COLOMBIA: Indians and Blacks Displaced by War in Remote Northwest

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Mar 26 2004 (IPS) - Heavy fighting between leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups in the remote jungle region of northwestern Colombia led to the forced displacement of 1,275 Emberá indigenous people this week.

Six hundred of the displaced remain at the spot where the Opogadó river runs into the Atrato river, which is the spinal column of the department of Chocó, on the border with Panama – a jungle area of immense biodiversity where roads are few and far between and transportation is carried out by boat.

The other 675, who have been on the move since Thursday afternoon, are cutting through the tropical forest and hope to arrive Sunday in La Loma, where the Integral Peasant Association of Atrato (ACIA), created in the early 1980s by the local authorities of Afro-Colombian communities in the area, operate a humanitarian centre.

”They’ll stay there until the situation calms down,” a source with the Roman Catholic diocese of Quibdó, the capital of Chocó, told IPS.

Afro-Colombians living in the neighbouring community of Mesopotamia may also flee their homes, said the source, who added ”they already have their bags packed.”

An estimated three million people in this South American country of 42 million have been displaced by the four-decade civil war, according to human rights groups.

For 400 years, the Emberá Indians have shared their ancestral territory with black communities that managed to preserve traces of African culture while adapting to rural life in the jungles of Chocó.

The majority of the blacks and Indians in the region live in hamlets of between 70 and 200 people, on the banks of rivers, especially the 600-km-long Atrato.

Since the 1970s, guerrillas have been present in the department – both the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the largest rebel group, and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN).

But in 1996, the paramilitaries began to fight for control over the region.

According to human rights groups and other civil society organisations, in Chocó the paramilitaries are taking part in a strategy that can be seen in other parts of Colombia as well: displacing the rural population to pave the way for the expansion of plantation agriculture and other economic endeavours, like oil production and mining.

In the case of Chocó, the idea is to gain land for plantations of palm oil, the raw material for an industry that is subsidised by the government.

”There are already several thousand hectares of oil palm plantations in the territory of the black communities, and now they want to take the indigenous reserves,” said one of the heads of ACIA.

Chocó, which has coastline along the Caribbean Sea as well as the Pacific Ocean, also has a tropical forest rich in valuable wood, as well as deposits of platinum, gold, silver, bauxite, tin, radioactive cobalt, chrome and nickel.

However, the local population lives in poverty, totally neglected by the government, lacking health and educational infrastructure.

In the space of 22 months, 35 people in the region were killed by the paramilitaries, guerrillas, and army troops, said Catholic priest Jesús Flórez, spokesman for the diocese of Quibdó.

”The guerrillas murder civilians who they accuse of being paramilitary collaborators, while the paramilitaries carry their equipment right past the Navy post” without being stopped or questioned, he said.

The army ”killed six Indians who were hunting or fishing along the upper stretch of the Atrato river last year, and earlier this month troops murdered a displaced person in Quibdó, later depicting him as a guerrilla” who was killed in combat, Flórez added.

The presence of the army ”has been negative, because it has acted against the civilian population,” said Leiner Palacios, with ACIA.

Jurist Liliana Uribe, with the Seeds of Liberty Foundation, said ”there is a strategy of terror and death along the lower and middle stretches of the Atrato river,” and ”the practices of terror in Colombia have to do with a state policy that generates structural impunity.”

A commission made up of representatives of the diocese, ACIA, the Emberá Waunana Regional Organisation, and the non-governmental organisation Peace and Third World from Spain set off by boat up the Atrato river on Wednesday, to assess the humanitarian situation.

For years, the Roman Catholic Church, through the diocese in Quibdó, has been the only institution that has provided continuous assistance to the people living along the rivers in the area.

Its brigades bring health care, education and humanitarian aid to the local population, 60 percent of whom have their basic needs unmet, according to official statistics.

In addition, international human rights groups have provided some assistance, and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Bogota has periodically followed up on the situation in Chocó since a mass killing occurred nearly two years ago in the municipality of Bojayá.

On May 2, 2002, 86 civilians, including 45 children, were killed in the village of Bellavista, on the banks of the Atrato river, when fighting broke out between the paramilitaries and the FARC.

The FARC launched a gas cylinder bomb against the paramilitaries, who were attempting to force their way into a chapel where the local population had taken refuge.

Apparently the homemade bomb hit the chapel, killing many of the people inside. The local residents said 33 paramilitaries were also killed, although they were counted as civilians. That brought the total death toll to 119.

Nearly two years later, ”what happened in Bojayá has not been fully investigated, and the bodies have not all been identified,” said Seeds of Liberty Foundation activist Uribe.

”The investigation by the prosecutor’s office has basically focused on establishing the FARC’s responsibility for what happened, but not on determining what part of it was the responsibility of the paramilitaries,” she said.

Meanwhile, military investigations ”only reached the preliminary stage,” Uribe added.

The incident was labelled a ”war crime” by the United Nations, and the Colombian office of the UNHCHR held the guerrillas, the paramilitaries and the state responsible.

Government forces were accused of allowing paramilitary boats to reach the town, along the Atrato river, and of inexplicably failing to stage a preventive military action, thus leaving the civilian population completely exposed.

When the massacre occurred, President Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) promised that Bojayá would be rebuilt in six months, two kms from the site of the tragedy.

”A while later, under the new government, (Vice-President Francisco) Santos came and said the same thing: that it would happen in six months,” said Yenmin Cuesta, one of the heads of ACIA.

So far, the only thing that can be seen in the spot where the new village is to be built is an area of flattened earth. For that reason, the local population no longer calls the place Bojayá, but ”Severá” (It’s Yet to be Seen): ”It’s yet to be seen” if the government will live up to its word, they explain.

ACIA brings together the local authorities in the communities of Afro-Colombians. It organises the collective purchase and transport of inputs needed to produce food, and of supplies not produced in the remote region.

Since 1996, ACIA’s boats are the only ones that bring in provisions.

The group was at the vanguard of the struggle for the passage of Colombia’s ”law on ethnic black communities”, which in 1996 granted collective land titles for 700,000 hectares to rural black communities that have kept their ethnic traditions alive.

But the war has driven much of the local population away. In 1996 there were 45,000 people living in villages in the area, compared to 33,000 today.

The leaders of ACIA said the conflict is destroying 20 years of community organising efforts that have focused on the survival of the local communities.

ACIA’s boats have suffered attacks and robberies at the hands of the paramilitaries and the guerrillas, as well as restrictions by the armed forces, while the diocese’s missions have been harassed and intimidated by the Navy.

In the last six months, the organisations of local indigenous people, black communities and the diocese sent four warnings to the state, complaining of a ”strategy of persecution” against the local communities, which have been ”immobilised and attacked.”

”We are not opposed to the military forces fulfilling their task of guaranteeing the public order and fighting the illegal armed groups. We are opposed to a military presence that intimidates and labels the civilian population within the conflict,” said the diocese in a communique.

For its part, ACIA stated that ”We are asking all of the armed actors to stay out of our communities and allow the community councils and local authorities to work with autonomy.”