[E-rundbrief] Info 460 - RLA 2006 - Festival de Poesia de Medellin (Colombia)

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 460 - Right Livelihood Foundation: 2006 
(Stockholm): Right Livelihood Award/ 'Alternative Nobel Prize' 2006 
for the Festival Internacional de Poesia de Medellín (Colombia). 
"...for showing how creativity, beauty, free expression and community 
can flourish amongst and overcome even deeply entrenched fear and violence."

Bad Ischl, 28.9.2006

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

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Right Livelihood Award 2006

www.rightlivelihood.org

Festival Internacional de Poesia de Medellín

Colombia

Gloria Chvatal, Fernando Rendón, Gabriel Jaime Franco (Festival 
organisers) - click to enlarge, free to use, please credit Ana Lucia Florez

"...for showing how creativity, beauty, free expression and community 
can flourish amongst and overcome even deeply entrenched fear and violence."

     * Interview with Fernando Rendon of the Festival
     * Background Info on the Violence in Colombia

The International Poetry Festival of Medellín is one of the largest 
and most prestigious poetry festivals in the world. It started in 
1991, when Medellín was one of the most dangerous and violent cities 
in the world. Through poetry readings in the streets, people have 
reclaimed their city.

The idea: poetry against terror

The International Poetry Festival of Medellín started as a protest 
against the political violence and hatred prevailing in Colombia and 
especially in Medellín. In the early 1990s, Medellín was ruled by 
fear, political terror and fighting between criminal groups. Some 100 
people could be murdered on a weekend. After 6 pm, the city was 
usually dead due to a curfew imposed by the paramilitary.

Initiator Fernando Rendón says: "It seems a difficult task to find 
flourishing and tranquil decades in our country in the last 150 
years, but the decade of the nineties was particularly sombre and 
mournful. (...) The festival arose from a proposal to overthrow the 
wall of terror and fear imposed by the internal feuds of our 
country." It was an attempt "to create through poetry an atmosphere 
that without ignoring the spiral of death and the inertial strength 
of hate could put a little light in this sombre scene."

The idea was simple: By organising poetry readings in the streets, 
the Festival initiators helped people to re-establish a cultural life 
and reclaim their city. More and more listeners overcame their own 
fear and attended the poetry readings.

During the 10 days of the annual Festival in Medellín, there are 
public readings of poetry in the streets, in parks, residential 
areas, at the university and libraries, in theatres, cooperatives, 
schools and cultural centres, restaurants, malls, subway stations, 
factories, churches and even in prisons. Each year, some 80 poets 
from 55 countries participate actively in the festival. Up to 200,000 
people come to listen to the 80 to 100 poetry readings.

The Festival has brought much positive international attention to 
Medellín, and it has invited many foreign poets: Until 2006, 747 
poets from 131 countries have read their poems in more than 60 
languages and dialects during 906 public readings in 33 Colombian cities.
History and organisers

The International Poetry Festival of Medellín was organised for the 
first time in 1991 by thirteen people connected with the literature 
magazine Prometeo, which was founded in 1982 and has published 75 
issues and 14 books of poetry. The main inspiration came from the 
editors of Prometeo, the poets Fernando Rendón and Angela Garcia. 
Rendón was born in 1951 in Medellín. He worked as poet, editor and 
journalist and was the founder of Prometeo. The organisation 
responsible for both Prometeo and the Festival is the Corporation of 
Art and Poetry Prometeo.

Further activities and outreach programmes

In addition to the Festival and magazine Prometeo, the Corporation of 
Art and Poetry Prometeo has projects which include a TV documentary 
series entitled Tiempo de Poesia, an International Poetry School and 
the Gulliver project, poetry workshops for children in the poor 
neighbourhoods of Medellín. In 2005-06, the Corporation of Art and 
Poetry Prometeo

     * offered through the Poetry School 10 free courses for 600 
students, 16 conferences, and dozens of lectures and symposia;
     * carried out 16 workshops of poetry appreciation under its 
Gulliver project for 320 children from 6-11 years from the poor 
districts of Medellín;
     * created a Network of Latin American Poetry festivals, with 
Festivals from Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico and, soon, Costa Rica, 
San Salvador, Nicaragua and Argentina. The Corporation of Art and 
Poetry Prometeo has also helped to strengthen many of these, and to 
create the Itinerant Poetry Festival of Africa;
     * edited in Spanish and English the Colombian poetry Web page of 
Poetry International of Rotterdam, in which 32 Colombian poets have 
already been included; and
summoned the International Poetry Prize for books published in 
Spanish, the Latin American Poetry Prize of the City of Medellín, and 
the National Prize of Stimulus to the

Young Colombian Poetry.

Campaigning for democracy

In 2003, the Festival brought together the first Global Conference on 
Poetry for Peace in Colombia, which passed a declaration about the 
political situation in Colombia.

The Corporation of Art and Poetry Prometeo has also campaigned for 
the democratisation of the country by disseminating a letter signed 
by 188 poets and writers, 282 artists and hundreds of other Colombian 
professionals, and 138 poets from 82 countries. It has also 
participated in the Committee of the First National Meeting of 
Artists and Intellectuals "to promote a process of unity of action 
between Colombian poets, artists and intellectuals in the struggle 
for freedom of creation, expression and mobilisation, and for the 
full democratisation of our authoritarian and intolerant country."

Quotes:

Fernando Rendón:

     "The Festival has the conviction that culture must and has to 
play a fundamental role in any process of development. It has the 
certainty that arts and poetry will contribute decisively to the 
up-surging of a new humanity, a new human society."

