Juhern Kim, acting representative of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) in Colombia, gives a presentation on the intergovernmental organisation’s strategies. Credit: GGGI Colombia

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Jun 6 2018 (IPS)

Colombia is a global power in biodiversity and water resources, but at the same time it depends on exports of fossil fuels, coal and oil, to the world. But don’t panic: in the green economy there are also incomes and jobs – says a world expert on the subject, Juhern Kim.

“If Colombia makes intelligent use of its abundant natural resources, its natural capital, it can create new business opportunities linked to bio-economics, sustainable agriculture and forestry, which have the potential to generate income and create green jobs,” Kim, an environmental economist and ecosystem management specialist, told IPS in an interview.

Kim is acting representative in Colombia of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), an intergovernmental organisation created in 2012, which promotes sustainable development that is both economically viable and socially inclusive. It works directly in 26 countries, including Colombia.

In June last year, Colombia ratified the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, by which it pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2030, to help fight global warming.

Among other issues, Kim analysed in his interview with IPS how this South American country is moving towards climate change mitigation and adaptation and a low-carbon economy, as committed to in the climate agreement signed in December 2015 in the French capital, at the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The expert, who previously represented the GGGI in Vietnam and worked on issues related to the green economy at the UN Environment, also analysed how Colombia can make its energy mix and its economy greener in general.

IPS: Colombia is the world’s fifth largest producer of coal. How does the GGGI suggest bringing about an end to mining, an activity that runs counter to the climate accords?

JUHERN KIM: Coal production plays an important role in the Colombian economy: it contributes around 1.5 percent of GDP and 18 percent of total exports. Since about 95 percent of the coal produced in Colombia is exported, national coal production is affected by international market trends.

The recent volatile price fluctuation for commodities, and the associated impact on the Colombian economy, clearly shows that the country’s economy needs to be diversified in order to grow more and better.

Furthermore, future global demand for coal will tend to fall, although it will happen progressively and not for all types of coal.

Many countries have started to shut down their coal plants, and have been working on reducing the consumption of other fossil fuels, reinforced by international commitments such as the Paris Agreement, where Colombia made its own commitment as well.

GGGI promotes a sustainable and inclusive economic growth path, which implies the reduction of coal and other fossil fuel use, due to the negative environmental impacts.

That’s why GGGI has been supporting the government of Colombia for the last year and a half through the National Planning Department (DNP) to formulate a long-term green growth policy, that proposes actions related to the economic activity of coal in three ways:

1. Incorporation of renewable energy in the energy mix. GGGI advocates for countries to achieve energy transitions towards cleaner technologies. In Colombia, the production of electricity from coal amounts to 8 percent of the total.

2. Exploring new economic growth drivers to diversify the economy currently depending on the mining-energy sector (oil and coal exports). For instance, Colombia has abundant resources associated with natural capital, such as biodiversity – if Colombia utilizes these resources wisely, they can create new business opportunities related to bio-economy, sustainable agriculture, forest economy, which have the potential to generate income and create jobs (green jobs).

3. Curbing the environmental impacts of coal mining, especially by informal miners. Coal mining has informality rates close to 40 percent, while many productive units do not have an environmental license and have exploitation techniques that are harmful to the environment. It is intended to strengthen the mining formalization and provide technical assistance to reduce pollution.

IPS: How can the coastal population be protected from the intensification of tropical storms and the advance of coastal erosion?

JK: Colombia is being highly threatened by tropical storms and coastal erosion in two coastal areas that represent nearly 1,700 km in the Caribbean and 1,300 km in the Pacific.

Colombia has coasts on two oceans, and the frequency and intensity of such extreme events have been increasing, which, added to the deficient planning of urban development, increases the vulnerability and risk of people, infrastructure, and ecosystems.

The National Adaptation Plan recognises the country’s vulnerability to this type of events.

The country is now moving in the right direction led by the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development (MADS) by including climate change variables within the planning and zoning of the territories, which will be articulated with adequate financing and technology transfer to implement mitigation measures for this type of risks.

Of particular importance is the ecosystems-based adaptation measure.

In this case, protecting and increasing the mangroves on the coastal lines will reduce coastal erosion, and at the same time allow the sustainable use of this type of ecosystem for the benefit of local people’s livelihood.

In other cases, it will be necessary to implement traditional infrastructure measures that avoid short-term calamities. Increasing local capacities, public awareness, adequate planning and the implementation of risk mitigation measures are key to achieving this objective.

IPS: A key question is the energy transition. How can clean energy be promoted in Colombia? Is community self-management better, or are large regional concessions, criticised as monopolies, preferable?

JK: Colombia has a high proportion of clean energy from hydroelectric generation (70 percent). However, this energy depends on the hydrological cycle which makes it vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

In that sense, it will be beneficial for Colombia to diversify its energy mix with other sources of clean energy, with some policy changes and regulations in the wholesale energy market.

Colombia currently lags behind in terms of the production of non-conventional renewable energy resources, compared to neighboring Latin American countries like Chile. However, Colombia has a strong potential for generation of solar, wind and biomass energy, and those can also serve as alternative off-grid solutions.

We believe that renewable energy projects should be carried out by entities that have the right technical and financial strengths required to develop, operate and maintain this type of projects.

IPS: What does the GGGI think of fracking?

JK: Fracking, like any other exploitation technique, has associated risks in its implementation and management, as it is known for generating many environmental impacts, such as potential contamination of ground and surface aquifers, methane emissions, air pollution, etc. In addition, it also has a potential for increasing oil spills, which can harm soil and surrounding vegetation.

In general, as an institute dedicated to green growth, we promote the development of alternative renewable energy sources to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. As mentioned above, it would be expected that the government make some efforts to diversify their economy to generate new sources of economic development while taking care of the environment and social impact.

IPS: According to environmental analysts, when the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) withdrew from the territories it controlled, it became evident that the guerrillas had played a role as forest rangers in those areas, because thousands of hectares have been razed since then. What is your take on the situation and what do you think can be done?

JK: Although the presence of guerrillas in many forested zones of the country prevented the entry of agricultural expansion and exploration for natural resources in some sense, it is probably not that simple to say that they played a role as forest rangers, because they also supported the production of illicit crops that generated deforestation.

In brief, understanding the reasons for the increase in deforestation in the country is not simple math at all. And finding solutions is not simple as well.

It seems that the post-conflict process has been generating a change in the territorial dynamics, in some cases through an absence of control arguably provided by guerrillas in the past, in other cases through a high-level of speculation associated with unproductive land use, with false hope embedded for some people wanting to be awarded land titles if they put any type of activities in the land, and sell their land at a better price in the future.

The playing field must be levelled. The abovementioned situation prevents rural producers and entrepreneurs from accessing land with adequate support for productive activities and conservation incentives, such as credits (i.e. financial instruments), access to markets, financial incentives for conservation (e.g. payment for ecosystem services), and so on.

In fact, the whole landscape should be properly planned in an integrated way – i.e. sustainable landscapes approach, which promotes economic gains but minimising environmental impact and increasing social returns.

For instance, productive zones for local economic development should be set up, but it is not wise to set them in the biological corridor. Also, financial instruments designed to promote sustainable agriculture methods, such as agroforestry, can be a driver for making a sustainable transition.

Also, Colombia has defined an Integrated Strategy for the Control of Deforestation and Forest Management, which sets clear guidelines on how to address this issue. However, having this strategy is not enough if there is no tight alliance among Colombian society as a whole.

In addition, the public authorities have an important role to play to implement the vision for conservation of forests (i.e. command and control) – e.g. functions of the prosecutor offices, judges and many other actors, committed to reduce illegality.

Excerpt:

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos signs the peace agreement, observed by FARC chief Rodrigo Londoño, Latin American presidents and other dignitaries, in an open-air ceremony in the city of Cartagena de Indias. Credit: Colombian presidency

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Sep 27 2016 (IPS)

It was like a huge party in Colombia. “Congratulations!” people said to each other, before hugging. “Only 20 minutes to go!” one office worker said, hurrying on her way to Bolívar square, in the heart of Bogotá. And everyone knew what she was talking about, and hurried along too. Complete strangers exchanged winks of complicity.

Starting at 5:00 PM on Monday Sept. 26, the people in the square watched a live broadcast of the ceremony in Cartagena de Indias, 664 km to the north, where the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels signed a peace agreement, putting an end to 52 years of armed conflict.

Fifteen presidents, 27 foreign ministers and three former presidents, as well as United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, took part in and witnessed the historic event.

The first big test for peace will come on Sunday Oct. 2, when Colombians will vote for or against the peace deal, in a referendum.

The ceremony began with one minute of silence for the Colombians who were killed or forcibly disappeared in the last half century, while dozens of white flags were raised.

This was followed by an a capella song by traditional singers from Bojayá, a town in the northwestern department of Chocó where 79 people were killed in May 2002, including 44 children. The United Nations blamed the FARC, the far-right paramilitaries and the army for the war crime.

“We are very happy/full of joy/that the FARC guerrillas/are laying down their arms,” they sang. During the war, “in our community/they didn’t even let/us go out to fish or work. We want justice and peace/to come from the heart/for health, peace and education to reach our fields.”

At 5:30 PM, President Juan Manuel Santos and FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño, known by his nom de guerre Timochenko, signed the “final agreement to end the conflict and build a stable and lasting peace”, agreed on Aug. 24 in Havana after five years of peace talks held with international observers.

Colombians are “bidding farewell to decades of flames and sending up a bright flare of hope that illuminates the world,” Ban Ki-moon said.

The two leaders signing the accord spoke next.

The former rebel leader apologised “to all the victims of the conflict for all of the pain that we have caused in this war,” receiving a standing ovation in Cartagena as well as Bogotá, while thousands of people chanted “Yes we could!”

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon speaks at the ceremony for the signing of the peace deal in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Credit: UN

The FARC rebel organisation will now become a new political party. ““No one should doubt that we are moving into politics without arms,” Londoño said. “The war is over. We are starting to build peace.”

Santos said “I welcome you to democracy. Exchanging bullets for votes, weapons for ideas, is the bravest and most intelligent decision…you understood the call of history.”

“We will undoubtedly never see eye to eye about the political or economic model that our country should follow, but I will staunchly defend your right to express your ideas within the democratic regime,” the president said.

After 14 years, the European Union removed the FARC from its list of terrorist organisations. And U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said his government would “review” doing the same.

Ban confirmed that the signing of the agreement marked the start of the U.N. Security Council peacekeeping mission to verify and monitor the ceasefire and the laying down of arms within 180 days.

On the sunny afternoon in Bolívar square, 70-something Graciela Laverde, wearing a colourful cotton dress, told IPS her biggest wish was “peace, education and recreation for so many children, an end to all the corruption and the killing of so many innocent people….If God wills, there will be peace.”

The referendum

The first big step along the complex route to consolidating peace will be the Oct. 2 referendum in which Colombians will vote whether or not they back the final peace deal.

The campaigns urging people to vote “yes” have been diverse and have included initiatives too numerous to count. For example, grandmothers playing with their grandchildren cut out large signs reading “si” (yes) to tape in their windows.

The campaign for the “no” vote, meanwhile, was led first and foremost by the far right: former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) and former attorney general Alejandro Ordóñez, who may be Uribe’s candidate in the 2018 presidential elections.

The campaign has targeted Colombians in urban areas, who make up 70 percent of the population. “The people living in rural areas are prepared to vote ‘yes’,” analyst Jesús Aníbal Suárez told IPS, adding that it was urban residents who had the most doubts.

Suárez expects low voter turnout of around 35 percent, which would still be high enough to meet the legal requirements for the referendum. He projects a 60-40 percent result in favour of “yes”.

President Juan Manuel Santos (R) shows FARC chief Rodrigo Londoño the symbolic pen made from a bullet that the two used to sign the peace agreement putting an end to over half a century of conflict in Colombia. Credit: Colombian presidency

“There is a great deal of uncertainty, and that leads people to abstain from voting,” he said. “Uribe’s effort has made its mark, it has managed to confuse people,” by widely disseminating false information about the peace agreement, he added.

But there is a new segment of the population in favour of the “yes” vote: the military and police, who total nearly half a million people in this country of 48 million.

“The members of the military can’t vote, but their families, the people around them, can,” said Suárez. “I heard retired general (former police chief) Roso José Serrano say: ‘I don’t want one more police officer to die.”

“Soldiers and police officers feel like they have been cannon fodder. Their families will vote for the ceasefire, just as a matter of logic,” because the deaths in combat have been reduced to zero.

During the 2014 presidential elections voters were polarised between reelecting Santos, so he could continue the peace talks with the FARC, and voting for Uribe’s candidate Óscar Zuluaga, who wanted to suspend the negotiations and relaunch them on a different footing.

Today, the “no” camp is calling for a renegotiation of the accord.

Suárez believes that in 2014, the families and friends of the half million soldiers and police voted for Zuluaga, but will now vote “yes”.

At the same time, the “no” campaign has complained about the government’s new sex education for preteens.

Because the peace agreement has a gender perspective, an unprecedented aspect in any peace deal anywhere in the world, Ordóñez’s followers protested on the day of the signing ceremony, in a small demonstration in Cartagena, that the peace accord represented a threat to children because of its “gender ideology.”

Evangelical Christians, who number several million in Colombia, vote in a disciplined manner, and their preachers have told them to vote “no”. The local Catholic Church leaders, despite Pope Francis’ support for the peace talks, declared themselves neutral with regard to the referendum.

“The referendum will define which direction this will take,” said Carlos Lozano, director of the Communist weekly publication Voz, who was close to the Havana talks.

“If the ‘no’ vote wins, which I don’t believe will happen, things would change a great deal, even if the war didn’t break out again,” he told IPS.

“It would be very difficult to hold another process of peace talks and reach another agreement,” he said. “It’s a document that has consensus support, which is worthy of the state, worthy of the guerrillas, and was built with great care, in a very detailed manner.”

Social actors and government representatives sign a social and political pact for reparations and peace in Colombia on Apr. 11, the National Day of Remembrance and Solidarity with the Victims of the Conflict. Credit: UARIV

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, May 16 2016 (IPS)

“If you’re going to talk about Colombia and the peace process, do it somewhere else,” was heard at a regional preparatory meeting for the World Humanitarian Summit, according to Ramón Rodríguez, with the Colombian government’s Unit for Attention and Integral Reparation for Victims (UARIV).

“Cuba’s representative, for example, stated: ‘This is a World Humanitarian Summit, we’re going to talk about humanitarian questions in general, and not specific cases,” the official said with respect to the preparations for the first gathering of its kind, to be held May 23-24 in Istanbul.

“For the organisers of the World Humanitarian Summit, disasters are the main issue. They practically fobbed us off,” added Rodríguez, UARIV’s director of social and humanitarian questions, in an interview with IPS in his Bogotá office.

This is true even though United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, when he called the summit, declared that “We must ensure no-one in conflict, no-one in chronic poverty, and no-one living with the risk of natural hazards and rising sea levels is left behind.”

In any case, “the issue (of the Colombian armed conflict) draws a lot of attention, although it is very limited,” said Rodríguez, an industrial engineer who organised and directs the world’s biggest humanitarian aid logistics system, in terms of percentage of a national budget that goes to citizens of the country itself.

Colombia is the only country in Latin America and the Caribbean where a humanitarian crisis has been declared due to internal armed conflict.

In nearly seventy years of civil war in different shapes and formats, the counting of and attention to victims has undergone major changes. Today there is basically industrial-level aid, adapted to a lengthy, calculated disaster.

“We, the government, are the main humanitarian actor in Colombia,” said Rodríguez. “We have an emergency response team. We work with humanitarian organisations through local humanitarian teams.”

Perhaps the main lesson that the Colombian government learned was that it had to count the number of victims and people affected by the conflict, in order to address the humanitarian crisis in its true magnitude. Until 2004, getting the government to admit the number of victims was a tug-of-war.

In 1962, a study on Violence in Colombia (by Guzmán, Fals and Umaña) estimated that 200,000 people were killed between 1948 and 1962.

The victims of forced displacement began to be counted in 1985 by the Catholic Church, at the time the only non-governmental institution with the capacity to carry out a national census of displaced persons.

In 1994, the government put the number of displaced persons at 600,000; however, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) counted 900,000.

But it was a 2004 Constitutional Court sentence that ordered the government to – gradually – acknowledge the real number of displaced persons, thus recognising the effects of the war.

The Court has been able to verify compliance with the ruling thanks to the support of a non-governmental alliance of academics and researchers: the Follow-up Commission on Public Policies on Forced Displacement.

Finally, in 2011, on the initiative of the government of current President Juan Manuel Santos, whose term began in 2010, the Victims and Land Restitution Law was approved. Among the many measures it involved, it created the UARIV.

At the time, the government recognised 4.5 million people affected by the war in a country of 48 million.

The UARIV opened a Single Registry of Victims, which up to Apr. 1, 2016 had counted a total of 8,040,748 victims since 1985.

Apart from the debate on whether the victims were undercounted, or the number of victims grew, or what grew was the number counted by the state, today UARIV knows that 84.2 percent of the registered victims are displaced persons, and that 45.4 percent come from the geostrategic, resource-rich and dynamic department of Antioquia in northwest Colombia.

It also reports that when the threats peak, this coincides with a peak in forced displacement of people from their land, which intensified between 1995 and 2007, while kidnappings (which account for 0.5 percent of victims) peaked in 2002 and are now becoming a thing of the past.

The UARIV also recognises that the worst years of the war were between 2000 and 2008, and that 2015 has been the most peaceful year since 1985.

In addition, the unit reports that among the victims there are slightly more women than men, while children are the single largest group. And it says one-fourth of the victims are black or indigenous people.

Rodríguez has kept up his monitoring as the peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas continue in Havana.

“I asked for a report for the Jan. 1-Apr. 30 period,” he said. “In the same period last year we had 15 mass displacements. In 2016 we had 16. In 2015 1,425 families were affected, 5,721 people. So far this year we have 1,200 more people. Which means that there was an increase in the number of people affected between 2015 and 2016.”

The increase is attributed to criminal bands made up of former far-right paramilitaries, and to the National Liberation Army (ELN), a smaller left-wing rebel group, with which the government recently announced the start of talks.

Colombia is now on the verge of a peace deal. But Rodríguez said it will take “three to five years to achieve peace. There will be an upsurge in violence,” not only because of former paramilitaries but also guerrillas who refuse to lay down their arms.

“Something that should be shown at the World Humanitarian Summit is the rise in violence that is going to occur when the peace agreement is signed. The question of control territory is of great importance to the armed actors, and converges with economic aspects,” said the official.

For Rodríguez, the “victim response, assistance and reparations model” that Colombia has come up with is another key element that would be useful to share at the Istanbul summit.

The model has two phases. The first, immediate humanitarian aid, operates within 48 hours after acts of violence, and comes in two forms: funds, through the municipalities, and in kind, through operators who are subcontracted, who were paid a combined total of more than five million dollars in 2015 for providing services.

Several months later, the victims are registered in the Single Registry of Victims, and emergency and transition aid (for housing and food) begins. The last phase is reparations, which includes indemnification of different kinds.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Participants in the biannual International Civil Society Week 2016, held in Bogotá, waiting for the start of one of the activities in the event that drew some 900 activists from more than 100 countries. Credit: CIVICUS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Apr 29 2016 (IPS)

When Tamara Adrián, a Venezuelan transgender opposition legislator, spoke at a panel on inclusion during the last session of the International Civil Society Week held in Bogotá, 12 Latin American women stood up and stormed out of the room.

Adrián was talking about corruption in Venezuela, governed by “Chavista” (for the late Hugo Chávez) President Nicolás Maduro, and the blockade against reforms sought by the opposition, which now holds a majority of seats in the legislature.

The speaker who preceded her, from the global watchdog Transparency International, referred to corruption among left-wing governments in South America.

Outside the auditorium in the Plaza de Artesanos, a square surrounded by parks on the west side of Bogotá, the women, who represented social movements, argued that, by stressing corruption on the left, the right forgot about cases like that of Fernando Collor (1990-1992), a right-wing Brazilian president impeached for corruption.“Together, civil society has power…If we work together and connect with what others are doing in other countries, what we do will also make more sense.” -- Raaida Manaa

“Why don’t they mention those who have staged coups in Latin America and who have been corrupt?” asked veteran Salvadoran activist Marta Benavides.

Benavides told IPS she was not against everyone expressing their opinions, “but they should at least show respect. We don’t all agree with what they’re saying: that Latin America is corrupt. It’s a global phenomenon, and here we have to tell the truth.”

That truth, according to her, is that “Latin America is going through a very difficult situation, with different kinds of coups d’etat.”

She clarified that her statement wasn’t meant to defend President Dilma Rousseff, who is facing impeachment for allegedly manipulating the budget, or the governing left-wing Workers’ Party.

“I want people to talk about the real corruption,” she said. “In Brazil those who staged the 1964 coup (which ushered in a dictatorship until 1985) want to return to power to continue destroying everything; but this will affect everyone, and not just Brazil, its people and its resources.”

In Benavides’ view, all of the panelists “were telling lies” and no divergent views were expressed.

But when the women indignantly left the room, they missed the talk given on the same panel by Emilio Álvarez-Icaza, executive secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), who complained that all of the governments in the Americas – right-wing, left-wing, north and south – financially strangled the IACHR and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Emilio Álvarez-Icaza, executive secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the last one on the right, speaking at an International Civil Society Week panel on the situation of activism in Latin America. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

He warned that “An economic crisis is about to break out in the Inter-American human rights system,” which consists of the IACHR and the Court, two autonomous Organisation of American States (OAS) bodies.

“In the regular financing of the OAS, the IACHR is a six percent priority, and the Inter-American Court, three percent,” said Álvarez-Icaza.

“They say budgets are a clear reflection of priorities. We are a nine percent priority,” he said, referring to these two legal bodies that hold states to account and protect human rights activists and community organisers by means of precautionary measures.

He described as “unacceptable and shameful” that the system “has been maintained with donations from Europe or other actors.”

There were multiple voices in this disparate assembly gathered in the Colombian capital since Sunday Apr. 24. The meeting organised by the global civil society alliance CIVICUS, which carried the hashtag ICSW2016 on the social networks, drew some 900 delegates from more than 100 countries.

