RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Activists Renounce State Protection in Protest

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Sep 1 2003 (IPS) - Some 50 human rights and social activists in Colombia said ”no, thanks” Monday to the bodyguards, armour-plated vehicles, bullet-proof vests, and cell-phones that the government had assigned them as protection.

The activists staged a sit-down protest outside the seat of government, demanding that President Alvaro Uribe provide explanations for the persecution of activists by the security forces in this civil war-torn country, where human rights defenders are among the primary targets of selective killings.

”Why would we want an armour-plated vehicle if 118 trade unionists are in prison?” Domingo Tovar, director of human rights in the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), the country’s main trade union, asked IPS.

”Why would we want bodyguards, if 49 labour activists have been killed” since Uribe took office in August 2002? he added.

In addition to the trade unionists, 23 social activists have been killed in the past year.

In the same period, 792 extrajudicial executions, 160 forced disappearances, 144 cases of torture, and 573 death threats have been registered in the ”databank on human rights and political violence” kept by the Jesuit Centre for Popular Research and Education (CINEP) and by the Justice and Peace organisation.

CUT holds the right-wing paramilitary militias responsible for 90 percent of the murders of trade unionists, and Tovar said most of the remaining 10 percent of the killings were committed by the state security forces.

In the first year of the Uribe administration, hundreds of men and women were rounded up in large raids in different parts of Colombia and presented to the press, without trial, as guerrilla supporters.

According to the databank on human rights and political violence, 2,546 people were arbitrarily detained between July 2002 and July 2003.

Forty-seven percent of those detained in the first eight months of the Uribe administration were campesinos, social activists, opposition politicians, leaders of communities displaced by the violence, trade unionists, students and human rights activists.

The detainees were arrested and prosecuted ”for their social activity, or simply for living in areas that authorities consider ‘suspect’,” reported the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective, a prestigious local human rights group.

”We want guarantees for our right to assembly, our right to defend human rights, and our right to exercise political opposition. We are not asking for anything that is not consecrated in the constitution,” said Tovar.

An hour and a half after the sit-in protest began, the government announced that Uribe and Vice-President Francisco Santos had given orders for the creation of a government commission to discuss the activists’ complaints about violations of their basic rights.

The protest was organised by human rights groups, the association of relatives of the disappeared, and the trade unions representing the country’s oil-workers, miners, food industry workers, health system employees, teachers, judges, university professors and bank employees.

Also participating were organisations of peasant farmers, and the survivors of the Communist Party and the Patriotic Union, a leftist coalition whose members were killed off in the 1980s and 1990s, including two of the coalition’s presidential candidates.

Some of the special measures designed to protect the lives of activists were adopted by the government after it was ordered to do so by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, two Organisation of American States (OAS) bodies.

In other cases, the protective measures had been taken by previous governments, through the Interior Ministry.

Precautionary measures granted by the OAS bodies are binding, and are a mechanism invoked as a protective measure that is to be accompanied by investigations into the threats faced by the beneficiaries.

But the activists on whose behalf precautionary measures have been granted say no investigations have been carried out to bring to justice those who threaten their lives.

In the early morning of Aug. 24, 600 soldiers and police officers raided a number of homes in Cajamarca in central Colombia. Although they had 34 arrest warrants, 56 people were taken into custody.

Parliamentary Deputy Hugo Zárrate of the leftist Democratic Pole said that in the raid, an elderly paraplegic former parliamentary secretary who is well known in the area was arrested. The town’s priest was also detained.

The 16 people who were taken into custody without an arrest warrant were released a day and a half later, after four prosecutors investigated whether or not they had a criminal record, said Zárrate. ”People are being hauled in on the basis of mere suspicion,” he told the lower house of parliament.

”The recent detention of around 42 social activists and human rights defenders in Saravena, department of Arauca (on the border with Venezuela), 28 of whom remain under arrest, appears to be part of an on-going coordinated campaign to undermine the work of trade unionists and human rights activists and expose these sectors to increased attack from army-backed paramilitaries,” Amnesty International said in a communique last Wednesday.

Among the detainees from Saravena were José Murillo, president of the local ”Joel Sierra” Regional Human Rights Committee, and Alonso Campiño, a member of the committee and the vice-president of the regional branch of CUT.

”Trade unionists and other human rights defenders in the department of Arauca are facing a coordinated military-paramilitary strategy to label them and their organisations as subversive, thereby exposing them to arbitrary judicial proceedings and risk of violent attack by paramilitary groups,” said the London-based rights watchdog.

”The arrests of José Murillo and Alonso Campiño come after the Regional Human Rights Committee had denounced the presence of paramilitary groups operating in collusion with the security forces in Saravena,” Amnesty added.

”The arrests also follow a spate of accusations against the Committee made by the security forces in recent months that they were subversive collaborators,” said the statement.

Arauca is the most heavily militarised department in Colombia, in proportion to the population.

As part of its military aid to Colombia, the United States has provided 98 million dollars to create and train a special army brigade to protect oil industry infrastructure in Arauca, where the California-based Occidental Petroleum and British Petroleum operate.

”Many abuses have been committed,” but ”the government measures form part of a programme of national security and defence,” ruling party Senator Jairo Clopatofsky, chairman of the Senate commission on national defence and security, told IPS.

Clopatofsky applauded the creation of the government commission to discuss the violations of activists’ rights, expressed his solidarity with the protesters, and said the Senate plans ”to study with the government each of the measures that have been taken, as well as whatever arrests, unjust or otherwise, that might have taken place.”

Precautionary measures have been issued for entire ethnic groups, like the Embera-Chamí and Embera-Katío indigenous communities, and for campesinos in Arauca, Cauca in the southwest and Catatumbo in the northeast, the members of the political prisoners solidarity committee, trade unionists and members of Congress.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights also ordered Colombia to protect the members of the Association of Relatives of the Disappeared and the residents of the San José de Apartadó Peace Community, in northwestern Colombia.

The residents of San José de Apartadó have declared themselves neutral, refusing to support any of the armed actors involved in the country’s four-d ecade civil war.

However, the right-wing Uribe says civilians cannot be neutral, but have the obligation ”to align themselves with the institutions of the state and with the army to defeat terrorism.”

In the view of one of the members of the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective, ”precautionary measures ARE useful. It has been clearly demonstrated that they are politically effective as tools to dissuade the killers.”

Only two of around 80 Colombian beneficiaries of precautionary measures granted by the OAS human rights bodies have been killed, and two became the victims of forced disappearance.

But the member of the Lawyers’ Collective asked not to be identified, because death threats hang over the group, which won the 2003 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders.