Human Rights Column

Pilar Hernandez

In an effort to understand how human rights activists - some of them in the mental health fields - conceptualized their experiences of trauma and advocacy, within their social context, I spent eight months joining them in their activities and interviewing them about their life stories.

As I developed relationships with them, and the meaning and purpose of their work, it became clear to me that of paramount importance to these people is their presence in a web of relationships in communities. In the Colombian context, as well as in other countries in Latin America, communities and relationships are at the heart of the social fabric. In fact, "solidarity," an essential feature of their stories, can only be understood in relationship to others.

Colombia is a country in which the political system remained exclusionary and out of touch with the reality of its people, where a bipartite oligarchic system has been so immune to the realities of its population that public protest has taken increasingly militant and violent forms. The response to this violence by the state and paramilitary groups has been extremely repressive. The terms of the political engagement in the country have become rooted in violence, leading to a regime of human rights abuse. Human rights groups and non-governmental organizations work in extremely difficult conditions to try to ensure some protection for the internally displaced populations and to inform concerned organizations overseas of what is going on.

Within the family therapy field, Falicov's (1995) multidimensional ecological view is a useful frame for understanding how the social fabric enables certain kinds of relationships for community survival, and how questions of human rights come hand in hand with the ways in which people speak of their struggles. How do people make sense of adversity? To understand this question in the spirit of facilitating therapy as well as advocacy, I would like to offer for discussion an important dimension in this work: community resilience. Walsh's (1995) resiliency based approach, links processes to challenges, and provides a context for functioning. If this frame is broadened, it can be used to encompass a variety of cultural contexts. When people are aware of adversity and committed to working for human rights, resilience is a process by which they link their individual/familial histories to the history of their nation/society and create a sense of coherence and community.

I suggest that, in Colombia, despite the apparent breakdown of the system of protection, what sustains a semblance of social order in these violent times is a network of social valuing mechanisms by which citizens relate to each other. A key strategy for surviving through decades of violence has been negotiation. People have been able to negotiate daily life within their communities in the midst of political violence.

An example of the role that a human rights activist plays in these contexts of negotiation is the following:

Beatriz was a community organizer and nurse assistant in a city of arrival for displaced people. People left heir lands due to the persecution and crimes of paramilitary groups. She lived in the same area for more than twenty years and since her arrival got involved with women's groups. She was well known in the community for her work with various human rights organizations and the building of a health center in this impoverished area. In addition, she visited families on a regular basis and developed friendships with them. Because of the value that people placed on her, she was able to advocate for people before the army, the guerrillas and the medical establishment. For example, in spite of the harassment by the army, she was able to go to their headquarters to request that people who were arrested be placed in an official list to prevent their disappearance. She was also able to secure medical services for people who could not afford the price of consultation and medicines. Furthermore, on one occasion a guerrilla group was informed that a health assistant was stealing money from people. This woman had a family to sustain and stole the money to cover their expenses. The guerrilla group tried her and sentenced her to death. Beatriz was informed by neighbors, and asked people in the community to help her talk with the group leaders. To her surprise, she found out that she knew many of them. She advocated for the life of this woman and helped her move out of the area. She was able to intervene in these situations because of her leadership role and the trust that people had placed in her over the years. People told her what was happening, who was there to talk to and how to connect. When discussing her views of her multiple roles in this community, she explained that in general her work was to link social concerns with personal care for others. Thus, people trusted her ways of caring as well as her political views.

In a context like this, "Solidarity" is located in the shared ideological and geographical spaces that people live in, in the web of relationships in which activism takes place. The relationships and solidarities that people build over time are at the heart of the building of supportive nets. For example, there is closeness among certain displaced populations, certain peasant groups, certain NGOs and certain politicians.

Within the mental health field, the activists' accounts pointed at key roles in their work: building bridges, connecting people, negotiating spaces, developing threads for people to understand each other. The feature that enables the work to survive is the creation and development of webs of personal and political relationships. Beatriz was a person to whom people used to go for help and trusted to share their problems. She was in a position where she could refer people to medical and mental health service organizations as well as to advocacy groups.

For many of the people I talked to, some forms of healing take place in community, in the telling and the bearing witness, in the naming of trauma and in the grief, the rage and defiance that follow. I see this kind of activity as a way of publicly reconstructing a past (personal and community) that cannot be forgotten or limited to the memories of those who live in towns affected by violence.

Pilar Hernandez is a psychology intern at Sunset Park Health center, Lutheran Hospital, New Jersey. She wrote her dissertation on "A Personal Dimension of Human Rights Activism: Narratives of Trauma, Resilience, and Solidarity." She has worked on issues of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and PTSD as a consequence of the war in Columbia.