The ICSW2016 ended Friday Apr. 29 with the election of a new CIVICUS board of directors.

Tutu Alicante, a human rights lawyer from Equatorial Guinea, is considered an “enemy of the state” and lives in exile in the United States. He told IPS that “we are very isolated from the rest of Africa. We need Latin America’s help to present our cases at a global level.”

Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang has been in power for 37 years. On Sunday Apr. 24 he was reelected for another seven years with over 93 percent of the vote, in elections boycotted by the opposition. His son is vice president and has been groomed to replace him.

“Because of the U.S. and British interests in our oil and gas, we believe that will happen,” Alicante stated.

He said the most interesting aspect of the ICSW2016 was the people he met, representatives of “global civil society working to build a world that is more equitable and fair.”

He added, however, that “indigenous and afro communities were missing.”

“We’re in Colombia, where there is an important afro community that is not here at the assembly,” Alicante said. “But there is a sense that we are growing and a spirit of including more people.”

He was saying this just when one of the most important women in Colombia’s indigenous movement, Leonor Zalabata, came up. A leader of the Arhuaco people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains, she has led protests demanding culturally appropriate education and healthcare, and indigenous autonomy, while organising women in her community.

She was a keynote speaker at the closing ceremony Thursday evening.

A woman with an Arab name and appearance, Raaida Manaa, approached by IPS, turned out to be a Colombian journalist of Lebanese descent who lives in Barranquilla, the main city in this country’s Caribbean region.

She works with the Washington-based International Association for Volunteer Effort.

“The most important” aspect of the ICSW2016 is that it is being held just at this moment in Colombia, whose government is involved in peace talks with the FARC guerrillas. This, she said, underlines the need to set out on the path to peace “in a responsible manner, with a strategy and plan to do things right.”

The title she would use for an article on the ICSW2016 is: “Together, civil society has power.” And the lead would be: “If we work together and connect with what others are doing in other countries, what we do will also make more sense.”

In Colombia there is a large Arab community. Around 1994, the biggest Palestinian population outside the Middle East was living in Colombia, although many fled when the civil war here intensified.

“The peaceful struggle should be the only one,” 2015 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Ali Zeddini of the Tunisian Human Rights League, who took part in the ICSW2016, said Friday morning.

But, he added, “you can’t have a lasting peace if the Palestinian problem is not solved.” Since global pressure managed to put an end to South Africa’s apartheid, the next big task is Palestine, he said.

Zeddini expressed strong support for the Nobel peace prize nomination of Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader serving five consecutive life sentences in an Israeli prison. He was arrested in 2002, during the second Intifada.

 Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Tunisian 2015 Peace Prize-winner Ali Zeddini (left), next to Sri Lankan activist Danny Sriskandarajah, secretary general of Civicus, and two other participants in the International Civil Society Week, hosted by Bogotá from Apr. 25-28, with the participation of 900 activists from more than 100 countries. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Apr 26 2016 (IPS)

Collusion, according to the dictionary, means “secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others.” That is what the world’s political and economic elites engage in, according to Danny Sriskandarajah, secretary general of the international civil society alliance CIVICUS.

The reason for this is that they are afraid of dissent, the activist from Sri Lanka said Monday, Apr. 25, the first day of the International Civil Society Week 2016 which has drawn 900 civil society delegates from all continents to the Colombian capital.

This is the first time the biannual CIVICUS event is being held in Latin America.

In Sriskandarajah’s view, this is the reason that protests by young people in every region of the world are cracked down on by the police, often brutally.

He also said this is why civil society organisations are facing a global crisis, with governments that seek to impose their policies.

To do so, more governments are making overseas funding of civil society organisations illegal, while at the same time stepping up state surveillance of their online activities, due to fear of the power of civil society and the social networks to mobilise citizens to protest.

To this is added intimidation and repression which, in many cases, are curbing people’s ability to fight for a broad range of human rights.

Fundamental freedoms are under attack, said organisers and delegates.

CIVICUS tracks threats to basic freedoms of speech, expression and association in over 100 countries. In 2015, it counted 156 murders of human rights defenders worldwide.

Last year, half of the rights violations documented by CIVICUS happened in Latin America, where human rights defenders were the main targets. The most dangerous country was Colombia.

During more than three years of peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas, over 500 community organisers and activists have been murdered in Colombia, especially small farmers and rural leaders seeking to reclaim land belonging to their families and communities, as well as human rights activists supporting their struggle.

The global crackdown on activism has continued in 2016. Two high-profile cases were the murders of Honduran human rights activist Berta Cáceres and South African community leader Sikhosiphi Bazooka Rhadebe.

Sriskandarajah said “We need to find new ways to defend activists and hold governments to account for these violations as well as the progress they must make in the fight against poverty, inequality and climate change.”

These and other central ideas form part of the Apr. 25-28 international week in Bogotá, whose hashtag is #ICSW2016. The week will culminate in the CIVICUS World Assembly on Friday Apr. 29.

The organisers were expecting 500 delegates at ICSW2016, but 900, from nearly 100 different countries, showed up. They were received by the host organisation, the Colombian Confederation of NGOs, created in 1989 as an umbrella group for non-governmental organisations fighting for economic, social and cultural rights.

Participants have been inspired by the presence of 2015 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Ali Zeddini of the Tunisian Human Rights League, one of the four organisations that joined forces to guide Tunisia’s spontaneous 2010-2011 Jasmine Revolution during the power vacuum left by dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987-January 2011) after he fled the North African country.

The Tunisian movement was finally successful in bringing about a transition to democracy, with a new constitution that establishes, in articles that cannot even be rewritten by another constituent assembly, that Tunisia is a civil state based on the people’s will, not the will of God. It also guarantees freedom of belief, conscience and religious practice.

The ICSW2016 will review mechanisms that hold governments accountable for murders of activists and other human rights violations. The delegates will also assess the progress made in the fight against poverty, inequality and adaptation to climate change.

Other participants are José Ugaz of Peru, the chair of Transparency International, and South African activist Kumi Naidoo, former head of Greenpeace and current director of the Africa Civil Society Centre.

The participating organisations include the Community of Democracies, Global Philanthropy Project, Article 19, the International Centre for Non-Profit Law, Amnesty International, the International Land Coalition, Abong – the Brazilian Association of NGOS, Transparency International and ACT Alliance.

One of this week’s workshops will address recent trends in the use of technology to empower and mobilise citizens.

One example is DataShift, a social data platform and Civicus initiative “that builds the capacity and confidence of civil society organisations to produce and use citizen‑generated data.”

A Youth Assembly was held Sunday Apr. 24 ahead of the ICSW2016. The delegates discussed solutions to youth poverty and inequality, as well as adaptation to climate change.

IPS spoke to Jhoanna Cifuentes, a Colombian with a degree in biology who is an activist with Red+Vos, a young people’s network. She is taking part in the ICSW2016 in representation of the Colombian Youth Climate Movement (MCJC).

The MCJC was created in 2014 to participate in the annual climate conferences. That year’s edition was held in Peru.

“We realised there was no space for young Colombians to come together and make their voices heard,” Cifuentes said. “We didn’t know each other, we all worked with different focuses. Our 10 groups organised and joined forces.”

The experience showed her that these civil society meetings are a chance to meet and network with people involved in similar activism. Because, she said, “Our work can’t just be limited to the local level, we have to have a wider influence.”

The Youth Assembly put out a statement on priority issues for young people, such as inclusion, gender and the environment. “But in order for these questions not to remain just on paper, it is the duty of each one of us to develop these initiatives and concerns in the organisations we work with,” Cifuentes said.

“I think a meeting like this one serves that purpose: to share information and make contacts in order to form networks, to work together in the future,” she added.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates, Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyanolombia, and Colombia, María Ángela Holguín, signed eight cooperation accords late Tuesday Feb. 9 during the Emirati minister’s visit to the South American nation, during a ceremony in the San Carlos Palace, the foreign ministry in Bogotá. Credit: Gloria Ortega/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ, Feb 10 2016 (IPS)

“I am honoured to be in Colombia at a time when important steps towards peace are being taken,” the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, said after meeting with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

In Havana, the Santos administration is holding peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, which have been fighting since 1964. Agreement has been reached on four of the six points on the agenda, including bringing in the United Nations Security Council to oversee any eventual ceasefire agreement.

“You have been caught up in a brutal civil war for a very long time,” said Al Nahyan. “Our region is also in the middle of a very difficult fight against terrorism.

“We would like to learn from your experience in dealing with terrorism and terrorists,” he added.

Late on Tuesday, Feb. 9, the first day of his two-day visit to Colombia, Al Nahyan and Colombia’s foreign minister María Ángela Holguín signed agreements in the areas of cooperation in infrastructure, tourism, trade and investment, renewable energies and culture.

“I’m convinced that through the United Arab Emirates we will be able to reach the Gulf countries, and get to know that region of the world better,” Holguin said during the ceremony held to announce the accords.

“We have all the tools needed to strengthen a very important relationship and continue along the road to generating more development for Colombia and greater opportunities for the UAE,” added Holguín, who described Al Nahyan’s visit as “very beneficial” for bilateral relations.

In the San Carlos Palace, Colombia’s foreign ministry, the two ministers signed four agreements, including a Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA), which offers investors legal security “and will give Emirati companies peace of mind,” said Holguín.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos greets the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan, in the Casa de Nariño, the seat of the presidency, at the start of their Feb. 9 meeting in Bogotá during the Emirati minister’s visit to this South American country. Credit: Presidency of Colombia

They also signed a Tax Information Exchange Agreement (TIEA), which was negotiated in February 2014 during a visit to Colombia by a UAE Finance Ministry delegation, and was pending the ministers’ signatures. The first round of negotiations on the FIPA was also held at that time.

In addition, the foreign ministers signed a Framework Agreement in Cultural, Educational and Sports Cooperation and a Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in Environmental Protection, Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, an area in which the two countries have acted in a coordinated manner in global diplomatic forums.

Finally, they signed an agreement from a meeting held Monday Feb. 8 in Bogotá by the Colombia-UAE Joint Cooperation Committee, which is pushing for a strengthening of the growing trade relations between the two countries.

After a meeting in which 60 members of the business communities from both countries took part, the UAE Federation of Chambers of Commerce signed memorandums of understanding with Colombia’s National Industrial Association and Confederation of Chambers of Commerce.

Documents on bilateral cooperation in tourism and innovation in small and medium companies were also signed.

Holguín said the agreements would expedite progress on “more documents” in the near future.

Colombia and the UAE established diplomatic ties 40 years ago. But it was the opening of embassies, in Abu Dhabi in 2011 and in Bogotá in 2013, that basically launched bilateral relations.

Colombia, according to the Emirati minister, was among the first countries to support the UAE’s candidacy to host the World Expo 2020 in Dubai, the first that will be held in the Middle East.

Colombia was the second stop in Al Nahyan’s official Latin America tour, which took him first to Argentina. After visiting the colonial city of Cartagena on Wednesday Feb. 10, to see the port infrastructure, he will continue on to Panama and Costa Rica, before heading home.

An enthusiastic Holguín said her Emirati guest “wants to see the ports, and we hope he will get excited and bring hotel owners to Cartagena, which would also be very important for development in our country.”

“The news is that, first, closer bilateral ties were forged with this tour, which will of course translate into numbers,” Cecilia Porras, the president of the Colombian-Arab Chamber of Commerce (CCCA), told IPS.

“The Arab press is giving a great deal of coverage to this tour because relations with each one of the countries of Latin America are giving a major boost to two-way investment, technology transfer and trade,” she added.

According to the CCCA , Colombia’s exports to the UAE reached 97.6 million dollars in 2014 – the last year for which solid figures are available – nearly double the 50.6 million of the year before, and a far cry from the 11.6 million in exports in 2012.

The difference between 2012 and the following two years is explained by Colombia’s oil exports to the UAE. Although it might sound strange for one of the world’s leaders in oil production to be importing oil from Colombia, the viscosity of this country’s petroleum is useful for the UAE’s blends and for use in the petrochemical industry.

Besides oil, Colombia has exported a variety of goods to the UAE, amounting to between 12 and 14 million dollars, said Porras.

These exports include cut flowers, plants, coffee – although through intermediaries in other countries, such as the United States – gold, emeralds, leather goods such as saddles, designer clothing, knitted fabrics, furniture, sugar and confectionary products, while the UAE exports to Colombia construction materials, doors, windows, ceramics and tubing, as well as petroleum by-products.

Visits to the UAE by Colombian tourists grew 23 percent between December 2014 and December 2015, based on the number of visas arranged by the CCCA, which organises business trips.

In 2014, during a visit by Holguín to the UAE, the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding for political consultation, aimed at facilitating dialogue on bilateral, regional or global issues.

The UAE and Colombia cooperated closely in the negotiations on the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda. Colombia has also played an active role in the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), based in Abu Dhabi.

In January, the Gabriel Plazas public school in the Colombian town of Villavieja, in the Tatacoa desert in the central department or province of Huila, was one of the eight 2016 winners of the Zayed Future Energy Prize, created in 2008 by the UAE government to celebrate innovation and leadership in renewable energy and sustainability.

The 100,000 dollar prize will enable the school to build a “bioclimatic” lunchroom using sustainable construction techniques from the past that keep the school cool in a natural manner, in a desert climate where temperatures remain between 22 and 38 degrees Celsius year-round.

The school will be equipped with solar energy and water extracted from deep wells by means of wind power.

According to data provided by local journalist Luisa Fernanda Dávila, from the Huila newspaper Opanoticias, the cafeteria will be used to serve a healthy lunch to the 539 students, who are the sons and daughters of poor farmers and families displaced by the armed conflict.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Journalist Juan Gossaín (left) and the Colombian government’s chief negotiator Humberto de la Calle in the latter’s apartment in Cartagena de Indias, during an interview about the peace talks with the FARC. Credit: Omar Nieto/Prensa de Presidencia de Colombia

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ, Jul 7 2015 (IPS)

There is a growing sensation in Colombia that the peace talks with the FARC guerrillas are “about to come to an end” – in success or failure, according to the government’s chief negotiator, Humberto de la Calle.

In his apartment overlooking the sea in the Caribbean coastal city of Cartagena de Indias, former vice president De la Calle (1994-1996) was interviewed by veteran Colombian journalist Juan Gossaín. The two used to work together on the morning news and talk programme of the RCN Radio station, which Gossaín headed for 26 years, until 2010.

The interview was more like a friendly conversation, without a question and answer format. It was distributed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace to be published Sunday Jul. 5.

The chief negotiator, generally reluctant to talk to the media, warned that the government might walk away from the talks: “I want to tell the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in all seriousness, this could end. It is likely that one day they won’t find us at the negotiating table in Havana’.”

“The patience of Colombians is running out. The risk is real,” said De la Calle, although he also stated that the process could end “because we reach an agreement, since in this final stretch we are dealing with important underlying issues.”

As De la Calle said, “although it seems like a paradox, the peace process has received more support from outside than here at home.”

President Juan Manuel Santos worked painstakingly and in secret to launch peace talks after taking office in August 2010.

And while in the talks themselves the government has never threatened to pull out, it has made such statements to the media in the past.

In October 2012 the talks were officially launched in Oslo, two years after Santos was sworn in, with Cuba and Norway as guarantors and Chile and Venezuela as facilitators. Since then the meetings have been held in Havana, where the 38th round of talks is now taking place.

Under the principle that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” preliminary accords have been reached on three of the six main points on the agenda, in 32 months of talks.

These three points involve a wide range of aspects related to land reform; political participation; and the substitution of drug crops.

The pending items involve the right of victims on both sides to truth, justice and reparations; disarmament; and mechanisms for the implementation of an eventual peace deal.

The negotiations are taking place as the decades-long conflict drags on, and it looks like a clause stipulating that nothing that happens on the battlefield can affect the talks has fallen by the wayside.

The intensification of hostilities is costing lives and causing environmental disasters, and support for a continued military offensive, rather than a negotiated peace, is growing again.

But the same thing happened 15 years ago, as indicated by Gallup poll results.

To the question “what do you believe is the best way to solve the problem of the guerrillas in Colombia?” the response in June 2015 was a tie between those who selected the option “continue the talks until reaching a peace agreement” and those who chose “no talks; try to defeat them militarily.”

A similar tie was seen in July 2003, March 2004, October 2010 and June 2011, while in the rest of the polls carried out, a majority chose a negotiated solution.

Since 2001, a majority of respondents have consistently supported peace talks over a military solution, with the exception of the December 2001- July 2003 period.

But since December 2001, respondents have said they do not believe the insurgents could ever seize power by force.

Looking at Gallup polls over the past 15 years, it is clear that De la Calle’s assertion that “people are more skeptical than ever” regarding the peace talks is not true. The results indicate that, no matter what happens, the sense of “desperation” that the chief negotiator mentioned, and that his interviewer emphasised, fluctuates.

“We have to be honest enough to tell Colombians that the peace process is at its lowest ebb since the talks began,” De la Calle said.

But why is that happening? It’s the question of justice, he said. “It is the touchiest part of the negotiations. The FARC have to assume responsibility for their actions. The state does too, of course.”

De la Calle said the Colombian government would only agree to a ceasefire if the top FARC leaders spent some time in prison for crimes against humanity – although the negotiator said they would be held “in decent conditions, without bars or striped uniforms.”

He also acknowledged that the FARC “have said they are willing to accept a system of justice that would include these components.”

If that is true, it’s not clear where exactly the problem lies.

In February, the attorney general’s office revealed that it planned to investigate over 14,000 businessmen, ranchers, politicians and members of the security forces with alleged ties to the partially dismantled far-right paramilitaries.

Almost simultaneously, former president César Gaviria (1990-1994) proposed for these non-combatants “a pardon in exchange for their recognition of the crimes committed, an apology, and a willingness to provide reparations for the victims.”

Segments of the business community and some political factions welcomed or expressed an openness to discussing the proposal, others rejected it, and others were concerned or upset.

In any case, the ever vulnerable climate surrounding the peace talks became even more tense.

Not long afterwards, the negotiators in Havana announced a preliminary agreement regarding an issue that is especially thorny for those who not only enjoy impunity but have also been active behind the scenes, anonymously: a non-prosecutorial truth commission.

Above and beyond the discussion on justice and punishment, De la Calle says the main obstacle now faced in the peace talks is the question of a bilateral ceasefire – “the FARC’s top priority,” in his view. The insurgents would also have to stop raising funds through practices like extortion and involvement in the drug trade, he added.

A bilateral ceasefire when “there are other sources of violence, besides the FARC,” as De la Calle rightly points out?

The much smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) would appear to be awaiting the results of the peace talks with the FARC before launching its own negotiations, while remaining active.

Then there are the ultra-right-wing paramilitary groups that either did not take part in the 2003-2006 partial demobilisation or regrouped as what the government calls “Bacrim” – for “bandas criminales” or “criminal bands”.

“We can’t tell the security forces to stay quiet,” De la Calle said. “If they want a ceasefire, the government is willing to do that, but ‘concentration zones’ would be essential.”

In these “rural concentration zones” first demanded by Álvaro Uribe during his presidency (2002-2010), “convicted guerrillas would be held for a time, without requiring that they turn in their weapons,” De la Calle explained.

IPS postponed publication of this article in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a response by email from FARC chief negotiator Iván Márquez to several of De la Calle’s statements.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The first delegation of victims of Colombia’s armed conflict offer a press conference after their talks with the government and FARC negotiators on Aug. 16 in Havana, Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Aug 25 2014 (IPS)

Three major advances were made over the last week in the peace talks that have been moving forward in Cuba for nearly two years between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas, while the decades-old civil war rages on.

On Saturday Aug. 16, a group of relatives of victims of both sides met face-to-face in the Cuban capital. It was the first time in the world that victims have sat down at the same table with representatives of their victimisers in negotiations to put an end to a civil war.

And on Thursday Aug. 21 an academic commission was set up to study the roots of the conflict and the factors that have stood in the way of bringing it to an end.

That day, the unthinkable happened.

High-level army, air force, navy and police officers flew to Cuba, under the command of General Javier Alberto Flórez, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In the 24-hour technical mission they met with their archenemies, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which emerged in 1964) to discuss “how to implement a definitive bilateral ceasefire, and how the FARC would disband and lay down their arms,” said President Juan Manuel Santos.

Santos described the participation of active officers in the talks, as part of a subcommission installed on Friday Aug. 22, as “a historic step forward.”

Twelve victims, of the 60 who will travel to Havana in five groups, met for nearly seven hours on Aug. 16 with the FARC and government negotiators, who included two retired generals, one of whom was Jorge Enrique Mora Rangel, an army officer accused of human rights abuses.At one extreme, former rightwing President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) proposes the creation of a higher court to review the sentences handed down against members of the security forces from 1980 to 2026, and to release them while the sentences are revised. At the other extreme, the FARC do not recognise Colombia’s legal system as having the authority to try the guerrillas, once a peace agreement is reached.

The group of 12 was made up of six relatives of victims of crimes of state and of the far-right paramilitaries (which partially demobilised in the last decade), four victims of the FARC, and two victims of two or three different armed actors.

It was “a unique experiment that has not been seen anywhere else,” according to Fabrizio Hochschild, representative of the United Nations in Colombia.

In previous forums in Colombia, thousands of family members of victims have expressed their main demands: the truth about what happened to their loved ones, improvements in the mechanisms for reparations, guarantees that what happened will not be repeated, and justice.

The negotiators gave the task of selecting the groups of victims’ relatives to the U.N., Colombia’s National University, and the Catholic bishops’ conference. They were chosen from an official universe of 6.7 million victims and survivors, including 5.7 million victims of forced displacement, most of whom are small-scale farmers.

In the Colombian conflict, the last civil war in Latin America, the dead number at least 420,000 since 1946, including more than 220,000 since 1958, according to commissions for the historic memory set up in 1962 and 2012.

The creation of a Historical Commission on the Conflict and Victims (CHCV), at the behest of the negotiating table, was announced Thursday Aug. 21.

The commission consists of six academics and one rapporteur named by each side, for a total of 14 historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economist and political scientists.

The CHCV will analyse the origins of the armed conflict, the aspects that have stood in the way of a solution, and the question of who is responsible for its impacts on the population.

The rapporteurs will produce a joint report, by late December, although they will not “attribute individual responsibilities” and the report “must not be written with the aim of achieving specific legal effects,” the negotiating table stipulated.

