Nico sent along some helpful feedback that didn’t make it into the published draft, pointing out among other things that state violence is the primary barrier to organizing and partnership. “i think it’s important to make clear that not all colonos have that mentality…  what about the colonos who organized in marquetalia??   i think there is definitely a stigmatization of colonos of being very individualistic, but in any given community, you seen signs of people helping each other out.” He also pointed out that there are in fact indigenous guerrilleros, and the FARC aren’t anymore likely to target indigenous or campesinos.

Editors. Editors are important. Preguntando caminamos…

Published in Left Turn (June 2009)

An Unlikely Alliance: Indigenous and Campesinos Build an Alliance for Self-Defense

By Andrew Willis Garcés

To reach one of the Colombian indigenous tribes that overlaps with Venezuela, you first need to get to the town of Honduras, in the municipality of Convención in the Norte de Santander department. It is accessible by a precarious, one-lane dirt road hugging the eastern spine of the Andes Mountains; average speed, about 12 mph. From there you walk or, if you’re lucky, ride a donkey past acres of relatively new coca fields and forest being cleared for that or pasture. After four hours you’ll arrive at the state Catatumbo-Barí Forest Reserve and the small village of Bridicayra, one of the few remaining indigenous Barí settlements.

Though hard to reach, the area is highly coveted by multinationals, some of which sent proxies this past January to a bi-annual assembly of Barí leaders, in hopes of enlisting them in the cause of resource exploitation. Twenty-three of all Barí towns were represented at the assembly in Bridicayra. Also in attendance were lawyers, environmental ministry officials, journalists, and documentarians. However the most unlikely guests the Barí shared space with during the assembly weren’t these urban professionals, but local campesinos.

In Colombia, campesinos are mostly non-indigenous family farmers who don’t necessarily share the Barí’s philosophy of collective ownership, much less their political unity. They have often been pitted against indigenous people by wealthy landowners and corporations. Yet despite being traditional rivals, the Barí and campesino communities have been driven to a partnership by common enemies, including multinational mining companies, complicit Colombian regulatory agencies, and the US government.

Catatumbo: Site of Struggle

The Catatumbo-Barí Forest Reserve is a land of mountains and valleys in the northeast of Colombia, running along the river that gives the area its name and which dumps into Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Nearly every inch outside the reservation is under cultivation, mostly by subsistence farmers growing coca, cacao, yucca, plantains, and beans.

The Barí in Bridicayda relocated to the village 10 years ago, one more involuntary move in many lifetimes of struggle for the tribe. Descendants of the Arawak, their range once extended uninterrupted along the Catatumbo River into Venezuela. The Spaniards, landed in the Maracaibo Basin in the early 16th century and famous for their “golden hallucinations,” decided the area’s frequent lightning strikes turned stone into gold and began to explore the region. Barí communities were forcibly displaced to make way for commercial routes and for the production of cacao. Barí warriors engaged in open warfare with Spanish forces for over the next 200 years. Pressures declined somewhat after Simón Bolívar’s army expelled the royals in the early 19th century.

But in 1905 oil was discovered in Catatumbo, and by 1930 a Gulf Oil (now Exxon) subsidiary had drilling rights. A government contract signed with the company in 1931 made explicit government protection against armed Barí resistance: they’re referred to as “savages” in the document, and the federal government pledged to battle the natives with soldiers and police.

The Barí fought with spears and arrows for 50 years, but ultimately were forced to give up the vast majority of their land. They were massacred even as a wave of national mobilizations forced the government to set aside land for two reservations, where most of the Colombian half of the tribe has lived since. So blatant was the government policy of tribal eradication during this time that French ethnologist Robert Jaulin introduced the modern definition of “ethnocide” after observing the Barí’s decline in the 1960s.

Since first contact with Europeans, the number of Barí has shrunk 70 percent, and their territory is down to 7 percent of its original size. Today there are fewer than two-dozen tribal villages in the region spread across five municipalities in remote areas. Less than 3,200 Barí remain, with another 9,000 across the border in Venezuela. The communities still rely on the same traditional agriculture, hunting, and fishing that have sustained them for centuries, although Western diseases and the persistent threat of forced displacement have made many more dependent on cacao as a cash crop.

