SIDE B

The Colossal success of Shakira is evident the world world over, but little is known about the other side of this multifaceted artist’s life and work.

By Mark Holston

It would be easy to believe that as Shakira’s Oral Fixation tour moves from country to country, the singer’s sole focus would be on conquering the global pop music landscape with one scintillating performance after another and solidifying her stature as one of the most successful and influential music artists of her generation. But that would be selling the Colombian dynamo far short. In her case, the booming album sales and record concert appearances have increasingly become the means to an end.
“On tour, when I spend most of the time aboard a plane and in hotels, it is sometimes hard to keep up with newspapers and TV news,” she admits. “But I do get a chance to look into a child’s eyes, and speak with the local people and understand what they are going through.”
For the past six years, her most passionate mission in life has been helping thousands of poor Colombian children whose lives have been torn apart by the country’s endless civil strife. For her outstanding accomplishments in the professional arena and her tireless work on behalf of her country’s most innocent victims of violence, Hispanic Magazine has selected her as this year’s Hispanic of the Year.
In 2001, Shakira used the highly symbolic title of her breakthrough album, Pies Descalzos (“Bare Feet”), to establish an identity for a new project, the Fundación Pies Descalzos. The nonprofit organization is dedicated to improving the lives of innocent young Colombians who, through tragic circumstances, have been forced to live at the margins of society. As the foundation’s honorary chairman, Shakira has provided high-profile leadership, financial support, and a style of hands-on personal involvement that has made her a frequent and energizing presence at the site of foundation projects.
“I do feel a huge satisfaction seeing all the progress [made by the foundation], and the betterment of the children, but I am also troubled knowing how much more there is to do,” she says of her experience working hands-on with the children. “ I am constantly thinking about the next steps, because these kids deserve our hard work to provide them with education. That is the key to their future.”
The needs the foundation is addressing are overwhelming. Citing the problem of displacement in Colombia as the second worst humanitarian tragedy in the world and the most dire in the Western Hemisphere, the Fundación Pies Descalzos reports that over 2 million Colombians have been forcibly displaced because of the civil war; that as many as 800,000 children in the country have been the victims of violence and forced from their homes; that 6,000 children have been killed or crippled by land mines; and that the death of close to 5,000 children a year is the result of rampant violence.
Exacerbating the situation is the sad fact that many of the children have also been orphaned. The plight of Colombia’s displaced is a nightmarish reality. They arrive by the countless dozens every day to the country’s largest cities, seeking refuge from the violence that ravages vast rural areas where fighting rages between left-wing guerrilla groups, paramilitary gangs funded by large landowners and government forces. The cities, unfortunately, provide little in the way of support for the newcomers, and they are forced to survive under the most trying circumstances, typically in the poorest barrios with the least services and fewest opportunities.
The foundation began operations with the firm belief that the psycho-social traumas associated with forced displacement are reduced when children have the opportunity to attend school and have their basic daily nutritional needs provided. The organization’s first school was inaugurated in 2003 in the small Pacific coast city of Quibdó, where the need was particularly compelling: Officials believe that up to 35 percent of the city’s population has been forced to abandon their homes. Fundación Pies Descalzos’ efforts there have provided benefits on several levels, from making daily schooling possible for over 600 children to providing steady employment for two-dozen teachers. Foundation officials estimate that the benefit of the program ripples out to an expanded community of more than 3,000.
The following year, in Shakira’s home city of Barranquilla, two schools, Escuela Las Américas and Escuela Siete de Abril, were built, staffed and equipped. These two institutions serve close to 1,000 children in two neighborhoods that have been particularly hard-hit by displacement and the accompanying ravages of homelessness and poverty. In Bogotá, which attracts thousands of the displaced every year, the foundation began work in 2005 in the barrio of Soacha, which, according to the Colombian Social Welfare Network, has one of the country’s highest rates of arrivals of displaced people. At the Gabriel García Márquez School and the El Minuto School, approximately 1,000 of the newly arrived children are finding a chance to start their lives over with thoughtful instruction, counseling and proper nutrition.
As impressive as the foundation’s activities have been to date, they represent just a small percentage of what needs to be accomplished if the problem is to be effectively addressed on a nationwide level. According to their own statistics, Fundación Pies Descalzos’ efforts have reached less than 5 percent of all Colombian children in need of their services. And the need is only getting greater: With fully 50 percent of all displaced Colombians being 15 years of age or younger, the number of new victims is increasing at a rate of close to 60,000 a year. And, as history has documented in recent decades, a cure for Colombia’s endemic violence has proven difficult to find.

Born Shakira Mebarak Ripoll in 1978 on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, the little girl who would grow up to become one of the biggest pop music sensations of her era came of age after the country’s prolonged period of political chaos known as La Violencia kept a bloody stranglehold on the nation from 1948 to 1960. As she developed into a talented young artist, writing and performing her first music, the region was again engulfed in civil strife when leftist rebel groups the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces) and the ELN (National Liberation Army) began to exert control over vast reaches of the country. Their brutal tactics, combined with the efforts of right-wing private armies and government military forces to defeat them, provoked the ongoing dislocation of hundreds of thousands of Colombians that has become an ongoing national catastrophe.
“I’ve seen firsthand the problems caused by the violence,” she says of her experience growing up in Colombia. “That has led me to take a firm position that a solution must be reached in a peaceful way. I don’t think any violent solution is justifiable.”
While Fundación Pies Descalzos grows and provides much needed assistance to thousands of young Colombians who would face a stark future without its presence in their lives, it is also, through Shakira’s efforts, bringing the story of Colombia’s plight to an international audience. Her popularity in Spain, for example, recently produced $423,000 in contributions from residents of Madrid, $30,000 from the Spanish capital’s Hard Rock Cafe, and another $52,000 from supporters on Gran Canaria, in Spain’s Canary Islands. These funds will be used to construct a new school in the town of Corregimiento La Playa, but close to another $1 million is needed to complete the project. (The foundation’s website (www.fundacionpiesdescalzos.com)solicits a broad participation in the effort, asking potential supporters to consider just a $30 contribution.)
Shakira has enlisted some talented and influential assistance to make sure the foundation reaches its fundraising and operational goals. Serving as executive director is María Emma Mejía, a former foreign minister and minister of education in Colombia in the late 1990s and a former candidate for vice president. She has also served as a peace negotiator in ongoing discussions with the FARC and is currently involved in a process that is working to bring the ELN back into civil society. Patricia Sierra, a psychologist and university professor who specializes in social psychology, has brought to the foundation her extensive experience in working on programs for infant and juvenile populations in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America.
While the multi-Grammy winning singer and composer’s career maintains a meteoric pace, the reality on the ground in Colombia is that achieving measurable success in combating the country’s endless cycle of violence comes at a painfully slow rate. Yet Shakira and her supporters know that education is the cornerstone of this effort. “I think it all begins with education, which is what we here at the foundation are trying to tackle.” Says Maria Emma Mejia, explaining, “I think if we have an educated youth, rich and poor, with equal opportunities then things will be different.”
Bringing her fight to a broader audience, Shakira will be working with Maná, Juanes and other Latin American artists to launch a foundation called América Latina en Acción Solidaria, or ALAS, this December in Panama. Inspired by the work of Live 8 in combating poverty in Africa, the artists spearheading the foundation hope it will address some of the major problems afflicting children throughout Latin America. And as an ambassador to UNICEF, Shakira will be in El Salvador speaking with the Maras, the violent gangs who have a vile reputation of enlisting children to fight.
It’s a long road to travel, but Shakira and the Fundación Pies Descalzos are banking on bringing needed change, one child at a time.