Colombian Landowners, Peasants Listen to Each Other

December 21, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Dic 20 (IPS) – Colombia’s large-scale agricultural producers and peasant farmers managed to listen to each other for the first time about the core cause of the decades-long armed conflict: the concentration of rural land ownership and the social and economic development of the countryside.The exchange of views took place at a three-day forum held in Bogota at the request of the negotiators taking part in the peace talks between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which began a month ago in Havana.

The left-wing FARC emerged in 1964 from a group of peasant farmers who were forced in 1948 by violence waged by large landowners and the government to colonise land abandoned by the state, which they defended with guns since 1950.

Six decades and hundreds of thousands of victims later, there is little public information about how the peace talks are going. But it is clear that the different sides see the question of land ownership as lying at the centre of the hostilities.

It is the first point on the agenda for the talks, which were unexpectedly announced in late August, after two years of secret preliminary negotiations.

The forum on "integral agrarian development", which ended Wednesday Dec. 19, was organised by the United Nations Development Programme and the Centre of Thinking and Follow-up on the Peace Talks, an ad-hoc body set up by the National University of Colombia.

The organisers brought together 1,314 delegados – 33 percent of whom were women – from 522 social and business organisations representing 15 productive sectors from around the country. The debates of the commissions, made up of 20 groups of 60 to 90 people on average, were closed to the press. The conclusions of the debates were sent to a final plenary session.

The delegates discussed the different issues contained in the first point of the peace talks agenda: access to and use of land; unproductive areas; the formalisation of property ownership and of rural labour; the agricultural frontier and protection of nature reserves and communally owned indigenous and black territories; rural development programmes; and infrastructure.

Other issues debated were the social development model; incentives for agricultural production, cooperatives and a solidarity economy; technical assistance, subsidies, credit and marketing; and food security.

The conclusions compiled by the commissions included all of the contrasting positions, as well as the areas where agreement was reached. The final document will be presented to the negotiators on Jan. 8 in Havana.

The statistics from the Colombian countryside speak for themselves: 1.15 percent of rural property owners hold 52 percent of the agricultural land. The country’s Gini coefficient, which is commonly used as a measure of inequality of income or wealth, stood at 0.87 in rural areas – one of the highest levels of inequality in the world given that a score of 1.00 would represent a single person or body owning all of the farmland.

Currently, 38 million hectares are used for large-scale cattle-ranching. But if that total was cut in half, neither productivity nor profitability would be affected, said Agriculture Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo. Meanwhile, just five million hectares are dedicated to agriculture, when at least 22 million are needed.

Optimising land use would bring greater prosperity and profits, Restrepo said in late November. But he added that this cannot be imposed by decree.

Rafael Mejía, the president of the rural association of Colombia, which represents large landowners and agribusiness interests, punctually attended the forum. "I came to listen to you, and for us to be listened to with respect and civility. We managed to do this, and I am satisfied," he said in his brief closing message.

"I listened to you attentively. I have learned from all of you….We have to learn to turn the page if we want to build, all together…a rural sector like the one we all want, where we all have a place," he added.

IPS was informed that Mejía commented in the hallways that this was the first time that he had the opportunity to listen to the peasant farmers, and that he realised that they had proposals "that can be discussed."

On the first day of the forum, Mejía stressed that the poverty and poor conditions in rural areas could not be eradicated if the violence continued. He also said that "private property and productive activities, in the framework of a market economy, are non-negotiable."

But Jesuit priest Francisco de Roux, provincial of the Society of Jesus’s Colombia Province, stated in his own closing remarks that "What Colombia is doing is discussing the model to be applied, even if some say it is not negotiable.

"The model that we have had until now has produced inequity; it is at the heart of the conflict; it has to do with the mass migration caused by forced displacement; and it has not produced the expected economic growth in the rural sector," said the priest, who is an economist known for his work on behalf of the country’s poor farmers.

For his part, Andrés Gil, the head of the Asociación Campesina del Valle del Cimitarra, an association of small farmers from the central Cimitarra valley, said the forum "has created an atmosphere in which it is possible to try to bring about a closer alignment of positions in the world of agriculture – the positions of the rural associations and peasant organisations."

The best aspect of the forum was "the debate of ideas and proposals through political channels rather than war," he told IPS. "That is the stride forward made by this event…Opportunities like this should be fomented around the country. This should be the way politics and strategic decisions are built in Colombia."

But the Colombian federation of cattle ranchers refused to attend the forum because the resulting conclusions would go to the peace talks with the FARC, the federation’s spokesman, José Félix Lafaurie, told the press.

Lafaurie, who has been accused of ties to the far-right paramilitary militias, argued that many cattle ranchers have been the victims of the rebel group over the past decades.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Agriculture, Conflict, Development, Featured, Latin America, Peace, Social Justice Tagged With: , , , ,

Colombians Hope for Peace, But Are Sceptical

November 21, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Helda Martínez

BOGOTA, Nov 19 (IPS) – Scepticism, fear of expressing an opinion and a dash of hope make up the cocktail of responses from Colombians asked about the possibility of the decades-old civil war finally coming to an end as a result of the peace talks between the government and the FARC guerrillas, which began Monday in Havana.“I really hope so,” María Jaramillo, a 40-years-old accountant, told IPS. “God willing. But I think it’ll be difficult, because nothing is easy with the guerrillas. Of course if peace is achieved it would be an enormous accomplishment, because many peasants would return to their land, all the bombing would stop, and the country would grow.”

Some of the other people interviewed by IPS in Bogotá’s central Bolívar square were more sceptical. Political science student Elizabeth Núñez said she did not believe the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) were really seeking peace, “although nothing is impossible.”

“So far, to judge by what the guerrillas are saying, it’s the same as ever. As if they had no intention of respecting the results of the dialogue,” Núñez told IPS, before the FARC negotiators announced a unilateral ceasefire on Monday in Cuba.

The actual start of talks in Havana is the culmination of six months of secret preliminary contacts between the government of conservative Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and leaders of the FARC, the left-wing rebel group created in 1964 in the central province of Caldas by peasant farmers in response to injustice on the part of the government and the courts.

Santos announced in August that peace talks would be launched as a result of the preliminary negotiations held with the support of the governments of Cuba and Norway, which are now guarantors of the talks, and of Venezuela and Chile, as observers.

The “general agreement for the end of the conflict and the construction of a stable, lasting peace” that emerged from the preliminary talks basically proposes that the FARC will abandon armed struggle if the government agrees, among other things, to bring to a halt major mining and infrastructure projects in rural areas, and to carry out an ambitious comprehensive agrarian development plan.

