(edited for copyright purposes-proud patriot Moderator Democratic Underground)
January 12, 2008
Fear, Impunity and State Power
Colombia's paramilitary regime and social movements
by David Parker
MONTREAL -- In August of 2007, Paola, a mother, university student and teacher, received a written death threat. She is a member of the Committee for Solidarity for Political Prisoners, a group that struggles for the rights of political prisoners in Colombia. It is a country where state repression has broken the social fabric, where being a human rights defender can have dangerous consequences; since 2002, there have been 955 assassinations committed by the Armed Forces, the highest level of politically motivated homicide in the Western hemisphere.
In a country where repression of social organizations involves selective and collective assassinations, disappearances, detentions and massacres, fear of death is part of daily life. On the bus on the way to the Industrial University of Santander in Bucaramanga, Paola handed me a note sent by the paramilitary organization known as “Aguilas Negras” to 11 student organizers, accusing them of being linked to networks of the FARC and ELN, Colombia’s two largest guerrilla groups. The death threat assured their recipients that their actions were being monitored and their days numbered. "You and the organizations you represent are a problem for Colombia... The plan to annihilate you all will begin with the very next student strike."
The death threat is a common tactic from this nationwide right-wing paramilitary group. Weeks ago, the local office of SINALTRAINAL, a national union of food workers, received a written death threat under the front door. Fear courses in the veins of the country; a legitimate fear, a well-sanctioned and reasonable fear for the safety of human rights defenders, unionists, peasant leaders, Afro-Colombians, indigenous leaders and community members.
Paramilitary and military forces have honed a method of instilling fear and producing forced displacement throughout the country. Jose Antonio knows this tactic well. An Afro-Colombian peasant, a subsistence farmer until his forced displacement and the theft of his lands in 1997, he and his family have lived it first-hand. As we walked through the African Palm plantations in Choco, Jose Antonio showed me the former location of his community. Ten years ago, under Operation Genesis, the whole region was attacked by air, water and land, a concerted military and paramilitary operation that massacred, tortured, assassinated and forcibly displaced over 4,000 traditional communities living ancestral lifestyles. He showed me the former location of his brother's small farm, which is now rows of African Palm trees.
More:
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/1598~~~~~Colombia: Oil palm grows by the force of violence
Since the beginning of the decade, all the areas of expansion of oil palm plantations have coincided geographically with areas of paramilitary presence and expansion, to the extent that some of the new plantations being developed have been financed as farming projects for the same demobilised paramilitary from the AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia – United Self-Defence Force of Colombia) who had previously made incursions into these very areas.
This strategy of territorial control through the expansion of oil palm is reinforced by government policies supporting and providing incentives for the planting of oil palms, also clearly in a quest for economic, political and military control of large areas of Colombia currently outside state control.
These state policies are reinforced by the investment strategies of international bodies. An analysis of the investment plans of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) illustrates this: “For the IDB, medium and long-term crops have greater export potential, a greater capacity for surviving in an open economy, yield greater benefits in terms of the pacification process and generate sustained growth of the agricultural sector, thereby overcoming the problems of long-term financing of farming. (…) And in accordance with the Country Document (IDB), the programme focuses its activities on the zones and important projects from the perspective of pacification efforts. In general, the IDB regards investment in medium and long-term crops as strategies for governability or territorial control in the face of problems such as guerrilla conflict, political violence, common criminality and drug crops. Extensive farming provides a genuine alternative for the occupation of territory and for the creation of employment in conflict areas.”
Ultimately, all these policies share the idea that oil palm cultivation is a type of economic development useful in the pacification of the country. This confluence of illegal and criminal acts, government policies and international investment forms the Colombian oil palm model.
More:
http://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/132/Colombia.html ~~~~~Colombia: The Violent 'Agrarian Counter-Reform' Conspiracy
by Constanza Vieira* (bogota)Saturday, August 21, 2010
Inter Press Service
An unknown number of agribusiness owners and public employees at all levels, as well as far-right paramilitaries, have a common link with rural people who have been forced off their farms or killed in Colombia: the land stolen from the latter group in the armed conflict.
'It was a conspiracy. There were the ones doing the killing, others who would follow behind, buying up the land, and the third wave, who would legalise the new ownership of the land,' said former paramilitary chief Jairo Castillo or 'Pitirri', who has lived in exile for 10 years and is serving as a key protected witness in the trials of legislators and other political leaders implicated in the 'parapolitics' scandal for their ties to the paramilitary groups.
Pitirri is one of those asking the justice system why it is only focusing on 'the ones doing the killing'; why it is not inquiring into who seized 5.5 million hectares of land, according to figures from the Commission to Monitor Public Policies on Forced Displacement, set up on the initiative of civil society groups.
The testimony of Pitirri was presented Thursday in a congressional debate on political control over land, paramilitarism and forced displacement, by leftwing legislator Iván Cepeda.
More:
http://www.globalissues.org/news/2010/08/21/6687~~~~~Forced Displacement, Land Reclamation, and Corporate Power in Colombia
By Eustaquio Polo
~snip~
Thank you for letting me address you tonight. Please receive a warm welcome from the Chocó county of Colombia and from myself, Eustaquio Polo Rivera. I am Vice President of the Major Council of the basin of the Curvaradó River, and legal representative of a smaller council.
