After returning home from three months in Colombia as an international accompanier, Erin Blyth reflected on her experience. For that time, she left behind her friends, family, and daily life to accompany communities facing the realities of conflict and resistance.
Life as an accompanier brings volunteers face-to-face with the challenges our partners navigate every day. It also reveals the power of nonviolent strategies to deter violence, reduce risk, and create space for communities to continue their work. In Colombia, where defending land, rights, and the environment can be met with threats and violence, choosing nonviolence is an act of profound courage.
Reflections from Colombia
by Erin Blyth
For the past three months, I have spent my time riding mules through thunderstorms, threshing corn, attending meetings in the capital, and role-playing how to respond to possible situations in the field, including control posts operated by armed actors. I have been volunteering with FOR Peace Presence, supported by FOR Austria, providing international protective accompaniment in Antioquia, a north-west region of Colombia.
Protective accompaniment is a nonviolent protection strategy that supports people and communities engaged in non-violent approaches to peacebuilding and resistance. Across Colombia, frontline human rights and environmental defenders receive death threats, and many are killed for standing up for dignified living conditions, basic security, and environmental integrity. The EGC (or AGC), Colombia’s largest and wealthiest criminal neo-paramilitary armed group, exerts control across Antioquia and the Caribbean and Pacific coasts. The group emerged from former paramilitary structures that originally formed to protect business interests from left-wing guerrilla groups and elements of the civilian population who were drawn into counterinsurgency operations by their government at the behest of the USA. Today, the EGC seeks total territorial, social, economic, and military dominance, effectively replacing the state in many rural areas. Its wealth comes largely from drug trafficking, directly or indirectly controlling illegal mining, extorting small-scale farmers and businesses (e.g. charging a fee for each cow owned or sold), and raising “taxes” on public sector and multinational companies. In exchange, these companies can operate free from local opposition and scrutiny of their environmental impacts. The insecurity, poverty, and environmental destruction plaguing rural communities are not isolated; they are connected by a long, convoluted thread to decisions made in government offices, business boardrooms, and consumer homes.
Protective accompaniment works by raising the profile of what is happening in this corner of Colombia through our physical presence and sustained attention. It aims to increase the political costs of human rights violations and aggression, as well as to reduce the space for impunity — preventing abuse against human rights and land defenders from being conveniently filed away and forgotten. Our physical presence and solidarity help to open a secure space for local resistance and peacebuilding initiatives to take root and grow. Reading, thinking, and speaking about this work contributes to the protection and success of these peacebuilding efforts. During my time with FOR Peace Presence, we mainly accompanied two processes in north-western Antioquia: the Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó (Peace Community) and Conpazcol, a Colombia-wide victims’ organisation which in turn accompanies the Mesa Interétnica por la Paz de Blanquita-Murrí (Interethnic Commission for Peace). North-western Antioquia is a region deeply impacted by illegal mining activities, which threaten the collective grassroots processes seeking peaceful and sustainable coexistence in harmony with nature.
Accompanying the Peace Community meant six hours riding on a mule to facilitate visits and stays in veredas — clusters of homes and community land from which families were displaced and where they continue to face ongoing threats. We put up our flag so that our presence is visible, accompany community members as they harvest rice and tend cattle, and cook dinner together, sharing in the lives and challenges of the people we accompany. Something deeply impacting was staying in the former home of a woman and child who were murdered in 2024 during escalating tensions over the community’s opposition to an illegal road being built through their farmland.
In Blanquita-Murrí, FOR Peace Presence accompanies various activities of the Interethnic Commission for Peace, including the Escuela Agroecológica. The school brings together Indigenous, campesino, and Afro-Colombian communities to promote agroecology and food sovereignty. Agroecology seeks to bring the social, environmental, and economic necessities of living in the territory — people, nature, and farming — into a sustainable relationship with one another, while food sovereignty strengthens the community’s independence and security. It was deeply heartening to watch so many children and young people keen to learn about conservation, the damaging impact of illegal gold mining, and sustainable agriculture as a viable economic alternative. Something beautiful and hopeful was the huge grin of a boy proudly clutching a digital camera lent to him by the professor, as he rushed over to a group of classmates who had excitedly called him to take a picture of a large spider they had just discovered hiding between the rocks in the stream.
Life in rural Colombia is challenging. I learned about the daily realities of violence, displacement, and oppression — but also community, resistance, and a fundamental commitment to peace. Each day as a protective accompaniment volunteer was a physical, mental, and moral challenge. The people I accompanied are ordinary individuals whose commitment to peace and justice requires extraordinary courage. It was a privilege to walk beside them in their tireless march for peace.