The Andes

Venezuela defends Russian arms purchases

Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel responded angrily to charges by US Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere Roger Noriega that his government’s new arms deal with Russia is intended for trafficking to Colombian guerillas. "Venezuela is a… Read moreVenezuela defends Russian arms purchases

COLOMBIA: REBEL LEADER EXTRADITED, MASSACRES MOUNT

by Weekly News Update on the Americas

REBEL LEADER EXTRADITED TO U.S.

On Dec. 31 a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Juvenal Ricardo Ovidio Palmera Pineda (alias Simon Trinidad), was taken from a maximum security Colombian prison and flown to Washington on a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) plane. In Washington, Palmera was taken to US District Court–kept open late on New Year’s Eve, just for him–where the Justice Department said he appeared before Magistrate Judge John Facciola; he was then driven to an undisclosed location. Palmera has been indicted in the US on charges of drug trafficking, kidnapping and supporting terrorists. The US government says Palmera shipped five kilos of cocaine to the US; the kidnapping charges stem from the FARC’s February 2003 capture of US military contractors Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell and Marc Gonsalves after their plane crashed in the southern department of Caqueta.

Palmera was serving a 35-year prison sentence in Colombia after courts there convicted him of aggravated kidnapping. Palmera was a negotiator for the FARC during peace talks with the government of Andres Pastrana Arango. He was arrested in Ecuador on Jan. 2, 2004. Palmera is the first FARC leader to be extradited to the US. Alleged FARC member Nelson Vargas Rueda was extradited to the US on May 28, 2003, to face charges for the March 1999 murder of three US activists, but he was returned to Colombia on July 1 of this year after the US government dropped its case against him for lack of evidence.

The US has made 270 extradition requests to Colombia. On Nov. 24, Colombia’s Supreme Court authorized the extradition of Palmera and two leaders of the rightwing paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC): Salvatore Mancuso and Carlos Castano. On Dec. 16, the Colombian government agreed not to extradite Mancuso, who faces drug trafficking charges in the US, as long as he complies–and pushes other AUC members to comply–with the terms of a "peace accord." All arrest orders against Mancuso are suspended while the peace process proceeds, and he travels in Colombian government vehicles under state protection. Castano disappeared last April and rumors spread that he was killed in a factional fight within the AUC; other reports suggest he may be in Israel, or in the US, where his wife, Kenia Gomez, and their daughter were recently granted asylum.

On Dec. 17, Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez authorized Palmera’s extradition but issued an ultimatum giving the FARC until Dec. 30 to free 63 hostages in exchange for halting the extradition. The list of hostages includes the US military contractors–Howes, Stansell and Gonsalves–along with politicians, soldiers and a German businessperson. The FARC did not respond–and did not refer to the offer in three communiques issued on Dec. 27 and 29–but had made clear in the past that it would not accept such a deal, and would only free the hostages in exchange for the release of 500 jailed rebels.

(Miami Herald, Jan. 1, Nov. 26; El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Jan. 1, Nov. 26; AP, Jan. 1; El Mostrador, Chile, Dec. 31; FARC Communiques, Dec. 27, 29)

28 DEAD IN TWO MASSACRES

On Dec. 23, several contingents of the AUC’s "Northern Bloc"–headed by Salvatore Mancuso and currently engaged in "peace negotiations" with the Colombian government–came to the Middle Catatumbo region of Norte de Santander department from Ocana municipality and the southern area of neighboring Cesar department. The paramilitaries set up a roadblock on the road that links the town center of Convencion to the village of Cartagenita in Convencion municipality, where they abducted and murdered campesino Jesus Humberto Guerrero Jimenez and stole 10 million pesos ($4,147) from him. At the same site, the paramilitaries abducted and killed an unidentified young campesino who lived in Cartagenita.

Early on Dec. 25, the paramilitaries entered the village of Santa Ines, in El Carmen municipality, where they forced the community’s residents to gather before separating seven campesinos from the group and killing them. Four of the victims were identified as Leonel Bayona Cabrales, Samuel Perez Abril, Custodio Melo and William Montano. The paramilitaries also abducted, tortured and freed two other campesinos, and robbed the village residents of 15 head of cattle, money and other possessions.

Also on Dec. 25, the paramilitaries abducted two unidentified men near the border of Ocana and Convencion municipalities, and murdered them in the hamlet of Culebritas in Convencion. Some 1,000 residents of the villages of Cartagenita, Miraflores and La Trinidad in Convencion municipality have fled their homes in terror and are hiding in rural areas, unable to reach larger towns because of the paramilitary siege. They are running out of food and have no access to medical attention.

The paramilitaries remain in the area, divided into two groups: one stationed in the hamlet of Santa Maria, between Cartagenita and Miraflores in Convencion municipality, 12 kilometers from the base of the army’s Energy Road Plan Battalion #10; the other in the hamlet of Planadas, in El Carmen municipality. The residents of La Trinidad, Miraflores and Cartagenita had previously been displaced by paramilitary violence at the hands of the AUC’s "Catatumbo Bloc"–which was officially demobilized this past Dec. 10–and had returned to their homes on May 20, 2003 after being promised that the government would provide them with security.

