Colombians in Philly seek the truth from its Armed Conflict survivors

During a brainstorming session in an executive conference room at the Hotel Le Méridien in Philadelphia, 30 people sat in groups of six, with white index cards, note pads, and markers.

They were the U.S. delegates volunteering for Colombia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Non-Repetition Commission, and they were going to learn to record testimonials from survivors of Colombia’s internal war known as the Armed Conflict.

“Let’s think about the time periods and the reasons why you or someone … fled from Colombia to the United States or any other country during the Armed Conflict,” said Carlos Beristain, taking notes, divided by decade from 1950 to 2020, on an easel.

The workshop participants, tasked with summoning the stories of survivors, were survivors themselves of the complex dispute among the Colombian government, far-left guerrillas, far-right paramilitary, drug cartels, dissident-organized armed groups, and criminal gangs, which began 60 years ago and continues today. These factions confront one another over social, economic and political inequality, abuse of power, land theft, and drug trafficking.

The Colombian-based commission began its efforts in November 2018. Of its 11 commissioners, Beristain, a psychiatrist from Spain specializing in helping victims of war, oversees 170 delegates to collect testimonies of Colombian exiles in 24 countries, including the United States. So far, his delegates outside the United States have already collected 500 testimonies using an encrypted software to preserve the confidentiality of the survivors.

A 2018 report from Colombia’s National Center for the Historic Memory said the exact number of total Colombian exiles remains unknown as official reports do not include those who fled the conflict and did not request international protection.

The commission’s goal is to publish a report by November 2021 using 15,000 testimonies.

"It’s a part of history that is unknown, which includes a personal process of self-reconstruction and self-repair that is very valuable and needed to learn what happened, to understand why it’s such a complex conflict and to find how to avoid it from happening again,” said Beristain, who has worked on similar projects in Paraguay, Ecuador, and Peru, and led the memoria histórica report about the 1960-96 Guatemalan war.

To find volunteers outside Colombia, Beristain reached out to human-rights organizations and researched the list of survivors and victims’ family members in exile who had registered with the Colombian government’s Unique List of Victims (RUV, for its acronym in Spanish).

Before the coronavirus became a worldwide crisis, Philadelphia served as the headquarters for the February three-day training in the United States. Although less than 3% of Latinos living in the Philadelphia area are Colombian, the city was deemed centrally located for the U.S. portion of the project. Participants came from Washington, California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New York, and the District of Columbia for the workshop, conducted in Spanish.

Maria Giraldo Gallo is one of three delegates assigned to the Philadelphia region. She moved to the city in 2014, after her husband was offered a scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Giraldo Gallo has experienced her own trauma but didn’t want to share those details so that she could establish trust with interview subjects, who may have opposing views of the conflict.

The 29-year-old said her volunteer work and training with the commission has given her a better understanding of the perspectives of women, the LGBTQ community, and black and indigenous groups in the context of war. It has helped her navigate difficult conversations around sexual violence and displacement.

She said the report will help to explain, for those of Colombian descent born outside the country, why their family was displaced.

“This project is a time of collective reflection, deep listening, and open dialogue, to talk about those things we never talk about, that we never learned but what our parents said it was,” said Giraldo Gallo, who lives in West Philadelphia and is a multicultural specialist for the Philadelphia School District.

“That access to detailed research-based information about our people’s memory is what’s important for the younger ones.”

The woman from Cali traced the changes in Colombia that eventually brought her to the United States to the year 1996.

It was then that she and her husband were part of a group of 11 professionals who trained more than 800 teenagers over the course of nine years in technical careers that would allow the youth to open businesses, hoping it would keep them from being recruited by the guerrillas. It worked: The Chester County woman, who requested anonymity because she fears persecution, remembered students opened two bakeries and a shoe repair shop in Cali.

“We wanted them to know that they didn’t need political support or the validation of any group to make a living for themselves and their families,” she said.

In 2003, things changed drastically: Students stopped attending the workshops and she started to receive threatening phone calls. Over the next two years, she was forced to move to a new home and the group disbanded, its members never speaking to one another again for security reasons.

In January 2005, she was six months pregnant with her first child, a boy, when members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia locked her with three other women in a camp, separated from her husband. She spent two months there and was tortured.

She recalled in detail her memories of those days: The sound of a nearby stream, the screams of those wounded, the wind caressing the trees at night, and the many times guerrilla members kicked her belly.

Eventually she and the others escaped. An emergency C-section resulted in the loss of her child.

Months later, she and her husband immigrated to the United States and requested asylum. Over the next 15 years, she started a new life working as a doula and a language interpreter. She is now the primary wage earner in her family and is the director of a nonprofit. She and her husband have a 13-year-old son.

Now 51, she still passionately loves Colombia but says its people, particularly survivors like herself, have lost trust in the government and its institutions. The commission, she said, is a worthy endeavor.

“If this is what’s needed to unify all Colombians, to stop our indifference, then I’m in all favor of sharing my story, to declaim the truth.”

Critics say television series like Narcos or Pablo Escobar, The Drug Lord have simplified the conflict, leaving out the complex mix of violent crimes fueled by the abuse of power, the battles between politically polarized groups and movements, and how this has affected the people of Colombia.

In fact, the survivors of the Armed Conflict have different perspectives on who is right, what went wrong, and how to end the conflict.

Cristina Escobar, a sociology professor at Temple University and a Philadelphia commission delegate, said the coronavirus pandemic has complicated some of the groundwork of the project, which is based on gaining trust.

The team of three had already spent five months searching for institutional support from local organizations such as libraries and churches, to guarantee neutral, safe spaces to talk comfortably with the survivors.

Now, Escobar said, they are looking forward to connecting with survivors virtually on social media, email, and video conferences.

“These aren’t the best circumstances, knowing people are scared of the [health] crisis and also fear their past [in Colombia], but this collaboration is meant to build a better future for us.”