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The Ethical Collapse of Justice
THE ETHICAL COLLAPSE OF “JUSTICE”
HAS REACHED THE “INFORMATION” MEDIA
A new attack against our Peace Community is trying to destroy our ethical endowment in the eyes of national and international public opinion. The attack uses methods that are inconceivably perverted and mean. It took place last May 28, 2009 at 6:10 a.m., when President Uribe’s ex-Minister of Interior and Justice, FERNANDO LONDOÑO HOYOS, interviewed the ex guerilla commander alias “SAMIR” on his radio program “The Hour of Truth”, broadcast by Radio Super. “SAMIR” commanded the Otoniel Alvarez Company of the FARC’s 5th front. He had turned himself in to the Army last November 2008.
That interview thoroughly resembled a script agreed-upon beforehand...read the whole article
http://www.colombiasupport.net/news/2009/06/EthicalCollapse.doc
Colombia Support Network
P.O. Box 1505
Madison, WI 53701-1505
phone: (608) 257-8753
fax: (608) 255-6621
e-mail: csn@igc.org
http://www.colombiasupport.net
COLOMBIA SUPPORT NETWORK STATEMENT ON PRESIDENT URIBE=?ISO-8859-1?B?uQ==?=S VISIT TO WASHINGTON
Tomorrow, June 29, President Alvaro Uribe Velez of Colombia is scheduled to meet with President Obama in Washington. Several important issues between Colombia and the United States should be on the table for discussion.
Last week the Colombia Support Network (CSN) delivered through a reliable friend of the President’s several documents and a set of observations and recommendations about the policies of the United States toward Colombia.
Most of these spring from the review of Colombia policy undertaken at our CSN annual national meeting on May 29-31 in Madison. The recommendations we made include the following:
1. The U.S. government should oppose the proposed Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Colombia until the following issues have been addressed:
a) The current draft will promote chaos in the Colombian countryside. In a country where 4.5 million people are internally displaced (nearly 10% of Colombia’s population and more than any other country except Sudan/Darfur),the proposed duty-free entry of subsidized food crops from the United States will undermine small-scale agriculture in Colombia, resulting in still more people being displaced from their lands. The FTA would promote large-scale African palm cultivation, benefiting large landowners and paramilitaries linked to drug-trafficking, who are the only ones with the extensive lands and monetary resources needed to undertake African palm production, which requires heavy capital investment and several years’ wait to have producing palm trees. The displacement of tens of thousands more persons would result in instability, itself contrary to the goal of United States foreign policy to promote “stability” in other countries.
b) Contrary to what President Uribe has said, labor union leaders and organizers in Colombia continue to be killed and threatened on a broad scale, greater than in any other country in the world. Before the United States government approves a bilateral trade agreement with Colombia these murders and threats need to be addressed and the Colombian government needs to take effective measures to end these assaults on unions.
c) President Uribe and his cabinet ministers have shown indifference to ecological concerns. The FTA should not be approved without incorporating substantial commitments by both countries to establish strong environmental protections in areas threatened by development projects, particularly the Amazon rainforest areas of Colombia. An end to the spraying of coca crops (and farmers’ food crops) with strengthened glyphosate (Round-up Ultra), or fumigation, should be a United States commitment. This relic of the failed “War on Drugs” has destroyed much of campesino agriculture, as food crops have been decimated by the fumigation.
d) The intellectual property provisions of the FTA must recognize Colombian indigenous peoples’ right to use their traditional medicinal remedies, without having to pay royalties to United States pharmaceutical companies for patents issued in the United States for these processes and the plants they involve. This protection from U.S. patents infringing upon these historical practices should be a fundamental part of any FTA between the United States and Colombia.
2. President Obama should consider carefully the effects of United States military assistance to Colombia, which has exceeded 5 billion dollars over the last decade. We submitted for President Obama’s consideration the CSN report detailing Colombian military forces’ abuses of the civilian population since September of 2005, which details hundreds of incidents of abuse, including murders, disappearances, collaboration with illegal paramilitaries, and the “false positives” kidnapping and killing of youths falsely presented later as “guerrillas killed in combat”—with information concerning the rewards for these atrocities established by Colombia’s Ministry of National Defense. Military assistance to Colombia should be halted unless and until these abuses, including military threats to local community organizations such as the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, end.
3. The United States government should take into account the political corruption surrounding President Uribe and his government. As Colombian newspapers have revealed in the past two days, the bribing of members of the Colombian Congress to vote for a Constitutional change to allow President Uribe a second term, carried out by close associates of Mr. Uribe, involved more than 30 Congressmen who accepted nominations to notary public posts and to diplomatic posts in return for, or as a reward for, their promise to vote for the change Uribe sought. This on top of the warrantless wiretapping of phone conversations and email communications of members of the Colombian Supreme Court and of leaders of opposition political parties which the Uribe Administration carried out. Our United States government should maintain high ethical standards, not reward those who, like Alvaro Uribe Velez, use their political office for personal gain and use the perquisites of their office illegally to consolidate and extend their own power.
4. Finally, we believe President Obama should take into account the manner in which President Uribe’s government has opened the door to foreign investment in a way which undermines the sovereignty and prosperity of the Colombian people. As journalist Garry Leech pointed out in an eye-opening presentation at the CSN national meeting, President Uribe has, in league with International Monetary Fund (IMF) directives, made access to his country’s natural resources very cheap and has welcomed foreign investment on extremely preferential terms. This will lead to a perception of inequality and resentment, sowing the seeds for a reaction which will give rise to the “instability” which United States foreign policy supposedly seeks to avoid.
We hope these concerns will be reflected in the policies President Obama and the United States Congress adopt toward Colombia in the days and months to come.
John I. Laun, President of CSN, on behalf of the CSN Board of Directors and Membership
Colombia Support Network
P.O. Box 1505
Madison, WI 53701-1505
phone: (608) 257-8753
fax: (608) 255-6621
e-mail: csn@igc.org
http://www.colombiasupport.net
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The United Nations Office of Human RightsConcerned about illegal interceptions
Bogotá D.C. June 16th, 2009
( Translated by Emily Hansen, a CSN volunteer translator )
The Colombian Office of the United Nations High Commission of Human Rights expresses its profound worry regarding interceptions of illegal communications and tracking realized by intelligence organizations, such as the Administrative Department of Security (DAS), against judges, human rights defenders, political party representatives and journalists, among others.
The Office reminds that secret communication is a constitutionally recognized individual right that guarantees an inviolable space of liberty and privacy. The interception of communications is only acceptable under exceptional circumstances with a prior judicial order and following all formalities established by law. Additionally, the right to personal and familiar privacy, and the right to protecting ones reputation, have also been violated.
In various reports regarding Colombia, the High Commission has recommended that the State strengthen its investigations and disciplinary control in order to improve the protection of human rights defenders, including cases of stigmatization of their work. Additionally, the Commission has recommended that a revision of the State’s intelligence archives be carried out with the purpose of examining the truthfulness and impartiality of the information contained in the archives, and with the goal of excluding from these archives erroneous or biased data.
The illegality of the interceptions additionally affects the rights of all people to know, update, and rectify information collected in public and private databases and archives. The Office is also worried about illegitimate uses of information collected through illegal interceptions and the possible grave consequences for the affected persons. Furthermore, the public perception that illegal interceptions exist can cause self-censorship in the exercise of liberty of expression and communication for fear of repercussions.
The Office believes that the new intelligence law, with its focus on guaranteeing the rights of and demand for strict respect for political and judicial controls, constitutes an appropriate legal step in preventing similar situations. Therefore, the Office suggests a rapid implementation of the law along with pertinent changes in the Administrative Department of Security (DAS).
The Office recognizes the diligent way in which Colombia’s Legal and Attorney Generals have advanced the investigations regarding these acts and hopes that they will permit an appropriate judgment and sanction of those responsible.
The Office considers the Colombian Government’s invitation to various experts, including the Special Representative of the Secretary General regarding the situation of the human rights defenders, and the Special Communicator regarding the independence of judges regarding the independence of judgers and lawyers, as confirmation that the commencement of international scrutiny contributes to improved protection of human rights and individual liberties of the citizens.
Colombia Support Network
P.O. Box 1505
Madison, WI 53701-1505
phone: (608) 257-8753
fax: (608) 255-6621
e-mail: csn@igc.org
http://www.colombiasupport.net
Uribe is Destroying Democracy to be Reelected
(Translated by Steve Cagan, a CSN volunteer translator)
Send by RECALCA*
Warning to the International Community:
We are sending an alert to the international Community to the governments and parliaments of the world, to the labor federations, social movements and human rights organizations, about the very serious situation which we are suffering in Colombia on account of the systematic sharpening of the attacks of the Alvaro Uribe Velez government against legitimate institutions in the country that raise questions and promote alternatives to his policies by democratic and peaceful paths.
Multiple facts make this dramatic situation evident:
- The ambushing of the judicial arm, whose members have been systematically watched, lied about and lost their recognition, which has forced the presence of a special rapporteur of the United Nations for judicial independence and another for the so-called extrajudicial executions, which are an broadly documented crime by the State.
