Associate Peyman Vahabzadeh on "From Colombia… With Hope: A Travelogue of Solidarity"

In September 2022, I had the distinct honour of being invited by Unidad Especial de Paz to deliver 3 public talks and 3 academic lectures, in the city of Medellín and town of Amalfi in the Department of Antioquia. These talks were on the subjects of violence, nonviolence, peace, pain, pedagogy and related topics. For me, this turned out to be an outstanding and moving week-long trip to a country I had never been to before, and my gracious hosts at Unidad facilitated my being in touch with the complex realities of Colombia, a country that is admirably trying to leave behind its long history of violence and conflict in spite of incredible adversities and setbacks. Unidad Especial de Paz is a unit within Universidad de Antioquia (UdeA, founded in 1803), a public, research university, and a highly respected one. My presence and dialogues with audience and colleagues gave me a unique opportunity to further reflect on the issues of violence and nonviolence—questions that have been a focus of my works through a phenomenological lens for several years and continue to drive my work.

I visited Colombia in the aftermath of the historic 2016 Peace Accord between the Colombian state and FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo, FARC-EP), that ended 52 years of conflict – reportedly the longest running civil war in modern history. The Accord was reached during the presidency of Juan Manuel Santos (in office, 2010-2018), and won him the 2016 Noble Peace Prize. The top commander of FARC, Rodrigo Londoño (aka Timochenko) signed the agreement. Reaching peace was a momentous breakthrough, achieved only after failed previous attempts (namely, the 1999-2002 peace talks by president Andrés Pastrana). Still, reaching peace continues to be complicated by the presence of smaller armed groups fighting the state, the paramilitary forces, and narco-cartels that control several regions in the country and have sophisticated private armies. 

I am not qualified to offer a history or analyses of the Colombian struggle for national peace and collective integration, and I leave this task to the experts. What I offer here are some of my reflections on the arduous task of peace-building and admirable efforts of civil society activists as well as the knowledgeable members of Unidad Especial de Paz. These personal reflections of a diremptive mind inevitably bring together various memories, elements, issues, and observations that otherwise might not have converged.  

An Iranian Latino

What I write here is inevitably narrated through the eyes of a thrown person: an Iranian exile in Canada who has been living here as a permanent outsider for over three decades, a denizen of the generous mountains and forests of British Columbia on the unceded territories of indigenous peoples. I have long learned and appreciated how to live my life as an incurable outsider akin to Georg Simmel’s figure of “the stranger” who is “the potential wanderer,” someone happily caught between belonging and non-belonging. My “thrownness” in this world is of course deeply existential, a là Martin Heidegger, but this thrownness is also an effect of the generalized conditions of global capitalism in our age and the various states’ monopolies over the legitimate use of gewalt within a territory, as Max Weber had famously carved out the image.

Thrownness, however, has complications. 

I came of age in Iran in a loving and progressive family, son of a librarian and a teacher, learning about Latin America, reading the revolutionary literature of Che Guevara, Carlos Marighella, and Tupamaros, endlessly grieving the overthrow and death of Salvador Allende, memorizing popular Latin American songs (without knowing Spanish) and those of la Nueva Canción (Victor Jara and “el pueblo unido…” comes to mind), and loving the ethereal indigenous tunes of zampoña pan flute. Images unfurled in my mind through these sensory experiences. It felt as if Latin America was next door to Iran! At 17, I was not just an internationalist but a global young man already. I am not young any more but somehow I’ve remained global, with Latin America having a special place in my thinking. 

The Historic Turning Point

My trip coincided with two momentous events, two turning points, two “firsts” in Colombian history that qualify as watershed moments. 

