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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,
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and it's populated
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with incredible fauna, flora.
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It's got water, it's got everything
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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
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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
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in my country.
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This guerrilla, and the main group
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is the FARC guerrillas --
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Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia --
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and they have financed their war
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by kidnapping, by extortion,
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by getting into the drug trade,
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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.
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It's not really good,
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and if you look at the human cost
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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
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over 220,000 lives.
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So it's a little bit like
the Bolivarian 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
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resolve this problem peacefully,
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and as part of that,
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we decided to try something
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completely radical 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? Okay.
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I am going to talk about
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gigantic trees
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that we put in nine strategic pathways
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in the jungle
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covered with Christmas lights.
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These trees helped us demobilize
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331 guerrillas,
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roughly five percent
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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
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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
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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
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to effect the outcome of the conflict
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with the things that we do,
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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,
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if you live in the cities,
you're very far away
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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
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access 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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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
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the underlying insight
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that has guided this whole campaign,
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which is
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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
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to talk to the guerrillas was to have them
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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
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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 Joanni Andres.
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Joanni Andres is 25
when we took that picture.
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He had been seven years in the guerrilla,
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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,
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in his squadron, if you will,
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this beautiful girl was recruited,
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and they fell in love.
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Their conversations were about
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what their family was going to be like,
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what their kid's 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
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in the lower ranks of the guerrilla,
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so their romance was discovered
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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
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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,
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he said, "What am I doing here?
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She had the balls to get out.
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I need to do the same thing." 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. Okay?
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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,
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but I can find out. (Laughter)
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But what I can tell you is that
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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
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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
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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,
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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,
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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, because
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that led us to think that we needed
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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
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with the three stars,
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he's Captain Juan Manuel Valdez.
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Captain Valdez was
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the first high-ranking official to give us
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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
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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
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and we really miss him,
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but I'd want you all to see him,
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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
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the guerrillas who came out
during the Christmas tree operation
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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
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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,
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their little crosses and religious things,
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and put them in these floating balls
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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,
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a demobilization every six hours,
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so this was incredible and it was about
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coming 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
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was we asked, we found 27 mothers
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of guerrillas and we asked them
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to give us pictures of their children,
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ones they only could recognize themselves,
so as not to put their lives in danger,
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and we asked them to give
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the most motherly message you can get,
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which is, "Before you were 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
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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,
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but there was a World Cup this year,
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and Colombia played really well,
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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.
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We're saving a place for you."
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So this was television,
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this was all sorts 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
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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,
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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
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that it only has to do with what we do,
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but what I do know is that our work
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and the work that we do
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may have helped a lot of them
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start thinking about demobilization,
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and it may have helped a lot of them
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take the final decision.
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If that is true, advertising is still
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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,
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please call us. We'd love to help.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)