In one of the improvised poor neighborhoods that cling to the bare mountain slopes on the edge of Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, the paramilitary was preparing to forcibly recruit a local youth named Alberto. Most people can’t imagine contradicting such a demand. But Alberto said “No,” he was not interested, so the paramilitary threatened him. Alberto contacted the Red Juvenil de Medellín (Medellín Youth Network), with whose support he organized a community bonfire in his neighborhood. Around the fire that night, he talked about the Network, said that he had a different vision and that he refused to join any armed group. He asked for everyone’s solidarity and respect for his decision.

“He converted the community,” says Leonardo Jiménez, a leader of the Network. Alberto still has his support group. And if in some moment he has some difficulty or security problem, he contacts his support group, who has a plan to put him in someone’s house. Some put word out on the Internet, while others compile his case and do legal work if needed.

The Medellin Youth Network is a youth organization that operates explicitly on principles of nonviolence. Started in 1990 by young people who had lost loved ones to the armed conflict, the group trains youth in nonviolence and cooperative play, supports young men who refuse to serve with the police, military or illegal armed groups, and promotes respect for human rights and youth’s ideas in Colombian society. A core group of about 30 young people work out of the group’s office and gathering space, a large house not far from the city center. Another 150 youth organized into neighborhood and issue groups are regularly involved in their activities.

The Network’s first members came together for mutual support. They wanted to break the stigma that “youth” equaled “violence” by making their pacifist views public. Their first actions were instinctive responses to violence in the city and included processions from the poor hillside neighborhoods that ring the city, with music and theater that expressed the participants’ rejection of violence.

Then, in 1996-97, members of the organization learned about other conflicts around the world and about ideas that were new to them, such as nonviolence and conscientious objection. Some members visited anti-militarist groups in Spain and learned more. They decided that the time for simply criticizing the state of affairs in their country had passed and that they needed to demonstrate affirmatively the kind of world they wanted to live in. They started offering nonviolence training outside of their own gatherings, taking their workshops into schools and neighborhoods where there was conflict. At the same time, they began to expand their antimilitarism and human rights work to include nonviolent direct action, an aspect of their witness that is now fully developed.

Going into neighborhoods and seeking out youth means meeting up with the armed groups, who often challenge them. Some youth who have gone to neighborhoods to promote the Network have experienced armed battles.

The heart of the Network’s mission is to encourage young people’s belief in the value of all human life, to work together to overcome fear, and to become empowered to live and espouse these values. Their conscientious objection project exemplifies this approach. Male Colombians graduating from secondary school are required to serve a year in the police or the army, and there is no provision for alternative service or refusal on grounds of conscience. Those who do refuse are barred from higher education and from many jobs. The Network provides support to conscientious objectors, in addition to publicizing the issue of conscientious objection in the media and on the street.

The Network’s activities have included evocative and powerful sidewalk theater performances, public draft-card burning, and the leafleting of induction lines under the gaze of soldiers. Preparation for these actions is intensive and includes coaching, role-playing, and other exercises designed to build confidence and to teach the principles and practice of active nonviolence.

In 1999, the Network organized discussions with youth in Medellín about what the closing millennium meant to them, and what they wanted from the new millennium. Then, on New Year’s Eve, they organized a massive free concert by a well-known Argentinian band, Todos tus Muertes (All your Dead), in a central Medellín park. The results of the discussions were gathered in a manifesto and presented at the concert.

In August 2003, the Network organized an international conference in Medellín that aimed to connect anti-militarist activists nationally and internationally, share some of the Red’s own experiences and break the isolation that surrounded the city’s nonviolent initiatives. The gathering also contributed to the Network’s effort to break the "youth and violence" stigma of youth, as well as nourishing its members’ own ideas by opening an intergenerational dialogue.

During an FOR delegation’s visit, some Network members took part in a march and rallyin downtown Medellín, called to express solidarity with Los Pasajeros (The Passengers), a popular rock group that had been arrested and detained for performing at a protest rally. They returned to the office jubilant, in matching T-shirts made for the occasion and depicting a chained fist holding a microphone, surrounded by the words “I too am Los Pasajeros: Arrest us all!” Thankfully, this challenge was not taken up, though things do not always go so smoothly.

In May 2004, Network members participated in the annual Day of the Workers march. They had not planned to carry out any protest, but while they marched, the police began beating up a trade unionist from another group. In solidarity, Network members moved to form a circle around the man being beaten, and police, without provocation, threw several Network members to the ground and proceeded to beat them. One man, Martín Rodríguez, was beaten unconscious and when he awoke, he was suffering from amnesia. He has recovered slowly. The Network attempted to bring charges against the police for this attack, but the case was consigned to a military court, where it is unlikely to result in any sanction.

