TOP STORY: U.N. official says indigenous face extinction]
tlagiloi
Number 42: March 22, 2004
(1) BRIEFS
30 Coca-Cola workers launch hunger strike
Human rights advocate slams attorney general
U.S. knocks disarmament but offers $2 million
Ecuador, Colombia to beef up border security
(2) TOP STORY (Stacey Hunt)
U.N. official: indigenous face extinction
(3) MEDIA (Phillip Cryan)
Columnist sparks ire against parks spraying
(4) FIRST NATIONS (Nixon Yatacue in Caldono, Cauca)
Southwestern group exercises sovereignty
(5) LETTER (David Bushnell in Gainesville, Florida)
Former guerrillas in danger
(6) FROM THE EDITORS
Daily news updates at www.colombiaweek.org
(7) THE LAST WORD (Ambassador William Wood)
'Transparency has been lacking'
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(1) BRIEFS
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30 COCA-COLA WORKERS LAUNCH HUNGER STRIKE: Protesting Coca-Cola labor
policies, 30 employees of the company's Colombian affiliates began a hunger
strike March 15. National Food Industry Workers Union (Sinaltrainal)
President Luis Javier Correa Suárez told the Spanish news agency EFE the
hunger strikers set up tents at bottling plants in eight cities to protest
11 plant closings last year by Mexico-based Femsa, whose major shareholder
is the Atlanta company. The union says Femsa pressured 500 workers to resign
in exchange for a severance payment despite their right under Colombian law
and a union contract to transfer to another plant. The hunger strikers are
also protesting what they describe as company lock-ins March 9 in the
northern cities of Cúcuta and Cartagena to pressure workers to renounce
union contracts. And they're protesting the Social Protection Ministry's
February 25 authorization of Coke plans to dismiss 91 workers, mostly union
leaders. In an open letter to Coca-Cola, Correa accused the company of
consolidating production in an effort to destroy the union and cut pay. In
recent years, the union says, nine Sinaltrainal members have been murdered,
five of the union's leaders have been imprisoned on terrorism charges, and
65 of its activists have been threatened with death. Many of the incidents
have occurred at bottling plants. Alleging company support for the attacks,
the union filed a 2001 lawsuit against Coca-Cola and its Colombian
affiliates in the U.S. District Court in Miami. Last July the union called
for an international boycott of Coke products. SOURCES: Beverage World,
3/17/04; EFE, 3/15/04; El Universal, 3/17/04; Sinaltrainal, 3/16/04;
Vanguardia Liberal, 3/16/04. (CM)
HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATE SLAMS ATTORNEY GENERAL: A leading international human
rights advocate harshly criticized Colombian attorney general Luis Camilo
Osorio on March 11 for ending an investigation of a former general's alleged
paramilitary links. In a news release, Human Rights Watch Americas Director
José Miguel Vivanco called for the appointment of a special investigator to
examine Osorio's actions. And he disputed a claim by Osorio that there was
insufficient evidence to charge former Gen. Rito Alejo del Río with
paramilitary collaboration, dereliction of duty, and embezzlement. Osorio's
office has obstructed cases against top military officers and paramilitary
leaders, Vivanco said. And veteran prosecutors working on human rights
cases, including del Rio's, have been forced to quit, he added. In recent
weeks, amid questions of malfeasance, top officials in the office have
resigned or been transferred. Del Rio was arrested in 2001 but freed during
investigation of actions taken in 1996 and 1997 when he commanded the army's
17th Brigade in the northwestern province of Antioquia. Former President
Andrés Pastrana dismissed him from the army. And the United States revoked
his visa in 1999. SOURCES: El Tiempo, 3/12/04; Latin American Weekly Report,
3/16/04; Reuters, 3/11/04. (TK)
U.S. KNOCKS DISARMAMENT BUT OFFERS $2 MILLION: U.S. Ambassador to Colombia
William Wood on March 17 announced $2 million in U.S. aid for the
government's paramilitary talks, but criticized President Alvaro Uribe
Vélez's administration for what he described as a lack of transparency in
the demobilization of a unit of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia
(AUC), the country's main paramilitary federation (see THE LAST WORD below).
The funds are designated for planning those "very complex, very difficult"
negotiations, he said at a news conference in the northwestern city of
Medellín. His predecessor, Anne Patterson, said last year the United States
had devoted at least $3 million for paramilitary talks. Some 871 members of
the AUC unit, the Cacique Nutibara Bloc (BCN), turned in at least some of
their weapons in a December ceremony after controlling most of Medellín for
years. Wood noted the government has not disclosed their whereabouts.