Minga, a Colombian human rights group, is asking the government to protect the civilian population, neutralize the paramilitaries responsible for the violence, provide emergency humanitarian assistance to displaced communities and assist their safe return, and open criminal investigations into the killings. In addition, Minga wants Sergio Caramagna, head of the Organization of American States (OAS) accompaniment mission which is overseeing the negotiations with the paramilitaries, to verify these violations of the ceasefire. (Minga, Dec. 29, via Prensa Rural)

On the night of Dec. 31, at least 17 campesinos were shot to death in the rural community of Puerto San Salvador, Tame municipality, in the eastern Colombian department of Arauca. Another three campesinos were wounded in the attack. The victims had gathered in a public spot to celebrate New Year’s Eve. Tame mayor Alfredo Guzman said the victims included six women, seven men and four children. One of those injured in the attack said the perpetrators had accused the victims of being paramilitary supporters. That testimony led local authorities to blame the FARC for the massacre, though Arauca police commander Col. Rodrigo Palacio told the press that the police and military are still trying to determine who was responsible. (EFE, AFP, Jan. 1)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 2

ARAUCA: ARMY KILLS GIRL

At 3 AM on Nov. 28, the Colombian army’s Mobile Brigade 5 entered the village of El Botalon in Tame municipality, Arauca department. The uniformed troops were accompanied by individuals out of uniform who have been recognized as participating in past paramilitary actions. Later in the morning, as fighting broke out between troops and insurgents in the area, the soldiers set up a sniper post and fired at a busy intersection, badly wounding Karly Johana Suarez Torres, who was either nine or 11 years old. Wounded by a bullet to the head, Suarez died en route to a hospital in the city of Arauca. The army surrounded El Botalon, preventing any of the residents from leaving and blocking food and supplies from entering. (Humanidad Vigente, Comite Regional de Derechos Humanos Joel Sierra, Nov. 29, via Colombia Indymedia)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 19

BOGOTA: CAMPESINOS PROTEST TRADE PACT

On Nov. 29, Colombian campesinos marched in Bogota with their cows, oxen and tractors to protest a planned free trade treaty (TLC) between the US and three Andean nations. The protest was held a day before the sixth round of trade talks was set to begin in the US city of Tucson, AZ, between representatives of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and the US. The talks were scheduled to close on Dec. 4. The previous round of talks was held Oct. 25-29 in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The four governments have been discussing the trade pact since last May, and hope to sign it by February 2005, despite opposition in all four countries. (Caracol Noticias, AP, Nov. 29) The talks come on the heels of a four-hour visit to Colombia on Nov. 22 by US president George W. Bush. Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez used the visit to press Bush for a "fair trade accord" with special consideration for the Colombian agricultural sector and more flexibility on intellectual property rights; Bush apparently did not respond to the request. (Red Colombiana de Accion frente al Libre Comercio y el ALCA [RECALCA], Nov. 29)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 5

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Jan. 17, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW4Report.com

VENEZUELA: MURDER CASE LEADS TO MIAMI?

by Weekly News Update on the Americas

Investigators probing the Nov. 18 car bomb assassination of Venezuelan state prosecutor Danilo Anderson have found telephone records suggesting that the killing was planned at a meeting in Miami this past September. One of the participants at the meeting was Jose Augustin Guevara, a brother of ex-police agents Otoniel and Rolando Guevara, who were arrested on Nov. 26 on charges of "premeditated homicide" and conspiracy in the Anderson murder. Otoniel Guevara is accused of being an agent of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). A cousin of the three brothers, Juan Bautista Guevara, is suspected of having planted the bomb on Anderson’s car. Eyewitnesses place him at the scene shortly before Anderson’s car exploded.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested Jose Guevara in Miami in 2001 when he attempted to withdraw funds from a bank account belonging to Peru’s then-fugitive spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos Torres, who was wanted in Peru in connection with corruption and human rights abuses. The FBI then released Jose Guevara into its witness protection program. The Guevara brothers are said to have been paid $1 million for hiding Montesinos in Venezuela. Montesinos was arrested in Caracas on June 24, 2001. Venezuelan government spokespeople have also accused Florida-based rightwing Cuban-American Rodolfo Fromenta, head of the anti-Castro paramilitary group Comandos F-4, of links to the Anderson murder.

Venezuela’s Attorney General’s Office has taken over the investigation of the Anderson murder after concerns were raised about irregularities in the probe conducted by agents from the Scientific Criminal Investigations Corps (CICPC), including links between the Guevara brothers and the CICPC. (Venezuelanalysis.com, Dec. 2; El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Dec. 1; La Republica, Lima, Nov. 27) On Nov. 26, CICPC agents fatally shot lawyer Antonio Lopez, a possible suspect in the Anderson case, in an alleged gunfight. The same day, former police agent Juan Carlos Sanchez, also wanted in connection with the Anderson killing, died in a confrontation with police. Both Lopez and Sanchez were linked to the Guevara brothers. Authorities later raided Lopez’s home and said they found high-powered weapons and explosives. (AFP, Nov. 26; NYT, Nov. 24)

At the time of his death, Anderson was heading up investigations into some 400 opposition figures for possible involvement in an April 2002 coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez Frias or other destabilization attempts against the government. On Nov. 26, two of the men Anderson was investigating sought asylum in the Salvadoran embassy in Caracas. Lazaro Forero and Henry Vivas, former chiefs of the Caracas Metropolitan Police, were arrested by Venezuelan authorities on Dec. 3 after the Salvadoran government turned down their request for asylum. The two are accused of responsibility for violence which killed 20 people and wounded dozens more at an opposition march in Caracas on Apr. 11, 2002. Opposition forces used the violence as a pretext for their coup attempt against Chavez the next day. (BBC, Reuters, Dec. 3)

