Healing Youth: Wounded by Colombia's War
by PAUL JEFFREY*
In the December 2007 issue of Response, a portion of the article, "Healing Youth: Wounded by Colombia's War," was omitted. The full article follows.
Mario Ortiz was jealous of his three older brothers. They joined the Colombian army and got to carry guns in the decades-long war between leftist insurgents and the Colombian military. When Mr. Ortiz also tried to sign up for the army, he was rejected because of he was only 13 years old. So he hopped on a bus in his rural village and got off at a right-wing paramilitary base several hours away where he was given a gun and sent into combat. The boy was thrilled by the adrenalin rush of war and enjoyed the lucrative salary the paramilitaries paid. Yet he had no idea what he was doing.
“I didn’t know what I was fighting for. I still don’t know. I joined simply because it was the only way I could have a gun,” Mr. Ortiz said.
The teenager spent three years in the paramilitaries. His unit entered into combat against both the Colombian military and the country’s guerrillas. He was shot once in the shoulder and spent several weeks recuperating. The violence was overwhelming. Mr. Ortiz said his unit regularly disfigured dead enemy combatants, often chopping their cadavers into little pieces. Yet he says neither he nor his comrades in arms had a clue what the war was about. “None of us understood what we had gotten ourselves into, or why we were there,” he said.
By the time peace negotiations produced a partial dismantling of paramilitary groups in 2005, Mr. Ortiz had seen enough. At age 16, he gladly accepted demobilization and passed into the hands of a government agency that put him in a residential center in Bogota with other demobilized combatants from both the paramilitaries and leftist rebel groups.
Mr. Ortiz said the former teen-age fighters lived together without rancor. As they shared, Mr. Ortiz learned what led others to join armed groups.
“Some did it for the emotion, like me,” he said. “Others to get revenge for the killing of a family member. And some mistook one group for another and ended up joining the wrong army.”
While the Colombian government provided the former combatants with room and board, and an education, it couldn’t keep them completely separate from the war’s protagonists. Mr. Ortiz said he was approached by paramilitaries who tried to recruit him back into their ranks, offering an increase in salary. Guerrilla groups also tried to entice their soldiers back to the front lines of the war, but didn’t offer economic compensation. Mr. Ortiz said guerrilla groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia attract volunteers willing to fight for free, while the paramilitaries ? which are linked in several ways to the U.S.-backed government ? have to pay for soldiers.
When Mr. Ortiz turned 18, the government set him free, though it continues to provide a small scholarship as long as he studies. Before he left the residential center, however, Mr. Ortiz met some outreach workers from Taller de Vida (Life Workshop), a Bogota-based group that’s supported by the Mission Giving of United Methodist Women. It works with former child combatants, helping them heal from their experience of violence as they begin a productive and peaceful life. The organization also works with displaced youth who fled the war’s violence in the countryside.
Besides providing counseling to help Mr. Ortiz sort out the personal issues that remained from his time at war, Taller de Vida convinced him to join a team of young people making a video documentary about Colombia’s armed conflict. There are 16 team members ? half former guerrilla combatants, half former paramilitaries ? and together they are investigating the roots of the war, writing the script and acting out the parts. Mr. Ortiz said the group has bonded well and cooperation thrives despite different histories.
“Our challenge is to help other young people in Colombia understand that the armed groups aren’t good for the country,” Mr. Ortiz said. “We want people to think for themselves, and if they are considering joining an armed group we want them to understand the risks and consequences they will face.”
Girls face tougher challenges
The former young combatants are not a homogeneous group. According to Stella Duque, a psychologist who founded Taller de Vida, youth who serve in the paramilitaries often leave broken and troubled, frequently suffering from drug abuse. They tend to be apolitical, disobedient, and yell a lot.
“The paramilitaries kill more people than anyone else, and their recruits have often had to crawl through dead bodies as part of their initiation,” she said. “They take disrespect to the extreme, even drinking the blood of their victims.
“The former guerrilla combatants, by contrast, are often too obedient from my perspective,” Ms. Dugue said. “Although they tend to be better educated and speak a language that’s closer to ours, about rights, for example, I nonetheless worry about them.”
Girls who come out of the armed groups usually face greater challen-ges than the boys, Ms. Duque said.
“Our studies have shown that the conflict’s effects are felt much more by girls, but getting help to them can also be more difficult,” she said. “Boys often continue moving around, going to school or getting work, but girls are expected to stay home, clean the house, care for siblings and prepare the food. To get them into our projects we often have to push to get permission from their families.”
