Colombian immigrant knows real terror

www.jsonline.com Last Updated: Feb. 22, 2003 County Lines Laurel Walker

It's a relative thing, this sense of security.

Our collective blood pressure rises when the government puts our nation on high alert over terrorist threats. We get a little anxious and edgy, or maybe do desperate things, like tape up our windows with plastic and duct tape.

Still, we haven't begun to feel the fright that is embedded in some people, like Esther Canales in days past and her countrymen in Colombia still today. Esther Canales

Photo/William Meyer Esther Canales, who sought asylum in the U.S. in 1999, is a health promoter for the Hispanic Community Health and Resource Center in Waukesha.

"People are not safe" in Colombia, she said. "Any people." Searching to find the right words in English, which she is still working to master, and with the help of a translator, Canales said there is no sense of security anywhere in her native land.

"Maybe they will be fine in their house, in their work, in the street," she said. Then again, she added, maybe not, because violence shows up anywhere and often in her native land.

"A lot of my friends in Colombia have died from the violence," she said. "I never read the news of Colombia."

Canales, 44, was a lawyer, political activist, women's rights advocate and kidnapping survivor when she came to the United States from Colombia under political asylum in December 1999. She now lives and works in Waukesha, where she is a health promoter for the Hispanic Community Health and Resource Center.

At a time when Americans are more concerned than ever about terrorism in their backyard, Canales' story is a reminder that terrorism existed long before Sept. 11, 2001.

Canales grew up with eight siblings in a middle-class family on a dairy farm in the northern part of Colombia.

For as long as she can remember, the country has been split between warring and corrupt factions - the military, police and paramilitary acting for the government, guerrilla groups seeking socialist reforms and political power for themselves, and, more recently, the drug traffickers.

When she was very young, Canales said, her uncle - then a university student - had joined one of the guerrilla groups that appealed to certain intellectuals. But at age 26, when he decided he'd made a mistake and tried to disassociate himself, he was killed by them.

Canales still remembers how when she was 6 her grandmother was persecuted, as a result of her uncle's politics - particularly the night a paramilitary group came knocking at the door and ransacked her house.

She went to public school and, after studying at a private university, became a lawyer with a practice in family law, adoption, domestic abuse and divorce cases. Canales also became active in politics herself. She was elected one of 17 municipal representatives - like an alderman here - in 1988. In 1992, she was elected one of 16 state representatives - like a state legislator here.

In 1995, Canales participated in a women's rights congress in Cuba - an extension of her local efforts to teach women their rights at seminars and clinics.

Some of those seminars attracted 400 women and were "like revival meetings," she said, recalling one emotional event when a woman came bruised and battered by her husband who had ordered her not to attend.

Meanwhile, Colombia became even more violent. Drug traffickers grew in power and influence, using their drug money to corrupt the rebels and the government.

They recruited young men - often teenagers - to carry out assassinations and murders.

"There was a lot of disorder," she said.

"The narcotraffickers are not the principal trouble," she said.

The U.S. has come to Colombia's aid in fighting the drug traders, she said, and "it's helping." But the clashes between guerrillas and the military have worsened.

Just over a week ago, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, was blamed for a huge explosion that destroyed several houses and killed at least 16 people. A house was holding explosives that went off during a search after police learned that FARC intended to kill President Alvaro Uribe the next day.

The U.S. State Department, warning against Americans traveling to the country, said in December, "Violence by narcotraffickers, paramilitary groups, guerrilla and terrorist organizations and other criminal elements is widespread and increasing in certain areas."

It reported 3,000 kidnappings there in 2001, more than any other country. Hundreds of people are killed every month over politics, but many more because of common crime.

"Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world," the report says.

Canales knows firsthand. "All people in Colombia are afraid," she said.

In 1998, Canales was managing a political campaign for a Liberal Party presidential candidate. While in a rural village on his behalf, she, her husband (from whom she has since separated) and two friends were kidnapped by FARC, the rebel group.

She was separated from the others and taken to a mountain encampment - where eventually she was reunited with her husband and friends. They were held for 14 days.

The guerrillas did not physically harm them or demand ransom, Canales said. But once they realized she was not with an opposition group, they agreed to release her if she carried the message of their goals for the country to the media.

She said she did that, only to face intimidation in the community through anonymous phone calls, surveillance of her home and an extortion attempt. Out of fear and to recover from her psychological trauma, Canales moved from city to city in Colombia, and even to Venezuela.

Finally she took her family's suggestion that she seek asylum in the United States, where a sister already lived. She arrived in 1999, staying with her sister until she decided to visit a friend in Wisconsin in November 2000.

Within days of that visit, she had a job with Quad/Graphics Inc. She also found Wisconsin a place where she would be pushed to learn English and where she would become independent again.

"I like Wisconsin people," she said. "I feel at home here."

"And I feel safe in America, in spite of September 11," she said.

A version of this story appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Feb. 23, 2003.