Another two opposition figures who were under investigation by Anderson, former Venezuelan national guard officers Jose Antonio Colina and German Rodolfo Varela, appeared in their final US asylum hearing on Nov. 29 at the Krome detention center in West Miami-Dade. The two sought asylum in the US on Dec. 19 of last year; they are accused in Venezuela of bombing the Colombian and Spanish diplomatic missions in Caracas on Feb. 25, 2003. At the Nov. 29 hearing, US prosecutors told Immigration Judge Neale Foster that neither Colina nor Varela deserve asylum because they fled to evade prosecution–not persecution. Attorneys for the two men blasted US prosecutors for allegedly favoring Chavez, and accused Foster of bias. Foster ordered closing arguments in writing by Jan. 14, promised to weigh the evidence fairly and said he would issue a ruling early next year. (Miami Herald, Dec. 1)

Venezuelan actor and anti-Chavez activist Orlando Urdaneta, interviewed in October on a Miami television station, urged that efficient commandos be hired to assassinate Chavez and his associates in Venezuela. The interviewer, Maria Elvira Salazar, suggested to Urdaneta that the commandos would ideally be Israeli; Urdaneta agreed. On Nov. 25, the Israeli embassy denied any connection with sectors trying to destabilize the Venezuelan government, and denied that any Israelis were involved with the Anderson assassination. (EFE, Nov. 29, Newsday, Nov. 20)

Newly declassified intelligence documents have confirmed that the CIA was aware that dissident military officers and opposition figures in Venezuela were planning a coup against Chavez in 2002. In a senior intelligence executive brief dated April 6 of that year, the CIA said that "disgruntled senior officers and a group of radical junior officers are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chavez, possibly as early as this month." The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Jeremy Bigwood, a freelance investigative reporter in Washington. In interviews with the New York Times and other news organizations in the days after the April 12 coup, administration officials vigorously denied having had advance knowledge of plans to oust Chavez, who regained power on April 14. (NYT,. Dec. 3)

On Nov. 22, the foreign minister of Spain’s socialist government, Miguel Angel Moratinos, criticized the rightwing government of former Spanish president Jose Maria Aznar for supporting the coup in Venezuela. On Dec. 1, Moratinos reiterated his accusations but apologized for having made them in the wrong place and at an "inappropriate" time. While Aznar didn’t instigate or help plan the coup, he also "didn’t condemn the coup d’etat, endorsed it and offered it international legitimacy," Moratinos charged. (AFP, Dec. 1)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 5

PERU: ONE KILLED IN MINE PROTEST

by Weekly News Update on the Americas

On the evening of Nov. 16, some 2,000 campesinos took over the Buenaventura mining company’s La Zanja camp in the Pulan district of Santa Cruz province, Cajamarca department, in northwestern Peru. The Front for the Defense of the Environment–a previously unknown group, according to governor Segundo Amado Linares–apparently organized the takeover of the camp in order to press a community demand for an end to mining explorations in the zone. Local campesinos fear mining will bring contamination to the area, harming their health and the agriculture they rely on for survival. The campesinos–many of them members of the organized defense groups known as rondas–burned the camp’s buildings and vehicles as the 200 workers based there fled. Police intervened with tear gas but were unable to regain control. Campesino Juan Montenegro Lingan was killed by a bullet, and several people were wounded. Police finally retook the camp on Nov. 17 and arrested 18 people, who were all released later in the day after appearing before a judge. Judge Adolfo Arribasplata also ordered the arrest of 23 other people believed to be involved in the attack on the camp, including the mayor of the village of Tongod, Roberto Becerra Mondragon. (La Republica, Lima, Nov. 19, 25; AFP Nov. 17)

On Nov. 22, residents of Santa Cruz province began a 48-hour civic strike to press their demand for an end to mining exploration. Santa Cruz mayor Cruz Anacario Diaz Mego said area mayors and other local authorities are supporting the communities’ demands, though he said they also condemn the attack on the mining camp. More than 1,000 campesinos marched in Santa Cruz on the first day of the strike, which shut down virtually all activity in the province. On the second day of the strike some 5,000 campesinos marched in Pulan, while Diaz Mego announced in Lima that the strike would be extended indefinitely because Buenaventura officials had rebuffed attempts at dialogue. Diaz Mego said he and other leaders are demanding the temporary suspension of the company’s explorations until local concerns about contamination and the reinvestment of mining profits into the community are addressed. Buenaventura finance manager Carlos Galvez was defiant, saying the company would not cede to any type of pressure and would continue its explorations. A new contingent of 200 riot police arrived from Chiclayo to defend the mining camp against any further attack. (La Republica, Lima, Nov. 22-5)

STRIKES AND PROTESTS SURGE

Some 13,000 doctors carried out a 48-hour strike at 143 state hospitals throughout Peru on Nov. 25 and 26 to demand government compliance with an accord on salary increases signed last May 1. Wearing their white coats, the doctors marched to the Congress building in Lima on Nov. 25, where they presented their list of demands. Hundreds of obstetricians marched to the Congress on Nov. 24, the first day of their own 48-hour strike against layoffs and to demand better benefits. Among other complaints, obstetricians say they are fired if they take maternity leave. Public health support staff meanwhile began their own open-ended strike. (La Republica, Nov. 25, 27; wire services, Nov. 25)

Teachers, workers and campesinos from the leftist General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP) marched in Lima on Nov. 25 to protest the government’s neoliberal economic policies and demand greater social spending. The CGTP is calling for a constituent assembly to write a new constitution with a new labor code to replace the one promulgated in 1993 by then-president Alberto Fujimori. Protesters also blocked several main avenues in Lima to reject a planned "free trade treaty" (TLC) with the US. (La Hora, Quito, Nov. 26, wire services)

