DATELINE COLOMBIA—NOTES FROM THE FIELD
Maureen Orth
There is no dearth of young people who want to volunteer in Colombia as we once did. Last February I returned to my
vereda and Escuela Marina Orth in Medellín with two 23-year-olds, Brian Asher and Henry Wellington of Washington, D.C., who are currently teaching English at the school for a semester. Both are recent college grads—Brian was captain of the lacrosse team at Brown and Henry graduated from Penn and then worked on the Obama campaign, and their Spanish is a lot like ours when we started.They are living near downtown Medellín with the family of the One Laptop Per Child curriculum instructor based at the school and I am delighted to report they are just loving it! The children are fascinated with the young gringos and are thrilled to be able to hear the native English pronunciation of words. Normally a tourist visa only lasts three months but the Colombian embassy here has made it possible for them to renew their visa in-country and so far they have traveled to Santa Fe de Antioquia, Río Negro, Santa Marta and Cartagena. Both sets of parents and friends have also come to visit and it is unanimously thumbs up for the Colombian people, countryside, hospitality and beauty (particularly of the female kind).
The American embassy in Bogotá is interested in having the Peace Corps return as well, the current idea being that to begin, the volunteers would stay in safe, urban areas and instruct Colombian teachers. If the Colombian government and various groups and corporations would also back more schools with individual laptops for primary students, then Peace Corps could also train for computer teaching. These transformative laptops, which were funded by Chevron at my school and still cost about $220 each (the cost should lower to $100 when sufficient manufacturing volume is attained) are also being considered for rural areas once controlled by the FARC.
My second trip to Colombia this year was to Bogotá at the end of March for a fascinating conference on Counter Insurgency sponsored by AID and the Colombian military. Top brass from both the U.S. military and the Colombian military attended to discuss among other topics whether the Colombian example of beating back the FARC could also be applied to Afghanistan, where we learned the U.S, is spending a mind-boggling two billion dollars per week. Both Colombia and Afghanistan have a terrorist enemy that finances itself with narcotics trafficking and seeks refuge across borders.
On the conference’s first day we were flown to La Macarena in Meta, former headquarters of the FARC number two, Mono Joyjoy. There are no roads in or out. Our Russian helicopter featured two gunners with submachine guns pointed out of either side of the aircraft because there are still FARC. When we landed we saw the latest military solution at work—social action. A cluster of white trailer-like modules on a heavily guarded army base compromise various government departments in an area where the government had rarely shown up before. Today the Colombian military clears the area first, but in order to secure the territory and to win hearts and minds of the populace, which had often subsisted by planting coca, a program of interagency cooperation and social action has to take over, to provide services and to introduce alternate crops. It is not easy but it sounded awfully familiar, particularly to an old community development volunteer.
After billions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the official doctrine 40-plus years later is to teach both the military and the government to listen to the "felt needs of the community." Interestingly, the headlines that followed the next week about Defense Secretary Gates’s modification of the U.S. defense budget echoed all the themes we heard at the conference. Colombia is now justly proud of how well its military is prepared to fight in the jungle—it has been trained by U.S. special forces. We saw a Colombian rapid deployment force rappel down a rope from a hovering helicopter right into Joyjoy’s old camp. Today, 70% of the remaining FARC reside near or across the border in Venezuela and Ecuador.