Free Screening of “The War We Are Living”
Women, War & Peace PBS series

Friday, March 29 2013, 6:30pm at the Free Space

If you ask Colombia’s city dwellers and governing political class, they’ll tell you the country’s 40-year-old civil war is over. But The War We Are Living reveals the “other” Colombia, in rural areas far away from the capital, where the war is all too real – and now the battle is over gold. In Cauca, a mountainous region in Colombia’s Pacific southwest, two extraordinary Afro-Colombian women are fighting to hold onto the gold-rich land that has sustained their community through small-scale mining for centuries.

Clemencia Carabali and Francia Marquez are part of a powerful network of female leaders who found that in wartime women can organize more freely than men. As they defy paramilitary death threats and insist on staying on their land, Carabali and Marquez are standing up for a generation of Colombians who have been terrorized and forcibly displaced as a deliberate strategy of war. If they lose the battle, they and thousands of their neighbors will join Colombia’s 4 million people – most of them women and children – who have been uprooted from their homes and livelihoods.

This event is co-sponsored by the Minnesota Young Workers, Witness for Peace, and the Minnesota AFL-CIO Women in Leadership project.

Questions, contact Jessica Hayssen at 651-261-8559 or jhayssen@mnaflcio.org.