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Colombia: World Leader in Forced Displacement
Helda Martínez - 25.02.2011 21:36
Sunday, 20 February 2011 21:07 - Helda Martínez
Colombia: World Leader in Forced Displacement
 http://indymedia.nl/nl/2011/02/74013.shtml
 HRW 2005 Internal Displaced -
HRW 2010 Paramilitary groups -
Wola2010 Plan Colombia - No Model -
(IPS) - "We want to shout out to the world, and no one will be able to keep us silent: forced displacement is still happening in Colombia, which is why we are asking for solidarity. We aren't terrorists, we aren't criminals; we are farmers whose dignity and rights have been stolen from us."
These were the words of a community leader from the central department (province) of Tolima, who asked not to be identified because he has received threats.
He spoke with IPS, with visible anger and sadness, outside of the Presidential Agency for Social Action and International Cooperation (Acción Social), where security forces broke up another protest last week by farmers displaced by the country's nearly five-decade armed conflict.
Some 5.2 million people were displaced from rural areas of this South American country between 1985 and 2010, according to a report released Wednesday by the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES).
This figure confirms that Colombia still heads the list of countries with the greatest number of people forced to flee their homes by political violence, as indicated in 2009 by the UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency.
The study "Consolidation of What? Report on Displacement, Armed Conflict and Human Rights in Colombia in 2010" was completed in the final stretch of the government of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), the authors say.
"Unlike his predecessor, President (Juan Manuel) Santos is fomenting social and political dialogue, including the question of peace on his agenda, and vindicating the victims," they stress.
"It is early to know whether the shift will be permanent," but the hope is to achieve "a non-military solution to the conflict that has been bleeding this country dry" since the early 1960s, the report says.
In the last 25 years, the war has forced "11.4 percent of the population to change their residence, because their lives, physical integrity or freedom were threatened," says the 140-page report, published in Spanish.
Half of the total population of internally displaced persons fled their homes during Uribe's two four-year terms in office.
Acción Social reported that 86,312 people were displaced in 2010, but CODHES puts the figure at 280,000, based on its daily monitoring of the phenomenon, fact-checking and verification of the information.
Statistics on violence and displacement in regions where the National Plan for the Consolidation of Territory is being carried out indicate that "32.7 percent of the people uprooted from their homes come from municipalities included in this policy to fight the left-wing guerrillas."
The counterinsurgency programme was launched by Uribe in 2007 with the pretext of "meeting the goals of the government's Democratic Security policies, shoring up investor confidence and making progress towards effective social policies."
It has been implemented in 86 of the country's 1,141 municipalities. The mining industry is active in 21 of the 86 municipalities, and in 14 others, large-scale cultivation of oil palm and biofuel crops has displaced production of food crops.
These productive activities are associated with the violent eviction of rural families from their land, the CODHES report states.
The Commission to Monitor Public Policies on Forced Displacement, set up after the Constitutional Court handed down rulings in 2004 ordering the government to protect the rights of displaced persons, reports that between 1980 and July 2010, more than 6.6 million hectares of land were violently seized by illegal armed groups.
The departments where most of the land was seized coincide with the regions where the National Plan for the Consolidation of Territory is being carried out, especially the western departments of Antioquia and Chocó, where rural families have lost 1.9 million hectares of land.
CODHES reports that 44 of the 86 municipalities included in the National Plan are among the areas with the highest rates of forced displacement last year, with six different violent episodes that affected 2,684 people and included 19 massacres in which 92 people were killed.
In that area, 176 targeted killings were also committed, of indigenous people, public employees, community leaders, a human rights activist and a journalist.
Communities returning to their land as part of the process of the restoration of rural property to displaced farmers have also been caught up in the violence, which cost the lives of 44 leaders of displaced communities between March 2002 and January 2011.
After they are forced off their land, the farmers tend to fall into poverty, usually swelling the populations of the shantytowns surrounding the country's large cities. Up to 70 percent of the displaced are living in poverty.
