Colombia’s indigenous uprising

ON OCTOBER 13--516 years to the day that First Nation originarios discovered Christopher Columbus--some 12,000 indigenous Colombians marched onto the Pan-American Highway in Cauca and refused to lift their blockade until their demands for land, liberty and life were met by the state.

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, already facing widespread strikes by sugar-cane cutters, judicial workers and university students, declared a national state of emergency and sent in the National Police's mobile anti-riot squad to break up the highway blockade.

The resulting clashes between protesters and police killed at least two indigenous Colombians, and wounded 130 more. Nevertheless, the protests continue. Last week, indigenous rights groups marched to Cali, the third-largest city in Colombia, to press their demands. Representatives of the indigenous coalition were scheduled to meet with President Uribe as this article went to press.

We recently returned from 10 weeks in Colombia as international accompaniment delegates with the human rights organizations Witness for Peace, Christian Peacemaker Teams and Justicia y Paz. We traveled to at-risk communities in rural Cauca, Chocó, Santander and Bolívar, as well as in Bogotá and Medellín.

In the departmental capital of Popayán, we met with the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC, by its initials in Spanish) and heard their perspective, platforms and prescriptions firsthand.

"In the movies of today that we call news, we are shown that the bad guys are Indians and the good guys are cowboys," said CRIC member Jorge Caballero. "Uribe is shown as the good cowboy, and the rest of us are just the bad Indians."

CRIC is a coalition of First-Nation originarios with a collective history more than 10,000 years old. CRIC and other groups, like the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN, by its initials in Spanish) and the National Indigenous Organization of Cauca (ONIC, by its initials in Spanish), began organizing in the contemporary context in the 1970s, to defend themselves against a brutal dirty war waged by Colombia's power elite to break up indigenous territories.

"As indigenous people, we live on collectively titled land," said Aida Quilcue, spokeswoman for the CRIC council of elders, who carries a traditional tribal baton symbolizing authority. "Historically, we have conserved our natural resources and worked collectively to preserve the resources for future generations. No one owns the water, but we live on the land and are willing to protect it."

Quintín Lame, an indigenous guerrilla group from Cauca, demobilized in 1990 and joined the peaceful political process as a bloc in the constituent assembly, a move that helped lead to a recognition of cultural, social and economic rights for indigenous people in the 1991 Colombian Constitution. Moreover, the International Labor Organization Convention 169 and Colombian national law 21 protect the cultural and territorial rights of indigenous people.

According to Francisco Ramírez Cuellar, a mining union lawyer who has survived seven attempts on his life, and the author of The Profits of Extermination: How U.S. Corporate Power Is Destroying Colombia, these laws should provide some protection for indigenous people:

Colombia's 1991 Constitution defines the country as an "estado social de derecho" or "social state of law." This progressive language means that the state is defined as functioning under the rule of law and promoting the political, social and economic rights of all its citizens. It defines the role of the state in protecting social rights and economic rights more broadly than does traditional liberal thought of the nineteenth century, or neoliberal policy of the late twentieth.

Unfortunately, the indigenous rights outlined in the 1991 Colombian Constitution and subsequent statutes, are rarely upheld.

On December 16, 1991, at least 40 indigenous men, women and children from the Nasa tribe were massacred in the Huella community in northern Cauca by a bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces (AUC, by its initials in Spanish) paramilitary organization, which was on the payroll of local landowners and drug-traffickers. The Fiscalia, Colombia's version of the prosecutors' office, former Colombian President Ernesto Samper, and the Inter-American Court for Human Rights have all denounced state involvement with the atrocities.

Popular pressure forced the administration of Ernesto Samper to sign a treaty with the indigenous people to return 15,600 hectares of land stolen from them by right-wing paramilitary death-squads. Even so, right-wing paramilitaries continued their repression. About 3,000 Nasa were displaced from the area by the AUC in 2001.

But Uribe refuses to fulfill this obligation, citing the need for rural economic development and transnational investment to prepare for the passing of a free-trade agreement with the United States. "The Uribe government has not fulfilled its obligations to us," said Quilcue of CRIC. "The agreements that have been signed have not been honored."

Since 2005, CRIC and other indigenous communities have engaged in a civil resistance and land recuperation project that they call "Liberar la Madre Tierra" (Liberate Mother Earth) to reclaim and recuperate the traditional lands that have slowly been taken from them since the time of the Spanish conquistadores.

THE LATEST crackdown has been brutal. On June 13, 300 indigenous youth were attacked by the Colombian National Police's mobile anti-riot squad on a hacienda they were occupying outside of Caloto in northern Cauca. The police fired gas canisters filled with glass and rocks, and one youth was shot in the leg by a round of live ammunition.

An indigenous forum in 2006 was also repressed by state security forces using live ammunition. And on November 27, 2007, four indigenous community members were seriously wounded when National Police and other men wearing civilian clothing fired on them with tear gas and pistols.

Individual activists have been targeted for assassination as well. Since January, dozens of indigenous youth in Cauca have been murdered by state security forces, many of them so-called "false-positive" killings because the bodies were dressed up and presented as if they were guerrillas killed in combat. On July 3, indigenous movement leader Rafael Coicue was assaulted by masked gunmen and shot in the left eye in his home in Corinto, Cauca. Fortunately, he survived the attack.

Since then, the number of threats, attempted murders and killings has only grown. On August 11, the ACIN indigenous organization received a seven-page letter written by a newly reformed paramilitary organization threatening them and CRIC with death as "a consequence of their disrespect." The letter, signed by the "angry farmers" of Cauca, is widely believed to be the work of wealthy landowners whose interests are threatened by the indigenous land recuperation projects.

