Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice by Abby Reyes

In 1999, Ms. Reyes was the twenty-five year old girlfriend of a young man named Terence Unity Freitas. Both of them had been involved in assisting indigenous communities counter threats to their homelands imposed by national and corporate interests, Abby in the Philippines and Terence among the U’wa people in Colombia near the Venezuelan border. Starting a life together, living in Brooklyn, in February 1999, Terence took a trip to Colombia along with two other activists, older indigenous women named Ingrid Washinawatok (Menominee) and Lahe’ena’e (Hawaiian). Their work was to help the U’wa block an oil drilling planned by the Occidental Petroleum Company. After spending a couple of weeks in Colombia and completing their visit, as they traveled to the airport, the three were kidnapped by Colombian guerrilla forces called FARC. A few days later the three were murdered and their bodies discovered by a Venezuelan farmer.

I read this book because Terence’s mother, Julie Freitas, is a member of my church. I had heard her story of her son’s kidnapping and murder. Then, a few weeks ago, she announced that this book had been published. I read it to learn more of the story and to be better able to support Julie. Julie appears throughout the book as Abby continues to turn to Julie for sympathy and guidance, and as the two of them navigate the legal, political, and emotional aftermath of the event.

The book, primarily, though, is a personal memoir. This is Abby’s story. It begins with her own interest and education in supporting the rights of indigenous persons and preserving the earth. She meets Terence in the Bay Area where he is already doing work with the U’wa. They share a few years together in their early twenties. They wonder whether they will be able to walk together through the distant and sometimes dangerous places their passions and work will take them, and are beginning to answer that they could conceive of that kind of life together. Julie refers to Abby as Terence’s “fiancee” but though marriage may have been their intention it doesn’t seem to have been formalized before Terence took his fatal trip.

In the years following the murders, Truth Demands becomes a grief journal, and a trauma-recovery journal. Abby asks deep questions of how to sustain justice work against powerful forces, how to persist amid the slow pace of change, and how to maintain personal health amid the sometimes dangerous but always exhausting work required. She speaks of a mystical approach to healing, through metaphor, dreams, native rituals, and practices from Buddhism. Again and again she returns to the earth, most of the twenty chapters are named for bodies of water. And she makes connections with numerous friends, colleagues, and wisdom voices, including Ram Dass, Joanna Macy, and others less well known.

As Abby slowly healed she carried these fragmented stories into the rest of her life. She goes to law school, becomes a professor, marries, has children. The impetus to write the book now, and the title of the book, came from a call from the Colombian Truth and Recognition Chamber, to examine the case, and others like it, and an invitation to Abby, also representing Julie, to participate in a process that would allow the truth to be named and the perpetrators to make amends in a way meaningful to the survivors and perhaps create a path for them to re-engage in society. Abby considers the phrase “Truth Demands” in two ways. What truth do those who survived the violent acts of others demand to know to set their hearts at rest? And what does truth itself demand of all of us as we create a better way forward?