Mennonite Weekly Review

BOGOTA, Colombia — What intruders took in the dark of night from our Mennonite church office in Bogotá were two computers.

What they apparently wanted was highly sensitive information on victims of violent human rights abuses, those who document the cases and local church-es courageously working for peace.

What their thefts created in us, however, was a new appreciation of the power of two things: the strategic use of fear as a political tool and the power of the Holy Spirit within transformed believers to deny fear its victory.

A few weeks after this incident, we can’t confirm who broke in to the office of the justice and peace ministry of the Colombian Mennonite Church, Justapaz. Nor do we know what they plan to do with the stolen information collected by the two programs.

Early June 14, intruders entered through the roof, disabled the alarm system and stole two computer central processing units.

They left behind other computers, a fax machine and the office safe. Soon after the break-in, night watchmen from a hotel and a clinic a block from our office observed policemen stop two men with a CPU, but the policemen didn’t arrest them or report the incident.

The Justapaz break-in was at least the sixth in a series of political robberies targeting the information of non-governmental organizations, but it was the first time a church organization was attacked in this way.

The attack reflected intimate knowledge of our organizational workings. It ripped from our staff the ability to protect the subjects and collectors of the sacred stories shared with us in strictest confidence. It shredded our desperate desire to believe that doing non-partisan truthtelling could continue unmolested even as the world began to pay attention, and ask “What can we do?”

On the Sunday after the attack, a persecuted widow with five children came up after church. She was on the stolen lists because she had documented her horrific story of loss and continued persecution.

The widow, Maria, cried as she choked on her fear that her whole family was now going to be killed, just as her husband had been a few years ago.