This is not a truth commission, which should emerge once a peace agreement is signed. But it is a firm step in that direction.

Meanwhile, the aspect that appears to be foremost in the mind of public opinion in Colombia is neither the question of truth nor how to guarantee that the atrocities won’t happen again; it is the question of justice.

At one extreme, former rightwing President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) proposes the creation of a higher court to review the sentences handed down against members of the security forces from 1980 to 2026, and to release them while the sentences are revised.

At the other extreme, the FARC do not recognise Colombia’s legal system as having the authority to try the guerrillas, once a peace agreement is reached.

That position is based on a certain logic: if the guerrilla group is part of the negotiations, along with the state, and both have committed crimes, the state “cannot be both judge and jury,” the FARC negotiator, a commander whose nom de guerre is Pablo Catatumbo, told IPS in Havana.

At the same time, the families of victims of forced disappearance do not accept impunity.

The victims’ families asked the negotiators on both sides not to get up from the table until an agreement is reached.

But the fragility of the peace talks, held under the principle of “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” is evident.

There are still 28 pending aspects in the three points that have been agreed, of the six points on the agenda for the talks. It will be difficult to reach a consensus on these unresolved aspects, which are marked in red: 14 sub-points in the area of agriculture, 10 in political participation and four in the area of illegal drugs.

The CHVC is to make recommendations for reaching agreement on these sub-points.
Besides its interest in the question of justice, the public wants the FARC to demobilise and lay down their arms.

General Mora Rangel said in June “they must demobilise and hand over their weapons…they have to do so to join society and Colombia’s democratic system.”

But according to peace analyst Carlos Velandia, there will be no demobilisation, no laying down of arms, and no reinsertion.

There will be no photo ops of a “mass demobilisation”, like the ceremonies held in the mid-2000s showing the paramilitaries handing in their weapons, he said. Instead armed structures will be transformed into political structures, although the mechanism has not been worked out yet, he added.

And unlike in the case of the paramilitaries, “there won’t be thousands of insurgents stretching out their hands for ‘Papá State’ to help them,” he said.

Despite the obstacles, “the problem doesn’t lie over there, where both sides are taking a proactive stance,” a Catholic priest who is well-informed on what is going on in the talks in Havana told IPS.

The problem lies in Colombia, he said, where Uribe – now an extreme-right senator and a leader of the opposition in the legislature – had an enormous influence on public opinion during his two terms as president.

Uribe is “working on” businesspersons, bankers, large-scale merchants, and some journalists, to win them over in his fierce campaign against the peace talks, the priest said.

“Santos isn’t a leader, he’s a follower. If the country turns against him, he’ll abandon the peace process,” he maintained.

If there is strong public support for an eventual peace deal, the powerful oligarchy’s pressure on Santos could convince him to block a referendum on the peace agreement.
But if Uribe and victimisers who do not want to be more openly identified by the victims manage to foment rejection of the peace talks among voters, they would not object to a referendum on an eventual peace accord.

A precedent for this was set in Guatemala, where turnout for a referendum on a peace deal that put an end to 36 years of civil war – 1960-1996 – was extremely low, and among the few voters who did show up, a majority rejected the peace agreement.

In Colombia’s peace talks in Havana, the mechanism of a popular referendum is the sixth point on the agenda, which is still pending, and Santos has not referred to it in public.

To block these maneuvers, “there have to be more and more decisions aimed at recognising the legitimacy of the talks, including acts of truth and forgiveness. That will make it more likely, although not more sure, that the peace process will move forward successfully,” because “the more people who can forgive, the closer we are to seeing peace win out,” the priest said.

Different sectors of society agree on the need for “a new social pact” to approve the accords and work out the pending aspects marked in red. For the FARC and many others, on the left or the far right, these pacts should be reached through a constituent assembly that would rewrite the constitution. But Santos would appear to be leaning towards a referendum instead.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Shaman Víctor Jacanamijoy, spiritual leader of the Inga indigenous people from the Colombian province of Putumayo, leads a ceremony in Bogotá during a Jun. 11 “spiritual harmonisation for peace” event organised nationwide by native authorities to send out a clear message for the elections. Credit: Courtesy of Tatiana Ramírez/ONIC

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Jun 11 2014 (IPS)

Colombians will basically decide Sunday whether to continue the five decade counterinsurgency war or persevere in the attempt to negotiate a political solution to the conflict, in order to allow the children being born this year to experience what their parents have never known: a country at peace.

Depending on the outcome of the Jun. 15 runoff election, an emerging violent sector could take over control of the state, perhaps for the next few decades.

In the second round of the elections to choose the president who will govern this war-torn South American country for the next four years there does not seem to be much choice, between the centre right and the extreme right.

The former is represented by sitting President Juan Manuel Santos, who is seeking reelection, and the latter by Óscar Iván Zuluaga, a follower of senator-elect and former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

The two candidates are now neck and neck in the polls, after Zuluaga took 29.3 percent of the vote and Santos followed with 25.7 percent in the first round on May 25, when turnout stood at 41 percent.

Both candidates would apply neoliberal, free-market policies, according to which a prospering business community is the lever for the country’s development. They would both keep taxes low for the wealthy, while providing cash subsidies for the poor financed with the revenue expected over the next 20 years or so from the massive production of oil, coal and gold by multinational corporations.

Neither of the two promise to industrialise the country with the capital generated by these non-renewable resources. And both support free trade agreements and associations, which threaten the production of many national industries as well as agriculture, and more specifically small farmers.

Both candidates were ministers under Uribe: Zuluaga headed the Finance Ministry and Santos the Defence Ministry.

Under the Uribe administration some 2.5 million people were displaced by the war and at least 3,000 civilians were murdered by the military and passed off as guerrillas killed in combat – so-called “false positives” – under a body count system in which members of the armed forces were offered incentives like weekend passes, cash bonuses, promotions and trips abroad for killing insurgents.

Zuluaga is seen by his opponents as Uribe’s puppet.

But while Santos was elected in 2010 with the votes of the right, including Uribe supporters, he angered his former boss as soon as he took office by countering several of the ex-president’s main policies and criticising some of his government’s actions – prompting fierce opposition from Uribe.

Santos also patched things up with his awkward neighbour, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez – detested by Uribe – who governed from 1999 until his premature death in 2013.

With Chávez’s aid, Santos undertook negotiations to put an end to the war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which was founded as a communist-inspired peasant army and turned 50 years old on May 27.

After two years of exploratory talks, formal negotiations began in November 2012 in Havana. The talks are closely followed by the international community, and are moving ahead even as the conflict rages on, because Santos has not agreed to declare a ceasefire.

Now, five days ahead of the runoff vote, Santos and a smaller but more radical guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), which also emerged in 1964, announced that since January they have been holding exploratory talks that could lead to formal negotiations.

The exploratory phase with the FARC was kept secret and only revealed once it gave rise to full-blown talks. So because he reported the contacts made with the ELN, Santos was accused this week of using the peace talks for electioneering purposes.

In Colombia, the armed conflict has always been decided at the ballot box. Without fail, candidates promise to bring it to an end, with the only difference being in how they propose to do so: by a negotiated solution or promising once more to defeat the rebels by military means?

While Uribe opted for the latter, Santos has combined the two approaches.

Zuluaga, like Uribe, denies that there is an armed conflict in Colombia, referring instead to “the terrorist threat.” He has accused Santos of “negotiating with terrorists.”

Santos responds that the money that is swallowed up by the war could catapult Colombia into the big leagues of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – the so-called rich countries’ club.

Zuluaga initially announced that he would suspend the peace talks as his first measure as president – although he later toned down the threat.

But he said that he was not bound by what had been agreed so far by the two sides in the negotiations.

There is a real possibility that he might withdraw from the FARC talks at the first chance, and that he may never launch negotiations with the ELN, if he becomes president.

The risk that Zuluaga could sink the peace process, seen by international observers as a serious attempt at peace, has led to the unthinkable: two-thirds of the left, according to surveys, say they would vote for Santos – who represents the traditional oligarchy – even though they only see eye to eye with him with regard to his peace policy.

The other one-third of the left see no difference between Santos and Zuluaga/Uribe and say they have serious doubts that Santos will live up to any agreement signed with the guerrillas.

There is a real possibility of that. Which is why the unprecedented backing of Santos’s reelection by anti-establishment sectors takes on even greater significance.

This has been fuelled, in the last 15 days, by a new movement in support of the peace talks. Every day, dozens of initiatives emerge, by artistes, intellectuals, victims’ organisations, central trade unions, indigenous and women’s groups, journalists and political leaders, to protect what has been achieved so far and press for the talks to continue.

This diverse, and partly spontaneous, pressure group could make the peace talks truly irreversible if Santos wins. But in any case the movement would be more organised to confront Zuluaga if he was to walk away from the negotiating table as president.

In contrast with those who do not see any differences between Santos and Zuluaga and his mentor, the reality is that Colombia’s economic elite is divided. And this is precisely why Santos has managed to push his peace policy forward so far.

Álvaro Uribe forms part of an emerging economic elite that has accumulated wealth thanks to the war, and is completely immersed in the logic of confrontation and counterinsurgency.

Uribe is a member of a clan that has been wrapped up in scandals, lawsuits and accusations for its ties with the far-right death squads that grouped together in the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) to fight the guerrillas, but then drove millions of peasants off their land to seize their property.

Perhaps that was why Uribe was the only one who managed to convince the AUC paramilitaries to demobilise; 80 percent of them did so, although many regrouped.

The division seen in Colombia’s leadership may originate in competition over business. Santos represents a more modern segment of the economic elite. For example, they do not need drugs to be illegal – a necessary condition in order for drug trafficking to generate the enormous revenues that financed the AUC.

The sector represented by Santos has done its math and concluded that the armed conflict is an obstacle to economic growth. For at least 15 years, they have believed that better business could be done if Colombia were not caught up in war.

The Jun. 15 elections will demonstrate whether that sector is still a minority.

One-third of senators and over one-fifth of the lower house that will potentially vote on peace accords in Colombia are suspected of links with paramilitaries. Credit: Photo composite by VerdadAbierta.com

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ, Mar 13 2014 (IPS)

In July 2004, when paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso was demobilising, he admitted to the Colombian parliament that the illegal extreme rightwing forces controlled 35 percent of the seats. Ten years later the situation is very similar: one-third of the new senate, where congressional power mainly resides, is allegedly linked to the paramilitaries.

These are the conclusions of the non-governmental Peace and Reconciliation Foundation’s monitoring of candidates in the congressional elections of Sunday Mar. 9.The former president, himself also under investigation for alleged links with the paramilitaries, was angered by the announcement of the peace talks.

Thirty-three candidates related or allegedly related to paramilitary forces active in the Colombian armed conflict were elected to the senate, equivalent to 32.4 percent of the 102 seats. In the lower chamber, 37 were elected, or 22.3 percent of the 166 seats, the Foundation said.

They are the heirs of politicians related to paramilitarism (the parapoliticians, in local terms, dozens of whom have been tried and convicted), or they are alleged to have direct links with the criminal organisations that took over after the paramilitaries demobilised under then president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

The specialised web site VerdadAbierta.com (OpenTruth) says that 15 politicians elected to the senate were under investigation for allegedly making pacts with the paramilitaries, while 11 under the same suspicion won seats in the lower chamber.

This Congress, elected by Colombians with an abstention rate of 56.42 percent, is potentially the most important in half a century.

Apart from the abstentions, among the 14.3 million people who did cast a ballot, over 2.3 million votes were invalid, and 885,375 electors cast blank votes, more than six percent of the total, following a campaign over the social networks promoting this protest action, according to preliminary official data.

This means that lawmakers elected by a minority in this country will decide what happens to the accords that could end a civil war lasting 50 years, and debate new bills arising from the negotiations.

But no party obtained more than 20 percent of the vote, and divisions persist among the elites between support for a negotiated solution and the pursuit of a military outcome. This is one reason why the peace talks have been able to make headway.

Juan Manuel Santos, in office as president since 2010 and now running for reelection for 2014-2018, has achieved significant political consensus in support of his peace efforts, with a five-party National Unity coalition made up of Partido de la U, Cambio Radical, Partido Conservador (all three of the right), Partido Liberal (centre) and Alianza Verde (centre-left).

The coalition has 80 of the senate’s 102 seats, 100 of which are disputed nationally by the parties and the other two set aside for indigenous people’s candidates.

Santos leads voting intention polls for the presidential elections on May 25 by a wide margin. But analysts say he will have to go to a runoff ballot on Jun. 15 to win victory.

If the result bears out the polls, Santos would begin his term with a parliament, installed Jul. 20, with 46 senators in his support, not counting the conservatives, who are divided for and against the peace talks, and he would control the lower chamber, with 92 out of 166 members.

No doubt the Partido Conservador, which went from 22 to 19 seats, will again hold the balance of power, and will demand bureaucratic posts and contracts for its activists in exchange for its support. Four of its elected parliamentarians are under investigation for alleged paramilitarism.

The Partido de la U dropped from 28 seats to 21 in the senate, but continues to be the most voted party. Eight of these senators are under investigation for paramilitary connections. Cambio Radical rose from eight to nine seats, with four elected members under investigation. The Liberals maintained 17 senators, seven of them with alleged paramilitary connections.

Alianza Verde, for its part, still has five senate seats, one of them to be occupied by Claudia López, the main investigator of links between politics and paramilitarism.

According to Verdad Abierta, 16 percent of elected members of Congress for Cambio Radical and 14 percent of those for Partido de la U are under investigation for paramilitarism.

Another party that has supported some of Santos’ initiatives, Opción Ciudadana, is strongly criticised for links with far-right paramilitarism and 27 percent of its lawmakers are under suspicion.

The centre-left Polo Democrático Alternativo fell from five to three senators. This small bloc, which expelled the Partido Comunista from its ranks, could be an ally in the peace process.

According to some analysts, the biggest threat to a negotiated peace now comes from Uribe’s new extreme rightwing party Centro Democrático, which basically won the 19 senate seats lost by the Partido de la U and the Partido Conservador combined.

Uribe wants a military defeat of the guerrillas to force them to surrender their weapons, and to sentence them to prison terms in accordance with their crimes, without adopting measures of so-called transitional justice and without political rights, which would cause the collapse of the peace negotiations.

The former president, himself also under investigation for alleged links with the paramilitaries, was angered by the announcement of the peace talks.

The dimensions of the conflict are shown by justice system and journalistic investigations indicating that Santos and his peace negotiators were spied on by military intelligence agents loyal to Uribe and possibly linked to human rights violations.

Uribe did not achieve his goal of winning one-third of the senate, but the Centro Democrático has more than 14 percent of senate seats and is the second strongest party, with over two million votes.

Thousands of demonstrators have been protesting in Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar against the removal of Mayor Gustavo Petro over his Zero Garbage programme. Credit: Andrés Monroy Gómez/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ, Dec 13 2013 (IPS)

The ousted left-wing mayor of the Colombian capital, Gustavo Petro, is a casualty of the battle over the introduction of a Zero Garbage programme, which had included thousands of informal recyclers in the waste disposal business.

“His removal was arbitrary,” said Nelson Rojas, one of the workers in the city government’s Basura Cero (Zero Garbage) programme.

“We don’t know what is going to happen now,” he told IPS in Plaza de Bolívar, where tens of thousands of people have demonstrated every day in front of city hall in support of the mayor since he was sacked on Monday Dec. 9.

Petro was fired and barred from holding public office for 15 years due to three “extremely serious infringements,” according to the inspector general, Alejandro Ordóñez, who has the authority to investigate and dismiss public officials.

Two of the infringements were logistical and the third was a “violation of the principle of free enterprise.”

The measure against Petro appeared to be final. But legal experts have said they found an article in the constitution establishing that the mayor of Bogotá can only be removed by the president, at the inspector general’s request.

According to the ultra-conservative Ordóñez, the mayor’s decision to put 63 percent of the lucrative waste disposal business in public hands violated the principle of free competition. At the time, the business was run by four private contractors.

The inspector general charged Petro with handing garbage collection over to public companies that supposedly lacked experience and that used garbage dumpsters instead of trucks for six months, which caused the death of one worker.

“There’s a lot of money in waste disposal,” said Rojas, wearing a green Basura Cero uniform. “The private companies are opposed because they got rich off the collection of garbage.

“The inspector general is an ally of the rich and they are against the mayor’s policies,” he said, as people rallied in Plaza de Bolívar, where Petro had urged people to come out to protest his removal.

“The private companies don’t give work to women or to older people,” he said.

Three women and a man wearing the same green coveralls agreed. “In Basura Cero, 60 percent of the workers are women. And it is mainly women who are employed to sweep the streets in Bogotá,” said another one of the protesters.

“More than 3,000 families will be left without a livelihood…we’re going to keep working in Basura Cero, we’re going to protest in shifts,” he added.

Jorge Estrada, 37, also wearing a green coverall, held up a sign with the reasons the mayor was fired: “For giving the recyclers decent working conditions”; “For taking the garbage business out of the hands of the Bogotá mafia”.

This city of eight million people is run as an autonomous capital district made up of 20 municipalities. Over the past year, garbage collection in 12 of them – 63 percent of the waste disposal in the city – has been in the hands of Aguas de Bogotá, a subsidiary of the state-run Empresa de Acueducto y Alcantarillado de Bogotá water and sewage company.

In the rest of the municipalities waste disposal is still carried out by three of the original four private consortiums.

Dec. 18, 2012 was the deadline for the city government to fulfil a constitutional court order for all organised garbage pickers to be included in the waste disposal business nationwide. The aim was to create equal conditions for those who make a living scavenging for and reselling recyclable materials.

Petro’s predecessors failed to fulfil a similar sentence in 2003, instead extending the contracts held by the private companies, which are the exclusive owners of the rubbish in their areas.

In practice, waste pickers, who go through the bags of unseparated trash that residents of Bogotá leave out on the sidewalk, made a tiny dent in the private companies’ monopoly.

The contractors are paid per ton of garbage trucked to the Doña Juana dump on the south side of Bogotá – a system that discourages recycling.

After taking office in January 2012 it took Petro six months to win city council approval for his development plan, which included a new rubbish collection system.

The idea was to move towards the goal of zero garbage by reducing the amount of waste dumped in landfills by separating garbage at source and recycling.

A city government census found that there were some 15,000 garbage pickers in Bogotá. The Zero Garbage programme hired 3,000 of them, and the rest are paid to transport recyclable waste to warehouses, instead of only paying the private contractors.

The new system extends the life of the city dump, and incorporates a vulnerable segment of the population in the business of trash collection.

But the private companies, who wanted to bid for new seven-year contracts, were not pleased when Petro tried to temporarily extend their contracts as he worked out the details of the new system.

In heated negotiations, Petro talked about putting the entire system into public hands. That is what inspector general Ordóñez cited when he argued that Petro was violating the principles of free enterprise and free competition.

When the city government saw no agreement was going to be reached, it prepared a district company to collect the garbage after the Dec. 18 deadline.

In just over two months it reconverted Aguas de Bogotá, which cleaned up sludge and garbage from sewers in dumpsters that were specially conditioned to transport leachates.

But the Petro administration suffered a severe backlash.

The contractors did not agree to return the garbage trucks to the city.

There weren’t enough dumpsters and the city government faced legal limits that kept it from acquiring trucks or adopting other measures before Dec. 18 because officially there was no emergency yet.

Three days before that date, the influx of garbage to the landfill dropped, according to measurements by the Special Administrative Unit of Public Services of Bogotá.

The night before, mountains of garbage had begun to appear on the streets, which the city government garbage collection service was unable to pick up because it would have violated the terms of the private companies’ contracts, which gave them exclusive control over the waste.

The city government was careful not to allow the contractors’ trucks into the landfill after Dec. 18, because it would have meant an automatic extension of the contracts.

The Petro administration used the dumpsters for leachate and rented used garbage trucks from the city of New York.

Although it took the trucks weeks to arrive, the system was working again within three to eight days after the Dec. 18 deadline, depending on the municipality.

In the negotiations, Petro finally agreed to allow three consortiums to continue operating in eight of the municipalities.

But in the view of the inspector general, it was not necessary to put garbage collection into public hands in order to live up to the constitutional court order.

The inclusion of thousands of garbage pickers in the system has involved carrying out a census, issuing special cards, and helping people open savings accounts – a process that has not yet been completed.

Justice Minister Alfonso Gómez Méndez announced that the government would propose a constitutional reform to modify the post of inspector general, who is named by Congress, has practically absolute power, and has 30,000 public employees under him.

But in the meantime, the constitution allows the inspector general to sack publicly elected officials, whose only recourse is to appeal to the inspector general’s office itself.

Only if the constitutional article that would leave the case in the hands of the president, Juan Manuel Santos, prevails will Petro be able to return to the mayor’s office.

Carmen Moreno in the Las Pavas community kitchen. Credit: Gerald Bermúdez/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
LAS PAVAS/BOGOTÁ , Nov 14 2013 (IPS)

The rural community of Las Pavas in northern Colombia received this year’s National Peace Prize Wednesday in recognition of its peaceful struggle for land that is claimed by an oil palm company, in a case that became an international symbol of the conflict over land in this country.

The day before, the members of the community, organised in the Asociación Campesina de Buenos Aires (Asocab – Peasant Association of Buenos Aires), were formally recognised as victims of forced displacement in a ceremony held in the offices of the government’s Unit for Integral Assistance and Reparations for Victims in Bogotá.

Inclusion on the official Registry of Victims strengthens Asocab in its legal battle against the company with which it is disputing ownership of the land – Aportes San Isidro SA.

As of Oct. 1 the registry included the names of 5,087,092 victims of forced displacement, out of a total of 5,845,002 victims of crimes committed since 1985 in Colombia’s nearly half-century civil war.

Adjacent to the 1,338-hectare Las Pavas hacienda, Buenos Aires is a small village in the municipality of El Peñón in the northern province of Bolívar, some 270 km southeast of the provincial capital Cartagena de Indias.

The village, which has a single street, is on Papayal island located between the river of that name and the Magdalena river, which crosses Colombia from south to north.

People in this area live in villages like Buenos Aires and depend on fishing, farming and raising farm animals for a living.

Through the Unit for Integral Assistance and Reparations for Victims, the state has rectified its previous position, and now officially recognises that the community was forcibly displaced at least twice from Las Pavas, where they worked the land.