- The persecution of social leaders, irresponsibly and without proof accusing them of being members of armed groups in Colombia, as they just did during their visit to Canada, threatening to have them arrested with the help of other governments.
- The persecution of distinguished opposition political leaders, like Jorge Enrique Robledo, Piedad Cordoba, Wilson Borja, Gloria Ines Ramirez and Jaime Caicedo, against whom the Inspector General’s Office—an institution submitted to the interests of the President—has opened disciplinary actions, based on supposed evidence of links with illegal groups, in one more act of manipulation of the justice system to persecute serious, respected and legitimate political opponents and close down democratic space through the path of criminalizing them.
- The threat of calling a Constituent Assembly to close down the Congress of the Republic if it doesn’t approve the referendum allowing him to be reelected.
- The persecution of important and recognized indigenous leaders, Like Feliciano Valencia, Aida Quilque and Daniel Pinacue, against whom arrest warrants have been issues, ignoring the indigenous jurisdiction clearly established in the National Constitution.
- The growth of attacks upon and murders of leaders of workers’ confederations, for which the ILO has again included Colombia in the watch list of the commission on labor standards while the International Trade Union Confederation has again confirmed that of the 76 unionists murdered in 2008, more than half were in Colombia.
- The scandals that surround the government every day are multiplying. The connection of high functionaries of the government with paramilitary groups, tapping the telephones of members of the courts and of the opposition as part of a systematic program of surveillance against them, extrajudicial executions and pressure on Congress to approve reelection, among other acts.
In recent days, this situation has become more serious, and Uribe Velez has tried, with numerous foreign trips and making efforts to sign harmful treaties, to put a smoke screen in front of international public opinion, looking for support at the cost of losing our national patrimony, accepting all kinds of onerous conditions and distracting attention from the realities of his government, accusing anyone who opposes him of being complicit in terrorist acts, which has been broadly condemned by the participants in the indigenous and social movements and the democratic left, which the government stigmatized and persecutes.
We call on all the governments and peoples of the world to be in solidarity with the Colombian people who are suffering the results of 7 years of attacks on democracy by Alvaro Uribe Velez. Government measures, directed at closing democratic spaces, centralizing power in the President and in executive organs and the public security forces, with evident links to narco-trafficking and the paramilitaries, are increasing in the measure of the growing encirclement of accusations, investigations and evidence against the illegal and criminal actions of the government.
The government of President Alvaro Uribe Velez is trying to asphyxiate the already limited constitutional liberties, dismantle individual and collective civil rights, persecute and silence every form of democratic opposition and at the same time hand over the wealth and sovereignty of the country in exchange for obtaining international support that will allow it to overcome its evident illegitimacy. At this moment, Colombian society and democracy confront a great threat that comes from their government.
We demand of heads of states and parliaments of those countries that are negotiating or are in the process of ratifying and Free Trade Agreement with the Colombian government, that they stop those accords, which will deepen the siltation of poverty, displacement and violence in Colombia, and will give President Uribe the support he is looking for to consolidate his authoritarian project.
*RECALCA brings together 50 of the most important social and labor organizations in the country, to coordinate education, outreach and mobilization strategies in the face of the free Trade Agreement that the national government is pushing.
Colombia Support Network
P.O. Box 1505
Madison, WI 53701-1505
phone: (608) 257-8753
fax: (608) 255-6621
e-mail: csn@igc.org
http://www.colombiasupport.net
14 of every 100 people working in Colombia are children
(Translated by Emily Hansen, a CSN volunteer translator)
-Today is the day to say No to Child Labor-
The fact that 14.3% of the employed population is under the age of 17 is, or should be, an embarrassment to any country. This is the child labor rate in Colombia, where, according to the latest statistics of DANE*, 1,628,300 children are permanently employed; clear evidence of a grave deficit in decent work, and of the increasing poverty rate and decreasing income that the Colombian families are suffering, especially in rural areas.
The unemployment of parents or their unstable working conditions, the limited access educational, health, food or recreational programs, resulting in the insecurity in the neighborhoods and the poverty produced by the unequal distribution of national wealth, continue to be the principle causes of child labor in Colombia. Children are being forced to go out and work to add to their family’s income.
The DANE informs us that 786,567 children between the ages of 5 and 17 hold various jobs, 841,733 children work 15 or more hours per week in their homes. These numbers together total 1,628,300, which constitutes a 14.3% child labor rate.
36.4% of child laborers are engaged in agricultural work. Following agriculture as the next most common child employer is the trade industry with 30.4%. Regarding salary, 37.6% of child laborers do not receive pay, and 28% receive only one-quarter of the minimum wage. 28.1% of child laborers earn a wage that falls between one-quarter of minimum wage, and the minimum wage itself, and only 5.8% earn more than the minimum wage.
In addition to the lower female child labor rate (4.2% as compared with 9.4% of boys), there are broad differences in the types and conditions of the work. For example, of the total number of children who work at home more than 15 hours per week, 77% are female. Additionally, 53% of young girls participate as family workers without pay in the trade sector.
Regarding the rural-urban relationship, while the child labor rate in the country was 10.9%, the rate in the cities was 5.4%, despite the 2% drop from 2005.
Situation in Antioquia and Medellin
Taking into account the cutoff age decided upon by the presidential Agency for Social Action, the situation of child labor in Antioquia is very worrying. Antioquia, especially including its rural areas, is the province that presents the worst statistics, where 24,500 children work. The municipalities of Anori and Santa Fe de Antioquia have the highest rates of agricultural child labor, while Apartado, in the Uraba zone, has the lowest rate. The situation in Apartado is explained by the high levels of agricultural formalization in this area, and the presence of the union that prohibits, by unanimous decree, child labor in the banana plantations.
In Medellin, and the Metropolitan Area, according to DANE’s 2007 statistics, there are 707,343 children between the ages of 5 and 17, of which 60,023 are child laborers in the industrial, trade and confections and textiles sectors, or work more than 15 hours per week in their homes. Of these child laborers, 40% do not go to school.
Children in the war
Forced recruitment is considered one of the worst forms of child labor, according to the 182nd Convention of the International Workers Organization. In Colombia, child conscription is one of the two humanitarian indicators that, instead of decreasing, is actually increasing. The other is the use of landmines.
According to the Attorney of the International Court of Children Affected by War and Poverty, at the beginning of 2008, between 11,000 and 14,000 children are engaging in armed conflict in Colombia. One in every four soldiers was a child.
However, the numbers are not clear, as the paramilitaries did not turn over all of the children in their ranks during the demobilizations. Moreover, the resurge of urban bands and cells has made it possible that the numbers are even higher – a prospect which is universally condemned by national and international human rights organizations.
One of the primary findings of studies and experts is that child conscription is highest among poor children as is mainly a rural phenomenon. In the country, poverty is the direct track to forced child recruitment. The indigenous and African-descended populations who inhabit the districts that are farther removed from the urban centers are particularly vulnerable. Examples of these zones are Choco, Antioquia, Cordoba, Guaviare, Putumayo, Santander, Cundinamarca, Valle de Cauca and Meta. These zones have the highest permanent averages of child labor.
According to the MAPP-OEA, these recruitments are especially prevalent in the agro-industrial zone of Uraba, some communities in Medellin, and various parts of the provinces of Cesar and Magdalena. These zones are the territories of highest risk and dispute regarding the new crime organizations.
However, the phenomenon is tending to become more urban, due to the new emerging crime organizations that are disputing areas under their control, especially the drug trafficking business.
The solutions to child labor
It is imperative that public policies and child labor eradication programs that are more extensive than the prohibition, control, access and subsidies of temporary programs be designed, as current temporary measures are weak solutions to a structural problem.
The coming together of the governmental and civil society agendas should bring to fruition social politics that will end the situation of vulnerability when families agree to realize the conditions necessary for a dignified life. For example, there should be a basic set of rights, and a basic income that would provide for necessities such as food, health and education. Adults should enjoy decent working conditions, and measures of social responsibility that would guarantee their livelihoods and rights, and fundamental child development should be fostered.
In the city of Medellin the effort of the municipal government to design and develop programs of rapprochement, awareness, recognition and attention to the impoverished families. From this program, positive effects on those family groups that receive a monetary subsidy that is mainly used to cover health and family costs can be seen. These programs have helped children stay in school, and have minimized their participation in labor activities. However, the result is insufficient to completely eradicate child labor.
*(DANE : Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadistica). The Colombian Government’s official statistics administration
Colombia Support Network
P.O. Box 1505
Madison, WI 53701-1505
phone: (608) 257-8753
fax: (608) 255-6621
e-mail: csn@igc.org
http://www.colombiasupport.net
Unions Protection: CUT's Proposal to the Minister of Interior
CUT's [1] Proposal to the Minister of Interior
(Translated by Emily Hansen, a CSN volunteer translator)
Bogotá, May 27th, 2009
Dr. Fabio Valencia Cossio
Ministry of the Interior and of Justice
Rafael Bustamante
Human Rights Director
Ministry of the Interior and of Justice
Bogotá D.C.
