I have been in Argentina for two weeks now. For my first week, I was in Buenos Aires for an orientation with the other Young Adult Global Mission folks who will also be spending a year in a Lutheran church placement in Argentina or Uruguay. We were housed at the Lutheran seminary in Buenos Aires, ISEDET, and spent the week visiting various Lutheran organizations and other groups that are working to promote the peace and justice.
One of the groups that we visited during our orientation was Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. We went to the mothers´ weekly Thursday march in La Plaza de Mayo, where they still ask the government, 30 years later, where their children are today. The mothers began gathering around the plaza when the government was disappearing their children during the Dirty War in the late 1970s. These sons and daughters were mostly in their teens, twenties, and thirties, and were often youth that had a new vision for their country, a vision that differed from the current social order of that time. Many of the groups of youth that were targeted were church groups.
After witnessing a march around the plaza, we had the opportunity to meet with some of the mothers and hear their own personal stories. They spoke about the power and importance of names and telling stories to keep the memory of what happened alive. 30,000 people disappeared in that time! Just as we say for the Holocaust, ¨Never Forget¨, it is important that this struggle stay alive – that the government not only acknowledge what it did, but tell the families of the disappeared where their children are, and who killed them. To this day, we still do not know where the bodies are, nor do we know who the potential killers are. Yet, places have been discovered to be much like the concentration camps that one would find in Europe.
It is also important for the citizens of the U.S to be aware of the ways in which our government played a role in the Dirty War. Much of the problems at the time were around issues of money and trade, and the U.S. government wanted to keep Argentina in its control. At that time, the U.S. had created a military base, known as the School of the Americas, now currently known as WHINSEC (Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), to train Latin Americans techniques of torture and other ways to dehumanize the people of Latin America who were fighting for their human rights and dignity.
As you can imagine, these women had powerful stories to tell and to this day understand what their children were fighting for – a just world. The mothers are involved in current projects of advocacy that they believe their children would have been rallying and organizing for today. They held a banner that read, ¨¡Distribucion de la Riqueza Ya!¨ (Distribution of the Wealth Now!).
This past week, I moved to Obera, Argentina, which is the northeastern province of Argentina. It sits on the border of Brazil and Paraguay. I will be working with IELU (United Evangelical Lutheran Church)´s Project for Human Promotion and Sustainable Development and with the congregation ¨Dios Es Amor,¨ a church community located in the rural outskirts of Obera. So far I have been spending my time with my facilitators, Maria Elena Parras and Pastor Mariela Pereyra. I have been accompanying them in their daily work, further acquainting myself with the projects and communities that I will be involved with this year.
For me, the highlight of my week was when Tito, one of the small farmers that is involved with the Project for Human Promotion and Sustainable Development, invited me to join him on a ride out to his farm to check on the Yerba mate (Argentina´s tea), tea, lemons, and bananas growing on his farm. We took an hour ride out through the rolling hills of the red earth of the province of Misiones. I had a chance to hear more about Tito´s life story and the life of a small farmer in Misiones. I enjoyed the visit to the farm, where we checked on his new Yerba, which unfortunately is not growing well due to the lack of rain these last few months, and harvested some of the lemons from his trees.
What strikes me right now is the number of pine tress that are growing in the province. In the 70s, the government attempted to help the region by distributing pine trees as a raw material for the area, for paper, firewood and furniture. However, the pine tree is not a native plant, and takes too much water from the ground. It is both a mystery to me and the farmers as to why the government would choose to plant pine over a native plant to the area. This is one of the areas that small farmers are working on – asking the government for native trees instead of pine trees. Yet, the government seems to be taking its time in listening to the farmers´ request. I am just beginning to understand the struggle of farming out here in Misiones, and I know that I will have more to say about it in the future.
