On January 19, a car bomb exploded a few meters from a building in the city of Saravena, in the Colombian municipality of Arauca, where some 60 community leaders had gathered.
The activists survived the bombing because hours before the attack, they had erected makeshift barricades with plastic barrels they filled with stones as FARC dissidents, with Antonio Medina at the helm, were attempting on assassinating them.
The attack claimed one life, Simeón Delgado, who was a security guard at the Colombian Agricultural Institute headquarters where the van exploded causing extensive damage to several buildings, including the Héctor Alirio Martínez building which is used by community-led organizations and was the target of the attack.
In the eye of the hurricane is the candidate for the Chamber for La Guajira, Juan Loreto Gómez Soto, after learning of alleged pressure from officials of the mayor of Uribia to invaders of a propertyto whom they would be promising land titles in exchange for votes.
The denunciations of the demands of the vote this March 13 in exchange for property deeds, also cover Senator Mauricio Trujillo, who aspires to repeat a seat, both represent the Conservative Party.
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They are the candidates that the team supports for the ‘Transformation of Uribia’, which brought the current president Bonifacio Henríquez to the mayor’s office.
Property was donated by the Ministry of Defense to the municipality of Uribia
The complaints are related to the ‘Flor del Campo’ property, which until a few weeks ago was owned by the Ministry of Defense, but was ceded free of charge to the municipality through Resolution No. 0225 of January 25, 2022.
Said property is made up of some 366 hectares and according to what was indicated by the Municipal Planning Secretary, René Lindarte, It is inhabited by some 3,200 families: 14,000 people including older adults, adults, youth and children.
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The mayor’s office had made the request, through the official letters of February 23 and May 6, 2021, in order that the property be transferred to it, which since 1943 was declared vacant at the La Guajira Special Police Station and made available to the Army. , but it is no longer used and is not necessary for the development of its institutional mission.
Living conditions are deplorable there
The District’s purpose was to provide housing solutions for local and migrant families who have informally settled on the site for about eight years.
However, in the settlement the housing conditions are deplorable, most of them are built in mud and yotojoro, a material extracted from the cactus. It does not have public services since, due to lack of ownership, the municipality could not invest in the area. Of course, the area is full of posters of the two candidates.
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However, the municipality defends political propaganda in the midst of misery.
For the secretary, political advertising with posters is just normal, “we are in a campaign process where there are candidates making political proselytism in the country and then there must be people who are identifying with a candidate,” says the official.
He reproaches that they want to damage the work they have been doing with signs like these, so they will continue, “that is not what is going to stop us so that we can continue with that social work that we have outlined and that is going favor of the community. Our government has an expiration date and we cannot stop,” he said.
They denounce that individuals asked for 600 thousand pesos for deeds
Lindarte assures that the information they received was that they were being scammed, they were asking for 600 thousand pesos for the deeds, so the network of leaders was activated to keep people informed of how the process was going to be carried out.
“We received that complaint demanding money, not political proselytism,” said the Secretary of Planning.
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It clarifies that there is a process prior to the granting of the deeds, such as carrying out a soil study, a characterization process and promoting an urban development model, since eight neighborhoods would be created.
The candidate’s defense
The candidate for the House of Representative for La Guajira, Juan Loreto Gómez, who was on the run in Alta Guajira, was surprised by the complaint, since he had never visited the settlement, so he asked the competent authorities to do the relevant research.
Also, he invited citizens to denounce any irregular situation of any person or group offering gifts in exchange for votes since they do not agree with bad political practices.
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“Perhaps it is a story poorly told with particular political interests that generates this type of reaction and that I would also react in this way, but I want them to be clear that we do not do rigged practices,” said Gómez.
He also assured that he has more commitment to go to that community, “knowing that there are supporters there means that the proposal has echoed in the department, even in the popular sectors it has generated good acceptance,” said the candidate.