Cordial greetings,
The situation of violence against the unionist movement continues, and becomes more defined with its broad range of human rights violations that include homicides, arbitrary detentions, tortures, forced disappearances, and threats. The registered human rights violations against the unionists in 2008 numbered 547, which constitutes a 20% increase over the 441 violations registered in 2007. The number of homicides rose from 39 in 2007 to 49 in 2008.
Colombia is currently the leading country in the world in terms of union members assassinations. Since 1986, 2712 directors and affiliated unionists have been assassinated, with an impunity record of 95.6%. There is a 100% impunity rate for the 193 disappearances.
Concerning threats, regardless of the promises on the part of the Colombia government of better protection of the unionist movement, in 2008, the unionists received 251 death threats, which constitutes a 97.1% increase over the previous year.
These quantitative references are a simple reflection of the dramatic and growing situation of human rights violations against the unionists that now demands that the State fulfill its constitutional obligation to guarantee fundamental rights, such as the right to unionists’ freedoms who are now being threatened and to enjoy a dignified and respected life.
The existence of systematic anti-union violence and the pressure by the unions forced the government to establish a Unions Protection Program in 1997 run by the State that protected the constitutional rights of the unions. This program made possible the existence of the following laws:
Article 6 of Law 199 of 1995, Order 372 of 1996, Law 418 of 1997, extended by Law 549 of 1999 and the judicial framework that establishes the mechanisms of protection of the population involved international and internal conflicts, specifically of the unions when they seek to prevent the physical elimination of their leaders and defend the rights of association, and the demands of the workers of the framework of implicit economic, social and cultural rights in the universal declaration of human rights, gave life to the unions protection program headed by the Ministry of the Interior and Justice and that facilitated the creation of CRER[2] , a program that was previously extended to the most diverse victimized populations. This protection program suggests an agreement between the victimized organizations and the national government through international compromises with the ONU[3] , the CIDH[4] and the OIT[5] . As a result, any intervention that modifies the unions program should be in accordance with the previous discussion the CUT – the organization which has suffered 85% of the unions human rights violations in 2008, and is the most victimized union organization, should be consulted.
The government has unilaterally modified the conditions of protection for the social and union leaders. Such is the case with the legal changes under which the DAS[6] , which once operated the transportation and escort security program, would no longer be able to offer this service. These changes enacted by the government also caused the hiring of escort services to be marginalized and given over to the private vigilance company VISE[7] , a process which is gradually being applied to other parts of the program. We have publicly reiterated that we reject these changes because it presents the rupture of the constitutional responsibility that the Colombian government has in guaranteeing the protection of the unions and their leaders. Moreover, it begins a process of marginalization of the work and privatization of the functions of the State, and augments the level of risk in a country in which its internal conflict is maintained, and causes conditions of extreme vulnerability for the civil population. Due to the above considerations, we propose that the government begins a process of negotiation and compromise that seeks to define alternatives that are in agreement with the conditions that gave rise to the unions program, and that acknowledges a range of definitions of victimized organizations, such as we have proposed in the past to the International Commission of Human Rights on March 23, 2009 in Washington.
We hereby make official our proposal and make explicit the fundamental criterion that, in our opinion, should include a mechanism that integrally responds to our protection needs.
PROPOSAL
1. A government responsible for guaranteeing the protection of the unionist movement
2. The implementation of the union protection program through the Ministry of Interior and of the CRER Union, and through an inter-institutional agreement with the National Police that would create an office that would administer the lending of security services.
3. The hiring of escort personnel that are currently providing their services to those protected by the union program, with an indefinite contract with salary and benefit guarantees appropriate for the responsibility of the escort service.
4. The new mechanism should make it possible for the union leaders and their organizations to suggest people they trust to be hired as escorts, assuming they fulfill the legal requirements.
5. The agreement of the new mechanism and methods that the union protection program assumes should the approved by the following observers: la Procuraduria, the Public Defense and the following international organizations: ONU, CIDH and OIT
After working on and discussing our proposal, we solicit an audience with the Minister of the Interior and Justice, and Dr. Fabio Valencia Cossio, and we hereby put forward the definition of a concerted effort that gives solution to this delicate situation.
Respectfully,
TARCISIO MORA GODOY, President CUT
DOMINGO TOVAR ARRIETA, General Secretary
LUIS ALBERTO VANEGAS, Director Human Rights
BORIS MONTES DE OCA, Director Labor Relations
[1] CUT: Central Unitaria de Trabajadores: Central Workers Union
[2] Comision de Reconciliacion y Reparacion: Reconciliation and Reparations Commision
[3] Organizacion de las Naciones Unidas: The United Nations
[4] Comision Interamericana de Derechos Humanos: The International Human Rights Commission.
[5] Organization Internacional de Trabajo: International Labor Organization
[6] DAS :Essentially the FBI equivalent in Colombia
[7] VISE : A private security company
Colombia Support Network
P.O. Box 1505
Madison, WI 53701-1505
phone: (608) 257-8753
fax: (608) 255-6621
e-mail: csn@igc.org
http://www.colombiasupport.net
Unmasking the War on Drugs
The Afro-Colombian communities Union del Rio Chagui, Recuerdo de Nuestros Ancestros del Rio Mejicano and Union del Rio Rosario in the state of Narino in southwestern Colombia decided to eliminate coca growing through an arduous program of manual eradication---removing coca plants by hand. They signed an agreement with the United Nations to eradicate coca in their lands. But, even though they had made this commitment and removed coca from their lands, the Colombian government, supported by the United States, has decided to spray their lands with concentrated glyphospate (Round-Up Ultra), which will kill their food crops. This reveals the real reason behind the fumigation campaign: to force them off their lands, so they can be taken over for large-scale African palm projects and economic development programs to benefit multinational mining and other companies seeking accesss to Colombia’s natural resources.
Please join the threatened Afro-Colombian communities in protesting the fumigation of their lands. Tell President Alvaro Uribe and his Ministers that you oppose fumigation and wish to see the Afro-Colombian communities’ rights to their lands and their way of life protected.
And tell President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and your Senators and Representatives in Congress that you oppose U.S.-promoted fumigation and want to see the U.S. Government protect the rights of the Afro- Colombian communities to their lands and their customs. Tell them it is clear that the supposed “War on Drugs” is a pretext for neo-liberal policies promoting multinational corporate interests at the expense of the Colombian people. Tell them you now know that no basis exists for fumigation of these lands and the excuse given that the lands are used for coca production is demonstrable false.
PLEASE WRITE : to your Senators and Representatives and suggest they take note of the failure of the War on Drugs in Colombia To send messages to your members of Congress, please go to our website and see CSN’s Action Center: www.colombiasupport.net
To President Barack Obama
www.whitehouse.gov/contact
To Secretary of State Hillary Clinton : secretary@state.gov
www.state.gov
To Mr. Alvaro Uribe – Velez, President of Colombia : E-mail: auribe@presidencia.gov.co
Fax: 57 1 566 2071
Or check his website www.presidencia.gov.co
Tp Minister of Environment : Carlos Costa- Posada Dear Mr. Costa
ministro@minambiente.gov.co
To the Director of the Colombian Police : Major General Oscar Naranjo . Dear General Naranjo
oscar.naranjo@correo.policia.gov.co
Original letter in Spanish to President Obama
http://www.colombiasupport.net/2009/Carta_Final_mayo_12_09.pdf
CSN ‘s English translation of original letter to President Obama
http://colombiasupport.net/2009/Open_letter_to_Obama_fromColombia_Pacfic_coast.pdf
Colombia Support Network
P.O. Box 1505
Madison, WI 53701-1505
phone: (608) 257-8753
fax: (608) 255-6621
e-mail: csn@igc.org
http://www.colombiasupport.net
To Resist Is To Say No: Peace Is Tied to the Existence of People in Their Territory
(Translated by Kevin Funk and Susan Tritten)
Rebelión
By Angeles Díez
April 3, 2009
Danilo, Ana Maria and Marcela visited the Haydee Santamaria Association this week during their stay in Madrid to bring us the voices of the Colombian resistance. Colombia is a country at war. In spite of and counter to the official image that simulates, conceals and exports “democratic normalcy,” by just scratching the surface, we find in Colombia one of the clearest examples of capitalism in an all-out orgy of barbarity. Facing this monster, resistant peoples rise up from Colombia to Palestine, developing strategies of struggle, a thousand ways to say NO.
Only a few days before the London meeting of the G-20, capitalism’s visible head, our Colombian compañeros were invited to participate in a meeting on The Rights of Peoples Against Globalization and Its Reform [i]. They would share the floor and ideas with the Palestinians. What do these two peoples have in common, two cultures apparently so distant from each other? Land.
In the documentary “Resisting for Peace,” the two struggles are related as one, defending their land from plunder, saying no to colonization, not forgetting, remembering the names, the trees, the victims, that is, defending all of humanity.
Danilo tells us, “to resist in order to defend the land is the expression of the dignity of a people.”
