© 2006. Used by permission.
LOUISVILLE, KY. – Adelaida Jiménez is keeping secrets from her two pre-teen sons. It is a habit that she has learned: Tell them only what they need to know and save the rest for later.
When they are bigger. Or, when the threat has passed.
After all, how do you explain terror? How do you justify exile as the only way to keep hired killers or armed paramilitary soldiers from blowing your father, or his children, to Kingdom Come? How do you tell your children that staying safe means leaving home, maybe for good, or, at least until the political climate cools down? How do you say that and not scare your child out of his mind, especially when you are trying to tend to your own trauma and not fall prey to your own worst fears?
So Jiménez is parceling out information on a “need-to-know-basis.”
Evading terror is why she and her husband, Milton MejÃa, are now in Texas, temporarily living in the house of a man they didn’t know until six weeks ago. It is why they are taking a crash-course in English. Why their boys — Ivan, 12, and Andreis, 9 — are in a new school, in a new town, in a new country, miles away from their friends and family.
And it is why she keeps telling herself that this is the only option the family had: Leaving was the only thing left to do.
“We had a very hard situation,” says Jiménez, remembering the last year when her husband had to go in-and-out of hiding to save his life, while she pretended that everything was normal as she tended the kids and went to work. “For me, it was too much anxiety. Aside from work, I had to bear a lot of stuff alone.”
Jiménez was the pastor of a Presbyterian congregation in Barranquilla, a humid port city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, when her husband’s human rights work ran afoul of Colombia’s clandestine ideological armies. The family left Colombia on Aug. 14 in the company of more than 20 U.S. Presbyterians who had traveled to Barranquilla to participate in a three-day celebration of the Colombia Presbyterian denomination’s 150th anniversary.
The former executive secretary of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia and a clergyman, MejÃa is no stranger to death threats.
In 2004, an anonymous caller, who claimed to represent one of the country’s right-wing paramilitaries, tried to extort $4,000 from MejÃa. The caller proposed that MejÃa use monies the church had allocated to help Colombians displaced by political violence in the countryside–persons who were flooding into Barranquilla or living in shantytowns on the city’s edge.
The nation’s internal conflict has displaced 3.5 million people, mostly poor farmers who are terrorized and forced off desirable land that either guerrilla, paramilitary, or military units are attempting to hold for either profit or as turf. Multi-national corporations or rich landholders will pay big money to industrially farm the land or tap its oil reserves. Property along the north coast is lucrative since a new canal is allegedly under study to ease passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Although police arrested and jailed the caller, he later walked away from the prison and has not been seen since.
Last October, new threats emerged against MejÃa and three other human rights workers in Barranquilla, including Mauricio Avilez, who had been jailed by the authorities before, while directing a human rights office on the denomination’s campus there. No formal charges were ever filed. A displaced man claimed that the government’s military intelligence intends to assassinate them and that he was offered $1,000 to testify that the activists had links to guerrilla groups.
MejÃa has always argued that the church uses peaceful, democratic means for social change and never advocates violence. During Avilez’ interrogations two years ago, it became apparent that the church’s Barranquilla headquarters was under video surveillance by the government.
The tension has only worsened since last fall
MejÃa has spent the year relentlessly moving, staying in one safe house after another, moving between Barranquilla and Bogotá.
“The anxiety is still here,” he says now, adding that the family hasn’t escaped uncertainty completely, just the lethal kind.
They intend to move again in six months, once he and Jiménez have, hopefully, mastered English, to begin advanced seminary studies at a yet undetermined Presbyterian school in yet another new city. He doesn’t have a job, and while he is grateful for all the help, he is unaccustomed to depending on the kindness of strangers.
“What’s good about being here is that, at last, we don’t have the fear we had in Barranquilla. I can go to a park close by here and exercise,” MejÃa says, adding that he stopped running at home so that he would not be an easy target for gunmen, finally opting to ride an exercise bike in the tiny laundry room of his house. “And I can take the kids to school here. That’s something I couldn’t do for the last few years.”
“We’re still analyzing what to do. And we are asking God’s guidance to show us the way and where to go.”
MejÃa has been to the United States before, testifying before Congress on several occasions in opposition to the billions the U.S. government sends to Colombia to fight the drug war. He lectures often in congregations and presbyteries. International human rights groups have long identified links between factions within the Colombian military and paramilitary units who are contracted to do dirty work like assassinations, forced disappearances, and kidnappings.
Like Colombia’s guerrillas, the paramilitaries finance their operations with drug money. If paramilitaries funded by drug-money are in cahoots with the military, then funneling U.S. aid to certain units within the army only ends up helping some of the trafficking the alleged war was aimed at stopping, or so the argument goes.
Further, buying more weapons to fuel Colombia’s internal conflict only escalates violence against civilians, according to church-based human rights workers like MejÃa.
Colombia’s churches have lobbied the U.S. government to send developmental aid to help relieve the poverty that fuels the nation’s internal violence and to build the missing infrastructure, like roads and bridges, the lack of which prevents farmers from getting legal crops to markets. Such abject poverty ensures that farmers will plant coca–a far more lucrative crop than beans or corn — that can be cheaply transported into processing centers in the jungle.
Although statistics for 2005 are not expected to be so dire, armed groups murdered 40 Protestant leaders in 2004. In recent years, the Episcopal Conference of Colombia has reported that 62 Roman Catholic priests, nuns, and missionaries have been assassinated. Five bishops have been assassinated, as well as the Archbishop of Cali.
“For me, it just became (too) difficult to stay in Barranquilla. Up to the last minute, I tried to stay in Bogotá, tried to find a job, but people from the church thought it was better for me to leave because the situation can get worse,” MejÃa says. He knows the statistics too well and does not want to be one.
He thinks it is no coincidence that he left Colombia and arrived in the U.S. on his 40th birthday, embarking on a fresh start for the second half of his life. The departure date was unplanned; it was picked by the departing U.S. Presbyterians.
So Jiménez is trying to get her academic transcripts from Barranquilla to seminaries here, along with those of her husband. She is intending to study Bible and he is hoping to study issues in church and society or ethics.
After months of not sleeping, she is finally beginning to rest at night.
“For me, this is starting a new life, with nostalgia for what is left behind,” she said. “It is not easy, but little by little, it is calming down. When a person leaves a country, you have to leave a lot behind, family, affection, culture, language.”
Alexa Smith is a freelance writer living in Louisville, Ky.