The peace talks formally began in October in Oslo, with an agenda that encompasses land reform, including alternatives for illegal drugs; the future legal political participation of the guerrillas; an end to the armed conflict; and assistance for victims.

However, the content of each point on the agenda has not been clearly worked out, and radical differences have emerged. For example, the land restitution programme, the Santos administration’s flagship strategy, which the president sees as a major stride forward in the area of land reform, is criticised by the guerrillas as a measure that will actually benefit the business elites and foreign corporations.

Many Colombians, meanwhile, prefer to keep silent in this polarised nation.

When IPS approached a random selection of people in the square, which is surrounded by the cathedral, parliament, the Supreme Court, and city hall, nearly a dozen declined to talk, saying they didn’t have time, even though it was Sunday.

But many others did respond. “Peace! We have been needing a peace process for the past 20 years. The deaths of so many soldiers, guerrillas and civilians would have been avoided. That’s why I hope there will be no interferences in this process,” responded Arturo, 50, who said he was a secondary school teacher.

“But we also know about the economic interests behind the war,” he added. “Peace would take resources away from the army, and would end the business of the others (the insurgents), which is also lucrative. I think the conflict will still stretch on for a number of years.”

“One factor is the polarisation that was aggravated by (right-wing) president (Álvaro) Uribe in his two consecutive terms (2002-2010), by fanning radical hatred,” university professor Armando Ramírez, an expert on public opinion, told IPS.

“To this is added the generalised lack of understanding, all the way from primary school up to university, of the real significance of democracy, public opinion or civil society…and the media efficiently contribute to the disorientation by favouring the establishment’s arguments,” said Ramírez.

“On radio and television, most political programmes address this issue like show business: there are anecdotes, curious aspects, and short reports devoid of context, while serious newspaper stories and columns target experts or academics, not ordinary people,” he said.

Andrés Felipe Ortiz, a member of the non-governmental Observatorio de Medios en Derechos Humanos, Medios al Derecho, agreed with Ramírez. “People depend on information to have an opinion, but the press is not clear, and polarisation is exacerbated, so people conclude that the (peace) process won’t go anywhere,” he told IPS.

“Santos called for prudence, and that’s valid, but it’s not the same as concealing things,” he said. “It’s clear that the media do not help people understand things that are of mass interest. Nor is there any sort of teaching on human rights or international humanitarian law. Journalists document things, they don’t explain.”

In Bolívar square, there were also people who believe the peace talks should be joined by the demobilised United Self-Defence Units of Colombia (AUC), the far-right paramilitary militias created by large landowners in the 1980s, allegedly to fight the guerrillas, and who took part in a demobilisation process under the Uribe administration.

“It’s obvious that we should give ourselves a chance at peace,” Carlos Blanco, a lawyer who said he was an adviser to “an organisation that defends the demobilised” paramilitaries, told IPS. “But it’s also obvious that in this process, the AUC should be represented, because their demobilisation was autonomous and voluntary.”

The AUC “were created as a political platform that collapsed, because the initial rules of the game were modified and the chiefs were extradited,” he said, referring to the paramilitary leaders who were extradited to the United States on drug charges, such as Salvatore Mancuso, who is serving time in a U.S. prison and has asked to take part in the current peace talks.

“We will achieve peace when the different sides give in and the victims and victimisers sit down across from each other and forgive each other,” said Ismael Rodríguez, a 31-year-old airline employee.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Featured, Latin America, Peace, Politics Tagged With:

Narco-States Grope for New Strategy*

November 5, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, Nov 05 (IPS) – Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala face the need to modify their approach to the fight against drug trafficking and are urging the world to do the same. But Mexico and Colombia’s willingness to make the necessary changes is unclear.The three countries are connected by a powerful circuit of trafficking of drugs – whose main market is the United States – weapons and money from illegal activities. But the extent of the problem and the way drug organisations operate in each one of these countries vary.

Mexico is urgently in need of a new strategy. The militarisation of the drug war since President Felipe Calderón took office in late 2006 has resulted in more than 90,000 people killed, some 10,000 missing and at least 250,000 forced to flee their homes, according to human rights groups and press reports.

And the power of the drug cartels, over society, the government and the economy, has remained intact.

Colombia, for decades the world’s number one producer of cocaine, should look at how the mafia works in Italy to understand its own drug cartels, while Mexico should look at Colombia, said one of the most knowledgeable analysts of the drug trade in Colombia, sociologist Ricardo Vargas, a researcher associated with the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute.

His summary of the situation puts one in mind of the descriptions by Italian journalist Roberto Saviano in his book “Gomorra” of how organised crime works in Naples, where few economic activities are really what they appear to be, and most leave no tracks.

The situation in Colombia “can be likened to the case of Italy, in terms of the effort to reduce violence and create much more sophisticated mechanisms of managing illegal activities, relations with the world of politics, and taking advantage of the economic growth experienced by some countries in Latin America,” Vargas told IPS.

Drug traffickers “are also investors, and launderers of huge amounts of dollars. For that reason they don’t need a lot of violence; they need a more organised and subtle, a more business-oriented, structure,” just like the mafia has in Italy today, he said.

The analyst said he saw Colombia as “moving in that direction,” while “Mexico is still in a phase of outright violence.”

Guatemala, meanwhile, a small Central American country that has become a storehouse and transit point for drugs, has one of the world’s highest homicide rates. But its president, right-wing Otto Pérez Molina, has publicly suggested that drugs be decriminalised as part of a regional agreement that would include the United States.

In a joint statement to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in October, the presidents of the three countries urged U.N. nations “to undertake very soon a consultation process to take stock of the strengths and limitations of the current policy, and of the violence generated by the production, trafficking and consumption of drugs in the world.”

Colombian analyst Luis Garay says that what is needed is close cooperation in intelligence, and oversight of financial flows.

“Intelligence has to operate transnationally, the way criminal organisations do,” Garay told IPS. “It must be highly interactive and must operate in real time. Regional cooperation is not the best, but it is the second-best option, because any cooperation must include the United States.”

Garay is the academic director of Scientific Vortex, a non-profit research group that describes itself as providing “methodologies and inputs for policy-making, under integrative science principles.”

He studied case files from Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala and social interactions between drug traffickers, paramilitaries, businesspersons, legislators and government officials in legitimate and clandestine activities, with which organised crime has effectively co-opted the state, he said.

The result of that work is the book “"Narcotráfico, corrupción y Estados. Cómo las redes ilícitas han reconfigurado las instituciones en Colombia, Guatemala y México" (Drug trafficking, corruption and states; how illicit networks have reconfigured the institutions in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico”), co-authored by Scientific Vortex director Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán and released in Mexico City in late October.

