Jose Miguel Sokoloff: How we used Christmas lights to fight a war | TED

93,936 views ・ 2014-12-08

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:12
So, I thought a lot about the first word I'd say today,
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and I decided to say "Colombia."
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And the reason, I don't know how many of you have visited Colombia,
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but Colombia is just north of the border with Brazil.
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It's a beautiful country
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with extraordinary people, like me and others -- (Laughter) --
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and it's populated with incredible fauna, flora.
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It's got water; it's got everything to be the perfect place.
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But we have a few problems.
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You may have heard of some of them.
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We have the oldest standing guerrilla in the world.
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It's been around for over 50 years,
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which means that in my lifetime,
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I have never lived one day of peace in my country.
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This guerrilla -- and the main group is the FARC guerrillas,
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Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia --
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they have financed their war by kidnapping, by extortion,
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by getting into the drug trade, by illegal mining.
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There has been terrorism. There have been random bombs.
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So it's not good. It's not really good.
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And if you look at the human cost of this war over 50 years,
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we have had more than 5.7 million displaced population.
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It's one of the biggest displaced populations in the world,
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and this conflict has cost over 220,000 lives.
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So it's a little bit like the Bolívar wars again.
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It's a lot of people who have died unnecessarily.
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We are now in the middle of peace talks,
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and we've been trying to help resolve this problem peacefully,
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and as part of that,
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we decided to try something completely lateral and different:
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Christmas lights.
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So Christmas lights, and you're saying,
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what the hell is this guy going to talk about?
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I am going to talk about gigantic trees
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that we put in nine strategic pathways in the jungle
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covered with Christmas lights.
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These trees helped us demobilize 331 guerrillas,
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roughly five percent of the guerrilla force at the time.
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These trees were lit up at night,
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and they had a sign beside them
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that said, "If Christmas can come to the jungle, you can come home.
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Demobilize.
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At Christmas, everything is possible."
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So how do we know these trees worked?
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Well, we got 331, which is okay,
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but we also know that not a lot of guerrillas saw them,
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but we know that a lot of guerrillas heard about them,
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and we know this
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because we are constantly talking to demobilized guerrillas.
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So let me take you back four years before the trees.
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Four years before the trees, we were approached by the government
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to help them come up with a communications strategy
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to get as many guerrillas as we could out of the jungle.
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The government had a military strategy,
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it had a legal strategy,
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it had a political strategy, but it said,
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"We don't really have a communications strategy,
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and it probably would be a good thing to have,"
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so we decided to immediately jump into this,
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because it is an opportunity to affect the outcome of the conflict
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with the things that we do, with the tools that we have.
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But we didn't know very much about it.
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We didn't understand in Colombia, if you live in the cities,
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you're very far away from where the war is actually happening,
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so you don't really understand it,
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and we asked the government to give us access
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to as many demobilized guerrillas as possible.
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And we talked to about 60 of them
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before we felt we fully understood the problem.
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We talked about -- they told us why they had joined the guerrillas,
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why the left the guerrillas, what their dreams were,
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what their frustrations were,
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and from those conversations came the underlying insight
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that has guided this whole campaign,
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which is that guerrillas are as much prisoners of their organizations
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as the people they hold hostage.
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And at the beginning, we were so touched by these stories,
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we were so amazed by these stories,
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that we thought that maybe the best way to talk to the guerrillas
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was to have them talk to themselves,
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so we recorded about a hundred different stories during the first year,
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and we put them on the radio and television
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so that the guerrillas in the jungle could hear stories, their stories,
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or stories similar to theirs,
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and when they heard them, they decided to go out.
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I want to tell you one of these stories.
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This person you see here is Giovanni Andres.
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Giovanni Andres is 25 when we took that picture.
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He had been seven years in the guerrilla, and he had demobilized very recently.
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His story is the following:
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He was recruited when he was 17,
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and sometime later, in his squadron, if you will,
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this beautiful girl was recruited, and they fell in love.
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Their conversations were about what their family was going to be like,
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what their kids' names would be,
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how their life would be when they left the guerrilla.
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But it turns out
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that love is very strictly forbidden in the lower ranks of the guerrilla,
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so their romance was discovered and they were separated.
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He was sent very far away, and she was left behind.
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She was very familiar with the territory,
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so one night, when she was on guard,
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she just left,
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and she went to the army, she demobilized,
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and she was one of the persons that we had the fortune to talk to,
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and we were really touched by this story,
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so we made a radio spot,
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and it turns out, by chance,
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that far away, many, many kilometers north,
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he heard her on the radio,
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and when he heard her on the radio, he said, "What am I doing here?
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She had the balls to get out. I need to do the same thing."
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And he did.
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He walked for two days and two nights,
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and he risked his life and he got out,
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and the only thing he wanted was to see her.
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The only thing that was in his mind was to see her.
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The story was, they did meet.
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I know you're wondering if they did meet.
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They did meet.
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She had been recruited when she was 15, and she left when she was 17,
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so there were a lot of other complications,
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but they did eventually meet.