Sugar producers in Chiclayo blocked the Panamerican highway on Nov. 25 to demand government help in improving production. (La Hora, Nov, 26) On Nov. 24 and 25, residents of the northern Ancash region held a civic strike to demand construction of a highway. (AFP, Reuters, Nov, 25) In Ayacucho, residents held a 24-hour strike on Nov. 24 to demand solutions to a conflict over water use. (LR, Nov. 25) In the southern department of Puno, hundreds of people blockaded a main road in Juliaca to protest electricity rate hikes, while residents of Ilave staged a 48-hour strike to protest the rate hikes and high fuel prices and to demand the resignation of Puno governor David Jimenez Sardon, who is accused of corruption. (LR, wire services, Nov. 25)

On Nov. 24, two people were killed and four others wounded during an attack on squatters in Alto Unine, 80 kilometers from the city of Satipo in Junin department. Two of the wounded have disappeared. Police arrested 13 people in connection with the attack. Survivors say the attack was led by Dionisio Maldonado, husband of the president of the Juan Santos Atahualpa Housing Association. The Association, which claims ownership of the disputed land, had recently won a court ruling against the squatters and had previously evicted the 30 families living there and destroyed their homes and property. The squatters had then returned to the land. (LR, Nov. 26, 28)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Nov. 28

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, Dec. 10, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW3Report.com

ECUADOR: RUMSFELD DOES QUITO

by Weekly News Update on the Americas

At a meeting of Western Hemisphere defense ministers in Quito, Ecuador, on Nov. 16, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called for increased Latin American action against terrorism, hinting that the region’s militaries should be more involved in domestic law enforcement. The US has had "to conduct an arduous yet essential re-examination of the relationship between its military and law enforcement responsibilities," he said. Many Latin American countries suffered from human rights abuses while they were under the rule of US-backed military regimes in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result some, like Argentina, have tried to bar the military from policing operations. US officials have suggested that the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda is moving into the hemisphere; the US has offered no evidence, and some experts are skeptical. (Reuter, Nov. 17)

Rumsfeld visited three Central American countries on his way to Quito. After a Nov. 11-12 stay in El Salvador, Rumsfeld stopped over in Nicaragua, where President Enrique Bolanos promised to destroy the country’s more than 1,000 surface-to-air missiles, a move opposed by the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). (Nicaragua had already destroyed about 1,000 missiles by November 2003, but resisted destroying the rest). On Nov. 13 Rumsfeld arrived in Panama for talks with President Martin Torrijos. Rumsfeld promised that the US would continue to provide technical advice to the National Police on the struggle against terrorism and on security for the Panama Canal. (La Prensa, Panama, Nov. 17)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Nov. 21

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, Dec. 10, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW3Report.com

CHILE: MASS PROTESTS AT APEC MEET

by Weekly News Update on the Americas

Chilean police arrested some 300 people, mostly students, who were protesting in Santiago on Nov. 17 against the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, scheduled for Nov. 19-21 in Chile, and the participation of US president George W. Bush. "No Bush, no APEC," the protesters chanted. Militarized Carabinero police attacked them with water cannons and tear gas. Those arrested included journalists and Rodrigo Soto, a member of the Chilean branch of Amnesty International; he was released without charges. Protesters said many arrests were arbitrary. "They took away my friend because he said cowards wear green," student Tamara White told a reporter; the Carabineros wear green uniforms. The demonstration was called by the Anti-APEC Coordinating Committee, headed by the Chilean Communist Party and the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front (FPMR). (AFP, DPA, Reuters, Nov. 18)

The Chilean Social Forum (FSCH), a coalition of some 100 groups opposed to neoliberal economic policies, held a far larger demonstration on Nov. 19. Estimates ranged from 15,000 to 70,000 for participation in the event, a march along the Alameda, Santiago’s main avenue, to the Bustamante Park, where organizers held a cultural event. The march was peaceful, although there were isolated confrontations in the park and police agents used tear gas. The FSCH had scheduled workshops and meetings on Nov. 20-21 to discuss alternatives to neoliberalism. In preparation for the FSCH, the national police distributed a leaflet to schools and government offices urging citizens to report "suspicious attitudes" and "the places of anti-APEC meetings." "Chile may be at the end of the world, but for international terrorism, nothing is far enough away," the leaflet warned. (Servicio Informativo "Alai-amlatina" Nov. 19; NYT, Nov. 20)

The center-left Chilean government suddenly dropped plans for President Ricardo Lagos to host a large formal dinner for Bush the evening of Nov. 21 at the end of the APEC meeting. Instead, the two presidents were to have a small "working dinner" together. Lagos indignantly denied reports that the formal dinner was cancelled because of excessive security demands by US officials, who reportedly wanted to have all 250 guests searched with US metal detectors. (La Tercera, Chile, Nov. 21) There was an incident between US and Chilean security agents before dinner on Nov. 20. According to the New York Times, "a scrum of shoving Chilean security officers" blocked Bush’s lead Secret Service agent. Bush "turned around and walked up to the group, reached in to pull his agent free, and walked back into the [dining] hall, shaking his head." (NYT, Nov. 21)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Nov. 21

MAPUCHE ACTIVISTS ACQUITTED

On Nov. 4, the criminal court in the Chilean city of Temuco acquitted eight members of the Arauco Malleco Collective, a Mapuche [indigenous] activist group, who had been accused of terrorist association for a series of arson attacks against the Forestal Mininco company and private estates in the Ninth Region. The three-judge panel ruled that the Public Ministry had failed to present sufficient proof of the defendants’ participation in the attacks. Mapuche activists Jorge Huaiquin, Oscar Higueras, Marcelo Quintrileo and Mauricio Contreras were freed upon acquittal; Aniceto Norin, Pascual Pichun, Jose Llanca and Patricia Troncoso–the one non-Mapuche in the group–were returned to jail, where they are serving sentences for convictions related to the Mapuche conflict.

