COLOMBIA: Truth Commission Report Paves Way for Hostage Release

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Dec 22 2003 (IPS) - Five foreign tourists kidnapped by Colombia’s ELN guerrillas were released Monday. But a truth commission report highlighted the fact that some 200,000 indigenous people and peasants remain captives of the civil war in the remote Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains.

Five foreign tourists kidnapped by Colombia’s ELN guerrillas were released Monday. But a truth commission report highlighted the fact that some 200,000 indigenous people and peasants remain captives of the civil war in the remote Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains.

Three months after the ELN (National Liberation Army) – the country’s second-largest rebel group – kidnapped a group of backpackers, the Colombian government reached a deal with a spokesman for the insurgent group Saturday on the mechanisms for their release, which occurred Monday.

Under the humanitarian accord, four Israelis and a British national were handed over to a commission made up of representatives of the Catholic Church, the Office of the People’s Defender (ombudsman), and the United Nations.

The released hostages were Israeli citizens Erez Altawil, Beni Daniel, Ido Guy and Ortaz Ohayon, and Mark Henderson from Britain.

They were seized on Sep. 12 while visiting the Lost City, an archaeological site in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range in northern Colombia, along the Caribbean shoreline.

Weigel caused a commotion in the German press when she appeared in a video, smiling and posing as a combatant, saying she was shocked and moved by the humanitarian crisis and extreme poverty she witnessed.

”Many people go hungry, as I recently experienced myself. It is cold, they have no medicine and…the ELN is fighting to achieve some change,” said the German tourist.

As a condition for the release of the rest of the tourists, the ELN demanded that a truth commission visit the remote, conflict-torn area to investigate gross human rights abuses that they said were committed by right-wing paramilitary groups in the area.

An ”observation commission” was set up, and its report on the humanitarian crisis in the Sierra Nevada region was published last week, and presented to President Alvaro Uribe and ELN spokesman Francisco Galán, who is serving time in the Itagüí maximum security prison.

The report was presented by Bishop Héctor Fabio Henao, director of the bishops’ conference’s Social Pastoral, People’s Defender Volmar Ortiz, and priest Darío Echeverry, the head of the Catholic Church’s National Conciliation Commission.

”The ELN approved the report, which had already been approved by the president,” said Henao.

To secure the captives’ release, the observation commission, which declared itself ”autonomous”, travelled to the Sierra Nevada in late November accompanied by UN representatives, and visited six different locations, where it talked to local residents.

The testimony was collected from people who ”warned that their identity not be released, for fear of possible reprisals, and that certain information be handled with discretion.”

The commission heard reports of ”extrajudicial executions, death threats, disappearances, torture, attacks on the civilian population and their property, widespread forced displacement, the occupation of victims’ farms,” as well as ”the pillaging of the cattle and household goods of local residents, recruitment of minors and the use of antipersonnel mines.”

The report describes Sierra Nevada as a ”strategic” spot in the civil war, because its proximity to the sea facilitates the smuggling of ”arms and munitions, as well as drugs.”

The observation commission found ”a critical humanitarian situation generated by grave, massive human rights abuses, the systematic violation of international humanitarian law,” and ”the lack of a real and effective state presence.”

Fighting for control over the area are the 5,000-strong ELN, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) – the main rebel group, with an estimated 17,000 members -, the right-wing paramilitary umbrella known as the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), with a total of roughly 12,000 combatants, and government forces.

The drug trade, a growing source of revenues for the irregular armed groups involved in the four-decade civil war, has also been a motive for increasing U.S. intervention in the conflict, through Plan Colombia, since the United States is the main destination for the cocaine and other drugs produced in the Andean region.

The Sierra Nevada, where the guerrillas have been active since the 1980s, has been the site of a paramilitary offensive and an increasing army presence over the past two years, according to the truth commission.

The paramilitaries ”are advancing towards the highest mountainous areas, which have traditionally been controlled by the guerrillas,” says the observation commission’s report.

Both the ELN and the FARC, which have been fighting in Colombia for 40 years, are also active in the Sierra Nevada.

The AUC, which links drug trafficking militias and death squads that make no secret of their alliance with the military, began to enter the area around a decade ago.

The paramilitary groups emerged in cocaine-growing regions, and banded together, according to the truth commission report, ”in reprisal against social mobilisation and activism by peasant farmers and trade unionists.”

According to the commission, the area’s cocaine exports amount to 1.2 billion dollars a year.

Over the past year, ”human rights violations and infractions of international humanitarian law have increased to such an extent that the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada are facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the country,” says the 64-page report.

Some 160,000 peasants live in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which are also the ancestral home of four indigenous communities – the Arhuacos, Arzarios, Kankuamos and Koguis – who today number around 50,000.

The commission found a defenceless local population facing an ever-present risk that the paramilitaries or guerrillas will deem them sympathisers or supporters of the other side, and take reprisals.

The territorial expansion of the paramilitaries ”involves an interest in expanding coca crops and pressuring the peasants to grow coca; otherwise (the local population) is the object of displacement or forced displacement,” says the document.

The complaint most often mentioned by the report is that the armed forces and paramilitaries work together.

The paramilitaries ”have well-known camps and a regular presence in the villages, and they launch systematic attacks on the populace while the security forces take no real and effective action against them; on the contrary, testimony from a range of sources refers to the collaboration between them,” says the document.

”We have seen them dress up as paramilitaries, using the name of ‘Los Arrasadores’ (the demolishers), but they belong to the army’s Córdoba Battalion,” according to one of the anonymous local residents interviewed by the commission.

”The people are paralysed by fear, and do not dare report the abuses to the municipal” and provincial authorities, says the report.

The Sierra Nevada is peppered with ghost towns, empty villages, abandoned farms, vacant homes and closed-down businesses.

”Everything has been pillaged and plundered by the groups that attacked the populace,” according to the report.

The paramilitaries charge fees for allowing local residents to take their farm products to market, and they steal part of the farmers’ goods and destroy anything they deem useful to the guerrillas. ”They don’t even let us bring in children’s boots,” said one witness.

The guerrillas ”also attack and steal peoples’ belongings, and sometimes set up control posts in which they exercise similar pressure,” adds the commission.

The AUC does not allow ”foodstuffs to be carried up into the mountains because they believe they are for the guerrillas,” the report explains, adding that local residents survive by hunting and eating ‘malanga’, a tuber similar to the sweet potato.

The commission states that ”humanitarian assistance and a lifting of the blockades is urgently needed for these families to survive with a minimum of food security and basic supplies, even in the midst of the armed conflict.”

The worst human rights violations are the numerous selective murders or mass killings, ”perpetrated especially by the AUC,” the report underlines.

In the case of massacres, the paramilitaries ”select their victims from a large group of local residents who have been rounded up, and then murder them individually or in small groups, and scatter the corpses.”

The individual selective murders involve ”the extrajudicial execution of victims whose names appear on lists” that have been previously drawn up, says the report.

Despite the danger, the Sierra Nevada’s archaeological sites, natural beauty and ethnic diversity continue to draw tourists.

Colombia’s highest mountain peak, 5,775 metres high, is located in the Sierra Nevada, just 42 kms from the sea. In 2002, a large part of the region was declared a biosphere reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).