The first event was the election of Gustavo Petro to presidency, which commenced in August 2022. Holding a PhD in Public Administration, Petro was a former M-19 guerrilla (Movimiento 19 de Abril) in his youth. After spending under two years in prison, he “demilitarized” (to use a common expression in Colombia) and turned to politics. In his long political career, he was elected a senator and also the Mayor of Bogota, before running (unsuccessfully) for president in 2018, and then in 2022. Petro is the first leftist president and the first president who is not from the white, male, upper-class political elite. His running mate and current vice-president is Afro-Colombian woman, lawyer, human rights, and environmental activist Francia Márquez, the first black vice-president in Colombian history. She brought to the campaign acute legal and advocacy work for women, minorities, and the victims of violence. In 2014, she took part in the Colombian Peace Process, held in Havana (for 3 years), to raise the issue of victims of violence with the negotiators. The “Petro-Francia” campaign of “Change for Life” (Cambio por la Vida) ran on progressive objectives such as demilitarization of not only various guerrillas but also the paramilitary, improving women’s rights and the rights of LGBTQ community, addressing the needs of victims of violence, taking action regarding climate change, increasing taxes for the richest families, investment in healthcare and transportation, and find a solution to the complex issue of illicit drugs and coca farming.  

The second momentous event was the release, in June 2022, of the massive report (8,000 pages) of Colombia’s Truth Commission. The report registered the enormous human cost of 50 years of civil conflict in Colombia, a conflict that had claimed nearly 220,000 lives, of which 80% were civilians, and left behind over 5.5 million internally displaced persons. During the conflict, 27,000 individuals were kidnapped, mostly by the guerrillas and for ransom. 3,000 union members were assassinated by the paramilitary. The government is currently investigating 4,200 extra-juridical murders, allegedly by Colombian military. Countless acts of sexualized violence have been reported, nearly half-a-million between 2001 and 2009 alone. 

Still, the country left me with a distinct impression of a cautious hope. 

Unidad Especial de Paz

Standing out as an exemplary university-based institute, Unidad Especial de Paz is dedicated to peace, reconciliation, nonviolence, and reintegration. Unidad is the only such project or unit in Colombian academy. It is an outcome of a grassroots academic movement: a number of faculty volunteers started intermittent meetings in 2015. This group was called Mesa Universitaria por la Paz. In 2017 they proposed to UdeA the creation of a special unit for peace. Consequently, Unidad was founded in 2018 and began its work officially in 2019 (right before COVID hit), and it is already having an impact in Antioquia. Unidad brings together professors from different faculty, but it is structurally comprised of a small group of dedicated staff. It is directly under the auspices of UdeA Rector and as such avoids bureaucracy. Despite its small size, Unidad represents what an advocacy academic unit can do for the greater cause of peace, justice, and dialogue. It is specifically tasked with teaching, research, and community outreach regarding peace and reconciliation in Antioquia. Unidad is connected to an interdisciplinary undergraduate program (designed by multiple departments) called “Pedagogy, Rurality, Peace,” and the students who complete this program receive a certificate awarded by Ministry of Education. The Unidad has designed an MA program called “Conflicts, Peace, Human Rights” that is currently in the process of certification by Ministry of Education. 

Among the community activities of Unidad is their assisting coffee-producing peasants in storing their coffee, free of charge, in two buildings in UdeA campus for 3 years, so that the peasants won’t have to go through big corporations to sell their products. 

The public commitment of Unidad is evidenced through the vast network of academic and community contacts and the regular scholarly and community events that Unidad holds, promotes, supports, or in which it partakes. Unidad runs on a fairly modest budget and does not have resources of its own; it is funded by UdeA mainly through the channelling of university resources. It receives funds for its projects. Unidad regularly invites academics nationally and internationally to speak about peace-building and to have dialogues with academics as well as community or civil society organizations. It is run by the attentive dedication of educator and director, Hugo Alberto Buitrago Montoya, and academic coordinator, Maria Cristina Rengifo Ramirez. It is housed in the central campus of UdeA in Medellín, a lovely, green campus with an organic feel to it, whose concrete and red-brick buildings, none of which disturbingly tall, blend with the web of promenades, numerous coffee stands, sophisticated political graffiti, and equatorial trees and vegetations including tall guava trees where, if one’s lucky, one can see the permanent residents of the campus, aside from the birds, Titi monkeys (I wasn’t lucky! In my UVic campus the permanent residents are the deer; one can hardly miss them!). 

