Peace city.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Briefly Noted - Brief article - Book review

In 1997, battered by their country's civil war, approximately 1,500 campesinos from San Jose, Colombia, established a zone they called the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado. Henceforth, no armed groups would be welcome in their territory, be they leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, or soldiers and police.

In The Power of Staying Put, a monograph published by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Juan Masullo Jimenez notes that 210 community members were assassinated in the ensuing years. But the villagers dug in, grew stronger, recovered a lot of the land they'd...