The Medellín Youth Network (Red Juvenil) organized the International Gathering of Solidarity with Conscientious Objection in Colombia on July 18-19 in Bogotá. The Red points out that even though the Colombian Constitution guarantees that “no one will be obliged to act against their conscience,” the same Constitution requires Colombians to take up arms when public needs demand it.

The Red Juvenil has also promoted conscientious objection to military taxes, with an analysis of the country’s huge investment in war machinery. In the weeks leading up to the international gathering, the Red published the personal statements of several Colombian conscientious objectors. Here is one of them. (Click here to read in Spanish)

OBECTOR’S DECLARATION
“War is a massacre between people who do not know each other but kill each other, for the benefit of people who do know each other, but don’t kill each other.”

By Mauricio Montoya

A long time ago I declared myself a conscientious objector, but now that I am of age I reaffirm my position. NO ARMY DEFENDS PEACE.

Since I was a kid I never liked playing cops and robbers, gunmen [pistoleros] and all the other games that reflected the crude reality of war, since I refused to live out the armed conflict waged in my neighborhood. At that point the only game that possible for me and my family was to be under the bed or on the floor, hiding so no shot from a gun could get us [se nos incrustara] in the forehead.

To hear the shouts of the armed groups, “sons of bitches get down so you know what’s good for you,” “if we get in [si logramos bajar] we’ll wipe out even your bitch mothers”… and the “bitch” mothers praying and lighting candles so that their children would return safe and sound after the [pernota].

With my little friends, I also played the guesing game, “who will have been the cutie [chulo] today? (a chulo is a dead person), we asked. And tomorrow, who is dead now? Maybe we guessed right, but sometimes not, because we never even thought that, one day, one of us would be the chulo.

Even now I remember him… my friend Meme [“el meme”]. They killed him in broad daylight, in front of me, in front of others. I don’t blame those who killed him, because they were also my friends, friends who had no chance to get ahead [salir adelante]. They had no more to eat than what their mothers could get, whether by selling sweets [confites] or selling their own bodies. Friends who decided to sell to the highest bidder – not the best, because the only thing they could guarantee was death. Never did that bidder have to [pernoctar]. Never did that bidder have to risk his life. Never did he have to see a family member dead from combat of the day before.

In this society there are many ‘bidders,’ whose interest is that we kill each other. That we be their toys, but they’re never interested in what we think, in what we want to build… our freedom.

What I never forgave or will forgive is that my friends forgot that we were all friends.

Sometimes I also played the guilty one [jugaba el culpable], late at night or maybe at dawn. We felt the passage of military boots. And we knew they were military because people in the neighborhood didn’t have boots.

We heard the loud knocks on our doors. The shouts, “open the door it’s the army,” “we’re going to search the house”. The rest of the family and I had to leave the warmth of our beds, as they insulted and threatened us.

The soldiers checked if we had weapons or drugs under our mattresses. Why did they search, we asked ourselves, if they know all the spots [conocen todas las ollas] in the neighborhood? If the army is supposed to be defending us, why don’t they intervene to stop the daily killings of people in the neighborhood. Later I understood why… I understood that the guerrillas [milicianos], the paramilitaries and the soldiers are the same, but with different clothes.

These events and many others that I can’t describe on paper made me think: what of my future? Since I had already decided to not take part in the war of this neighborhood, nor take part in the war of any other neighborhood or society. But I worried even more, when I remembered that according to the unjust laws of this society, I would have to pick up a weapon when I came of age and be a direct protagonist in the war.

At that point I found a political way [una propuesta política] for non-cooperation with the armed structures, non-cooperation with a state based on militaristic logic. And at that moment I joined that way, which is the Youth Network (Red Juvenil).

Today as an adult and thanks to the Red Juvenil I have no fear of saying: I am not a toy of war! And I reaffirm my conscientious objection, based on a political rationale [razones políticas], staying firm in refusing to join the military ranks of this society. Because there it’s authoritarian, blind obedience, machismo, repression, inequality, denying the possibility of freedom and of thinking as autonomous being. There you can only be a marionette [muñecos de cuerda].