Another eight defendants–seven Mapuche activists and one non-Mapuche supporter–have been charged in the same case but remain at large; in October they issued a communique saying they would go into hiding rather than face an unjust trial. (La Tercera, Santiago, Nov. 5)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Nov. 14

See also WW3 REPORT #95
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, Dec. 10, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW3Report.com

COLOMBIA: WHO ARE THE “NARCO-TERRORISTS”?

Did Bush Pledge Support for Colombia’s Top Terrorist and Drug Dealer in his Cartagena Photo-Op with Alvaro Uribe?

by Bill Weinberg

President Bush’s brief stop in Colombia on his return from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Chile on Nov. 22 brought this forgotten front in Washington’s war on terrorism briefly into the headlines. Bush promised Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe–his closest South American ally–to boost aid for his military campaign against so-called "narco-terrorists."

"Our two nations share in the struggle against drugs," Bush said during a joint press conference with Uribe at the Caribbean port of Cartagena. "The drug traffickers who practice violence and intimidation in this country send their addictive and deadly products to the United States."

Bush expressed optimism that Colombia can win its war against drugs and terrorism. "Colombia is well on the way to that victory," he said, adding that Uribe has built "an impressive record" since he took office in August 2002.

"We will win, but we have not won yet," Uribe chimed in. He added, using his favorite metaphor: "We have made progress, but the serpent is still alive." (AFPS, Nov. 24)

Uribe made sure to wear a Red Sox cap at the photo-op, in honor of Orlando Cabrera, the Boston shortstop who pledged his support to Bush after his team won the World Series in October–who was also on hand to wow the press. (NYT N23)

The top target of Uribe’s "anti-terrorist" campaign is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a 15,000-strong leftist guerilla force which Uribe’s army is currently battling in a major offensive in the country’s southern jungles, known as Plan Patriot. Days after Bush’s visit, Defense Minister Jorge Uribe (who was appointed by the president, but is not related to him) told reporters that informants said the FARC had instructed agents to "assassinate President Bush" in Cartagena. Bush was protected by 15,000 Colombian troops and police, US troops, and Secret Service agents during his three-hour stop in Colombia. (AP, Nov. 30)

Invisible Terror

Just two weeks before Bush’s Cartagena photo-op, 100 unarmed peasants were killed in a massacre by rightist paramilitary troops in Colombia’s southern jungle province of Putumayo. Survivors who fled across the border to Ecuador said the victims were cut to pieces with chainsaws and machetes while tied hanging from beams. Unlike the Bush visit, this failed to make headlines. (La Hora, Quito, Nov. 12, via Weekly News Update on the Americas)

Shortly after Bush’s visit, on Dec. 6, two Embera-Katio indigenous leaders were assassinated by gunmen who entered their reserve in Antioquia province. The three were Horacio Bailirin, former director of the Indigenous Organization of Antioquia (OIA); Arturo Domico, another OIA leader; and Misael Domico, former governor of the Embera-Katio reserve of Las Playas, in Apartado municipality, where the killings took place of. Witnesses said 10 heavily armed men in Colombian army uniforms carried out the killings, dumped the bodies in the nearby Rio Ibudo, and threatened to kill more if community members retrieved the bodies for a proper burial. This also failed to garner any headlines in the US. (ACIN statement, Dec. 9)

Much of the ongoing violence in the Colombian countryside does appear to be linked to drugs. The paras and guerillas appear to be at war for control over Colombia’s cocaine trade–the key to money, weapons and power in the country. Peasants who are forced to grow coca leaf for one side end up being targeted by the other. The peasants killed in the Putumayo massacre, for instance, we apparently working as hired hands to harvest coca on a jungle plantation. In June, the FARC was implicated in a similar massacre of peasant coca-growers in Norte de Santander province (see WW3 REPORT #100).

Officially, the US-backed Plan Colombia is aimed at putting an end to drug-related violence. In an August press conference in Washington, US Drug Czar John Walters claimed coca production has declined in Colombia by 30% over the past two years, and also boasted that 40% of US cocaine imports had been intercepted last year, thanks to international cooperation. (AP, Aug. 10)

But a new report critical of US policy in Colombia, "Going to Extremes," released by the DEC-based Latin America Working Group (LAWG), states that this has not resulted in a reduction in the amount of cocaine reaching the US–production in the Andean region as a whole has remained stable for 15 years, with Peru and Bolivia picking up the slack following the crackdown in Colombia. This is partially why Bush has expanded Plan Colombia into the Andean Initiative, with military aid packages for Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia.

And in spite of official optimism, Ricardo Vargas of Andean Action, a Colombian policy group, told the New York Times after Bush’s visit that coca production has spread from 12 of Colombia’s provinces to 23 in roughly the period that Plan Colombia–with its program of aerial herbicide-spraying of coca-growing areas–has been in effect. (NYT, Nov. 23)

The "Bogota Cartel"?

Critics also point to ongoing collaboration between the Colombian army and the ostensibly outlawed paramilitary groups. The paramilitary network known as the United Colombian Self-Defense Forces (AUC) is (like the FARC) on the US State Department terrorist list. The problem, say rights organizations, is that Uribe is not fighting the AUC–his government is negotiating with them, while refusing to do so with the guerillas. Despite official denials, rights advocates continue to cite cooperation between the AUC and Colombia’s official military.

