An Interview with Ruby (Yudis Alba) Arteaga & José Roviro López Rivera
Defending campesino rights in Colombia
By Emmanuel Valentine Onu
Defending their collective right to their land and protecting it from violence has been at the core of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó since it was founded in 1997, in the midst of armed violence, forced displacement, and the murder of its leaders. The Peace Community is a remarkable, and inspirational community-led non-violent peace building initiative, which has inspired other initiatives across Colombia and around the world. We spoke with campesino human rights defenders Ruby (Yudis Alba) Arteaga and José Roviro López Rivera from the Peace Community, who have been working to protect the hamlets that form part of the Peace Community from violence and destruction of their land. They have both faced threats to their lives because of their defence of their rights, which has escalated in recent months since the murder of community members Nallely Sepúlveda and Edinson David on 21st March this year.
According to Front Line Defenders’ 2023 Global Analysis, Colombia remains the most dangerous country for human rights defenders, having the highest number of killings of human rights defenders for yet another year. PBI has supported the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó since 1999.
Ruby (Yudis Alba) Arteaga. Photo credits: James Atherton / Lush
Can you tell us a bit about the hamlet of Mulatos and how important it is to keep it protected?
Ruby: The hamlet of Mulatos, the settlement where I live, which was founded in memory of Luis Eduardo Guerra and in memory of those who died in the massacre on 21 February 2005. For the community, memory is so important to ensure that history is not repeated. The hamlet of Mulatos is a symbol of nature with mountains, rivers and valleys - it's an essential symbol of how we live.
Mulatos is a small place, but it's so important to be able to be there, to feed into its life every day and for people to remember the barbaric events that took place there. This is so the memory of the attacks against us that happened in Mulatos are not forgotten, to keep them alive in our minds, to stop these injustices from being repeated to people like us who just want to live in harmony with nature.
At the moment the Peace Community is experiencing threats which means that many, including you, have had to leave the hamlets that form part of the Peace Community. Can you tell us what has happened and how these threats have affected your livelihood?
Ruby: It's difficult because as a community we’re used to having a lot of daily hardship. We felt like we were moving forward - we were back on the farms, we were living in relative peace - and then suddenly history repeated itself. It feels like we’ve come full circle, and that we're starting again from zero after everything that we have done to try to prevent history from repeating itself. We fear that this could happen to any member of the community and members of our family - we fear for their lives. It is like having this giant trying to come and squash us. We have been doing so much to try to prevent history from repeating itself, and now we’re longing for that feeling of relative peace again.
It has had a huge impact on me personally and us as a community, because we are now going through what we and our parents lived through when we were very young. Our parents worked so hard to prevent history from repeating itself, for us. Now we have got this struggle of how not to lose our farms, but also how to defend our right to defend our territory without being killed for doing so. We are figuring out how to do that and not die. And so it has left a huge impact on us.
José Roviro López Rivera. Photo credits: James Atherton / Lush
Can you tell us your journey of being involved with the peace community and how it shaped and influenced you?
Roviro: I entered the Peace Community when I was ten years old because I had been living on a farm and was forcibly displaced. As a result, my family and I formed part of the Peace Community. I studied in the community until year seven in 2004. Then came the 21st of February massacre in 2005 in Mulatos. We had to move because President Uribe sent in the army. Also, because of the agreement with the community, we refused to live on the same plot as armed actors. That was when we were displaced from Mulatos to what is now called San Josécito. We were displaced from the area that we had been living in, the community land. There, we started to build for the families along with my parents, brothers, and other people in the community. Then, once we had settled there, I began studying from year eight onwards in the city of San José de Apartadó.
It was in 2008 that I finished my baccalaureate. Having finished my education there, I started to train in alternative education in the community. We began to develop our own alternative education system. This was a process that varied within the community. We trained ourselves in alternative education to teach the children in the community. So, I started to work with the children, to teach.