We Live in an Authoritarian State That Kills the Body As Well As the Soul
Danilo Rueda defines the Colombian State as neofascist because it is a privatized state with ties to the drug mafia. It’s a mafia State that has created a mafia culture. “It’s the logic of getting everything with the least effort possible, whatever is easiest, the logic of effective justice because it’s immediate. You pay money to get something that someone else has; it’s do-it-yourself justice. Paramilitarism has become the logic of the State and its citizens.”
But modern authoritarianism looks different from what we are used to seeing in Hollywood movies about Nazis and fascists. It’s an authoritarianism that is camouflaged in liberal institutions: the parliament, justice… The multiple human rights commissions, established liberties, are, little by little, in Colombia, “legitimizing the authoritarian State.” Tell me what you brag about and I will tell you what you lack, as the Spanish saying goes.
Danilo tells us, “In Colombia we live under State repression expressed, for example, in 1,500 peasants executed and presented by the State as terrorists killed in combat. Also 6,800 people detained illegally, counter to all the formalities of a liberal state, without proof, without due process, where witnesses are paid to accuse those they don’t even know. The techniques of repression have been demonstrated; they are consolidating a political power clearly expressed in the exercise of government by President Alvaro Uribe Velez, who has the means to control the courts, the means to point out and publically stigmatize, through the media, those he considers the opposition. The President tries to show that there is no domestic armed conflict. That is to say, what was a peasant resistance, initially based on a liberal philosophy, became an armed uprising that defined itself economically through communist ideas, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and another armed uprising inspired by the Cuban Revolution, the ELN (Army of National Liberation). He tries to show that neither is justified. His objective is to create the illusion that there is nothing that would explain an armed rebellion, that is to say that in Colombia democracy has always existed, that the basic necessities of most people are met, that poverty does not justify rebellion because there are institutional channels to resolve those conflicts and demands, and that those who practice violence are sick beings, terrorists.
“The discourse that any opposition is terrorism has been maintained basically since Sept. 11, 2001. This attitude explains why rehabilitation camps are created in view of the policy of democratic security. That sick population has to be cured by military treatment and so military forces become providers of health care and education; they become judges, the ones who resolve domestic issues, the ones who are going to guarantee business development, for example, oil in the Arauca area near Venezuela. They’re considered rehabilitation zones. That’s what the country as a whole is experiencing, marginal territories completely occupied and delineated by the military who give the people three options, each a trap: be displaced, assume the military’s way of thinking, or develop proposals and acts of resistance. There are only three possibilities: you’re with me, you leave, or you turn yourself in.”
The Paramilitarization of the Colombian State
The second element that Danilo tells us about is the paramilitarization of the State. He explains that paramilitarism has become the State’s strategy, a form of terrorism in which armed civilians are the expression of the privatization of the State. This means that the formality of the public good continues to be proclaimed while the private paramilitary sector, linked to the land, decides the direction of the State. Danilo places the roots of the paramilitarization in 1962, when a United States government mission arrived in Colombia, and he sees as a precedent the French military forces who taught their counter-terrorism manuals that the French army used in Algeria.
Danilo says that, according to official data, out of 25 million hectares of cultivated land, 6.8 million hectares are for beneficiaries of paramilitary groups. “We’re talking about official information, which means it could be much more, because they don’t consider lands held collectively by African-American or indigenous communities. In these areas appropriation is not usually carried out through eviction as in mestizo peasant areas, rather they take a direct form of corporate occupation. These 6.8 million hectares cleared by military violence coincide with extractive projects by mining companies, infrastructure projects, some of them with capital from Spanish entrepreneurs, for example, in the coastal zone, everything that has to do with water or agrobusiness related to palm oil. We begin to discover that the reason they say that there is no armed conflict or that the Colombian State is being paramilitarized is for economic interests, just the same as it is with most of the conflicts in the world. There are geostrategic interests for the model of capitalist society.
“What we are experiencing and living today is, in some way, an exercise in neofascism. This privatized state is a police state tied to the drug-trafficking mafia. It is a State where the president’s farms and his estates were places where people of the political opposition were executed, or they are estates where paramilitary commanders are in charge. They are extradited when they begin to talk about the ties and strategies of control by the State, control of traditional political parties or the creation of new parties to take power.”
For Danilo, the third element that the Colombian State manages is the peace process. In official discourse, it’s about moving the peace process forward, but none of this is true. “Between 1997 and 2002, the effort to dominate was not only military in nature, but it also became political and social. There are 32,000 combatants. They have taken control of legislative and executive powers; they have taken over economic plans for the global market (the drug trade, agrobusiness, ties with extractive and oil or mining operations. . .) So it was necessary to create a mechanism of impunity for these criminals.”
The Colombian State creates mechanisms to guarantee impunity for its crimes. Danilo tells us how the State provided judicial mechanisms so that the paramilitary forces implicated in displacements and assassinations of peasants would have a way to avoid serving their sentences. “In exchange for telling everything they knew, they would get a maximum of eight years. They would fulfill the sentence at the moment they handed over their arms and they would be taken to agricultural farms that they would share with peasants. It’s a model of reconciliation and land restitution in which land taken from the peasants is held in a land bank, and in which, after the paramilitary forces ask for pardon they are given land next to the peasants so that they can work together in agrobusiness. If the paramilitary soldiers did not tell the whole truth or they continued to commit crimes and were linked to drug trafficking, they would be extradited.
“Curiously,” he tells us, “when they begin to talk about implications surrounding the President, about how the State security apparatus was used by the paramilitary troops, about how attempts were made against the President to gain publicity and to implicate the FARC, about how votes were bought for seats in the House or the Senate, for mayors or the president himself, they were extradited.”
Paramilitarism Creates a Culture of Violence
“Paramilitarism exists as a strategy of the State and a way of thinking by the citizens. Today anyone who speaks out against President Uribe is the enemy. Anyone who criticizes the President is a terrorist or friend of the FARC.
“Dressing differently is going against morality. Social workers are threatened. But this society that is being built in Colombia is part of what’s happening on the planet. All this occurs in zones where the highest proportion of biodiversity is concentrated. It is in our countries where the oxygen vouchers are. Who pays for these oxygen vouchers? Developed countries like Japan and Canada.” Ana Maria says that they are payments made to a community in exchange for maintaining forest resources, but that that resource is controlled by paramilitary forces. These countries can consume more oxygen because they pay compensatory fees. “At the same time there’s the energy crisis. They cultivate palm oil or sugar cane in our countries for ethanol or agrofuels. For whom? The ones who control these businesses in Colombia are the paramilitary organizations. What happens in this world, what we consume in this world, is related to what happens in Colombia and other Latin American countries.”
Marcela Was Displaced by Paramilitary Forces When She Was Ten
“In November of 1997 paramilitary troops came to the place where we were living,” continues Marcela. They burned the houses, they stole the cows, the cattle we had, and everyone had to leave with just what they had on their backs. The same thing happened in Choco, in Cacarica, in Meta. In some places it was mass displacement and in others it was selective.
“The pretexts for their coming were, ‘the thing is, we’re coming to finish off the guerrillas and you’re collaborators with them so we’re going to kill you.’ That was the pretext. And we told them that we weren’t guerrillas. I was ten years old and from what I could gather, I knew that I wasn’t a guerrilla and neither was my dad. I have a lot of brothers and sisters; we were all scared; my mom just cried. We were displaced. We spent four years stuck in shelters because we couldn’t return to our land. Then we realized that the same soldiers who had displaced us were coming back to help us. The same thing in Cacarica, in Meta, exactly the same, the same faces that we saw, with armbands; then we saw them dressed as soldiers. So growing up as we did, we realized, we began to understand that places where there had been displacements were precisely the richest lands. For example, there was a lot of water on our land. Afterwards we realized that the displacement was not because we were guerrillas, but because they were going to build a dam.
“It was terror. Then we found out that is was to plant bananas, it was that they wanted to build the Panamerican highway, in Curvarado it was to plant palms, it was because there were companies behind it that were there to get hold of the land that they had taken from us in order to develop megaprojects. In Curvarado, in Palma, in Meta, in Dabeiba the dam; in Putumayo, oil. . . .
“Monsters all of them, with the government’s support, since they control the paramilitary soldiers and the Army. What were our communities supposed to do? Go back so that they could kill us or look for a way to organize so that we could go back and recover our land? In my community we began to create a plan to get our land back, civil resistance to demand our rights from the government and a guarantee for our safe return.”
Ana Maria Experiences National Support in Displaced Communities
Without national and international support, these communities would be isolated and they would easily be displaced again. Ana Maria says their resistance also depends on us.
“I speak for all the communities.” Marcela tells us about concrete acts of resistance. “We constructed a plan for our lives, with our identity, with our principles, with our symbols, with the flag, the anthem. . . Each community is similar in organization. As a way of protecting our life, in our case, in 2001, we organized to get land for a temporary settlement. It wasn’t our land; but in 2004, the Army came and displaced us again.