Campesino legacy

While the Barí were being slowly massacred, across the country Colombia’s 30-year war between Liberal and Conservative Party forces was displacing massive numbers of families from their homes. Some settled in the Catatumbo, and now call themselves colonos, or colonizers, proud of, as they see it, having opened up land to subsistence cultivation. These campesinos were offered up to $1000 pesos by multinational companies for every indigenous person they killed, and were encouraged to push further into Barí land, creating a labor pool for future resource extraction efforts and helping undermine Barí resistance.

Insurgents have also come to inhabit the region in the last several decades, particularly guerrilla fighters with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), for whom Catatumbo is a refuge.

In 2002 paramilitaries—funded by business interests and seeking to break the insurgents’ base with scorched-earth tactics—began killing campesinos and setting villages ablaze, driving thousands of families to the cities of Cúcuta and Bucaramanga at the edges of the zone. Fed up with government neglect and official impunity as the killers paraded around highways, many campesinos organized formal refugee camps, squatting in public parks and occupying municipal buildings. It was here that the campesinos began to organize to give voice to the displaced, winning government attention and building alliances with other groups impacted by violence and state impunity.

Two years later, many campesino families decided to return home. A group of law students, who had given human rights workshops in the refugee camps, accompanied them. Through their work with the students, who went on to form the Luis Carlos Perez Law Collective, the campesinos also linked up to regional allies. Eventually campesino leaders returned home to rebuild, everything uncertain.

At the same time they were heading home, the government-sponsored paramilitary demobilization (process of getting fighters to leave paramilitary groups) carried out in the first term of president Álvaro Uribe Vélez was changing the face of the armed right-wing presence in the region. Paramilitaries were replaced by a surge in army troops, who in fact, were ordered to go even harder against the rebels. The army began displaying bodies of executed alleged guerrillas. In reality they were campesino civilians, murdered and used in a massive, nationwide body count fraud exposed last year, now known as the “false positives” scandal.

Betrayed and brutalized, the campesinos began organizing for self-defense, legally constituting the Campesino Association of Catatumbo (ASCAMCAT) in 2005 and signing up local Collective Action Committees as affiliates. The committees are the smallest unit of governance, and in many cases are the only organized government presence in remote villages.

Unlikely Alliance

Although preoccupied with defending themselves from extrajudicial executions, ASCAMCAT leaders also expanded their work with the legal collective to confront a new threat: multinational mining and oil companies. It was here that they found common ground with their indigenous neighbors.

In 2006, the government oil company Ecopetrol sent representatives to meet with the Barí, to ward off resistance to plans for eventual exploitation of the reserve. The Luis Carlos Perez legal collective had begun meeting with tribal leaders through mutual involvement in a regional human rights network, and discovered the company had told both indigenous and campesino leaders that their neighbors had been bribed off. As attorney Melissa Balisterio explained, “Both groups came to us and said, ‘Those guys are taking money from the company! They’re being bought off.’ Of course, none of it was true, the company wanted to split them apart.” Seeking to build a bridge against a common enemy, the attorneys pushed for a meeting. “We said to each, ‘have you talked to them?’”

There are many obvious reasons for indigenous groups to avoid contact with campesinos. In addition to the historic role of campesinos in official ethnocide, unlike most in the region the Barí don’t grow coca, and community members don’t join armed groups. Campesinos are heavily stigmatized, accused of terrorism by the government, and many civilian leaders are imprisoned for organizing nonviolent resistance, to say nothing of those that have been assassinated by army troops and paramilitaries. Likewise, indigenous groups have been targeted by the FARC, accused of being government collaborators. Twenty-seven Awá were executed in February in the southern state of Nariño. For the campesinos, then, allying with the Barí carries its own risks.

At a meeting organized by the lawyers that same year, ASCAMCAT and the Barí agreed to collaborate. It was a historic alliance, the only one of its kind between campesino and indigenous groups in Colombia.

“We don’t always care for the land as we should,” explained ASCAMCAT leader Eduardo, who pointed to the campesino tendency of clearing land using brush fires. “And we’re focused on individual land ownership, whereas the Barí own everything collectively. You can see the conflict.”

Many Barí confirmed this tension. Campesinos, wary of further forced displacement, are understandably concerned with receiving official title to the land they work and live on. Many of them also grow coca, however federal law gives the government the ability to take away reservation land if it’s being used to grow prohibited crops. “We understand there aren’t other viable cultivation options for campesinos in the region, they need to grow coca to feed their families. But we also need to protect the reserve,” said one concerned Barí elder.