On Colombia’s Independence Day in 2004, the Network organized an anti-militarist street theater scene during the city’s military parade. Knowing that the police would expect them (they had protested at the military parades for three previous years), they had one of their members dress as a street person and carry their costumes and props in a plastic sack. He was not stopped by police, and once inside the controlled parade area, he shared the costumes and props with other Network members. They then enacted a scene of soldiers pointing play guns at a young woman protester, with members of the group shouting, “No! No army defends us!” The group had quietly met with sympathetic photojournalists a week before the parade to let them know that something would happen and to ask that they turn their cameras on the theater when it began. And so they did. The governor of the state, who was on the nearby reviewing stand, said he supported free expression and – with little other choice, since the cameras had turned away from the military parade – watched the Network’s protest.

For more information in Spanish, go to www.redjuvenil.org

Testimony: Leonardo Jiménez

“An organization that fills you with colors”

Like the majority of youth in the Colombian city of Medellín, Leonardo Jiménez grew up poor. Many of the families in his neighborhood had fled from violence in the countryside. But Colombia’s war is played out in urban zones, too, where armed groups vie for control of neighborhoods and the people who make their lives there. He has suffered directly from the war: paramilitary men killed his father after he objected to them conducting their business in his restaurant. Across Colombia, young men like Leonardo are drawn into the war through a military draft, while many others – male and female – are recruited by illegal armed groups. Leonardo became a conscientious objector when he realized that serving in an armed group contradicted his pacifist convictions. Today, he works actively with the Network and leads workshops on nonviolent cooperation and direct action.

We are not interested in being recruited by any armed group. We want them to let us walk our own path. And it is not an armed path.

The dominant culture was that all social expression was led, promoted, and created by adults. It was what we call adult-centric. If you talked about the war, if you talked about the situation in the country, then adults in the organizations and government told you “No, you are too young to have political ideas.”

The Network people were honest. They told us: We’re trying to organize something. We have some ideas. We’d like you to come and contribute, create … From the beginning, the language was inclusive. And that, well, someone from the humblest of origins can tell. Making an organization for youth is not the same as making an organization with youth.

The majority of the youth in the Network have a history with the violence. They have been victims; a family member has been killed, or a friend, or they’ve seen killing directly. They are people who have lived the presence of violence, have lived that pain. And they are looking for another possibility. It is as if you were in a gray panorama, and then there is this group that fills you with colors. You would want to stay involved, wouldn’t you?

The exhaustion [from violence] has generated in us an identity. The war has generated in us an identity. Our common stories have generated in us an identity.

There is talk in Colombia about an armed revolution. But for us, revolutions are not made with weapons. “Revolution,” what is it? To renovate, to create, to invent … But war was invented long ago, and so were weapons. There’s no revolution; they are not revolutionizing anything. To us, they are all just armies.

There is a group that feels oppressed, because the government doesn’t listen, because it doesn’t want to make reforms. And that group decides to get out of the oppression. But it chooses a method, which is to arm itself in order to be heard. We understand the reasons, and we can share them. But we do not share the method.

We have been accused of being dreamers, utopians, because we talk of a world without armies, of anti-militarism. And that is not in people’s minds. Because what the war has done is introduce a chip, like a computer program, that processes one’s ideas, and then there can’t be anything different than that program. And when there are moments of crisis in the city, most people keep their eyes on the ground. And the Network, with its idea to keep ourselves at that level of imagination has been difficult. Medellín a city with a crisis of ideas.

We have had to learn to be one step ahead of what they’re thinking, in this case the government, the armed groups. An idea is not so relevant if it occurs to you after the adversary takes a step. You have to be always prepared, and even have two or three ideas for responding.

The Women’s Path of Peace

The story of the Women’s Path of Peace—La Ruta Pácifica de las Mujeres—could be any woman’s story.

Any woman in Colombia has anguished when her child, husband, father, or brother goes to war. She has buried and mourned him. And she has suffered violence directly; she has been threatened and accused and forced to take one side or another in a limitless conflict that has touched every aspect of daily life. She has also been raped.

During a regional security council meeting with the governor in late 1996, a nun revealed that 95% of the women in one community of Urabá had been raped. This ignited something deep within a few women activists in the city of Medellín. They called for an act of solidarity: A thousand Colombian women from women’s groups around the country to go to Urabá and put their arms around those who had suffered the humiliation of war.

Across Colombia, busloads of women departed for Urabá. Many traveled for several days. Some left their communities for the first time. Many did not have permission from their husbands or fathers, but went anyway. And when 1,500 Colombian women arrived in Urabá on November 25 — the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women — they hugged their sisters. Thus was born La Ruta Pácifica de las Mujeres.