“Right after that, we noticed what they had done in Chocó. They had created humanitarian zones, a place to live, to protect life, where the people could live. This area is clearly defined and no one who is armed can enter. In Cacarica they had already tried this experiment and we did the same in Dabeiba. We put up some symbolic barriers with wire with signs that say ‘no armed person enters here.’ That’s to protect lives and the land. We’re in a small town, but to make a living, we have to farm, so we have to go out to the fields, so then we mark off the boundaries and declare them biodiversity zones. We mark the boundaries and say that megaprojects are not permitted; these are the strategies that we’ve put together to protect ourselves. They respect us a little more because that’s protected by international human rights laws and the organization Justice and Peace helps us register complaints. But the threats continue and they’ve killed some of our people. But it’s a struggle and we try to protect ourselves in the middle of a conflict that we all face.
“We try to resist because we are small communities, but we try to create community development plans. I’m a teacher. I teach in the school and we try to create our own educational projects so that the children will learn what we want them to learn, not what the government imposes, because the government mandates what the children have to learn and turns them into machines that reproduce the system. What we try to do is teach them our plan for community life so that they know why we are there because many children have been born since the displacement and they haven’t been able to live the way we lived before. We want the young people to learn resistance.
“How do we resist? We fight so that the school where the children and young people learn is inside the humanitarian zone, so that they learn with us, with those who have grown up inside the community. I teach them abut the experience and history that I know well. As for health, we try to depend as little as possible on medicine or on what the market promotes. Medicine should be made with herbs and plants from the community, in order to depend as little as possible on commercial products. There are people who are `pranic’ healers with energy from the water, the trees, and the land. This is also a form of resistance. In the area of agriculture we’re trying to farm without the chemicals and agrotoxins that the market promotes. We want them to be ecological products, clean and healthy, to depend as little as possible on the market and to build our own things from our being as peasant men and women, from the earth. We resist from our small space.
“Although the threats continue, we constantly lodge complaints about what happens to us. We have international support through the Justice and Peace organization. They register complaints about what happens to us; they don’t leave us to fend for ourselves. Other times friends like you come and visit us and it seems that the soldiers don’t want to create problems and they respect us a little more.”
Acts of Resistance in the Communities Are Varied
“We are trying to unite all our organizations and so we participate in the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes. We are indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, peasants, social and human rights organizations; we are a great deal of people working together. We have meetings; we participate in marches. In February of this year, we held a conference in Curvarado that was about the peasants of Colombia and of the world too and about our opposition to the extractive mining of Careperro hill, which is in a communal indigenous area of Curvarado. The mining companies want to extract all the minerals there. It brought together all the indigenous communities to say no; we are not reconciled to the destruction of that place. For the indigenous people it is sacred, blessed, where the spirits are. If they’re destroyed, if we permit it. . . I don’t know. . . Life is destroyed.
“Other acts were, for example, when we went back to the land from which they had displaced us, we found that they had planted palms, that they had planned and organized to expel us. We got the communities together and we planned to face that monster and we decided to go and cut down palm trees and began to sew corn and beans to eat. That really annoyed the companies, but it was our land. All the communities joined together to do it.
“As for memories, we decided not to let them be lost; we decided to write them down. We have monuments in Dabeiba, the tree of life, an enormous tree where the names of everyone who was assassinated before the displacement are carved. In Cacarica, there’s a monument and a rap group that sings the history of the community. In Meta, in Putumayo, everywhere there is resistance. We have memory houses. We put photos of the people in them, names of our neighbors who were assassinated, seeds native to our region, objects from the homes from which we were displaced. They’re collective spaces; they’re being built everywhere. It’s the memory of resistance. We’re part of an alternative network together with other movements. I’m here to share our history and the resistance that we bring from all parts of Colombia, to show another face that the media doesn’t show. Our reality is hidden, we live another reality there. The paramilitary forces haven’t been demobilized; I have seen them. They continue displacing and assassinating people. I see them dressed as soldiers, then as civilians and so on. . .”
The Resources of Cooperation Serve to Finance Paramilitary Troops
Danilo says that resources from the international community, cooperative resources, are being used to pay the paramilitary forces who are not being demobilized. “Supposedly 20,000 paramilitary troops were demobilized. They are people who appropriated land, who assassinated, and who sit on the board of directors of corporations and their demobilization is financed through international cooperation. For three years they pay them three times the minimum salary of any Colombian worker. They finance their training. The community of Madrid finances them as well as municipal governments of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party. Only with social justice can there be a solution, not in that way.”
Two Fields of Resistance Where We Can All Meet Together
For Ana Maria, Marcela and Danilo it’s necessary to think of resistance as a joint effort, by everyone, built collectively, shared by everyone who is willing to say no. They address us, those of us who are listening, and they tell us that each one has to resist in his or her context. “You also are saying NO.”
The question is how we join together, how we unite. “For eight years, we have been trying to weave together. . . with larger expressions like the landless movement in Brazil, with smaller communities such as Santo Tome in Madrid, with the Mapuche movement, trying to build on the basis of shared principles. Not only is there resistance in the south, but also in the north. We have created a network where we can begin by getting to know each other, in solidarity in urgent actions, in solidarity with the dynamics that permit us to find each other. There are alternative networks where we come together.”
For Danilo there are two areas of struggle, two fields where we can all come together, the fight against impunity and the fight against globalization. In those areas we all unite.
“In the field of impunity your experience with Franco’s regime comes to mind, the effects of repression that continue, the fear of speaking out more forcefully, or the fears of the collective subconscious. We have to learn from that because we’re a society that lives in terror. We need to learn from your legacy. Even more because we don’t believe that the judicial apparatus that exist today can deliver justice, not the United Nations, not the International Court of Justice. So through memory, we have to honor the victims, honoring the historical meaning of their struggle in the present because we give it new meaning. There’s an initiative from the International Center of Memory. For their generation, for ours, and for humanity, it’s important. We have to design what truly democratic states should be. We learn from the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo that they, for example, are capable of getting on a plane and when it’s in flight, they stand up and say aloud, ‘Here’s a person guilty of genocide; there’s a person guilty of genocide on this plane, he’s in first class; his name is . . .’ It’s an exercise in social justice. We have to resort to ways that are accessible to us, that are grass-roots ways to make accusations. It’s clear that it is necessary to work with the United Nations, with the European court, but the processes of dignifying people iare carried out in a different way.
We have to see how to confront the problem of globalization in a practical way. There must be other ways of conducting trade.
It’s really important for all of us to know what is going on in each place. On April 25, in the network, we are going to celebrate the first ceremony honoring people in Italy during the day of the partisans. We invite you all to come. Also, petitions are made by communities and groups in the network. There was a petition from the Palestinians and from the people of Afghanistan (in particular from one group that has been resisting since the empire decided to change tactics in Iraq and concentrate on Afghanistan, so it was important to us that we lend our support there.)
In addition to that, this is how global knowledge of resistance is built. We have to know each other, to recognize each other and to overcome our isolation.
The meeting closed with a commitment by everyone to spread the resistance of the peasant committee from Colombia.
[i] The meeting with the title “Resistance and South-North Alternatives for a World in Crisis” took place on Thursday, April 2, in the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.
To Resist Is To Say No: Peace Is Tied to the Existence of People in Their Territory
(Translated by Kevin Funk and Susan Tritten)
Danilo, Ana Maria and Marcela visited the Haydee Santamaria Association this week during their stay in Madrid to bring us the voices of the Colombian resistance. Colombia is a country at war. In spite of and counter to the official image that simulates, conceals and exports “democratic normalcy,” by just scratching the surface, we find in Colombia one of the clearest examples of capitalism in an all-out orgy of barbarity. Facing this monster, resistant peoples rise up from Colombia to Palestine, developing strategies of struggle, a thousand ways to say NO.
Only a few days before the London meeting of the G-20, capitalism’s visible head, our Colombian compañeros were invited to participate in a meeting on The Rights of Peoples Against Globalization and Its Reform [i]. They would share the floor and ideas with the Palestinians. What do these two peoples have in common, two cultures apparently so distant from each other? Land.
In the documentary “Resisting for Peace,” the two struggles are related as one, defending their land from plunder, saying no to colonization, not forgetting, remembering the names, the trees, the victims, that is, defending all of humanity.
Danilo tells us, “to resist in order to defend the land is the expression of the dignity of a people.”
We Live in an Authoritarian State That Kills the Body As Well As the Soul
Danilo Rueda defines the Colombian State as neofascist because it is a privatized state with ties to the drug mafia. It’s a mafia State that has created a mafia culture. “It’s the logic of getting everything with the least effort possible, whatever is easiest, the logic of effective justice because it’s immediate. You pay money to get something that someone else has; it’s do-it-yourself justice. Paramilitarism has become the logic of the State and its citizens.”
But modern authoritarianism looks different from what we are used to seeing in Hollywood movies about Nazis and fascists. It’s an authoritarianism that is camouflaged in liberal institutions: the parliament, justice… The multiple human rights commissions, established liberties, are, little by little, in Colombia, “legitimizing the authoritarian State.” Tell me what you brag about and I will tell you what you lack, as the Spanish saying goes.