The book suggests using financial intelligence information, creating a trilateral investigation agency, reaching agreements for technical and logistical cooperation between Mexico and Colombia, and signing agreements for investigations between institutions in the three countries.

Luis Astorga, a professor at the political science faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says “a fundamental element is being ignored: the United States, which must be taken into account in the internal, bilateral and international debate,” he told IPS.

In Mexico, president-elect Enrique Peña of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, who takes office Dec. 1, announced a shift in the country’s anti-drug strategy, to expand beyond the hunt for drug traffickers. He proposed creating an elite body to fight the cartels, and promised to cut the number of murders in half in his first year in office.

But he has not announced detailed measures. And his track record does not shed much light on the question. In his 2005-2011 term as governor of the state of Mexico – which surrounds the Federal District of Mexico City – he replaced the state’s chief prosecutor three times, and the murder rate climbed from nine per 100,000 population in 2007 to 14 per 100,000 in 2010, according to official figures.

Vargas believes that in Mexico, the violence “will tend towards reaching a point of equilibrium, and will improve, although not with an end to the drug trade but through a process of stabilisation in which Mexican drug traffickers will consolidate structures along the lines of what exists in Colombia.”

This will be seen as “a great political achievement by Mexico. But it will not mean the disappearance, but the consolidation through other channels, of these criminal organisations,” Vargas said.

That is the big issue ignored in the October declaration by the presidents of Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico calling for changes in the global fight against drugs. “No country has fully acknowledged that the problem lies in the presence of solid organised crime structures, which also have a strong capacity to influence states,” Vargas said.

“That dimension of the problem has not been put on the table, although it must be the cornerstone of any real change in strategy,” he said.

Mexico’s criminal organisations are involved in nearly two dozen different kinds of illegal economic activities, from drug and people trafficking to kidnapping, extortion, contraband and counterfeit goods, which gives them the ability to quickly mutate.

Nevertheless, Vargas believes that Mexico and Colombia should lead a process of influencing multilateral institutions where Latin America has an important presence, to spearhead reforms in international conventions on drugs.

Mexico’s president-elect announced that he chose General Óscar Naranjo, a former Colombian police chief, as his future security adviser.

According to Vargas, Naranjo “advocates differentiated treatment of marijuana and other substances. If his actions are consistent with what he has proposed up to now, Mexico and Colombia could drive a process of experimentation with the decriminalisation of marijuana use.”

That would be an “extremely interesting approach,” because there is no evidence available yet of the effects that this would have in the region, said the analyst.

He also mentioned the case of Uruguay, where the government presented a bill that would essentially create the world’s first government-run marijuana market. But he said that the South American country’s experience was “a bit isolated from the Latin American context.”

* With reporting by Constanza Vieira in Bogotá.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Crime, Featured, Health, Latin America, Politics Tagged With: , ,

Colombia to Seek Its Own Oslo Accord

August 29, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Aug 29 (IPS) – The Colombian government and FARC rebels will start formal peace talks in Oslo on Oct. 5, in an attempt to put an end to an armed conflict that has gone through different stages since 1946, with brief lulls.The text of the agreement signed in Havana has not yet been divulged. But it reportedly contains a clause stating that neither party will withdraw from the negotiating table until a final peace deal is reached.

President Juan Manuel Santos decided to cut short the rumours in the local press, and announced Monday that “exploratory talks” had been held and that “in the next few days the results of the contacts with the FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) will be made public.”

He said there were three “guiding principles” in the talks. “First: we are going to learn from the mistakes of the past, in order to avoid repeating them. Second: any process has to lead to the end of the conflict, not to its prolongation.

“Third: military operations and a military presence will be maintained in every centimetre of the national territory,” he added – raising questions with respect to speculation about a possible bilateral ceasefire as of October, or at least within the next six months.

The contacts apparently began at an informal level a year and a half ago, and moved into a phase of greater commitment, but still in secrecy, in May, according to the news director of the Venezuela-based Telesur TV network, Colombian journalist Jorge Enrique Botero.

According to Canal Capital, a Bogota public TV station, more than 30 meetings have already been held, in Colombia and abroad.

IPS was able to confirm that a member of the FARC high command took part in the meetings – physician Jaime Alberto Parra, whose nom de guerre is Mauricio Jaramillo. He currently commands the eastern bloc of the rebel group.

Different sources have also confirmed that conservative President Santos was represented in the secret preliminary talks by his brother, journalist Enrique Santos, former president of the Inter-American Press Association, and director of El Tiempo, Colombia’s leading daily newspaper, from 1999 to 2009.

In the 1970s, Enrique Santos founded the – now defunct – left-wing magazine Alternativa along with Colombian Nobel Literature Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez.

On the government side, the contacts have been led by the president’s senior security adviser Sergio Jaramillo and Environment Minister Frank Pearl – both former officials under the government of right-wing President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), who is now an outspoken critic of the government and of the talks.

Between one and three retired generals also reportedly took part in the preliminary talks.

Botero confirmed what British correspondent Karl Penhaul told the W Radio station on Aug. 1, when he revealed meetings between the government and the FARC in Cuba.

According to Penhaul, when President Santos visited Havana, supposedly to wish his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chávez a speedy recovery after surgery for cancer, he met with FARC emissaries.

“Guerrilla sources…told me that the president himself (Santos) met with guerrilla commanders in Cuba to explore the possibility of talks,” the British reporter said.

In late July, Penhaul published a videotaped interview with Benito Cabrera, alias Fabián Ramírez, a commander of the powerful Southern Bloc of the FARC who had been reported as killed by the army.

Penhaul said at the time that the positions of the government and the communist guerrillas were “very distant from each other.”

Two recent surveys by the Fundación Ideas para la Paz (FiP), an independent non-profit think tank founded by a group of Colombian entrepreneurs, said a successful military solution to the civil war was unlikely, and the armed forces’ offensive was seen as a tactic to force the FARC, the country’s main rebel group, to the negotiating table.

But in the last three years, support for the use of military force rose from 28 to 37.3 percent among those surveyed, while preference for a negotiated solution dropped from 67.1 to 54.6 percent. Backing for a combination of the two strategies went up from 4.9 to 8.2 percent in the same period.

Another reporter, former vice president Francisco Santos (the president’s cousin), who is now his opponent and works in the RCN Radio station, said that “it all started” in the Colombian city of Santa Marta in August 2010, in a meeting of reconciliation between the left-wing Chávez and Santos, who had just taken office.