It should be noted that Juanlo aspires to occupy the seat currently held by his mother María Cristina ‘Tina’ Soto, who is being investigated by the investigation chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice.
Soto, was called for investigation for her alleged participation in a complex network of electoral corruption that would have been forged for her arrival in Congress in the 2018 elections.
The congresswoman is criminally investigated to answer for the crimes that accuse the voter of corruption, conspiracy to commit a crime, falsehood in public and private documents and procedural fraud.
reactions
The candidate for the Chamber for the Liberal Party, Jarlen Garrido Weber, asked Gómez to clarify the situation, because it is a very delicate accusation, which is not good for democracy, nor for the department of La Guajira, which is going through a difficult situation.
“We have had experiences in the past with the removal of former governors and there is an investigation in the Supreme Court of representative María Cristina Soto for precisely the same crime and we want the department to have enough clarity so that we are not involved in a new traffic scandal or of buying or exchanging votes for privileges,” Garrido said.
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This is a story that was portrayed for the first time by Caracol Radio’s 10AM program, who toured the area and revealed audios, photos and videos.
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“In rural Minnesota we still have a work ethic, and I’ll call them Christian values, and that’s not reflected in our local newspaper,” said Al Saunders, a farmer and friend of Wolter’s who graduated from Benson High School a couple years after Anfinson.
“I just can’t stomach it anymore,” said Saunders, whose family settled on part of his sprawling farm more than a century ago, and who speaks almost lovingly about the rich brown soil. Anfinson’s editorials on farm subsidies and politics leave him fuming. “Trash gets thrown at you so many times and eventually you just give up.”
He grudgingly subscribes to the Monitor-News, which has a circulation of roughly 2,000. But just to follow local politics.
Anfinson does cover Swift County intensely — the city council, the county commissioners, the school board and nearly every other gathering of consequence. He’s there for school concerts, community fund-raisers, elections and livestock judging at the county fair. His white Jeep is often spattered with mud from the county’s dirt roads.
He works relentlessly. Wednesday afternoons, after he gets that week’s edition ready for printing the next morning, often count as his weekend.
Anfinson is 67 but looks at least a decade younger. A contemplative man who casually quotes Voltaire, he loves newspapers deeply, and mourns the hundreds of small-town papers that have gone under in recent years.
Still, Anfinson sometimes is surprised to find himself in Benson.
Family is a powerful force here, and this town is knitted together in ways that few Americans understand anymore. His grandfather, a poetry-loving plumber and child of Norwegian immigrants, came to Benson as a child. His father came home from World War II, became a reporter at the Monitor-News and eventually bought the newspaper with a partner.
Anfinson grew up planning on a journalism career somewhere beyond small-town Minnesota. But he found those plans upended when his father’s health began declining in the late 1970s.
“I thought I’d come back here just for a little while,” he said. “It turned into the rest of my life.”
Not that he regrets it.
He’s proud that his reporting means something here, whether it’s a high-school student getting an award or an expensive building project the community rejected after he wrote about it.
Still, there are times when it’s exhausting. And expensive. With declining circulation and ads, he estimates his three little local newspapers are worth at least $1 million less than a decade ago.
“The easy part is speaking truth to power. The hard part is speaking truth to your community. That can cost you advertisers. That can cost you subscribers,” he said.
FILE – Jason Wolter, pastor of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, sits next to his wife, Tracy, at their home in Benson, Minn., Nov. 29, 2021.
It can be easy, looking around Benson, to think it is a land that time forgot.
Bartenders often greet customers by name. The town’s cafes feel like high school lunchrooms, with people wandering between tables to say hello. Those in search of solitude go to the Burger King, where they sit alone at plastic tables, staring out the windows.
Benson was built in the 1870s as railways reached this part of the prairies, and trains remain the town’s background music. In the cafes, people barely look up when mile-long trains roar through downtown. Few people stop talking. They’ve been hearing those trains for generations.