Danilo tells us, “In Colombia we live under State repression expressed, for example, in 1,500 peasants executed and presented by the State as terrorists killed in combat. Also 6,800 people detained illegally, counter to all the formalities of a liberal state, without proof, without due process, where witnesses are paid to accuse those they don’t even know. The techniques of repression have been demonstrated; they are consolidating a political power clearly expressed in the exercise of government by President Alvaro Uribe Velez, who has the means to control the courts, the means to point out and publically stigmatize, through the media, those he considers the opposition. The President tries to show that there is no domestic armed conflict. That is to say, what was a peasant resistance, initially based on a liberal philosophy, became an armed uprising that defined itself economically through communist ideas, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and another armed uprising inspired by the Cuban Revolution, the ELN (Army of National Liberation). He tries to show that neither is justified. His objective is to create the illusion that there is nothing that would explain an armed rebellion, that is to say that in Colombia democracy has always existed, that the basic necessities of most people are met, that poverty does not justify rebellion because there are institutional channels to resolve those conflicts and demands, and that those who practice violence are sick beings, terrorists.
“The discourse that any opposition is terrorism has been maintained basically since Sept. 11, 2001. This attitude explains why rehabilitation camps are created in view of the policy of democratic security. That sick population has to be cured by military treatment and so military forces become providers of health care and education; they become judges, the ones who resolve domestic issues, the ones who are going to guarantee business development, for example, oil in the Arauca area near Venezuela. They’re considered rehabilitation zones. That’s what the country as a whole is experiencing, marginal territories completely occupied and delineated by the military who give the people three options, each a trap: be displaced, assume the military’s way of thinking, or develop proposals and acts of resistance. There are only three possibilities: you’re with me, you leave, or you turn yourself in.”
The Paramilitarization of the Colombian State
The second element that Danilo tells us about is the paramilitarization of the State. He explains that paramilitarism has become the State’s strategy, a form of terrorism in which armed civilians are the expression of the privatization of the State. This means that the formality of the public good continues to be proclaimed while the private paramilitary sector, linked to the land, decides the direction of the State. Danilo places the roots of the paramilitarization in 1962, when a United States government mission arrived in Colombia, and he sees as a precedent the French military forces who taught their counter-terrorism manuals that the French army used in Algeria.
Danilo says that, according to official data, out of 25 million hectares of cultivated land, 6.8 million hectares are for beneficiaries of paramilitary groups. “We’re talking about official information, which means it could be much more, because they don’t consider lands held collectively by African-American or indigenous communities. In these areas appropriation is not usually carried out through eviction as in mestizo peasant areas, rather they take a direct form of corporate occupation. These 6.8 million hectares cleared by military violence coincide with extractive projects by mining companies, infrastructure projects, some of them with capital from Spanish entrepreneurs, for example, in the coastal zone, everything that has to do with water or agrobusiness related to palm oil. We begin to discover that the reason they say that there is no armed conflict or that the Colombian State is being paramilitarized is for economic interests, just the same as it is with most of the conflicts in the world. There are geostrategic interests for the model of capitalist society.
“What we are experiencing and living today is, in some way, an exercise in neofascism. This privatized state is a police state tied to the drug-trafficking mafia. It is a State where the president’s farms and his estates were places where people of the political opposition were executed, or they are estates where paramilitary commanders are in charge. They are extradited when they begin to talk about the ties and strategies of control by the State, control of traditional political parties or the creation of new parties to take power.”
For Danilo, the third element that the Colombian State manages is the peace process. In official discourse, it’s about moving the peace process forward, but none of this is true. “Between 1997 and 2002, the effort to dominate was not only military in nature, but it also became political and social. There are 32,000 combatants. They have taken control of legislative and executive powers; they have taken over economic plans for the global market (the drug trade, agrobusiness, ties with extractive and oil or mining operations. . .) So it was necessary to create a mechanism of impunity for these criminals.”
The Colombian State creates mechanisms to guarantee impunity for its crimes. Danilo tells us how the State provided judicial mechanisms so that the paramilitary forces implicated in displacements and assassinations of peasants would have a way to avoid serving their sentences. “In exchange for telling everything they knew, they would get a maximum of eight years. They would fulfill the sentence at the moment they handed over their arms and they would be taken to agricultural farms that they would share with peasants. It’s a model of reconciliation and land restitution in which land taken from the peasants is held in a land bank, and in which, after the paramilitary forces ask for pardon they are given land next to the peasants so that they can work together in agrobusiness. If the paramilitary soldiers did not tell the whole truth or they continued to commit crimes and were linked to drug trafficking, they would be extradited.
“Curiously,” he tells us, “when they begin to talk about implications surrounding the President, about how the State security apparatus was used by the paramilitary troops, about how attempts were made against the President to gain publicity and to implicate the FARC, about how votes were bought for seats in the House or the Senate, for mayors or the president himself, they were extradited.”
Paramilitarism Creates a Culture of Violence
“Paramilitarism exists as a strategy of the State and a way of thinking by the citizens. Today anyone who speaks out against President Uribe is the enemy. Anyone who criticizes the President is a terrorist or friend of the FARC.
“Dressing differently is going against morality. Social workers are threatened. But this society that is being built in Colombia is part of what’s happening on the planet. All this occurs in zones where the highest proportion of biodiversity is concentrated. It is in our countries where the oxygen vouchers are. Who pays for these oxygen vouchers? Developed countries like Japan and Canada.” Ana Maria says that they are payments made to a community in exchange for maintaining forest resources, but that that resource is controlled by paramilitary forces. These countries can consume more oxygen because they pay compensatory fees. “At the same time there’s the energy crisis. They cultivate palm oil or sugar cane in our countries for ethanol or agrofuels. For whom? The ones who control these businesses in Colombia are the paramilitary organizations. What happens in this world, what we consume in this world, is related to what happens in Colombia and other Latin American countries.”
Marcela Was Displaced by Paramilitary Forces When She Was Ten
“In November of 1997 paramilitary troops came to the place where we were living,” continues Marcela. They burned the houses, they stole the cows, the cattle we had, and everyone had to leave with just what they had on their backs. The same thing happened in Choco, in Cacarica, in Meta. In some places it was mass displacement and in others it was selective.
“The pretexts for their coming were, ‘the thing is, we’re coming to finish off the guerrillas and you’re collaborators with them so we’re going to kill you.’ That was the pretext. And we told them that we weren’t guerrillas. I was ten years old and from what I could gather, I knew that I wasn’t a guerrilla and neither was my dad. I have a lot of brothers and sisters; we were all scared; my mom just cried. We were displaced. We spent four years stuck in shelters because we couldn’t return to our land. Then we realized that the same soldiers who had displaced us were coming back to help us. The same thing in Cacarica, in Meta, exactly the same, the same faces that we saw, with armbands; then we saw them dressed as soldiers. So growing up as we did, we realized, we began to understand that places where there had been displacements were precisely the richest lands. For example, there was a lot of water on our land. Afterwards we realized that the displacement was not because we were guerrillas, but because they were going to build a dam.
“It was terror. Then we found out that is was to plant bananas, it was that they wanted to build the Panamerican highway, in Curvarado it was to plant palms, it was because there were companies behind it that were there to get hold of the land that they had taken from us in order to develop megaprojects. In Curvarado, in Palma, in Meta, in Dabeiba the dam; in Putumayo, oil. . . .
“Monsters all of them, with the government’s support, since they control the paramilitary soldiers and the Army. What were our communities supposed to do? Go back so that they could kill us or look for a way to organize so that we could go back and recover our land? In my community we began to create a plan to get our land back, civil resistance to demand our rights from the government and a guarantee for our safe return.”
Ana Maria Experiences National Support in Displaced Communities
Without national and international support, these communities would be isolated and they would easily be displaced again. Ana Maria says their resistance also depends on us.
“I speak for all the communities.” Marcela tells us about concrete acts of resistance. “We constructed a plan for our lives, with our identity, with our principles, with our symbols, with the flag, the anthem. . . Each community is similar in organization. As a way of protecting our life, in our case, in 2001, we organized to get land for a temporary settlement. It wasn’t our land; but in 2004, the Army came and displaced us again.
“Right after that, we noticed what they had done in Chocó. They had created humanitarian zones, a place to live, to protect life, where the people could live. This area is clearly defined and no one who is armed can enter. In Cacarica they had already tried this experiment and we did the same in Dabeiba. We put up some symbolic barriers with wire with signs that say ‘no armed person enters here.’ That’s to protect lives and the land. We’re in a small town, but to make a living, we have to farm, so we have to go out to the fields, so then we mark off the boundaries and declare them biodiversity zones. We mark the boundaries and say that megaprojects are not permitted; these are the strategies that we’ve put together to protect ourselves. They respect us a little more because that’s protected by international human rights laws and the organization Justice and Peace helps us register complaints. But the threats continue and they’ve killed some of our people. But it’s a struggle and we try to protect ourselves in the middle of a conflict that we all face.
