Who: Val Liveoak, founder and director of Peacebuilding en las Américas What: A talk about peacebuilding work in Colombia, Honduras, and elsewhere in Latin America When: Thursday, October 1, 7 p.m. Where: Live Oak Friends Meetinghouse (Quakers), 1318 West 26th Street (between Durham and Ella, just inside 610 North) For more information: see friendspeaceteams.org/or contact Ann Sieber at amazingan@aol.com
Val Liveoak will be visiting the Houston Quaker meetinghouse and talking about her recent peacemaking work in Latin America. Liveoak is just returning from a half year spent in El Salvador, Colombia, and Honduras, where she is building a network of community facilitators in nonviolent conflict resolution and trauma healing. “In Central America, the legacy of civil war has added to the continued poverty and injustice that sparked the conflicts,” writes Liveoak. “Weapons abound and crime, gang violence, and continued political problems have compelled Quakers and others to seek new solutions.” Peacebuilding en las Américas supports work in Bogotá and on the northern coast, where many displaced people, demobilized combatants (from the army, guerrilla and paramilitary groups), and conscientious objectors struggle to find more peaceful ways to survive. In 2009, more than 50 workshops are planned throughout the region, using the Alternatives to Violence Project developed in the prison system of New York State in 1975, and community-based trauma healing work, modeled on the work of African partners in Burundi, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Two community workshops were recently completed in the Department (State) of Córdoba, part of the Northern (Caribbean) coastal region. As a coastal area, this is an area that has been particularly hard hit by violence related to both the civil war (Colombia has the longest running civil war in the hemisphere at around 50 years) and narco-trafficking. Outright battles between armed groups, including paramilitaries, guerrillas, the army and police, and drug and youth gangs for control of strategic territory have violently displaced hundreds of thousands of residents, and currently account for deaths averaging more than one a day in the capital, Montería. In addition to her work as a facilitator of nonviolent training workshops, Liveoak just returned from a peace mission to Honduras, where she met with the political counsel at the U.S. Embassy and other officials to explore paths of supporting the nonviolent resistance to the current military coup. “As a nonviolent activist for over 35 years,” Liveoak writes, “it’s exciting to me that the resistance movement has so far been nonviolent, if only by default. This follows a trend in other movements in Latin American nations such as Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador. I believe that many members of the Honduran movement are nonviolent because they do not think they have nearly enough power and weapons to mount an armed opposition. But others, I believe, are truly interested in continuing nonviolent struggle, and learning more about it. They are inventing new tactics and reviving older ones. They are reaching out for solidarity and support from all over the world.” Liveoak’s initiative, Peacebuilding en las Américas, is a subset of Friends Peace Teams, a Quaker organization that sends peacekeepers to areas of conflict around the globe. For more information, visit http://friendspeaceteams.org/. |