I went to the city of Mulatos to work as a teacher with small primary school children until 2011, when I returned to San Josécito. There, I started to work but it was no longer in the education space as only young people came to take up these roles. I started to work in the committee on agricultural production, such as cocoa production and other things in the community. That was what I was doing till about 2014/2015 when I entered the Internal Council of the Peace Community as a coordinator. During that time, I lived in the Hamlet of La Unión for a year and a half before moving to La Esperanza for about six months. In 2021, I returned to San Josécito for some time and then went to La Resbalosa in 2022 while also being a coordinator in the Internal Council.
I was living there until last year when I was forced to leave because of threats against my life that meant that I could no longer continue to live there. Now we can only go there in large groups with international accompaniment for maybe days or weeks. The level of risk is so heightened that we can only go there for temporary periods.
If we come back to who I am today, I am who I am because of the community. I grew up in the community and I am so grateful for that. For who I am today as a human rights defender, I am so grateful for belonging to the community. I cannot imagine who I would be if I hadn't grown up in the community. Would I be involved in violence? I don't know. So, yes, I am what I am because I grew up in the community.
What are your aspirations for the future of the Peace Community?
Roviro: I hope to live a long time, to be able to see my children grow up, to be able to see Ruby's children grow up, and the other children in the community to grow up. I hope the community will last a hundred years and then a hundred years more. I hope that the Colombian state will grant us the titles to our land in collective reparation for the violence and the violations that we have suffered over the 27 years since the Peace Community was founded. I hope the community can form an alternative model, something that could be a symbol of peace, that could give strength to others who are losing strength in their respective processes of defence because their leaders are being killed and they are being attacked. So, I have to say I am not very optimistic about the future, but I do hope that I can live to be able to continue to create a space for peace and for there to be a different consciousness in the community and in the country in the future.
José Roviro López Rivera and Ruby (Yudis Alba) Arteaga during their visit to London
At the core of the Peace Community is respect for the land, can you expand a bit on what the land, environment and nature means to you?
Ruby: Our stance is to stop mining and exploitation of the planet, because extractive industries are so damaging to the environment. If you take everything out of the Earth, how can you expect the Earth to be green? You’ve stripped it of its resources. People need to stop thinking of the planet as something to exploit, and start thinking of it more as something to live in harmony with. People need to stop seeing the Earth as a business. It's about finding some sort of harmony and living with the planet, and that’s what the land, environment and nature means to me.
Roviro: For the Peace Community, nature represents life - the animals and the environment being healthy, without illnesses that are caused by the overwhelming numbers of cars and factories in cities. In our land, we protect the environment. We live together with the animals, a variety of trees and with the water. As Ruby said, extractive industries destroy all of that - they take coal, oil or gold, privatise water, extract sand and rocks. The fact that we have our land helps us to protect it - we have cultivated these places that were treated badly before by people who were operating there. That’s our life.
In the future, we’re not going to be fighting for different materials like coal or oil, it's water that we’re going to be fighting for. And so our goal is to care for the water in light of this future.
Like many others, we were horrified at the senseless murders of community members Nallely Sepúlveda and Edinson David in March of this year. Since 1997, the Peace Community has faced horrific violence and persecution, how do these events shape your community and how do you overcome them?
Roviro: This has had a huge impact on the Peace Community, and everyone is scared. The way that Nallely and Edinson were killed has created a lot of fear in the community. Lots of people now don’t want to leave their homes or the hamlets. The children in the community are still asking why it has happened.
It's a difficult question to answer, how to overcome this, because the justice system hasn’t done anything for us and the state institutions are not supporting us. Many people who live in the area [where Nallely and Edinson were murdered], who aren’t part of the community, are against the Peace Community, because they have been tricked by the destructive industries, who have told them that they will be gaining something from this destruction.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if any of us got killed, and if that would force the community to be displaced, or whether we would be able to continue. But now, despite the threats, we plan to stay put. The Peace Community trusts in the coordination committee to find support around the world, to find ways to move forward and to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. We also use laughter - you’ll have seen that we laugh - which is a great therapy against the fear that we hold within us.
Ruby: Those who have lost their lives give us the strength to continue, because all they were doing was living a just life. They never hurt anyone and they had their dreams ripped from them. We can’t continue letting this happen to people who just want to grow food and have cattle as part of the life they want to live.
