There are things worse than death

In Colombia, like in no other place on earth, they kill us for civic engagement, for caring for our land, our water, for protecting and guaranteeing the rights of our communities; they kill us for being citizens, and doing what any citizen in an authentic democracy would do.

I am Soraya Bayuelo, daughter of Blanca Castellar, and I was born in Carmen de Bolívar. However, my name and my circumstances are those of any woman from Montes de Maria, or one of the many from this blessed land. We grew up among poverty and the abandonment of the state, and we learned to pose the question: why? We sow the land which was taken from us by the lords of violence, those who appear in their formal attire during election season, and we learn to ask: why? We collect our dead and cry in silence when they prohibit us from living, from singing, from talking, from thinking, from sowing, from walking our streets of soil and thirst, and we ask again: why?

We have learned that the answers to these questions come and go until they become justifications so that others may impose upon us more silence, more lies, more deaths. Then we remember that the only way to make our land similar to what we had envisioned, when we were not afraid, was to work together. They do not understand that by leaving us at the margins of decision making about our own future, we learned to observe, to listen and to decide, and when our thoughts, words and ideas returned, they would be stronger than their shouts and their bullets, and that nobody would ever again be able to silence us.

For the past thirty years, we have worked to recover the voice which was taken from us because we believe in the power of words with the same conviction and fortitude with which we reject violence, in any of its forms and from any of its promoters. We are builders because we have discovered that questions break the silence when transformed into collective action, and this strength converts us into one body, a territory that feels, that believes, that remembers, and one which is capable of opening up space for life even though our own lives often end up as blood drenched statistics. We carry on because we are not willing to relinquish what they could never take from us: our dignity.

In Colombia, like in no other place on earth, they kill us for civic engagement, for caring for our land, our water, for protecting and guaranteeing the rights of our communities; they kill us for being citizens, and doing what any citizen in an authentic democracy would do. But there are things worse than death, and in Montes de Maria, we know this well. One of those is the pain produced by seeing our country once more submersed in silence and death.

It is for this reason we continue to ask why, and we will not give up because our job is to remind each inhabitant of our country and of the world that we have every right to live in peace.

*This article was originally published in Spanish in Semana magazine. The original article can be found at the following link: https://www.semana.com/opinion/articulo/lideres-sociales-en-los-montes-de-maria-columna-de-soraya-bayuelo/616408?fbclid=iwar0sz9nmlun2sngbw_is5e1bxwybru2ckzcctfikwq4ljyyt97j-ainamuu

*Image from La Silla Vacía