High in the mountains of western Antioquia, Colombia, where the mist settles into the coffee fields each morning and the air smells of wet earth and woodsmoke, exists the rural municipality of Caicedo. Approximately 60 miles from Medell\u00edn, Caicedo is home to around 10,000 campesinos, of whom only about 2,000 reside in its small urban center. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Something incredible takes place here. The people have chosen peace. Not once, in a moment of hope. But over and over again \u2014 through decades of terror, through kidnapping and murder, through grief so deep it could have swallowed them whole. They chose it at the ballot box. They chose it in their schools. They chose it in the way they grow their coffee and raise their children and remember their dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On April 1, in a bilingual webinar that moved many of us to tears, Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service officially welcomed Caicedo into the Nonviolent Cities Project<\/a> \u2014 honoring it as the first nonviolent municipality in Colombia and a living example for communities everywhere that another way is possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n