SOURCES: El Espectador, 3/18/04; El Tiempo, 3/17/04, 3/18/04; Reuters,
3/17/04. (BK)
ECUADOR, COLOMBIA TO BEEF UP BORDER SECURITY: In a 44-point pact March 17,
the governments of Ecuador and Colombia agreed in Bogotá to strengthen
cooperation along their shared border. The cooperation is to include efforts
against kidnapping, extortion and contraband such as drugs, drug-processing
chemicals, illegal weapons and explosives, according to El Universo, a daily
in the Ecuadoran city of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Lucio Gutiérrez said
there had been "no hidden requests, either from the Colombian government or
from the U.S. government," for Ecuador to "become militarily involved in the
Colombian conflict," the newspaper added. Some human rights advocates and
Ecuadoran military officials questioned the pact's value given the border's
control by Colombian guerrillas. Former Ecuadoran Defense Minister Gen. René
Vargas Pazzos noted the accord doesn't address his country's response when
the Colombian military drives guerrillas across the border. "Either we
receive them with gunshot and shell or we ask them to lay down their weapons
and give them refuge," he said, according to El Universo. The agreement
calls for Colombia to add more than 1,500 military personnel and build a new
Marine infantry base along the frontier. It also calls for a joint task
force to inspect the border region for effects of Colombia's antidrug
fumigation on people and the environment. SOURCES: BBC, 3/15/04, 3/19/04;
Dow Jones Newswire 3/17/04; El Universo, 3/18/04, 3/19/04; Latinnews Daily,
3/16/04, 3/18/04. (BK)
© 2004 Colombia Week. Research by Gregory Kipling and Suzanne Wilson.
Writing by Bill Kingsbury (BK), Thomas Kolar (TK) and Cynthia Mellon (CM).
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(2) TOP STORY: U.N. official says indigenous face extinction
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BY STACEY HUNT
Colombia Week
Colombian indigenous communities are in danger of extinction as
paramilitaries and guerrillas target them for massacre, torture,
displacement, rape and forced recruitment, a U.N. official said March 16.
At the end of an eight-day tour of Colombia, U.N. representative for
indigenous rights Rodolfo Stavenhagen called on the government and
international organizations to help stop the attacks. "If no emergency
humanitarian action is taken, they run the risk of disappearing," he said of
some indigenous groups, according to Reuters.
A national indigenous organization says at least 136 indigenous Colombians
were killed in 2003, mainly by paramilitary forces, Reuters added.
One group, the Kankuamos of northern Colombia's Sierra Nevada Mountains, has
lost more than 200 members to killings since 1986, said Stavenhagen, a
Mexican. Ten Kankuamos have been murdered since an October demand by the
Inter-American Commission for Human Rights that the Colombian government
adopt measures to prevent the group's genocide, he added.
"They are killing us one by one," an indigenous representative said,
according to Stavenhagen. "If things continue this way, we're going to
disappear as communities."
While indigenous peoples constitute only 2 percent of Colombia's 44 million
inhabitants, their traditional territories cover 30 percent of the country.
Paramilitaries, guerrilla groups and government forces fight to control
rural land and people for a variety of reasons, including drug cultivation,
forced conscription and land grabs.
Some indigenous communities have had some success in keeping the armed
groups off their territory. But fighting has driven tens of thousands of
indigenous people to shantytowns surrounding cities.
© 2004 Colombia Week. Stacey Hunt, a master's candidate in political science
at Rutgers University, returned to the United States last August after a
year of research in Colombia with a Fulbright scholarship. SOURCES: El
Espectador, 3/18/04; El Tiempo, 3/15/04; Reuters, 3/16/04. Research by
Gregory Kipling and Suzanne Wilson.
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(3) MEDIA: Columnist sparks ire against parks spraying
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BY PHILLIP CRYAN
Colombia Week
Daniel Samper Pizano has turned his column in the Bogotá daily El Tiempo
into a megaphone rallying the public against U.S.-backed antidrug spraying
in Colombia's 49 national parks. His writing led to a two-day deluge of more
than 1,100 angry messages on El Tiempo's Web site. It sparked a March 18
protest in Bogotá outside the agency that oversees the parks. And it
threatens to turn an upcoming Senate debate on the spraying into another
protest scene.