“This is an admission of judicial incomprehension because it wasn’t understood that this community was displaced from its source of livelihood, not its place of residence” in Buenos Aires, said Juan Felipe García with the Javeriana Pontifical University’s legal clinic on land, which is providing legal assistance to Asocab.

“Today we’re going to celebrate because the truth has triumphed,” he told IPS.The campesinos want to change the name of Las Pavas, “which reminds us of difficult times,” says Misael Payares. It will now be called Milagro de Dios (Miracle of God).

The decision benefits 464 people belonging to the 124 families grouped together in Asocab. However, it does not imply recognition of ownership of the Las Pavas land.

The dispute over ownership of the hacienda is a separate legal case, which is before the Council of State and could drag on for 10 more years, the director of the legal clinic, Roberto Vidal, told IPS.

“What lies ahead now is working with the community to decide what measures they want to prioritise; reaching all of the institutional agreements necessary; coordinating with the various institutions; and obtaining the reparations they are demanding,” the director of the Victims Unit, Paula Gaviria, told IPS.

“We have to wait for the authorities to comply,” said Asocab leader Misael Payares, “so that we can see our dream come true, which is to stay in Las Pavas.”

The hacienda has been at the centre of the wider dispute over land in Magdalena Medio, a stunningly beautiful region that used to be coveted by the drug barons because of its location, which is strategic in the logistics of the trafficking of cocaine by air.

On a nearby farm, Rancho Lindo, planes landed and took off until 1983. “Were they shipping firewood, manioc, yams, or what?” Payares quipped.

Since that year, Jesús Emilio Escobar Fernández, a cousin of and front man for notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar (1949-1993), has figured on paper as the owner of Las Pavas.

Up to 1963 the land was unused publicly owned rural property.

The hacienda was abandoned after 1992, as a result of the crackdown on Escobar’s Medellín drug cartel. An enormous tree growing out of a swimming pool is testament to the fact that the property was abandoned.

The people of Buenos Aires, who have large families and are often illiterate, decided then to plant crops on part of the land of Las Pavas, and set up the Association of Peasant Women of Buenos Aires.

Later they learned that, according to article 52 of a 1994 law, the owners of privately-owned rural land lost their property rights if the land was used for drug trafficking or if it had been abandoned for at least three years.

So they occupied Las Pavas, and Asocab was born in 1997, to cultivate cacao, plantain and oak.

The left-wing guerrillas (which emerged in Colombia in 1964) used to simply pass by Buenos Aires, on their way to a nearby hill covered with coca crops, which drew many temporary harvest workers.

Sometimes they would demand payment of a tax, in the form of a chicken or a pig, from the campesinos working Las Pavas, and once they shot and killed a man who they accused of being an army informant.

When the far-right paramilitaries (which began to be formed in 1981) arrived in the area along the Papayal river in 1998 and set up camp a 20-minute walk from Buenos Aires, the guerrillas pulled out.

The paramilitaries “started to kill people,” one of the founders of the women peasant association, Carmen Moreno – whose brother is ‘disappeared’ – told IPS.

Bodies missing the head or legs would float down the river past Buenos Aires. “Even the kids would see them. And they would come shouting ‘Mommy! Mommy! There’s a leg floating by….It’s a woman, mommy, because the toenails are painted!”

But all through those years, hunger would push the villagers, confined to Buenos Aires, to brave their fear and panic over and over again and return to Las Pavas to plant and harvest their crops.

In 2006 they began the legal proceedings to get the state to revoke the existing land title, under the 1994 law. They even applied for and were granted farming loans from state institutions.

But in 2007 it turned out that the front man Escobar Fernández had sold Las Pavas to the companies Aportes San Isidro and CI Tequendama – the latter of which belongs to the Daabon group.

These firms say that no authority informed them that the private ownership status of the land was in question – which made it legally impossible to buy or sell the land.

The companies set up an oil palm production project, drying up wetlands, diverting streams and blocking roads.

President Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) made oil palm production his administration’s chief agribusiness strategy, and his successor Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) continued that policy.

The government decided that 66,000 hectares of oil palm should be grown in Papayal, and that a palm oil refinery to produce biofuels should be installed there.

Oil palm is the third-largest crop in Colombia, planted on more than 400,000 hectares and employing over 130,000 workers, according to the international organisation Solidaridad, which promotes responsible food production and sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels.

Oil palm has great production potential compared to other oil-producing plants, and its use is growing in the food, hygiene and cosmetics industries as well as the emerging biodiesel industry.

But in Las Pavas, palm oil is no longer being produced, and the legal battle continues.

In 2009, the companies in question got the police to evict the local campesinos. The incident cost Daabon its contract as the main palm oil supplier for The Body Shop cosmetics chain, whose parent company is L’Oreal.

Daabon preferred to pull out of the project rather than negotiate with Asocab, as The Body Shop had urged it to.

The local campesinos returned to Las Pavas in 2011. Since then they have been living there, some of them in shifts, in a settlement with two dirt roads running between improvised dwellings covered with black plastic.

In the hacienda house, Aportes San Isidro has posted armed men, without official authorisation.

The campesinos constantly complain about intimidation, destruction of crops, tires shot out on Asocab’s tractors, theft of livestock, or fires set to seeds stocks or nearby brush by incendiary device attacks on the camp.

“An outlaw group no longer has control; a few companies do,” said Payares.

“We haven’t had a human victim yet, because we have been smart enough to keep that from happening,” said Efraín Alvear, the community’s historian.

“Conquest without rifles” is the title of the book he has been writing by hand for years about the story of Asocab, he told IPS.

After their inclusion in the registry of victims and the award of the National Peace Prize, the campesinos plan to change the name of Las Pavas. “That name reminds us of difficult times,” says Misael Payares. It will now be called Milagro de Dios (Miracle of God).

Aerial view of the Machín volcano. Credit: Servicio Geológico Colombiano/Observatorio de Manizales

By Constanza Vieira
FINCA GALICIA, Cordillera Central, Colombia , Oct 26 2013 (IPS)

A new system of tunnels at the Alto de La Línea mountain pass in Colombia’s central Cordillera mountain range will open up a key logistics route for this country and neighbouring Venezuela. But it could be overcome by disaster if the Machín volcano erupts.

The complex engineering feat includes two main one-way tunnels, 8.8 and 8.6 km long, as well as 21 short tunnels and 29 viaducts that will total 6.8 km in length.

The first of the main tunnels, which will be the longest road tunnel in Latin America, is to be completed by mid-2014. The firms that will build the second tunnel have not yet been selected.

Danger: volcano ahead

But in the department (province) of Tolima, the road passes six km from an unassuming hill which is actually the Machín volcano, one of Colombia’s most dangerous volcanoes, which has erupted six or seven times in the past 10,000 years. The most recent eruption occurred around 800 years ago.

“The most explosive volcanoes remain quiet for long periods of time,” said Marta Calvache, director of the Colombian Geological Service (SGC).

The SGC – formerly Ingeominas – drew up the first hazards map for the Machín volcano in 1998, which it amplified in 1999, 2000 and 2003.

The map recommends that the hazards posed by the volcano be taken into account in decision-making on “strategic medium and long-term plans for routes, especially roads.”

The La Línea tunnel and the Machín volcano are 15 km apart as the crow flies. If the volcano erupts, “the tunnel will be left without a road,” Calvache told IPS.

More than 100 monitoring stations keep an eye on the volcano 24/7. In 2008, authorities declared a yellow alert, which is still in place. (Green is for normal, yellow for alert, and red for warning and evacuation.)

Even the smallest eruption by Machín would be larger than the eruption of the Ruiz volcano, 45 km to the northeast, which in November 1985 spewed out 0.3 cubic km (km3) of lahar – mudflow or debris flow – which destroyed the town of Armero, killing 22,000 of its 28,000 inhabitants and leaving over 5,000 injured.

“Machín’s normal eruptions can cover several cubic kilometres. And the big ones have been approximately 20 km3,” Calvache said.

If the next one is big, “it will affect the entire central area of the country,” including parts of the provinces of Tolima, Quindío, Valle del Cauca and Cundinamarca that are home to nearly one million people combined, the geologist warned.

The Machín volcano’s eruptions “produce major pyroclastic flows (a fast-moving current of hot gas and rock). No one survives a pyroclastic flow, and the basin would be completely changed,” Calvache said.

“That change, in human terms, would be forever. It would be human beings who would have to adapt,” she said.

“The volcano has been changing,” she added. “What we don’t know is whether that change is headed towards an eruption or if it is simply being unruly and will go back to being calm again for many years.”

The authorities are apparently betting on the latter.

In the environmental impact assessment for the tunnel, “Machín isn’t mentioned as a risk factor,” environmentalist Néstor Jaime Ocampo, of the Cosmos Ecological Foundation based in Armenia, the capital of Quindío, told IPS.

One of the 29 viaducts that form part of the project to upgrade the La Línea highway and mountain pass. Constanza Vieira/IPS

Key route

The government of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) declared the La Línea route “strategic” in 2005.

La Línea is essential for trade between Cúcuta, the main city on the border with Venezuela, in the northeast, and Colombia’s only Pacific Ocean port, Buenaventura, in the west.

The road runs through the wealthiest part of the country, the central highlands, where Bogotá is located.

“All of the freight that reaches Bogotá from the Pacific comes through here,” Luis Orlando Muñoz, the head of the Colombian Society of Engineers (SCI), told IPS. “Thousands of tonnes of imports and exports are transported daily. This is the country’s spinal column, when it comes to roads.”

Ocampo, the environmentalist, said “What is being built is a modern road corridor between Caracas and Buenaventura.” In other words, Venezuela’s outlet to the Pacific.

The corridor connects the Gulf of Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea with Ecuador on the Pacific, and it forms part of the plans outlined by the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA).

Stressful driving

Like almost all roads in Colombia, the one joining Cúcuta and Buenaventura has just two lanes along most of its 1,020 km.

As it climbs into the central Cordillera range – the highest of the three branches of the Andes in Colombia – the road switchbacks through a stunning landscape of cloud forest, Quindio Wax Palm (Ceroxylon quindiuense), and the royal purple flowers of the Glory Bush (Tibouchina lepidota), and past paddocks and cliffs.

Truckers treat the La Línea route with respect. Because of the frequent fog, steep inclines of up to 18 percent, and tight curves, the average speed is just 18 km an hour. It took IPS six hours to drive the 38 km between Ibagué and this mountain pass.

The need to control traffic on this narrow, busy road and the extreme poverty in the area have given rise to a strange occupation: human stoplights – men and women dressed in rags who use flags, flashlights and whistles to warn drivers that a semi-trailer truck is coming in the other direction, just around the next curve.

It is impossible for these huge trucks to avoid invading the other lane when taking a curve on the La Línea road. Drivers thank the human stoplights by tossing them a few coins.

The tunnel will ease traffic by cutting the distance by 10 km and saving drivers an 840-metre climb, which will reduce the average time it takes to drive across the Alto de La Línea pass by 87 percent for truck drivers (to 80 minutes) and by 72 percent for cars (to 30 minutes).

The average speed should increase to 60 km an hour, and accidents should be reduced by 75 percent, according to the Colombian Infrastructure Chamber.

Logistics and planning delays

Nearly 80 percent of Colombia’s domestic cargo is transported by road, according to the transport ministry.

But the country’s road infrastructure “is lagging by at least 30 years,” Diana Espinosa, the president of SCI – the engineers association – told IPS.

She attributed that to a lack of adequate state policies and to “the dedication of funds to financing the war [the nearly half-century armed conflict against left-wing guerrillas], which is causing us a huge lag in infrastructure.”

In the last decade, road freight traffic has increased multifold, reflecting the growth in foreign trade, especially imports.

The volume of imports is three times that of exports, according to the National Council on Economic and Social Policy, the national planning authority.

For that reason, the first main tunnel will serve traffic from Buenaventura to Bogotá.

Ignoring the risk

“People prefer the known risk to unknown solutions,” expert on natural disasters Gustavo Wilches-Chaux told IPS to explain why, despite the tragedy in Armero, no one is considering relocating Cajamarca, population 10,000 – the town that is closest to the Machín volcano.

To the contrary, the South Africa-based firm AngloGold Ashanti is moving forward with the massive La Colosa open-pit mine between Cajamarca and La Línea.

Ocampo said that “By pursuing economic activities in that area, like the La Colosa mine, we are inviting tens of thousands more people to live in an area of hazardous volcanic activity.”

“A blockage of the highway lasting just a few months would be a catastrophe – the country’s foreign trade would practically collapse,” the environmentalist said.

“This is not about our comfort, so our drive from Armenia to Ibagué will be 25 minutes shorter. This is for the comfort of the multinational companies. And it will be us who will pay a steep toll for going through that tunnel.”

The protests in Colombia have spread to the cities, fuelled by images of police brutality against rural families. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Constanza Vieira and Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Aug 30 2013 (IPS)

A strike declared nearly two weeks ago in Colombia by farmers and joined later by truck drivers, health workers, miners and students spread to include protests in the cities before mushrooming into a general strike Thursday, demanding changes in the government’s economic policies.

The protests ballooned after clashes with the ESMAD anti-riot police left at least two rural protesters dead and over 250 under arrest.

Also fuelling the unrest, say analysts, was the attempt by President Juan Manuel Santos to minimise the strikers’ actions. He said on Sunday Aug. 25 that “the so-called national agrarian strike does not exist.”

The authorities, meanwhile, allege that the nationwide roadblocks and protests have been connected to the country’s left-wing guerrillas.

The head of the Fensuagro agricultural trade union, Húber Ballesteros, was arrested Sunday, accused of financing the rebels. He is one of the 10 spokespersons selected by the Mesa de Interlocución Agropecuaria Nacional (MIA) to negotiate with the government.

MIA, a national umbrella movement, emerged from over two months of protests by campesinos or small farmers in Catatumbo, an impoverished area in northeast Colombia, where they are calling for government measures that would make it possible for them to stop producing coca – their main livelihood in the isolated, roadless area — and switch to alternative crops.

Since the campesinos began to protest in Catatumbo in June, the problems facing small farmers around the country have become more visible.

The difficulties they face are especially exacerbated in the central provinces of Boyacá and Cundinamarca and in Nariño in the southwest, where smallholder production of potatoes, onions, maize, fresh produce, fruit and dairy products is the main economic activity of much of the population.

Since Monday Aug. 19, small farmers around the country have been on strike to protest that they cannot compete with low-price food products imported under free trade agreements with the United States (in effect since May 2012) and the European Union (in effect since Aug. 1). They are also complaining about rising fuel, transport and production costs.

Another target of the farmers’ protests is “Resolution 970”, passage of which was required by the U.S.-Colombia FTA, which protects genetically modified seeds under intellectual property rights, making the replanting of them a crime.

In addition, they are protesting large-scale mining projects that have been given the green light in agricultural regions, without consulting local communities as required by law.

It all boils down to the lack of real policies for the countryside, says MIA, which presented a lists of demands before the farmers’ strike began.

The list calls for solutions to the crisis affecting farmers; access to land titles proving ownership; recognition of protected campesino territories; participation in decisions involving mining industry activity; guarantees for exercising political rights; and social spending and investment in infrastructure like roads in rural areas.

On Sunday Aug. 25, the protests spread to the cities, after farmers posted photos and videos on social networking sites of the ESMAD riot police’s brutal crackdown on campesino families, including children and the elderly.

A mission of human rights defenders reported that the riot police had fired live ammunition into crowds of protesters, and that injured demonstrators had wounds indicating that they had been beaten and even stabbed or shot by ESMAD. The mission also documented reports of sexual abuse and rape threats against the wives and daughters of campesinos taking part in the protests.

One woman who reported that the police threw a tear gas canister directly at her inside her home told the human rights defenders: “I was cooking for my kids when I saw an ESMAD agent in the window who, without saying anything, broke the glass and just threw [the canister] inside. I ran out to protect my kids.”

In response to the images and reports of police brutality, people in the cities began to protest, with “cacerolazos” – where demonstrators bang on kitchen pots and pans – which are common in some Latin American countries but are unusual in Colombia.

President Santos apologised and launched a dialogue, in an attempt to negotiate by region or by sector. But his strategy failed and the unrest continued to spread.

Santos said on Wednesday Aug. 28 that his instructions to the security forces to clear the roadblocks, “as they have been doing,” were still standing.

On Thursday, he unexpectedly cancelled his participation in Friday’s Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) summit in Suriname.

Thousands of indigenous people in the southwestern province of Cauca reported Wednesday that they had begun rituals to join the protests.

“The national agricultural strike is the result of problems and demands that have built up over many years,” economist Héctor León Moncayo, a university professor who is a co-founder of the Colombian Alliance against Free Trade (RECALCA), told IPS. “The only solution now is to bring about a major transformation.”

“A true agrarian reform process has never been carried out in Colombia. Every attempt has failed,” he said. The civil war, which has dragged on for nearly 50 years, “was a pretext for building up military power, and in parallel, paramilitary power,” he argued.

“The far-right paramilitaries stepped up the violence against the campesino population, fuelling massive displacement,” he said.
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According to the figures of the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a leading Colombian human rights group, 5.5 million people were displaced from their homes between 1985 and 2012.

From behind the scenes, “the drug lords increased the concentration of land ownership, and today there are very few regions with a small-scale campesino economy. Clear examples are the latifundios (large landed estates) where sugarcane and African oil palm are grown,” Moncayo said.

According to January statistics from the National Agrofuels Federation, 150,000 hectares of land are dedicated to sugarcane and oil palm, of the country’s total of five million hectares of farmland.

The government of César Gaviria (1990–1994) introduced free-market reforms to open up the economy. And more recently, free trade agreements have further undermined the competitiveness of small farmers.

Moncayo said campesinos have lost the ability to make a living by selling their products, thanks also to dumping – the export of products by Colombia’s partners at prices below production costs.

“It would be very hard to get the free trade agreements revoked, but it is possible – and urgently necessary – to design sustainable policies for rural development for campesinos,” he said.

According to the United Nations Development Programme, 32 percent of Colombia’s population of 47 million lives in rural areas, and between nine and 11 million people depend on farming for a living.

“We need to make the transition from traditional agriculture to agroecology, to revive the Colombian countryside,” Adriana Chaparro, a professor at Uniminuto, a private college that offers degrees in agroecology, told IPS.

“Agroecology is a big challenge that would make it possible to obtain the best results from farming, without deterioration of the land,” she said. “It would also prevent what many are calling for: subsidies for agriculture, which would require increasingly large investments, which are difficult to finance.

“These protests, which include fair demands, are also an opportunity to take a close, critical look at our agricultural practices, without falling into the government’s way of thinking,” Chaparro said.

Agroecology student Tatiana Vargas said these practices “should become a way of life, which would help us go back to our essence.”

FARC negotiators in Havana speak to the press in November 2012. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Aug 23 2013 (IPS)

Colombia’s FARC guerrillas announced Friday a “pause” in the peace talks in Havana, which formally opened a year ago. But analysts say it is only a temporary glitch.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos unexpectedly announced Thursday that he had introduced a fast-track bill in Congress to hold a referendum in which voters would approve or reject any peace agreement reached with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

The president said it would be best for the referendum to coincide with the March 2014 legislative elections, although he left open the possibility of it being held in May 2014 instead, during the presidential elections, when he is expected to run for re-election.

Colombia’s laws do not allow referendums to be held simultaneously with elections. The reform presented by Santos would make that possible.

That would formally set a deadline for the peace talks, even though the agreement to negotiate, published in September 2012, did not contemplate any time limits.

A clause in that agreement states that neither of the two sides will leave the negotiating table until a final accord has been reached. Norway and Cuba are guarantors of the peace talks, and Venezuela and Chile are observers.

Prior to the current crisis, sources knowledgeable about the negotiations said a final peace agreement could be ready in the first few months of 2014.

The sixth point in the document published in September 2012 includes the discussion of a referendum or another mechanism for approval of the final peace deal. But that question has only been addressed informally in Havana.

According to official reports, agreement has only been reached on the first point on the agenda – integral agrarian development – in the talks so far, although there are still key details to be worked out on that question.

The negotiators are reportedly discussing the second point, regarding rights and guarantees for the opposition, access to the media, and mechanisms of citizen participation, including guarantees of safety and equal conditions for vulnerable segments of the population.

Conflict and peace analyst Carlos Velandia said the talks in Havana “are much more advanced than what they have told us.”

He said progress has been made on several aspects of the agenda, although it is not clear which ones.

Historian Carlos Medina Gallego tweeted that “Conflict occurs in peace talks when one side takes decisions outside of what was agreed and seeks to impose its will on the other.”

The “pause” introduced by the FARC apparently indicates that there is no agreement on the mechanism for voters to approve an eventual peace accord.

The rebel group wants a constituent assembly to be elected, to rewrite the constitution.

But serious problems with the electoral system that have been denounced, such as vote-buying, raise fears that politicians with funds from drug trafficking and corruption would win a majority of seats on the assembly.

Nor is any parallel reform planned in the legislature, where the conservative president’s supporters hold a broad majority of seats, to resolve issues like low voter turnout or barriers that make it virtually impossible for voters in remote communities to participate in elections.

The communist FARC was founded in 1964, as was the second-largest insurgent group, the pro-Fidel Castro National Liberation Army (ELN), which was influenced by liberation theology, a current in the Roman Catholic Church which finds in the teachings of Jesus Christ a call to free people from unjust economic, political, or social conditions.

Discreet exploratory talks with the ELN have taken place since Santos took office in August 2010, but with ups and downs that led to a breakdown.

However, this week there were signals that the exploratory talks may resume.

According to Velandia, a former ELN leader who spent time in prison for his involvement in the guerrilla group, said the “pause” in the talks between the FARC and the government “is a temporary situation.”

“The FARC will certainly not leave the negotiating table,” he told IPS. “But the government’s actions have done a great deal of damage to the talks and could slow down the process.”

José Jairo González, an analyst with the Centro de Estudios Regionales del Sur, a local think tank, told IPS that “I don’t think it is the government’s intention to try to impose the referendum at any price.

“This is a reasonable pause to look at the limits and reach of the referendum and the prior conditions for participation in the (legislative) elections in March or the presidential elections,” said the analyst, who studies Colombia’s nearly half-century armed conflict.

