CounterVortex

NONVIOLENCE IN COLOMBIA

A Growing Anti-Militarist Movement Demands Right to “Active Neutrality” in
Armed Conflict

by Bill Weinberg

Maria Brigida Gonzalez, with her long gray-streaked braids and nurturing
smile, comes across as the kindly grandmother that she is, even if she is
deft with a machete, and wears knee-high rubber boots to negotiate muddy
jungle trails. Her village, San Jose de Apartado, resembles many such
campesino communities carved out of the jungle throughout Latin America,
with pigs, chickens and turkeys rummaging freely in the lanes. And, like
all too many, it has recently been the scene of much hideous violence. But
Maria Brigida and her village are on the frontlines of a grassroots
citizen initiative to find a peaceful settlement — or at least advance the
right to neutrality — in the escalating and chaotic civil war that is
tearing apart Colombia.

 “Our neutrality means we will not participate with any armed actors,” says
Maria Brigida, in her understated manner. “But we will denounce human
rights abuses by any side.” A hand-painted sign on road outside the
entrance to the village reads: “I am a member of the Peace Community of
San Jose de Apartado. I am freely committed to the search for a peaceful
and negotiated settlement to the conflicts that exist in the country, and
to work for peace within the community.”
 

Maria Brigida is one of eight members of San Jose’s community council
(including three women), who have been elected every year since 1997, when
the community declared its neutrality in the war which had claimed many
local lives. Every community resident over 12 can vote in the council
elections. By consensus, the community’s young men do not serve in the
army, despite official conscription. By not serving, they lose the right
to work and education, but in a remote and largely self-sufficient
campesino community, this makes little difference. “If we had a legitimate
army, perhaps they would serve,” says Maria Brigida. “But not with this
army that attacks the civil population and assassinates children.”

Over 100 have been killed in San Jose since the first massacre there in
1996. The various community projects are named for its local martyrs. The
community center is named for Anibal Jimenez, who was among six killed in
a February 1999 massacre by by right-wing paramilitary troops. The maize
granary is named for Francisco Tabarquino, killed by “paras” in 1997 on
road to Apartado, the municipal seat. The carpentry workshop is named for
Ramiro Correa, killed by leftist guerillas in 1997 while working in the
fields. The pre-school, built with European foreign aid, is named for
Bartoleme Castano, a local resident who served on Apartado’s municipal
council with the leftist Patriotic Union (UP), killed by par as in Apartado
town in 1996. He was 77 years old. A fountain outside the community center
is inscribed with the names of the martyrs, with the words, “To remember
the past is a commitment to the future.”

Survival, Terror and Resistance in San Jose de Apartado

San Jose de Apartado lies in the low, tropical and deeply conflicted
region of Uraba, near the Caribbean gulf of the same name. The flatlands
along the coast host sprawling banana plantations, but San Jose lies along
the inland moun tains, where peasant settlers have be en eating into the
jungle for two generations — many of them first displaced by political
violence in the highland regions to the south. The community was first
established in 1962 by settlers from Santa Fe, Antioquia department.
Apartado is also in Anti oquia, but Uraba — which straddles Antioquia, Choco
and Cordoba departments — has its own identity, in large part as a violently
contested frontier.
 

San Jose is a corregimiento, or unincorporated township, made up of 32
veredas, or settlements, of whic h three — San Jose, the principal one, and
outlying La Union and Arenas — are integrated in the Peace Community. Lands
are titled to the corregimiento, and worked communally. As a relatively
recently-settled district, the San Jose corregimiento covers o ver sixty
percent of Apartado municipality’s territory–by far biggest of Apartado’s
four corregimientos. The residents grow maize, beans, rice and sugar cane
for their own consumption, as well as cacao and “primitivos,” their own
local miniature banana v ariety, for sale to export companies. By community
agreement, they only use traditional seed varieties, and are trying to
phase out agro-chemicals. They make fertilizer from fermented soy and
yogurt with ai d from a church-linked development group. Their e cological
ethic is a mandate of survival in the fragile rainforest environment. Says
Maria Brigida: “The mountains are the source of our water. If we leave
them alone, we will have abundant water. If we cu t the trees there, the
rivers will go dry. If we cut one tree, we plant two. We don’t want this
good land to become a desert.”

