his backers still a threat to Mejia? Is this merely a reprieve? Are they waiting — which is what Colombia’s killers do best — for Mejia to let his guard down? Was this the prank of a privileged kid trying to extort money? Or was he really delivering a message from one of the clandestine groups that monitor those who talk about human rights, one of the identifying traits of a subversive in this repressive political climate.

“The tension is a lot less now,” Jimenez says, sitting in front of an open window in the couple’s home in a middle-class Barranquilla neighborhood, nervously tapping the floor with her foot. “But the thing I ask myself is, how will all of this end? Because there is no way of knowing what these ... people are thinking.”

She takes precautions, but tries to appear as if life is normal.

When she is at work at the church-run American School where she serves as a chaplain, secretaries and receptionists turn away strangers. When possible, she and Mejia go places together. They try to keep their boys — Andreas, 6, and Ivan, 9 — on normal schedules, telling them nothing about the threats. Some family friends have backed off, concerned about the risk of even socializing with the Mejias.

Mejia’s problems began when he disregarded the rules that Colombian kids memorize along with the alphabet: Keep your mouth shut. Keep your eyes averted. Keep your dreams quiet. Keep focused on getting by in the miserable present rather than trying to change the future. Keep away from conversations about human rights. Hear nothing.

Mejia did the opposite. He has, in fact, raised the consciousness of Presbyterians here to consider the social aspects of the Gospel, the injunctions of the prophets. Which may be why he has been singled out from among them.

He admits that he has criticized the Uribe government, which has vowed to weed out subversives, and even rewards informants for turning in neighbors, friends, family or complete strangers. Yes, he says, human rights workers resent the poverty, the unemployment, the displacements, and yes, they think it is wrong for Colombia’s wealth to be kept in the hands of only a few.

That isn’t guerrilla rhetoric, even though the messages may sometimes converge. The methodologies are light-years apart.

“We use civil process, democratic procedures,” he says, noting that the human-rights community doesn’t advocate taking up arms against the government. “We are doing something legitimate, and legal.”

Mejia shakes his head. His words sound so sensible, so obvious, that he is somewhat incredulous about the events of the past year. He doesn’t talk much about the threats, although he has informed some Christians in the United States, some friends at Church World Service, some colleagues at the Lutheran World Federation — most of them far away.

A letter-writing campaign to President Uribe was initiated by PC(USA) missionary Alice Winters, who teaches Bible at the seminary in Barranquilla. Hundreds of letters were directed to his Bogata office.

“That was the hardest part for us,” Jimenez says. “Most people did not know anything. To work with teachers, people at the church, as if nothing was happening. The hardest thing was to appear as if I was passing life in an ordinary way.”

She had Ivan memorize important telephone numbers. She told the children never to answer the telephone; and she began taping the calls. She and Mejia told the boys never to talk to strangers. Mejia began leaving for work at odd times and returning home on an irregular schedule that was carefully calaculated. A few pastors, close friends, served as chauffeurs.

“I never dreamed this sort of thing could come to me; I never dreamed I would have to reduce my life in such a way,” Mejia says, commenting that the fear provoked by death threats must be experienced to be understood.

He used to take regular walks. Now he exercises on a treadmill and a stationary bike stashed in the laundry room. His office protocol is like his wife’s: To strangers who could be informants or assassins he is unavailable. He keeps an eye out for motorcycles.

“It changed our entire lifestyle,” Jimenez says, adding that, during the worst times, in 2002, she grew paranoid and had bad dreams, imagining Milton dead, or both of them dead and her two sons alone. She worried that her boys might be kidnapped, or worse.

As a school chaplain, Jimenez knows what it is like to tell a small child that his daddy is gone forever. She found herself imagining what a teacher might say to her own sons in that situation, knocking their lives off-kilter.

After Pezzano’s escape, the U.S. Embassy offered bodyguards at the request of a U.S. Presbyterian, but Mejia said no. He said no again to exile, not wanting to seem to be giving in to his enemies. Nor did he want the presence of bodyguards to interfere with his pastoral work.

“I told the Embassy if it really wanted to help Colombia, put pressure on the Colombian government so impunity does not continue,” he says. “My faith and my pastoral work would not permit me to accept protection. I can’t imagine having bodyguards, much less running away from this.

“And we do understand that may have been the real objective.”

He says he knows of others who accepted bodyguards after being threatened, but are dead anyway. “I have to place my faith completely in God,” he says. “Watch out for problems, take reasonable measures of security. But when you are in danger, no matter how many precautions you take, you really don’t know. You have to serve God. Go ahead and do the best … ministry that you can.”

Love and work are what keep him going, he says.

“We have given ourselves over to what we like,” he says of himself and his wife, speaking of their work. “Both of us work too much. But we do it because we like what we are doing. ... It makes us who we are.”

Fear is the worst enemy, Mejia says. When the people of Jimenez’s church finally learned about Pezzano’s escape, they began praying — frantically, fearfully. “I told them that I wanted them to pray, but not with fear,” he says.

Mejia is determined not to let fear settle into his psyche, distorting his thinking and his behavior. He is still focusing on outwitting terror. Jimenez reckons that over the past year, they have learned to care better for each other, to pay attention to small joys. They bonded as a couple like never before. During the longest days and the worst nights, they had only each other to talk about their fears and doubts.

As he talks, his oldest son comes into the room in clingy, blue pajamas. It is just before bedtime. He insists to this mother that he has brushed his teeth. He just cannot remember exactly when.

Mejia smiles, softly. “For me, the joy of sharing with my friends is a form of resistance to fear,” Mejia says, adding that laughing and dancing come to mind as ways of cheating death, beating it one day at a time. “Happiness is a form of resistance.”

Then he adds: “Life is fragile. Very fragile. Too fragile.”