González added that the referendum could not be held under the current electoral system, “which is being questioned; that’s what the FARC is saying.”

The referendum would have to be decided on by the new legislature elected in March.

In any case, it is not clear in Santos’ bill when a special constituency would be created to allow FARC representatives to run for Congress.

The FARC’s “pause” coincides with a national strike launched Monday Aug. 19 by coffee, cacao, potato and rice farmers, cargo truckers, gold miners and health workers, who have blocked key roads. There have been violent clashes between strikers and the riot police.

Late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez played a decisive role in bringing about the exploratory talks with the FARC, which apparently began in early 2011.

IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze, interviewed by IPS at the end of his Aug. 2-8, 2013 visit to Peru and Colombia. Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Aug 12 2013 (IPS)

“There is no development without peace. It should be understood that, for there to be development in a country, there must be an internal peace process,” says Kanayo Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

With respect to Colombia, the Nigerian expert in agricultural development said: “We have to create a platform of trust” in abandoned rural communities.

IFAD is the only United Nations agency created to provide financial support to peasants and smallholder farmers. It works with governments, but in bottom-to-top projects. Organised groups of people propose their own initiatives which compete for funding, through the Agriculture Ministry in the case of Colombia.

The funds are managed by the communities themselves. More than 1,700 projects presented by Colombian rural groups obtained support that way through the IFAD-Rural Opportunities project that began in 2007 and is now coming to an end.

IFAD is now launching a new programme in Colombia through the Agriculture Ministry, which will act in war zones, termed “territorial consolidation areas” by the government – a controversial concept involving both questions of security and development.“IFAD is not a top-down institution, it is bottom-up. You walk with the communities. They have to be part of the project. They have to own it.” -- Kanayo Nwanze

“Small and medium enterprises in rural areas are a source of generating social stability in countries,” Nwanze says in this interview with IPS in Bogotá at the end of his Aug. 2-8 visit to Peru and Colombia.

Nwanze met with the presidents of both countries – Ollanta Humala of Peru and Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia – and visited rural communities.

Q: IFAD has wide experience working in conflict zones to bring development and to help to build peace. How can this experience be applied in Colombia?

A: We have found in many parts of Africa and Asia – India is a very good example – where, if there is ability to organise rural populations, women and men and children, and give them opportunities to have gainful employment…youth in particular are less likely to be attracted by rhetoric and extremism.

Just a few days ago we launched a new programme called TOP (Trust & Opportunities Project), which takes the first project into a different dimension, a much higher dimension.

Trust & Opportunities, we believe, will contribute significantly to bringing hope, economic development, and social inclusiveness to rural areas of Colombia. And we hope that this process will contribute to peace and development in Colombia.

Q: Most of the places where the new project will be deployed in Colombia are still war zones. What kind of concrete difficulties could that pose?

A: I can talk from our experiences elsewhere. A good example is…projects involving community development and natural resource management in communities of the northeastern states of India.

The primary impact of that project was not only community development and management of natural resources, but [the fact that] it generated such economic benefits that young people who formally were engaged in extremism now had jobs, and it reduced the rate of insurgency.

You see, IFAD is a unique institution. Apart from being a specialised U.N. agency, which gives us…global legitimacy and trust by populations and governments, [we have] the ability to organise rural populations, so that they have…their own structural governance platform to operate.

You need a mechanism where you can build trust, between the populations in the war zone and the governments. And this is what IFAD is fantastic at doing. We trust and we are trusted by the communities; they see us as their friends. The governments we work with – in Colombia [for instance] – see us as very apolitical [and that] our interests are basically for the populations and for the national policy dialogue.

The difficulties that people often face in these communities is the way…an idea or a concept [is presented to them] – you have to avoid just parachuting in and telling them ‘this is what you have to do’.

IFAD is not a top-down institution, it is bottom-up. You walk with the communities. They have to be part of the project. They have to own it. And that way they are committed to it; when they own it they want it to succeed; if it is parachuted from the top, they reject it.

And there is no other institution that I know of within the U.N. system or within the international financial institutions that goes to the remotest and most difficult areas in the countries. IFAD does.

Q: Is the new TOP in line with Colombia´s policies?

A: First of all, I think it is important to understand that IFAD only works with governments. IFAD does not define for governments what governments should do. IFAD works with governments, partners and rural populations, to define the programme that they want.

Now, President Santos’ major priority today is peace and inclusive development. So what do we do? We say OK.

We have allocated 25 million dollars. That is nothing for Colombia. But what we bring is knowledge and experience on how we work with rural populations. So, we are a facilitator…[and] our programmes are defined by the strategy and the priority of the governments for its people.

Our programmes are not political. But the outputs, the results can have political impact, because they bring about political stability and trust in the community, which is the foundation for peace.

In Latin America – in Brazil, Peru or Guatemala – or in different countries in Africa or Asia, when you go to the community, you see the commitment and the excitement they have, for the simple fact that they are now doing dignified activities that are generating money.

Do you think that they want to take up arms against the government? No. That is so fundamental.

Q: What general impression did you get from your trip to Peru and Colombia?

A: In both countries I was impressed. In Peru, because of the president’s commitment to agriculture and rural development. I’m also impressed with the emphasis that is given to creating peace through investment in development, in both countries.

Unless we have stable and vibrant rural communities, we cannot achieve sustainable development in any country, because you always have this gap between those who have and those who have not. And when the gap gets to [a certain] point, it’s like a string that snaps. And when it snaps, you have political crisis.

Excerpt:

Local campesino Omar Caicedo shows IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze the fruits of his land, in Colombia’s biodiverse Pacific coastal region. Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Aug 7 2013 (IPS)

“I was a hunter. I killed many animals,” said Rosalino Ortiz, a representative of Mashiramo, a campesino organisation that monitors biodiversity in Colombia’s Massif range in the southern department of Huila.

After taking workshops organised by the Rural Opportunities programme of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, financed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) “your mentality changes,” Ortiz said. “And I started planning a business” with 23 other campesinos (small farmers), he added.

Now Ortiz talks about ecotourism. And he said “we have more money.”

After receiving training from the programme, he is well-versed in computers, and plans to become a forest engineer “to bring skills to the organisation.”

“It’s one of the best programmes,” said Cielo Báez with the Asociación de Productores Agroecológicos de la Cuenca del Río Anaime (APACRA), an association of agroecological farmers in the Anaime river watershed.

“They transfer the funds to our account. They trust us, the grassroots communities,” she told IPS.

“We decide what we really need, which is the reason for the programme’s success. Many people make those decisions from their desks,” and decide what tools to send communities, without consulting them – materials that end up “piled in some corner,” added Báez, whose association is in the mountainous municipality of Cajamarca in the central department of Tolima.

The families belonging to APACRA, who take turns collectively working on the members’ farms, are no longer intimidated by receiving a 15,000-dollar loan because, said Báez, “we have the support of an accountant and an auditor.”

“IFAD, through Rural Opportunities, has enabled our families to have a better quality of life,” she said. “Because they work in an integral manner, we grow stronger as a whole.

“We have trained with them. We are 15 families with more or less two youngsters each: some 30 youngsters who have had access to education. Now they are still campesinos, but with studies. And we involve the entire family: the elderly, the children,” she added.

The key to obtaining support from Rural Opportunities/IFAD is the word “business.” The programme has managed to bring together campesinos in associations in vastly different parts of the country.

Andrés Silva, director of Rural Opportunities, spoke with Báez and Ortiz under the gaze of IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze, who came to Colombia after visiting projects in Peru backed by the specialised United Nations agency, which was created to support development initiatives among the poorest rural populations around the world.

“This is the horn plantain. This is cacao. Here we have beans. We also have tamarind,” another campesino, Omar Caicedo, showed Nwanze.

Caicedo belongs to the Cooperativa Agropecuaria de Usuarios Campesinos del Patía, a campesino cooperative in the southwest department of Cauca.

Nwanze, a Nigerian expert in agricultural entomology, was familiar with most of the fruits and vegetables he was shown. Until Caicedo pointed to the “hacepuede, an exotic fruit. It’s sweet, you can try it in juice, or just like this. It’s also medicinal. You can drink it when you’re fasting. It helps fight amoebas,” the campesino explained.

The president of IFAD said that “when a few years ago, in my campaign for governments and for the development community to recognise small agriculture as a business, and to make it attractive for the youth, I didn’t know all this was already being done in Colombia.”

Nwanze said he was “very impressed to see young people taking agriculture and agriculture-related activities as a money-generating business.”

IPS has also come into contact with other community projects backed by Rural Opportunities/IFAD, such as Ecopollo, run by female heads of households in the Asociación Municipal de Mujeres Campesinas de Lebrija (AMMUCALE), an association of campesino women in the east-central department of Santander.

Thanks to the large sheds where they raise 1,800 chickens, which they sell in markets and nearby stores, or to local families, some of the women have even managed to send their children to university.

The women involved in Ecopollo – which means ecochicken – say they have raised their children to love the countryside, and their university studies are for them to bring new skills and knowledge when they come back to Lebrija.

Another project is the Corporación de Recuperación Comunera del Lienzo in the town of Charalá, also in Santander, where 70 farming families set up a production chain that stretches from the cultivation of organic cotton to the Museum of Linen.

The museum, which operates in a large corner house in the town of Charalá, displays traditional weaving and dyeing techniques of the Guane indigenous people, who are now extinct in that region, once famous for its fabrics and weaving.

Rural Opportunities/IFAD began its work in 2007 and formally ends this year, after financing more than 1,700 projects. Now it must reinvent itself.

“We won’t invest in the same families,” the programme’s director, Silva, told IPS.

The idea is for the associations that have become small rural companies to share their best practices with other groups of local families, and to help them avoid the mistakes they themselves have made along the way, in order to multiply the experience.

One of the central objectives is to keep people from moving to the cities by offering alternative livelihoods in rural areas.

The campesinos of Mashiramo are focusing on becoming a local network that helps link up other organisations: “We’ll be the businesspeople, who share our knowledge and experience,” Ortiz said.

The result: organised knowledge that can be shared and replicated.

But not only the communities have learned along the way. It has also been a learning experience for the agriculture ministry.

“We have learned we have to support people, seek out knowledge, dig out the treasures from the local cultures, encourage the spread of local talent beyond the families,” Silva said.

AngloGold Ashanti Colombia billboard on the road from Ibagué, capital of Tolima, to Cajamarca: “Together we build the future: La Colosa means progress for Colombia in harmony with the environment and hand in hand with communities.” Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
CAJAMARCA, Colombia , Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

People in a farming town in central Colombia voted overwhelmingly against global corporation AngloGold Ashanti’s La Colosa gold mine.

In a popular vote on Sunday, whose results are binding, 99 percent of the 2,995 people in the municipality of Piedras who cast ballots – out of a total of 5,105 local people eligible to vote – said “no” to the South Africa-based gold mining company’s operations in the area.

Piedras, in the central province of Tolima, is 96 km west of La Colosa, the largest open pit gold mining project in the northern Andes, located in the district of Cajamarca, known as “Colombia’s breadbasket.”

Early last decade, AngloGold Ashanti (AGA) arrived in these hills of cloud forest and peasant fields.

La Colosa, which is still in the feasibility study stage, is the third-largest mining project of AGA, which is the world’s third-largest gold producer, with 21 mining operations in 10 countries.

According to the report “Mining in Colombia – Foundations for going beyond the extractivist model”, published this year by the office of the comptroller-general, La Colosa will produce a total of 759 tonnes of gold over 20 years. The estimate is based on 2008 figures from AGA.

AGA Colombia’s director of communications, Sandra Ocampo, told IPS that the material removed would yield one gram of gold per tonne.

AGA estimates the mine’s useful life at 20 years, although Ocampo said it could be longer, since the firm’s technicians “are still making discoveries that increase its size, in the project’s direct area of activities and in surrounding areas.”

The company thus does not rule out the possibility of mining gold in La Colosa for up to half a century.

But that depends on whether “the preliminary exploration can move forward so AGA manages to assess what there is in the area,” Ocampo said.

In the battle over La Colosa, AGA filed a lawsuit in January against Piedras Mayor Arquímedes Ávila, because a roadblock by local residents was blocking the circulation of the company’s employees, vehicles and machines.

But the attempt to sue the local government, which according to the company had failed to take action to prevent the roadblock, did not go anywhere.

The Tolima environmental authority brought AGA’s activities in the area to a halt on three occasions, most recently in March, when it announced penalties for repeated irregularities.

AGA decided to install the processing plant for La Colosa in Doima, a rice-growing village in the municipality of Piedras, whose residents began to mobilise as soon as they found out about the plans, in January.

Activities to block the gold mining project have continued since then. Ávila called on the 5,105 eligible voters in Piedras to come to the polls on Sunday to respond “yes” or “no” to one question: do you support AGA’s mining activities in the area?

The 12-line question asked local residents whether they accepted the “exploration, exploitation, treatment, transformation, transportation and washing of materials” from the company’s large-scale gold mine.

It also asked if they accepted the “storage…and use of materials harmful to health and the environment,” like cyanide and other toxic substances, and “the use of surface and underground water” for gold mining, which threatens the water supply for human consumption and agricultural use.

But AGA argued that “the description included in the question does not reflect the way we operate.” The firm complained that it had not been listened to, and that Sunday’s vote was not “an informed and coherent decision” but one that was “induced by prejudice”.

Under Colombia’s law on plebiscites, the result of the vote is binding if at least one third of voters participate – in other words, a minimum of 1,700 voters in the case of Piedras.

However, different interpretations of the law’s jurisdiction mean a legal battle is looming.

The ministry of mines and energy claims municipalities cannot decide on gold-mining projects within their jurisdictions, and that authorisation by the ministry or by the national environmental permitting authority takes precedence over popular votes or plebiscites.

According to Colombia’s statistics office, 33.5 percent of the people in Piedras and 28.3 percent in Cajamarca were poor – defined as “unsatisfied basic needs” – as of June 2012.

Cajamarca divided

In a communiqué, AGA said mining would generate 1,500 direct jobs and 60,000 indirect jobs, as well as 477 million dollars in taxes and royalties over the next 20 years.

“La Colosa is a golden opportunity for Tolima…that will bring progress and well-being,” it stated.

But many people in Cajamarca who spoke to IPS were sceptical.

“The mining company is buying up farms, and those who don’t want to sell find themselves hemmed in and without a future,” said one mulberry grower who preferred not to give his name.

“Without permission, AngloGold uses private roads to drive in with a hellish number of trucks,” said a local woman who was also fearful of having her name published.

Although her restaurant has benefited from the influx of company personnel, she said she preferred to leave a healthy environment to the young people in her family.

AGA created the civil organisation Sí a la Mina (Yes to the Mine), which divided the community. And the local leaders who have not been won over feel isolated.

The majority of the population in Cajamarca supports mining and believes that everyone will benefit, and that in 30 years, everything will be back to normal, because AGA told them it would cover the mine with greenery after it is finished.

At least, that is what rural children say the mining company has told them.

Local people who spoke to IPS said the children live in remote rural areas of Cajamarca, where they never even see cars, and where they walk several kilometres to school each day.

On Saturdays, AGA sends vehicles to pick them up at their homes to take them to parties it has organised. The company has also distributed laptop computers to local students. When they come home from these events, the children argue with their parents about why they are opposed to the mine.

The mayor of Cajamarca, Evelio Gómez, has accepted the mine. If a school needs painting and reforms, AngloGold pays. It also makes gifts, like ambulances.

“And the mayor doesn’t do anything,” a local resident of Anaima, in Cajamarca, told IPS. Most of the people in that village are united against La Colosa – as are the people of Piedras.

Navi Pillay at a press conference in the Palais des Nations, Geneva. Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Jul 18 2013 (IPS)

The Colombian army killed Marta Díaz’s son Douglas in 2006, dressed him in combat fatigues and reported him as a FARC guerrilla killed in a shootout. Díaz searched for him everywhere, in prisons, hospitals and morgues, until she finally managed to track down his remains in 2008.

Douglas was just another “false positive” – the euphemism used in this South American country to describe army killings of young civilians passed off as guerrilla casualties.

Since then, Díaz, an activist with the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE), has helped hundreds of other mothers who have lost their sons.

“Last year I received 27 death threats. And there have been seven so far this year,” she told IPS.

On Wednesday, Díaz was at the Centre for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation in Bogotá, established by the city government to promote debate and actions to document what is happening in Colombia’s decades-long civil war.“Last year I received 27 death threats. And there have been seven so far this year” -- Marta Díaz.

Seven human rights umbrella groups representing more than 400 organisations met this week with United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay and Anders Kompass, her director of field operations and technical cooperation.

Many victims like Díaz were in the packed auditorium. Pillay and Kompass heard more than 100 three-minute speeches.

Closing the office

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced Tuesday that he would close the Colombia office of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Díaz said the fact that the announcement was made just when Pillay was starting a four-day visit to Colombia indicated that it was aimed at “confounding her and all of us human rights defenders, to get us all to fight to prevent the OHCHR from pulling out.”

The strategy was to divert attention from denunciations of human rights violations, which would be overshadowed by the news, Díaz said.

“It surprised me as much as it did the rest of you,” Pillay said on Wednesday, referring to the president’s announcement.

“We don’t need a U.N. human rights office in our country anymore,” Santos stated in an address given in Bogotá, which reached Pillay when she was in Santander de Quilichao, in the war-torn southwestern province of Cauca.

Pillay travelled to Cauca to meet for several hours with leaders of black, indigenous and rural communities who had plenty to say about the need for multilateral bodies to continue monitoring human rights in this country.

The OHCHR office in Colombia opened in 1997, and each renewal of its mandate has been preceded by a quiet diplomatic tug-of-war.

The authorities’ dislike of the U.N. office peaked after the May 2002 massacre in the village of Bojayá, where 119 people were killed and 98 injured after villagers took refuge in the church.

Shortly before they fled, the leftwing FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), who were lobbing homemade mortars at far-right paramilitary fighters who had set up camp behind the church, hit the building with a gas cylinder bomb that veered off course.

Kompass, the OHCHR representative in Colombia at the time, went on a mission to the village of Bojayá, on the Atrato river in northwestern Chocó province.

In his report, Kompass said all of the armed parties to the conflict had to answer for the massacre: the FARC guerrillas, who bombed the church; the paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) – since demobilised in talks with the government – which had occupied the village; and the state itself.

The government of then-President Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) criticised the report, and the army’s Fourth Brigade said it did not “share unfounded versions which are aimed at showing possible ties between the army and navy and the illegal (paramilitary) self-defence groups.”

From Geneva, then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson intervened in support of Kompass.

But on Jun. 14, 2002, Kompass’s mission in Colombia was abruptly cut short. His removal was the condition set by the government to keep the OHCHR office open.

Kompass is now the person who names the directors of the OHCHR country offices. For example, he designated Todd Howland to head the Colombia office, who at the start was seen by activists as too quiet.

But on Jul. 10, Howland issued a harshly worded report on what happened during protests by peasant farmers in Catatumbo, an impoverished area in northeast Colombia on the border with Venezuela.

The peasants in Catatumbo, who have been protesting for over a month, are demanding that the area be declared a “peasant reserve” and that a scheme be adopted that would allow them, in an organised manner, to stop producing coca – their main livelihood in the isolated, roadless area — and switch to alternative crops.

But no progress has been made towards an official declaration of the peasant reserve, and the government instead ordered the eradication of coca crops by force in June. The crackdown on the protests has left four dead and 15 injured.

Howland reported grave violations of economic, social and cultural rights in the Catatumbo region. He also said that during the crackdown on the protests shots were fired from high-powered rifles that are usually used by the security forces, which indicated “excessive use of force” against the demonstrators.

High-level Colombian officials accused the OHCHR office of exceeding its mandate, just a few days ahead of the second visit to the country by Pillay, who before being named to her current post served as a judge on the International Criminal Court, which has Colombia under observation.

Body count scandal

Pillay’s first visit was in October 2008, when the “false positives” scandal broke out, involving the killings of at least 1,416 people by the security forces as a result of the “body count” system. This army strategy used incentives like weekend passes, cash bonuses, promotions and trips abroad to reward soldiers and officers for “results” in the counterinsurgency effort.

The bodies of the victims, some of whom were lured from poor neighbourhoods by false job promises and then killed, were presented as guerrillas killed in combat.

Although extrajudicial executions have been committed for over three decades in Colombia, the statistics show that the number of “false positives” shot up during the government of rightwing President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

According to Javier Giraldo, the priest who directs the human rights and political violence data bank of the Jesuit Centre for Popular Research and Education (CINEP), it is “very worrisome that the peak in false positives killings occurred from 2006 to 2008 – just when President Santos served as defence minister.”

Santos was defence minister from July 2006 to May 2009. The CINEP data bank documented 918 “false positives” between 2006 and 2008.

Reports of killings of this kind dropped to 18 a year in 2009 and 2010, before increasing to 85 in 2011 and falling again to 52 in 2012.

Santos claims that he worked to put an end to the practice when he was defence minister. “We changed the doctrine,” he said on Thursday – thus acknowledging that there was a specific “body count” strategy.

But according to the president, “the country’s need for a United Nations Human Rights Office…has gradually disappeared.

”I’m going to tell (Pillay) that we are discussing whether extending the mandate is really worth it. Or, if it is extended, it would be for a very short time, because Colombia has made enough progress to say: ‘We don’t need any more United Nations human rights offices in our country’,” he added.

Various U.N. sources, as well as international affairs expert Laura Gil, have been telling IPS over the last three years that the government was hoping to close down the U.N. office.

The sources said Santos wanted to shed Colombia’s reputation of having the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western hemisphere, in order to request admission to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the 34-member-strong nations club, which aims to sets high human rights standards.

They explained that being under OHCHR monitoring was not compatible with membership in the OECD.

Biologist Juliana Cárdenas gathers samples of the invasive species West Indian foxtail along the road between the towns of Orocué and Yopal, in the Colombian department of Casanare,.during the Travesía Humboldt. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
OROCUÉ, Colombia , Jun 21 2013 (IPS)

Along the unpaved road between the town of Orocué and the Wisirare private reserve in the eastern Colombian department of Casanare, biologist Juliana Cárdenas asks the driver to stop the bus so she can collect a specimen of West Indian foxtail, a kind of grass growing along the road.

