COLOMBIA:
Decades of War Over Land

Constanza Vieira


BOGOTA,  (IPS) - In Colombia ''it isn't that there are displaced people because there is war,'' but ''there is war so there will be displaced people,'' says peasant activist Gilma Benítez, unwittingly summing up the conclusion arrived at by researchers after five decades of armed conflict.

In many rural areas of this South American country, life is measured from war to war, the first of which broke out in 1948, the second in 1954, the third in 1962 and the fourth, which is still raging, in 1964.

The armed conflicts have all shared a central element: land has violently changed hands, and hundreds of thousands of peasants have been displaced from the countryside and forced to flee to towns and cities.

As a result, ''0.4 percent of the population owns 61.7 percent of the best land in the country,'' Jorge Rojas, director of the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement, told IPS.

According to the local human rights group, since 1985, a total of 3.1 million people have fled their land, or had it seized from them. The displaced have lost at least two million hectares in all.

Colombia now has the third largest displaced population in the world, only surpassed by Sudan and the Congo.

Forced displacement has mainly occurred ''in areas where the land is in dispute, due to the riches found in the soil or underground, and because of 'megaprojects','' said Rojas.

Daniel Manrique with the Latin American Institute of Alternative Legal Services said those who are keen on getting their hands on the land of peasant or indigenous communities have speculative interests: the property of the victims of displacement ''is likely to climb in value because it is located in the areas of influence of transport, agribusiness, tourism, energy or mining megaprojects.''

The war that began in May 1964 produced a rebel army of peasant origin that defines itself as Communist: the powerful Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), perhaps the world's oldest guerrilla army.

Since its baptism of fire, FARC has been led by former peasant farmer Pedro Antonio Marín, whose nom de guerre is Manuel Marulanda, and whose enemies have dubbed him 'Tirofijo' or Sureshot.

''The self-organised and self-led resistance of the potential victims, the peasants, emerged'' in response to the ''reactionary violence'', Marulanda wrote in 'Cuadernos de campaña' (journals from the front), published in 1973.

According to those involved in the creation of FARC 40 years ago, peasant farmers were forced to take up arms to defend themselves against the attacks of armed gangs created by the land-hungry elites with backing from the State.

The argument that the armed conflict was triggered by rural poverty emerged at a later date.

Twenty-eight percent of Colombia's 44 million people live in the countryside, and official statistics indicate that 82 percent of the rural population lives below the poverty line, including 43 percent living in absolute poverty.

In the first and second armed conflicts, the plight of the peasants ''was truly appalling. A massacre today, the burning of every house in a village tomorrow, the members of an entire family taken prisoner and disappearing forever, insecurity and danger knocking on the door of every shack,'' Marulanda wrote in his journals. But today's civil war is not much different.

In 1948, the rural population began to be attacked by pro-government armed gangs that roamed the countryside, sowing terror and seizing the property of peasant farmers seen as opponents of the government.

''The police and local authorities supported them,'' and the peasants began to arm themselves with old shotguns and revolvers to repel the attacks, wrote Marulanda.

The first and second armed conflicts, comprising the period known as 'La Violencia' (1948-1958), left around 300,000 dead and two million displaced.

FARC is no longer fighting only for the security and safety of rural communities and legal title deeds to the land worked by peasant farmers. But it does have an''agrarian programme'', dating back to July 1964, which proposes ''revolutionary land reform that would change the social structure of the Colombian countryside from the very roots''.

In the third armed conflict, in 1962, the government attempted unsuccessfully to occupy the remote mountainous region of Marquetalia, in central Colombia -- around 800 sq km of inaccessible cloud forest where a group of peasant families had cleared land for farming, with the support of the Communist Party.

The families, who described themselves as a movement of rural workers, had asked the government to build roads and schools in the area, and grant them access to loans to expand their herds and crops.

During the Cold War, the perception arose that Marquetalia, home to Marulanda and around 50 families who still held on to their weapons from the period of La Violencia, was ''the epicentre of the revolution'', in the words of José Joaquín Matallana, then-commander of a battalion that ended up playing a decisive role in the final outcome.

On May 18, 1964, some 2,000 soldiers surrounded the peasant enclave, blocking the entrance of even basic provisions like food and medicine.

Operation Marquetalia lasted three months and formed part of the Latin American Security Operation, designed and supported by the U.S. military.

The men soon realised that the women, children and elderly could not survive the siege. They were evacuated from Marquetalia along secret paths on the night of Jun. 14. Before the families left, they set fire to their own homes.

That marked the end of their civilian lives, although FARC considers May 27, when Marulanda and his men engaged in fighting for the first time, as its date of birth.

''Since then, they have spread around the entire country, in mobile guerrilla'' brigades, says rebel spokesman Raúl Reyes.

FARC now has some 30,000 combatants, backed up by 10,000 civilian 'milicianos' (militia-members), plus 60,000 members of the political wing, the clandestine Bolivarian Movement, and around two million sympathisers, two-thirds of whom live in rural areas, a spokesman for the Bolivarian Movement told IPS.

''If the attack on Marquetalia had not been carried out, it is very likely that FARC would never have been born,'' Jacobo Arenas, one of the movement's Marxist ideologues, reflected decades later.

In 1984, FARC signed a peace accord with the government, seeking political recognition of the movement's influence in the regions under its control, through the creation of the Patriotic Union. The new political party achieved some success at the polls, but ceased to exist after 3,000 of its leaders were murdered.

Since 1982, FARC defines itself as a ''people's army'' whose declared aim is to share power in a government of national reconstruction, after taking part in the design of a new constitution.

The atrocities committed in the 1940s and 1950s by the semi-official armed bands known as 'chulavitas' continue to be carried out today by paramilitary groups that in many regions operate in coordination with the military.

Today's paramilitary militias were set up in the 1980s by local elites, with army support, and by drug traffickers who owned vast extensions of the best land in Colombia.

''Around four million hectares are in the hands of drug traffickers,'' out of a total 45 million hectares of farmland, said Rojas.

A majority of the paramilitaries are grouped in the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), which have escaped the control of their original promoters.

The government, led by ultra-conservative landowner President Alvaro Uribe, is currently discussing a ceasefire with the paramilitary umbrella group, in exchange for guarantees that no legal action will be taken against its leaders.

As in the mid-20th century, the original victims of the aggression, armed peasant farmers-turned-guerrillas, also wage violence, sometimes with as much cruelty as their adversaries.

However, the United Nations and leading human rights watchdogs like Amnesty International and Americas Watch hold the paramilitaries responsible for at least 80 percent of human rights abuses in Colombia, like the torture and mass killings of peasant farmers. One common paramilitary technique is to dismember victims, including women and children, with chainsaws while they are still alive.

According to human rights lawyer Alirio Uribe, the head of the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective, there is no possible military solution for the war, which ''has stretched on and on with grave consequences, especially for the civilian population,'' against a backdrop of a growing disregard for international humanitarian law.

The State ''has been unable to check the expansion of the insurgent groups through its strategy of strengthening the armed forces and creating and supporting private armed groups like the paramilitaries,'' he told IPS.

Of the average 100 people who die violent deaths each day in Colombia, five are killed in combat and 15 are civilians considered enemies or sympathisers of the adversary and murdered by one of the armed groups.

Another 80 are killed in a context of crime and violence generated by growing poverty and marginalisation, said Uribe (no relation to the president).

''It would not be enough for the armed groups to stop shooting each other,'' because what is needed is ''a new pact that would guarantee economic, political, social and environmental rights, as well as the specific rights of women and children,'' argued the lawyer.