It was also the mandates of survival on the jungle frontier that drew San
Jose into the war. The village receives littl e support from the municipal
government. It is on the power grid, but the unpaved and gully-ridden road
to the municipal center is maintained by the community residents
themselves in regular mingas, or work parties. It was the demand for basic
services that led to San Jose becoming a stronghold of the left-wing UP
party — which held the Apartado municipal government from the mid-1980s to
1996. Things began to improve in San Jose in those years, and the annual
March avocado festival actually brought some Colombian tourists to the
primitive village.
 

But the UP w as founded by former members of the Colombian Revolutionary
Armed Forces (FARC), the country’s largest guerilla group — and is accused,
especially by the Colombian right, of still being li nked to the leftist
rebels. The emergence of UP loyalties in Apartado brought a harsh backlash
from the burgeoning right-wing paramilitary network, which established a
firm grip over Uraba in the 1990s. UP candidates were assassinated. And
UP-loyalist zones such as San Jose were targeted for terror.

The first massacre was in September 1996, when paras entered the village
and killed four — including a pregnant woman. “For the previous four
months,” relates Wilson David, coordinator of the Peace Co mmunity council,
“some 200 army troops had been based in village. They demanded that local
families house them. Now it is clear they were gathering information.”
 

The second massacre, in February 1997, fit the paras` established pattern.
Riflemen with military-style uniforms and the distinctive black-and-white
armbands of the United Colombian Self-Defense Forces (AUC) arrived at dawn
and ordered the inhabitants to gather. They had a list, and demanded 11
residents, including two women. The 11 were marched out of village with
their hands tied behind backs. They were later found dead on the road with
signs of torture.

Next month, on March 23, 1997, the Peace Community was declared by
community leaders in the veredas of San Jose, La Union and Arenas. They
acted with the support of Apartado`s Bishop Isaias Duarte (who would be
ki lled in Cali in 2002, allegedly by a FARC gunman). Five days later,
March 28, paras arrived in the outlying vereda of La Union. They killed
three, and told the residen ts they had five days to abandon the vereda.
Three thousand left La Union and Arenas, mostly to San Jose. Abandoned La
Union became a battle zone between FARC guerillas and AUC paras.
 

“We became targets for refusing to cooperate with any armed forces,” says
Wilson. “There are 115 orphans in our community now. We have a grave
responsibility to them and our own future.”

The paras — in civilian clothes and armed with pistols, but sometimes
wearing the AUC armband — established a roadblock on the road to Apartado
for nine months. Up to 50 were killed at the roadblock. Produce and money
were stolen. Wilson says collusion between the army and ostensibly
outlawed paras was blatant. “It is clear. The army protects the paras.
They pass the para roa dblocks and they don’t interfere.”
 

FARC retaliation, rather than defending the besieged communities, only

escalated the atmosphere of terror. In the 1996 Barrio Las Chinitas
massacre in Apartado town, 35 were killed — apparently by the FARC–in a n
attack on a party being held by para loyalist-families. Nelson Campos
Nunez, Apartado’s UP mayor, was accus ed of complicity in the attack.

Ironically, Uraba’s fundamental power shift from the UP and FARC to the
AUC was related to the FARC’s violent rivalry with another leftist
guerilla faction, the Popular Liberation Army (EPL). Wilson charges that
the EPL be gan to cooperate with the AUC in their campaign against the
FARC. In 1991, the EPL in Uraba officially laid down arms and became a
legal political party, Hope, Peace and Liberty — still known by the Spanish
acronym EPL. Apartado’s current EPL mayor Mario Agudelo is said to be
linked to the paras. Teodoro Diaz Lobo, the former EPL mayor, is now in
prison in Medellin on charges of links to armed para activity. Wilson
charges that the formerly leftist EPL “is now the political arm of the
paras.” 

The tentative progress of the 1980s was reversed in the ’90s. Says San
Jose community leader Jesus Emilio Tuberquia: “The violent struggle
b etween left and right has paralyzed everything. The idea of both sides is
that if you aren’t with one you are with the other. But we aren’t with
either.”

