About the author


  • Name: Tanya Snyder
    Education: Macalester College
    Major: History
    Internships: American Friends Service Committee Program Assistant; Grant Writer, Education for Peace in Iraq Center Program Assistant; Resource Center of the Americas
    Work Experience: Witness for Peace International Team Member in Bogotá, Colombia and
    Havana, Cuba
    Language: Spanish
    Study Abroad: School for International Training in Nicaragua

    This bio was accurate at the time this article was printed.

Witness for Peace

By Tanya Snyder
This article was printed in Abroad View fall 2004

I moved from my home in Washington, D.C. to war-torn Colombia to join the International Team of Witness for Peace in April 2002. This decision was the culmination of several years of struggling with issues of peace and justice, a process that had been jump-started by my study abroad experience with the School for International Training (SIT) in Nicaragua four years earlier.

Nicaragua was, for me, a crash-course on the impacts of U.S. policy in Latin America. I was learning about what Witness for Peace calls “cycles of military and economic violence” in a place where the U.S. had supported a war that killed 30,000 people, reinstating an economic system that benefits the rich and leaves the poor behind. I returned to the States feeling committed to work for change.

A few years later, while I was trying to organize local opposition to Plan Colombia, President Clinton’s unprecedented $1.3-billion military aid package, I traveled to Colombia on a Witness for Peace delegation. The team consisted of 37 people from all over the U.S. There were rank-and-file union pipefitters, Green Party candidates for public office, labor leaders, representatives of various national environmental organizations and many other justice seekers. I felt I had found the community in which I belonged.

Three months later, I was a member of the Witness for Peace Colombia Team. My experience was life-changing but by no means unique. I heard countless stories of brutality and torture in a deadlocked civil war that has been raging for more than 40 years. I remember a delegation meeting with “re-insertados,” people trying to “re-insert” themselves into civilian life after having left one of the armed groups. The side they had left viewed them as traitors; the opposing group tried to use them for information. The price on their heads rose. It was hard for them to find jobs. The government, while encouraging members of illegal armed groups to de-mobilize, was doing next to nothing to support or protect them. Members of the pacifist Mennonite Church were shouldering much of this work, providing them with business opportunities and enduring the emotional burden of trying to help those who live under constant threat and who sometimes give up and go back.

My friends in the U.S. treated me like some kind of martyr, risking my life to work for peace. Sometimes they admitted that they were intimidated to write to me about what they suddenly called the “trivialities” of their daily lives, when I was doing something so profound. The work felt profound, of course, but I also had my own trivialities—making new friends, looking for ways to have fun within the boundaries of our strict security protocol, and struggling with gender dynamics as the only woman on a six-person team. My caricature image of life in Bogotá—dodging bullets on the way to the grocery store—melted into the mundane reality of daily life.

I transferred to the Cuba Team in October 2002. I had been to Cuba twice before and already loved it. I was drawn to the opportunity to live in a country engaged in a living revolution and daily paying the price for it through a U.S.-imposed trade and travel embargo.

The Witness for Peace office in Havana is based in the Martin Luther King Center, a Cuban NGO that grew out of the local Baptist church with the idea that Christians need to focus not only on heaven, but also on building social justice in the world. The King Center provides a facilitator to accompany each of our delegations in order to incorporate an authentic Cuban voice into all aspects of the experience.

Delegations are the Cuba team’s primary responsibility. Cuba receives more, and larger, Witness for Peace delegations than any other program site, so most of my work consisted of organizing and accompanying these groups. We helped set up meetings with organizations, government offices and schools and then brought the delegations to the meetings. More importantly, though, we paid close attention to the pedagogy of the experience. The team must keep an eye on group dynamics, ensuring that the days are not too packed yet are full enough that the delegates can make the most out of their short time in the country in order to foster deeper exploration and analysis. Although we don’t try to force our perspective on anyone, we are educators, and our goal is that if the delegates see the issues as we do, they will be motivated to work for political change. Sometimes it’s the delegates who come to Cuba expecting no more than fun in the sun who are the most transformed by what they learn there.

In the early days of Witness for Peace, volunteers physically accompanied members of communities at risk. But arguably, the more important work—and what we currently focus on—is the transformative experience of the delegates themselves and the change they can create back home in their own communities.

Our Colombia Team is the only team currently working in the context of war. Still, its work focuses more on changing the debate in the U.S. than on direct accompaniment of people in danger. The team members themselves stick to a rigorous security protocol, which mandates when and where they can and cannot be alone, which communications technologies they need to carry, whom they need to consult before traveling and even what they should wear. Security is a daily concern in Colombia, whereas Cuba is one of the safest places you can be.

In March 2004, I moved back to Washington, D.C. to take a temporary job in the national office of Witness for Peace. After almost two years abroad, I was ready to come home and re-join my community here. Now I am on the other side, working with people who have returned from life-changing experiences in Latin America and helping them to become more effective activists.
Working toward a radical shift in U.S. policies and priorities can feel like a constant swim upstream. But once you know a country and its people, destructive policies mandated by the Capitol have a profound impact on your life and the lives of those you love. You become part of the struggle, part of the global community of solidarity, part of the solution. AV

Witness for Peace (WFP)

WFP started in 1983 when people of faith and conscience, concerned about U.S. support of the Contra in Nicaragua, brought a delegation of U.S. citizens there. They wanted to see for themselves what was really happening and what effect their government’s policy was having. They discovered a few things:

• Their presence quieted the conflict, as U.S.-armed Contras did not attack communities where there were U.S. citizens.
• A profound bond of solidarity formed between people struggling for peace and justice in both countries.
They had firsthand experience to bring back to the U.S. to counter misinformation about the U.S. role in Nicaragua.
• WFP did not bring people to Nicaragua for tourism but brought them to see firsthand the effects of U.S. policy. These individuals returned home with a commitment to educate their communities, churches, members of Congress and the media. Now WFP has four program sites: Nicaragua, Mexico, Cuba and Colombia.
• WFP offers a variety of job opportunities, internships, travel programs and tools for activism.

For more information, see www.witnessforpeace.org