According to an IPS source close to the FARC, who will remain anonymous for security reasons, it is not true that Chile and Spain are among the facilitators of the peace talks, although Venezuela, Cuba and Norway are. The latter hosted the talks between Palestinians and Israel that gave rise to the 1993 Oslo Accords.

A prominent Norwegian figure reportedly took part in the preliminary talks from the start, but the identity of that individual has not been revealed.

RCN Radio said the government itself has been leaking details of the negotiations to begin acclimating the highly polarised Colombian public to the idea of peace talks.

The negotiations will be held behind closed doors, although they will take into account proposals and input from the citizens, and the negotiating table will issue joint reports, RCN Radio reported.

In late July, President Santos said the conditions were not in place to sit down to talks with the FARC.

However, the Caracol Radio station reported that four months ago, the president began to hold discussions with generals and colonels, to convince them that peace was possible.

In addition, two weeks ago, meetings were stepped up with the different parties in Congress to create regulations for some aspects of the so-called “legal framework for peace,” approved in June, which will apparently provide the guidelines for the negotiations with the guerrillas.

The military argue that the legal framework has gaps. But the controversial law reportedly did not please the FARC either.

A regional commander whose nom de guerre is Pablo Catatumbo, who heads rebel forces in western and southwestern Colombia, said in a letter read by IPS that the legal framework “runs counter to peace.”

The legal framework, added Catatumbo, "is more oriented towards including in the processes of impunity those who were left out of the earlier legislation: the ‘parapoliticians’ and the army.”

The “parapoliticians” have ties to the far-right paramilitaries and have formed part of their strategy of terror, which has killed and “disappeared” thousands of peasants and forced millions to flee their rural homes.

When “just one of the sides” draws up a framework of this kind, “it is to favour its allies,” not to achieve peace with the other side, the letter says.

In the letter, dated in July, Catatumbo also mentioned that the FARC have suggested that the United States be included in the talks, since it is the country that finances the war and sells Colombia most of its weapons.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Conflict, Featured, Latin America, Peace Tagged With: , ,

Thousands Call for Peace in Colombia

May 21, 2012 by

The Real News Network

Thousands of victims of violence march in Bogota tell warlords they want an end to the conflict


More at The Real News


Filed Under: Conflict, Human Rights, Inequality, Insurgency, Justice, Latin America, Politics, Social Justice, Video Tagged With: ,

COLOMBIA-U.S.: Trade Deal "Throws Country into Jaws of Multinationals," Critics Say

May 16, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Helda Martínez*

BOGOTÁ, May 16, 2012 (IPS) – The entry into force of Colombia’s free trade agreement with the United States was met by student protests and opposition from a segment of the business community, small farmers, and trade unionists.

The trade deal, signed in 2006 after two years of negotiations, went into effect Tuesday after a lengthy process of modification of Colombia’s domestic laws to bring them into compliance with the agreement.

In response to the protests Tuesday, the authorities closed down public universities, as well as bus stations in Bogotá.

The day was also marked by a bomb attack against the armoured car of Fernando Londoño, a former interior and justice minister of the government of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), which killed two of his bodyguards and injured him as well as some 30 passers-by. Another car-bomb had earlier been deactivated.

But the Colombian government celebrated the start of the free trade agreement (FTA) signed by then presidents Uribe and George W. Bush (2001-2009). President Juan Manuel Santos said the accord signed with the United States, which is already Colombia’s main export market, would boost this country’s economic growth by nearly one percent a year and create 500,000 jobs.

The FTA, which will be implemented in stages, will gradually eliminate tariffs on virtually all products traded between the two countries. It also contains provisions that regulate investment, agriculture, industry, services, telecommunications, intellectual property, public procurement, and environmental, labour, sanitary and cultural questions.

But activists, students, farmers and other critics of the FTA say Colombia yielded in a number of areas, in exchange for nothing.

To back up their arguments, they point out that President Barack Obama said the trade deal would help "achieve my goal of doubling U.S. exports."

"But (Obama) says little to nothing about increasing imports," Enrique Daza, the head of the Colombian Action Network Against Free Trade, told IPS.

Last year, Colombia’s exports to the United States amounted to 21.7 billion dollars, or 38 percent of this country’s total sales abroad, while imports from the U.S. stood at 13.6 billion dollars – 25 percent of Colombia’s total imports.

The FTA will have a "scandalous effect on agriculture in Colombia, especially, immediately hurting the production of cereals, because huge shipments will enter our country (from the United States) tariff-free and at subsidised prices," Daza said.

He added that the problem is aggravated by the fact that "the government does not fully control the entry of imports because it does not have a unified customs information system.

"This means that the authorised quantity could come in through each port, multiplying the amount of tariff-free goods entering the country," Daza said.

A 2009 report, "Impact of the U.S.-Colombia FTA on the Small Farm Economy in Colombia", financed by Oxfam, says: "In short, Colombia guaranteed unconditional access to its domestic market for principal U.S. export products such as rice, corn (maize), wheat, barley, soybeans, beans, oil seeds, chicken, pork, high quality beef, dried milk, and whey, among others."

"However, in contrast, the United States conditioned the entry of an important Colombian product, sugar, to a duty free quota, and did not guarantee the elimination of non-tariff barriers," say the authors, Luis Jorge Garay, Fernando Barberi and Iván Cardona.

Under the FTA, 79,000 tonnes of tariff-free rice and 27,000 tonnes of chicken will enter Colombia from the United States in the first year alone, to the detriment of local farmers.

"Colombia’s consumer goods industry, which for years has suffered problems from the opening up of the economy, will continue to be hurt," said Daza. "As a result, the big local industries will prefer to sell out to multinational chains, as occurred in the case of the Bavaria brewery," which was the second-largest in South America and was acquired in 2005 by UK-based beer maker SABMiller.

Economist Juan Pablo Fernández, an adviser to the left-wing Independent Democratic Pole party, told IPS that small-scale producers of goods such as car parts, machinery and home appliances "will become mere importers, in the best of cases."

Activists estimate that 350,000 small-scale beef and dairy farmers will be hurt by competition from beef imported from the United States.

Meanwhile, cut flowers from Colombia, which cover nearly 80 percent of demand in the U.S., will be directly affected by the strengthening of the peso against the dollar which, according to Daza, "is essential to the FTA, which states that intervention in the domestic foreign exchange market is considered anti-competitive."

To all this is added the crisis facing the coffee industry. "We don’t have enough beans, so coffee is imported from Guatemala and Vietnam, to meet domestic demand," he added.

