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COLOMBIA:
Growing International Support for Peace
By Mario Osava
BOGOTA (IPS) - The Nasa indigenous
people who live in southwestern Colombia
risked their very lives when they took it
upon themselves to blow up munitions and
weapons they discovered on their lands.
They found a munitions store belonging to
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC),
the main insurgency in this country, which
emerged 45 years ago.
To hand over this material, discovered just
over two weeks ago, to the Colombian army,
or to seek their help as the only personnel
technically qualified to destroy the arsenal
safely, would have been to invite reprisals
from the guerrillas, María Claudia Coicué
told IPS.
Several Awá indigenous people were murdered
in February on suspicion of collaborating
with the army, Coicué added. The FARC
admitted to killing eight Awá, but 17 are
missing, according to the indigenous group
caught in the crossfire of the armed
conflict, who are still looking for the
bodies of the victims in order to bury them
on their own land.
"Both the army and the guerrillas are our
enemies," said Coicué. But the neutrality of
indigenous peoples is difficult to maintain.
The FARC wanted to control part of the Nasa
territory, imposing their rules which are
rejected by the indigenous people, said the
young Nasa woman, a recent graduate in
social work from the National University.
"We are the ones who discipline our own
community members," not the guerrillas, she
said.
Coicué was taking part in the Second
Peoples' Forum, organised by the
international organisation Peace for Life (PfL)
and the Colombian Justice and Life Project,
which ended Monday in the Colombian capital.
The central theme was "Without Fear of
Empire: Global People's Resistance".
The Forum in Bogotá, attended by some 350
people, including 62 foreigners, approved a
declaration expressing "strong backing" for
a humanitarian agreement on a swap of FARC
hostages for imprisoned rebels, as a step
toward a "negotiated political solution to
the armed conflict" in Colombia.
The People's Forum, the first of which was
held in 2004 in Davao City, Philippines, is
an initiative of PfL, which is based in the
Philippines and has members all over the
world.
PfL is a faith-based movement resisting
imperialism and militarised globalisation,
and dedicated to creating life-enhancing
alternatives based on peace and social
justice.
Liberation theology is one of the
inspirations of the movement, and was the
subject of a seminar at this second Forum,
as were the Palestinian question, the crisis
of neoliberal globalisation,
self-determination for indigenous peoples
and the impact of war and empire on the
lives of women.
In Bogotá, the representatives of a score of
countries and of the Palestinian territories
and Puerto Rico approved a final declaration
condemning "the United States empire which,
often with the complicity of Europe, is
multiplying people's suffering," especially
in Colombia where it feeds the "nightmare"
of armed conflict that has lasted over five
decades.
The United States is experiencing a decline
due to its economic crisis and the
resistance or competition of other peoples
and countries, but it remains a threat and
it has mounted a ruthless attack on Colombia
in order to secure strategic positions and
resources such as oil and lands, the
declaration says.
Colombia is being "bled to death," with
millions of displaced persons fleeing from
violence and the expropriation of their
lands, but there is hope because resistance
is growing, even within the United States
itself, the declaration concludes.
The war in Colombia is in the interests of
the powerful, who use it as a means "to take
over the best lands," to plant monoculture
crops, and to seize oil and mineral
resources, according to Oscar Martínez, a
Catholic priest and coordinator of the
Continental Movement of Christians for Peace
with Justice and Dignity (MCCPJD).
The government of President Álvaro Uribe is
propped up by support from "the empire, the
media and illegal powers," like far-right
paramilitary groups and drug traffickers,
said Pilar Marín, a teacher and an activist
in the Movement of Teachers for Educational
Dignity, who was a rapporteur for some of
the seminars at the Forum.
The Uribe administration's strategy of
seeking a military defeat of the guerrillas
has aggravated tragedies like the forced
displacement and killings of teachers. In
the past 15 years, nearly 3,000 teachers and
their families had to flee their homes,
according to spokespersons for the
educational system.
Murders by government troops and
paramilitary forces of teachers, trade
unionists, rural leaders, indigenous people
and young people falsely accused of being
guerrillas, added to internal displacement
and emigration, are the result of the armed
conflict involving the Colombian army,
guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug mafias.
Lately, "selective murders" have replaced
the indiscriminate massacres previously
carried out by government forces and the
powerful élites, according to Marín. The "polarisation"
which labels all those who are not allies as
enemies or guerrillas puts those who reject
the policies of both sides in an impossible
position.
In the midst of so many conflicts, "viviendistas"
or housing movement activists are living
their own drama, which also brings them into
conflict with the government, this time for
reasons of social justice.
The movement's goal is to prevent the
eviction of some 800,000 mortgage-holding
families. Over the last three decades they
have been paying off their loans, but now
they face losing their homes because they
can no longer afford to meet their payments.
Three hundred thousand families have already
been evicted, 189,000 eviction requests are
stuck in the clogged wheels of the justice
system, and a further 300,000 are being
processed, said Manuel Avendaño, founder of
a Bogotá-based group which tries to block
evictions by mobilising activists to prevent
police from enforcing eviction orders.
The eviction rulings are based on laws which
run counter to the constitution, and several
international treaties signed by Colombia
also guarantee the right to decent housing,
said Juan Rodríguez, who was about to be
evicted from his home four years ago, but
was helped by the activists and has since
joined the movement.
Interest payments on predatory loans can be
as high as 37.4 percent a year and are only
reduced in case of "social need." This means
that purchasers have to repay the principal
of the loan 15 or 20 times over, according
to the "viviendistas."
Evictions are often violent. At first they
were enforced by squads of 50 military
police, but now they are executed by up to
150 police, causing deaths, injuries and
violations of human rights, since they
separate children from their families and
oblige many people to live on the streets,
Avendaño said.
A recent eviction, for example, left a
family of eight, including an 82-year-old
man, in the gutter, he said. A 15-year-old
member of the family was killed by
paramilitaries in Ciudad Bolívar, a huge
shanty town in the south of Bogotá, where
hundreds of thousands of people displaced by
the war have settled.
In the southwestern city of Cali, when
eviction becomes inevitable, "we demolish
our houses rather than let them be taken
away from us," said Jaime Tobón, who with
fellow members of the housing movement also
took part in the People's Forum. "We have
already demolished three houses in response
to the abuses by the banks," he said.
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