The campus is a sanctuary – the police cannot enter it (unlike Canada!). Entry is allowed at the gates by producing university ID or registering upon arrival (a common routine in Colombia). The fact that university is a sanctuary indicates the power of civil society and safeguards student activism. The university is a utopia, to borrow the idea from late Jerry Zaslove, where dialogical ruminations about another world and an alternative future flow freely. Just like the campus of UNAM in Mexico City, this campus registered with me the potentials of the young people, and reminded me of my year (1979-1980) as a university student at the (now renamed) National University of Iran, before I was expelled due to political activism. The process of my exile began with that dismissal. Walking through UdeA main campus, I could not help but regret witnessing the sterile, hygienic, hegemonized, and even corporatized campuses across Canada.  

And yet, I was told that dealing drugs was big on campus. Here, as in elsewhere, drug networks are powerful and dangerous. What’s more, on occasion, if one’s lucky (I was lucky!), one can see some young militants, this time members of the newly-formed EP-C (Emanicpación Popular-Clandestina), in a group of about eight, roaming across the campus in full, black military outfit, black berets, with their faces covered with black balaclavas and sunglasses, distributing revolutionary literature and writing (rushed) graffiti on the wall. The University administration is unable to stop any of these activities, considering the potential catastrophe that might follow any confrontation. And the students know how to keep a distance. In fact, keeping distance is a daily routine in many situations. 

The UdeA central campus is a microcosm of the Colombian reality, which makes peace and reconciliation processes all the more complicated. Utopia, after all, has its challenges… 

Unlearning War

Speaking of EP-C, I was told that there are currently at least 12 (I also heard 16 and 26 in my conversations) small militant groups, and at least 6 of them are influenced by the ELN, according to a report. Unlike the ELN, which stands at 2000+ strong, and is now the primary leftist militant organization in the country, these smaller militant groups do not have a social base and are mostly comprised of radicalized and alienated young people who wish to fight for justice. But the road to liberation and justice has unending switchbacks, in Colombia as in elsewhere, in the age of neoliberalism: this road has already been traveled in Colombia, and the outcome (52 years of a devastating civil conflict) was only a prolonged self-destruction and routinization of violence. And this is precisely the lure of violence, as Hannah Arendt teaches us: it delivers results. The irony of violence in Colombia is precisely the fact that even unhindered violence delivered no outcome. 

The point is: desaprender la guerrilla y aprendar la paz (unlearn war and learn peace). Hugo Chavez, the former president of neighbouring Venezuela, had famously said that the age of guerrilla warfare in Latin America has long passed. He was an advocate of peace negotiations in Colombia. 

But the point is precisely this: the history of Colombia in the twentieth-century has been an history of violence, with a decade-long period of civil war between conservatives and liberals known as La Violencia (1948-1958).[1] This period was ignited by the assassination of presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán of the leftist wing of the Liberal Party in Bogotá. This period was the immediate precursor of FARC’s rebellion, notwithstanding the significant differences between the two phenomena. La Violencia’s legacy and its impact on Colombia’s political development in the rest of century is hardly deniable. From my point of view, it seems that a certain syntax of action had overdetermined much of Colombian mode of communication between different and conflicting social groups. Let us not also forget that M-19, Petro’s former guerrilla group that later became a political party after de-militarization, was an armed reaction to the fraudulent elections of 19 April 1970. Resorting to arms at the time of political impasses means that the political edifice is closed unto itself and foreclosed unto others, and that it is so vehemently guarded by the rich, political elite and so brutally shielded by the state’s military and privately-funded paramilitary that any objections against the fraudulent workings of the system can only take the form of a visible exit from institutional politics. Armed struggle, as I have pointed out in my work on the Iranian Marxist guerrillas, is the attempt at political re-institutionalization.[2]Still, how can the younger generation “unlearn war” if such is their history and if this is carved in their parents’ memories? 