Ruta: a Pacifist-Feminist Movement

La Ruta Pácifica de las Mujeres, simply called Ruta (Path), is a movement that seeks to strengthen nonviolent action against war. There are intricate shades of meaning in this title. Ruta is literally a way for women to reach places where other women are living the horrific realities of war and war’s ensuing cruelties, and accompany them in body and spirit. Ruta is also a course of action; it calls for women to take the step beyond being victims of war to being social and political actors in a struggle for nonviolent change.

Ruta is essentially feminist. After marching to Urabá in 1996, participating women evaluated what they had learned. They saw that the symbols of nonviolent resistance that had emerged during the mobilization were the same symbols used in feminist culture. Those symbols include: cooking pots, flowers, silence, the black of mourning, the yellow of truth, the white of justice, the green of hope …. They saw that this symbolism held the potential to counteract and even transform the traditional paternalist language of political relationships — and the language and culture that have perpetuated war for so long in Colombia.

Widening the Path

After the first mobilization, women set out for other regions that were under the assault of war. They launched nation-wide marches to Bolívar, Cartagena, Barrancabermeja, and Bogotá, and regional marches to many other areas — wherever the specter of war meant that women needed companionship and solidarity.

On November 25, 2003, Ruta led 3,000 women in a caravan of 100 buses to the Southern jungle department of Putumayo. Putumayo is at the heart of joint U.S.-Colombian drug eradication efforts that include aerial fumigation of coca fields. The fallout from the spraying has dramatically increased food insecurity, displacement, the spread of coca cultivation to other regions, destruction of natural resources, and recently-proven genetic damage among young women.

With official refusal to change this drug eradication policy, Ruta women decided to go to Putumayo and take a stand against it. Over 300 women’s groups from across Colombia endorsed Ruta’s statement against the “militarist policy of the current government, which favors the use of weapons and force to treat problems that are rooted in and generate poverty, historic expropriation, marginalization, and disorder.” They demanded that the “women and men of Putumayo be allowed to influence the decisions that affect their lives and health and those of their children, and the land which sustains them.”

Gaining Global Recognition

Ruta is different from other movements. People outside it sometimes call the movement crazy. Women within say if the fusion of utopian values and extreme realism is crazy, the label just might be true. The women admit their actions are often unpredictable, and say others sometimes underestimate them. However it’s seen, Ruta has not gone unnoticed.

During the Putumayo mobilization, the U.S. Ambassador to Colombia spoke against Ruta’s declaration. Ruta leaders consider the attention significant. “The Ambassador wouldn’t say anything unless he felt our movement had political weight,” said Marina Gallego of Ruta. “And we have influence outside of Colombia because our peaceful opposition to war and violence appeals to women everywhere.”

The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the British organization International Alert agree. In 2001, they awarded the Millennium Peace Prize for Women to La Ruta Pácifica de las Mujeres in recognition of it’s struggle for peace, justice and equality. Ruta accepted the award with the following words:

Colombia is at war. It has been for over 40 years, violating Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law, and causing suffering, pain, and chaos. Women re-create life. We lead peaceful revolutions without bullets, without anti-personnel mines, without destroying the country’s infrastructure and environment, without massacres, without disappearances, without threats, and without torture. Ruta … demands a political negotiation of Colombia’s armed conflict. We are an opportunity to transform the culture of war that reigns in our country … we have told the warring men that we do not deliver children for war, and that we will not allow our hands and wombs to contribute to war. Our bodies will not serve as war booty …. We demand that the arms race supported by the developed countries stop …. We demand that not one more dollar be spent on war ….

The Millennium Peace Prize is not only an acknowledgment of what they’ve created. It is also also a challenge for Ruta to advance its fundamental political goal: a negotiated solution to Colombia’s war. A military approach is not the answer. “It may create some pacification, but it will just delay the real solution,” says Olga Lucía Ramírez of Ruta, “because the products of war remain. The idea of violence as a means to an end will be legitimized and reinforced.” The way to avoid that is to negotiate.

Ruta insists it is not just the government and the guerrilla groups that need to sit down and talk at the negotiating table. Unless all actors — especially women who will counteract the traditional, paternalist language of society and politics — are given a voice in the negotiations, there is no hope for real and lasting peace.

Overcoming Fear and Taking Steps Forward

Taking and maintaining a nonviolent stand brings fear and risks. The first time women came together and traveled to Urabá, they were afraid. Each subsequent mobilization was easier, psychologically. Their fear is something the women have learned to recognize and understand. They know if they let it infect them, they will be paralyzed. It is Ruta’s unique solidarity — indeed, its sisterhood — that gives women the strength to march in the face of war and violence and authoritarianism.

La Ruta Pácifica de las Mujeres understands there is strength in numbers, power in being a woman, and security in wearing black and wielding flowers. It is the women’s collective strength, their internal democracy. And it is their efforts to be coherent in word and action from a feminist perspective that makes Ruta an unconventional movement so full of hope.