Despite these reservations, the Barí and ASCAMAT have embarked on a joint organizing campaign to educate campesino reserve neighbors about the tribe’s situation, campesino rights, and sustainable farming techniques. The Ángel David Jaime Pérez Leadership School, named after a recently assasinated regional Communist Party leader and spearheaded by ASCAMCAT, has held six sessions with Barí participation. Representatives of both groups, along with attorneys, have visited dozens of homes, and speak frequently at Collective Action Committee meetings.

They’re already seeing results. “Our relationship has improved considerably. The campesinos have been conscious of why we’re in this struggle, because the Barí are defending their territory,” Barí cacique Jaime said in an interview. “We’ve also explained that the Barí are not just the Barí, as we say, ‘the Barí are the Barí, but the other half of the Barí is the land.’ The majority of campesinos want to coexist, to share this space together, and are conscious that the land is the fruit that provides all to everyone, for campesinos as for us.’”

Reserve for Hydrocarbons?

The partnership has grown to confront illegal mining. Both groups came together for a Barí-led march to Cúcuta on Indigenous Peoples Day in October of 2007 and 2008, which drew dozens of campesinos who joined in as the procession wound through the region. The “March in Defense of Wildlife and the Land” called for Ecopetrol to stop seismic testing and preliminary excavations around the reserve, and to draw attention to coal companies like Rio de Oro that take advantage of lax environmental regulation by the Environment Ministry. The ministry has at times refused to enforce a basic law requiring companies seeking extraction permits to conduct consultations with local residents and publish environmental impact studies.

Mining is prohibited in the forest reserve, which includes a sizeable area highlighted as a probable source of hydrocarbons. But companies may have an ally in the notorious trojan horse for multinationals, the non-profit group Conservation International. A representative of the group appeared at the Barí cacique assembly in January, professing to be working on unspecified “natural resource issues” that included conducting “biodiversity studies.” As documented in Left Turn Issue No.12, Conservation International has a history of partnering with repressive governments to drive indigenous people out of resource-rich “sensitive areas” coveted by multinationals in places like Chiapas, Mexico. The group has been enlisting local Catatumbo organizations to help with a study that would support changing the perimeter of the forest reserve, which could open the mining interest area to exploitation.

The Environment Ministry and other state agencies have been backing similar changes, with three proposals that would reduce the size of the Reserve pending official scrutiny. This despite a 2008 decision by the Constitutional Court that declared a new forestry law backed by the president invalid for lack of input from indigenous communities. Exploiting the reserve has clearly become a priority for the Uribe government. Over the last several years, the departmental and national governments appropriated over $75 million to speed construction of a two-lane highway through the region that leads to an ocean port, ensuring quick access for any new coal mines. The state oil company is likely anxious to continue exploratory drilling as well, as many of its wells are expected to run dry by 2011.

The Barí are not the only tribe affected. Nearby in Norte de Santander, the international Occidental Petroleum has been criticized by a state judge for illegally drilling on protected U’Wa indigenous land, which presumably was permitted by regulatory agencies.

Alliance for the future

If they succeed in keeping mining companies out, the Barí and campesino groups may stay unified thanks to US foreign policy. Each summer, cropdusters swing through the area, guarded by Air Force helicopters. They spray Monsanto’s glyphosphate on as many staple crops like yucca and cacao as they do on the desired target, coca. The toxic poison can drift over two miles and the planes are notoriously inaccurate. Many residents have developed skin and respiratory illnesses, and some women have experienced stillbirths. It also takes the soil years to recover enough to support the basic staple crops again, but coca can be replanted relatively quickly. The specter of the US free trade agreement weighs heavily for both. “[The free trade agreement,] means death for us,” one campesino leader told me, echoing the Zapatistas’ naming NAFTA a “death sentence” in 1994.

Both groups plan to continue to collaborate. At the January assembly they announced plans for a joint speaking tour in Italy this May, where at least one ally made it clear that the groups are confronting a global problem. “This isn’t just about them, about attacks on people who live in the reserve and depend on it for survival, about self-determination for these groups who consider this kind of resource exploitation a threat,” says attorney Balisterios, who also plans to continue accompanying their struggle. “It’s about all of us who need a healthy environment for the future.”

Fortunately, there is Fault Lines.