Like the paras, the FARC retaliated against the Peace Community’s
assertion of neutrality. In October 1997, community council member Ramiro
Correa and two others were killed by FARC guerillas at the outlying vereda
of Crista lina after telling them they would not cooperate with the rebels.
“But the greatest threat is from the state, acting with the paras,” says
Wilson.
 

Three were killed in para incursions in San Jose in April 1999, and five
in February 2000. In July 2000, at La Union, where residents had recently
returned to their homes, six were killed by paras, including a community
co uncil member. In March 2001, paras entered San Jose, burned houses, and
threatened to leave a “ghost town.”

A certain degree of security was won for the Peace Community when outside
observers arrived to monitor the situation and provide a disincentive to
attacks. Justicia y Paz, a church-linked Colombian organization, sent in
observers in 1997. They were followed by foreign observers from Pe ace
Brigades International and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who now
respectively maintain a presence at the veredas of San Jose and La Union.
A community radio micro-transmitter was also established, aiding vigilance
and coordination, especially with outlying veredas.
 

But violence in the corregimiento does continue. In June 2003, an army
battle w ith FARC guerrillas in a San Jose banana field just outside the
central vereda killed ten trees, and left a fence damaged. The UN High
Commissioner for Refu gees has a program in San Jose for residents
displaced from the outlying vereda of Mulatos by FARC-army fighting
earlier this year.

After a few days in the vereda of San Jose with a small delegation of
activists from the United States and Spain, the resi dents mounted us on
horses and mules for a two-hour trek up the trail to La Union. Plots o f
cacao and sugar cane were interspersed with cattle pasture and patches of
jungle as the trail climbed up towards the mountains, with rushing rivers
plunging through the green canyons that fell away on either side. Far from
the road, La Union gets few visitors, and the residents were happy to see
us. The vereda was considerably more primitive than San Jose, with no
electricity or running water. When we were brought up to a small
mule-driven communal sugar mill on a ridge overlooking the vereda, we
could see the Gulf of Uraba in the distance.
 

La Union’s exiled residents started to return in 1998. La Union resident
Javier Sanchez remembers the grim year they spent ex iled in San Jose after
being forced to flee. “We couldn’t go three minutes outside San Jose.
Otherwise–” he draws a finger across his neck. Since returning, the
residents have organized work groups to protect each other in the fields,
and Sanchez says the threat of para terror has actually brought them more
closely together. “Now the community has control here — neither the
guerillas nor the paras.”

While the school in San Jose vereda is run by the municipality, the little
school in La Union is run by a group of Franciscan sisters. One old
schoolhouse in the small compound of three stands empty and sacked.
Religious murals depicting images of Jesus and slogans about peace
contrast one wall pock-marked by bullet holes from a para attack in ’95.
The residents say the paras shot up and ransacked the school, but didn’t
kill anyone that time. La Union’s central square also has a makeshift
memorial inscribed with the names of the vereda’s martyrs.
 

Despite recent progress, the threat of violence is never far away. Late
that night, as we slept in the little cabins provided to us, an army
helicopter hovered directly over La Union — low enough to wake residents,
and violating the community’s edict against entry to armed actors.

Indigenous Inspiration
 

Wilson David says that much of the inspiration for the Peace Community
came from the nearby community of Embera-Katio Indians, who asserted their
right to local control of their lands against all armed factions even
before indigenous autonomy was officially reco gnized by Colombia’s 1991
constitutional reform, whi ch established a system of “resguardos,” or
indigenous reserves.

The Embera-Katio resguardo of Playas begins just across a rickety bridge
over the Apartado River from San Jose, and the Peace Community has
fraternal relations with the indigenous co mmunity. Maria Bigida leads us
over the bridge and along a jungle trail for a kilometer or so before we
arrive at a clearing with a cluster of traditional Embera thatch-roof
homes, called chozas. The resguardo extends into mountains of the Serrania
del Abibe, which forms the border with Cordoba department. The residents
lived in separate communities spread out over their lands until they came
together in the central village in response to fighting in the area in
1997. They were initially dependent on Red Cross aid during the
transition, when they had to abandon cultivated lands, but they have now
regained their self-sufficiency. The village of Playas is not on the
electrical grid, but solar panels provide some light and power. The women
still wear traditi onal garb. 

