Interview with Hector Aristizabal

[roody]

about torture and transformation.
http://www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=177&Itemid=74

Hector coordinates the puppetistas at School of the Americas Watch vigil. One year ago, I sat by him at dinner after the SOAW vigil, and he talked about how we have to take it to the streets and get out of our box (the street dedicated to the protest, surrounded by barriers.) This year the puppetistas broke out of the box and did an unpermitted march outside the "free speech area."

[Judi Lynn]

1. Thanks for posting the interview with Hector Aristizabal. Just finished reading it.

He has lived with a reality which has been denied here: one funded with US taxpayers' coerced support, as we have no choice but to give material support to countries this which torture, and which create conditions for the poor which are deadly for them, as it happens when they privatize public property, and allow profit-focused corporations like Drummond to operate freely, and most brutally, most disrespectfully using human lives as fuel when poverty is the disease the people try so hard to escape through taking whatever work is available.

He points out these companies do NOT employ these horrendous shortcuts to profit here in the U.S., and the toll taken in human suffering in Colombia is simply unforgivable.

Knowing this situation is "dug in" and is operating freely, likely to continue perpetually, shredding and destroying peoples' lives would drive decent people mad. As Hector Aristizabal pointed out, he was driven to regions beyond thought, beyond memory itself as his consciousness bore witness to nothing but astonishing pain as a result of physical, psychological, spiritual torture. He was pushed into a position of either living with the insufferable devastation or trying to find someway to get beyond it, somehow, in a positive way.

At this point, I don't know how he has managed to do it. No doubt this survivor is an exception, unfortunately.
He deserves to live in a world in which what has happened to him can't keep happening constantly, a world without any chance of transformation, transcendence.

You've connected with a man who has overcome conditions which clearly destroy others. He seems like a powerful worker for good in a world with very, VERY few of his strength.

He covered so MUCH ground in a compressed time frame. Wonderful! Now that's a significant skill.

Thanks for posting this. It's truly appreciated.