Part 1

Part 2

http://obamarememberus.wordpress.com

Let’s start with gratitude to an awesome Bay Area radio show,  La Raza Chronicles on KPFA, for giving Latin American social movements a voice on US airwaves, and featuring this blog last week.

I’ve been asked by folks in the US what media projects exist here. I encourage Spanish-reading folks (ACIN, Prensa Rural and the IMC have some articles in English) to check these below. But all the links to the right are foreign sites in English.

News Video

• Noticias UNO – the only progressive Colombian cable news. Sadly, hard to find offline
• Red de Prensa Alternativa del Suroccidente de Colombia – although encumbered by a difficult layout, this site has a good video archive

News

• Rebelión – maintained by an international collective of volunteer activist translators
• Prensa Rural – the only media activists focused on amplifying & capacitando campesino movements
• ACIN Communications Collective – news on indigenous movements in the southwest
• Colombia IMC
• Desde Abajo – these folks also produce one of the few widely available Left print newspapers
• Anarcol – anarchist news from Colombia and around the world

Commentary

• Periódico El Turbión
• Revista El Salmón
• La Silla Vacía – a Colombian version of Huffington Post

Video/Visual/Art

• Colectivo Vivo Arte
• Antena Mutante – Medellín-based collective, known for live streaming video of events, and who have facilitated a unique occasional partnership between Colombian and Oaxacan artists

That’s the good news. But since activists often receive threats or worse after being singled out in public by government officials, the “official” line is worth keeping in mind. So many challenges even to mundane journalism. Here’s some video with subtitles by CIP featuring “footage of some of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe’s recent attacks on journalists and peace activists, in some cases falsely tying them to terrorist groups.”

Hollman Morris, ironically enough, won a press freedom award. Uribe’s comments were immediately denounced by folks in many places, and have provoked an international campaign to protect human rights defenders and journalists, currently in formation.

More fotos.

This week five hundred people representing over a hundred social movement groups from across the Americas gathered in Medellín for a People’s Development Alternatives Assembly coinciding with the 50^th anniversary meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank.

With the slogan “IADB: 50 Years Funding Inequality. Enough!,” the assembly organizers put forward a program of workshops and spaces for social movement dialogue, combined with public marches and visible denouncements of what they call US neoliberal policies writ large on Latin America.

Organizers like Diego Rodríguez from the Argentinian non-profit, M´Biguá, Citizenship & Environmental Justice, were critical of what they called the unsuccessful development model promoted by the bank, the promotion of privatization policies at the expense of local interests, and the bank’s populist rhetoric, which they say belies the exclusion of women, indigenous communities, people of African descent and other populations in bank programs.

Participants critique the fact that, in 1960, the region had an external debt of US $237 million, which today is above $42 billion. The Colombian IADB debt alone would require $2,500 from every Colombian to pay off. The bank is responsible for 41% of the country’s external multilateral debt, and 9.5% of total public debt. Activists point to bank investments in the privatization of public infrastructure and programs promoting export dependence resulting in the country importing 90% of wheat and corn supplies.

“Considering that the primary objective for the creation of the Inter-American Development Bank was to speed up the process of both individual and collective sustainable economic and social development in its member countries,” says Diego Rodríguez. “It’s reasonable to ask: How is it that after 50 years of work by the so-called experts do we still have alarming levels of poverty, destitution and inequality across the region?”

The assembly comes at a time when the bank’s role in the country’s water privatization in particular is being questioned, as a broad coalition of social movements in Colombia push for an official referendum on the human right to water. From 1993 to 2005, Latin American countries took on $5.3 billion in debt related to water projects. Most of these loans, according to Food & Water Watch, required countries to change laws and public institutions to allow private ownership and to raise overall rates.

Organizers are demanding that the bank lift loan requirements obligating private sector participation in water management, halt all loans to these companies and loan agreements which threaten the environment, and are calling for the IADB to give priority to public health and water access projects targeted to low-income communities.

Groups like Gender Action have also criticized the bank’s effects on women. They say less than 1% of funds distributed between 2003 and 2006 went to reproductive health projects and HIV/AIDS prevention. They’re calling on the bank to make public information in its Gender and Diversity Unit funding, and to increase funding of programs promoting gender equality.

