Influencing The World: The Colombian Experience

“Te amo primo”, was the last thing I said to my cousin before he set off on his endowing new military career. It was a great opportunity that promised a sufficient salary to support the family on, regardless we were all devastated to see him go. Weeks had gone by with no communication from my cousin. It was nearly 7 months since he had left until we were told his body was found rotting away in a mass grave close to the border of Venezuela. He and many others were lured in by the Colombian army with promise of work, then executed, and falsely declared as FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) insurgents in order to inflate military combat killings of rebels, otherwise known as “false positives”. A definition familiar to statistics, “false positives” are test results which wrongly indicate that a particular component is present. In what was the FARC/ paramilitary infested Colombian mountains where I spent most of my childhood, “false positives” were defined as 10,000 civilian systematic executions, promotions for the officers who carried them out, and $1. 3 billion aid packages from the United States government.

My cousin’s murder was a mere tally to boost military statistics to mislead the country and U. S. government into supporting the proclaimed “war on terror and drugs” was prospering. To say the least, this traumatic event is where my journey on the road to education began. Before the “false positives” scandal came to light, I grew up confused on the violence in my country and very much ignorant on how the military, statistics, or guerillas had to do with an innocent 17 year-old boy who still liked SpongeBob and blushed when talking to girls. All I knew were those spine chilling words, “terrorism, FARC, and drugs” were the cause of my family’s incredible loss. I carried this heavy heart until it was time to choose a major for my undergraduate. I decided to dedicate my path of education to the defining factor that surrounded my childhood, by majoring in Homeland Security and concentrating on counterterrorism. During my study, a 15 week course in Modern U. S Foreign Policy taught by Dr. Glenn Dorn, undoubtly influenced my now chosen career choice by providing meaning to those frightening words that plagued my childhood and gave insight to Colombia’s bloody civil war as I recounted my own horrors living among the sewage of my country’s slow road to healing post Escobar and civil war era. The course fueled my interest in international conflict, thus pushing me to dive headfirst into research of various genocides, domestic and international terrorism, foreign policies and environmental security. I was even invited to speak at several universities on the convergence between traditional national security and environmental protection and policy development for a changing environment and the threat multipliers for human security. The success of this onetime event per university, eventually lead to a semester long seminar and my appointment to lead speaker. Although my knack for environment security speaking looked prolific for a future career, it was on August 24th, 2016 that I decided I would be a key participant in foreign policy as a diplomat.

This date marked a historic event in which FARC’s leader, Rodrigo Londoño announced, “Farewell to arms, farewell to war, welcome to peace,” as 7,000 guerrillas handed over their weapons and ended half a century of armed insurgency sealing a peace agreement with the Colombian government. Although demobilization of FARC members have been underway for over a year, it will ultimately lead to a sustainable peace for Colombia. As for the “false positives” scandal, it has engulfed the Colombian military and spit out many officers, including several high ranking generals right into prison. If the Colombian experience, as well as current international conflicts have taught us anything, it’s that there is a strong need for an international perspective and a more global vision, to better understand the conflicts surrounding us. We are in a rapidly changing world and it is important to move away from outdated policies where strategy models have severely fallen short and replace with active diplomacy that not only adapts, but influences the direction of change. I believe a Master’s in Government from John Hopkins University would provide the tools and education to tailor and expand my knowledge of the various government structures, continue to foster the invaluable ability to think clearly about the nature of political values, powers, and policies in order to provide a sophisticated and unbiased approach to research based-recommendations for effective policy making, and negotiable solutions to build stronger relationships with foreign countries and better U. S. interests abroad. In addition to my extensive knowledge of conflict-affected environments, I have gained practical experience which I feel will contribute to my academic and professional success at John Hopkins. My environmental security speaking led to an offer as a research analyst intern under the Secretary of Government in Emergency Management and Response in Medellin, Colombia to develop a new contingency plan for the city and surrounding municipalities.

My duties included using new techniques and solutions to address analytic issues by recording and synthesizing large volumes of data, disparate sources of information and use this information to design more efficient emergency processes for planning, preparedness, response, and recovery requirements in the effort to strengthen emergency response and systems. I witnessed the fruition of my work upon my departure, as it is the current emergency management plan in place for the cities of Medellin, Caldas Sabaneta, Laurels, Envigado and Itagüí. I am also currently working an internship for AmeriCares as an emergency response cadre in Okinawa, Japan. Here I lead a team who assist with writing and editing an Emergency Response Deployment Handbook and research options for future online and in-person training opportunities for the response teams upon deployment. I expect the graduate work at John Hopkins to be demanding, challenging, as well as ultimately rewarding. I look forward to the experience from an intellectual as well as social point of view and I hope to learn and grow as an individual and future diplomat while fostering the pride of doing so as a Blue Jay at John Hopkins University.