COLOMBIA: Growing International Support for Peace

• by Mario Osava (bogota)
• Tuesday, March 24, 2009
• Inter Press Service

They found a munitions store belonging to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main insurgency in this country, which emerged 45 years ago.

To hand over this material, discovered just over two weeks ago, to the Colombian army, or to seek their help as the only personnel technically qualified to destroy the arsenal safely, would have been to invite reprisals from the guerrillas, María Claudia Coicué told IPS.

Several Awá indigenous people were murdered in February on suspicion of collaborating with the army, Coicué added. The FARC admitted to killing eight Awá, but 17 are missing, according to the indigenous group caught in the crossfire of the armed conflict, who are still looking for the bodies of the victims in order to bury them on their own land.

'Both the army and the guerrillas are our enemies,' said Coicué. But the neutrality of indigenous peoples is difficult to maintain.

The FARC wanted to control part of the Nasa territory, imposing their rules which are rejected by the indigenous people, said the young Nasa woman, a recent graduate in social work from the National University. 'We are the ones who discipline our own community members,' not the guerrillas, she said.

Coicué was taking part in the Second Peoples' Forum, organised by the international organisation Peace for Life (PfL) and the Colombian Justice and Life Project, which ended Monday in the Colombian capital. The central theme was 'Without Fear of Empire: Global People's Resistance'.

The Forum in Bogotá, attended by some 350 people, including 62 foreigners, approved a declaration expressing 'strong backing' for a humanitarian agreement on a swap of FARC hostages for imprisoned rebels, as a step toward a 'negotiated political solution to the armed conflict' in Colombia.

The People's Forum, the first of which was held in 2004 in Davao City, Philippines, is an initiative of PfL, which is based in the Philippines and has members all over the world.

PfL is a faith-based movement resisting imperialism and militarised globalisation, and dedicated to creating life-enhancing alternatives based on peace and social justice.

Liberation theology is one of the inspirations of the movement, and was the subject of a seminar at this second Forum, as were the Palestinian question, the crisis of neoliberal globalisation, self-determination for indigenous peoples and the impact of war and empire on the lives of women.

In Bogotá, the representatives of a score of countries and of the Palestinian territories and Puerto Rico approved a final declaration condemning 'the United States empire which, often with the complicity of Europe, is multiplying people's suffering,' especially in Colombia where it feeds the 'nightmare' of armed conflict that has lasted over five decades.

The United States is experiencing a decline due to its economic crisis and the resistance or competition of other peoples and countries, but it remains a threat and it has mounted a ruthless attack on Colombia in order to secure strategic positions and resources such as oil and lands, the declaration says.

Colombia is being 'bled to death,' with millions of displaced persons fleeing from violence and the expropriation of their lands, but there is hope because resistance is growing, even within the United States itself, the declaration concludes.

The war in Colombia is in the interests of the powerful, who use it as a means 'to take over the best lands,' to plant monoculture crops, and to seize oil and mineral resources, according to Oscar Martínez, a Catholic priest and coordinator of the Continental Movement of Christians for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MCCPJD).

The government of President Álvaro Uribe is propped up by support from 'the empire, the media and illegal powers,' like far-right paramilitary groups and drug traffickers, said Pilar Marín, a teacher and an activist in the Movement of Teachers for Educational Dignity, who was a rapporteur for some of the seminars at the Forum.

The Uribe administration's strategy of seeking a military defeat of the guerrillas has aggravated tragedies like the forced displacement and killings of teachers. In the past 15 years, nearly 3,000 teachers and their families had to flee their homes, according to spokespersons for the educational system.

Murders by government troops and paramilitary forces of teachers, trade unionists, rural leaders, indigenous people and young people falsely accused of being guerrillas, added to internal displacement and emigration, are the result of the armed conflict involving the Colombian army, guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug mafias.

Lately, 'selective murders' have replaced the indiscriminate massacres previously carried out by government forces and the powerful élites, according to Marín. The 'polarisation' which labels all those who are not allies as enemies or guerrillas puts those who reject the policies of both sides in an impossible position.

In the midst of so many conflicts, 'viviendistas' or housing movement activists are living their own drama, which also brings them into conflict with the government, this time for reasons of social justice.

The movement's goal is to prevent the eviction of some 800,000 mortgage-holding families. Over the last three decades they have been paying off their loans, but now they face losing their homes because they can no longer afford to meet their payments.

Three hundred thousand families have already been evicted, 189,000 eviction requests are stuck in the clogged wheels of the justice system, and a further 300,000 are being processed, said Manuel Avendaño, founder of a Bogotá-based group which tries to block evictions by mobilising activists to prevent police from enforcing eviction orders.

The eviction rulings are based on laws which run counter to the constitution, and several international treaties signed by Colombia also guarantee the right to decent housing, said Juan Rodríguez, who was about to be evicted from his home four years ago, but was helped by the activists and has since joined the movement.

Interest payments on predatory loans can be as high as 37.4 percent a year and are only reduced in case of 'social need.' This means that purchasers have to repay the principal of the loan 15 or 20 times over, according to the 'viviendistas.'

Evictions are often violent. At first they were enforced by squads of 50 military police, but now they are executed by up to 150 police, causing deaths, injuries and violations of human rights, since they separate children from their families and oblige many people to live on the streets, Avendaño said.

A recent eviction, for example, left a family of eight, including an 82-year-old man, in the gutter, he said. A 15-year-old member of the family was killed by paramilitaries in Ciudad Bolívar, a huge shanty town in the south of Bogotá, where hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the war have settled.

In the southwestern city of Cali, when eviction becomes inevitable, 'we demolish our houses rather than let them be taken away from us,' said Jaime Tobón, who with fellow members of the housing movement also took part in the People's Forum. 'We have already demolished three houses in response to the abuses by the banks,' he said.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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