The bank has also been under fire recently from unlikely enemies, like Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), who has criticized the bank for over a billion dollars in losses connected to investments in toxic assets. Two financing alternatives critical of the bank’s history in the region have also emerged, the Venezuela-led Bank of the South and the ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America), a partnership of Bolivia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

The IADB is run by 49 member states, 21 of which are not in the Americas. The US holds 30% of voting shares, while Latin American countries hold 50%. In 2007, The bank gave $2.9 billion to private enterprises, nearly half the total, and plans to approve loans totaling $18 billion at the meeting this weekend. Between 1996 and 2002, the bank gave $523.7 million to transnational water companies after they were awarded concessions in Argentina, Bolivia and Honduras. But Colombia might be the country most impacted by IADB privatization policies – in 15 years, nearly 50% of the country’s water services have been privatized.

Bank-Led Water Privatization

With Law 142 of 1993, Colombia’s Congress made way for private companies to run public utilities, and also began the process of lowering subsidies to poor residents. Cartagena was the first to privatize, with the help of the World Bank, giving Spanish company Aguas de Barcelona, a subsidiary of French conglomerate Suez, a 20-year contract and 45% of the new company, Aguacar. In the next few years, cities including Barranquilla, Santa Marta, Palmira, Tunja, Cartago and Monteria all signed concessions with multinational companies. As of 2004, there were 125 private and 48 mixed public-private water companies in the country.

The bank’s effects on water access are best illustrated by the example of Pereira, the capital of the department of Risaralda. According to a Public Services International (PSI) report, the city’s water utility, Public Companies of Pereira (EEPP) was an autonomous, multi-service enterprise that also supplied telephone, electricity and waste services. Like many Colombian utilities, the company used surplus revenues from phone service fees to subsidize the costs of water service to poor residents.

The IADB accused EEPP of using this subsidy as a tactic to “hide financial deficits for water supply and sewerage.” The same report documents that in the three years following the IADB-mandated separation of the different service sectors of the original company, water rates for the poorest residents increased 238%, and a variety of measures were used to terminate union members.   Article 8 of the performance plan developed in compliance with IADB regulations obliges the company to convert to a mixed enterprise for public services, a change that ended protections of the acquired labor rights of SINTRAEMSDES members.

A study by NGO Misión Vida also found a reduction in water consumption in Pereira following the private conversion. Another 1996 study by researchers at the Universidad de los Andes also found consumption declines of 18% to 26% in Medellín and Barranquilla following rate increases in privately controlled utilities.

But not all cities have caved in to privatization. The World Bank, an IADB relative, loaned Bogotá $145 million in 1996 to prop up the city’s water utility, and for many years encouraged the city to privatize, ultimately leading city officials to decline further World Bank funding. The Water and Sewerage Company of Bogotá (EAAB) has remained public, increasing access to 300,000 residents each year in neighborhoods across the sprawling metropolis at the base of the Andes.

Menahem Libhaber, the World Bank’s chief water and sanitation engineer in Latin America, told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2003 that while EAAB is a “very good company, very highly respected,” it needs to be privatized to reduce costs. “The salaries are huge, the employees get a lot of benefits — health and education — which is OK. I’m for socialism. But this is very expensive — people cannot pay the water bill,” he said. “The company needs private sector involvement.”

According to the same ICIJ report, instead of paying out dividends to investors, the EAAB reinvests its income. In 2001, the EAAB spent about $180 million in public works, mostly in poor neighborhoods, 40% of all water-sector investment in Colombia.

And in 2002, Cali water workers union SINTRAEMCALI won a battle against privatization of the city’s water utility. The campaign culminated in a 35-day occupation of the central administration building, and featured support from fellow PSI affiliates in the United Kingdom and the UK Colombia Solidarity Campaign.

Water as a Human Right

International Development Bank: 50 Years Financing Inequality

With privatization threatening to further erode basic access, subsidized water rates and union contracts, and at least 30% of the population without basic access to water according to the Colombian Red Cross, activists have decided to take coordinated action. They’re using a strategy made popular in Uruguay in 2004, when the country became the first in the world to declare access to clean water a fundamental human right through a public referendum.

Led by Ecofondo and the Committee to Support the Referendum, a coalition of labor unions, environmentalists, consumer organizations, indigenous groups and student unions have been organizing since 2007 to win an official referendum to add the human right to water to those guaranteed by Colombia’s constitution.  In September of 2008, organizers submitted two million signatures in support of the effort, well more than the 5% of the population needed to put the issue on the ballot.