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I don't know if they're together now, but I can find out. (Laughter)
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But what I can tell you is that our radio strategy was working.
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The problem is that it was working in the lower ranks of the guerrilla.
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It was not working with the commanders,
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the people that are more difficult to replace,
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because you can easily recruit but you can't get the older commanders.
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So we thought, well, we'll use the same strategy.
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We'll have commanders talking to commanders.
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And we even went as far as asking ex-commanders of the guerrilla
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to fly on helicopters with microphones
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telling the people that used to fight with them,
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"There is a better life out there,"
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"I'm doing good," "This is not worth it," etc.
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But, as you can all imagine, it was very easy to counteract,
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because what was the guerrilla going to say?
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"Yeah, right, if he doesn't do that, he's going to get killed."
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So it was easy, so we were suddenly left with nothing,
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because the guerrilla were spreading the word
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that all of those things are done
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because if they don't do it, they're in danger.
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And somebody, some brilliant person in our team,
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came back and said, "You know what I noticed?
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I noticed that around Christmastime,
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there have been peaks of demobilization
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since this war has started."
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And that was incredible,
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because that led us to think that we needed to talk to the human being
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and not to the soldier.
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We needed to step away from talking
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from government to army, from army to army,
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and we needed to talk about the universal values,
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and we needed to talk about humanity.
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And that was when the Christmas tree happened.
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This picture that I have here,
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you see this is the planning of the Christmas trees,
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and that man you see there with the three stars,
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he's Captain Juan Manuel Valdez.
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Captain Valdez was the first high-ranking official
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to give us the helicopters and the support we needed
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to put these Christmas trees up,
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and he said in that meeting something that I will never forget.
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He said, "I want to do this because being generous makes me stronger,
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makes my men feel stronger."
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And I get very emotional when I remember him
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because he was killed later in combat and we really miss him,
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but I wanted you all to see him, because he was really, really important.
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He gave us all the support to put up the first Christmas trees.
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What happened later is that the guerrillas who came out
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during the Christmas tree operation and all of that
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said, "That's really good, Christmas trees are really cool,
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but you know what? We really don't walk anymore.
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We use rivers."
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So rivers are the highways of the jungle,
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and this is something we learned,
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and most of the recruiting was being done in and around the river villages.
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So we went to these river villages,
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and we asked the people,
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and probably some of them were direct acquaintances of the guerrillas.
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We asked them, "Can you send guerrillas a message?"
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We collected over 6,000 messages.
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Some of them were notes saying, get out.
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Some of them were toys. Some of them were candy.
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Even people took off their jewelry, their little crosses and religious things,
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and put them in these floating balls that we sent down the rivers
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so that they could be picked up at night.
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And we sent thousands of these down the rivers,
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and then picked them up later if they weren't.
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But lots of them were picked up.
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This generated, on average, a demobilization every six hours,
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so this was incredible and it was about: Come home at Christmas.
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Then came the peace process,
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and when the peace process started,
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the whole mindset of the guerrilla changed.
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And it changed because
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it makes you think, "Well, if there's a peace process,
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this is probably going to be over.
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At some point I'm going to get out."
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And their fears completely changed,
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and their fears were not about, "Am I going to get killed?"
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Their fears were, "Am I going to be rejected?
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When I get out of this, am I going to be rejected?"
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So the past Christmas, what we did was we asked --
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we found 27 mothers of guerrillas,
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and we asked them to give us pictures of their children,
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when they only could recognize themselves, so as not to put their lives in danger,
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and we asked them to give the most motherly message you can get,
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which is, "Before you were a guerrilla, you were my child,
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so come home, I'm waiting for you."
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You can see the pictures here. I'll show you a couple.
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(Applause)
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Thank you.
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And these pictures were placed in many different places,
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and a lot of them came back,
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and it was really, really beautiful.
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And then we decided to work with society.
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So we did mothers around Christmastime.
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Now let's talk about the rest of the people.
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And you may be aware of this or not, but there was a World Cup this year,
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and Colombia played really well, and it was a unifying moment for Colombia.
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And what we did was tell the guerrillas,
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"Come, get out of the jungle. We're saving a place for you."
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So this was television, this was all different types of media saying,
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"We are saving a place for you."
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The soldier here in the commercial says,
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"I'm saving a place for you right here in this helicopter
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so that you can get out of this jungle and go enjoy the World Cup."
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Ex-football players, radio announcers,
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everybody was saving a place for the guerrilla.
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So since we started this work a little over eight years ago,
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17,000 guerrillas have demobilized.
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I do not -- (Applause)
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Thank you.
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I don't want to say in any way that it only has to do with what we do,
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but what I do know is that our work and the work that we do
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may have helped a lot of them start thinking about demobilization,
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and it may have helped a lot of them take the final decision.
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If that is true, advertising is still one of the most powerful tools of change
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that we have available.
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And I speak not only my behalf,
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but on behalf of all the colleagues I see here
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who work in advertising,
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and of all the team that has worked with me to do this,
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that if you want to change the world,
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or if you want to achieve peace, please call us.
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We'd love to help.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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