Reconciliation from the Bottom Up: Experiences from San Carlos and Granada
Jaqueline, Sandra, Claudia, and Rubiela, a delegation of local women peacebuilders from Colombia, shared their bottom-up peacebuilding experiences with the S-CAR community on September 10, 2015. Granada and San Carlos, two municipalities in the state of Antioquia, were among the hardest hit by violence and displacement. Between 1995 and 2006, paramilitary groups, the national army, and the guerrillas battling for control of the territory led to the killing of thousands and displaced around 80% of the population. After President Uribe (2003-2005) held dialogues with the paramilitaries, the violence subsided. When the current President, Juan Manuel Santos, signed into law the Victims and Land Restitution Law, the displaced began to return to their communities. What followed was bottom-up reconciliation efforts by the people in both San Carlos and Granada.
The four local women peacebuilders shared their efforts in rebuilding the social fabric of their communities. They shared their personal experiences in the conflict, discussed reconciliation initiatives, and expressed a common goal of restoring the dignity of all the victims of the conflict. These efforts ranged from clearing land mines, building the Salón del Nunca Más (the Hall of Never Again), Jardin de la Memoria (the Memory Garden), and memorials in public squares, to creating youth-programs addressing mental trauma, choosing educational pedagogy such as the Waldorf method, and building psychosocial approaches appropriate for dealing with the trauma in their communities.
Among the many initiatives in Granada, the community built the Hall of Never Again, which was not only a physical space but also a place for members of the community to view photos and read stories of the victims. Another initiative, Granada Siempre Nuestra (Granada Always Ours) is an NGO and a local initiative that promotes socio-cultural projects.
They work towards integral community development that encompasses both educational and entrepreneurial processes. In continuing to build from the local level, they have developed psychosocial approaches for dealing with trauma in Granada that focuses on ‘rebuilding imagination’ because they believe that the first thing that is limited in a victim is their capacity to imagine another reality.
In San Carlos, the Memory Garden is a place where members of the community can plant a symbolic paper flower with the name of a victim. Each color has a different meaning: for the people who survived and returned, the color is light green. For people who were displaced, the color is a dark green and for those who were forcefully displaced, the color is purple. Yellow stands for those who died from land mines, red is for those who were assassinated and white is for women who were raped. Orange represents all those who resisted and dark blue is for those who were forcibly recruited. The garden is full of colors and representative of the complex and painful reality of the conflict.
The lessons they shared about the bottom-up approach used in their communities as well as their personal stories of resilience illustrated the power of the reconciliation model the community is building. The ideas were born from the community and financed by the Colombian government and international community. In 2011, San Carlos won Colombia’s National Peace Prize. In light of the agreement between the FARC and the Colombian government that was signed on September 23rd, these local experiences from San Carlos and Granada are a valuable lesson on how the local people can reimagine and rebuild their lives in their communities. ¡La Paz es Imparable! Peace is Unstoppable!