When we arrive, the village leaders are away in Apartado town for a
regional indigenous meeting, but Maria Brigida’s friend Rosa Angela Borja
greets us and cooks up some fried plantains and eggs. She explains
something of the Embera-Katio system of self-government, which officially
has local force of law under the 1991 constitution. Each of the three
Embera-Katio resguardos in Apartado–Playas, Palma and Coquera–has an
elected leader called the “ca bildo local,” and a “cabildo mayor” is
charged with responsibility for all three. Rosa says that children can
vote from age two or three, “if they behave well.” Men who serve in the
military lose their membership in the community, Rosa says. She cites the
“peligro” (danger) to the village if the guerillas perceive it as loyal to
the army.

But despite the constitutional right to local autonomy, the army does not
always respect the resguardo’s declared intention to keep their land free
of all armed faction s. As we ate our lunch, a detachment of army troops
marched right through the heart of the village. Rosa says they were taking
advantage of the fact that the menfolk were away that day. “They know it
isn’t correct,” she says.
 

Medellin: Youth Network Resists Para Culture

The activists I visited San Jose with had come to Colombia for an
International Conference on Active Nonviolence and Resistance to War, held
August 11-16 in Medellin, capital of Antioquia department, hosted and
organized by a local yout h group. So after five days in the jungle
corregimiento, a trip in a chiva (collective mini-bus) along the dirt road
to Apartado, followed by an hour plane flight, brought us to the
provincial capital 5,000 feet high in the Andes. There we found ourselves
ensconced in the slightly faded swank of Medellin’s 1940s-vintage Hotel
Nutibara — a somewhat incongruous setting for an event overwhelmingly
attended by slightly unkempt activists wearing message t-shirts. The
conference brought together anti-militaris t and human rights activists
from all over Colombia — most of whom were in their twenties, and some even
younger. Also in attendance were young draft resisters and their
supporters from Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, Guatemala and Spain, as well
three represe ntatives of the War Resisters International, the venerable
pacifist organization dating to the aftermath of World War I, from Europe
and the US.
 

The group that hosted the conference, the Red Juvenil, or Youth Network,
was founded in 1990 in Medellin’s popular barrios “to promote youth
participation in political life,” says the Red’s Milena Meneses, a
political science student at the National University who also teaches
inmates about their human rights in Medellin’s prisons. “We promote an
alternative you th culture to that of gangs and sicarios,” or hired
assassins, she says. “We use theater and art to reach out to the city’s
youth, and we are tied to the larger popular movement of the left in the
barrios.” Many young members of the Red are former gang me mbers who found
new direction after experiencing a Red presentation in Medellin’s schools.

Medellin’s poor barrios are as much a part of Colombia’s war as the
campesino communities of Uraba. Medellin’s Zona Centro Oriental, where the
Red was foun ded, was site of the 1992 Villatina massacre of nine youths by
un-uniformed police in an act of what is locally known as “social
cleansing” against gangs and lumpen culture — although it was never
determined that the unarmed victims were even gang members. The families
were eventually indemnified after the city government was forced to
concede complicity in the massacre. 

October 2002 saw an army sweep code-named Operation Orion in Medellin’s
Comuna 13 district, which had become a stronghold of a n urban guerilla
militia known as the Armed People`s Commandos, or CAP. Days of street
fighting left some 35 dead, and the district is still patrolled by army
troops, who scoot around the streets on motorcycles, M-16s slung across
their backs. In this and other outlying poor districts that climb the
steep hills overlooking the city center, the AUC’s notorious Metro Bloc is
waging a quiet war of extermination against street gangs and urban
guerillas. The Red Juvenil is part of a network of community center s in
these viole nce-ravaged districts attempting to promote education,
self-help and human rights.

As if to exemplify the harsh realities the Red confronts every day, one
night during the conference, a police officer was shot dead right outside

the hotel, and one confer ence attendee was briefly detained on suspicion.
 