The good news is that the Petro government will resume the peace talks, suspended since 2018, with the ELN in November. This is a complicated matter: FARC was a typical Marxist-Leninist group, styled in the manner of the twentieth-century communist parties and with hierarchical command structure, approximately 13,000 strong by 2016, and as such, its central leadership was able to negotiate peace on behalf of the membership, although a small faction known as FARC-Dissidents (of roughly 2000 members) has refused to lay down arms. The ELN is a different type of organization with a more participatory and democratic structure that gives ELN units greater autonomy. Lower ranks of ELN will debate the terms of potential peace accord. The future peace agreement will have to go through the entire group and debated, as the terms of negotiations, I imagine, might already have. 

Yet, perhaps the greatest challenge will be the demilitarization of the paramilitary – about 18,000, many of them also engaged in drug trafficking. Paramilitary began a as protective force of landowners against Marxist guerrillas, but then gradually the paramilitary constituted a block of power that supported right-wing governments, in recent years, that of ex-president Álvaro Uribe (in office: 2002-2010). Under international pressure, Uribe wanted to disarm the paramilitary to improve the image of Colombia. Now, after the Peace Accord with FARC, the paramilitary has grown into a force that is no longer needed. But what can Colombian politicians do about this phenomenon?

“Unlearning war and learning peace” means, in sociological terms, launching and supporting a multifaceted and prolonged process of socialization, and Unidad Especial de Paz and many civil society groups, to three of which I had the honour to present, are indeed agents of socializing Colombian peoples away from violence and toward reintegration and peace. Socialization was a key theme that ran through my public talks. My attending a peace festival was an affirmation that socialization for nonviolence was going strong. 

The City of Eternal Spring

Medellín, la ciudad de la eterna primavera, is characterized by its red-brick buildings, its dense and lush green vegetation, abundance of guava (or fruit of the people, as they call it), majestic, old-growth laureles trees (reminding me of old-growth horse chestnuts in Cook St. village in Victoria), pleasantly 20+ temperature all-year-round, and yes, traffic congestion on the main roads.

Before this trip, Colombia was to me the land of Gabriel García Márquez, and in my arrival I got the impression that the country seemed so fit for his world-renowned magical realism. Civil conflict, rampant drug trade and use, staggering inequalities, crime and violence flow alongside incredibly hospitable and kind people, a vibrant but always threatened civil society, and the activists who try to turn the page on the violent chapter of their history. If this reality is not magical, I don’t know what is. Before my trip, Medellín was the city where Colombian priest and liberationist Camilo Torres had revealed his platform. Torres turned out to be the first great martyr of Latin American revolution when he died in the ranks of the (Fidelista) guerrilla group ELN(Ejército de Liberación Nacional or National Liberation Army) in 1964. 

Madellín appeared in my view differently, however. I was fortunate to attend the festival Hecho en Paz (Made in Peace) in the city’s Jardin Botánico, a microcosm of Colombian equatorial jungles with curling promenades, several book exhibitions, a children’s storytelling show on stage, and multiple resting areas and food vendors. The showcase was the booths where the women who were victims of violence presented their products and artworks for sale. It was a moving site, as one noticed how pain and suffering could be embraced by creative and productive works, and how in the process, these works could help the victims of violence with their long process of recovery. “Healing comes when you dispossess others of your pain and make it your own,” I once wrote in a poem. Peace in Colombia has had an “outward” political beginning through the peace process, but peace also needs to be cultivated “inward”—within the lives of the victims of violence who have and will overcome victimhood, by courageously taking ownership of their pain and becoming agents of their own liberation from violence. To me, this was what “Made in Peace” really meant. 

Violence descends upon us: it crashes into us with force and then it leaves (at time only to return multiple times thereafter). Violence is a shapeshifter, as it varies in kind and execution. Violence carves the memory and leaves deep scars. But it always leaves a disproportionate impact on the receiver of violence who most often needs to deal with throughout an entire lifetime. 

