Yesterday I almost bought a candy bar, but I stopped when I saw that the ingredients included palm oil. Palm oil is one of the major exports Colombian people are being forced off their land to make room for. Multinational corporations make a lot of money from palm oil, apparently. Enough that they buy weapons for groups that do stuff like line people up and cut their heads off with chainsaws. See, Colombian paramilitary groups run people off the land with terrorism, and then the multinationals can have space to grow their palm oil.

I picked up another candy bar. It was made by Nestle, so I put it down. The union representative I met in Colombia told me that Nestle killed some of his friends.

I decided that candy bars aren’t good for me anyway, though I knew that whatever my next meal was, it would probably leave blood on my hands.

I consider myself an anti-violence activist, and someone committed to peace, but my trip to Colombia has me wondering how much I actually live those ideals. It’s one thing to “know,” intellectually, that when you buy Chiquita bananas or Kraft foods of Coca-Cola, your purchase supports “bad stuff.” It’s another to sit next to a woman sobbing over the death of her husband, knowing that you helped finance the weapon that killed him.

I feel fairly certain that she wouldn’t have had much interest in how hard it is for me to find socially responsible products, how I would have had to be really inconvenienced to do so, and how I really mean well.

If I oppose sexual violence, how can I buy products that force women into refugee communities where they are raped without consequence? What would it mean for me to actually be in solidarity with those women? What does it really mean to oppose violence, from our position of privilege? What would we have to give up?

I don’t have any answers, but the questions are not comfortable.

I’m returning from two weeks in Colombia, during which I met with a lot of people working in the struggle for peace. Many, many people asked me to tell Americans what is happening there. I’m still not sure what that means, and I probably won’t be for a long time, but a lot of people wanted you to see these pictures.

This is Alejandra (center). Her father and brother were “disappeared” six years ago, in violence that is deeply linked to U.S. foreign policy and imperialism in Colombia.

This little girl was too young to give us her name. She lives in a barrio of displaced people in Medellin. Displacement within Colombia occurs in incredible numbers, mostly through the actions of paramilitary groups funded by multinational corporations and the fascist U.S.-supported Uribe government (among Bush’s last acts and Secretary of State Clinton’s first were declarations of support for Uribe). Women in these communities are commonly raped by paramilitary and others with impunity.

This is the kind of home people live in in the displaced communities. You’ll notice that this one has no windows.

I’ve just returned from two weeks in Colombia, and I have tons I’m excited to tell about. From an incredibly inspiring meeting with Colombia’s only Afro-Colombian senator to looking into the eyes of someone whose husband was killed with 26 bullets my banana purchases helped pay for, my life and activism are changed forever. Lots of my experiences were relevant to student activism and feminist/anti-violence organizing, and I’ll be sharing them over the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

I just wanted to quickly write a note to let readers know why the blog is a little silent lately. Nora is working on her dissertation for the next two months and I am currently out of the country for a class I’m taking. I’ll have plenty to write when I return on January 27th, but we don’t have much in the way of computer access here. I’m excited to say more when I return!