Citizens’ Media against Armed Conflict: Disrupting Violence in Colombia

Notes

Life at the Crossfire 1. All translations from Spanish originals (publications and interviews) are my own. 2. The Huitoto are one of Colombia’s indigenous peoples. 3. One of the first laws of the National Front, Law 14 of 1958, started JACs; these were initially formed as rural neighborhood committees with the idea that JACs would bring peace by involving community members in local decisionmaking processes; by 1966 nine thousand JACs had been formed in the country (Zamosc 1986, 38). According to Jaramillo et al., the concept of JACs came from three sociologists: Camilo Torres, Orlando Fals Borda, and Andrew Pearse (Jaramillo , Mora, and Cubides 1986, 255). 4. For decades, the weak presence of state institutions has been blamed for the absence of the rule of law and the use of armed violence as a way to rule social life. To this day in Colombia, there are more than twelve hundred urban centers where there is not one police officer, and approximately 20 percent of the country’s municipalities have no state institutional presence (García Villegas and de Sousa dos Santos 2004, 54). 5. For more on Colombian women in the guerrillas, see Hodgson 2000; Lara 2000; Vásquez Perdomo 2005. 6. In some regions, guerrilla organizations became the de facto state. Another testimony narrates the life of a Magdalena Medio woman so badly battered by her husband that around 1984 the guerrillas advised her to leave the region; later, the same organization helped her get the title to the land she had lived on, forced her husband off the land, and invited her to come back to take over the farm and live in peace with her children (Arenas Obregón 1998, 54). 7. Money paid to guerrillas in exchange for protection from their violence. 8. It is not only hacienda owners who had dealings with the paramilitaries. Other national and international corporate sectors used or backed paramilitaries to fend off guerrillas; in May 2008, Chiquita Brands International was fined for payments made to paramilitaries over several years. Other international corporations, 275 NOTES such as Drummond, Nestlé, and Coca-Cola, are being investigated (Brodzinsky 2007). 9. Even during the worst years of armed violence between Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path), the self-defense groups known as Rondas Campesinas, and the Peruvian armed forces, the homicide rate per hundred thousand inhabitants in Peru was eight to ten times lower than the Colombian rate (Romero 2003, 27). 10. In Rincón del Mar, a small fishing village on the Caribbean coast, someone told me that the paramilitaries forbade villagers to make love on the beach at night, a traditional practice for couples unable to find privacy anywhere else, due to the cramped conditions in their small houses and large families. For first-person narratives of civilian life among opposing armed groups see “Le tengo anotado el parte,” Desde Adentro, http://www.desdeadentro.info/index.php?option=com_con tent&task=view&id=51&Itemid=14. 11. Norteño and vallenato music are preferred by paramilitaries. 12. The lists of behaviors imposed and prohibited by paramilitaries changes from one region to another. 13. Profiting from stolen gasoline is common, especially among paramilitaries in Magdalena Medio (Vásquez 2006, 319). 14. Colombian journalist and filmmaker Mady Samper documents some of the most salient cases of civilian resistance to armed conflict. See Samper 2002. 15. The study was conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Institute of Peace (http://www.usip.org) and was carried out by Vlado Bratic (Hollins University), Ian Larsen (USIP), and Lisa Schirch (Eastern Mennonite University). Scholars have recently defined the term “peacebuilding” as “the effort to rebuild social fabrics and relationships torn by armed conflict.” The term “peace making” refers more specifically to the signing of peace agreements, cease-fires, etc. While peacebuilding involves everyone affected by armed conflict, peace making generally involves only elites, military leaders, and diplomats (Lederach 1997; Wolfsfeld, Alimi, and Kailani 2008, 375). 16. Without a doubt, the world’s main protagonist in this camp is Search for Common Ground (see http://www.sfcg.org/programmes/cgp/programmes_cgp.html). 17. Benjamin Ferron compiled terms, including alternative, radical, citizens’, marginal, participatory, counter-information, parallel, community, underground, popular, libres, dissident, resistance, pirate, clandestine, independent, new, young, micro (Ferron 2006, 1). For a thorough list see Alternative Media Global Project, “Naming and Qualifying Alternative Media,” available at http://www.ourmedia network.org/wiki/introduction:defining_alternative_media:naming. 18. Decree 1446 of 1991 regulates the airwaves and defines these three categories for radio broadcasting...