Since July, negotiations with the AUC have been taking place in a 142-square-mile safe haven in northwestern Cordoba province, where AUC leaders are not subject to arrest, and where their demobilized fighters are supposed to gather before they disarm. But the AUC paras maintain their reign of terror throughout much of the country, threatening peasant communities and imposing "war taxes" on them, and carrying out assassinations and massacres against the uncooperative.

Especially controversial are proposals for the AUC leaders to receive an amnesty from prison time for massacres and atrocities. A group of Colombian lawmakers has come together to draft a proposal requiring paramilitary bosses convicted in such cases to serve at least eight years, and return all property acquired illegally. Under the proposal, the penalties would be a government condition for any peace agreements with the paras. Lawmakers supporting the measure include both Rep. Wilson Borja Díaz, a former trade unionist injured in a 2000 para assassination attempt, and Sen. Rafael Pardo Rueda, a former defense minister who supports President Uribe. (Colombia Week, Nov. 22; NYT, Nov. 16)

The measure would apply to guerilla organizations too. But Uribe has shown little interest in resuming peace talks with the guerillas, broken off under his predecessor Andres Pastrana. In a Dec. 2 communique, the FARC proposed that a safe haven be established for the group in Valle del Cauca province–but insisted that Plan Patriot be called off before any talks resume. (ANNCOL Dec. 3)

Controversy has long raged over whether a new crime machine has consolidated since the rival cocaine cartels of Medellin and Cali were crushed in the 1990s. There may be legitimacy to rightist claims that the FARC aspires to become the "new cartel." But Uribe’s critics claim he has long maintained ties to the paras, who now control at least as great a share of the cocaine trade–if not greater. Critics increasingly speak of a "Bogota Cartel" which is emerging–with far closer links to Colombian officialdom than either the Medellin or Cali cartels ever maintained.

Coca or Oil?

And targets of AUC’s terror have included not only guerillas, but also (as in the recent Antioquia assassinations) Indians demanding their constitutional right to local autonomy and non-involvement in the war, and (as in the recent Putumayo massacre) peasants simply caught between all sides. Another key target has been trade unionists

In 2002, 184 trade unionists were killed in Colombia–82 of them teachers, according to the teacher’s union FECODE. (ANNCOL, Nov. 30) In 2003, 94 were killed, while 58 have been slain in 2004 as of press time. Altogether, 2,100 unionists have been slain since 1991. Nearly all are believed to be victims of AUC terror. Only 19 of these killings have been successfully prosecuted. (NYT, Nov. 18)

Oil workers opposing Uribe’s plan to privatize the state company Ecopetrol have been especially targeted by the paras–and they have nothing to do with the cocaine trade. The AUC and the FARC may be struggling for control of the cocaine trade. But the fast-growing US involvement in Colombia may have to do with control over another resource–oil.

The Iraq war and Middle East chaos have made South America’s oil resources more strategic to the US. Venezuela, bordering Colombia, is the fourth US supplier after Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Canada–and it is under the populist government of Hugo Chavez, a White House target for western hemisphere "regime change" second only to Cuba. Colombia itself is among the top 15 global suppliers to the US, and Uribe hopes to privatize the country’s industry as part of his push to join Bush’s Free Trade Area of the Americas.

One beneficiary of the escalated troop presence in Colombia is Occidental Petroleum–colloquially, "Oxy". Bush’s 2003 foreign operations budget request included $98 million to train and equip a Colombian army brigade to protect Oxy’s Cano-Limon pipeline linking the oilfields of Arauca province with the Caribbean. Arauca, the heart of Oxy’s operations, hosts the greatest concentration of US military advisors and has Colombia’s worst human rights situation. (See WW3 REPORT #43)

But the oil industry is seeking to expand beyond Arauca, on the Orinoco plains bordering Venezuela. Uribe is luring investment for Putumayo, in the Amazon basin bordering Ecuador, where a new bonanza of oil is said to await. Putumayo is now the epicenter of Uribe’s Patriot Plan offensive against the guerillas–which has largely been ineffective. Guerilla fighters melt into Putumayo’s jungle as the army approaches, leaving behind snipers and land mines to pick off government troops. Under close army protection, the firm Petrotesting Colombia is exploring for oil and gas deposits in Putumayo. The army hasn’t even been effective at protecting these operations–in recent months, FARC has burned nine Petrotesting tanker trucks, and killed one driver.

Uribe’s efforts to lure more transnational investment are paying off. ExxonMobil and the Brazilian giant Petrobras have recently signed offshore drilling contracts on what the New York Times calls "beneficial terms." Harken Energy–President Bush’s former firm–recently signed exploration contract.

Beneficial terms aren’t the only lure–Uribe also has to guarantee oil companies a modicum of security against guerilla attack. Towards this aim, he has launched a Presidential Councilor for Infrastructure Protection, which serves as a direct liaison between oil companies and the military.

Of course, the hardline Uribe has militarized the entire country since taking office. The New York Times reports that there are now army or national police troops operating in all of Colombia’s 1,100 municipalities, filling in gap of some 200 since before Uribe took power. But critics note that those forces receiving the most US military aid are in Colombia’s oil zones. "Even if the Uribe government has launched offensives in other places, the US assistance has been in places that do have oil reserves," Adam Isacson of DC’s Center for International Policy told the Times. "Coincidence?" (NYT, Oct. 22)

RESOURCES:

Latin America Working Group:
http://www.lawg.org/

Center for International Policy’s Colombia Program:
http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/index.htm

——————-

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 10, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW4Report.com

PERU: POLICE KILL 3 COCALEROS

by Weekly News Update on the Americas

On Oct. 18, some 2,500 campesino coca producers (cocaleros) from San Gaban
in Carabaya province, Puno department, began blocking several points of a
highway leading to the neighboring department of Madre de Dios. The
cocaleros also blocked the main entrance to the San Rafael mine and
threatened to seize the San Gaban hydroelectric plant in nearby Shuane.
They were demanding that the government immediately suspend a coca
eradication operation being carried out by agents of the Anti-Drug
Department (Dirandro) in San Gaban.