With respect to which sectors will be affected by the FTA, Daza said "it is easier to list the ones that won’t be hurt, such as some importers and those who will profit from the economic activities of the state, like businesspeople who are already benefiting from trade globalisation policies."

And Colombia is in an even more disadvantageous position because in eight years of negotiations it did not upgrade railways, rivers or ports in preparation for the changes to be brought by the FTA.

In other words, said Daza, "the negotiators of the agreement threw the country into the jaws of the multinationals."

The treaty will also lead to an increase in poor-quality jobs in the informal sector, which is "the way to boost profit margins, like what has occurred in the flower business, palm oil plantations and small-scale mining," he added.

The Oxfam report, meanwhile, states that the negotiation of the FTA did not even take into consideration issues that were described at the start as essential, such as Colombia’s decades-long civil war, "the importance of the welfare of the rural population to the economic, social and political stability of Colombia," and "the need to create profitable alternatives to illicit crops."

The negotiation, the authors say, "was governed exclusively by commercial interests."

* With reporting by Constanza Vieira

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Featured, Latin America, Trade Tagged With: ,

COLOMBIA: ‘Impunity’ – Keeping the ‘Black Hand’ Anonymous

July 1, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jun 30, 2011 (IPS) – The film "Impunity" has only just now arrived in Colombia, although the filming was completed a year ago and it was first shown to the public in Geneva in January. But the wait was apparently worth it because the documentary contributes key elements to the heated debate on the so-called "black hand" behind many of the atrocities committed in this South American country.

Impunity, directed by Colombian investigative journalist Hollman Morris and Colombian-Swiss filmmaker Juan José Lozano, takes a close look at how the paramilitary demobilisation process worked.

The documentary shows members of the far-right paramilitary militias talking in judicial hearings about what they claim to remember. As they make their confessions in one room, the relatives of victims watch them on screens in another room, and ask them questions by teleconference, seeking kernels of truth about their loved ones: "Where is he?", "What did you do to him?"

"I can’t remember", "We killed thousands", the paramilitaries answer. "We killed that one for being a guerrilla," or "we made a mistake" are other frequently repeated responses.

The confessions are what the Justice and Peace law, passed by the rightwing government of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) in 2005 to set the rules for the demobilisation process, calls justice.

   
HH confesses*

"I would like to ask the victims, the country, whether Colombia is really ready to hear the truth, because every time we talk about the people who have benefited from the war, the ‘heroes of the fatherland’ come out to call us liars.

So, we better not talk again about the people who are untouchable in this country, and we’ll just continue talking only about the peasant who farmed manioc or coffee, who doesn’t matter to anyone.

Here we say that we cut off his head, that we chopped him up, that his wife was raped, that we stole his plot of land, and no one is shocked. But when we talk about the people in this society who benefited or had ties to the self-defence forces, oh yes, then we’re causing a scandal, and we’re ‘dishonouring’ these people.

But the people we decapitated, the widows who saw their husbands or their sons cut up alive in front of them – we haven’t dishonoured those people.

For those people, society doesn’t come out to say we dishonoured them, and that we have to answer for them. ‘Oh, yeah, they killed her husband, he was a guerrilla for sure,’ is the first thing everyone says. But no.

What is a dishonour for those poor peasants is that because of the advice and financing of those big ‘heroes of the fatherland’, their families died and they were displaced and dispossessed of their land, of their livestock. That is a dishonour."

Sometime after this speech, ‘HH’ was extradited, and as a result he never confessed to more than 11,000 crimes, including 2,500 cases of forced displacement, for which he was responsible according to the legal charges.

*Testimony from Impunity.
Under the law, members of the paramilitary forces who took part in the demobilisation process and gave a full confession of their crimes would receive a maximum sentence of eight years.

The stated purpose of the law was to seek truth, justice and reparations, and to put a stop to the mass killings and the dispossession of small farmers from their land.

The paramilitary militias were supposedly organised 30 years ago to fight the leftwing guerrillas who emerged in 1964. But they ended up co-opting one-third of the national Congress during the 2002-2006 legislative period, and took over some six million hectares of land, displacing millions of peasant farmers from their homes and killing or forcibly disappearing tens of thousands of people.

The cameras capture the victims’ relatives as they sit, expressionless, listening to the paramilitary confessions. Most of them are women, and many are silently crying or sitting with their heads down as they relive the horror. They only occasionally exchange furtive glances after a cold, distant response from the war criminal who happens to be on the stand.

They emanate a profound loneliness and a terror that they have lived with for years, but which is still alive and very much present. In many parts of Colombia, the killers have taken over the State and are still in control. These women know this better than anyone.

When Impunity was shown Jun. 20 in a theatre with a capacity for 1,300 spectators, 2,000 people showed up, even though news of the showing was only spread by means of social networking sites.

The documentary coincided with the revival of a hot debate. The week before the documentary was shown, President Juan Manuel Santos resurrected the concept of the "black hand," thus "redefining the political landscape," according to analyst Álvaro Forero, writing in the Bogota daily El Espectador.

In Santos’ description, the "black hand" refers to "those who don’t want the victims to get reparations, only the victimisers," and who "kill peasant activists who are trying to get their land back."

While the leaders of the leftwing insurgent groups are hunted down by the military and pursued in court by name, no names are given for those represented by the old concept of the black hand.

The film Impunity shines a spotlight on mechanisms that help preserve that anonymity.

It shows how the press is warned to leave the hearings when the paramilitaries touch on powerful interests and give the names of military officers and members of the business community, and how, after these glimpses of the truth, Uribe unexpectedly gave the green light to the 2008 extradition to the United States of 14 imprisoned paramilitary leaders.

The last of the paramilitary chiefs to be extradited was Éver Velosa, alias "HH", who was the one who spoke out the loudest.

The prosecutors urged him to give a more in-depth confession about the so-called "Group of Six" – perhaps the black hand itself: a group that acted as adviser to the late Carlos Castaño, who was the top commander of the paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC).

In response, Velosa said the condition for giving their names was "sufficient guarantees, not for me, but for other people."

When the Impunity filmmaking team tried to interview him in a prison near the northwestern city of Medellín, they received an anonymous message that said: "Don’t come here. Be very careful with what you’re going to do here." Around that time, the computer containing all of the information on the production of the documentary was stolen from the filmmakers.

Before he was extradited, Velosa complained in court that Colombia, which has been caught up in a civil war for three generations, only wants to know about the hundreds and thousands of crimes committed against ordinary Colombians, but not about the people behind the killing, the "intellectual authors" of the massacres. (See sidebar.)