Girls who leave the armed groups also face dramatic psychological challenges. “In the war they were often used sexually,” Ms. Duque said. “Once on the outside, they change partners very quickly. It’s difficult for them to relate to men who weren’t part of an armed group. They feel rejected by the others, and fear that they will be seen as worthless, as dogs, by people who haven’t experienced the conflict in the same intimate way. Despite that, they have dreams of finding a partner who wasn’t in the war. We have to work harder with them, but once they’re in the program, they’re the ones who give the most.”
Whatever their gender and whatever the armed group they once belonged to, in many cases the young people can’t go back to their rural homes without putting themselves or their families at risk. Some were recruited or kidnapped as early as 8 years of age, or were born into armed groups, so they’re trapped in the sprawling megacity that Bogota has become in recent years. Millions of people ? Colombia has the third largest number of displaced people in the world ? have fled violence in the countryside for the safety of the city. There they find grinding poverty.
In addition to its work with former combatants, Taller de Vida also does extensive work with internally displaced young people, getting them involved in a variety of activities, including theater and dance.
Yesenia Moreno is a 23-year-old dancer who was displaced by the war as a teenager. She got involved in a Taller de Vida theater group, and it changed her life.
“If they don’t have the luck to fall in among groups like ours that help them to reconstruct their life stories, the displaced arrive in Bogota with nothing, live in barrios of extreme poverty and walk like ghosts through the city,” Ms. Moreno said. “Some of us have been fortunate enough to transform our stories. I’ve stopped feeling sorry for myself, begun to recover my dignity as a displaced person and as a woman, and begun to move forward into a different future.”
Today Ms. Moreno leads dance workshops for Taller de Vida, helping displaced kids to discover freedom in new kinds of movement.
“Art is the only way to liberate and heal yourself after so many painful experiences, whether you were a victim or a perpetrator,” she said. “The government wants to talk of social insertion for these young people, but there’s no social network to support that. While they may guarantee your food, what happens to you as a person, what happens to your rights? So we’ve created an artistic space where we can think about and achieve healing.”
The idea isn’t just to train dancers in technique, Ms. Moreno said. There are schools that do that.
“We do psychological and emotional work, helping you feel dignified and responsible, with rights, and then you can begin to learn to weave your own social networks,” she said. “We use dance and movement to liberate you from tension in your body. Military training has robbed these kids of their body, so we work with the body. You’re an actor now not of war but of peace. Just as you could kill someone as an actor in war, and there was nothing you could do about it afterward, you can now reflect on your experience and bring someone back to life through dance and art. You reflect on your experience to learn from it, and learn why things happened.
“The more we use our bodies in these new ways, the more we respect them. During the war we quit respecting our bodies. We could even die at any moment. What sense does it make to care for your body if you could be killed at any moment? But now that you’ve escaped from that and know that life will go on, you’ve got to learn to respect your body anew.”
A sad country
Ms. Duque said the organization’s programs help young people marked deeply by the war to reinvent their lives.
“Art has been an essential tool in this process,” she said. “In theater, you need all of your resources to confront the public, to act and yell and move. If you can do that in the theater, then you can do it in your life. Day after day we’ve got to draw on resources and creativity and humor in order to survive.”
Many who aren’t helped to recover from the trauma of the conflict continue to be victimized. “They go through the world anonymously, hiding their past, not being known, deceiving themselves, and often end up being involved in delinquency, drugs or prostitution,” Ms. Duque said. “Those are the only doors left open to them.”
The end result is a sad country, she said.
“Too many children and youth are sad, without desire. They turn to drugs in high numbers. They get pregnant at 12 years of age. They are a generation broken by the war, sad, reared in an environment of disrespect, accustomed to the violation of their rights ? a generation forced by the dominant classes to walk with their heads down, submissive, in anonymity and darkness. We’re a country that’s lost in the middle of impunity, lost in the middle of a war that’s more than 40 years old. The emotional life of Colombians suffers from living in the middle of a war with no end.
"The youth, especially, see no future for themselves. So teen suicide has been increasing, especially the last couple of years, among kids from both poor and rich families."
Despite the challenges, Taller de Vida is expanding its programs throughout the country.
The country's last hope, Ms. Duque believes, is its young people. "If we lose this opportunity with these young people, we lose the country," she said. "We've got to resist and invite others to this labor of resistance, which is the basis of our hope. If they give up, then what hope do future generations have? We have to resist."