I come here with the grace of God and the support of the church of Justicia y Paz and also with help from Molly and Jake. I have been asked to tell you a little bit about the human rights abuses that the people of the Chocó territories are suffering.
~snip~
In the year 2000, a group from the police collected signatures from members of paramilitaries and some peasants left in the area. They said they were collecting the signatures to get
three military bases in the area, and they claimed that this was so peasants could return to their land. This was not the case. These signatures were used by businesses to take over the land and implement the planting of African palm plantations in the collectively-titled territory. They used them to prove that peasants were in agreement with the planting of the palm, but the peasants were actually outside the territory, fled to the hills.
In this year 2000, we realized that their goal was not to take the guerrilla out of our land, but to take our land from us, to take our communities, and to implement in our territory the monoculture of palm oil and cattle ranches. In that same year they sent some commissioners to different parts where there were still peasants living on big farms. They told us that we should sell to them, and that if we didn't want to sell to them, our widows would sell cheaper. Through those tactics of intimidation they acquired parts of the territory, because people were afraid to lose their lives.
Also they would say that we had to sell, that the land was needed by the bosses. It is dangerous to say this because our lives are under threat, but I feel that I must: the bosses were Carlos Castano, "the German," Mancuso—these are all names of paramilitaries.
More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/forced-displacement-land-reclamation-and-corporate-power-in-colombia-by-eustaquio-polo
~~~~~
Colombia: Paramilitaries Don't Want to Take the Blame Alone
by Constanza Vieira (bogotÁ)Sunday, July 11, 2010
Inter Press Service
The so-called para-politics, para-institutions and para-economy in Colombia 'have their place in the dock' among the accused, said eight former leaders of ultra-right armed paramilitary groups, now demobilised and charged with crimes against humanity in the nation's decades-long civil war.
From prison, the eight sent a letter last week to those who were once among their potential military targets: the leaders of the centre-left Alternative Democratic Pole (PDA), Gustavo Petro, former presidential candidate for that party, and Iván Cepeda, congressman-elect and spokesperson for the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE).
~snip~
The former paramilitaries wrote that the 'real truth' is not yet known about the war they joined more than 25 years ago. Their archenemies, the leftist guerrillas, emerged 46 years ago.
They write that their demobilisation and disarmament, and 'the half truth and half justice,' will be 'worth nothing' if those who 'personify' the paramilitary phenomenon remain invisible in political and economic power, 'evading, at any price,' their responsibility.
The armed groups are merely 'the shock force,' 'the tip of the iceberg,' of the 'macro' phenomenon of paramilitarism, they said, noting that as long as the 'true scope' remains hidden, 'paramilitarism, offspring of consented impunity,' will reproduce.
Below their signatures they put their fingerprints, in the style of the messages from the now-dead Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (1949-1993).
More:
http://www.globalissues.org/news/2010/07/11/6262
~~~~~
Land grabs by narco-traffickers and paramilitaries: Colombia's death squads get respectable
November 10, 2005
The United Nations and other organisations have condemned a new Colombian law that will grant former members of death squads near-immunity and allow their leaders to retain their loot and drug profits. Is this demobilisation or legitimisation?
Carlos M. Gutiérrez
THE justice and peace law passed by Colombia's parliament on 21 June allowed the president, Alvaro Uribe, to claim he had made peace with, and demobilised, the extreme-right paramilitaries. There was widespread and varied reaction from multilateral bodies, politicians, human rights campaigners and the press. An editorial "Colombia's capitulation", on July 4 in the New York Times suggested: "It should be called the impunity for mass murderers, terrorists and major cocaine traffickers law."
The Colombian congress knows how the paramilitaries came into existence, what they have done and who has been, and continues to be, behind them. It has given them political status without the approval of the international community or the prior national consensus that the law's promoters had sought. As the director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights office in Colombia, Michael Frühling, remarked a week before the law was passed, "it is not a good idea to treat paramilitarism as a mere political misdemeanour" (1).
The government may deny parentage, but the extreme-right groups are happy to admit that they are the children of the state. "We were born paramilitaries," says one of their most prominent leaders, Ernesto Báez. "The weapons sent to us in June 1983 at Juan Bosco Laverde, San Vicente de Chucurí and Puerto Boyaca and in the Magdalena Medio region, had government stamps on them."
Shortly before the law came into force, several Democratic members of the United States Senate wrote to Uribe to express their anxiety about "the very negative impact that this law could have on peace, justice and the rule of law in Colombia" (2). Earlier, a group of their Republican opposite numbers had declared their support for efforts to achieve peace in Colombia, provided that "such a process is conducted pursuant to an effective legal framework that will bring about the dismantling of the underlying structure, illegal sources of financing and economic power" of terrorist organisations. "It is also critical," they added, "that the provision of benefits to leaders be conditioned on the groups' compliance with the ceasefire and cessation of criminal activity" (3). Uribe promised to take their demands into account and then ignored them.
More:
http://www.landaction.org/display.php?article=365
ETC.
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