The measure was submitted before Congress on March 16^th. Two days later, a colorful, multigenerational gathering of over 5,000 people from nearly every department, as far as the remote district of Putumayo, assembled in the capital to march from the Planetarium to the Plaza Bolívar in front of Congress.

The first days of debate failed to yield agreement in Congress. Interior Minister Fabio Valencia Cossio said the Uribe government opposes the referendum, because it is “unclear” and “inconvenient.”  News reports this week however indicate that the president will support the popular initiative in order to increase the chances that another referendum also be allowed to make its way through Congress: one changing the constitution to allow him to run for a third term.

Many hope the general sentiment in the legislature won’t be reflected in statements made by the chief of the Public Ministry,  Alejandro Ordóñez , who told one reporter that “it’s not possible to recognize water as a fundamental human right because the state has no way of complying.” Some activists point to comments such as these as evidence of opposition by private entities in Bogotá and Medellín benefiting from current policies. But one popular chant, “The water is ours, damnit!” and many signs and banners decrying the takeover of public resources for profit, belied the activists’ resolve. “We’ve always been here,” a representative of the Nasa indigenous people said from a stage in the plaza. “Just like the water that gives us life.”

I saw this clearly on March 18 at a demonstration in the capital to support a national referendum that would insert the human right to water in the country’s constitution, the March in Defense of Water. Water privatization has yet to get a national focus in the US, even though Atlanta and some midwestern cities have gone private.  In Colombia, where water is always listed by indigenous and campesino groups in the list of coveted resources available in rural zones, and 50% of the utilities have been privatized in 15 years, it’s a different story. It was a festival of solidarity. Many different public and private sector unions (including local delegations from around the country), the ONIC indigenous federation, environmentalists, water consumers associations, disabled activists, high school and university students, artists, anarchist collectives, feminists – everyone had their banner, and most a rally speaking slot. A TON of youth came out and organized a huge, modified nursery school game in the middle of the march.

Here’s video.

And the music. Aterciopelados have been involved in the fight to preserve natural water sources for years, naming their most recent album Rio (river) and travelling by boat to collect signatures for the referendum. Apparently they played at a different rally last weekend. Here’s their “Cancion Protesta.”

This local all-women hip-hop group played at the March 18th rally. Por Razones de Estado, For Reasons of State.

My post with awful first-hand anecdotes and photos will have to wait. Witness for Peace is pulling together an incredible effort to stop US funding of fumigations in the next month. Click here to sign their petition, which will be delivered to Congress & Obama by a Colombian & US delegation this week. And go here to sign up for WfP action alerts as this effort moves forward.

Here’s a video the great Witness folks in Colombia have put together, released today.

Journey to the heart of coca country where United States tax dollars have financed the aerial fumigation of 2.6 million acres of land in Colombia – the world’s second most biodiverse country.See cropdusters target coca plants, the main ingredient of cocaine, with concentrated herbicide as part of the U.S. war on drugs. Listen to people on the ground, hear about the impacts, and learn new ideas about how to solve this deadly problem.

Surprise prizes for the women and soccer for the men!

Here’s video from the women’s day march on the other side of Antioquia, in Medellin.

I met Lorenzo Camacho in Puerto Nuevo Ité, Antioquia, known locally as Cooperativa for the longtime artisanal gold miners and lumber harvesters collective store there. Most of the community was driven out and the buildings burned in ’96 by paramilitaries. A community housing project sponsored by the ACVC and funded in part by the EU is now in the process of restoring the village.

He’s from Cundinamarca state, Yacopi municipality, and was forced to flee in’82 after receiving death threats from the army for being an alleged guerrilla sympathizer. Since then, they’ve had to move three other times, displaced by the army or paramilitaries. He wrote this song after coming to Puerto Nuevo a few years ago. I’ve had a few fascinating conversations with campesino and indigenous leaders who talk about the creation of memory and myth, and the use of storytelling and song, which some feel movements here often lack. Just like in El Norte, folks here get submerged in the day-to-day, which in this case includes daily harassment and threats by the army. (More on that soon.) There’s never enough time.

Apologies, the volume is low. Feel free to suggest alternate translations in the comments.

