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COLOMBIA: Communities in Resistance
John Ludwick
Javier Sánchez says he owes his life to
a miracle. On July 8, 2000, as 15
heavily armed and hooded paramilitaries
entered La Unión, a
strategically-located village of 500
people in northwest Colombia, Sánchez
had just returned from working the
fields on the far side of town. He
recalls seeing a small army helicopter
circling high above La Unión before
hearing the staccato of automatic rifle
fire.
Upon rushing back, Sánchez, 32, found
the pulpy remains of six men, all
community leaders, splayed out in the
grassy plaza in the town’s center. "It
was a miracle because had I been there,
for sure they would have shot me, too,"
said Sánchez. Local leaders — Sánchez is
also one — are frequently the targets of
military or paramilitary attacks.
Many such villages dot the roadmap of
contemporary Colombian history -
settlements haunted by political
violence and fear. What sets this
massacre apart is that La Unión forms
part of the San José Apartadó Peace
Community, just one of dozens from
across the country that have chosen to
organize and resist the dark forces of
the country’s decades-old civil war.
Several such communities gathered
recently in San José Apartadó, in the
northwest department of Antioquia, to
share experiences, show solidarity and
develop strategies they hope will help
them confront the political violence.
After the town was devastated by attacks
in 1997, its residents organized and
rallied international support to grant
it special status as a peace community.
There are numerous forms of organized,
non-violent resistance in Colombia, said
Diego Pérez, an investigator for the
Human Rights and Political Violence Data
Bank, but what unites them is the desire
to remain neutral parties in the
conflict and have no contact with any
armed group, including state security
forces (LP, Jan 24, 2000).
Pérez said that part of this resistance
means defending their territories
against economic interests because "the
conflict isn’t only about the armed
groups who attack the communities, but
also the desire of some to exploit the
natural resources and rich biodiversity
found on their land."
Colombia’s indigenous population, which
has been resisting outside aggression
since the discovery of the Americas, has
been more successful in standing firm
against armed groups than their
campesino or afro-Colombian
counterparts, thanks in large part to
their ability to organize, Pérez said.
Nonetheless, indigenous Colombians have
paid dearly for their opposition.
The Nasa people of the Upper Naya River
region in the southwest department of
Cauca are one example. On April 11,
2001, one hundred armed men identified
as paramilitaries entered the remote
region to slaughter and disappear around
50 indigenous inhabitants.
Despite this and other bloody setbacks,
the Nasa community has managed to
achieve important gains, among them
recognition as a specially designated
jurisdiction in which they enjoy a
certain political autonomy and control
their own justice system.
José Enrique Güetio, a Nasa leader, says
strengthening traditional ways and
rejecting many customs imposed upon them
by the outside world has been key to
realizing these achievements.
"We’ve undertaken an organizational
process in which we’ve established
reserves, town-hall meetings, and we’re
recovering our own education system and
our native tongue," he says. "This has
served us well, much more than things
from western culture."
In each case, resistance has meant
finding creative and practical ways to
deal with different tactics used to
intimidate and ultimately submit or
displace the local inhabitants. Besides
threats, massacres and selective
killings, a common strategy employed by
all sides are economic blockades aimed
at starving out a population, preventing
it from selling products in the
marketplace, and thereby leaving it
isolated and vulnerable.
To counter the measure, many groups have
prioritized "economies of resistance,"
which includes ensuring food
self-sufficiency and establishing trade
with neighboring towns.
The communities in Lower Caguán, located
in the former demilitarized zone in
south-central Colombia, ceded to the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
in 1998 to kick-start a peace process,
have had to adopt such measures to
guarantee their survival in the region.
Since the February 2002 announcement by
then President Andrés Pastrana
(1998-2002) that the peace process had
failed and army troops were to retake
the demilitarized zone (LP, March 11,
2002), paramilitaries and military
officials alike have painted its
residents as guerrilla collaborators.
The result has been dozens of killings,
mass arbitrary arrests and the forced
displacement of more than 5,000 people,
prompted largely by army and
paramilitary-imposed economic embargoes.
Edilberto Chávez, who hails from the
Peñas Coloradas area of Lower Caguán,
says the communities in his region have
learned hard lessons from their
neighbors and have prepared themselves
to counter economic blockades. In
addition to promoting staple food crops
such rice and grain, they’ve also
prioritized the production of sugarcane
products, as well as foodstuffs such as
jams made from regional fruits for
trade.
"In case of a blockade we don’t want to
find ourselves isolated and forced to
tolerate hunger and abandon our land
because of hunger, because this is one
of the strategies they use," Chávez
said.
Another technique used by many to
counter repression is publicizing human
rights violations. The ACIA, a
non-government organization that
represents thousands afro-Colombians in
the Middle Atrato region in the Pacific
department of Chocó, regularly denounces
political violence despite the dangers
it poses.
"All the armed groups are present in our
territories and all are violating the
rights of the black population," Julio
Córdoba, a member of the ACIA’s
executive committee, says. "We’ve made
the decision not to be silent in the
face of incursions, threats, or the
killings committed by the guerrillas,
the ‘paras’ or the armed forces
themselves."
Communities have implemented other
measures - accompaniment by
international observers, the Catholic
Church, or the Human Rights Ombudsman,
among other methods - but in the end
those gathered in San José Apartadó
agreed that if their dream of living
free of violence is to succeed, serious
political commitment is needed at all
levels of government.
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