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On Assignment | Never Again | JRS Mission & Identity

On Assignment

ON ASSIGNMENT IN BUENAVENTURA, COLOMBIA

In August of 2008, Associate for Policy, Shaina Aber visited the JRS office in Buenaventura, Colombia. Shaina writes:

I visited JRS’s new office in the city of Buenaventura, Colombia’s most important Pacific port city, with some trepidation. I had heard of Buenaventura, directly from the mouths of Colombian refugees and displaced people. They spoke of persecution at the hands of drug lords, paramilitaries and guerilla, reported the disappearances of family members and friends and detailed numerous other losses. Last year a UNHCR officer told me that seventy-five percent of the Colombian refugees who end up seeking safe-haven in Costa Rica claim Buenaventura as their last residence in Colombia. The JRS team in Buenaventura had also informed me of their brushes with the city’s swelling violence. On June 29th 2008, for instance, our team helped to coordinate a children’s festival in Buenaventura, as part of an effort nurtured by one Doña Chila, a displaced mother who had organized the activity to raise awareness about the forced recruitment of children into the illegal armed groups who exercise control over sectors of the city. Immediately following the children’s festival Doña Chila was gunned down in the street, in front of the local Catholic Church, by two men on a motorcycle. The murderers still have not been found, though the Buenaventura police suspect that a paramilitary gang was culpable. The JRS office, who had worked closely with Doña Chila and her group of displaced women leaders, was deeply shaken by this cold-blooded assassination. As I planned my trip to Buenaventura for a month later, I could not help but feel slightly uneasy, wondering if my presence would draw unnecessary attention to our work, and endanger our team and the displaced persons we accompany.

Buenaventura seemed to be heaving with people when I arrived in August. At midday I was bombarded with the liveliness of the city: the abundance of noise, the smell of roasting chontaduro fruit, and fresh fish, humid sea air, and the frenetic commerce of the port. These elements are startlingly juxtaposed with the more sinister energy created by the whispers of political disappearances and the assassinations of community leaders in broad daylight. I found myself especially shocked by the ubiquitous presence of fresh-faced young men in Colombian army uniforms carelessly slinging machine guns as long as their torsos over their backs. Nowhere in Colombia had I seen so much military presence, and yet Buenaventura remains one of the most violent cities in the Western Hemisphere. Over 10% of the city’s population has suffered forced displacement, and many more are considered vulnerable to future displacement. JRS presence in the city is timely and essential as the Colombian government recently released plans to forcibly displace another 17,000 Buenaventuran families as part of a tourist-port development scheme.

The people of Buenaventura are thirsty for recognition and solutions. They have lived too long in the crossfire of a senseless tripartite war. They know they are too often forgotten in the polarized and politicized debate over Colombia’s future. This is the hidden Colombia, the one that the visiting U.S. Congressional delegations have not yet seen. This is the Colombia that is bleeding, that has been robbed and raped, that is wracked by violence and riddled by loss, that waits for a place at the decision-makers' table, that labors for hope beneath the shadow of despair. This is the Colombia that must be brought into the light, these are the people who must be consulted, it is their resilience and strength we must draw upon to form solutions, and it is their creativity and dreams we must teach others to respect.

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