According to Carabaya mayor Michel Francois Portier Balland, some 350
police agents had been carrying out the eradication operation for several
weeks, backed by seven helicopters, a small plane and several troop
transport vehicles. The agents destroyed not only coca plants but dozens of
hectares of fruits and other crops. The cocaleros say they grow only small
subsistence plots of coca leaf for domestic use, which they trade with
neighboring communities for food. Portier called on Interior Minister
Javier Reategui Rosello to suspend the eradication operation and begin a
dialogue with cocalero leaders and local authorities in order to avoid a
confrontation between cocaleros and police.

According to Adolfo Huamantica, mayor of San Gaban district, the cocaleros
had called for the open-ended strike on Oct. 13 after waiting all day for a
commission which the government’s National Commission for Development and
Life Without Drugs (DEVIDA) had promised to send, but which never showed
up. DEVIDA president Nils Ericsson said he had sent representative Jose
Figueroa to the zone but that Figueroa had determined it wasn’t necessary
to meet with the cocaleros. Portier said the cocaleros also sent a
delegation to Lima during the week of Oct. 11 to seek a solution, but they
received only promises of future dialogue.

On Oct. 19, more than 1,000 cocaleros approached the San Gaban
hydroelectric plant and prepared to occupy it. While they gathered there,
police burned the camp where the cocaleros were staying, destroying their
tents and possessions. As the cocaleros neared the hydroelectric plant’s
main building, police agents first used tear gas then fired their weapons
at the crowd, killing cocaleros Florencia Quispe Coaquira, Jose Sonco
Palomino and Wilber Campos, and wounding five others, at least one of them
seriously. Four police agents were also hurt, one seriously. The agents
finally withdrew after running out of bullets. (La Republica, Lima, Oct.
19-21)

In the afternoon of Oct. 19, following the incidents at San Gaban, Peru’s
Council of Ministers held an extraordinary session and instituted a 30-day
state of emergency in the districts of San Gaban and nearby Antauta.
Reategui, the interior minister, accused the protesters of being drunk and
incited by "narco-terrorists"; he claimed police fired their weapons in
self-defense after being attacked. Defense Minister Roberto Chiabra Leon
alleged that the protesters were not cocaleros at all, but
"narco-terrorists" who were angry because government anti-drug forces had
recently destroyed 10 local maceration pits, where coca leaves are pounded
into base cocaine. (La Republica, AP, Oct. 20)

On Oct. 20, after the cocaleros withdrew from the hydroelectric plant, the
government set up a dialogue commission headed by Agriculture Minister
Alvaro Quijandria to meet with protest leaders and local and regional
authorities. (La Republica, Oct. 21)

Some 1,000 cocaleros marched in San Gaban on Oct. 21, after lifting their
strike to allow a 10-day truce and await the results of the negotiations.
Protest leaders laid out a platform of 17 demands, including a census of
cocaleros, an end to eradication operations, the titling of cultivated
lands, the promotion of profitable alternative crops to replace coca, and
simplified requirements for agricultural loans. (La Republica, Oct. 22)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 24

U.S. TO DOUBLE TROOP PRESENCE IN COLOMBIA; GENERAL STRIKE SAYS NO TO MORE WAR

by Bill Weinberg

Colombia makes few headlines in the United States these days. But
Washington’s involvement in the western hemisphere’s longest, bloodiest war
is rapidly escalating, as the world’s attention is elsewhere. And the
latest signal of increased US embroilment comes just as a vocal civil
movement is emerging in Colombia to demand an end to the military option.

Congressional approval last weekend of a doubling of the Pentagon’s troop
presence in Colombia was closely followed by a national wave of protest
throughout the war-torn South American nation, as some 1.4 million
public-sector workers walked off their jobs and took to the streets for a
one-day strike. Organized by major trade unions as well as civil
organizations, the Oct. 12 strike demanded an end both to President Alvaro
Uribe’s push to join Bush’s Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and to
the rights abuses and atrocities associated with the government’s
counter-guerilla war–which the US has funded to the tune of $3.3 billion
since Plan Colombia was passed in 2000.

The vote in Washington two days earlier doubled the cap on US military
advisors in Colombia to 800, and raised the cap on the number of US
civilian contract agents–pilots, intelligence analysts, security
personnel–from 400 to 600. The measure came as a little-noticed part of
the 2005 Defense Department authorization act, and was a defeat for human
rights groups which had been pushing for a lower cap. The new 800/600 cap
is exactly what the White House asked for. An earlier House version would
have established a 500 cap for military personnel and kept the cap for
civilian contractors at 400, but this was rejected in joint committee. A
proposal establishing these caps in the Senate–known as the Byrd amendment
for Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV)–was defeated in June by a vote of 58 to 40.
Among the two senators who abstained was John Kerry.

The authorization bill says the measure is aimed at helping the Colombian
government fight "against narcotics trafficking and against activities by
organizations designated as terrorists," naming the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the
United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). But rights groups point to a
long record of close collaboration between Colombia’s armed forces at the
AUC, a rightist paramilitary group. And while US troops are officially
barred from actual combat missions in Colombia, many fear that Washington
is on a slippery slope.

"This amounts to authorization of increased involvement by US troops in an
internal armed conflict in Colombia," says Kimberly Stanton, deputy
director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). "And it was
passed without significant public debate. We are sliding into a protracted
civil war in Colombia."

