04356
August 6, 2004

Pieta

Colombian mother cries for activist son accused of terrorism

by Alexa Smith 

LOUISVILLE — Eli Maria Alvarez can’t stop crying. 

  Between sobs, bits of information blubber out. Yes, her son, Mauricio, had seemed more nervous, quieter, in the days before he was arrested. But she couldn’t get him to talk. Yes, he slept less. No, he didn’t go to the office as often. 

      The last time she saw him, she says, they were both in a cramped, Barranquilla jail cell, and he told her to agree to this interview. To let people know that if he is released, he will need a visa to get out of the country — and will need a place to go. 

      She adds this new concern to the why-is-he-late, what has-gone-wrong, what-if-he’s-hurt, what-if-he-doesn’t-come home litanies that keep her awake at night. 

      She says she was always worried about him, afraid for him, her law-student son who worked for poor people for free. Her youngest of three. The baby. The poet. The idealist. 

      Now he’s locked in a cell with three men who would cause any mother to lose sleep. The cell stinks. The food is lousy. He didn’t have a bed, so she dragged a roll-away cot to the jail and set it up for him.  

      Now he’s telling her that he can never go back to public school. And he certainly can’t go back to human-rights work. 

      “He needs to make a new start someplace else,” she says. 

      This is almost too much. She has been afraid that he would disappear. Now he’s telling her that, even if he is released, even if his lawyers show that there is no evidence to convict him of terrorism or subversion or any of the other awful things he is accused of, she will lose him anyway.  Even if he gets out of jail, he will still be out of her reach.

      It dizzies her to think that this is the best-case scenario.

      Her translator, Presbyterian Church (USA) missionary Alice Winters, stops talking and says, “She’s weeping.” 

      In the background, Eli Maria’s daughter, Renata, murmurs endearments softly in Spanish. A man clears his throat. Winters, who is translating in her third-floor apartment in a Barranquilla high-rise, says that, from now on, Mauricio’s siblings, Renata, 25, and Moises, 29, will have to do the talking. It’s too much for their mother. 

      The family crowds around a telephone on Winters’ desk. The phone at home isn’t safe. Eli Maria is sure that it is tapped. 

      This family has a huge problem. Mauricio Avilez Alvarez, 24, is charged with terrorism, subversion and murder. He’s a law student who works on the campus of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia, helping some of Colombia’s six million displaced families apply for government aid and document human-rights violations. 

      Barranquilla, like Colombia’s other big cities, is ringed with camps full of refugees, but no one calls them that because they haven’t crossed any borders. They’re “displaced” — unable to go home — but still in Colombia. Most fled violence; and because the people behind the violence control the regions they left, they can’t go back. So they sit. With little work, no money, few hopes. 

      Few cities welcome this kind of financial burden. And in Colombia, a paranoid logic argues that, if these people were forced off their land, they must be the dangerous ones. And if they’re here, they must be guerrillas-in-disguise ready to infiltrate the cities, waiting for the right moment to unleash terror. But most are just people trying to get by. 

      And most of them are barely doing that. 

      Moises clears his throat. 

      Yes, the volunteer lawyers that Mauricio organized on behalf of Colombia’s displaced, are working frantically to get him out of jail. An appeal has even been sent to the attorney general’s office in Bogota, but there has been no word. They have hired a new lawyer, but the case seems to have stalled somewhere in the system. 

      In Colombia, human-rights workers, union leaders, church leaders — anyone who can be tarred with a left-wing label — is in jeopardy of arrest. Mauricio is accused of being a guerrilla. He is accused of planting a bomb that exploded a few blocks from the synod office, injuring dozens of people. 

      Human-rights workers say his arrest is typical. It is a way to silence groups who are critical of new government policies intended to fight terrorism, but also smother civil liberties. 

      If the accused is released, he becomes an easy target for paramilitaries who often silence “subversives” with well-aimed shots. 

      There is no way that Mauricio has done what he’s accused of, says Moises, who, to his mother’s dismay, has taken over Mauricio’s job as director of CEDERHNOS, a human-rights center where volunteer law students do field work with displaced persons. 

      “No, no, no, no, no, no,” he says. 

      The day the bomb exploded, he says, Mauricio was in the office on the synod campus all day. 

      Right now, Moises is concerned about his brother’s health and safety in jail. 

      He accepts that his brother, if he is released, must leave Colombia. 

      “Right from the beginning, everybody realized that leaving the country was an option, even his lawyers. … If he ever gets out of jail, every paramilitary group will have him in their sights, as someone to be dealt with.” 

      Winters translates that phrase bluntly: “They’ll try to kill him.” 

      “The purpose of all this is to teach people that nobody should be a human-rights defender, nobody should get into this work in the first place,” Moises says. “That’s a problem. So, we’ve got to have a Plan A (to get Mauricio out of jail), and then a Plan B (to get him out of the country).” 

      The word on the street, Moises says, is that his accuser is a paid informant named Luis Enrique Meneses Pedraza, who testifies against others as part of a federal amnesty program.  

      Mauricio was picked up after a doctor’s appointment in June. The doctor called his family. The family moved fast to protect him, lining up lawyers. 

      Moises says that, if he gets out of jail and leaves the country, Mauricio may be able to come back in two or three years. Maybe things will be cooled off by then. 

      He says that his brother would like to finish his legal studies. A Catholic, he’d like to study theology, too. In fact, he’s spending his jail time reading the dozens of books his family brings to the prison: novels, poetry, theology. He’s writing his own poetry, something he’s always done. 

      The brothers, Moises and Maurico, have shared a room since they were little boys. They did until the day Mauricio was arrested. At work and at home, they looked out for each other, according to Moises. He’s still trying to do that. 

      His mother says that she’s praying to the Virgin Mary to help her boy. 

      She says she knew something was wrong long before anything actually happened. She knows now that Mauricio had heard rumors among displaced people that officials were asking questions about him and his work. He was depressed. But he didn’t say much.  

      Renata says her brother always tried to protect his mother. 

      Renata says she doesn’t feel safe herself, nowadays. She knows that police could search the house at any moment. Sometimes she thinks someone is following her in the street. But she isn’t sure. 

      It is a disorienting mess, her mother agrees. “Everything that’s happening, I get it all mixed up in my head,” she says. “I knew this was risky. But it was a mission he had to do. … I understand that he wanted to work with the poor, to help people without help. 

      “He was always a good boy.” 

      And then she starts crying again.