The parks fumigation, part of a futile nationwide program to eradicate coca
and opium poppy crops, was approved by Colombia's National Council on
Narcotics last June and by the U.S. Congress in December. The spraying
endangers wildlife in the parks, which span 25 million pristine acres of a
country that leads the world in bird diversity, that's second in plant and
amphibian diversity, and that's third in reptile diversity. The spraying
also threatens cities that depend on the protected areas for their water
supplies. And it endangers the health and the food crops of the 800,000
people who live in the parks.
Samper, whose brother Ernesto served as the nation's president from 1994 to
1998, first tackled the issue in a February 25 column that criticized
President Alvaro Uribe Vélez for folding the Environment Ministry into a new
Ministry of Environment, Housing and Land Development and for appointing
Sandra Suárez Pérez to lead this "bureaucratic stew." Until November, Samper
noted, Suárez directed a U.S.-funded antidrug program that sprays hundreds
of thousands of Colombian acres a year.
In a second column, published March 3 under the headline "How to Stop the
Park-icide," Samper turned up the volume. "It's not enough to get indignant
about the fumigations," he wrote. "Something must be done." He asked readers
to attend the Colombian Senate's planned March 30 debate on the spraying.
And he urged them to flood Uribe, Suárez and human rights ombudsperson
Volmar Pérez Ortiz with protest letters and to send copies to the
Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense.
Samper's third column on the topic, published March 9, attacked the three
officials for ignoring the public outcry.
The columns apparently emboldened El Tiempo itself to take a stand. A March
13 house editorial departed from the paper's longtime advocacy for U.S.
military aid and collaboration between Washington and Bogotá: "To not
fumigate the national parks would be, for one honorable time, to put the
national interest of a country with the second greatest environmental wealth
on the planet before the interest of the United States."
And, two days later, the newspaper requested the Web site comments. By March
17, at least 1,167 had arrived, nearly all criticizing the spraying. "We
can't confront the barbarous deforestation involved in drug trafficking with
barbarous fumigation by the government," Luis Felipe Ibarra Tamayo of
Medellín wrote. "No arguments are needed beyond those of reality: You just
have to see the effects. We've got to wake up!"
Juan José López, a Colombian living abroad, took the sentiment further: "Why
don't we fumigate the brains, if they have them, of people who would even
consider destroying the biodiversity in our parks?"
Other readers noted the U.S. role. "Please, no more sacrifices and
self-inflicted wounds for a [drug war] that has only brought us death,
poverty and divisions," María Elena Ramos of Cali wrote. "Our government's
mission--let no one forget it--is to defend NATIONAL interests!"
The comments also raised points omitted from Samper's columns. The parks
fumigation order, for example, came from former Col. Alfonso Plazas Vega,
head of the narcotics council. Plazas helped plan and carry out the 1985
bombing of Colombia's Palace of Justice, occupied by members of a guerrilla
group called M-19. The bombing killed at least 76 civilians, including the
country's 11 Supreme Court justices. Plazas also helped form Death to
Kidnappers (MAS), a forebear of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia
(AUC), the country's main paramilitary federation.
Samper isn't the only public figure speaking against the parks fumigation.
Alfredo Molano Bravo, a columnist of the Bogotá weekly El Espectador, noted
in December that there would be a "gigantic" protest if George W. Bush
ordered herbicides dumped on Yosemite National Park, where marijuana crops
are grown. Other foes of the spraying include former health minister Camilo
González Posso and former environmental ministers Juan Mayr Maldonado and
Ernesto Guhl Nanneti. And former human rights ombudsperson Eduardo Cifuentes
Muñoz repeatedly urged suspension of fumigation anywhere in the country.
But Samper deserves credit for the groundswell. If journalists rallied the
public against war and impoverishment with the same conviction he has
confronted environmental destruction, things might start looking up in
Colombia.
© 2004 Colombia Week. Phillip Cryan is a policy analyst and educator who
returned to the United States in November after 18 months in Colombia. Find
previous installments of this biweekly column at www.colombiaweek.org.
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(4) FIRST NATIONS: Southwestern group exercises sovereignty
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BY NIXON YATACUE
CALDONO, Cauca--Coordinating a three-day annual festival called the Sakelu
is my most important job for the Caldono Indigenous Councils Association,
which represents six reservations in this southwestern municipality.
Nasas--members of Colombia's largest indigenous group--converge from all
over the country for the event, held March 18-20 this year.