"My husband was a cattle farmer," Miriam López told IPS in 2009 during a four-month protest camp by thousands of displaced people in the Tercer Milenio park in the centre of Bogotá. "We had plow mules, and planted mandioca, plantains and cacao, and we traded our crops in (the northeastern department of) Norte de Santander.
"They killed my husband, and I had to leave it all behind, in the hands of others," she said. "It was really hard. I would pull out the deeds to my farms and just sit and cry."
Like López, many displaced people had property and were relatively well-off.
CODHES director Jorge Rojas said the report questions Uribe's Democratic Security policies and National Plan for the Consolidation of Territory, because "in the first three years of its implementation, there have been many doubts about its effectiveness."
The 5.2 million victims of forced displacement make Colombia the country with the largest number of displaced persons or refugees in the world, followed by Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan, CODHES reported.
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2918-colombia-world-leader-in-forced-displacement
http://www.codhes.org/
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| Lees meer over: anti-fascisme / racisme antimilitarisme vrijheid, repressie & mensenrechten | | aanvullingen | | Afro-Colombian Farmers on Displacement | Jake Hess - 25.02.2011 21:59
Wednesday, 05 January 2011 19:33 - Jake Hess
Interview: Afro-Colombian Farmers on Displacement and Resistance
Five years after the alleged demobilization of army-backed paramilitaries in Colombia, violence and human rights abuses remain widespread in the countryside, displaced Afro-Colombian farmers and community leaders Juan Sanchez and Roberto Guzman* say.
Activists working on behalf of Colombia’s internally displaced population are subjected to extrajudicial killings and death threats by paramilitary groups supported by the Colombian army and palm oil firms active in rural areas, Sanchez and Guzman report. "They say we're guerrillas and that they're going to kill us," says Sanchez.
Sanchez and Guzman are members of grassroots community councils representing thousands of Afro-Colombians and Mestizos who have been working to reclaim their land since they were displaced from communities in the river basins of Jiguamiando and Curvarado in the northwestern department of Choco in joint operations carried out by the Colombian army and linked paramilitaries in 1996 and 1997.
Sanchez and Guzman sat down for this interview on a recent afternoon in Washington, D.C., during a U.S. speaking tour. In the conversation, they discuss the link between corporate and paramilitary power, the impacts of palm oil cultivation on local communities, and how displaced people are fighting back.
The Colombian army and allied paramilitary groups forcibly displaced your communities in the name of combating guerrillas. Now your land has been usurped by internationally-financed Colombian oil palm companies and other businesses. How did this happen?
JS: The military came around to the different communities and told the people to get out of the area because they were "going to combat the guerrillas." We didn't want to leave because we weren't part of this problem. But they kept on insisting and saying that "if you don't leave, the people who cut heads are coming behind us"; they were referring to the AUC [an army-backed paramilitary organization].
Massacres were committed and attacks continued in other parts of the region. We would see bodies floating down the river, and we would see birds that were eating the corpses. Both the military and paramilitaries kept threatening us that we had to leave. This was 1997.
That's how they got us out of the area. In 2000, 2001, we found out that the real objective of this operation wasn't to get rid of the guerrillas, but to get rid of us from the area in order to implement large-scale palm oil monocultures, cattle ranching, and other types of monocultures including teak and rubber plantations.
How does the production of palm oil impact the ecological and economic situation in your communities?
JS: First of all, they’ve destroyed our territory environmentally; it's completely damaged. They clear cut the territories, and river ways have been dried up by palm trees' consumption of water. The palm is sick; basically the pit of the palm has been infected by some kind of microorganism which is now attacking the coconut plants and other plants we've been trying to cultivate. Many people are very traumatized, especially when they go back to their land and see that there's nothing there.
RG: Palm oil plantations have degraded the soil to point that it doesn't produce like it used to. They got rid of trees, and all the food and properties we had left behind when we were displaced are gone. When we went back we didn't see anything; none of the properties were there, none of the trees.
Can you explain the 'humanitarian and biodiversity zones' established by displaced communities and what they aim to achieve?