The Red also organizes support for Colombia’s conscientious objectors to
the military draft. One year and eight months of military service is
obligatory from age of 18, and those who don’t show up lose the ir right to
work or attend university. It is mostly campesinos and kids from poor
urban barrios who are sent to the war zones, as students who have been
accepted by a university are allowed to remain in their home regions for
their studies. Indians are ex cepted from the draft under the 1991
constitutional reform, and Jehova’s Witnesses are also exempt. The Red was
among the groups that supported Colombia’s first conscientious objector in
1996, Luis Gabriel Caldas, who des erted from the army and served sev en
months in a military prison in 1996.

Since the Peace Communities began emerging in 1997, the Red has promoted
“active neutrality in the war as a posture for the popular movements,” as
Milena puts it. The Red h as hosted several national meetings in
Med ellin — such as the December 1999 Youth at the Milennium conference and
concert, which ushered in the new century with mural-painting and other
community projects in the barrios. Every July 20, the Red protests
Medellin’s Independence Day military parade, standing along the parade
route with signs bearing anti-militarist slogans, such as “Ningun ejercito
defenda la paz” (No army defends the peace). 

The August conference was also attended by representati ves from several of
Colombia’s Peace Communities. In addition to San Jose de Apartado, there
were representatives from La Balsita, also in Antioquia’s Uraba region;
San Francisco de Asis and Caicedo municipalities in the Antioquia
highlands; Sur de Boliva r in Bolivar department; and the Afro-Colombian
co mmunities of Villarica, in Cauca department, and Jijuamiando and
Cacrica, in Choco. Representatives from Caicedo related how, after the
FARC had repeatedly robbed trucks bringing their coffee crop to mark et,
the community organized a citizen foot processi on to accompany the trucks,
carrying white banners — signifying neutrality, not surrender. The tactic
worked, and the guerillas backed off. There were also representatives from
indigenous Paez communities in Cauca, and the independent peasant
organizations of Cimitarra Valley in the conflicted Medio Magdalena
region, which have likewise declared their neutrality.

One challenge for the Red has been the official embrace of the term
“non-violence” by Antioquia’s government. With aid from the Martin Luther
King Center in Atlanta, GA, Antioquia’s Governor Guillermo Gaviria Correa
encouraged local community assemblies in the department’s 124
municipalities to discuss national problems, and promote a “road to
non-violence.” He publicly embraced Caicedo’s neut rality effort,
officially dubbing it “Antioquia’s First Peace Municipality.” In April
2002, FARC guerillas forcibly detained Gaviria and his peace advisor
Gilberto Echeverri Mejia, a former defen se minister, as the two were
accompanying church leaders and some 1,000 supporters on a cross-country
march from Medellin to Caicedo to promote the “non-violence” campaign.
Gaviria and Echeverri were abducted just three kilometers short of
Caicedo, some 70 kilometers northwest of Medellin. In May 2003, they were
a mong ten hostages killed by the FARC in reaction to an army rescue
attempt. Gaviria has become extremely popular in martyrdom, and
Antioquia’s interim governor is carrying on the “non-violence” campaign.
 

But Gaviria was from the same Liberal Party as Col ombia’s ultra-hardline
President Alvaro Uribe, and the Red Juvenil finds that the official
“non-violence” campaign has in some ways made their work more difficult.
Says the Red’s Adriana Castano Roman, who recently completed law school:
“It puts us in a p aradoxical position. The communications media are in
their hands, and they are changing the popular perception of non-violence.
They certainly do not support the right of conscientious objection. And
it’s especially easy to dismiss us because we are young.”

The conference closed with an all-day concert in a Medellin park,
featuring local punk, metal, reggae, ska and rap outfits, many with
bitingly political lyrics and irreverent names like Bellavista Social
Club — Bellavista being the name of Medellin’s notoriously harsh prison. One
person was injured at the concert in the punk-skinhead violence that
frequently occasions Medellin youth culture events, reflecting the general
lef t-right political chasm. But the broken-rifle symbol of the War
Resisters Int ernational hung on the banner over the stage. As the event
ended well after midnight and Red volunteers started to clean up the
littered paper cups from the beer stand that cove red the park grounds,
Adriana breathes a sigh of relief. “The violence has been worse before.”
 

