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Women's Peace Caravan Heads to Epicentre
of War
Constanza Vieira
MOCOA, Colombia, (IPS) - Continuing
reports of skirmishes and the dynamiting
of oil pipelines and bridges in the
southern Colombian department of
Putumayo did not daunt the 3,000 women
who arrived in the area -- the epicentre
of the civil war -- from all over the
country Monday.
Delegates of 315 organisations from
eight regions, along with international
observers and reporters, drove in 96
buses to Mocoa, the provincial capital
of Putumayo, in the foothills of the
Andes mountains.
Moncoa Mayor Miguel Ruano named the
members of the peace caravan ''guests of
honour'', and declared Tuesday a ''civic
day'' in commemoration of the
International Day for the Elimination of
Violence Against Women.
Travelling with the women are
international observers from Germany,
Ecuador, Spain, the United States,
France, Peru and Switzerland, as well as
a delegation of the international
organisation Clowns Without Borders.
The caravan plans to enter territory
plagued by fighting between the army,
leftist guerrillas, and right-wing
paramilitary groups. The buses will
drive to the port towns of Puerto
Caycedo and Puerto Asís, in the
west-central part of the war-torn
department.
Putumayo is one of the hottest areas in
Colombia's four-decade armed conflict,
and is the focal point of the
government's U.S.-backed aerial spraying
campaign against drug crops.
An estimated 66,000 hectares of coca are
planted in Putumayo, an impoverished
region along the Ecuadorian border where
peasant farmers in remote areas have no
livelihood but their coca crops.
Within the framework of Plan Colombia --
a U.S.-financed anti-drug and
counterinsurgency strategy -- U.S.
advisers are commanding the spraying
operations in this isolated region. The
planes used to fumigate crops are
accompanied by helicopter gunships.
Washington is providing more than 605
million dollars this year for the
spraying efforts, which have come under
criticism from local authorities and
residents in the area, as well as
national and international environmental
and human rights groups. Activists and
health professionals have documented
extensive damages caused by the
fumigation to human health, livestock,
and food crops.
The peace caravan will drive Tuesday to
the small town of Puerto Caycedo to
celebrate the International Day for the
Elimination of Violence Against Women, a
date that was marked 22 years ago by the
first Feminist Encuentro (conference)
for Latin America and the Caribbean,
held in Bogota in 1981, and was
officially established by the United
Nations in 1999.
In the past three weeks, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC),
the main rebel group, has set fire to 20
oilwells near Orito, 40 kms west of
Puerto Caycedo, also affecting
installations such as a bridge, five
storage tanks, three pipelines, and
another pipeline shared with Ecuador.
The sabotage will prevent oil companies
from extracting 6,000 barrels a day,
until the situation is brought under
control. Around 50 percent of oil
production has thus been brought to a
halt in Putumayo, where abundant oil
reserves are not fully exploited due to
the action of armed groups.
A military operation against the
insurgents was staged to counter the
acts of sabotage against oil
infrastructure.
''We must capture en masse all of the
individuals who are involved in these
actions,'' said Colombian President
Alvaro Uribe, who reported that the
police and army had been ordered to set
out after ''the terrorists of Putumayo.''
The FARC, which rose up in arms 40 years
ago, has maintained control for several
years over a broad section of Putumayo,
where some 1,800 of its roughly 15,000
combatants are active.
About 600 members of the Self-Defence
Forces of Córdoba and Urabá, which forms
part of the 12,000-strong United Self-Defence
Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary
umbrella group, have also been present
in the region since 1998, and took over
all of Putumayo's major cities this
year.
The police are present in 10 of the 13
municipal seats, and an army brigade and
anti-narcotics battalion are active in
the department.
In addition, the new networks of peasant
soldiers and informers, two prongs of
the counterinsurgency efforts of the
right-wing Uribe administration, which
took office in August 2002, have begun
to cooperate with the army.
The organisers of the peace caravan
furnished the authorities, the
guerrillas and the paramilitaries with
the details of the route they would
take.
It took some of the participants six
days to reach Putumayo. Busloads of
women drove in from the Caribbean resort
city of Cartagena, 1,640 kms to the
north; Medellín and Quibdó, over 1,100
kms to the northwest; Bucaramanga, 1,240
kms to the northeast; Bogotá, Pereira
and Ibagué, 800 kms away; and Neiva,
Cali and Popayán, between 400 and 600
kms away.
The buses are not accompanied by any
kind of escort and have no police or
military protection, in accordance with
the organisers' wishes. The activists
did, however, call for national and
international solidarity, and invited
the press to join them.
The stated aim of the peace caravan is
to draw attention to the effects of the
spraying of illegal crops, drug
trafficking, and the war on women, their
families and the local economy, and to
the violations of international
humanitarian law by all of the armed
parties involved in the conflict.
While 37.6 percent of Colombia's
population of 44 million lives below the
poverty line, the proportion is 79
percent in the remote Putumayo.
Before setting out on the march, the
women told the press in a communique
that they were not willing to ''give one
more son, one more peso, or one more day
to the war.''
The activists want to open up a
''humanitarian corridor'' along the
highways the caravan will take.
The paramilitary and insurgent groups,
as well as the government forces,
periodically block deliveries of
humanitarian aid and food and the
circulation of civilians in
conflict-torn areas.
According to the Consultancy on Human
Rights and Displacement (CODHES), that
strategy is aimed at ''weakening the
adversary's social support base and
strengthening territorial, political and
economic control over areas suitable for
growing illegal drug crops.''
The local human rights group estimates
that 35,000 families, including 5,500
people in Putumayo, have been forced to
flee their homes because of the spraying
since 1999.
Colombia has one of the largest
populations in the world of internally
displaced people, who number between 1.5
and 3.0 million.
The government has not provided any
humanitarian assistance to the families
displaced by the spraying.
This is the third women's peace caravan,
which have gone ''where no one else
dares to go,'' Luz Helena Sánchez, a
medical doctor and activist who is
participating in the event, told IPS.
In 1996, some 1,000 women visited
Murindó, in Urabá, a banana-producing
province in northwestern Colombia that
was at the time the region most heavily
affected by the conflict and by human
rights abuses like selective killings.
In 2001, around 5,000 women drove to
Barrancabermeja, in central Colombia.
The oil port, located on the Magdalena
river, has a long history of civic and
labour activism.
Just a few months earlier, the city had
been under siege, with insurgents and
paramilitaries fighting street by street
for control amidst brutal mass killings
and selective murders.
By the time the peace caravan arrived,
the city had fallen into the hands of
the paramilitaries, which are blamed for
the large majority of massacres and
gross human rights violations committed
in Colombia.
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