“Por Aqui Vamos Llegando”
by Lorenzo Camacho

Por aqui vamos llegando
A estas tierra de Antioquia
De muchos departamentos
De Caldas hacia el Tolima
Caparrapí y Yacopi
Venimos la gente buena
A estas tierras de aqui
En Puerto Nuevo se vive
Pobre pero vivimos
Querido amigo les digo
Debemos de ser tranquilos
Vamonos para el baldio
Y alli pasamos los dias

“We’re coming here”
by Lorenzo Camacho

We’re coming here
To this land of Antioquia
From many departments (states)
We come, good people
To these lands
From Caldas to Tolima
Caparrapí and Yacopi
In Puerto Nuevo we live
Poor but getting by
I tell you friend
We should stay calm
We’re going to baldio
And there we’ll pass the days

“Stop-me-before-I-kill-again” seems to be the logic the Uribe administration has brought to the “demobilization” of paramilitaries, who have been conclusively linked to a majority of elected leaders in his governing coalition in the para-politica scandal. As the documents linked to and excerpted below show, the Uribe government has mostly absolved paramilitary leaders of responsibility for massacres and assassinations, probably to prevent them from telling all about the activities of their friends in government, and have treated them with kid gloves. This contrasts to the treatment of current and former guerrilla combatants; a clear double standard, as Narco News notes.

The government claims paramilitaries no longer exist, although I’ve met at least two dozen people who have been threatened by paramilitary or, as Corp Arco Iris calls them, “emerging armed groups,” just in the last year. Many activists received death threats by groups like the Aguilas Negras following the March 6, 2008 demonstrations against state and paramilitary violence. It will be useful to watch the response to today’s anniversary protests.

To understand the current state of impunity for paramilitaries, responsible for most threats, assassinations and, many say, the bulk of drug trafficking over the last two decades, it’s critical to know the impact of the Justice and Peace Law passed in 2005, three years after Uribe was elected and promptly signed a ceasefire with the AUC.

Here’s an excerpt from the CIP translation of a report by the director of INDEPAZ, “A Balance in the Red.”

Some of the figures are noteworthy: in three years no one has yet been sentenced; out of 3,431 people being processed for atrocities, only 9 have finished the confessions process. As of yet there is not one single victim who has been able to process his/her demands in a reparation proceeding, and not one peso from the perpetrators has been taken away through judicial sentencing… Out of a total of 3.5 million paramilitary victims, only 147,000 were brave enough to enlist for some kind of compensation. Barely 10,500 of them were able to attend a hearing, without any result, and less than 2,000 have legal representation… The 20 paramilitary heads who have given confessions turned in a paltry US$2 million and 99 farms (75% of the total money belonged to the “Mellizo” [narcotrafficker and sometime paramilitary leader Miguel Ángel Mejía Múnera, captured in May]). This contrasts with the US$5 billion accumulated by the narco-paramilitaries via narcotrafficking operations, the expropriation of more than 1.5 million hectares of land, and the appropriation of public funds in alliance with their “para-politician” partners.

OBLIGATORY US POLICY CONNECTIONS

• Declassified documents show the CIA knew about links between politicians and paramilitaries since at least 1994. 15 years later, Obama’s budget shows $419 million earmarked for Colombia’s military and police.
• The US wants to extradite a top para leader currently cooperating with victims’ lawyers. Last week several Colombian NGOs sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him to reconsider: Letter on extradition PDF

Here are a few other links on the “Justice and Peace” / demobilization process.

• Amnesty Intl: Justice and Peace Law will guarantee impunity for human rights abusers
• Narco News: Paramilitary Law Cements Colombia’s Double Standard
• International Crisis Group: Towards Peace and Justice?
• International Center on Transitional Justice: Brief on Justice and Peace Law Presented to Colombian Constitutional Court
• Latin America Working Group: The Other Half of the Truth: Searching for Truth, Justice and Reparations for Colombia’s Victims of Paramilitary Violence

Cherry-picked excerpts from this comprehensive LAWG report after the jump.

Truth. The lack of an independent truth commission severely restricts opportunities for truth. The National Commission for Reparations and Reconciliation (CNRR) is charged with producing a report on “the reasons why the armed groups started up and evolved,” but while this could result in an insightful report, it is a limited project by a handful of scholars. The CNRR’s presidentially-appointed members lack the independence and credibility brought by a UN-sponsored truth commission.