Red Juvenil`s efforts are beginning to have an impact in terms of popular
consciousness in Medellin and Antioquia, according to Adriana, and
mainstream legitimization of the term “non-violence” has also allowed the
Red to assert a dissident alternative to the official campaign. “Now we
are acknowledged as having at least a minority position,” she says. “Even
if they call us anarchists and utopians.”

www.redjuvenil.org

BETWEEN DYNCORP AND THE A.U.C: Glyphosate and Paramilitary Terror in Colombia’s Cimitarra Valley

by Bill Weinberg

Leaving Barrancabermeja in a canoa — a small launch with an outboard motor — the perilous patchwork of armed groups that vie for control of Colombia’s Medio Magdalena region becomes immediately obvious. Navy gunboats painted in camo line the shore along the huge oil refinery that looms over the Rio Magdalena. Just a few minutes later, a little past the edge of the city, paramilitary checkpoints on either bank survey the river traffic. They don’t stop our boat because we are flying the flag of Peace Brigades International from the bow, and the paras like to give foreign human rights observers a wide berth. There are practically no suburbs — just past the para checkpoint we find ourselves in an endless expanse of wetlands and jungle broken only by the most primitive of campesino settlements. Herons laze on the green banks as we make our way north to the Rio Cimitarra — a tributary of the Magdalena where coca growers, paras and guerillas have all staked their turf.

I’ve come to this remote and conflicted region with a commission from the Colombian rights group Humanidades Vigentes, accompanied by two representatives of the Peace Brigades for our protection. We spend a mosquito-haunted night at Puerto Machete, the little riverside settlement where the canoa drops us off. Then it is a four-hour hike along an unimproved dirt road and jungle trails to our destination: the little campesino vereda (settlement) of La Floresta. The last hour on the trail seems endless. We wade streams, sink knee-deep into mud, crawl under barbed-wire fences, climb and descend hill after hill. When a campesino from La Floresta passes us on his mule, I ask hopefully “Falta mucho?” (Is it much further?) He nods gravely and answers “Si, siempre.” Yes, always.

Poison from the Skies, Fear on the Land

There is no electricity in La Floresta, and no running water. The only sign of any government presence is in the form of destroyed land.

Our commission has come to document the impact of aerial glyphosate fumigation of the settlement’s lands to wipe out coca crops. The impacts are obvious as soon as we arrive. Marina Salguero, the official health promoter for Floresta and nearby settlements, who is licensed by the local municipal government of Cantagallo, maintains an extremely makeshift clinic in a little hilltop hut. A thin old man with big rash on his leg sits in the hut with a penicillin IV in his arm. His skin irritation, a result of being caught in his fields when the fumigation overflight swooped down, has become infected, Salguero says.

“I get cases like this all the time,” she says. “Children with head pain, vomiting, diaorrhea, skin irritation. Every time the planes come.” She points out a stretch of land on a nearby hill glaringly brown and dead in the green landscape — the result of the last fumigation, 15 days earlier. The brown stretch is right beside to a house. “Their home, their kitchen was fumigated. Their crops all destroyed–maize, platano, yucca.”

Salguero admits that coca is grown at La Floresta — “just to have a little money,” she says. “You saw how bad the road is here.” She notes that having to haul out legal crops on the road–followed by a river trip to nearest town, with paras sometimes stealing whatever goods the campesinos carry — means the cost of getting crops to market eats virtually all profits. In contrast, men come to the vereda to buy the coca and carry it out themselves.

“We are completely abandoned by the government here–municipal, departmental, national,” Salguero protests. “What alternative do we have? I’m responsible for three veredas, and I don’t even have a thermometer.”

On this recently-settled agricultural frontier, where land is cleared from the rainforest with no oversight, the campesinos have no ability to interact with the bureaucracy for credit or aid. “Here the land is not titled,” says Salguero. “Everyone has his predio (plot) and works it.”

When the campesinos take us on a tour of the vereda, showing us the plots which have been destroyed by fumigation flights, they all tell same story — legal food crops and forest destroyed along with the coca bushes. They pull up the dead stalks of yucca, killed before they could be harvested. They claim over 100 chickens have been killed by glyphosate spraying in the village since first fumigation flights in 2001. Sometimes it is clear that the legal crops were destroyed because they were planted amid coca crops. Sometimes it looks as if the glyphosate drifted, or was sprayed wildly wide of its target. Everywhere it is clear that the spraying is degrading these hard-won lands not only by direct poisoning, but by destroying the plant cover the holds down the soil, leading to erosion and muddy streams.

