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Hello, this is Theo Roncken from Cochabamba, Bolivia. I've been participating in a session on protective accompaniment. This was very useful in several ways, so the following is just one example.

While reading the suggestions and debates of the session, I realized that my own work  in Bolivia is pretty much focused on finding ways to strengthen LOCAL capacity to deal with violence and to build up a pro-active protective presence, while most of the contributions dealt with questions around INTERNATIONAL (external) protective presence. This difference in focus was quite revealing to me, as I had never really thought of local and external resources as being dealt with so separately.

My new awareness has helped me since then in better conceptualizing these two as complementary "spaces" that need to be harmonized. In last August the Rimarikuna Collective in Cochabamba, of which I'm a participant, organized a monitoring activity on violence around a Recall Referendum in Bolivia. We were quite succesful in creating, as a small pilot experience, new openings for direct (international) involvement in the processing and distribution of information about the events as they were happening.

Some of the output of that experience can be found at: http://rimarikuna.blogspot.com (in Spanish) and at: http://rimarikunaenglish.blogspot.com. If you're interested in our final report, (for the momento in Spanish only), please contact us at: rimarikuna [at] gmail [dot] com

Thanks to New Tactics for creating this opportunity to connect. I hope to participate again in the near future. 

Warm greetings to all,

Theo Roncken, Acción Andina - Bolivia