Article by PBI-Canada
On January 14, Yes! magazine published this article that tells the story of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó and references Germán Romero, a lawyer with dhColombia, and a new threat to the peace community: losing their communal land from a state project of agrarian reform.
Key excerpts from the article by Agostino Petroni include:
“In the ’70s, cacao production expanded around San José de Apartadó [a conglomerate of villages scattered in Urabá of Antioquia], adding to the corn and beans that were cultivated for subsistence there, and quickly became the area’s principal cash crop.
The land on which the cacao trees grew didn’t just interest farmers but also paramilitary groups, the FARC, drug-traffickers, landowners, and the army. The fertile soil was great for illicit coca cultivations, and proximity to Panama made it a natural smuggling corridor to North America. In the early ’90s, the various groups started taking hold of the area.
On March 23, 1997, Brígida Gonzáles, 69, along with the others who decided to stay, founded the Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó. This ‘Peace Community’ declared itself neutral in the conflict, pledging not to get involved in any way—from acting as informants to cultivating illicit crops—and asked to be left in peace.
The new neutrality status did not last long. A week after the declaration, members of the community were forced out by the conflict. The cacao trees were abandoned, and the forest took them back. [But] staying away from the fields meant economic ruin. After a few years of abandonment, the community decided to go back to their land slowly.
Members of the Peace Community have some individual land, but most of the 150 hectares of cacao trees grow in collectively owned plots.
“To them, this is actually a very profound act of transcending traditional capitalist society models and building something together,” [says Gwen Burnyeat who produced the documentary Chocolate of Peace].”
The Peace Community is known internationally thanks to the support of nonprofit organizations such as Peace Brigades International and Operazione Colomba. And because of the outside support, the community was able to enter the Fair Trade network and sell their cacao abroad for higher prices. According to [farmer Germán Graciano] Posso, the community sells about 50 tonnes of organic cacao a year to Lush, a British cosmetic company that makes soaps and other products with their cocoa.
The Peace Community, in addition to suffering this new wave of violence [after the peace agreement in 2016], is also under the threat of losing their communal land from a state project of agrarian reform, according to Germán Romero, a lawyer with dhColombia, a nonprofit organization in charge of representing the community in court to seek justice for the violence they have experienced.
“We’re trying to keep the integrity of the territory,” Romero says. He says the community has survived physical extermination but might not survive the state’s project of redistribution of land. Local politicians and entrepreneurs who are against the community accuse them of having stolen the lands they cultivate, a claim Romero dismisses.”
To read the full article by Agostino Petroni please see Cooperation and Chocolate: The Story of One Colombian Village’s Quest for Peace.
The Peace Brigades International-Colombia Project has accompanied the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó since 1999 and the Associated Network of Human Rights Defenders (dhColombia) since 2016.