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The space that decentralizes peace from the Montes de María
Por: Ivonne Elena Díaz | June 10, 2023
At the monthly meetings of the Montes de María Regional Peacebuilding Space, held sacredly on the first Saturday of each month, one breathes a sense of freshness emanating from the dawn that rises between the mountains. In the background, birds can be heard and, suddenly, that smell of coffee with cinnamon, freshly taken from the fire, arrives. After a few minutes, I see small groups of people gradually arrive, others arrive alone, but all ready to greet with a handshake and a warm smile of complicity, like those who know they have a common history.
In the sub-region of Montes de María, located between the departments of Bolívar and Sucre, various guerrilla and paramilitary demobilization processes have converged; international cooperation has injected millions of resources, and the State, under the umbrella of transitional justice, has implemented multiple public policies. These interventions, while promoting spaces for strengthening the Montemariano social movement, failed to rebuild trust or transform the community relationships that the conflict damaged, as they brought a dynamic of vertical participation, anchored to centralism, where the proposals and identity of the territory were not taken into account.
In 2013, from some meetings between regional leaders, the idea arose of starting a process that would reverse that distrust and contribute to the reconstruction of affected community relationships, so that, united, organizations and communities would work on the construction of peace and territorial reconciliation. This is how the Montes de María Regional Peacebuilding Space was born.
Ricardo Esquivia, one of the founding leaders of the Regional Space, with a strong and calm voice, full of that reassuring wisdom that years provide, tells me that the Space was initially conceived for a small group of territorial leaders, but they soon noticed the need to expand it and call on all organizations and communities in the region, because “we wanted to solve the lack of trust that does not allow cooperation and working together. One of the key points is that there is a reunion among equals, a space that generates trust among equals, a network of affections.”
The more than one hundred Montemariano organizations and communities that make up the Regional Space, taking as a reference John Paul Lederach’s peace proposal of focusing on the transformation of human relationships because it is in that interrelationship where the moral imagination for peacebuilding occurs, have woven a fine fabric of trust and affection. With dedication, creativity, and constancy, they elaborated the actions that are the heart of this platform: the monthly meetings and the Reconciliation Festival.
At the monthly meetings, the communities analyze the regional context, deliberate on their visions of environmental care, land, political advocacy, reconciliation, and territorial coexistence. But beyond a simple meeting, “it is the place where we shake hands between processes and give encouragement that it is possible to move forward,” Ricardo explains to me. Allies join this circle of trust: some NGOs, academia, international organizations like the United Nations, and public institutions like the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. But what makes the difference is that many of these people have worked in the territory, and from that trust woven with the Regional Space, they have managed to influence public policies, sometimes managing to evade the relentless centralism.
When it comes to organizing the Reconciliation Festival, an enthusiastic collective debate is formed. Some communities offer their municipality and organize committees ready to receive the more than 500 guests of this peace festival with artistic and cultural displays.
At the Festival, encounters take place between communities, but also between actors who seem unlikely to be able to dialogue, such as victims and former combatants. During the 2019 festival, held in San Onofre, in the midst of bagpipe presentations and plays alluding to the armed conflict, one of the first encounters was held between victims of the region and former combatants of the former AUC and FARC-EP who had operated in the territory. They sat in public to talk about truth and recognition of responsibilities with some victims.
Dialogue between victims and former combatants during the 5th Reconciliation Festival, in the municipality of Zambrano, Bolívar. Photo: Communications team of the Regional Space
The armed conflict as pedagogy for teaching peace
Aracelis Rodríguez, or ‘Profe Ara’, as she is called in the Regional Space, teaches research, pedagogy, and Spanish at the Normal Superior de los Montes de María. She became a normal school teacher and a master in Peacebuilding from the University of Cartagena with enormous territorial roots due to her painful experience as a displaced person from the armed conflict in this sub-region.
Profe Ara has experienced firsthand the transformation of her environment from dialogue, the extension of affection, and changes in relationships with others, promoted by the Regional Space. She points out, with a voice marked by the cadence of the Caribbean accent, that education is political, human, and transformative. Especially, the Reconciliation Festival “has been a channel that has allowed us to make the community aware that it is possible to negotiate, to have dialogues between probable and improbable parties.” But the teacher has not only stayed with what she experiences at each festival; she has brought to her school some testimonies of victims who achieved an invaluable personal transformation from forgiveness. She emotionally relates: “in my classroom there are so many victims and I didn’t know it, when they hear the stories they want to talk about what they experienced. There was a classroom where there are victim cousins and perpetrator cousins (…)”
At the Normal Superior de San Juan, Profe Ara has managed to institutionalize a program of critical reading, cinema, and theater, through which she disseminates to the educational community what the different Normal Superior schools suffered during the armed conflict, since their teachers were stigmatized for the pacifist pedagogy they taught. For this reason, two days are commemorated where they remember two rectors who were victims of forced disappearance.
As if that were not enough, Profe Ara with her project Escuela Territorio was chosen in a select group of departmental teachers to travel to Tokyo, Japan, for an immersion experience to learn about that country’s peace and reconciliation process. She came back very overwhelmed by the deconstruction they have made of the friend-enemy concept and by the visit to a teachers’ museum that is within reach of many. Therefore, with a mixture of criticism and nostalgia, she concludes: “the memory museums should not be in Bogotá, they should be in the territory. Look at the case of El Salado, they should have a living museum because it was here where the horror of war was lived.”
Cultural display of drums during the 5th Reconciliation Festival, in the municipality of Zambrano, Bolívar. Photo: Communications team of the Regional Space
The current situation in Montes de María is one of insecurity. Communities, organizations, and social leaders live in permanent anxiety. The Clan del Golfo is increasingly deepening its violent roots in the territory and this seems to happen in plain sight of the State, as there is no territorial security policy to mitigate the situation.
This is one of the dense topics I discussed with Angela Lederach in a video call, while she was taking a break in the midst of an exhausting move in the United States. She is a PhD in Anthropology and Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame, but she also knows the Regional Space and the Montemariano social movement well, as she has traveled the fields of this sub-region for more than 8 years. Angie, as she is called in the Regional Space, tells me that the Space has worked on a collective security proposal that puts the spotlight on how communities survived the conflict, pointing out that it is there where the seeds are to reinforce territorial security.
Although the cycle of violence refuses to close, the Regional Space persists in building bridges of dialogue with the State, and there Ricardo is emphatic in stating: “Today the State does not have a concrete strategy with steps to follow, they are doing trials and that does not help much. However, we must have faith. It is key that the government becomes concrete and tells us how we work together from Montes de María.”
Although the State has not taken the communities into account, the Regional Space continues its task of building peace. Ricardo, with confidence in the work done, concludes: “We have remained for 10 years meeting every Saturday of each month, the attendance is always large. For 5 years we have maintained the Reconciliation Festival, we have opened spaces for reunions between equals in disagreement, between different people and we have generated hope.”
This article is part of the special #TejidoVivo, a product of a journalistic alliance between the Dejusticia study center and El Espectador.
