IPP Balanza: 2 januar 2010

It was so ironic to be sitting around with a bunch of CISV hippies discussing peace and community justice and to look up to see the silhouettes of three soldiers just 10 meters away with guns half my size pointing skyward at their side while a fourth walked behind them using his like a cane. Halfway into discussions I would forget about them and suddenly hear footsteps in the blackness outside of the hut and I would occasionally catch a glimpse of a far off cell phone being used as a flashlight in the dark dark night.

Not being able to walk more than five steps without being face to face with the butt of a gun made it initially seem impossible to overcome the constant salient presence in order to do what we came for. However, almost as soon as we started our country Community Justice and Mediation presentations, we all quickly became engrossed with the material.

We also learned about the theory behind the Community Justice initiative in Arauca from a beautiful and passionate woman named Francy, one of the leaders of the program here from the School of Community Justice at the National University of Colombia in Bogota. She explained that traditional punishments from the judicial system reflect structural problems of the institutions and do not work to resolve these structural issues, nor do they work to correct any wrong that was committed. Federal punishments do not necessarily apply to a community´s needs. Community Justice, on the other hand, is implemented in order to rebuild the damaged community and to reintegrate the person that has committed the crime. The ¨punishments¨ are made according to the values and needs of each community with the ultimate goal of repairing the social fabric of the community to the way it was before the crime.

The most important thing that I took from today was the different ways that different countries utilize the tool of mediation, and therefore the value that they give this powerful tool. Nordic countries use mediation to create space for a dialogue of the parties in order to find closure as a parallel to the judicial process. In the United States, we use mediation as a way to try to avoid the judicial process. Colombia, on the other hand, uses mediation as a tool for community justice in order to try to reform the structural problems that exist within judicial system.