Then, on September 28, Raul Mendoza, the governor of the indigenous cabildo Peñon, and former member of CRIC's council of elders, was assassinated in his home in Popayán. The same day, indigenous movement member Nicolás Valencia Lemus was also murdered.

In the last three weeks, at least 11 indigenous people have been killed. The number could have been much higher, but a bomb recently found inside CRIC's office in Popayán, was removed successfully before it detonated. "Once again we are being pushed off of our land with bullets and blood," Quilcue said, her voice quavering with emotion as she tried to choke back tears.

INDIGENOUS CRIC representative Demetrio Moya Obispo said the political struggle in Colombia is integrated with the economic struggle against wealthy landowners and multinational companies. Because of this, Obispo said, the indigenous struggle is interrelated with the struggle of campesinos, labor unions and Afro-Colombians.

"Our lands are considered territories of peace, but we see that armed conflict is occurring on our lands," he said. "In Colombia we are seeing an economic and social crisis. The government says things are improving but that's not what we're seeing. [Uribe's] 'democratic security policy' is only helping the upper-class."

CRIC and other indigenous coalitions in Cauca state that "para-politicians," in league with multinational corporations, want to exploit and privately own their land for financial profit.

As Quilcue said:

President Uribe's Democratic Security Policy, financed by [the U.S.-backed] Plan Colombia, is meant to open the door for the free trade agreement. The new norms in the trade agreement give our water and land away to multinational corporations and directly go against the territorial and cultural rights of indigenous people, as well as against the rights of the civil sector. Our people have to be displaced from our land before the multinationals can exploit it.

Uribe has accused the indigenous people of Cauca of collaborating with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, by its initials in Spanish), rhetoric that CRIC and ACIN say is meant to delegitimize their movement. "We see this new type of military action as a new type of colonization of our communities," Caballero said. "We are not drug traffickers, not communists, not terrorists, but Uribe frames us as such so he can use a military response against our land liberation actions."

In fact, the FARC has also used threats and intimidation against the indigenous movement in Cauca, claiming that their communities are collaborating with the Uribe government.

"We understand that there is an extermination strategy against us," Quilcue said. "But we will not just lie down and die."

The recent Pan-American highway blockade forced President Uribe to agree to one of the indigenous peoples' demands--compensation for the affected communities for the land that was stolen from them by the paramilitaries. Uribe also met with indigenous representatives on October 19. But First-Nation Colombians have been promised compensation before, and other indigenous demands for health care, education and security from violence have not been addressed.

URIBE'S CLAIMS to have stabilized Colombia may have been premature. More than 2 million of the 4 million internally displaced Colombians have been forced off their land since Uribe took office in 2002, and several prominent human rights organizations have credibly demonstrated that extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances and arbitrary detentions by state security forces have all increased under Uribe's watch.

The so-called "parapolitical" scandal in Colombia--the involvement of mainstream politicians with right-wing paramilitaries--has implicated more than 70 congressmen. Of these, 30 are in prison. Also involved are a number of current and former military officers, government officials, local and regional politicians and members of Uribe's political party and inner circle.

The parapolitical scandal even involves Uribe himself. A declassified 1991 report by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency states that Uribe had close connections with Pablo Escobar, then the head of the Medellín drug cartel, as well as paramilitary organizations.

What about Uribe's high-profile program to "demobilize" the paramilitaries? This process also appears to have failed, depending on your point of view: Those who called this procedure the "amnesty and impunity law" might say the program did exactly what it was intended to do.

Dozens of civil society groups in Antioquia, Bolívar, Cauca, Chocó, and Santander all told us that a new paramilitary group, Las Aguilas Negras (the Black Eagles) has stepped into the vacuum left by the demobilization of some sectors of the AUC. According to the newspaper El Tiempo, so-called "next generation" paramilitary organizations have re-armed and are operating in at least seven departments around the country. Violence is up 107 percent in Chocó alone.

Meanwhile, Uribe has stepped up military attacks on the FARC, including a cross-border raid into Ecuador last March and the fraudulent use of the Red Cross emblem this summer to free hostage Ingrid Betancourt. These actions--both war crimes under the Geneva Convention--contributed to a worrisome destabilization of the region.

As an editorial in the International Socialist Review argued recently, the militarization of Colombia under Plan Colombia is meant not only t to quell a domestic leftwing insurgency, but also to act as a check on left-wing governments in Bolivia, Ecuado, and Venezuela.

Meanwhile, the most vulnerable Colombians bear the brunt of this repression. Indigenous peoples, along with peasants, Afro-Colombians, women and the urban poor, are among the groups that have suffered the most from Uribe's "democratic security policy" and Plan Colombia.

Thus, the Permanent People's Tribunal of Colombia issued a statement in July warning of "the imminent danger of physical and cultural extinction faced by 28 indigenous groups," in Colombia. The tribunal charges the Colombian government, armed actors and transnational corporations with "the deployment of strategies that have the objective of expelling indigenous peoples from areas of economic interest...[and]...to facilitate the exploitation of these areas...by transnational corporations," charges that the tribunal says amount to genocide.

It is in this context, then, that we must understand the "Bad Indian Uprising" in Colombia in 2008. International allies of conscience can stand in solidarity with Colombian civil society by demanding that the United States government de-fund Plan Colombia and block passage of the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Wars on drugs and terror should be redirected to a war on poverty. Alternative legislation like the Jubilee Act debt relief legislation and the 2008 Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act should be supported.

The next president of the United States of America must be held accountable for U.S. policy in Colombia.