JS: We started organizing ourselves into humanitarian zones and biodiversity zones in order to go back to our territories, because we wanted to defend not only our lives but the territory itself by being in the territory. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has created spaces where only the civilian population can be present. It's been a protection mechanism that's allowed us to resist and continue to live in our territories in the midst of an internal armed conflict.
The parallel biodiversity zones are areas where we cultivate food for our daily needs. There we replicate practices of agriculture that are traditional practices. These zones have served as a protection mechanism against the activities of the paramilitaries and military; they've been forced to respect these humanitarian zones.
In the Western media it's often argued that paramilitary groups were 'demobilized' during Alvaro Uribe's tenure and that Colombia is vastly more peaceful now as a result of this. Have the paramilitaries gone away?
JS: In 2005, there was a so-called demobilization effort, but what we say as rural farmers who live there is that there was no demobilization; it was a way to legalize these groups. Because those paramilitaries continue to operate and work in the same things they did before.
The same people are now part of groups such as the Black Eagles, and criminal bands called the Rastrojos and Gaitainistas. There's a military post near the humanitarian zone of Canedas, and right next to it there's a paramilitary post, separated by a small river. There's a lot of collusion [between paramilitaries, the military, and police.]
Is there collaboration between the Colombian army, paramilitaries, and internationally-financed Colombian companies in Afro-Colombian areas?
RG: Oil palm industrialists have paid paramilitaries to kill [activists working for land restitution] because of the announcements we've made about the situation. Retired colonel Felipe Molano testified after the murder of community leader Ualberto Hoyos that he was responsible for and guilty of this murder plot. [Molano] admitted that he bought [land that had been forcibly taken from its inhabitants] illegally from paramilitaries, and that he had investments in palm and cattle ranching in Cano Manso region in Curvarado. They continue to threaten the leaders inhabiting communities working to reclaim their territories.
As representatives of displaced communities, what are your demands?
JS: What we want is not only for the lands to be physically returned, but for there to be non-repetition in terms of displacement so that we can actually work on those lands. We also ask for justice for all of these injustices that have taken place in our territory.
* Not their real names
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/images/stories/colombia.jpg
Photo Courtesy of Peace Brigades International.
Sign at the entrance of El Muñeco Cemetery near the humanitarian zone of Caño Claro in the Curvaradó River Basin in Chocó, Colombia. Civilians fled this area in 1997, leaving behind their homes, crops and town infrastructure. After the area was emptied of inhabitants, oil palm companies leveled this cemetery and planted on top of peoples remains. One need only to slightly disturb the earth to uncover bones and clothes of the people buried there. The sign says “In memory of our deceased who live in our hearts, we will continue resisting for our territory that you once worked and left for us as a legacy.”
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2846-interview-afro-colombian-farmers-on-displacement-and-resistance
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Related:
February 4, 2011 - Honduras - Jeff Conant
Massive UN-Supported African Palm Plantations Leading to Oppression, Kidnapping and Murder
http://indymedia.nl/nl/2011/02/74008.shtml
| | Paramilitary orgs. & Colombian government | Wiki-L-World - 26.02.2011 21:54
2011-02-25 - Wikileaks World - Fri, 02/25/2011 - 23:46
Paramilitary organizations inside Colombian government: human rights violations continue
http://wlcentral.org/node/1381
| | Searching for Colombia’s Disappeared | L. Haugaard & K. Nicholls - 11.03.2011 07:25
Friday, December 10, 2010 - Lisa Haugaard and Kelly Nicholls
Searching for Colombia’s Disappeared
We already knew that Colombia has one of the highest numbers of internally displaced persons in the world, the highest rate of murder of trade unionists. But Colombia is ranking near the top on yet another tragic indicator: disappearances, according to a new report, Breaking the Silence: In Search of Colombia's Disappeared, just released by the Latin America Working Group Education Fund and the U.S. Office on Colombia.
http://lawg.org/storage/documents/Colombia/BreakingTheSilence.pdf
(..)
http://justf.org/blog/2010/12/10/searching-colombia’s-disappeared
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