     "The International Poetry Festival of Medellín has maintained 
and will maintain its efforts, as a way of opposition to barbarism 
and of looking into alternative routes of democratic and peaceful 
resistance to the extreme violence that strikes our country, seeking 
the strengthening and defence of the fundamental rights of the 
Colombian people: the right to live, the right to have liberty of 
expression, the right of meeting and the right to create."

The motto of the Festival is "Por una paz más activa que todas las 
guerras."  "For a peace which is more active than all wars."

Contact Details:
Festival Internacional de Poesia de Medellín
Transversal 39 A No 72-52
Medellin
COLOMBIA

Fax: +57 45 411249

http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/

On September 28, Fernando Rendón (Spanish speaking) can be reached at 
tel + 57 311 3089799.

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Interview with Fernando Rendón, International Poetry Festival of Medellin

questions asked by Ole von Uexkull on September 22, 2006
(free to use, no copyright)

Q: How did you conceive the idea of the Poetry Festival?

A: In circumstances of terror during the war between drug-traffickers 
and the Colombian state which ruled over Medellín in 1991. We clearly 
had two options: to flee or to face the situation. I proposed to some 
of my fellow poets the foundation of the International Poetry 
Festival of Medellín at the end of 1990. In this way we opposed 
beauty to terror, and we confronted poetry and death.

Q: What has made it such a success?

A: Poetry has a growing prestige in the world because it embodies the 
fundamental interests of people, their dignity, their aspirations to 
freedom, social justice and a harmonious peace. In an authoritarian 
and intolerant country such as Colombia, where free thought is 
penalized and we have no real freedom of expression or of assembly, 
the poets of the world have been the bearers of the poetic 
traditions, voices and thoughts of almost all the geographical 
regions of the earth. The spirit of dialogue of poetry has nurtured 
the spiritual resistance of the Colombian people against the 
adversity of an unjust state, and has opened new horizons for our 
menaced youth.

Q: There are different armed groups in Colombia who have often 
sabotaged attempts to build peace. Why have they never attacked the Festival?

A: The International Poetry Festival of Medellín has been respected 
by almost all the armed groups in the country. However, in 2003 
paramilitary groups threatened the Prometeo group that annually 
summons and organises the Festival. We had notice of this threat 
through a telephone call from Hollman Lozano, an employee in the 
Peace Advisory Office of the Presidency, during the first World 
Summit for Peace in Colombia, organised by our work group. The 
paramilitary commander "Doble cero" ("Double Zero") said to Lozano 
literally: "We're going to fill their bodies with lead".

Q: Has the Festival been threatened in other ways, too?

A:The Festival has been threatened and put under pressure in many 
ways, but especially it has suffered economic repression by the State 
and former mayors of the city of Medellín, the present one, Sergio 
Fajardo, being the sole exception. The Colombian media have 
deliberately ignored the Festival on many occasions. Some of the 
newspapers, such as "El Mundo" of Medellín, have even demanded that 
the Mayor´s Office of Medellín stop its financial assistance, because 
of our unbreakable political independence.

Q: Does Medellín become more peaceful during the Festival?

A:During decades, the Colombian people have proven their unswerving 
inclination toward life and peace with social justice. Naturally, the 
atmosphere of the city is deeply transformed during the months 
previous and after the Festival. However, the condition of social, 
cultural and spiritual decomposition caused by the actual corrupt 
Colombian political system and lack of a larger budget to project in 
a much wider scale our poetic proposal to the world have prevented us 
from developing our objectives even further.

Q: What makes poetry so attractive to so many people in Colombia?

A:Our people permanently desire peace, beauty, truth and justice, 
which constitute the natural yearning of all peoples on earth. 
Because of this, poetry, which legitimately represents this yearning, 
is appreciated in Medellín as life itself.


Background information on the violence in Colombia
by Fernando Rendón

Colombia is extremely complex, as is also Medellín, of course. The 
argument that poverty generates war by itself can be countered by a 
simple example: most of the countries of the region have the same 
situation of poverty and inequality, but they are not in the 
situation of internal war that Colombia has suffered for more than forty years.

During the last twenty years, 3.8 million people have been displaced 
in Colombia, excluding those that have not been registered. It is 
estimated that 30,000 people die every year in the social and armed 
conflict suffered by Colombia. The Colombian government now spends 
USD 16.5 million per day for security and defence.

Since 1991, the year in which the International Poetry Festival of 
Medellín was founded, only in the city of Medellín there have been 
45,000 violent deaths, more than in all Western Europe during the 
same period. The crime figures between 1987 and 1992 were equally 
dramatic: while in Colombia the homicide rate was 77.5 for each 
100,000 inhabitants, it was 24.6 in Brazil, 20.6 in Mexico, 16.6 in 
Nicaragua, 16.4 in Venezuela, 12.4 in Argentina, 11.5 in Peru, and 11 
in Ecuador.

Colombia has the highest number of journalists murdered in the 
Western World, the highest number of kidnappings and the greatest 
number of widows on the planet. We could give many more of these 
terrible figures (for example, that nearly 70% of the national budget 
is allotted to the war and the service of the foreign debt), but we 
think that the ones we have mentioned show clearly that Colombia is 
suffering what is perhaps the greatest humanitarian crisis in the 
Western World.

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Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
     Begegnungszentrum fuer aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
     Center for Encounter and active Non-Violence
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