Many farms and businesses have been owned by the same families for decades: through the droughts of the 1930s; through the thriving years around World War II; to the population decline that began in the 1950s.
But plenty has changed.
Stores closed. Little farms were bought up by more successful farmers. Families left. Swift County’s population has dropped about 30 percent since 1960, and now has about 10,000 residents. Meanwhile, a county that was 98% white in 1990 has seen a stream of new minority residents, particularly Latinos. The county is now 87% white – far whiter than much of America, but far more diverse than a generation ago.
Today, longtime locals can sometimes feel unmoored.
“There are a lot of people coming through that I don’t recognize,” said Terri Collins, Benson’s cheerful mayor, whose family has been in Benson for five generations. “I used to know all of my neighbors and now that’s different. And I don’t know what to blame for that.”
Once, neighborliness and good manners were near-commandments here. Now anger is on the rise.
Neighborhood shouting matches are more common, a local official’s car was vandalized, and a “F— Biden” flag now flies along a school bus route. Collins and the town police chief both say they sometimes worry about Anfinson’s safety.
“Ten years ago I don’t think anything like this would happen,” she said.
But that was then. Travel across the plains of western Minnesota and you’ll find plenty of people who are bestirred by a new and often dark vision of America.
They are not on the fringes, at least by current standards. They are, for the most part, mainstream conservatives who see a nation that barely exists in traditional newspapers and mainstream TV news broadcasts.
People like the store manager, sitting at an American Legion bar drinking $3 cocktails, who calls the billionaire financier George Soros, a Jewish survivor of the Nazis and a powerful backer of liberal causes, “one of the most evil men I’ve ever heard of.” And the semi-retired nurse who fears teams of sex traffickers she says operate freely in countless small towns.
But it would be a mistake to think they can be categorized easily.
Some desperately want Trump to run again; others pray he won’t. One farmer quietly admits he worries about the growing numbers of racial minorities; another enjoys hearing new accents at the grocery store. Many are nearly as dismissive of conservative media as they are of traditional news outlets.
While social conservatism has long run deep in Swift County — even the former, longtime Democratic congressman was anti-abortion and pro-gun rights — many say the presidency of Barack Obama marked a change.
Gay marriage was legalized and identity politics took hold. Growing calls for transgender rights seemed like an issue from another planet. The sometimes-violent racial justice protests that followed police killings of Black men had some here stocking up on ammunition.
Trump’s cries that he loved America resonated in an area where new approaches to teaching U.S. history, with an increased focus on race, were confounding.
So in a county where Obama won with 55% of the vote in 2008, Trump won with 64% percent in 2020.
“We’ve seen a shift here in Swift County,” said Al Saunders. “But you won’t see that in the newspaper.”
FILE – Reed Anfinson, publisher of The Swift County Monitor-News, holds the latest edition as he stands for a portrait at Quinco Press in Lowry, Minn., Nov. 30, 2021.
Anfinson’s weekly column, where he writes about everything from political divisions to rural housing shortages, is a local lightning rod.
He sighed: “That editorial page will have people hate me.”
Across the U.S., many smaller newspapers, already facing economic decline with the rise of the internet, have cut back or completely stopped running editorials, trying to hold onto conservative readers who increasingly see them as local arms of a fake news universe.
But Anfinson won’t consider that, even if sometimes he feels like he’s tilting at angry, small-town windmills. He says it’s his duty to expose people to new ideas, even unpopular ideas like stricter gun control.
The editorial page is, he says “the soul of a newspaper in a way.”
“I would be a traitor to the cause of journalism, of community newspapers,” by giving up on editorials, he said. “I would be cowardly.”
Some would call him stubborn, and his wife and business partner, Shelly, would not disagree. It can be complicated being married to Reed Anfinson.
Like the day last spring, when Anfinson was in the bar next to the office and a man loudly told a friend that Anfinson was a communist and “somebody should do something about that guy.”
