April 21, 2005
by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE – Mauricio Avilez talks softly about dying.

The dying that leaves one dead. And, paradoxically, the dying that leads to new life.

He has a poignant acquaintance with both.

On June 10, 2004, Avilez was arrested by Colombian authorities and jailed for 130 days, accused of sedition, murder and guerrilla activity. The district attorney ordered his release from prison last October when no evidence was produced to warrant a criminal charge, although the investigation was ongoing.

He has been in hiding ever since.

About a month ago, he surfaced at a United Nations human rights conference in Geneva, Switzerland. It was there – on April 16, his 25th birthday – that he learned that the Colombian government has formally closed its case against him.

His mother broke the news in a birthday telephone call.

Now the only problem is his physical safety – finding protection from the clandestine killers who want him dead and who have mercilessly harassed his family.

Avilez is working with the United Nations to get warranties from Colombia's government assuring his safety, so that he may resume some semblance of normal life. Otherwise he will have to leave the country.

It has been a lonely, agonizing year full of self-doubts, paralyzing fear and dogged hope.

Now the question is: What to do next? How will he live? Will coming out of hiding mean losing his life? Or saving it, by losing himself in the work that has kept him alive?

Resuming his professional role is risky.

Colombian paramilitaries are credited with killing or forcibly "disappearing" 449 people between January and July in 2004, according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists in Bogata; the group is still compiling deaths from the second half of the year.

That's double the number of deaths attributed to guerrilla violence.

The victims include a professor who shared Avilez' cell, who was shot dead on a Barranquilla street last fall after his release from prison.

The government is investigating accusations against another church worker, Guillermo Larios, a seasoned human rights veteran who shared a bullet-proof office with Avilez on the Barranquilla campus of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia. Yet another, the Rev. Jesus Goez, who also worked among Colombia's displaced, has gone into hiding because of death threats against himself and his family.

"Nobody goes looking for martyrdom, but it's a reality that is always present. Threats. Repression. Death," Avilez says, adding that it's a daily choice to follow his calling or to ignore it. "It's always been my vocation to work for human rights, as a Christian. Seeing everything that I've seen, and living everything I've lived, that conviction only penetrates me deeper."

That kind of talk worries his mother, who frets about his safety. Avilez's girlfriend wants to marry and have babies, but he says that's not likely, since it would put her life at risk too. He's a year behind in law school, but wants to finish so he can resume working on behalf of Colombia's more than 3 million displaced persons. That's how he got targeted in the first place.

When he was detained, Avilez coordinated law student volunteers who helped displaced families file applications for aid and document the human rights abuses that forced them off their land and into shantytowns on Colombia's northern Caribbean coast.

He worked for the Presbyterian Church of Colombia, in an office that served the poorest of the poor and ended up under government surveillance. Displaced people are suspected by the authorities and by armed clandestine groups on both left and right.

"I have a personal commitment to finish my legal studies and try to do human rights work ... so I can keep going on, helping people," Avilez says. "I need to be able to be with the people who need me," he says, adding that the long, lonely nights of the past year only intensified what he describes as a spiritual connection to suffering people.

In his mind, that's not reckless, it is resurrection-living.

"The day I stop dreaming, stop giving myself to others ... it is not living any more in a way that's meaningful," he says, choosing his words carefully. "To have this second opportunity is to be resurrected. It's a calling that says: ‘Don't be afraid,' that I should take up my cross and keep going. That's what I feel."

In an essay he wrote while underground, Martyrdom: A Liberating Cross, Avilez says avoidance of suffering isn't the Biblical pattern for salvation, or even for earthly redemption. The Israelites wandered in the desert. Job questioned the divine mind. Isaiah promised rescue from suffering, but it was a long time coming.

Why, he asks, should contemporary Christians expect to avoid suffering?

"Sometimes I get tired, it's heavy," he says, adding that in his own worst moments, he somehow felt God's hand invisibly at work, dragging him out of bed when he had nowhere to go, pulling him out of his self-absorption and offering him purpose in caring for others.

"It is like feeling an invisible hand that makes you go," he says. "And at that moment you're able to say, All the suffering, all the fear, is not only your own suffering, but that of those with you. There are people going through the same, or worse. And it just makes me more committed."

Avilez' arguments are always philosophical, and his point is always the same: Purpose is found serving less fortunate others. And it requires sacrifice.

"I feel (called) when I see people suffering," he says. "When I see people sleeping in the streets. When I see people continually treated unjustly. When I see pain, indignation, anger. When I feel fear, when I think, ‘Why do these threats keep on?' ....That's when I say to myself, ‘In this situation, the way to keep going is to give myself to others ... to be with the people who suffer.'

"I've had opportunities to decide things for my life ... but these people have no choices. Just restrictions. Just suffering. Just injustice. But even so, they – without having anything – open their arms and give us everything in their hearts. It is like seeing the face of Christ in each one of these people."

He spent the past year looking for parallels in the scripture to help him cope with his isolation and fear.

"In the book of Luke, Jesus is being crucified, going through horrible agony and saying that he will accompany all (of us) through our crucifixions, as we carry our crosses ... But what did he do to deserve a death like this?" he wrote in his essay on martyrdom. "We've read a lot about Jesus. We know he was poor. Excluded. Displaced. Persecuted. Threatened. Tortured. Assassinated in a seditious form. All of this happened in the midst of political unrest for his people. Yet, he suffered and (offered) himself ... for all to live on an earth full of milk and honey in brotherly community.

"He gives us a new commandment: ‘That you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.'"

Loving, he says, means losing oneself: Giving one's life unconditionally, knowing it may literally be lost in martyrdom. Or, more metaphorically, losing oneself in meaningful service.

"It's a radical thing to lose one's life. But it is also giving oneself unconditionally. It's a way to give life," Avilez says. "That's the way I see the thing."

Presbyterian News Service