Colombia and Senator Coleman

Photo - Displaced Colombians at Pastor Pedro's church, Cristo El Ray (Christ the King)

Yesterday and today are “Reading Days” and classes are cancelled. This morning a group went to meet with the new foreign affairs staffer in Senator Norm Coleman’s St. Paul office. An indigenous Colombian and two Afro-Colombians made the visit with three students, a pastor and two Lutheran World Relief representatives. Coleman has done an excellent job on Colombian policy work in the past and was already working finding a disappeared peace advocate who was slated to come to the US this weekend for a peace conference in Chicago. The powerful portion of our meeting came when the staffer began reading a list of statistics that ‘showed’ the President Alvaro’s administration was responsible for decreasing killings, displacements and disappearances in the country. The Colombians with us quickly stated that once you’ve killed/disappeared most of your opponents there’s no one left to kill/disappear and once you’ve displaced all the peasant farmers there’s no one left to displace. The situation is so complicated with many armed actors. Stateside there is a group working on the Sal y Luz (Salt and Light) peace project. There isn’t a group to back in this conflict. The project is designed to wage peace. Pedro, Pastor connected with the Luther Seminary Sal y Luz project, described a situation in which the government is financially compensating ‘disarmed paramilitaries’ when they ‘opt out’ of their fighting groups. One is living across the street of a widow with 12 children whose husband was killed by a paramilitary group – she receives no help. The other problems with this include Colombians who were never armed actors signing up for the ‘opt out’ program and others who reenlist with different groups while still collecting the benefits from the ‘opt out.’ No easy answers can be found to this and many conflicts. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak truth to power and to have a senator who is actively searching for answers in the bureaucratic nightmare of the US Senate.