“We try to resist because we are small communities, but we try to create community development plans. I’m a teacher. I teach in the school and we try to create our own educational projects so that the children will learn what we want them to learn, not what the government imposes, because the government mandates what the children have to learn and turns them into machines that reproduce the system. What we try to do is teach them our plan for community life so that they know why we are there because many children have been born since the displacement and they haven’t been able to live the way we lived before. We want the young people to learn resistance.
“How do we resist? We fight so that the school where the children and young people learn is inside the humanitarian zone, so that they learn with us, with those who have grown up inside the community. I teach them abut the experience and history that I know well. As for health, we try to depend as little as possible on medicine or on what the market promotes. Medicine should be made with herbs and plants from the community, in order to depend as little as possible on commercial products. There are people who are `pranic’ healers with energy from the water, the trees, and the land. This is also a form of resistance. In the area of agriculture we’re trying to farm without the chemicals and agrotoxins that the market promotes. We want them to be ecological products, clean and healthy, to depend as little as possible on the market and to build our own things from our being as peasant men and women, from the earth. We resist from our small space.
“Although the threats continue, we constantly lodge complaints about what happens to us. We have international support through the Justice and Peace organization. They register complaints about what happens to us; they don’t leave us to fend for ourselves. Other times friends like you come and visit us and it seems that the soldiers don’t want to create problems and they respect us a little more.”
Acts of Resistance in the Communities Are Varied
“We are trying to unite all our organizations and so we participate in the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes. We are indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, peasants, social and human rights organizations; we are a great deal of people working together. We have meetings; we participate in marches. In February of this year, we held a conference in Curvarado that was about the peasants of Colombia and of the world too and about our opposition to the extractive mining of Careperro hill, which is in a communal indigenous area of Curvarado. The mining companies want to extract all the minerals there. It brought together all the indigenous communities to say no; we are not reconciled to the destruction of that place. For the indigenous people it is sacred, blessed, where the spirits are. If they’re destroyed, if we permit it. . . I don’t know. . . Life is destroyed.
“Other acts were, for example, when we went back to the land from which they had displaced us, we found that they had planted palms, that they had planned and organized to expel us. We got the communities together and we planned to face that monster and we decided to go and cut down palm trees and began to sew corn and beans to eat. That really annoyed the companies, but it was our land. All the communities joined together to do it.
“As for memories, we decided not to let them be lost; we decided to write them down. We have monuments in Dabeiba, the tree of life, an enormous tree where the names of everyone who was assassinated before the displacement are carved. In Cacarica, there’s a monument and a rap group that sings the history of the community. In Meta, in Putumayo, everywhere there is resistance. We have memory houses. We put photos of the people in them, names of our neighbors who were assassinated, seeds native to our region, objects from the homes from which we were displaced. They’re collective spaces; they’re being built everywhere. It’s the memory of resistance. We’re part of an alternative network together with other movements. I’m here to share our history and the resistance that we bring from all parts of Colombia, to show another face that the media doesn’t show. Our reality is hidden, we live another reality there. The paramilitary forces haven’t been demobilized; I have seen them. They continue displacing and assassinating people. I see them dressed as soldiers, then as civilians and so on. . .”
The Resources of Cooperation Serve to Finance Paramilitary Troops
Danilo says that resources from the international community, cooperative resources, are being used to pay the paramilitary forces who are not being demobilized. “Supposedly 20,000 paramilitary troops were demobilized. They are people who appropriated land, who assassinated, and who sit on the board of directors of corporations and their demobilization is financed through international cooperation. For three years they pay them three times the minimum salary of any Colombian worker. They finance their training. The community of Madrid finances them as well as municipal governments of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party. Only with social justice can there be a solution, not in that way.”
Two Fields of Resistance Where We Can All Meet Together
For Ana Maria, Marcela and Danilo it’s necessary to think of resistance as a joint effort, by everyone, built collectively, shared by everyone who is willing to say no. They address us, those of us who are listening, and they tell us that each one has to resist in his or her context. “You also are saying NO.”
The question is how we join together, how we unite. “For eight years, we have been trying to weave together. . . with larger expressions like the landless movement in Brazil, with smaller communities such as Santo Tome in Madrid, with the Mapuche movement, trying to build on the basis of shared principles. Not only is there resistance in the south, but also in the north. We have created a network where we can begin by getting to know each other, in solidarity in urgent actions, in solidarity with the dynamics that permit us to find each other. There are alternative networks where we come together.”
For Danilo there are two areas of struggle, two fields where we can all come together, the fight against impunity and the fight against globalization. In those areas we all unite.
“In the field of impunity your experience with Franco’s regime comes to mind, the effects of repression that continue, the fear of speaking out more forcefully, or the fears of the collective subconscious. We have to learn from that because we’re a society that lives in terror. We need to learn from your legacy. Even more because we don’t believe that the judicial apparatus that exist today can deliver justice, not the United Nations, not the International Court of Justice. So through memory, we have to honor the victims, honoring the historical meaning of their struggle in the present because we give it new meaning. There’s an initiative from the International Center of Memory. For their generation, for ours, and for humanity, it’s important. We have to design what truly democratic states should be. We learn from the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo that they, for example, are capable of getting on a plane and when it’s in flight, they stand up and say aloud, ‘Here’s a person guilty of genocide; there’s a person guilty of genocide on this plane, he’s in first class; his name is . . .’ It’s an exercise in social justice. We have to resort to ways that are accessible to us, that are grass-roots ways to make accusations. It’s clear that it is necessary to work with the United Nations, with the European court, but the processes of dignifying people iare carried out in a different way.
We have to see how to confront the problem of globalization in a practical way. There must be other ways of conducting trade.
It’s really important for all of us to know what is going on in each place. On April 25, in the network, we are going to celebrate the first ceremony honoring people in Italy during the day of the partisans. We invite you all to come. Also, petitions are made by communities and groups in the network. There was a petition from the Palestinians and from the people of Afghanistan (in particular from one group that has been resisting since the empire decided to change tactics in Iraq and concentrate on Afghanistan, so it was important to us that we lend our support there.)
In addition to that, this is how global knowledge of resistance is built. We have to know each other, to recognize each other and to overcome our isolation.
The meeting closed with a commitment by everyone to spread the resistance of the peasant committee from Colombia.
[i] The meeting with the title “Resistance and South-North Alternatives for a World in Crisis” took place on Thursday, April 2, in the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.
Distorting the Referendum for Water as a Human Right
(Translated by Lucas Sanchez, a CSN volunteer translator)
DeVer 521
Bogatá, April 30, 2009
As if by magic masking his interest to remain in power behind his acceptance of the water referendum under the referendum to allow for his own reelection, Alvaro Uribe Velez has not only tainted the initiative to recognize access to water as a human right, but is using the initiative to advance his personal interests.
Since 2007, more than 2 million Colombians have signed a petition supporting a referendum that would guarantee the right to a minimum ration of water, the protection of lands essential to the production of potable water, and more broadly, the vision of water as a basic human right for present and future generations. Despite the wide support, however, the government and the national congress have altered and transformed the initiative into an instrument that will ultimately guarantee water as just another commodity for big business, while restricting access to drinking water in a society already submerged in poverty.
Following is the Committee to Promote the Referendum’s document addressing this situation.
Inter-ecclesiastical Commission for Justice and Peace
April 23, 2009
Yesterday, in a session of Committee I of the House of Representatives, a majority approved a document contrary to the citizen’s initiative supported by more than two million Colombian men and women.
The following substantial modifications were made:
The recognition of access to potable water as a fundamental right was eliminated.
The recognition of water as a public good was eliminated.
The prioritization of the use of ecosystems essential to the water cycle for these ends was eliminated.
The prohibition of the privatization of the management and delivery of water and sewage services was eliminated.
A colossal provision was added: again making it constitutional that “waters that are born and die within private land” are private, therefore imposing an exception to the principle that all water is a resource for public use. Thusly, water rights will be given to the new illegitimate owners of extensive private estates produced through the violent dispossession and displacement of more than four million peasants.
In contrast, the guarantee that waters running through ethnic territories would belong to those territories was eliminated.
In a draconian way, they altered the proposal for a universal free basic water allotment, falsely claiming it to be solely on behalf of the poor but yet within the existing established legal framework for the privatization of public utilities.
The modifications were agreed upon at the Casa de Nariño in a meeting of political factions supporting the government with President Uribe. He, the very same person who had radically opposed our referendum for the human right to water, suddenly changed his position and stated that it should be the people who to decide, but regarding a document entirely different from the one signed by more than two million people.
Faced with this reality, the National Committee in Defense of Water and Life, which promotes the referendum, calls for a continuation of the citizen’s movement to defend the original document. We must remain alert and monitor the House debate that will make a decision regarding the appeal presented by the spokesperson for the Promoting Committee calling for adherence to the original text.
The Promoting Committee for the referendum thanks the 8 members of Congress from the Liberal Party (Partido Liberal) and the Alternative Democratic Pole (Polo Democrático Alternativo), and two members of Radical Change (Cambio Radical) who voted in favor of the proposal recommendeding the approval of the referendum in its original form.
