Barrancabermeja

This morning our 7-person delegation and a worker from CPT attended a public action (aka demonstration) of the local Coca Cola workers’ union. It was the launch of a new campaign to get Coca Cola to admit that they've used paramilitaries against union workers, among other things. They posted lists of union leaders and workers killed, disappeared, and threatened. The union has been in secret talks with Coca Cola for a year, during which they agreed not to do any public action, but now that year is over and the talks have gone nowhere, so they're back to this. It was also an observation of the international day of protest against multinationals, which was actually on Sunday. Besides CPT, the Coca Cola workers were accompanied this morning by the oil workers union and by three nuns. After the workers went in for their shift at 6:45 a.m., we got fed breakfast at a fast food joint, Colombian style, in front of the plant. It was a piece of chicken wrapped in aromatic rice, a piece of white bread and a cup of hot cocoa. Delicious and nutritious.

After worship we went on a bus tour with a friend of CPT, who showed us the port area and the area around Ecopetról, the national oil company. He explained the issues those people live with. It was pretty sad to hear about how hard it is, and what hard work it is, for people to make their living in the port area. And it seems unions' power here has been eroded as well, by gradually building the division/resentment between unionized workers and non, even though the unions fight for the rights of non-union workers as well.

After we dropped our tour guide off, our bus driver took us to a barrio of displaced people, called Paola Ahora. We got out at the side of a road and he told us the story of how his son was killed there by paramilitaries who were trying to get at him. Pretty horrible. I felt like I had no right to shed a tear, but it's obviously important to hear people's stories. And they're not just random people, they work with CPT here.

Then we had lunch at a house of OFP, which was a hugely inspiring event. Wow are those women ever cool. The anglos around here have a particular hispanicism, they use “disappear” like "desaparecer", as a transitive verb, so they say someone has been disappeared. I find this a tragic linguistic invention in English, that this is done to a person by other people. If only we could disappear this use of the verb and its reality! Well, Jacqueline told us the story of an OFP house that was disappeared: they got there one morning and nothing was left but the cement floor. The paras (they're currently controlling Barranca) had dismantled it during the night and carted it away. Usually the verb is used for people, so this is quite a story. OFP is very well established (began 35 years ago in Barranca), so they have lots of support and managed eventually to rebuild the house on the same spot, but bigger and better. Isn't that cool? Their slogans are so great, the main one is "we don't birth or raise our children for war", because they want to take away the human capital of the war machine.

And then we went to a meeting with the peasants’ association of the Valle de Cimatera, which was also an inspiration. People just want to work the land and live in peace, and they're being chased off the land by rich landowners and multinationals, and there's chemical warfare going on against them. Hard to know how to respond to all that. One of my delegation colleagues apologized for his country’s drug habit and for the taxes which pay for Plan Colombia and the fumigation. When he said, “Lo siento”, he spoke for all of us. The people we met with explained that this “feeling” (i.e. “feeling sorry”) is an important element of solidarity in the struggle for justice and peace.

Tomorrow among other things we get oriented to Micoahumado, and eat lunch at another OFP house. I love them! Tonight we have two Catholic workers from Paz Cristi coming for dinner.

Thanks for reading, thinking of and/or praying for the people we’re meeting.