There were worse days in Colombia than the one I spent collecting horse manure. I ran around an equestrian military base in the southwest of Colombia, wearing striped pants gifted to me by a clown, with a Chilean guy, an Argentinian guy and some local farmers. We picked up dry, grassy clumps of dung to put into our deliciously rotting compost.
“Alejandra, over here!” Juan, the Argentinian, shouted, “It’s fresh!”
Read MoreBrother Juan gives me a tour of the coffee farm while he texts his milk guy. He’s ordering 20 liters of black market dairy because even in the isolated, Roman Catholic Trappist monastery in the mountains above Mérida, Venezuela, the ten monks who live here function the same way most Venezuelans do. When a shortage hits and they want something with the least possible hassle, they have to know the right people.
Read MoreHigh up in the green mountains around Mérida, Venezuela, morning mist is descending and settling on the city below. I’m on a bench in Mérida’s bustling market, called Mercado Principal, trying to let my stomach settle a smoothie that wants to come back up.
Read MoreHigh up in the hills on the west side of Caracas, Rodrigo Flores brews illegal beer in what’s left of his dead grandfather’s abandoned medical clinic. He uses two rooms to house his brewing machine, and stores the liquid for the fermentation process in some old plastic olive barrels. The floor below this operation is a labyrinth of gutted-out surgical rooms, broken windows, and resident bats.
“Welcome to my brewery,” he says, “We have to be quiet, because my grandmother and uncle live here too.”
Read MoreEvery three days or so, a line of people forms behind a semi truck in Plaza Vicente in the western Venezuelan city of Mérida. On a recent Tuesday, palettes stacked with ultra-pasteurized milk, flour, sugar and other essentials were unloaded from a Hamburg Süd cargo container and sold on the street for about half the supermarket price.
This isn’t the work of contraband smugglers, though. It’s all completely legal, brought to the community by the Venezuelan Production and Food Distribution (PDVAL) network.
Read MoreConversations about displacement in Colombia tend to center around violent upheaval, but as the country continues to work toward putting an official end to more than 50 years of internal armed conflict, a new threat to communities has emerged: development projects.
On October 27, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in Washington D.C. will hear cases on “Forced Displacement and Development Projects” from Colombians representing affected communities. These communities are grappling with a loss of livelihood and home from mining, dam and energy projects.
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