“I would like to confirm that this Poaceae (grass family) is an introduced species. And if it is, it might be an invasive species, because we’ve seen it all along the road,” she told IPS. “But if it is a native species, then it is simply the most abundant species in this savannah plant community.”

In 2012, IPS saw similar plants in a nature reserve in the Venezuelan state of Táchira. “In that case, this would be a widely distributed species, shared by the two (neighbouring) countries. Or it’s an invasive species that is also found in Venezuela,” Cárdenas responds.

The young biologist is a researcher on invasive species in the Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute, a private-public institution dedicated to biodiversity that forms part of the National Environmental System, linked to the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development.

The conversation occurred during the first stage of the Travesía Humboldt along the Meta river, which took place Jun. 14-20.

The trip covered parts of the departments (provinces) of Meta and Casanare – where Orocué is located – and was the first of a number of journeys planned for this year and next as “a formal part of the process of land-use regulation in the Orinoco river basin,” Humboldt Institute director Brigitte Baptiste said when welcoming the participants on the Travesía or journey, including IPS.

The Orinoquia region gives its name to the valley of the Orinoco river, the world’s third largest in terms of water volume, after the Amazon and Congo rivers. The Orinoco is 2,140 km long and the basin covers 991,587 sq km, 35 percent of which is in Colombia and the rest in Venezuela.

Colombia’s Orinoquia region, also known as the Llanos Orientales or Eastern Plains, covers 301,443 sq km, equivalent to just over 30 percent of the country’s mainland territory.

The Meta river, 804 km long with a 93,800-sq-km basin, is the largest Colombian tributary of the Orinoco, which is born in the southern Venezuelan state of Amazonas and forms a natural border with Colombia before running across Venezuela horizontally until flowing into the Atlantic ocean.

The first stage of the Travesía set out from the bustling, chaotic oil port city of Puerto Gaitán in the department of Meta, on the Manacacías river, eight km from the point where it runs into the Meta river and 105 km by boat upstream from Orocué.

The Travesía’s chief objective is to document the current state of Colombia’s Orinoquia region, which is what Cárdenas is helping to do. “A biological invasion is not always obvious. It is not always seen as such,” she said.

“As a precaution,” she said, “specimens are collected of many introduced species of plants that are already classified as highly invasive species by other countries.” The largest number of specimens comes from plants from the grass family.

Cárdenas took photos of the collected specimens while her colleague Lina Vásquez marked the exact location by GPS.

They later placed the specimens in newspaper with alcohol to preserve them. After they return to Bogotá, the specimens will be dried in a special oven, then classified.

“We usually don’t find flowering specimens, and that makes taxonomic classification more difficult,” Cárdenas said. “That is why we generally consult a specialist in this family, because the Poaceae are a large group.”

The first thing the scientists do is check a list of native species, to rule out that possibility, she explained.

“Invasive species normally appear in areas that have been modified or degraded, such as roadsides or ploughed fields. Vehicles and people are carriers of invasive species. You often carry seeds on your pants, for example,” Cárdenas said.

An invasive species is an organism – plant, animal, fungus or bacterium – that is not native and has negative effects on the economy or environment. Invasive species of plants and animals are the second greatest threat to biodiversity after habitat loss.

In Colombia, the third biggest threat is overexploitation of biological resources; the fourth is pollution; and the fifth is climate change, according to the Environment Ministry.

Indirect causes are the expansion of the agricultural frontier, lack of awareness of the strategic potential of biodiversity, and illicit drug crops, the ministry says.

Invasive species displace native species, “which changes the original structure of ecosystems,” Cárdenas said.

“This has a social and cultural impact, because the species that people originally depended on for a living change,” she said.

In the biodiverse, multicultural Orinoquia region, which has a decades-old tradition of cattle ranching that is gradually being displaced by monoculture agribusiness and oil drilling, the main biological invasion occurred as a result of introduced grass species, which shoved out native species.

But it was followed by other invasions, such as the introduction of African oil palm, which is already classified in other countries as an invasive species.

Colombia is the largest producer of palm oil in Latin America and the fifth largest in the world. And the Orinoquia region accounts for 30 percent of national production.

In 2012, the Environment Ministry’s National Plan for the Prevention, Control and Management of Introduced, Transplanted and Invasive Species documented 298 introduced and transplanted species of fauna and flora and 43 species of flora with a high risk of invasion.

But the list is far from complete, said Orlando Vargas, director of the Ecological Restoration Group in the National University of Colombia’s Biology Department, because with the exception of Amazonia, “there has been no research carried out by region.”

He also told IPS that in Colombia there is a tendency to always start over “from scratch.”

The expert said West Indian foxtail (Andropogon bicornis) “is the worst invasive species in the entire Orinoquia region. It is a species of grass that withstands grazing, slash-and-burn, flooding or drought.

“Although the species is native to the Americas, it has spread all over, and is invading many areas that do not flood, and pastures, throughout nearly the entire country. But these are things that have not yet been documented,” he lamented.

By Constanza Vieira
TUCURINCA, Colombia, Jun 11 2013 (IPS)

José “Goyo” Hernández has never been given a mask to keep him from breathing in the coal dust blowing off the 13 trains that pass daily through this village in the municipality of Zona Bananera in the northern Colombian department of Magdalena, during his 12-hour shift at the railway crossing.

The trains speed by at 80 kilometres an hour, with nothing covering the 160,000 tons of coal that pass through the village daily, extracted from the open-pit mines 226 kilometres to the southeast, in the neighbouring department of Cesar, by the U.S. mining company Drummond, Swiss-based Glencore Xstrata (through its subsidiary in Colombia, Prodeco) and Colombian Natural Resources, owned by U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Goyo wears the uniform of a private security firm contracted by Fenoco S.A., the private railway company awarded the Atlantic railway concession in 1999, whose shareholders include the same mining companies.

He guards the railway crossing where the coal train tracks cross the main street of Tucurinca.

Signs painted in English on the 120 train cars pulled by three engines indicate that each weighs 19.1 tons and has a maximum cargo limit of 60,750 kilograms.

The cars are filled to the brim with high-grade thermal coal. In compliance with an environmental permit for the coal’s transport, the surface layers have been moistened to minimise the amount of coal particles blown off by the wind.

But a report released by the Comptroller General’s Office in December 2012 concluded that this moistening is not sufficiently effective “in neutralising the release of coal particles.”

Studies have only been conducted on the land-based operations and activities in ports, the report stresses, which means there is no way of determining the “synergistic impacts” of all of the activities related to the export of coal, include its transportation on trucks, trains and ships.

When the train is approaching, Goyo sets up the “crossing signal”: two orange plastic traffic cones connected by a rope, and hanging from the middle of the rope, a small red metal plate with hand-painted white letters proclaiming “PARE” (STOP).

There is nothing even remotely resembling a safety barrier at this level crossing. Only a one-square-metre sign posted six metres from the railway line warns of the danger.

The people of Tucurinca love Goyo. They say that he and his co-worker, who handles the other 12-hour shift, have saved the lives of three people who attempted to throw themselves in front of the train.

Tucurinca has no sewer system, but it does have an aqueduct, although it only operates for six hours every two days. That is why it is not unusual to see women washing clothes at 10:20 in the morning in the ditch that runs alongside the railway tracks.

This is when the day starts heating up, with temperatures rising to 34 or 36 degrees Celsius by midday.

The women stand in the water up to their waists, soaping, scrubbing and rinsing the clothes. They also wash their hair. They smile and chat while they work. One of the women in the water, Amparo Padilla, says the coal dust doesn’t produce soot, so when clothes are hung up to dry they don’t get dirty.

Ana Rosa Figueras explains that the aqueduct does not reach her hut on the other side of the tracks from the ditch. “I live all alone, and where would I get the strength to haul water?” she commented to Tierramérica*.

In her yard there is an air quality meter, housed beneath a metal cover. “A couple of men come every two days, open it up, look at a paper and write something down. They come to check on the coal dust,” says Figueras.

“They study it, to see if it makes people sick,” she added, never pausing in her scrubbing and rinsing, as if worried that the ditch water would run out.

While she is washing, the slender woman picks her way with difficulty across the railway tracks carrying the clean clothes back to her yard. There she hangs them on the scaffolding where the meter is installed, which she uses as a clothesline.

María Josefa Arteaga, an elderly woman in a bright orange t-shirt, points out that the big coal companies do not pay any compensation for disturbing the life of the village.

People now complain of ailments that were not as widespread before, “when there used to be a train” – in other words, when the train was a passenger train, which carried people and goods to and from the village. Now the train comes but it never arrives: it just keeps on going with its cargo of coal.

People in the region say that the trains spread “illness” and that everything is contaminated by the coal dust, which breeds asthma and chronic bronchitis.

But there are no statistics, or they are not reliable, as noted in the Comptroller General’s report with regard to studies on the different impacts of the coal industry.

The environmental permits do not require the monitoring of suspended particulates smaller than 2.5 microns, something that is “essential for the adoption of measures that could decrease or mitigate the effects on human health that could result from the presence of particulate matter produced by coal export activities,” the report stresses.

Other more obvious impacts of the trains are the continual vibrations, which causes cracks in houses, and the noise, with decibel levels between 10 and 85 times greater than “normal” noise.

“The doors and windows shake. There are houses that are cracked. The owners fill in the cracks, and they split open again,” says cattle merchant Luis González, leaning against the wall outside his home across from the railway tracks.

“At night, the train passes every 15 minutes, 20 minutes at most. I’m used to it now and I don’t wake up anymore. It used to blow its whistle at night. You could hear it coming,” he recounts.

“Of course the train bothers me,” says his neighbour Ramona María Moreno, who was born in 1924 and adds that, if she had protested alone, she would never have reached such an old age.

“If the people don’t take action, there’s nothing that can be done. What good would it do me to complain if the others don’t join in?”

Colombia exports between 92 and 95 percent of the coal it produces and is the world’s fifth largest producer. According to the British Petroleum Statistical Review of World Energy 2012, 35.3 percent of the coal consumed in Europe is Colombian.

But the industry’s production chain is minimal, which is why it does not directly stimulate the economy, “at least in any appreciable way relative to the value exploited,” states another report from the Comptroller General’s Office, “Minería en Colombia: Fundamentos para superar el modelo extractivista” (Mining in Colombia: A basis for moving beyond the extractivist model), released in May 2013.

That is why in Tucurinca, as in other towns along the way as Colombian coal travels to the world market, the train passes, but it never arrives.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Land reform was the first item on the agenda of Colombia’s peace talks. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Patricia Grogg and Constanza Vieira
HAVANA/BOGOTA, May 27 2013 (IPS)

Colombian government and guerrilla delegates have announced an agreement on the question of land reform – an important step in the peace talks that began six months ago in Havana.

“This first document…is the ‘golden gate’ for the continuation of talks on the rest of the issues,” FARC negotiator Andrés París commented to IPS shortly after Sunday’s announcement.

“This is a firm step towards a final agreement to end the conflict,” he said, adding that the peace process “is being strengthened as the government’s spirit of change and reform grows stronger and as Colombians begin to see a future of peace in these talks, as well as changes that benefit them and improve their living conditions.”

A Latin American diplomat close to the talks told IPS that it was important that the positions of the government of conservative President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) insurgents had come closer together on the question of rural development, and that the talks could now move forward on other issues on the agenda.

Land reform is the first item on the agenda for the peace talks aimed at putting an end to the conflict that began in 1964, when the FARC emerged on the scene.

The document on “integral land reform” clarifies however that implementation depends on the talks reaching a final peace accord, as one of the principles guiding the process is that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

Accords on different points on the agenda “will only be applied once we have an overall agreement to end the conflict. In other words: there will be no partial application of the accords,” said chief government negotiator Humberto de la Calle.

FARC chief Iván Márquez said the agreement on land reform was vague on some points, “which will necessarily have to be taken up again before a final agreement is reached.”

These specific aspects apparently include the maximum permitted extension of large landed estates and foreign-owned rural property.

“Everything will be done with full respect for private property and the rule of law. Legal property owners have nothing to fear,” said de la Calle, who added that the agreement would radically transform rural Colombia and that it went beyond the traditional view of agrarian reform and was aimed at closing the gap between rural and urban Colombia.

FARC sources have told IPS that in Colombia, where no real land reform process has ever been carried out, there are estates of up to 100,000 hectares in size, while 87 percent of peasants have no land.

And according to the Gini Index, which measures income inequality on a scale of 0 to 1, land concentration in Colombia increased in the last decade from 0.74 to 0.87 – one of the most unequal distributions of land in the world.

The joint communiqué says the agreement on land issues would mean the start of radical transformations of rural Colombia, based on equality and democracy, by granting access to land for the largest possible number of landless peasants by means of a land bank, or “Fondo de Tierras para la Paz”.

The accord also covers housing plans, the provision of tap water, technical assistance and training, access to education, formal land titling, infrastructure, and soil recovery. “The agreement seeks to reverse the effects of the conflict and restore land to the victims of dispossession and forced displacement,” the document states.

“With the future generations of Colombians in mind, the accord delimits the agricultural frontier, protecting areas of special environmental interest,” it adds.

In addition, it says a food and nutrition system would be put in place as a form of social protection, to eradicate hunger.

The next round of talks, set to begin on Jun. 11, will focus on the question of political participation – FARC’s transition to a legal political movement. Other points on the agenda are an end to the armed conflict, the drug trade, victims’ rights and reparations, and mechanisms to oversee implementation of the agreements.

President Santos called the agreement on land issues “a fundamental step towards a final accord to put an end to half a century of conflict.”

“We will continue the process in a prudent and responsible fashion,” he wrote on Twitter.

In this stage of the talks, “these accords cannot be very concrete; they are just a framework,” sociologist Alfredo Molano, an expert on the conflict over land, told IPS.

A similar process will now follow with the remaining five points on the agenda, and after that, concrete details and numbers will be hashed out.

Molano stressed that the aspects on which agreement was reached included the gradual process of issuing formal title to all of the land occupied or possessed by peasants in Colombia.

“We’re talking about two million hectares,” he told IPS. “Today there are six peasant reserve zones (ZRCs) with a total of 800,000 hectares, and another five, covering 1.2 million hectares, are in the process of being created.”

The ZRCs are areas of collectively-owned rural land. But although they were recognised by law in 1994, they continue to battle for full recognition.

They curb the constant encroachment of the agricultural frontier in forested areas, and are considered a good formula to curtail the steady growth of latifundios or large landed estates.

Coal mining company Prodeco's port terminal in the Colombian city of Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast. Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, May 9 2013 (IPS)

“I was displaced here by mining a month ago. Illegal miners forced me out of my municipality. No, don’t write down where I’m from, let alone my name,” said a 40-year-old black man frightened for his safety. IPS agreed to say only that he is from Colombia’s southern Pacific coast region.

Two leftwing guerrilla movements are active in the biodiverse area between Colombia’s Andes mountains and the coast. The larger group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), is currently engaged in peace negotiations with the government of conservative President Juan Manuel Santos, and the smaller one, the National Liberation Army (ELN), is expected to start peace talks soon.

Far-right paramilitary groups are also operating in the region, termed by the authorities “bacrim” (from “bandas criminales” or criminal bands), after the demobilisation negotiated during the administration of former rightwing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010). The paramilitaries are the only armed sector that is growing in numbers.

The illegal armed groups are now involved in artisanal gold mining, which has long been practiced in the area. Production and trafficking of cocaine are apparently in decline in the south of the Pacific coast region. “Gold is the business now,” the displaced source said.

He said gold generates between 13 and 23 times more net profit now than cocaine in the southwest of Colombia, near the Ecuadorean border.

But to extract gold, initial capital is needed. And mining brings conflicts in its wake.

In the last 20 years, Colombia has been transformed radically, as it became a mineral and oil producing country. And its institutions have not yet adjusted to the new reality.

These are the conclusions arrived at by experts who talked to IPS at the presentation of “Minería en Colombia: Fundamentos para superar el model extractivista” (Mining in Colombia: A basis for improving the extractivist model), the most complete study to date, and the first of a series of reports from the comptroller-general’s office, the country’s highest fiscal control agency.

For six months, economist Luis Jorge Garay led the group of co-authors, made up of experts Julio Fierro, Guillermo Rudas, Álvaro Pardo, Fernando Vargas, Mauricio Cabrera, Rodrigo Negrete and Jorge Espitia.

The speakers during the Monday, May 6 launch of the report were former environment minister Manuel Rodríguez; Jorge Iván González, head of the National University of Colombia’s Centre for Economic Studies; and constitutional law expert Rodrigo Uprimny, head of the local NGO Dejusticia.

“This study is extremely important,” Rodríguez said. “For the first time, the complexity of mining in all its facets has been analysed in one volume, including environmental, social, legal and economic aspects.”

The report “indicates that we are undertaking mining with very little regard for the enormous social and environmental costs involved,” he said.

The 1991 constitution establishes a series of fundamental rights that have, however, been eroded when it comes to mining regulations. A government official can adopt a measure that runs counter to the constitution, but will take precedence in practice.

“For the last two or three decades, the state has been giving up a large part of its potential share in legal mining profits,” said Rudas, an economist. “The problem is not only illegal mining, but legal mining too, which is not yielding enough returns for the country to have a strong state that can afford to solve its other problems.”

Comptroller General Sandra Morelli said “the Colombian state has been considerably weakened, and it is not a question of size but of technical capacity and legal powers to intervene in a much more timely manner, to prevent the public interest from being harmed.”

Mining brings 1.1 billion dollars a year to Colombia, according to Morelli. “But the question is whether this sum is sufficient compensation for the impact of mining activity,” she said.

Colombia’s main mineral products are coal, nickel and gold, for which it is the world’s tenth, seventh and 22nd largest producer, respectively.

“There is an idea in Colombia that foreign investment must be attracted by offering gifts. This is not true. Foreign investment goes where there are resources, but even more to where there are clear rules,” said Garay, who coordinated the study.

“The report shows that mining, while it is promising, also entails enormous dangers,” said Uprimny. These range from environmental hazards, harm to indigenous and Afro-Colombian people, and disputes over land, to the possible intensification of armed conflict and forced displacement.

The study “makes recommendations to strengthen environmental regulations and legal regulatory powers. It is a very important report in a country that has become a mining nation,” said the expert on constitutional law.

“Environmental licences (to conduct mining operations) are given to anyone who asks; only three percent of applications are denied,” said Uprimny.

The displaced man, who attended the launch of the report, is part of the affected minorities – and of the three percent who are refused mining licences. “Afro-descendant communities are not given mining permits. We are told that we do not meet the requirements,” he said.

“In geographic terms, there is overlap of areas where displacement has occurred and where licences have been applied for or granted,” said report co-author Fernando Vargas, a lawyer and sociologist.

“Especially in the ancestral territories (of indigenous and black communities), gold mining is generating extremely serious tensions and humanitarian crises, violations of international humanitarian law and serious and systematic violations of human rights,” he said.

Infomal recyclers in Bogotá, Colombia. Credit: Matt Lemmon/CC BY-SA 2.0

By Constanza Vieira
May 2 2013 (IPS)

Nora Padilla, one of the six winners of this year’s Goldman environmental prize, dedicates her days to organising informal recyclers in the Colombian capital, where the city’s eight million inhabitants are just now reluctantly starting to classify their garbage at source.

Waste pickers in Colombia have finally gained recognition from the state after a 10-year legal battle.

Bogotá’s informal recyclers are now formally recognised as providers of a public service, and since March 2013 the city government pays them 44 dollars per ton of recyclable solid waste that they collect and transport to scrap dealers.

This income is in addition to what they earn selling partially processed, clean recyclable material to the scrap dealers, who pay them per kilo.

Until the city government issued the decree that waste pickers were to be paid for the service that they offer as part of the trash management system, only large private garbage collection consortiums received payment for transporting solid waste, in an industry that collects 7,700 tons of rubbish a day.

“We are very happy because this achievement by Bogotá’s recyclers is to be applied nationwide,” Padilla told IPS by phone from San Francisco, California, where she travelled to receive the Goldman Prize, often referred to as the “Green Nobel”, on Apr. 15.

“This victory – because it is a victory that after so many years of struggle the work of recyclers has been recognised and valued, that social justice has been done, through these payments – is an achievement that the rest of the world is noticing,” she added.

Padilla heads the Bogotá Recyclers Association (ARB), a pioneer organisation that emerged in 1987 and now groups some 5,000 waste pickers – one-third of the city’s informal recyclers.

“Recyclers on every continent, in every country we know about, are saying: ‘yes, it’s possible, we also want that’,” said Padilla, referring to the recognition of Bogotá’s informal recyclers as a valued part of the waste management system.

“This is not only a triumph for Bogotá’s recyclers; it is an achievement for recyclers around the world,” she said. “We thank the city, because it has begun to recognise us and to say: recyclers have rights.”

Padilla calls herself a “grassroots recycler, which means I offer an essential public service.” She estimates that with their manual labour, garbage pickers like herself collect 100 times as much recyclable waste material as is collected by formal industry in Bogotá.

The private garbage companies truck the waste they pick up to a giant landfill to the south of the city, known as Doña Juana, where they are paid by weight, which means classification of the waste is not a priority for them.

The landfill, created in 1988, is at the limit of its capacity. In recent years, there have been frequent complaints about the dumping of liquid waste from Doña Juana into the Tunjuelo river, a tributary of the Bogotá river, which in turn runs into the Magdalena river that crosses the country from south to north.

In the United States, the amount of energy wasted by not recycling aluminium and tin-plated steel cans, paper, printed materials, glass and plastic is equivalent to the annual output of 15 medium-sized power plants, according to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA).

In Colombia, such estimates don’t exist.

“I started working as a recycler as a young girl. By the time I was seven or eight, I was already going to the dumps, or to El Cartucho,” a slum in the heart of Bogotá, Padilla said.

She proudly explained that the first decision reached by the association was to guarantee that the members’ children would not have to go out with their parents to sort through waste. Towards that end, the ARB members pay the salaries of several women members who take care of the children while the adults go out to work.

Bogotá’s waste pickers sell the material they collect to scrap dealers at 1,361 centres.

A census of recyclers in Bogotá, commissioned by the city government in 2012, counted 13,984 organised waste pickers, 68.7 percent of whom were men. Over half were between the ages of 26 and 50, 10 percent were over 60, 5.2 percent were under 18, and 14.8 percent were between 18 and 25.

