Undermining

Photos by Larisa Zehr, Macayepo , Colombia

By Larisa Zehr, MCC Colombia

Para leer en Español

One Sunday morning in Bogota, we headed for one of the city’s best markets, Paloquemao.  We sipped hot café con leche and ate almojabanas, cheesy pastries,  browsed the tightly packed stalls for dry fruit, nuts, and whole wheat flour to take back home, and stared at the stacks of strange fresh fruit and vegetables.  You can buy almost anything at Paloquemao and almost all of it is grown in some region of Colombia.

We had enough time to walk back, and a block down the road, came to the security guards and automatic glass doors of a shiny new monstrosity of a shopping mall.  It seemed dropped from the sky- millions of dollars of panes of glass, colorful Adidas shoes, North American fast food and the newest Hollywood releases in the movie theater.  It was clean, uniform, and perfect.

Leaving, we soon started to walk along a flat gray wall for an entire city block- the exterior of Bogota’s largest mega-church.  There was space in the sanctuary for 10.000.  We squinted at the worship leaders from the back, over the swaying hands of several thousand.  There was a steak house and a gym, a radio station and a large scale map of Colombia and its new mega-churches: fruits of recent missions.  As we walked past the streams of Bogotanos heading into the service, we remembered some of our friends who were meeting in a house church only a half hour walk away.

That evening, after the plane ride and on the way to Sincelejo, I watched scenes of the Caribbean Coast move across the taxi’s windows.  Thatch roofs, motorcyclists with no helmets, broken concrete, stalks of yucca wilting with the lack of rain.   It is extraordinary what things co-exist in this world.

On Saturday, we had listened to a professor-activist who fights against a huge hydroelectric dam project in the department of Huila discuss the current strategy of development in Colombia and most of Latin America.  Massive transnational corporations propose huge, lucrative projects to the government, based largely on extracting or exploiting natural resources.  The governments jump at the chance to publicize their competitive advantage- the water, gold, lumber, or other natural resources- and bend to the companies, allowing them extreme amounts of legal power.

The government lets the corporation interact with the local environment, with almost no regulatory measures.  The corporation leaves the national government with few profits, and the people of the region have nothing except ruined farmland, few jobs, and a lack of future options.  Through rigorous research, the professor and his team have been able to prove that the damages caused currently and the projected loss of resources over the fifty years of the dam’s lifetime are significantly more than the profits accrued by the project, and the profits do not even stay in the country.

By turning the world into a neoliberal comparative advantage model, diverse ecosystems are replaced by huge reservoirs.  Electricity produced in Panama can travel to Argentina, but doesn’t get to rural towns in Panama.  The free trade agreements now signed in Colombia, Peru, Chile, and a number of other countries allow choice export markets to grow, at the expense of the farmers that have sustained their countries for millennia.  Malls and supermarkets take the place of the chaotic, diverse networks of local markets in which money spent stays in the community.

The church is part of the same strategy.  A uniform faith takes the place of geographical communities.  Differences are ironed out under the goal of contributing financially to God’s mission on earth, be it through building new mega-churches or funding mission trips across the world.  If you pay, you receive more blessings.  If you buy in, you receive more blessings.

We become valued not because of our cultural heritage, our grounding or love of place, our songs and food and literature.  Our activities no longer require relationship of specificity, but shopping, entertainment, church, and travel can all be accomplished without talking to another human being.  We can watch the same TV, eat the same food, and shop in the same stores in Colombia as in Lebanon, Sweden or South Africa.  We become flattened, the subjects of a market instead of a nation or a culture.  We are valued for our purchasing power or how much we produce.  It is the model of efficiency, the model of economic growth, the model of profit.  But what do we value?  At what cost?

Originally posted on http://movingfromitowe.blogspot.mx/2013/01/undermining.html