We continue to show people that continuing the collective struggle is worth it - that the lives of all 300 members of the Peace Community that have been murdered are not forgotten, and that they live on. Nallely loved to play football, and she would always be there at the Peace Communities anniversary on the 23rd of March. We need to keep their story alive, and this is how we confront such events - we share their stories with everyone, reminding ourselves of what they were like. That’s the way we can face this, though it's terribly hard, but for the future of the community we must keep struggling to keep the dream alive.
What are some of the key initiatives and projects the Peace Community is currently working on?
Roviro: We have an educational initiative, which began because the government refused to provide us with teachers in the Peace Community - this was around 2005/2006. We requested that the Ministry of Education of Apartadó provides us with a teacher that would come to the community. The Ministry of Education of Apartadó refused, because they said that there was a school in Apartadó that was 15 minutes away from where we lived. But we refused to send our children there, because the school was located right beside a military base. During this time, the FARC was very present and would go to the military base and start shooting. The children would have to hide under their desks as the bullets would actually penetrate the school. It was absolutely too unsafe to send our children there.
So, given this refusal we decided we would set up our own education programme. Everyone in the Peace Community contributed to the formation and development of the education programme. From 2006, we have developed and maintained a non-oppressive, free form of education, which is based on the specialties of the teachers. Children are not stuck in a classroom only learning the alphabet, but we also take learning experiences from nature, from plants, from rivers.
It's a very personal and unique education system formed by the different teachers in the Peace Community. It’s a broader education and it doesn’t just look at a narrow view of philosophy, but also at the philosophy of our land and our leaders. It teaches the history of Bolívar and Christopher Columbus, but also teaches the history of the Peace Community - the people who have died and the struggles that we have gone through. It also teaches us how to grow crops. When children in the community leave the school, they leave with a really holistic form of education. Many people who have gone through the school have also been taught to be leaders in the community, and many have joined the Internal Council after they finished their education. We think its the best form of education - a much rounder knowledge that encourages participation, value for the family, for life, for nature. It's a very different perspective from what you get from more traditional education systems.
Our own education system hasn’t been validated by any institution, because we do not aligned with the formal institutions. So if children wished to access other forms of education, they would take formal exams in order to do so.
Vigil held in London in support of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó. Photo credits: James Atherton / Lush
What can the international community do to support you and other members of the Peace Community?
Roviro : The international community can continue to accompany us spiritually from a distance, because many people cannot physically accompany us on the ground. At least in that way, we can create bonds with the international community who can give us moral support, pressure the government, and provide other types of support from a distance. We do have on the ground protective accompaniment through organisations such as PBI, FOR Peace Presence and Palomas, but it's not enough to be able to cover all of the different hamlets and villages that form part of the Peace Community. We need committed people to provide more support.
There's a lot of advocacy work that the international community do to support us from a distance, for example, speaker tours, because that's a very important thing if we can come over once or twice a year and talk about our needs, and give updates on the situation to help us always build on our support networks around the world.
Ruby: The support of the international community is extremely important for the Peace Community. It helps us to get stories out about what we're living through. It makes us feel like we are not alone, because we often feel alone. To know that other people care about what is happening in the community and that they want the community to stay on the land, to be able to continue to defend it. This gives us a great deal of strength.
Whenever any of us leave the community to come to an event like this, then those who are staying always make sure they send their thanks to all those who are working to help us to continue in our struggle, in our defence of the territory. So, it is so important to continue to strengthen these networks, and it is also important that we maintain the physical accompaniment, because really, they are the only thing there on the front line to support us when we face attacks or people are killed. These people from abroad who are there to help us protect ourselves are the only ones that are there to find ways out should we need to leave our homes, to denounce the actions of the state, and to make sure that these stories get out and are heard. So, these different sorts of international support are all very important to help us to continue in defence of our land, and to remain in our struggle.
➜ Find out more about the call by more than 45 human rights organisations for the UK Government to develop an effective and holistic policy for the protection of human rights defenders here!
➜ Watch the short film, “Chocolate of Peace”, about the work and life of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó available here!
➜ Donate here to help us continue our vital support to land and human rights defenders like Ruby and Roviro!