This national and regional struggle is moving toward the recognition by the national constitution of water as a public resource and a basic human right; but only united and sustained actions by all will allow these waters to remain free and clear of privatization.
Promoting Committee of the referendum: Rafael Colmenares (Spokesperson), Oscar Eduardo Gutiérrez, Martha Canon, Javier Marquez, Rodrigo Acosta, Humberto Polo, Héctor Gañan, Tatiana Roa and Cristo Miranda.
(http://ecofondo.org/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=656&Itemid=163)
HUMAN RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Victims of Caguan find their voice
By Constanza Vieira, special correspondent
( Translated by Nancy Beiter, a CSN volunteer translator )
FLORENCIA, COLOMBIA, May 12 (IPS) - In the middle of civil war and repression against the communities of Caguán, in the south of Colombia, the citizens are protesting human rights abuses. Why?
The answer was given by two leaders of the region, who did not confer before speaking with us. They said. "Either they make us disappear and/or they kill us, as they are doing. Or they put us in jail, as they have done”.
Prison is the probable destination for 96 of the inhabitants of Caguán, many of them local leaders, according to a recently leaked military intelligence report that accuses them of working for the guerrillas.
“In the end, you will learn to respect us.” When that phrase was directed at a military official, a smile erupted on the happy face of Feliciano Sánchez, displaced in 2004 from his home in Peñas Coloradas, a town on the river Caguán in the southern department of Caqueta. Beside him sat Yezid José Doncel, 58, who is among the 96 individuals named in the intelligence report.
Sánchez and Doncel described identical responses when, each in different places, but at the same time, they had been asked by a military officer why they persisted in looking for trouble by organizing forums and humanitarian missions that collect and disseminate testimonies of victims of abuses in this war zone.
The two activists belong to Asojuntas, a community organization in the municipality of Cartagena del Chaira.
"Ninety percent of the people of Cartagena del Chaira between the ages of 14 and 90 belong to Asojuntas”, said its president, Doncel. There are about 25,000 members organized into 187 Juntas de Acción Comunal (JAC) (Community Action Groups). There is one for each village, or rural neighborhood in this town of 13,622 square kilometers north of Florence, the departmental capital.
The JACs, recognized by law throughout the country, provide services in the valley of Caguán that are provided elsewhere by the authorities such as organizing schools, building or repairing roads and bridges, generating revenue, resolving conflicts, among other tasks in the area, where the state is absent.
Asojuntas is allied with the non-governmental Corporación por la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos Caguán Vive (Caguán Vive)(Corporation for the Defense of Human Rights of Caguán), among others, in an effort to convene the First Public Hearing for Truth in the Department of Caqueta, which met on Saturday in Florencia.
Caguán Vive is a chapter of the Movimiento de Víctimas de Crímenes de Estado (Movice) (Movement of the Victims of State Crimes).
Its founder, Joel Perez, disappeared on March 8 last year. His body was found in December, still smoking after being burned, stabbed, and decapitated, with two bullets in his skull, and fractured legs, a few kilometers from San Vicente del Caguán on the road linking this town with the neighboring town of Puerto Rico, in a stretch that has 15 military checkpoints.
Due to the slowness of the authorities, the remains of Perez, who was also a city councilman, remain buried without an identity as (NN) in the cemetery of San Vicente. He was also chairman of the JAC-Baja-Pata Vegas, founder and president of the Environmental Association of Baja-Pata and a member of the Municipal Committee of Cattlemen.
In 10 hearings in different parts of this Andean country since December 2006, Movice has facilitated the disclosure of over 1,000 testimonies from victims of state forces in the intractable Colombian conflict.
Movice promotes these hearings "in the hope that the direct involvement of victims will provide essential evidence for the identification of those responsible for planning and executing crimes of the state,” a category of crime that the government rejects.
According to the rules of each hearing, when victims go up to the podium to describe their drama it is forbidden to take pictures and all cameras are excluded, except for one that records the events and delivers the material to a committee of parliament.
Then, some parliamentarians, who have until recently comprised the opposition, are responsible for presenting criminal complaints before the Office of the Attorney General or bring cases to the Procuraduría General, a disciplinary body.
Few victims dare to speak in public. At the hearing in Florencia, there were 23 witnesses, several of whom were weeping. But 62 additional complaints were recorded at the same time outside of the auditorium of Amazonia University, which hosted the meeting.
Those who take these reports spend an average of 45 minutes talking with the person who is giving testimony.
"The important thing is not the formality of the proceeding," Oscar Gómez of the Corporation AVRE told IPS. AVRE is a humanitarian organization that provides psychological assistance to victims before and during the hearing as well as follow-up counseling.
In the last four hearings, Movice and AVRE have provided psychosocial support. Each organizations serves as a protective environment for the victim, allowing the person to dare to speak, and most importantly, enabling the victim can find the conditions to take a step beyond the tears in order to claim justice, Gomez said.
One characteristic of the hearing in Florence was that it emphasized that the Colombian conflict has cut across several generations. There was an old woman whose mother was a victim of the war of the 40’s and 50’s, known as La Violencia, and who, at the same time, told of the murder of her son.
The children of this history of violence are the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) which emerged in 1964. This town of El Pato, partly within the jurisdiction of San Vincente, was just one of their cribs. Born the same year was the National Liberation Army (ELN), influenced by the Cuban Revolution.
The warm earth, fertile, humid and still largely jungle, in the northwest corner of the Amazon, is breathtakingly beautiful. But the world does not know the Caguán.
This region was the site of three years of talks between the government of Andres Pastrana (1998-2002) and the FARC.
Pastrana demilitarized 42000 square kilometers around Caguán, but there was never a truce in the country.
The FARC took the time to become stronger, some say. The government meanwhile negotiated U.S. intervention in the conflict, emphasize others.
The most obvious result was Plan Colombia, a strategy designed, funded and overseen by Washington, with the primary goal of to attack the coca - the raw material for cocaine - to "take the fish out of the water”, the guerrilla being the fish and the water, the people forced to live with them in these neglected areas.
Since 2000 $5.179 million have financed this war via Plan Colombia.
Last week the U.S. president, Barack Obama, expressed interest in continuing Plan Colombia, and suggested, for 2010, a plan of military and police assistance of around $268 million, according to Adam Isacson, of the U.S. Center for International Policy, based in Washington.
The amount for this support will gradually be reduced, as planned by the government of Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush (2001-2009).
Plan Colombia was launched in Putumayo, the department adjacent to the south of Caquetá.
The Brazilian system of satellite monitoring of forest fires in the Amazon at the end of February 2002, showed hundreds of red dots around the Caquetá, and some large spots of the same color to the west of the seat of the talks.
The cause was a series of massive bombings raids that followed the breakdown of the negotiations at Caguán which heralded the entrance of the Plan Colombia in Caqueta.
After the bombing, came the army's 12th Brigade, based in Florencia, and led by Guillermo Quinonez, who later became chief of that force.
Quinonez was promoted to general a month before being suddenly relieved of his post on December 20, 2008, amid strong international pressure to investigate and punish innumerable executions of civilians around the country, which had been reported by the military as guerrilla casualties suffered in combat.
After the "softening" practiced by Quinonez, as it was described in laudatory terms by the Bogota newspaper, El Tiempo, was coupled with intensive aerial spraying of the coca zones with a mixture of the herbicide glyphosate, the special forces arrived from the army.
In April 2003, the FARC uncovered the beginning of Plan Patriota, a vast military offensive which later changed its name to Plan Consolidation, with U.S. funding.
According Caguán Vive in Caqueta and the neighboring department of Guaviare there are a total of 35,000 soldiers operating.
In turn, the guerrillas hinder or prohibit the entry of medical missions to Caguán. This is not to mention the many attacks and threats against politicians who oppose their plans, in other areas of Caqueta.
Since 1980, the coca boom has brought lots of money and an abundance of fortune seekers to the region, but since the crackdown, many people have left.
Of the 450,000 people who lived in Caquetá earlier this century, 145,660 are displaced, an equivalent of 32 percent or “almost the population of Chairá and San Vicente del Caguán,” said Senator Gloria Inés Ramírez of the Communist Party, a member of the Peace Commission of the Senate, and the only parliamentary representative at Truth Hearings.
At the hearing it was alleged that the army subjected the population to health and economic blockades, rationing both food and medicine.
“The military launched massive and arbitrary detentions, handcuffed women and men in front of their children”, said Nubia Perdomo, president of the Asociación de Comerciantes de Remolino del Caguán, who was captured in this village along with 24 other people on May 11, 2008.
One after another, visibly shaken mothers reported the executions of their sons, who were then represented by the army to be guerrillas who were killed in combat.
On Monday, all of the Asojuntas delegates of Bajo y Medio Caguán who attended the hearing, including Doncel and Sanchez, succeeded in getting the Departmental Assembly to agree to a June 18 debate on the human rights situation in the area. All of the social organizations in Caqueta that are known to IPS will take part.
In addition, Senator Ramírez undertook to convene a parliamentary debate over forcing the relevant authorities to accept responsibility for their actions and omissions in the region.
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