Colombian Women Visit Midwest to Help End World's Longest War

Baltimore, October 16, 2003 — A delegation of local peacemakers from Colombia is visiting the Midwest to ask for help in ending their country's intractable civil war. Three grassroots ambassadors, part of Lutheran World Relief's "Give Peace a Place in Colombia" campaign, are urging Midwest Lutherans and others to use their power as citizens to help change U.S. policy toward the strife-torn Latin American nation.

The three women are Yanith Giraldo, a local community leader and mother from a family uprooted by war, Irma Rodriquez, a human rights lawyer forced to flee her homeland after threats to her life, and Amparo Guerro, director of an LWR-related women's organization for the displaced in Bogota.

The women come with bitter experience of war and of violence related to the drug trade, and have each laid their lives on the line for peace in their communities.

They will speak about how their communities care for those affected by war, efforts to establish local peace sanctuaries, and how U.S. communities can support peace initiatives in Colombia through prayer, action and advocacy.

Hosting the visitors are congregations, women's groups, church leaders and college campuses in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Michigan, October 18 through November 2, 2003.

'Give Peace a Place in Colombia' is a Lutheran World Relief campaign for peace at three levels: innocent civilians displaced by war must have a place to live, Colombia's marginalized peacemakers must have a place at the negotiating table, and U.S. citizens must help win a place for peace in U.S. policy through their Members of Congress.

The current focus of U.S. policy toward Colombia, backed by nearly $3 billion in mostly military aid, is curbing the drug trade. But, economic alternatives to growing coca (the plant that produces cocaine), the protection of human rights, the well-being of more than two million displaced people, and a negotiated settlement to Colombia's conflict have received relatively little attention by comparison. The Colombian civil war began in the 1970s, making it the longest current war in the world.