But the census did not count unorganised recyclers, including homeless people.

On Mar. 21, a historic event occurred in Colombia, which was cited by the Goldman prize: 790 recyclers received, for the first time, payments for transporting 5,700 tons of recyclable waste to the scrap dealers over the space of two months. A few days later, another 700 people received payments.

The new system was designed in response to a 2011 Constitutional Court ruling that ordered actions to be taken to foment the social integration of Bogotá’s marginalised scrap pickers.

Presidents Santos and Chávez at a 2010 Colombia-Venezuela summit en Santa Marta, Colombia. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Mar 15 2013 (IPS)

Late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez played a key role in the current attempt to negotiate peace in Colombia. Along with Cuban President Raúl Castro, he confidentially urged the FARC guerrillas to agree to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’s secret proposal for peace talks.

For years, the late Venezuelan president and Cuba’s Fidel Castro had argued that armed struggle was a thing of the past. And Raúl, Fidel’s successor, took the same stance.

Chávez,who governed Venezuela since 1999 and died on Mar. 5, also provided the logistics to transport the FARC’s negotiators abroad incognito during the preliminary talks, when Santos decided that the contacts should no longer take place in Colombia.

Getting the two sides together “was the hardest past,” according to political scientist Ronal Rodríguez, a professor and researcher at the Venezuela Observatory of the private University of Rosario, in Bogota. Once that was achieved, Norway and Cuba assumed the role of guarantors and Venezuela apparently took a backseat, as a facilitator, along with Chile.

“In politics, only what has already happened is certain,” former Colombian minister Horacio Serpa told IPS. But the most likely scenario is that acting president Nicolás Maduro will be elected president of Venezuela in the Apr. 14 elections.

“In that case, as he has specifically stated, he will continue along the lines followed by President Chávez in this matter,” Serpa said.

“We Colombians hope that Venezuela will continue to help, and continue creating conditions so we can make peace…and that whatever the outcome of the elections, Venezuela will continue cooperating towards that end.”

Rodríguez said that in any case, “Venezuela has already played the most important role it could play with respect to peace in Colombia, by getting the FARC to have the confidence and trust to sit down at the table for peace talks.”

“The challenges that lie ahead mainly concern the negotiating parties, so Venezuela’s role will not be as important as it has been up to now,” he said.

But he said that if Maduro is elected, it would “give continuity to the process” and would give the FARC confidence regarding Venezuela’s presence as one of the guarantors that the peace talks would continue to move ahead.

He said, however, that if opposition candidate Henrique Capriles won the elections, Venezuela’s support for the talks would continue, because for Venezuela, Colombia’s peace process “is a structural, state question that goes beyond the differences between Chavismo and the opposition.”

Rodríguez noted that Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict “has already had a contagion effect across the border in Venezuela,” which suffers “kidnapping, extortion and all those dynamics that the armed actors (from Colombia) have brought.”

Like the FARC, a smaller rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), has also been active in Colombia since 1964. And far-right paramilitary groups, which were partially dismantled in 2006 after closed-door negotiations with the Colombian government, are another actor in the conflict.

“As in the case of all borders during wars, cross-border routes are sought for smuggling arms, provisions of all kinds and financing by means of legal and illegal operations,” former minister Camilo González, director of the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace, told IPS.

González added that “not only has business activity been affected, with negative effects for local residents, traders and producers on both sides of the border, but in several Venezuelan states, the insecurity associated with the presence of the FARC or the ELN has had an impact on many sectors.”

According to accounts gathered by IPS along the border in November, remnant or regrouped paramilitary bands are also active in the Venezuelan border cities of Ureña, San Antonio and San Cristóbal, the capital of the state of Táchira, where they extort local traders and businesses.

González said that “Venezuela in the post-Chávez era will continue collaborating with the peace process in Colombia,” because putting an end to the armed conflict “is in the interests of all sectors of society in Venezuela.”

“I think there will be continuity,” said Carlos Velandia, known as “Felipe Torres” when he was a member of the ELN national leadership. Now he is dedicated to research and consulting on peace.

His arguments are based on Maduro’s close involvement “in the construction of Venezuela’s willingness to support a political solution to the conflict” and the fact that “the conflict has leaked across the border, and also affects Venezuelan territory.

“And the only way to put an end to it is to negotiate peace here in Colombia,” he added.

“The presence of foreign forces is disturbing Venezuela’s democratic stability,” Velandia said.

In Venezuela, he said, “there are factions in the military that want to fully live up to the constitutional mandate to defend sovereignty and territorial integrity. And it’s really hard for a member of the military to see foreign forces in his country and look the other way.”

That means that “Venezuela has no alternative other than supporting a political solution in Colombia, because its security and tranquillity depends on that,” the former guerrilla said.

Alfredo Molano, a Colombian sociologist and writer, went a step further. He said that “if Chavismo collapses in Venezuela and a military dictatorship is established to, let’s say, avoid civil war, what prospects would the FARC have with regard to their own future?”

He said Chávez played the role of a peace-maker “in a clean, transparent fashion, which infused the different parties with confidence.”

But above all, “he was able to show the FARC that the conditions were in place to lay down their weapons, without renouncing their political objectives. Chávez established himself in power without weapons, simply with votes, and with them he subordinated the Venezuelan armed forces,” he told IPS.

“When they agreed to peace talks, the FARC had the Chavismo model in mind. They decided to trade bullets for votes because it is possible – as shown by Venezuela (where Chávez, as an army lieutenant colonel, led a failed coup attempt in 1992). But if that door is closed, the peace talks in Havana will fall apart,” Molano said.

Christian Völkel, a Colombia analyst with the International Crisis Group, takes a less pessimistic view. “Regardless of how important Venezuela’s participation was in the secret phase of talks, the negotiations now have enough momentum of their own to sustain them,” he told IPS.

“Chávez, without a doubt, was the politician that the FARC respected the most,” but that doesn’t mean his death “will have a dramatic effect,” he argued.

“The two sides have been negotiating in Havana for five months, and it looks like they’re already moving towards agreements,” said Völkel, referring to progress that has apparently been made on the issue of land ownership, the first question on the six-point agenda for the talks.

Alirio Uribe of the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective (CAJAR), questioned by reporters before filing a lawsuit against the expansion of jurisdiction of the military justice system. Credit: Courtesy of CAJAR.

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Mar 7 2013 (IPS)

Victims of crimes of the state want their recommendations to be taken into consideration by the peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas that are seeking to end half a century of armed conflict.

The “victims’ demands to the parties” involved in the talks, outlined in an 11-point document presented Wednesday Mar. 6, include “deliberate and decisive participation” by their representatives in the peace process taking place in Havana, Cuba, and state that “everyone guilty of crimes should be punished.”

“We feel solidarity with the victims of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, founded in 1964),” Franklin Castañeda, the president of the Committee of Solidarity with Political Prisoners and a spokesman for the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE), said in a press conference in the capital Wednesday.

But, he added, “Colombian society shouldn’t only demand things from the FARC.”

“State crimes should not be amnestied,” he said, and the state should acknowledge that it created far-right paramilitary groups to back up the army, and “should effectively dismantle” these structures.

“It is unacceptable for state crimes to be erased from the history of this country,” said left-wing parliamentarian Iván Cepeda.

“Our message is very clear: if there is going to be talk of justice, truth and reparations, everyone who has participated in this conflict has to assume their responsibility,” he said.

MOVICE, the Association of the Families of Detained-Disappeared, founded 30 years ago, and groups of sons and daughters of people who have been killed, as well as numerous human rights organisations, say that is the only way to keep the internal armed conflict from continuing, as it has despite several attempted peace processes that have taken place since 1955.

The organisations signed the “proposals on truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition” delivered Wednesday to the United Nations, which is facilitating the peace talks.

“This analysis based on international human rights law is built on the basis of much pain and many tears,” Jesuit priest Javier Giraldo said in the news briefing.

Giraldo and human rights lawyer Federico Andreu of the non-governmental Colombian Commission of Jurists headed the group that drafted the document, which sets forth 11 proposals, including the creation of an independent truth commission.

Preliminary negotiations between the government and the FARC began around two and a half years ago, in total secrecy, at the initiative of President Juan Manuel Santos.

The talks were officially launched in October 2012 in Oslo, and continued in Havana, where five rounds of negotiations have been held behind closed doors. Cuba and Norway are guarantors of the talks, and Venezuela and Chile are observers.

Progress has reportedly been made on several points, such as land ownership, the top issue on a six-point agenda that also includes the question of human rights.

In 2008, Mar. 6 was chosen as the “day of dignity of the victims of state crimes in Colombia”. On that day, large protests were held to pay homage to victims of forced disappearance and extrajudicial executions since 1946.

This year, 500 delegates met in Bogota in the sixth national conference of victims of state crimes. Besides producing proposals for the peace talks, they filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the expansion of the jurisdiction of the military courts, a reform approved by Congress in 2012.

They argued that the civilian justice system should have the authority to decide whether crimes committed by members of the armed forces are human rights violations or “acts of service” committed in the line of duty.

Andreu told IPS the groups’ demands to the government and the FARC were “based fundamentally on the obligations that international law imposes on the state, and on the rights that it upholds for victims.

“Any peace process, in order to be real, has to focus on strengthening the state of law, and on guaranteeing the key question: that the main authors of crimes against humanity, war crimes and human rights violations must be tried and punished,” he said.

“A series of measures must also be taken,” Andreu added, “to guarantee that the doctrines that prompted these crimes are abolished from the military sphere.”

The document demands that “the agents of the state who have committed, tolerated or incited these crimes, or have guaranteed the impunity surrounding them, be purged from the public administration.”

Unless these things are done, he said, “the peace process will be incomplete. There will be a process of demobilisation of one of the actors in the conflict (the FARC), but the violence and human rights abuses will continue.”

Map of La Guajira peninsula showing the Cerrejón mine, the railroad tracks and Puerto Bolívar. On the left is the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains and on the right, Venezuela. Credit: Felipe Osorio/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Feb 23 2013 (IPS)

Two weeks into an indefinite strike called by workers at Cerrejón, one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world, the company has agreed to sit down again and negotiate with Colombia’s National Union of Coal Industry Workers (Sintracarbón).

Negotiations, which had been broken off by Carbones del Cerrejón on Sunday, Feb. 17, are back on track with tentative meetings between company representatives and leaders of Sintracarbón, an affiliate of IndustriALL, a global trade union organisation that represents 50 million workers in a 140 countries in the mining, energy and manufacturing sectors.

Representatives of both sides met in the afternoon of Feb 22 to “discuss the methodology for resuming negotiations,” Sintracarbón president Igor Díaz announced on Twitter.

The decision by Carbones del Cerrejón — a joint venture between the multinational corporations Anglo American, BHP Billiton and Xstrata — to return to the negotiating table was most likely influenced by a change in attitude on the part of the Colombian government, who stepped in to play a role as mediator in this conflict.

In a laconic text message late on Wednesday, Feb. 20, Labour Vice-Minister José Noé Ríos told IPS: “We’re moving ahead. We’re still looking for a way (to solve the conflict) and overcoming the mutual distrust” between the parties.

The following day, Ríos was able to bring two representatives from both sides together to discuss the conditions for reopening negotiations.

A leader of the governing Liberal Party and former peace commissioner, Ríos is an experienced negotiator and in this opportunity he was called on to mediate by Sintracarbón.

Nobody, however, can accuse the vice-minister of “helping” the union, a Sintracarbón advisor told IPS. The source spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity and not as an official spokesperson for the union.

All things considered, after a week of efforts, Ríos’ mediation seems to be yielding results.

Another factor that probably played a role in the company’s change of heart was a social protest demanding a resumption of negotiations, staged on Feb. 21 in the northeastern department of La Guajira, whose economy revolves around the Cerrejón pit and its 9,870 workers.

The protest was initially called by local merchants as a measure apparently against the union, but it was taken up by the population who turned it around. And not just because the demand for dialogue coincides with Sintracarbón’s position.

Carbones del Cerrejón — and with it Guajira politicians and the government — came out of the civic strike looking badly in the eyes of the public, according to the union advisor interviewed by IPS.

During the strike, a usually silent population demonstrated loudly in front of closed stores and businesses, protesting the lack of a healthcare system in La Guajira and the missing royalties paid by Cerrejón to the government, allegedly misappropriated by corrupt local politicians.

Merchants and business operators also decried the environmental damage and health problems caused by coal mining and criticised the scarce development of La Guajira.

The company operates in the area since 1983, mining high-quality thermal coal, but only 10 percent of its purchases and contracts are conducted in Colombia, and less than one percent in La Guajira, the country’s fifth poorest department.

Carbones del Cerrejón established four foundations, with different purposes: strengthening government and accountability in La Guajira; promoting the construction of aqueducts and sanitation works; expanding micro-businesses; and fostering the sustainable development of the Wayuu indigenous people, who represent 42 percent of the Guajira population.

These foundations are financed with the company’s “tax deductions”, Álvaro Pardo, head of the extractive economy analysis centre Colombia Punto Medio, told IPS, and “the work they do has little impact, as is evident from the unsatisfied basic needs index and the alcoholism and illiteracy rates” in La Guajira.

According to his calculations, the almost five million dollars provided by Cerrejón from 1982 to 2002 in compensation to the Wayuu communities, are the equivalent of two and a half days of the company’s coal production.

The Red por la Justicia Tributaria en Colombia, an organisation of Colombian academics and activists who advocate for a fair tax system, mining companies deduct royalties and manipulate prices to lower the sums they are required to pay the government.

The company’s willingness to find a prompt solution seemed in doubt on Feb. 19 when Carbones del Cerrejón’s marketer, Coal Marketing Company (CMC), which exports 90,000 tonnes of coal per day, declared “force majeure” to get out of paying daily fines for not meeting supply contracts.

CMC had 15 shipments scheduled for Turkey and Europe between Feb. 7 –when Sintracarbón called the strike– and Feb. 18.

Force majeure can be invoked in extreme situations, such as natural disasters and strikes. On its website’s home page CMC proudly, and somewhat belatedly, announces: “We have never declared Force Majeure.”

Union records show that from 1986 to date Carbones del Cerrejón and Sintracarbón signed 12 collective bargaining agreements. This is the first work stoppage in the mine in 18 years.

In September 1995, nine workers were fired after a five-day strike called to protest against the quality of the food served by the company’s canteen.

In 1996, Gustavo Palmezano, a unionist who had participated in another Sintracarbón protest against two layoffs, was murdered. Half of the trade unionists murdered in the world over the last four decades were Colombian.

Díaz and another Sintracarbón negotiator have received repeated threats against them and their families since the list of demands was submitted in late November.

Carbones del Cerrejón condemned the threats, backed Sintracarbón when it reported them to the police, and urged the government to grant adequate protection to the unionists and their families.

According to data from Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, 30.3 percent of the world’s energy today comes from coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, whose gas emissions are a leading source of global warming.

With coasts on two oceans and very vulnerable to climate change, Colombia is the world’s fifth coal exporter.

Although in 2011, global coal consumption was up 5.4 percent from 2010, as per information from British Petroleum’s Statistical Review of World Energy, other power sources also increased, pushing international coal prices down.

The 2010-2014 National Development Plan projected an annual production of 124 million tonnes, at prices higher than today’s.

In 2012, 89.2 million tonnes of coal were extracted in Colombia, according to data from the Ministry of Mining and Energy.

In its conflict with Sintracarbón, Carbones del Cerrejón has claimed that prices have dropped 35 percent in the last two years.

The illusion of a development driven by the “mining locomotive”, as President Juan Manuel Santos likes to call it, crashes head on with the government’s weak enforcement of what are already lax regulations.

More than 90 percent of Colombia’s coal comes from fields mined by foreign companies. Carbones del Cerrejón is the single largest producer, with 38 percent.

The company’s operations extend over 800 square kilometres in the Guajira peninsula, bordering with Venezuela. It has its own railway lines running through the isthmus to Puerto Bolívar, a private port on the Caribbean sea which is used exclusively by Carbones del Cerrejón and CMC.

The company reported that in 2012 it exported five percent of global coal production: 32.8 million tonnes. This volume determines the amount of royalties the company must pay the government for extracting non-renewable resources. But the government does not control the volumes actually exported by large mining companies.

Sintracarbón is asking for an eight percent raise in wages — most Colombian workers received a four percent increase in average — and the company is offering five percent.

Carbones del Cerrejón says it agreed to a raise that doubles last year’s inflation and a bonus of 7,250 for each worker, in addition to “maintaining and improving all the benefits enjoyed by workers.”

While the company’s machinery, technology and productivity are on a par with U.S. and European companies, Cerrejón miners are paid five times less than their peers in the North, according to Colombia Punto Medio and other sources.

“Prices have dropped, but the enormous profits of the mining companies have not shrunk. They’re selling coal at about 60 dollars a tonne, but in 2001-2002 coal was 35 dollars a tonne and it was still profitable,” Pardo said.

The vice-president of Sintracarbón, Jairo Quiroz, believes Carbones del Cerrejón is trying to bring down the cost of production per tonne by cutting labour costs.

“That’s what they’re aiming for in this negotiation. Which is why they’re putting up less economic resources to respond to the workers’ list of demands,” Quiroz told IPS.

Colombia has suffered an internal armed conflict for so many decades that it almost amounts to a “forgotten crisis” for external donors. But the president of neighbouring Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, is well aware of the conflict, and understands that it destabilises Latin America, where centre-left governments proliferate.

“He is a man who is determined (to find) a political solution, and to bring peace to this country. He did not lose the sense that Colombia deserves a better fate,” a source familiar with the ongoing negotiations between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC guerrillas, told IPS on condition of anonymity.

Chavez “has understood that this internal conflict causes tremendous damage to the country, but that it is also a destabilising factor in the region,” he said.

Amid the secrecy, the government and people familiar with the negotiations agree that the Venezuelan president has played a cardinal role in the current peace efforts.

The outbreak of civil war in this country dates to 1946, and in its current phase persists between the state security forces and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), both guerrilla groups that emerged in 1964.

Apparently, Santos told Chavez about his intention to explore a peace agreement with the guerrillas in a meeting in August 2010, during the early days of Santos’ administration.

The negotiations with FARC are no longer secret, but IPS has learned that separate talks with ELN are also moving forward.

Inquiries by IPS found that, with great courage, Chavez encouraged FARC leaders to accept Santos’ gestures. The Venezuelan leader’s initiative was also endorsed by Cuban President Raul Castro.

The proposal probably came as a surprise to FARC, whose leaders finally said “Yes” to the negotiations.

The source close to the talks said that the decision was approved by all of the guerrilla leaders, though some had recorded their written reservations over secondary issues, such as whether the timing was right or if the guerrillas were contributing to the popularity of Santos, which was indeed what happened.

Chavez not only approached the parties, but has acted decisively as the facilitator.

The first contact between the Santos government and FARC took place in the Colombian territory of Catatumbo, on the border with Venezuela, according to Mauricio Jaramillo, the nom de guerre of Jaime Alberto Parra, one of the guerrilla leaders involved in the exploratory talks.

Jaramillo is the current commander of the Bloque Oriental (Eastern Bloc), which operates in the giant bi-national valley of the Orinoco River and especially along the border between Colombia and Venezuela.

This meeting took place before the talks formally started, Jaramillo said in a letter on Jan. 9. “The process was about to fail because of the difficulty of finding an agreed location for the negotiations,” he added.

Santos also boldly began the rapprochement, without the army’s knowledge, as revealed in an article on Dec. 29 in the Bogota newspaper ‘El Espectador’, written by the president’s brother, journalist Enrique Santos.

But Santos rejected FARC’s proposal that the negotiations continue in Colombia.

Venezuela also was ruled out as a venue to avoid accusations against Chavez’s government, according to IPS’ annonymous source. The Colombian military regularly warns that there are limits to Venezuela’s tolerance for FARC presence on its soil.

Finally, Havana was chosen to host the exploratory talks: “We decided on Cuba for safety reasons and, above all, because it guaranteed confidentiality,” wrote Enrique Santos.

This exploratory phase ended in August of 2012, leading to the formal negotiation stage, which opened last October in Oslo and since November has been taking place in Cuba.

The process has involved much political arm-wrestling – just answering the question of how Jaramillo was going to be transported to Venezuela and then to Havana took almost a year, demonstrating the level of mistrust between the parties.

The government wanted to arrange an overland journey, crossing three-quarters of Colombia’s territory to reach the border city of Cucuta in the northeast. According to Jaramillo, the government claimed that “the airlift transport was impossible because it violated the drug controls agreed with the USA.”

Thus, Chavez also facilitated the transportation logistics for Jaramillo and other insurgents to Havana, which was a matter of “vital importance”, the source added without giving details, although these difficulties are “well known” by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Finally, Jaramillo was taken to Venezuela by helicopter and from there travelled to Cuba. The same operation was repeated for the other guerrilla fighters.

The talks have had ups and downs, including a severe slump after the death of “Alfonso Cano”, the then commander of FARC and considered an expert negotiator, in a military operation in November 2011.

According to Jaramillo, “Upon formal request of the Colombian government, the bedridden Chavez was kind enough to intervene at some difficult times, contributing to smoothening some rough edges with his enormous prestige.”

Negotiations have moved behind closed doors in the middle of the war, since the government does not accept a truce. FARC, on the other hand, unilaterally decreed an offensive ceasefire for two months, starting last November and expiring on the 20th of this month.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the National University of Colombia on Wednesday handed government negotiators in Bogota, and FARC representatives in Havana, the civilian proposals to resolve what has triggered the war: inequality in land ownership, which in the Gini index ranks 0.87.

These propositions are contained in 11 volumes, compiling 546 proposals from 522 farmers and business organisations that participated in an agrarian forum held in Bogota last December.

(END)

The issue of land ownership is at the centre of Colombia's peace talks. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Dec 20 2012 (IPS)

Colombia’s large-scale agricultural producers and peasant farmers managed to listen to each other for the first time about the core cause of the decades-long armed conflict: the concentration of rural land ownership and the social and economic development of the countryside.

The exchange of views took place at a three-day forum held in Bogota at the request of the negotiators taking part in the peace talks between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which began a month ago in Havana.

