Inter Pares in Latin America:
Supporting Peace, Promoting Justice
VOLUME 26, NUMBER 1, JANUARY 2004
We are travelling up the Rio Atrato from Quibdó to Vigia del Fuerte near the Colombian border with Panama. The rain pummels the boat, making a mockery of the plastic canopy that is useful to shield us from the sun, but does nothing to keep us dry during the recurring squalls that buffet us in our journey. The river is wide and brown, and bound on either bank by thick jungle broken every now and again by wood and thatch villages that hug the bank.
We are travelling with members of the association that represents the people of these villages in their quest for peace and protection against the terrible violence they have experienced due to the war that rages throughout Colombia. We are part of the protection they seek, and part of their efforts to secure peace and the changes in society - including the rule of law and a safe and secure livelihood - that are necessary to make that peace permanent.
We are struck that the people we meet are like the river they live on. The current of the river flows constantly to the sea, but the river itself remains. The events these people experience flow through their lives, sometimes tragic and deadly, but their communities endure and remain, part of this lush and vivid landscape. It is this place and their part in it that the people of the Chocó rainforest are struggling to defend.
The context of people's lives includes the place they occupy, its past, its present and its emerging future. Like the people of the Chocó and other regions of Colombia where Inter Pares works, people throughout Latin America are working courageously together to recuperate their lives, their communities and identity, and to build lasting peace and justice out of the treacherous history of violence they have lived. This is a daunting task in the face of weak and corrupt states and the abandonment of the international community.
Inter Pares has been accompanying communities and their organizations throughout much of this tumultuous period in Latin America. The relationships we have formed are deep and enduring, and these relationships reinforce our collective efforts to promote justice and peace for people who for generations have experienced neither.
What does this work entail? It involves unfailing support to people committed to building durable solutions to conditions that are as old as the exploitation of empire, and as vivid as yesterday's massacre in Colombia, last week's political assassination in Guatemala, or last month's military incursion on indigenous communities in Chiapas.
This means providing physical protection and material assistance - food, housing, health care - to people in need. It also means assisting people and their organizations to exercise the rights of citizenship, and to develop the means to defend their lives, their communities and their futures through interaction with various levels of government, and with institutions of the state, such as the military and the police. It means supporting people's efforts to be actors in the political process of negotiation to end organized violence and enforce the truce, and the longer process of building, out of a truce, lasting peace.
Peace is not merely the suspension of armed conflict and organized violence. Peace is a positive quality. While a sustained peace must begin with the suspension of armed violence, to be durable the source and effects of the conflict have to be resolved and the basis established for humane co-existence and cooperative self-determination. Peace implies recuperated lives and livelihoods, a resurgent identity of people in a place they call their own, and the safety and security to be able - perhaps for the first time - to dream the dreams of children, to imagine these dreams coming true, and feel the power to work with these dreams to create a new future.
This Inter Pares Bulletin explores examples of work in Latin America where Inter Pares is part of action to survive war and to build and defend an authentic and durable peace.
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