The fumigation flights, carried out by planes from the private firm Dyncorp under contract to the US State Department, are accompanied by up to seven helicopters from the Colombian army or National Police. They take off from airport in Barrancabermeja. Army ground troops also come to burn down coca paste labs from time to time, or to search for guerillas. The campesinos complain that the troops demand mules for transport and chickens for food without compensation.

But it is the paramilitaries from the Central Bolivar Bloc (BCB) of the notorious Colombian United Self-Defense Forces (AUC) that have a far tighter grip on the community, and demand periodic payments of war taxes. The campesinos show us a document from the BCB’s local “Frente Conquistadores of Yondo” ordering the president of Floresta’s peasant council, the Junta de Accion Comunal, to show up in paramilitary-controlled Yondo town on Sept. 7 to make a “declaration” about production on their lands for taxes to the outlaw army. The campesinos also pay taxes to the guerillas — “Whoever has guns,” says Uriel Nieto, a member of the peasant council.

La Floresta is one of several communities that make up the Cimitarra Valley Campesino Association (ACVC), which has been pressuring for a better deal for the marginal region since it was founded in 1996. Yondo’s mayor Saul Rodriguez calls ACVC a front for the guerillas. “Itâ€ss a lie,” says Uriel. “We work as a community, not as an arm of the guerilla.”

Government Targets Campesino Activists, Not Paras

In 1998, following a series of cross-country marches and other protest campaigns, the ACVC worked out plan for the “Integral Development and Protection of Human Rights in the Magdalena Medio.” The plan was drawn up with the allied Federation of Agricultural Workers and Miners of Southern Bolivar (Fedeagromisbol), an alliance of campesinos and small-scale gold miners in the Sierra San Lucas who have been increasingly pushed out of the region by corporate gold interests in recent years. The plan was conceived as an alternative to government plans to forcibly eradicate coca in the region. The ACVC argued that with government investment in the region and a crackdown on paras, the campesinos could wean themselves off the coca economy.

Things have worked out differently. A special army unit called the Bloque de Busqueda, or Search Bloc, was formed specifically to target the paras, but never accomplished much. And since President Alvaro Uribe came to power last year, the paras have increased their hold on the region — while the ACVC itself has been the target of a crackdown.

Since March of this year, ACVC leaders Gilberto Guerra and Andres Gil have been wanted on “rebellion” charges related to past protest campaigns and alleged collaboration with the guerillas. They are currently in hiding. Says Miguel Cifuentes, secretary of the ACVC’s governing junta: “There are paras and assassins in the prisons. They are worth more alive than dead.”

Cifuentes denies that the ACVC has ever collaborated with the guerillas. “This is part of the Uribe government strategy to debilitate the movement,” he says. “They use denunciations in the press, charges against us — and when that fails, they try to kill us.”

Cifuentes speaks from experience. On March 4, days before charges brought against Guerra and Gil, Cifuentes was on the Rio Magdalena on his way to the Cimitarra Valley, when he was the target of an assassination attempt. He was just 15 minutes past the Navy presence at Barrancabermeja when paras opened fire on his canoa from their shoreline checkpoint. Cifuentes was only on the river because he had been given bad information that there was no para checkpoint up that day. “I knew if we stopped they’d kill me,” he says. His finger was grazed by a bullet, and his cellular radio hit, but he managed to get away to a nearby island, where he hid for 12 hours — at one point, while paras searched the island for him with flashlights. Local human rights workers finally rescued him. He has not ventured back into the Cimitarra Valley since, but helps staff the ACVC’s office in Barrancabermeja.

Laboratory of the Counter-Reform

The Medio Magdalena region, which includes the Cimitarra Valley and straddles the departments of Antioquia. Santander, Cesar and Bolivar, has ironically been dubbed by the Colombian government and foreign aid agencies a “Laboratory of Peace.” The program includes a European Union-backed proposal to promote African palm oil as an alternative crop and a spur to economic development in the region. Cifuentes opposes the African palm proposal as a technocratic pseudo-solution. “It is a monoculture, and it displaces traditional crops, worsening the food crisis in region and increasing campesino debt,” he says.

