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COLOMBIA: Commission to Investigate Massacre of Wayuu Indians

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, May 21 2004 (IPS) - A commission will be sent Saturday to the northern Colombian desert region of La Guajira, home to the Wayúu Indians, to verify reports of brutal attacks on indigenous men, women and children, including a massacre.

A May 3 anonymous denunciation signed by ”Wayúu indigenous people from Alta Guajira” reported an Apr. 18 assault by death squads on the village of Bahía Portete, home to 580 Indians.

The text said local residents were tortured, children were ”disappeared”, teenagers were raped, and women and men were murdered and their bodies dismembered.

The communiqué, written in poor Spanish – the language of the Wayúu, who live on both sides of the Colombia-Venezuela border, is Wayunaiki – stated that the attackers destroyed the cemetery holding the villagers’ ancestors, which according to Wayúu tradition is sacred and proves the ethnic group’s collective ownership of the land.

”We are going to verify what occurred, in the field, and send a much broader report,” Luis Evelis Andrade, an Emberá Indian and president of the National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia (ONIC), which called for the creation of the commission, told IPS.

According to ONIC, on that tragic day in April, 14 indigenous people were killed – at least six were women – and another 30 went missing, including four girls and a boy who were previously tortured to force them to say where their parents were.

The denunciation by the Wayúu of Bahía Portete, which concluded with the plea ”DON’T LEAVE US ON OUR OWN” (original in upper case), urged a commission to be sent into their territory to find ”native people who will take you to the real site of the incident and who won’t deceive you.”

The document added that the indigenous people had not turned to any authority ”because we are afraid they will continue to kill us.”

Government officials say it is too early to report on the number of victims until an effort has been made to clarify what occurred.

The commission is made up of representatives of ONIC, the Ombudsman’s office, the Colombian office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a Venezuelan lawmaker belonging to the Wayúu ethnic group, and several regional indigenous organisations.

Andrade ruled out participation by the Interior Ministry office on ethnic groups. ”It is inconceivable that people are being killed like this… while the government to some extent implies that it is not important,” he said, referring to what he considered a failure of the conservative government of President Alvaro Uribe to react.

After the anonymous denunciation was made, the London-based human rights group Amnesty International warned that if the Colombian authorities did not act quickly the right-wing paramilitaries might kill those they had kidnapped.

Amnesty reported eight murders and numerous kidnappings on May 7, but as of May 10 official sources had confirmed only the killing of one woman and the death of an elderly man from starvation.

There was also the massive displacement of some 500 Indians who fled Bahía Portete and the neighbouring village of Puerto Nuevo, now ghost towns, according to Amnesty.

The residents of Bahía Portete had recently been received threats from paramilitaries, said the human rights group.

A local paramilitary squad is attacking the Wayúu to force them out of the area, according to the National Human Rights Coordinator of the Colombian national police force. “The region is of vital importance for the distribution of narcotics through the various natural ports on the Caribbean coast,” says the police report.

But the police don’t rule out the possibility that the massive nature of the attack against civilians could have emerged from “personal differences” between the Indians and the paramilitaries.

ONIC called for urgent action May 10 and warned that “the Wayúu indigenous community has been forcibly displaced from its ancestral territories by the actions of elements belonging to paramilitary groups, who want to take over and control the territory.”

The indigenous organisation underscored “the apathy of the local and national authorities” in the first case attributed to “the power that the authors of this massacre wield, who represent the interests of the groups who want to control the port of Bahía Portete.”

ONIC accused La Guajira local authorities “of having prior knowledge of what occurred (the massacre)” and of not taking measures to comply with “their functions to defend the lives and integrity of the Wayúu people.”

The Ombudsman’s Office mentioned “clashes” between members of an illegal armed group and members of the indigenous communities, while President Uribe’s office issued a 56-word communiqué saying the Attorney General’s Office would establish “the veracity of the denunciations” and the armed forces would take “the necessary measures for the protection of that community.”

There are around 150,000 Wayúu, who represent 18 percent of Colombia’s indigenous population, which comprises 81 different groups in this country of 43 million people.

Their ancestral land, La Guajira peninsula, which extends into the Caribbean and the Gulf of Venezuela, holds rich natural gas fields that were recently granted in concession to the U.S. oil giant ChevronTexaco.

Also in La Guajira is Cerrejón, the world’s largest open pit coalmine, exploited by an alliance of the biggest coal corporations, including the U.S.-based Drummond.

The Wayúu are a warrior people. In the colonial era, they acquired European weapons in exchange for pearls and were able to fight the onslaught of the Spanish Conquistadors.

Experts say this is why the Wayúu have survived as Colombia’s second largest indigenous group, second only to the Paés, who also are legendary for their fighting ability.

The Indians are often the target of attacks by the various groups involved in Colombia’s decades-old civil war.

The fighting pits right-wing paramilitary groups under the umbrella of the United Self-Defence Units of Colombia (AUC) against the guerrilla groups FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and ELN (National Liberation Army), with drug traffickers and government security forces in the mix.

According to the United Nations, the AUC is the armed group that has perpetrated the majority of attacks against unarmed civilians since the mid-1990s.

Another anonymous communiqué the ONIC showed IPS – signed “Wayúu Resistance” – said the attacks were perpetrated by drug traffickers. The text identifies 10 of them by name; some are Wayúu themselves, though of a different clan.

It also says that Alta Guajira, where Bahía Portete is located, “is the centre of operations for warehousing and sending drugs abroad.”

“Wayúu Resistance”, which justifies its anonymity in that “Indians that have made denunciations have been displaced and assassinated,” also named two members of the local police force as accomplices and said the group would turn to the guerrillas if the government does not take action on the matter, “because we feel like unprotected orphans.”

“No one wants to show their face. Everything comes to us anonymously,” ONIC leader Andrade said. He has tried to convince some of the survivors of the attacks who escaped to neighbouring Venezuela to go to Bogotá to file official complaints, “but they don’t dare.”

While ONIC was working on setting up the investigative commission, on May 13 – Roman Catholicism’s Day of the Virgin of Fátima, venerated by paramilitaries and drug traffickers – the government’s high commissioner for peace, Luis Carlos Restrepo, signed an accord with the commanders of the paramilitary forces.

Under that agreement, the paramilitaries agree to cease completely all hostilities. In exchange, the government ensures protection for its leaders in an area of 308 square km, which they may only leave with special permission.

If they comply with the agreement, the government will not take judicial action against the leaders, and would therefore not approve the extraditions requested by the United States for drug trafficking charges against several of them.

“The Wayúu say that Restrepo said in Santa Fe de Ralito (site of the negotiations with the paramilitaries) that it was the guerrillas who were attacking the Wayúu, but there (in Bahía Portete) there are no guerrillas,” Andrade said.