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May 17, 2005

Becoming ‘prayer-warriors’

Presbyterians prepare for peacemaking campaign in Colombia

by Alexa Smith

     She’s got goals.

     She wants to live inside the Presbyterian Church of Colombia, be part of its spiritual and community life. And she wants to test "accompani-
ment" as a form of active

church, union and human rights leaders, violence is discouraged.

     She also wants to show skeptics that it is possible to go to Colombia and return unharmed.

     “People in the U.S. ... tend to look at international issues one at a time, and since 9/11, the focus has been on the Middle East,” White says in an interview in an un-air-conditioned conference center here. The unseasonal heat is not unlike that in Barranquilla, a steamy Caribbean city on Colombia’s north coast where the PCC is headquartered. “People are not paying much attention to Latin America now.

     “I find that most people aren’t thinking about Colombia. And if they do, they think it isn’t a place to go. They think it is too dangerous. And that’s one thing I hope to accomplish: Show them it is possible to go to Colombia and come back.”

     U.S. Christians have already done so this year, as part of the accompaniment program begun by the General Assembly Council (GAC) in December and coordinated by the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship (PPF), a pacifist group with a history of proactive non-violence. (For information, email Charles Spring at bunch@stanfordalumni.org).

     White says being a pacifist doesn’t mean being passive.

     At the moment, at least two Colombian church leaders are living with death threats. The Rev. Jesus Goez of Cartagena packed up his household and went into hiding in March after unnamed thugs beat up his 15-year-old son and warned the pastor that his coffin was ready. The PCC general secretary, the Rev. Milton Mejia, has lived with threats off and on for years: Two weeks ago, he got a quiet one, a warning him to be careful.

     One church volunteer is in jail on charges that the government hasn’t proved; legal charges against another were dropped in April after a lengthy investigation. But both know that the end of their legal problems isn’t a guarantee of safety from the clandestine right-wing groups who oppose human rights work and who exact a deadly punishment outside the justice system.

     “It’s a chance to learn more about accompaniment, which is still a frontier of peacemaking,” White says. “It (accompaniment) began to emerge in the 1980s in Central America … but this is a new form. This is accompanying a church. It is a community. But not a town. We’re not there to protect individuals as much as to be with the church, and I think, lend some pastoral support.”

     THIS ACCOMPANIMENT MODEL is still emerging, according to Charles Spring, a Presbyterian from Washington, DC, who spent a year in Colombia with the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a Chicago-based pacifist group that works to deter violence by standing between the combatants.

     “Here (the PCUSA-PCC program), the accompaniers take their cues every day directly from the church there,” says Spring, who is training Presbyterian volunteers. “Other (accompanying) groups certainly consult the locals, but then they make their own calls, which is more detached, more autonomous. With other groups, the locals serve as advisors. This groups works for them directly.”

     Witness for Peace, born out of violence in Central America, largely sends delegations to get eyewitness accounts of terror in Colombia and returns them to the United States to lobby for changes in U.S. policy

increases in development aid.

     The Presbyterian push is more nuanced, although it includes aspects of all of the above. Some days, accompaniers are sent to threatened organizations, like ANDESCOL, the displaced peoples’ advocacy group. Other days, they listen to stories from some of Colombia’s three million internally displaced poor, pushed off their land by violence. They file reports. They return home and speak to congregations, presbyteries, community groups and Congressional leaders.

     “I see it, sort of, like joining the church there, being a member for a time,” says White, who has been learning Spanish over the past year. “When I listen to Milton Mejia speak, I think that he has a huge pastoral burden. There is so much suffering, so much struggle. Our task is to visit with them and to bring hope, so they know they are not alone. We can share in the work.”      

     OF THE 16 PRESBYTERIANS trained in non-violent action, most are retired folks able to spend at least a month in Barranquilla, according to Spring. The majority hail from Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, the stomping grounds of Rick Ufford-Chase of Tucson, AZ, the PC(USA)’s activist moderator, who cut his political teeth on U.S.-Mexican border issues.

     That’s probably not a coincidence.

     “A favorite question of Rick’s is: ‘How do we as people of faith live responsibly in this global economy?’” says 64-year-old Erik Mason of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe, NM, a retired U.S. army officer who was recruited by PPF to serve on the March accompaniment team.

     It is no surprise to Mason that poor farmers grow cocaine to meet U.S. demand when they can’t compete with predatory multinational corporations to market their corn, rice and beans. “What are they supposed to do?,” he asks.

     Both Mason and White have history of traveling in Central America through church channels. White, in fact, is a Presbyterian activist who spent six months in a minimum-security Texas prison for trespassing on the grounds of the Western Hemisphere Insitute for Security Cooperation (WHISC) at Fort Benning, GA, formerly called the School of the Americas.

     White, a retired IBM computer programmer, was fined $5,000 for civil disobedience at the combat training facility, which is said to have trained Central American military officers in extortion, execution and torture. The Department of Defense says the curriculum has been changed.

     Not all the accompaniers are activists.

     Wood says she’s accustomed to “the two-thirds” world, having served as a missionary in Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea. “It feels pretty natural to go,” she says, adding that traveling with a Witness for Peace delegation to Colombia last winter deepened her interest. “And I know Spanish,” she says. “What’s the point in knowing it if I don’t use it in some way?”

     Phil Gates, who admits he’s no activist, says seeing a photo of a traumatized, young Colombian girl in Presbyterians Today moved him deeply. When he read that the PCC was seeking accompaniers, it felt like a call. He was relieved that he could do something. “Now I’m a prayer-warrior,” he says. “I pray every day. And when I saw that picture ... it was the symbol of all of the things wrong with Colombia. It was a no-brainer, a non-issue, about whether I should go.”

     He leaves in late June to “stand with my sisters and brothers experiencing harassment and intimidation in Colombia.”

     PPF’s Anne Barstow, who coordinates the travelers’ schedules, says: “Things have gotten worse in Colombia since we started the project. In Barranquilla, there are more threats to more people. And from what I hear about Colombia in general … there are massacres. It’s not good in Choco, there are thousands coming out again. And on the eastern border, there’s fighting going on with the FARC (anti-government revolutionaries) and the (pro-government) paramilitaries. ...