The film asks what will happen now that hundreds of thousands of pages of confessions of crimes by paramilitaries have been stacked up on shelves.

"Atrocities cannot only be an issue for the victims. They have to do with all of us, and the way we deal with them does too," Michael Reed, director of the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) Colombia Programme, told IPS.

The ICTJ helped finance Impunity. The filmmakers also received development aid funding from Canada, and financing from TV Suisse and Arte (Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne), a Franco-German TV network

"The attorney general’s office has to carry out an in-depth investigation into all of the implications, not just the material authors," Reed said.

"Although some court cases resulted from the confessions, the only thing the paramilitaries have done is repeat things that had already been constantly denounced and reported by human rights groups and the victims themselves," he said.

But one important thing, in terms of the intimidation constantly faced by prosecutors and judges, is that "the confessions have made it impossible to deny that the violations have taken place."

The Justice and Peace process is moving forward in a highly fragmented manner, like snapshots here and there, and what was needed was, precisely, a film about it.

"What we in the ICTJ are calling for," added Reed, is "a strategic focus where what is investigated is the criminal machinery, the crimes of the system – that is, when crimes are perpetrated as a result of policies or systematic practices."

Above all, the investigations should cover "the people who are ultimately responsible," he said.

According to analyst Forero, "By referring to the black hand, Santos…put a sudden halt to the social tolerance of the excesses of the ultraconservatives and declared the extreme right politically ‘illegal’."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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COLOMBIA: Kidnapped in No Man’s Land

June 28, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jun 28, 2011 (IPS) – "Today we are launching the new campaign for demobilisation in Caguán. Planting seeds of hope against the terror of the FARC," Colombian Defence Minister Rodrigo Rivera recently wrote in his Twitter account.

Caguán is the area in southern Colombia where three Chinese employees of the British oil company Emerald Energy, a subsidiary of the Chinese petrochemical giant Sinochem, and their translator were kidnapped Jun. 7.

Zhau Hong, Yang Jing and Tang Guo Fu were seized near the town of San Vicente del Caguán in a remote southern jungle region by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebels. Neither the nationality nor the identity of the translator has been confirmed.

The area where they were kidnapped, along the road between San Vicente del Caguán and the village of Los Pozos, is well-known to journalists because the village served as the site of the three years of peace talks between the government of Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) and the FARC that began in January 1999.

When the talks collapsed in February 2002, hostilities broke out again in the Switzerland-sized area in southern Caquetá province, where Caguán is located, that had been demilitarised for the negotiations.

   
Police at the service of Emerald Energy

Local communities have been protesting since April, complaining that they have not been consulted by foreign oil companies operating in their territory, and that agreements signed by the Uribe administration have not been fulfilled.

"The Ultimate Dream of a Multinational (Corporation): To Have an Army at Its Service" is the title of the November 2010 edition of Action on Colombia, the newsletter of the U.S.-based Colombia Support Network (CSN).

According to local community leaders, Emerald Energy intervened to keep the authorities from releasing six indigenous activists who had been arrested and beaten in a peaceful protest outside the company’s regional offices in the north of Putumayo, a province along the Ecuadorean border.

The protest was brutally put down by anti-riot police, and the detained demonstrators were badly beaten and denied medical attention for hours, the community leaders denounced.

Civilian and military authorities in a security council meeting the following day decided to release them. "But Emerald Energy, the petroleum company of which the indigenous community was making their demands, canceled the decision," says the communiqué printed in the CSN newsletter.

Of the six detainees, three are wise elders of the Nasa indigenous community, and one is a traditional authority representing the community.

The Colombian military began carrying out aerial spraying of coca crops as part of the heavily U.S.-financed Plan Colombia, forcing hundreds of thousands of coca farmers, who made up a potential support base for the guerrillas, to flee their homes and their land.

The first hours of bombing of Los Pozos by the air force after the peace talks fell apart in 2002 were registered by Brazilian satellites that monitor fires in the Amazon jungle, and could be seen in the footage as a huge area of heat, far more devastating than all of the forest fires combined.

Six months later, right-wing President Álvaro Uribe took office, until August 2010, and the central focus of his administration was to deal the biggest possible blow to the FARC, which at its peak controlled an estimated 40 percent of the national territory (basically rural, sparsely populated areas).

The left-wing rebels initially retreated. But in 2005 they began to surround the district seats again, even though the police and military had moved back into the main towns in Caguán.

Later came massive, long-term military operations: Plan Patriota, followed by Plan Consolidación, to which the FARC, a rural communist guerrilla force led since 2008 by a Bogotá-born anthropologist whose nom de guerre is Alfonso Cano, ended up adapting.

Under Cano’s leadership, the FARC has undergone a restructuring over the last year and a half, "which only began to be felt in August," coinciding with the start of the government of Uribe’s former defence minister Juan Manual Santos, military analyst Ariel Ávila, with the Armed Conflict Observatory of the Bogotá think tank Nuevo Arco Iris, told IPS.

San Vicente del Caguán-Los Pozos is now surrounded to the west by the elite "Teófilo Forero" FARC unit, to the north by the rebel group’s Yari Front, to the south by its 15th Front, and to the east by three columns of its 14th Front.

But the situation in the jungle where the three Chinese oil workers and their translator were ambushed and seized is even more complex.

The area is being penetrated by the paramilitary Popular Anticommunist Revolutionary Army (ERPAC), founded by drug trafficker Pedro Oliveiro, alias "Cuchillo" (knife). Before he was killed by the police in December, he used to take part in local security councils convened by civilian and military authorities to discuss the problem of the armed conflict.

The search for the Chinese oil workers and their translator is being conducted by the military’s highly trained joint Omega task force, a powerful unit that has shown "total complacency" towards ERPAC, according to Ávila.

Land of oil and mining companies

Two of the engines of the Santos administration’s economic plans, mining and oil companies, are advancing on Caguán.

The ERPAC paramilitaries want to play an intermediary role between the oil companies and the authorities, while the companies are outsourcing work to local firms.

"There is intense speculation around land," Ávila said, pointing out that ERPAC members have bought up property or forced small farmers off their farms to seize their land, "like what happened along the Atlantic Coast 10 years ago," one of the regions with the largest number of victims of the far-right paramilitary offensive of the time.

As in the immense, sparsely oriented Orinoquia region in eastern Colombia, where the state barely has a presence, land tenure in Caguán is not formalised. In other words, small farmers generally have no land titles, even though in many cases the farm has been in the family for generations. This situation has facilitated the land grab by large landowners and ultra-right paramilitaries.

Enter the FARC, with its restructuring process that requires more funds for a new armed offensive. One of its practices is to charge the oil companies a "tax".

