Composting under fire

Anne Barr

28th March, 2009

Next time you grumble that it's too much effort to seperate you plastic from your cans, imagine doing it as the bullets are flying over head

I’ve just spent a week in the settlement of San Josesito, in the northern Colombian region Urabá. This is where the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó relocated when the Colombian police and army moved into their village three months ago. They left their comfortable houses to build a new village from scratch because they refused to accept as their ‘protecters’ the same armed forces whose most recent crime (in a very long list) was the February massacre of eight members of the community, including a baby and two children.

They also moved out because they knew that the presence of the police and army was bound to attract guerrilla attacks. Which it did. When I arrived on Monday morning I had just missed the last bursts of machine-gun fire from a night-long battle between soldiers and guerrillas that had left three soldiers injured, and the people of the Peace Community shaken by a sleepless night of ‘ﬁreworks’ (so called because the army bullets are accompanied by a little red light – apparently something to do with differentiating between enemy and ‘friendly’ ﬁre).

The new settlement is less than a mile from the town of San José...

To view the rest of this article - you must be a paying subscriber and Login