Anfinson knows the man. So does Shelly. A longtime dental hygienist, she cleaned his teeth for 20 years. She still says hello when she passes the man on the street.
“I try not to create a bigger divide,” said Shelly, who, after a series of intensive classes on the newspaper business, began running another of the couple’s weekly papers two years ago.
“I’ve definitely lost sleep over some confrontations that he’s had,” she said. “But do you let that stand in the way of reporting the facts?”
Shelly is warm and gregarious and easy to like. And when it comes to politics, she’s not who you’d expect to be married to the man often tagged as Benson’s best-known liberal.
She’s a pro-life Republican who voted for Trump, at least the first time. It annoys her when news outlets talk down to conservatives. She worries that there are too few Republican journalists.
She and Reed married 20 years ago, after both had been divorced. She moved in across the street and soon he was walking her home.
She is often torn between support for Reed and worries over subscriber loss.
Still, she’s been pressing him to tone down the politics.
“It is a struggle. I can tell these things to my business partner. It’s harder to tell them to my husband.”
In the custom of small-town Minnesota, the Anfinson and Wolter families get along, at least outwardly. They wave when they see each other. When one family is out of town, the other will sometimes watch their home.
“We’re still personable,” Wolter says. “I just don’t trust him.”
“He’s not going to come to church and I’m not going to buy his newspaper. But we can still treat each other as neighbors.”
While he believes Anfinson is sincere in what he publishes, he does not believe his neighbor has a monopoly on truth.
Wolter also knows that plenty of people would write him off as just another conspiracy monger. But he’s far more complicated.
He worries his conservative opinions color what he believes: “There are times when I’ve thought: ‘Well, what if all my angst over this is misplaced?’” he said. “Maybe everyone else is right?”
But he worries more about America: “This is a dark time.”
He criticizes conservative politicians for trying to make it illegal to burn the American flag, but worries about far-right accusations that U.S. soldiers are hunting down American conservatives.
“Maybe five or 10 years ago, I would have said ‘That’s crazy!’” he said. “Now I acknowledge it might be possible. I’m not saying I think it’s happening, but at least I don’t dismiss it the way that I would have.”
Wolter, whose home library includes everything from Sophocles to “The Grapes of Wrath,” is a careful reader, in his own way. He’s wary of conservative news sites like Breitbart, believing it shapes its reporting to please conservative readers. Instead, he finds his news farther off the beaten path, like on Gab, a Twitter-like social media platform that has become home to many on America’s far right.
“For better or for worse I don’t really trust anything I read,” he says. The answer, he said, is research, probing the farthest corners of the internet.
The answers are not to be found, he insists, in the Swift Country Monitor-News.
Anfinson, for his part, doesn’t want to talk about Wolter, at least not directly. He’s watched Benson’s fragile web of community fray too much.
Instead, he talks proudly about the Monitor-News: how it prints letters to the editor that are harshly critical of it; how he reports the truth even if it costs him; how his coverage of the pandemic goes to the heart of journalists’ responsibility to keep their communities safe.
He mourns how some people see him as an enemy. His newspaper should bind people together, he says. Instead, America and Benson are growing angrier. Contentious midterm elections loom.
“It’s kind of sad,” he said. “But it would be foolish of me not to be aware of (my safety) with the sentiments out there.”
Does he carry a weapon? This soft-spoken man says he does not.
A dozen city councils have decided to withdraw from marquees and advertising media the controversial campaign of the Catholic Association of Propagandists (ACdP) that encourages people to “pray” in front of abortion clinics, considering that it violates the rights of women, although others, such as Madrid and Córdoba, they are going to keep it.
The controversial posters, with the slogan “Praying in front of abortion clinics is great”, were placed in 250 stands in 33 cities, in response to the bill being processed in Congress to criminalize the harassment of women and workers of clinics that practice voluntary interruptions of pregnancy.