In the area where the Chinese oil company employees were kidnapped, the FARC spread the rumour: "Oil companies are coming. And they’re coming with ‘paracos’ (paramilitaries). And we’re not going to let that happen," Ávila heard on a recent trip to the area, although he said the FARC is not focused on defending the local people, but on making money.

Colombia’s oil and gas regulatory authority, the ANH, created by Uribe, periodically organises the "Colombia Round" in which oil wells are granted in concession.

The Nuevo Arco Iris researcher said the oil companies, thanks to the land grab situation, "are corrupting everyone" in the area, including mayors, provincial governors, and even governors of indigenous reserves.

Ávila said the situation "is like the Wild West (in the U.S.) two and a half centuries ago – it’s no man’s land, and the idea is ‘save yourself if you can’."

"This process of the undermining and corruption of state institutions has led the FARC to be seen as heroes by part of the population, who were tired of the guerrillas but now see them as a possible solution," he said.

"In that framework, the FARC are becoming spokespersons for the communities," he said. The kidnapping of the Emerald Energy employees "is a message," he added.

Spokespersons for the Chinese government say it is doing everything possible to secure the release of the kidnapped employees.

And the Colombian government? Without naming names, it says it will expel any company that pays extortion payments, or ransom, to the guerrillas. But it has said nothing about the ERPAC.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Conflict, Development, Featured, Human Rights, Insurgency, Latin America Tagged With: , ,

Last Nomadic Tribe in the Amazon Faces Extinction

June 23, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IDN

By Daniela Estrada

IDN-InDepth NewsReport     
    
SAN FRANCISCO (IDN) – The movement for tribal peoples, Survival International, has raised the alarm that an outbreak of respiratory disease has struck one of the Amazon’s last nomadic tribes – whose numbers have already been decimated by flu and malaria.

Some 35 Nukak-Maku, including nine children, have been admitted to San José del Guaviare hospital in the southern Colombian Amazon, Survival said in a media release on June 23, adding that health advisor Héctor Muñoz had told Colombian radio that the hospital was well over capacity, leaving some Nukak with only make-shift beds.

Many members of the tribe have been living in a refugee camp on the outskirts of San José since being pushed out of their rainforest home by guerrilla armies and drug barons. Since they first emerged from the forest in 1988, more than half the tribe has been wiped out, mostly by common diseases caused by contact with outsiders. The Indians are now struggling to adapt to a new sedentary way of life, living on the outskirts of towns and relying on government handouts to survive, informs Survival.

In December 2010 a leader of the Nukak tribe from the Colombian Amazon made a desperate appeal for his people’s survival before the country’s top human rights committee. "We want to return to our forest," said Joaquín Nuká, "from where the FARC guerrillas forced us out – why, we don’t know."

Unlike most Amazonian tribes, the Nukak-Maku are highly nomadic hunter-gatherers, living in small temporary homes in the deep forest between larger rivers. But for many years the tribe’s homeland has been occupied by coca-growers, and Colombia’s violent civil war has engulfed their territory, leaving them unable to return home.

"[In the forest] we lived amongst all the food of the jungle," Joaquín told national radio station, Caracol. "The food that they give us here in San José is good, it is white people’s food, but it badly affects the children, we miss our forest foods."

Despite government efforts and an ongoing ‘War on Drugs’ that has received considerable funding from the United States, coca cultivation for cocaine continues to ravage the region, informs Survival International.

One of the most controversial methods employed to eradicate coca involves spraying deadly pesticides on the crops from planes. This has only served to push the farmers into ever-remote regions in the jungle, provoking violence against the indigenous communities who live there.

Survival has written to Colombia’s Health Ministry asking it to act immediately to safeguard the Nukak’s health. The organisation’s director, Stephen Corry, said: "This is really tragic news. After all these years the Nukak’s desperate situation remains the same, with no home, poor health, and little prospect for a better life. What’s so frustrating is that this burden, both for the Nukak and the state, wouldn’t exist if only the Nukak could go back to their forest – as they desperately wish to do."

Vice-president of the committee, Senator Alexander López, said: "The forced displacement … especially of indigenous communities such as the Jiw and Nukak, poses a severe threat to their survival as peoples… The Indians should return to their territories immediately and their way of life should be protected with dignity."

The Nukak are one of more than 30 indigenous peoples who face extinction in Colombia according to national indigenous organization, ONIC, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Survival is campaigning for the Nukak’s right to return to their reserve, on condition that it is made secure and that they receive proper health care.

At least 64 out of 102 Colombian tribes are facing ‘extinction’, says leading indigenous organisation ONIC. This was the conclusion of an ONIC report in April 2010 to mark the launch of its campaign to raise global awareness of the situation in Colombia and to save the threatened tribes from being wiped out.

ONIC’s own research found that 32 Colombian tribes face extinction, while the country’s Constitutional Court has stated that 34 tribes face a similar fate. Only two, the Nukak and the Guayabero, are considered to be at risk by both ONIC and the court, bringing the total number to 64.

According to ONIC, eighteen tribes number less than 200 people and ten less than 100. One, the Makaguaje, numbers fewer than five people. The reasons given for this desperate situation include:

- Colombia’s internal armed conflict which has been going on for more than 50 years and ‘disproportionately’ affects the indigenous population. Since 2002, more than 1,400 indigenous people have been killed and an estimated 74,000 have been forcibly evicted from their homes.

- A ‘model of economic development’ that ignores indigenous peoples’ rights to free, prior and informed consent and leaves them "more threatened than ever, given the developed world’s appetite for natural resources and raw materials." The biggest threats listed are oil, hydroelectric dams and oil palm plantations.

- The report states that Colombia’s indigenous people are the poorest in the country, and that they lack access to adequate health care, education and basic services.

The Nukak are cited as having some of "the most serious" health problems of all Colombian tribes. Since first regular contact just over twenty years ago, an estimated half of the tribe have died from respiratory problems, malaria, measles and other illnesses and infections.

ONIC’s report ends with a series of recommendations to the Colombian and international authorities, and two maps listing the 64 tribes threatened with extinction. These include the Arhuaco, Kogui, Embera Katio, Awá, Kofán, U’wa, Huitoto and Cuiva. (IDN-InDepthNews/23.06.2011)

2011 IDN-InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters

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COLOMBIA: Displaced Campesinos Want a Say on Land Restitution Bill

May 2, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Helda Martínez

BOGOTÁ, Apr 28, 2011 (IPS) – The Colombian government has been extolling a bill on Victims and Land Restitution which is being debated in Congress and is receiving extensive media coverage. But the demands of the victims themselves, forcibly displaced campesinos, are falling on deaf ears.

