REGIONAL AUDIENCE ON ARAUCA ON STATE CRIMES

Sent by Arauca human rights organizations
Bulletin #84
Breaking the gag
An opinion alternative
 
[Translated by Erick Gasca, La Chiva], a CSN translator
 
Department of Arauca, Colombia.  September 25, 2007
 
FIRST REGIONAL AUDIENCE OF THE COLOMBIAN CONGRESS HUMAN RIGHTS COMISSION ABOUT VICTIMS OF STATE CRIMES AND THE PARAMILITARY DIRTY WAR
 
 
Yet again, the Araucan people, after insisting several times, call to have in the region the first hearing about paramilitaries’ victims, what we and other regions have called victims of state crimes because we have always maintain the position and report that the dirty paramilitary war is the government’ policy which historically has been known as state terrorism. It is executed by several antidemocratic ultra-right governments for the oligarchies allied with the empire.  The hearing will take place on September 27 in Saravena, an emblematic town for its high level of organizational and also one of the most repressed by the “democratic security” policies. We hope to contribute with this effort to build a real national movement of victims of state crimes, to make public the horrendous moment of paramilitary imposition in the region, under the indulgence and shameless complicity of the Colombian Armed Forces, the multinational oilfield companies, the Pastrana and Uribe governments, and the local government imposed by “Parapolitics”, which left the horrifying aftermath of more than seven hundred civilian victims, among others, peasants, indigenous people, union workers, journalists, politicians and social leaders; a silent genocide with impunity.
 
The hidden truth behind the legalization process of state terrorism with its paramilitary death squads, in which Uribe’s government has insisted so much, must be unmasked. Paramilitary leaders have been confessing to horrifying numbers of people murdered, hundreds, thousands, and the truth coming to be more than three million victims. A half-truth with the impunity benefits from the “law of justice and peace”, for committing those abominable genocides they will only get a three or four years sentence in a five star jail and as dessert they will get as a prize the legalization of their fortunes, products of crime and drug trafficking. What they will never confess is: the reasons for that atrocious genocide and the economic and political interests behind the crimes, the state’s intellectual participation with the different governments and the top rank military officials, the participation of political leaders, livestock farmers, industrials, business people, landowners and multinational corporations. This part of the great truth is the criminals’ ace up one’s sleeve to blackmail and attain their legalization objective and also to still maintain their criminal structures, their great business of drug trafficking and the political manipulation of governments and institutions. In other words, state terrorism covered up for paramilitary gangs, to eliminate any vestige of opposition to the multinationals’ plundering, to the economic and anti-social policies imposed by the narco-oligarchy and the imperialist power of the US.

 
The atrocious genocide committed in Arauca during the last two years of Pastrana’s government and during the whole of Uribe Velez’s government under the paramilitary mask, was not committed because we are ugly or beautiful people. The truth is that Arauca has huge oil reserves under indigenous peoples’ and peasants’ land. It has the second greatest oil exploitation complex (Caño Limón) that represents a great deal for the government in power, for the oligarchic national companies with the multinational corporations. It has now projected a mega-road project, “path of liberators” or “marginal de la selva”. Also, for the United States, it represents a geo-strategic territory to install military bases to monitor a possible intervention against the Bolivarian revolutionary process in Venezuela. On the other hand, the socially organized Araucan people have been characterized always for opposing oil exploration. They mobilized persistently for the defense of the indigenous peoples’ territories and against oil exploration in the territory of the Uwa community. Who were those most interested in eliminating that opposition? The massacres and displacements had as an objective to clean the territory to be given to multinational corporations and their interests, to annihilate social organizations so that everything will remain unpunished. In Arauca, state crimes took place and still take place, where the national government, its military forces, the regional and local governments of Para-politics took and take part. We hope that the regional hearings of victims bring from anonymity this great truth and that justice prevails.

 
BREAKING THE GAG FOR PEOPLE’S RIGHTS, MAY WE GIVE OUR OPINION AND NOT BE SHUT UP!
















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