In 1962, Al Wahrhaftig and I, as part of Colombia I, were assigned as community organizers to Silvia, a mixed mestizo and indigenous community in the department of Cauca. We quickly realized that the Guambiano and Paez Indians already were organized; each was governed by a cabildo of elders chosen by unspoken consensus. In order to be ”chosen” to the cabildo, individuals had to pass through a series of stages of voluntary community service to prove their suitability, and to gain the necessary experience and wisdom for the cabildo.

We also saw that both groups had a long tradition of minga (community labor) for projects chosen by cabildo with the consensus of the group. What’s more, the communities had projects, notably, building unpaved roads so that the Indians could sell their products in the cities instead of having to sell to mestizo middlemen.

We had been trained in American community organizing. The unspoken assumption was that we would be bringing the blessings of Americanstyle democracy to disorganized and alienated communities. We had been taught that the first step was to hold an election to create a “legitimate” Community Action Board, which would then choose the projects.

But that would have meant undermining the existing Indian democracy by splitting the communities into rival constituencies, thus destroying the authority of the cabildos. So instead of following our training and organizing elections, we decided to work with the traditional cabildos to get the resources for the projects the community had already chosen.

Our 2008 visit with the Guambianos 45 years later showed an amazing success story. Today the cabildo is still the accepted community government, and the system of advancement through community service is intact. Whereas before the mestizos treated them as ignorantes, today the Guambianos enjoy full equality. The roads have been built, and there are schools in the rural areas, where the Guambiano language is taught along with Spanish.

They have a community hospital and Guambiano radio station. Guambianos have been elected to the Colombian National Senate and to the municipal government, and they proudly fly their own flag. They are proud of their culture and wear their traditional costumes as a mark of honor. There are two priests, a mestizo and a Guambiano, in the town’s Catholic church. The Guambiano priest validates the traditional “non-Christian” Guambiano rites of marriage and “baptism,” which is recognized as valid by the Church.

Perhaps most important of all, the presence of elected Guambiano congressmen in the national government has allowed the Guambianos to develop a legal basis to reclaim their ancestral lands, which, over the centuries since the Conquest, had been taken by the mestizos.

The Guambianos live at a major intersection in the “civil war” between the army, the right wing “paramilitaries,” and the left-wing FARC, and have found a way to maintain a precarious neutrality between these groups. As Senator Muelas explained it, the cabildo has told both the paramilitaries and the FARC that they are not welcome in Guambiano territory; that it is not a Guambiano war, and that if they try to move in, the Guambianos will resist non-violently. Amazingly, this seems to have worked. This is a community proud of its identity, of its progress, and confident of its future.

While there is no way of proving, or even of knowing, how effective their work was, it seems likely that, by supporting the traditional Guambiano consensus democracy, we were able to make an important contribution to the success of the Guambianos in maintaining their culture. I suspect that if they had instead been “successful” in imposing an electoral form of democracy, rather than respecting the consensus democracy, the Guambianos would not have been able to maintain their neutrality.

For me, the success of the Guambianos is an important lesson: instead of imposing an external system on traditional communities, the best way is to respect the existing cultural models, and find ways to help people to build on their own traditions. If only the U.S. had understood that in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, and Iraq.

The unexpected high point of our visit was an invitation to become padrinos (godfathers) to Jennie Andrea Yalanda, and thus compadres (co-parents) with her father and mother, Silvio Yalanda and Claudia Jimena. They explained that knowing she had American godfathers would help their daughter feel more secure, and more a part of the larger world. And of course it would give us a reason to keep in touch, and to come back to visit.