The mainstream media took little notice when representatives of eight organisations of campesinos or farmers displaced from their homes and lands handed a document to each of the members of the Senate First Permanent Constitutional Commission, which is studying the bill, expressing their misgivings over shortcomings and omissions in the draft law.

"So far, we have not been consulted about the provisions of the bill," Orlando Burgos, head of the National Bureau for Strengthening Internally Displaced People’s Organisations (MNFOPD), an advocacy group for the displaced victims of the internal armed conflict, complained to IPS.

The land restitution law could benefit some 400,000 campesino families, a total of about two million people, who lost their homes and their farms in the violence that has been tearing this South American nation apart for nearly five decades.

The armed conflict, which began in 1964 with the emergence of leftwing guerrilla groups, took a new turn in the 1980s when drug traffickers and far-right paramilitary groups entered the fray, preying particularly on the rural population and escalating the forced uprooting of small farmers and their migration to the cities.

The land restitution plan is a cornerstone of rightwing President Juan Manuel Santos’ government programme, and Agriculture and Rural Development Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo is pushing for its implementation.

If the law is approved, legal titles will be restored to the original owners of the lands that were misappropriated by far-right paramilitaries with the support of large landowners and cattle ranchers, local politicians and members of Congress, many of whom have been sent to prison for their involvement since 2006 in the "parapolitics" scandal.

The term "parapolitics" refers to an unholy alliance of regional and national political elites, drug traffickers, the armed force and paramilitaries, acting in concert to consolidate power in their hands, according to Claudia López, co-author of a report titled "Parapolítica:La ruta de la expansión paramilitar y los acuerdos políticos" (Parapolitics: The Path of Paramilitary Expansion and Political Agreements).

Forcible dispossession of small farmers in rural areas has occurred frequently in contemporary Colombian history, linked to different episodes of political violence. The practice dates back to the second decade of the 20th century, when campesinos first formed associations to defend their rights.

In 1928, banana plantation workers for the U.S.-based United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International), went on strike for decent labour conditions. They were massacred by Colombian government troops in Ciénaga, in the department (province) of Magdalena on the Caribbean coast.

Leftwing senator Luis Carlos Avellaneda, of the Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA, the Alternative Democratic Pole), wrote in March in his blog that the worst period of bipartisan violence in Colombia took place "from 1948 to 1958," between supporters of the rival Conservative and Liberal Parties. The decade is known simply as "The Violence".

The conflict was sparked by the assassination of a populist Liberal presidential candidate during an election campaign. Some 200,000 people were killed out of the total population of 13 million at that time, "especially in rural areas, and some two million campesinos were displaced" by the violence, Avellaneda said.

The 1961 Agrarian Reform approved by the government of Liberal President Alberto Lleras Camargo (1958-1962) raised hopes among small farmers, who at the time comprised nearly 70 percent of the population.

The national association of campesinos, ANUC, founded in 1967, "reached one million members, and carried out land occupations on approximately 2,000 haciendas between 1971 and 1975," according to Avellaneda, a member of the Senate First Commission that is analysing the Land Restitution bill.

However, under the administration of Conservative President Misael Pastrana (1970-1974), a 1973 "counter-reform" policy was adopted in order to dismantle what the agrarian reform had achieved. "Laws were repealed or reversed, dispossessions of rural farmers were resumed, and members of the campesino movement were persecuted and imprisoned," the senator said.

According to a report published in February by the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a leading human rights group, "at least 5.2 million people have been displaced as a result of violence in the last 25 years."

In the eight years of the administration of rightwing President Álvaro Uribe, whose term of office ended in August 2010, more than 2.6 million people were victims of forced displacement, equivalent to 51 percent of the official figure for the period 1997-2010.

"People were forced to abandon their home regions because their lives were in danger and their lands unprotected," the CODHES document says, spelling out the historical precedents that will have to be overcome by the future law on Victims and Land Restitution, and underlining the demands for guarantees, participation and security made by leaders of small farmers’ organisations.

Burgos, of the displaced people’s defence organisation MNFOPD, said Senator Manuel Enríquez of the rightwing Party of the U has offered to back the PDA’s advocacy on behalf of the dispossessed. "We have entered into a dialogue with the senator, but we still have some doubts," he said.

The main concern of the bill’s detractors is that "campesino leaders are still being murdered," Burgos said. Since President Santos took office in August 2010, 21 peasant leaders have been killed, and a total of 60 were murdered last year, he pointed out.

Burgos remarked on a video broadcast Apr. 10 by Noticias Uno, a local television channel, about the murder of displaced campesino Álvaro Sánchez, allegedly by former paramilitaries who were officially disbanded in a 2003-2006 demobilisation process negotiated with the Uribe administration. The video shows Sánchez confronting ex-paramilitaries in the act of seizing his lands; their response was to shoot him dead.

"It’s unthinkable to try to put things right in Colombia without dealing with the fundamental causes of the conflict, and when so many economic interests are in play," he said.

Burgos said that, shockingly, "the law, which contains 208 articles, is being put to the vote whole sections at a time, which clearly demonstrates the minimal attention being paid to a bill of vital importance to the country."

He pointed out that article 61 of the draft law states that victims displaced since 1986 would be eligible for reparations, while article 76 says those displaced since January 1991 would have the right to land restitution.

"Does that mean that lands usurped between 1986 and 1991 will automatically become the legal property of those who seized them?" Burgos queried.

"We think the land restitution law should recognise the rights of all those dispossessed since 1980, when the strategy of forced displacement really escalated," he stressed.

"We are requesting that proper mechanisms be established to avoid under-registration of people eligible for land restitution; that humanitarian needs be met in a regulated way; that the return of campesinos to their lands also be properly regulated; and that no new bureaucratic government entities be created. We think it is more appropriate that the existing bodies function efficiently."

One favourable development in the recent debates is inclusion in the bill of benefits for victims of bands of criminals, which experts say are successors of the paramilitaries demobilised under the Justice and Peace Law passed by the Uribe administration.

The Victims and Land Restitution bill is facing a tortuous passage through Congress. The text approved by the house of representatives was sent to the senate, and any amendments made there will have to be reconsidered by the lower chamber. If the final text meets with the approval of the full parliament, it will be promulgated by President Santos and forwarded to the Constitutional Court, which will then have 60 days to issue an opinion.

The arduous passage of the bill could take until the end of the year. Meanwhile, campesino leaders and organisations representing displaced people and other victims will continue to insist that their voices be heard.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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