Jorge Enrique Gomez is Medio Magdalena regional chief of the Defensoria del Pueblo, an official human rights watchdog created by Colombia’s 1991 constitutional reform. He has been at his post since February 2002, when he returned to the Medio Magdalena alter ten years in exile in El Salvador and Guatemala. He fled Colombia after receiving death threats for his work documenting local human rights abuses with CREDHOS, the Barrancabermeja-based non-governmental watchdog. Gomez believes that as long as fumigation continues, no alternative crop program will make much difference.

“To fumigate licit crops is a bad investment and a mixed message to the campesinos,” he says. “Cultivation of illicit crops is a result of the lack of any government presence in the zone. Fumigations affect the poorest sector of the populace.” He argues that the fumigations are not only counter-productive, but illegal.

“Itâ€ss the position of the Defensoria del Pueblo that the fumigations are against international humanitarian law. Article 93 of the Colombian constitution recognizes the Geneva Conventions and other international codes. So the fumigations are also illegal under Colombian law.” He cites the Defensoria’s Resolution 026-02, issued in response to fumigations in Putumayo department, which officially found the program illegal. He acknowledges that the Defensoria’s resolutions are nonbinding, but says they have “moral power.”

The ACVC’s 1998 accord with the government was supposed to instate a more meaningful alternative development program. The accord, signed by Gil and Guerra with President Andres Pastrana, established the Cimitarra Valley as a “Campesino Reserve Zone,” or ZRC, where small holdings are protected by law, and large holdings or latifundios are banned. The ZRC proposal set maximum holdings based on 72-hectare Family Agricultural Units, with no more than three allowed in a single private holding within the Zone. The Cimitarra ZRC, which covered the municipalities of Remedios and Yondo in Antioquia and San Pablo and Cantagallo in Bolivar, was officially declared in December 2002, in accordance with the 1998 accord. It was one of five declared throughout Colombia, with the other four in Meta and Guaviare departments. But in April 2003, the Cimitarra ZRC was eliminated by official decree of the Colombian National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INCORA), on the grounds it was exacerbating conflict in the region.

The INCORA decree disbanding zone, Resolution 046-03, was protested by dissident members of INCORA’s governing junta, who sent a letter to the body arguing that overturning the ZRC was illegal. INCORA was a semi-democratic body, with junta members representing campesinos elected via the National Association of Campesino Land Users (ANUC) and the National Federation of Agriculture (FANAL); members representing Indians elected via the Colombian Indigenous Organization (ONIC); members representing Afro-Colombians elected via the Process of Black Communities (PCN); and members representing women elected via National Association of Campesino, Black and Indigenous Women (ANMUCIC). But the majority on the INCORA junta–representing government agricultural agencies and the landed elite (via the National Ranchers Federation, or FEDEGAN, and the Colombian Farmers Society, or SAC)–voted in favor of overturning the Cimitarra ZRC.

In May, shortly after the vote, INCORA, established in the 1960s, was officially dissolved by President Uribe. It has been replaced by the Colombian National Institute of Rural Development (INCODER), which is charged with titling colonized lands, rather than land redistribution. Campesino organizations charge that the bureaucratic change is the final nail in the coffin of Colombia’s tentative agrarian reform measures.

Big ranches in Yondo municipality which existed before the ZRC was declared are still intact. Under the ZRC, they were supposed to be bought by the government and redistributed to campesinos — but they never were before the ZRC was overturned. ACVC’s Miguel Cifuentes claims these ranches both launder narco profits and serve as a base of support for paramilitary activity.

“We developed our own plan for a sustainable economic alternative,” says Cifuentes. “We called for roads, schools, hospitals, mills for sugar and rice, local cooperatives to exploit fish and timber, so the campesinos can take their product directly to the market without intermediaries. We called for rational exploitation of gold that doesn’t pollute the water. These solutions could work. But there is no political will to provide the resources. The region means nothing to those in power.”

(August 27, 2003)