A member of the Peace Community with María del Pilar Sanmartín Berraquero and Laure Isabelle Luciani (PBI Colombia). Photo: Raphael Buenaventura/Grace Media

When PBI arrived for its meeting with the Peace Community, everything was ready. The people were ready, the chiveros[1] ready to depart from the La Holandita farm in San José de Apartadó (Antioquia) and excitement and happiness was in the air. The people were preparing, along with the Grace movement and the multinational community Tamera (located in Portugal), for a pilgrimage to Bogota.[2]

This walk through the streets and neighborhoods of the capital had a dual purpose: protest and solidarity. On the one hand, the idea was to publicly call attention to the Community’s history as victims of human rights violations; and not just civil or political rights, but economic, social and cultural rights that, according to the Community, the State violates through the armed conflict. Additionally, the pilgrimage aimed to show the paramilitary and insurgent actions in the zone where the Peace Community members live.[3] The idea was also to serve as a support to those victims without a voice or without strength, in order to express solidarity and fraternity with grassroots social initiatives seeking to construct spaces of peace.

The first stop of the pilgrimage was in Facatativa (Cundinamarca), where hundreds of participants gathered, greeted by a large police force. In other communities we visited the Virgin of the Rocks,[4] where displaced families survive by recycling trash. The following day the pilgrimage continued to the Public Prosecutor’s office in Bogota in order to leave more than 300 miniature coffins representing the deaths the Community has suffered that all remain in impunity, since its founding in 1997. After a long day of walking, we arrived at the government office where, after leaving the “boxes” in the doorway, the Jesuit priest Javier Giraldo and Eduar Lanchero, who both accompany the Peace Community, and Gloria Cuartas, ex mayor of Apartadó, among other people, condemned what they saw as the lack of investigations and criminal proceedings for the crimes committed against the Peace Community. Songs of peace and solidarity accompanied this symbolic event in front of officials from the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the press. We were moved by the fact that if all those killed were still alive and walking with their families, the pilgrimage would have been four times larger.

The Peace Community has a horrendous and painful history. Its members have denounced almost 600 human rights violations, which include 197 murders and hundreds of disappearances, displacements, tortures, arbitrary detentions and thefts.[5] Nonetheless, nothing can stop this special group of people, whose coherence and radicalism join in the formation of this Community, which serves as an example of dignity not easy to imitate. 

In the context of the pilgrimage, Peace Community representatives met with the Vice President’s office to demand the creation of a Justice Evaluation Commission, [6] which would be charged with identifying the mechanisms that have allowed for such a high level of impunity in the region of Urabá.

Later, in the neighborhood of Bosa (Bogotá), the pilgrimage participants walked through the streets and shared their experiences with other organisations. The testimonies of resistance and struggle were moving. The testimonies came from indigenous people and afro-Colombians, from the city and the countryside, of all colors and flavors. But all had the same objective: nonviolent resistance against neglect and surrender.

In the context of sharing experiences, various cultural and pedagogical activities were performed, including theater productions, speeches and songs. We were witness to how the message of the Peace Community gives hope to other struggles in the country and serves as a model of resistance.[7]

The day ended with a celebration of the Eucharist, in which Javier Giraldo remembered the profound meaning of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó’s process of life. The priest highlighted the strength, bravery and coherence of its members, as well as its principals of nonviolence and neutrality.

The pilgrimage continued on its path to the neighborhood of Ciudad Bolívar, led by a guide who has lived and continues to live the local reality. Walking through this party of Bogotá is not easy. The area is located on a hill, and continues to grow as displaced people from all over the country have arrived. The residents live in a tense situation given paramilitary presence and activity, [8] and are highly stigmatised.

The last steps of the Peace Community, the Grace movement and Tamera were in the hamlets of Córdoba and San José de Apartadó, where together they built an altar in the chapel that is located on the site where they first discovered the remains of Luis Eduardo Guerra, a well-known member of the Peace Community, murdered in the massacre of February 2005 in the hamlet of Mulatos.