Day After Day

Peacemaking through Education

Sculpture by Sandra Catalina, 15. Downtown Bucaramanga ” una mirada through time passing through the orifice of a sculpture of the Guanes ethnic group from Santander in the midst of modern buildings that want to cover over history,” Nelson writes.

I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with the word “peacemaking.” It’s hard to place that discomfort but it is located somewhere around the feeling that it’s presumptuous — that peace could just be made, as if there is a formula, as if enough expertise could engineer it. I’m not against peacemaking, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve come to prefer my peacemaking humble; small-scale, low expectations, consistent over time, and with real impacts on people’s lives. It’s a taste that I’ve acquired over 24 years of collaborating with and staying in touch with Nelson Pájaro Mercado, a Colombian social leader who has been displaced four times in the last 40 years.

In marginal neighborhoods that ring four different Colombian cities, Nelson has created informal educational programs for kids unable to access the school system, as well as cultural programming to keep youth occupied and at a distance from the local gangs that feed armed groups. We partnered in 2001 to teach photography to thirty youth in Altos de Cazucá, on the far outskirts of Bogotá, a program that then became a Colombian non-profit that lasted for ten years and served more than 1,000 young people.

Back then, I became familiar with Nelson’s strategies of “working with the nails,” a common euphemism for scrounging together basic resources, that in Nelson’s context means also means working with the students’ parents to create an educational space where students and the community can come together. In the hills of Cazucá where gangs and armed groups held sway, that space was both precious and precarious. In the book Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz (Peabody Museum Press/Harvard University Press 2020), I tell the story of Nelson surviving two assassination attempts and fleeing Altos de Cazucá. Here I take up his story in Bucaramanga, where he settled and once again began the challenging process to create educational opportunities for impoverished youth, this time for those Colombians fleeing the rural areas in Magdalena Medio and Norte de Santander, as well as for Venezuelan migrants who were flooding the city.

Rainbow by Isabela, 12 years old. “This panorama is to show the colors of nature, surrounded by the rainbow, in a neighborhood with houses that look like cardboard boxes, located below the opulent buildings in the south of Bucaramanga.”

In Bucaramanga, Nelson found similar conditions to Altos de Cazucá, kids left in their houses while their parents worked long hours, often in the informal economy, and gangs tempting the youth into lives of consumption – both of drugs and fashionable brands. The latter was a slope that easily slid into recruitment. Nelson started to do what he knew, creating two projects: the first working to place 40 young kids in the school system and in the meantime teaching them basic literacy and arithmetic, and the second a cultural project teaching photography, video and music to keep the youth busy and creative.

In creating his new projects, however, Nelson applied some lessons learned. He no longer messed with politics. Serving on the local Community Action Group (Junta de Acción Comunal, JAC) in Altos de Cazucá had made him a lightning rod as armed groups competed to control the JAC. He also has stopped denouncing the grave human rights abuses that he sees around him. It’s just too dangerous. In Altos de Cazucá he could count on a steady stream of international visitors. His reputation as a community leader made him a point of entry for the Bogotá-based national and international humanitarian organizations and for well-meaning visitors of all stripes (like myself). In Bucaramanga, however, only one local university, the Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga, accompanies him.

Plants by Jorge Luis, 16. Nelson writes, “Hope in the resistance in favor of life, dreams and blooming—that life is a poem and a dream of watching plants grow.”

I’m proud to hear that photography is now a staple of his pedagogical work with the youth. He wants to do pinhole photography, that magical process in which a can or box’s interior is painted black, slightly punctured on one side and photosensitive paper is placed opposite the hole and the paper is exposed by uncovering and recovering the hole with a piece of tape. He knows that it captivates the students, but doesn’t have the resources for photographic paper and chemicals. His grown son, Andrés, earned a certificate as a technician of photography and videography and helps teach the students. Nelson’s ambition has been cut down to size, in part because armed gangs have become more effective at controlling the population and, in part, because he is older and has his own struggles, like getting his insulin prescription filled. But he is at it, day after day, in his small way — making peace.

Alexander L. Fattal is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. His scholarship and creative work have focused on representations of the Colombian armed conflict and the fitful efforts to build a lasting peace in that Andean country. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology as well as a secondary field in Critical Media Practice from Harvard in 2014.