The festival centers on seeds. Whether we come from a mountain village, a
sea-level valley or somewhere in between, we all bring seeds typical of our
climate for a huge communal exchange. The Sakelu includes rituals to purify
the seeds and thank the gods of the harvest, the condor and the hummingbird.
The rituals include dancing to the warm sounds of our drums and flutes.
But the Sakelu is much more than a cultural event. The seed exchange helps
us replant native savannah and forest species in danger of extinction. It
helps protect our food security, a guarantee of the U.N. Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. It enables us to resist the privatization of
life that transnational corporations are trying to impose in the name of
"intellectual property rights." And, most important, it symbolizes our
sovereignty.
The Caldono Indigenous Councils Association formed in 1995 to coordinate
cultural, economic and environmental projects such as the Sakela. The
association doesn't supplant the councils that formulate policies and
administer justice on the reservations, created during Colombia's colonial
period. Nor does it replace our spiritual leaders--our healers and elders.
Unlike Nasas in other parts of Cauca Province, we lack representation in the
municipal government, but the association is seeking to win national
recognition as an "indigenous territorial entity" (ETI). The Colombian
constitution, enacted in 1991, established the ETI process for groups to
establish self-rule, including autonomous systems of government, production,
education and health.
The association held a "territorial congress" here in Caldono last July to
reiterate our self-government rights, which emanate not only from the
constitution, but from natural law and the teachings of our elders.
We are also exercising our right to be free of the illegal drug economy,
which is difficult because some Nasa families have turned to cultivating
opium poppy, the raw ingredient for heroin, and because drug traffickers
exert pressure on our communities.
And we're forging peaceful alternatives to the nation's armed conflict. We
try to keep guerrillas, government security forces and paramilitaries off
our territory. Just last November, we convinced 200 members of the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the nation's largest
guerrilla army, to retreat from one of the reservations. How? We engaged
them in dialogue, lit torches and sang songs.
© 2004 Colombia Week. Nixon Yatacué, an indigenous Nasa in the Cauca
Province municipality of Caldono, coordinates an environmental project of
the Caldono Indigenous Councils Association. "First Nations" is a Colombia
Week series that appears every four weeks. Its editor, Lucía Vásquez Celis,
works with indigenous and farmer organizations across Colombia for the
Bogotá-based network Ecofondo. Find previous installments at
www.colombiaweek.org.
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(5) LETTER: Former guerrillas in danger
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W. John Green's review of Steven Dudley's work ("Book chronicles party's
extermination," March 15) was certainly well balanced, except for the
conclusion that in light of the Patriotic Union's (UP) fate it's hard to see
how any unarmed leftist activists can survive. Did Green mean Bogotá Mayor
Luis Eduardo ("Lucho") Garzón and the M-19 guerrillas that safely
demobilized some years ago aren't leftist?
Another danger not often mentioned, yet equally serious, is what happened to
the Popular Liberation Army (EPL). After its members demobilized, some other
guerrillas considered them traitors and systematically assassinated them.
Personally, if I were a repentant guerrillero, I'd get out of the country.
David Bushnell
Gainesville, Florida
See responses to other Colombia Week articles at www.colombiaweek.org. Send
your own letter to edi...@colombiaweek.org.
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(6) FROM THE EDITORS
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(7) THE LAST WORD: 'Transparency has been lacking'
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In rare U.S. criticism of President Alvaro Uribe Vélez's administration,
Ambassador William Wood cited the government for not disclosing the fate of
871 members of the Cacique Nutibara Bloc (BCN), a paramilitary group in
Medellín that ostensibly disarmed in December (see BRIEFS above). The
criticism came at a March 17 news conference in that northwestern city:
"The demobilization was carried out without the advantage of a legal
structure. A certain transparency and follow-up has been lacking. The world
doesn't really know what has happened to the former combatants who
participated in the program and I think the world wants to know. I think the
government has the answer and I think the answer is good, but the lack of
transparency creates doubts."
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Colombia Week (www.colombiaweek.org) is published Mondays. Editors: Marjorie
Childress, Anne Holzman, Bill Kingsbury, Chip Mitchell, Julia Olmstead and
Suzanne Wilson. Contributors: Phillip Cryan (Media), W. John Green
(Context), Stacey Hunt, Gregory Kipling, Thomas Kolar, Cynthia Mellon, Riley
Merline, Jana Silverman (Labor), Jim Trutor (Foreigners) and Lucía Vásquez
Celis (First Nations). Copyright 2004 Colombia Week. To seek republication
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