Cows, Coffee, Chocolate and Corruption

Life continues to be full of new discoveries and a growing feeling of comfort and ease even as we see and hear about large amounts of Colombian military passing near the community. There are adorable children everywhere who can’t get enough of Mireille and I tossing and twirling them around. They are continually amazed by pressing the button on my watch that illuminates the face in a satisfying green for about 3 seconds. There are well worn paths all over the community that lead to fields and cultivations that I slowly coming to know with my own eyes. There are fresh cacao and coffee beans to be bought from folks here, shelled and ground into addictively seductive and rich brown substances. The Colombian government continues to be full of scandal and political maelstrom as the true face of the unabashedly named Law of Justice and Peace, created to aid the demobilization process of paramilitaries, is finally unveiled in all of its ironic grandeur to the public at large. Lions and Tigers and Bears! Oh My! Allow me to share some thoughts:

Holy Cow:
Last week we played some soccer with the kids on the field that is cleared for play in between houses and the swimming hole. Recently a goal has been built out of bamboo, it looks more like a field goal post and doesn’t have a net so as to deny the would-be-scorer of the satisfying swish as the ball finds the back of the net, but it more than serves its purpose. The goal at the other end has yet to be built so we chose some appropriately distanced rocks and got to the business of soccer. The most dangerous part of the game was the multitude of cowpies that decorated the field. I hail from rural America so the smell of such natural and rich fertilizer is a familiar, comforting smell, but I have never played on a pitch so covered in crap. Each pile of steaming excrement was like an extra defender. The purveyors of said obstacles have recently been roaming around the community and have sufficiently freaked me out at night at least twice. Theirs is a gait different than the horses and pigs and chickens that routinely roam around; and in the sometimes-eerie quiet of night, I can easily confuse them for malevolent people creeping past our wooden house.

Coffee and Chocolate:
Last week we bought some coffee beans and cacao beans from some of our neighbors here in the community. The dried out beans must be toasted, then shelled then toasted again and finally ground. What could be a tedious task quickly becomes a process that involves lots of visiting and chatting. The coffee beans don’t need an initial toasting and are first shelled by asking our next-door neighbor to use her large version of the mortar and pestle. We dump the coffee beans in and start pounding away. This is a lot harder than it seems it should be and harder yet for out of practice gringos. We mashed up the hard little beans and then, to separate the shells from the amazingly whole beans, we used the slight breeze to our advantage by pouring the beans and shells from one container to another, allowing the wind to blow away the lighter shells as the beans fall into the receptacle. The beans are then toasted by our grandmother figure here, Doña Lola. Once toasted the same Doña Lola looks on with her crinkly eyes and loving smile as we use her large hand grinder to transform the coffee beans into aromatic splendor. Coffee beans are not oily like the cacao beans and we found it surprising difficult to grind them, as visions of electric grinders floated through our minds.

The coffee grown here is not as rich and dark as the coffee from further south in the same department, Antioquia, where the mountains are higher and more conducive to the famous, rich Colombian coffee. Not much is grown here as it doesn’t fetch a very good price. But I like the smoother taste and there is something amazing about drinking a hot cup of caffeine that comes from the organic coffee fields that lay just up the way from the community. I think it is worth noting that the famous Juan Valdez has retired and been replaced this past year. While reading “Semana”, Colombia’s version of Newsweek/Time I came across a blurb about the switch over. The Coffee Growers Federation elected a 40-year-old Antioquian campesino named Carlos Castañeda out of an applicant pool of 406 aspiring icons. He replaces Carlos Sánchez, the Juan Valdez we have known and loved over the last four decades, and will soon set off on a world tour, I’m unsure if the donkey has also been replaced. I had no idea that there was an actual man out there traveling the world and promoting Colombian coffee, I thought it was just a picture on a coffee can.

href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB3zbWUE_DGpdo9UloMNNNEGw5o65nfMXSAXpIV5E0HMT7G3uVDpkxJri6MWcMkyITW5UjMWCVZAqWm6ka1MQmuilBjj4UPr0R7EZSXxMf94QdmMR4PYSLlSbKZ6IyPXG8P7CcEQ/s1600-h/desgranando.jpg"> While I am rather confident there is no living caricature for Colombian chocolate, cacao does go through a similar production process. I showed a picture of the beans in their shells earlier on this blog – they are covered in a citrus tasting membrane and plucked out of their yellow-orange pods and then dried on roofs here, specially designed for such a process. Before shelling the cacao by hand, (as we are doing in this picture) the beans need to be roasted, and then the somewhat long process of shelling can begin. This is where folks stop in for a visit before long we have many hands helping the process along as we get to enjoy visitors to our house. Then it is back to Doña Lola’s where she roasts the beans for us, heats up her grinder and then we get to grind the beans into this fantastic paste of rich and bitter fresh chocolate. We then add in some panela (pressed raw sugar cane juice) and nuts to make chocolate bars that are simply delicious.

Corruption and Government, synonyms in any language:
I hear that President Bush has figured out how to fix the humanitarian disaster we have created in Iraq by sending in more troops. I am not surprised. The US has been “helping” Colombia in the same manner for years. We were lucky to attend a community workshop this past weekend given by a human rights lawyer on the International Criminal Court. Forever the nerd, I was fascinated, took furious notes and had about a million questions to ask. The lawyer spoke about the creation, the advantages and disadvantages of the court and the status of the community’s case with the ICC. At one point he referred to the US as a “bad neighbor” who instead of throwing water on the burning house that is Colombian, elects to throw gasoline. At the end we also talked about the aforementioned “Ley de Justicia y Paz” that was established to provide a legal and just way to demobilize illegal armed forces. According to the government, paramilitary demobilization has been achieved, never mind that the commanders are unpunished and the troops themselves have been reformed into new groups all over the country. Here in our zone, the Aguilas Negras now roam where the Bloque Bananero once controlled and terrorized.

The first of detained paramilitary leaders to give official testimony, Salvatore Mancuso, has so far listed 336 people whom he had ordered killed or kidnapped. He has named Colombian military men as complicit in many of these killings and massacres and said that his group had a monthly budget of $400,000 to pay off Colombian police and military. This official testimony serves to corroborate the obvious links between paramilitary and military forces. However, the men Mancuso has named are already dead or imprisoned. It remains to be seen if any active military commanders will be accused in his continued testimony or if Mancuso follows through on his insinuation that he will name politicians. This comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s orders to arrest three current members of congress for ties to the paramilitary while six more remain under investigation. This was a major scandal as the year ended and was accompanied by the continuing scandal involving the former head of DAS (the Colombian FBI) who has been implicated in crimes of collusion with paramilitary leaders, taking bribes and making deals to personally benefit his financial gain.

Mancuso’s testimony continues to be carefully monitored by victims and victims’ advocates. Under the “Justice and Peace Law” Mancuso is eligible to receive a maximum sentence of eight years for all the horrific crimes he claims responsibility for as well as remain safe from extradition to the US for narcotrafficking charges. Eight years! And he has already listed 336 people he was directly responsible for killing! This is indeed an interesting form of justice. As “Semana” said in its year end issue, “If corruption had a face, it would easily be the best candidate for the magazine’s Person of the Year”.

Here is a picture of non-corruption...our entire team while on retreat in Medellin, celebrating 25 years of Mireille. From left to right, Janice, me, Mireille, Gilberto. Janice and Gilberto man our outpost in Bogota, and Gilberto is soon to leave us for other adventures.