In the general strike that followed the vote, hundreds of thousands of
workers, joined by peasants and students, shut down cities throughout the
country. Bogota’s central square, Bolivar Plaza, was filled with some
300,000–Colombia’s largest protest in recent memory. Business was also
paralyzed in Medellin, Cali, Barranquilla, Bucaramanga and Cartagena, and
traffic was blocked on the Panamerican Highway. In addition to protesting
the war and FTAA plans, the strikers also opposed Uribe’s scheme to alter
the constitution to allow himself to seek another term in office. The
hardline Uribe, Bush’s closest ally in South America, has refused to
negotiate with the FARC, Colombia’s biggest guerilla army. A negotiated
settlement to the conflict was among the strikers’ demands.

The New York Times story on the raising of the troop cap (at the bottom of
page nine) claimed that "Under Mr. Uribe’s administration, violence has
ebbed in Colombia." But human rights groups in Colombia say that atrocities
have more than doubled since Uribe took office in 2002.

The Congressional vote also coincided with the release of a new Amnesty
International report on sexual violence in Colombia’s war. The report,
"Colombia: Violence Against Women," finds that rape and other sexual
crimes–including genital mutilation–are frequently used by both the
paramilitaries and the official security forces against communities accused
of collaborating with the guerrillas.

"Women and girls are raped, sexually abused and even killed because they
behave in ways deemed as unacceptable to the combatants, or because women
may have challenged the authority of armed groups, or simply because women
are viewed as a useful target on which to inflict humiliation on the
enemy", said Susan Lee, director of Amnesty’s Americas program.

The vote also came days after yet another peasant leader was assassinated.
On Oct. 6, the body of Pedro Jaime Mosquera Cosme, an Afro-Colombian leader
of the Campesino Association of Arauca, was found near the Venezuelan
border, with what the group called "clear signs of torture." Arauca is one
of the most conflicted of Colombia’s departments, and numerous campesino
leaders have been killed by paramilitaries and the army there in recent
years.

Rights advocates fear that in next year’s DoD authorization act, DC
hardliners will again push to get the cap on US troop levels raised–or
done away with altogether, as is proposed by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA).
WOLA’s Stanton sees the lack of media coverage of the vote–and Colombia
generally–as a bad sign. "The American people are not aware that we are
increasingly involved," she says, "with all attention focussed on Iraq."

RESOURCES:

Amnesty International press release on "Colombia: Violence Against Women"

Prensa Rural on killing of Pedro Jaime Mosquera
——————-

Compiled by WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, Nov. 6, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW3Report.com

URIBE: “FUMIGATIONS WILL CONTINUE”

Despite Court Ruling and Peasant Protest

by Andrew Epstein, WW3 REPORT Special Correspondent in Colombia

According to the United Nations report, Global Illicit Drug Trends 2003,
coca production in Colombia has been reduced by an impres sive 37%.
However, the US fumigation program, supposedly responsible for this
dramatic decrease, has also ironically been destroying US-funded
alternative development projects. Meanwhile, the Colombian drug economy has
diversified, with the expansion fro m coca leaf to opium poppy gaining pace.

The Putumayo region of Colombia is where the fumigation program has
claimed its greatest success, eliminating 33,000 hectares between 2000 and
2002. Don Ismael Cuaran of Putumayo is a former coca grower who was one of
the first farmers to pull up his own crop and try the alternatives. He has
tried corn, pepper, heart-of-palm and even raising a few
cattle–alternative development projects funded through Plan Colombia and
administered by local non-governmenta l organizations. Despite the fact
that Don Ismael has no coca growing on his land, he says has been
fumigated five separate times by a program the US Embassy in Bogota calls
"extremely accurate."

The Embassy has set up a program for farmers, such as Don Ismael, to lodge
complaints about licit crops that are sprayed by fumigation planes. Over
the past three years 8,000 such complaints have been filed. To this day
only two people have been compensated for a total of $5,000, an Embassy
official said on condition of anonymity. According to an Embassy official
in charge of compensation, Dyncorp, the US company that carries out the
fumigation, is supposed to report to the Embassy when they fumigate licit
crops. The motivation for reporting such mistake s is small since the error
is then deducted from Dyncorp’s contract-the company fined and the pilots
docked pay. The Embassy says that acceptable drift from the spray lane is
approximately 7 meters. However, they admit that the crop-dusters used in
the fu migation will only fly as low as the highest "obstacle"Ëœreferring
to native trees which can measure up to 80 feet. The Embassy maintains
that the program is accurate, and even claims that farmers are altering
the appearance of their land after their c oca has been sprayed to make it
seem like they were growing licit crops.

While the fumigation has appeared to decrease coca production within
Colombia, it has also diversified it. In 2000, there were 12 coca-growing
regions within Colombia; that n umb er has grown to 21 by the end of 2002.
Colombia is also becoming one of the leading poppy-producing countries in
the world (Latin American Poppy Fields Undermine U.S. Drug Battle, NYT,
June 8). Unlike coca, which needs plenty of light to grow, poppy is al most
impossible to fumigate. It can be grown in small patches, under the cover
of trees, and on steep mountainsides.

Despite a recent court order to suspend the fumigations, Colombian
President Alvaro Uribe had only a few words to say on the subject during a
recent trip to the Putumayo region: "I am very sorry, but while I am
President, the fumigations will not be suspended." (El Tiempo, Bogota.
June 29)

For recent photos of fumigated land where licit crops were being grown, see:

http://www.usfumigation.org/S.Tree-images/index.htm.

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)

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