In the festival, I was accompanied by two dear and young friends, David Esteban Builes Morales and Diana Paola Jerez Durán. David is an associate researcher with Unidad and often does remarkable field work in communities affected by civil war in Antioquia. He is also an engaged phenomenologist. My friendship with David goes back to some email exchanges in 2013 and being in touch thereafter. He was also the co-editor of an edited volume on the 50^th anniversary of Berger and Luckmann’s influential The Social Construction of Reality (1966), to which I also contributed through a study of the “secret connection” between Husserl, Schutz, and Berger and Luckmann.[3] It is amazing how phenomenologists belong to a nation of their own! Diana is a trained psychologist who works with the victims of the civil conflict. She is anything but a detached therapist. As we walked through the festival, she introduced me to many women she knew, all victims of violence, who either presented their artwork or products at the festival or were simply tending to their licenced street stands to make a living. These licences were issued through a special policy of the City of Medellín to help the victims of violence. The unsuspecting tourist would never guess that such ordinary phenomena of city life were public expressions of a society that was trying to overcome a violent past. Diana offered many precious insights into the peace process from the point of view of those affected most severely by violence. 

In Amalfi: Violence, Memory, Education

I delivered 3 public talks. Unidad was the host of them all, but with collaboration with local associations. It all began with a 3-hour car ride, from Medellín to the north, mostly on the narrow roads through mountains and lush forests, to Amalfi. It was a town with 27,000 inhabitants and 17,000 bicycles, as a resident jokingly said. There are no dedicated bike lanes or wide sidewalks (thank God!), and I loved merging with the pedestrians, bicycles, and motorists who skillfully roamed the narrow, busy streets without the slightest mishap in the evening when it seemed that the entire town was descending on the main square. Friendly stray dogs roam the central square and their robust bodies suggest they’re generously fed by locals. One can’t miss the town’s symbol, Tigre de Amalfi. It refers to the legend that in the 1940s residents killed a Bengal tiger near the town, but for some reason all depictions and statues of “tigre” were actually jaguar! My hosts could not explain this either. UdeA has a satellite campus in Amalfi: UdeA Sede Nordeste. The sessions in Amalfi were invited by Unidad Especial de Paz, Secretaría de Gobierno, and Casa Amalfitana de la Memoria.

I spoke in the lecture hall of the municipality to the secondary school teachers. Some of the teachers were associated with Listones Rojos para RecordArte (Red Ribbons for RecordArte), an advocacy group dedicated to fostering the collective memory of victims. A few attendees were from the local government. I spoke of storytelling as means of teaching nonviolence to the younger generations. I know that telling one’s story has been a widely-used method is counseling and carries therapeutic powers. What I suggested was more of a pedagogical approach: to tell a story of violence, nonviolence, revenge, and forgiveness that was, with emphasis, no one’s story. This is where, I imagine, fiction reveals its pedagogical power. By allowing the students to interpret the story time and again and debate their interpretations, the teacher can unearth the complexities of violence layer by layer. In this way, one can speak of violence and relate to one’s own experience without having to deal with the potential pain of speaking of these sensitive subjects directly. The teachers commented that the greatest challenge in reconciliation was the history of cycles of violence. How can we guide, they asked, society toward forgiveness? Criminal gangs, they said, were now, after the peace process, one of the greatest sources of violence. Sustained peace, it seemed, was as ephemeral as the morning dew. 

The next talk in Amalifi was delivered to the victims of violence. As one can imagine, this was the most moving engagement, as we shared personal stories with tearful eyes. The attendees were from Mesa Municipal de Víctimas and registered by Unidad para las Victimas, which indicates that they had received the special designation of “victim” by the Colombian State. Here, I spoke of the importance of pain and traumatic memory for a transition to nonviolence. Pain is akin to death: it is an absolute. No human wants to receive pain but when pain and trauma are a part of who I am, I can only “overcome” them by integrating them and redirecting them toward life. One must leave behind victimhood and grow into the agent of justice, I submitted. It turned out that the attendees had already practiced what I had uttered in my paper: they refused to be called “victims” and instead called themselves “survivors.” Almost all of the audience were women, and they were the most inspiring and yet the humblest persons I had ever seen. Despite the hardships and violence that they had endured, they glowed with hope and resilience. As one lady with disability told me her incredible life-history of violence and survival, she uttered the most matter-of-fact thing: that despite all that had happened (to her), “one simply needs to go on with life.”