At least 15 victims seeking justice through the Justice and Peace process were killed, while another 200 were threatened, according to the CNRR (as of September 2007). The widely publicized murder of Yolanda Izquierdo after testifying in Salvatore Mancuso’s hearing struck fear into victims’ hearts. Although the government finally produced a witness protection plan in late 2007 in response to a court order, threats and attacks continued in 2008, many bearing the name of the Aguilas Negras. Victims’ associations were broken into and their registries of victims stolen. The government failed to effectively investigate any of these crimes—and even failed to wholeheartedly denounce them. Finally, the U.S. and Colombian governments’ decision to extradite paramilitary leadership dealt a blow to the Justice and Peace process. Suddenly, the ringleaders were shipped out of the country, and their hearings were suspended. In the United States these mob bosses would face justice for drug trafficking— but not for the thousands of people they had murdered.

Justice. While Justice and Peace offers more possibilities to bring perpetrators to justice than many peace processes, rights groups argue that punishment is minimal even for crimes against humanity, and implementation is flawed. The vast majority demobilized without penalty. Only those against whom there were charges, or who believed their crimes would be discovered, sought reduced sentences—a total of 3,127 paramilitaries. Just 23 prosecutors in the Attorney General’s Justice and Peace unit, hampered by the small number of investigations of paramilitaries prior to demobilization, are responsible for handling these prosecutions. Moreover, most of the 3,127 paramilitaries who sought reduced sentences appear to have abandoned the process. As of December 2007, 941 of the 1,057 depositions that the Attorney General´s office had begun receiving were closed because the ex-combatants did not ratify their willingness to receive the law’s benefits; and not a single indictment was issued, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Colombia office.

Reparations. While the law has created some limited opportunities for truth and justice, reparations have gone nowhere. “Reparations” in this context means not only compensation for suffering, but return of stolen land. Paramilitaries must disclose illegally obtained assets, which are channelled into a National Reparations Fund. But even paramilitaries believed to have acquired vast riches through violence, extortion, and drug trafficking pled poverty. Just the following has been turned over to the Reparations Fund: 21 rural plots (5,439 hectares); 7 urban lots; clothing; 4,666 head of cattle and horses; 8 vehicles; 2 helicopters; 739 million pesos; 70 pairs of shoes, and a television in bad repair…. In February 2008, the Congress passed a bill with executive branch support making it easier to legalize land held in someone’s possession for more than five years. In a more peaceful context a proposal to legalize small farmers’ land would be progressive. But in wartime Colombia, the five years coincide with the period of paramilitary expulsion of small farmers, Afro-Colombian and indigenous people from their lands. Given ex-paramilitaries’ power advantage over poor farmers, this law could help them legalize their ill-gotten gains. Three years after the passage of the Justice and Peace law, virtually no reparations have been made, and almost no land has been returned.

The Right to “Never Again.” Colombian rights groups claim that one other fundamental right is far from satisfied by the Justice and Peace law: the right to “non-repetition,” a guarantee that the abuses will never again take place. Paramilitary power is still far from broken. OAS monitors document the emergence of some 22 illegal armed groups, as the paramilitaries “recycled” into new, smaller but still deadly units. The groups, believed to range from 3,000 to 9,000 members, are taking over drug trade routes and extortion rackets. While many of these new or recycled groups focus on criminal activities, some, like the “Black Eagles,” continue the practice of threatening union, human rights and community leaders. Some continue to receive support from Colombian soldiers and police.

From the start of the ceasefire agreement in December 2002 until June 30, 2007, the Colombian Commission of Jurists documents 3,530 killings and disappearances by paramilitaries (outside of combat). These abuses, while trending downward, indicate many have not demobilized. Guerrillas, who have not “demobilized,” were responsible for 1,805 killings and disappearances of civilians during a similar period (July 2002-June 2007). Paramilitaries during a ceasefire and demobilization killed and disappeared nearly twice the number of civilians as guerrillas still in active combat.

These efforts peaked in a nationwide demonstration against paramilitary violence on
March 6, following a February 4th march against FARC kidnapping. The “tale of two marches” exposed like a raw nerve the different ways in which victims of violence by the guerrillas and paramilitaries were treated by Colombian society, government and media. The government, having embraced the anti-FARC march, refused to endorse the anti-paramilitary march, and a top presidential advisor on national radio associated the march organizers with the FARC.