The left-wing FARC emerged in 1964 from a group of peasant farmers who were forced in 1948 by violence waged by large landowners and the government to colonise land abandoned by the state, which they defended with guns since 1950.

Six decades and hundreds of thousands of victims later, there is little public information about how the peace talks are going. But it is clear that the different sides see the question of land ownership as lying at the centre of the hostilities.

It is the first point on the agenda for the talks, which were unexpectedly announced in late August, after two years of secret preliminary negotiations.

The forum on “integral agrarian development”, which ended Wednesday Dec. 19, was organised by the United Nations Development Programme and the Centre of Thinking and Follow-up on the Peace Talks, an ad-hoc body set up by the National University of Colombia.

The organisers brought together 1,314 delegados – 33 percent of whom were women – from 522 social and business organisations representing 15 productive sectors from around the country. The debates of the commissions, made up of 20 groups of 60 to 90 people on average, were closed to the press. The conclusions of the debates were sent to a final plenary session.

The delegates discussed the different issues contained in the first point of the peace talks agenda: access to and use of land; unproductive areas; the formalisation of property ownership and of rural labour; the agricultural frontier and protection of nature reserves and communally owned indigenous and black territories; rural development programmes; and infrastructure.

Other issues debated were the social development model; incentives for agricultural production, cooperatives and a solidarity economy; technical assistance, subsidies, credit and marketing; and food security.

The conclusions compiled by the commissions included all of the contrasting positions, as well as the areas where agreement was reached. The final document will be presented to the negotiators on Jan. 8 in Havana.

The statistics from the Colombian countryside speak for themselves: 1.15 percent of rural property owners hold 52 percent of the agricultural land. The country’s Gini coefficient, which is commonly used as a measure of inequality of income or wealth, stood at 0.87 in rural areas – one of the highest levels of inequality in the world given that a score of 1.00 would represent a single person or body owning all of the farmland.

Currently, 38 million hectares are used for large-scale cattle-ranching. But if that total was cut in half, neither productivity nor profitability would be affected, said Agriculture Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo. Meanwhile, just five million hectares are dedicated to agriculture, when at least 22 million are needed.

Optimising land use would bring greater prosperity and profits, Restrepo said in late November. But he added that this cannot be imposed by decree.

Rafael Mejía, the president of the rural association of Colombia, which represents large landowners and agribusiness interests, punctually attended the forum. “I came to listen to you, and for us to be listened to with respect and civility. We managed to do this, and I am satisfied,” he said in his brief closing message.

“I listened to you attentively. I have learned from all of you….We have to learn to turn the page if we want to build, all together…a rural sector like the one we all want, where we all have a place,” he added.

IPS was informed that Mejía commented in the hallways that this was the first time that he had the opportunity to listen to the peasant farmers, and that he realised that they had proposals “that can be discussed.”

On the first day of the forum, Mejía stressed that the poverty and poor conditions in rural areas could not be eradicated if the violence continued. He also said that “private property and productive activities, in the framework of a market economy, are non-negotiable.”

But Jesuit priest Francisco de Roux, provincial of the Society of Jesus’s Colombia Province, stated in his own closing remarks that “What Colombia is doing is discussing the model to be applied, even if some say it is not negotiable.

“The model that we have had until now has produced inequity; it is at the heart of the conflict; it has to do with the mass migration caused by forced displacement; and it has not produced the expected economic growth in the rural sector,” said the priest, who is an economist known for his work on behalf of the country’s poor farmers.

For his part, Andrés Gil, the head of the Asociación Campesina del Valle del Cimitarra, an association of small farmers from the central Cimitarra valley, said the forum “has created an atmosphere in which it is possible to try to bring about a closer alignment of positions in the world of agriculture – the positions of the rural associations and peasant organisations.”

The best aspect of the forum was “the debate of ideas and proposals through political channels rather than war,” he told IPS. “That is the stride forward made by this event…Opportunities like this should be fomented around the country. This should be the way politics and strategic decisions are built in Colombia.”

But the Colombian federation of cattle ranchers refused to attend the forum because the resulting conclusions would go to the peace talks with the FARC, the federation’s spokesman, José Félix Lafaurie, told the press.

Lafaurie, who has been accused of ties to the far-right paramilitary militias, argued that many cattle ranchers have been the victims of the rebel group over the past decades.

Colombia will be removed from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights “blacklist” next year. In exchange, the government of Juan Manuel Santos facilitated a visit to the country by a delegation from the Commission.

For 12 years in a row, war-torn Colombia has been included in Chapter IV of the IACHR’s Annual Report, which singles out those countries with the most worrisome human rights situations. In 2012 the so-called blacklist included Colombia, Cuba, Honduras and Venezuela.

Colombia will now be the focus of a lengthier report, containing recommendations. In 2014, the IACHR will verify compliance with the recommendations. If Colombia has failed to comply, it could once again be included in Chapter IV in 2015.

But “the fact that a country report is being drawn up, rather than a country being included or not in Chapter IV, does not imply an improvement in human rights,” IACHR commissioner Felipe González said Friday Dec. 7 in Bogotá.

In fact the five IACHR commissioners who visited Colombia Dec. 3-7 observed “a serious humanitarian crisis” among those displaced from their homes by the civil war, who are “disproportionately” indigenous and black. It also documented threats faced by activists and homosexuals.

According to the IACHR’s preliminary observations from its in situ visit, between 8.6 and 11.2 percent of Colombia’s 47 million people have been forced to flee their homes by the internal armed conflict.

The rate at which people were displaced increased 63 percent in 2012, especially in the western and southern parts of the country, the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a prominent local human rights group, reported.

Colombians are fleeing fighting and death threats. But lately, the number of families leaving their homes to prevent the two main guerrilla groups – the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) – from recruiting their children has risen.

In addition, displaced persons in the southwestern department or province of Cauca told the IACHR that the authorities do not recognise them as victims because they were displaced by far-right groups that continued to be active after the demobilisation of the paramilitaries.

The commissioners visited Bogotá and the cities of Quibdó, Medellín and Popayán – the capitals, respectively, of the departments of the Chocó and Antioquia, in the northwest, and of Cauca.

González said they found “two different realities” in Colombia: while there are “sound institutions” in Bogotá, in the interior of the country “the state faces major obstacles to enforce the law and implement existing programmes,” due to “corruption at a local level, and a low level of political and social development.”

This is “especially seen in rural areas and with respect to certain population groups,” including blacks, who according to the IACHR, suffer “direct and indirect discrimination.”

González visited Popayán, the city that receives the largest number of displaced persons, in proportion to its population.

“We met with internally displaced persons, indigenous communities, women’s organisations, senior military officers, the governor, the ombudsman and the office of the public prosecutor. We observed a very complex situation. From the women, we received some specific complaints. But in general, they provided us with information that gave us an overview of the situation there,” the Chilean commissioner added.

The IACHR referred to “alarming information” on sexual violence against women by armed groups. Although according to the authorities, only one legal complaint has been filed, the regional ombudsman’s office found that cases were severely under-reported, especially when the perpetrators were members of the military.

“We told the military commanders about all of these reports we have been receiving,” González said. “We are going to remain in contact with them, while drafting our report.”

Many communities in Cauca are caught in the crossfire between government troops and the FARC, although the situation is changing now that peace talks have begun in Havana and the rebel group has declared a unilateral ceasefire.

Indigenous people in Colombia “are very worried about not being taken into account, or only in a marginal manner, and without meaningful participation in the negotiations,” said González, referring to the peace talks between the FARC and the Santos administration.

They believe that “eventually, part of the agreement could be that the FARC could maintain some reserves that are situated in indigenous territories.

“Of course, the IACHR encourages peace processes. But they have to be participative in nature, and they cannot be carried out at the cost of basic human rights standards,” he added.

”That puts the state in sort of a dilemma, but it would be regrettable if setbacks occurred after the important advances made by transitional justice in Colombia,” González said.

“History has shown that justice and reconciliation can be ‘married’,” he stated.

The IACHR, like the International Criminal Court, warned that an imminent constitutional reform that will expand the jurisdiction of military justice tribunals in Colombia would be “a serious setback, and would endanger the right of victims to justice.”

The Organisation of American States human rights body also said the reform contains “several provisions that would be incompatible with the American Convention on Human Rights.”

The IACHR pointed out, moreover, that judicial protection of fundamental rights “cannot be suspended, even in times of war.”

Protests held in Bogotá by groups that suffer the consequences of the war and do not feel represented in the peace talks. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Oct 17 2012 (IPS)

Closed-door talks between members of the FARC guerrillas and the Colombian government began in Oslo Wednesday, after the delegates were taken from the airport to an undisclosed location.

The negotiators plan to speak to the press in the Norwegian capital on Thursday. The two delegations travelled to Norway separately on Tuesday afternoon.

The government and the communist FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebels, which have been fighting since 1964 and control a large part of rural Colombia, each named five chief negotiators, five alternates, and 20 other delegates as advisors.

The number of delegates formed part of the agreement reached after a year and a half of exploratory talks held in near total secrecy, with Norway and Cuba as guarantors and Venezuela and Chile as observers.

The government delegation is headed by former vice president Humberto de la Calle, and includes other key negotiators chosen by conservative President Juan Manuel Santos, such as representatives of industry and senior military officers.

A source close to the FARC told IPS that in Wednesday’s meeting, the insurgent group’s delegation would draw attention to an “empty chair.”

While there are five government delegates, there are only four sitting on the FARC’s side of the negotiating table.

The empty chair belongs to Simón Trinidad, nom de guerre of former banker Ricardo Palmera, who was extradited to the United States in 2004 by then president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010). Trinidad is serving a 60-year sentence in a Colorado maximum security prison for the FARC kidnapping of three U.S. military contractors in 2003, who were held as hostages by the rebel group until 2008.

By naming Trinidad as one of their principal negotiators, the FARC is apparently indicating that his extradition marked the start of the undermining of Colombia’s autonomy in solving its internal armed conflict.

The group also appears to be pointing out that the peace talks require definitions of the U.S. role in the counterinsurgency war in Colombia, where it is the main source of military funds and the principal military strategist.

On Sept. 7, Colombia’s RCN radio station read out a letter from Trinidad in which he told President Santos: “My attendance as a peace delegate is feasible…All it would take is a simple political and diplomatic request on your part to the government of the United States; you know that very well.”

Colombia’s Justice Minister Ruth Stella Correa and the attorney general, Eduardo Montealegre, expressed more modest expectations, saying Trinidad could participate by means of a teleconference, if the U.S. authorities gave their permission.

There has been no public reaction on the question by the government of Barack Obama.

On Tuesday, INTERPOL’s (international police) wanted list still included the names of two other FARC negotiators facing U.S. arrest warrants in connection with the kidnapping of the three military contractors: Andrés París (Emilio Carvajalino), one of the FARC’s chief negotiators, and Tanja Nijmeijer, a Dutch-born rebel who forms part of the team of advisers.

But Interpol confirmed Tuesday that it had suspended the international arrest warrants for the negotiators named by the FARC, as requested by the Colombian government. Colombian arrest warrants for the guerrilla negotiators were also suspended.

The empty chair has been a symbol in peace talks between the government and the FARC since January 1999.

At that time, the then FARC commander Manuel Marulanda left his seat empty next to then president Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) when formal negotiations began in San Vicente del Caguán in southern Colombia.

On that occasion, Marulanda – described to IPS by someone in the know as “a tremendously wary peasant and a born military strategist” – contended that the FARC had uncovered a plan to assassinate him during the ceremony.

According to another source in Bogota, the second issues that the FARC will bring up in Oslo is the need for a comprehensive peace process, that would also include the National Liberation Army (ELN) in parallel talks.

The ELN, which also emerged in 1964, inspired by the Cuban revolution, is smaller than the FARC but has an influence over many communities.

In 2009, the FARC and the ELN put an end to a war between regional structures of the two guerrilla armies, which had led to the deaths of insurgents as well as civilians and had driven a wave of refugees across the border into Venezuela.

The agreement between the two rebel groups included a commitment not to negotiate for peace without the other insurgent organisation.

A communiqué issued by the leaders of the FARC and the ELN, with a September dateline, reported that a summit of guerrilla leaders had stressed the two group’s staunch determination to seek a peace agreement, and the aim to make their “ideas and actions converge.” However, they did not specifically state an interest in talks between the ELN and the government.

The same source close to the FARC told IPS that eventual negotiations with the ELN would be independent, until the two processes merged into one towards the end of the talks, when the question of victims would be addressed.

The source also confirmed that there have been contacts between the ELN and the government.

At the meeting between leaders of the two insurgent groups, they decided to mutually back the negotiating agendas of the respective peace processes.

The agenda for talks with the FARC contains five main points: land, political participation, an end to hostilities with the surrender of weapons, drug trafficking and victims.

The ELN agenda refers to power relations, territory and population, as well as natural resources and sovereignty.

The need for peace talks with the ELN is also underscored by new civil society networks and coordinating mechanisms that are emerging with the objective of influencing the peace talks with the FARC and the changes that lie ahead if a peace accord is reached.

Peasant delegates at the Marcha Patriótica peace movement’s first public appearance, on Jul. 20, 2010 in the town of La Macarena, in the FARC’s zone of influence. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Sep 13 2012 (IPS)

What are the obstacles to peace in war-torn Colombia? When government and rebel negotiators asked themselves this question, they concluded that one problem was that the media in this country had turned “peace” itself into a dirty word.

But Enrique Santos – the former owner of the leading daily newspaper, El Tiempo, older brother of President Juan Manuel Santos, and a key participant in the preliminary talks with the rebels – reportedly quipped: “That can be fixed in two weeks.”

IPS was told about the comment by a source close to the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Enrique Santos reportedly made his remark during the exploratory talks that began a year and a half ago and led to the president’s Aug. 27 announcement that formal peace talks would start in October.

“That assertion, if he really made it, is also a confession about how news is handled in a manipulative fashion,” journalist Arturo Guerrero told IPS.

Changing the mentality of the media “isn’t an easy task,” because “constant genuflexion before those in power is a characteristic of our press,” said Javier Darío Restrepo, a veteran reporter who heads the ethics department of the New Ibero-American Journalism Foundation (FNPI), founded by Colombian Nobel Literature Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez.

Under the government of right-wing President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), the media were “totally obsequious,” he told IPS. “No one could raise any doubts about him being the Messiah, the man who was going to change the country.”

During the Uribe administration, the media, basing their reports almost exclusively on military sources, celebrated bombings of guerrilla camps and rebel casualties. And anyone who dared talk about peace risked ridicule and accusations of complicity with the FARC, the main rebel group, in arms since 1964.

By means of a constitutional reform, Uribe managed to be re-elected to a second term, although his bid for a third term was cut short by the Constitutional Court. “Little by little, the press left him behind, and now they criticise him more and more openly. Why? Because the ones in power have changed, now it’s Juan Manuel (Santos),” Restrepo said.

Since Aug. 27, headlines trumpeting the benefits of peace mushroomed overnight. All of a sudden peace has become more profitable than war, and studies have been published to demonstrate this.

“Santos is realistic” a guerrilla leader and negotiator who until recently was dubbed a “narco-terrorist” blares out from the front page of one newspaper. “Peace comes first” states the president of the Supreme Court, Javier Zapata Ortiz, on another. “The Pope encourages the peace process with the FARC” says a front-page headline the next day.

Restrepo said “there is a kind of worship of those in power. That is one of the most worrisome aspects of our press, because it keeps it from being effective in its analyses and in denouncing abuses of power.”

In 1999, a United Nations general assembly resolution, the “Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace”, defined a “culture of peace” as “a set of values, attitudes, traditions, modes of behaviour, and ways of life…”

And article 7 of the Declaration states that “The educative and informative role of the media contributes to the promotion of a culture of peace.”

For that reason, upbeat headlines aren’t enough.

In order to usher in a culture of peace based on respect for life in Colombia, it is necessary “to work to change the mentality of journalists,” Restrepo said.

“Change has to do with training, and with incentives” such as prizes and praise, because “journalists love it when their work stands out,” added Restrepo, who said he imagines a kind of “ongoing campaign that would help the public learn how to distinguish what is going well and what has to improve.

“But above all, change has to do with journalists learning how to look at their own work with a critical eye,” he added.

Restrepo said it was “very difficult” to say when “the hatred propagated over the past decade will be appeased, because it will entail a change of attitude, which will require a long-term effort, in which the press has to be very involved.”

But it’s not a question of no longer reporting on “the barbarities being committed by the guerrillas, because this isn’t about achieving peace with our eyes closed,” he stressed.

What is needed, he clarified, is context; showing “how different countries that have experienced similar situations have resolved their problems, paying the price that is paid for peace.”

In his view, this “contextualisation” is not seen in certain newspapers, “because they are giving in to the primal instinct of ‘they are cheats, and how can we make peace with cheats?’ Well, it isn’t with friends that you make peace,” he said.

A country that is caught up in war for decades is repeating mistakes over and over again, he said. And the mistake made by the press is, “precisely, insisting on stirring up toxic memories, that poison people’s minds,” Restrepo said.

“It is the duty of journalists not to spread the poison,” but to report on these issues in such a way that “feelings turn into logic,” he argued.

Reality “is made up of many elements that, understood by readers, help them react intelligently instead of with knee-jerk reactions based purely on feelings,” he said.

The outlook has changed since late August.

The revelation that the government was holding exploratory talks with the FARC and that formal peace negotiations would begin in October in Oslo and would then continue in Havana took the media and pundits by surprise.

But for the past year, Congress has been debating legal reforms that now make sense in light of the announcement. The reforms would pardon war crimes committed by all of the parties involved in the decades-long armed conflict.

The projected reforms included the expansion of the jurisdiction of military tribunals; the creation of a legal framework for peace talks, that would benefit politicians and businesspersons with ties to the far-right paramilitaries; and an attempt at judicial reforms, already blocked by a civil society campaign waged by journalists and ordinary citizens over the Twitter social network.

Guerrero, a columnist with the El Colombiano newspaper who has helped raise awareness among journalists about the need for responsible coverage of the conflict, does not believe that public opinion “in today’s world of Internet” is as easily manipulated as Enrique Santos’s alleged remark would indicate.

“The absolute reign of the traditional media has noisily collapsed, because the social networks, blogs and the Internet in general have become a sixth continent, where these media no longer have an influence,” he said.

“That sixth continent is overwhelming…and many people are turning to it as a source of news,” he said. Meanwhile, “the large mass of people who do not follow the news and only find out what is going on every once in a while…are more susceptible to manipulation,” he added.

One decisive aspect is that “functional illiteracy is still high in the country, especially in rural areas,” Guerrero added. And that segment of the population also has “a quite rudimentary understanding of politics.”

In large cities, on the other hand, “what predominates is the conscious vote, and those sectors that have access to the Internet, that are the most educated, play a part in marking the horizon towards which the country is marching,” he said.

From left to right: FARC members Andrés París, Mauricio Jaramillo, Ricardo Téllez, Sandra Ramírez and Hermes Aguilar at Tuesday’s press conference in Havana. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Constanza Vieira and Patricia Grogg
HAVANA/BOGOTA , Sep 5 2012 (IPS)

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are taking a pragmatic, reformist stance in the new attempt to negotiate a peace agreement with the Colombian government, to put an end to nearly half a century of civil war.

The priorities on the rebel group’s agenda include putting a curb on large-scale mining projects and infrastructure works like hydropower dams in rural areas, and measures for rural development.

In exchange, the FARC would lay down its arms.

On Tuesday, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, speaking from the presidential palace in Bogota, and FARC chief Timoleón Jiménez, in a video broadcast from Havana one hour later, formally announced that peace talks would start in October.

In Havana, the words of the rebel commander were listened to attentively by FARC members Marco León Calarcá, Andrés París, Mauricio Jaramillo, Ricardo Téllez, Sandra Ramírez and Hermes Aguilar, in the news briefing for Cuban reporters and foreign correspondents, where questions were not allowed.

The talks will begin in Oslo in the first half of October, before moving to Havana.

According to Tuesday’s announcement, the first item on the agenda is agricultural reform.

The terms of the agreement were distributed to the press after Jiménez’s videotaped speech, in which he said the Colombian government had repeatedly stated that there would be no ceasefire.

The rebel leader said the government, “in its strange point of view, sees any possibility of a ceasefire, truce, armistice or demilitarisation as only contributing to generating perverse incentives.”

He also said the guerrillas “have come to this new attempt at reconciliation besieged not only by the brunt of the military offensive unleashed a decade ago, but openly compelled, by its growth, to reduce our political and social aspirations in exchange for a miserable surrender,” he added.

Nevertheless, he said, “we hold the hope that the regime won’t try to repeat the same script of the past.”

This is the third attempt at peace talks between Colombian governments and the FARC, an insurgent force that has an army-like structure.

The negotiations that made the most progress took place from 1984 to 1990. They were launched by the government of Belisario Betancur (1982-1986) and were brought to a violent end by President César Gaviria (1990-1994) in December 1990.

That round of talks gave rise to the Patriotic Union (UP), a left-wing party created as part of an agreement for the demobilisation and gradual reinsertion of the rebels in political life.

But the UP was systematically eliminated, with thousands of its members and supporters murdered.

The next peace process was initiated and ended by President Andrés Pastrana
(1998-2002). The talks were held in Caguán, a Switzerland-sized area in the south of the country from which military troops were temporarily withdrawn for the purpose.

After the talks collapsed, the United States got more heavily involved in Colombia’s counterinsurgency war.

The FARC maintain that peace is impossible without reforms, and that the reforms will emerge from the negotiations.

The insurgent group’s delegates to the talks “obey the decisions that are reached democratically in the secretariat” of the FARC’s central high command, a senior FARC commander stated in a private letter to which IPS had access on Monday Sept. 3.

The message adds that the rebel group will take part in the negotiations – which the participating parties say will continue uninterrupted until a peace deal is reached – as if they were “the most important of fights.”

The guerrilla leader also states that “on this side, everyone is ready” to engage in negotiations.

The National Liberation Army (ELN), a smaller rebel group, which like the FARC took up arms in 1964, has also said it is willing to sit down at the negotiating table.

The ELN has been seeking peace talks for years, but has failed to reach an understanding with any Colombian administration.

The letter seen by IPS says that at the root of the failure to reach an agreement to hold negotiations, as shown by previous exploratory talks, is the fact that the FARC considers that “peace will arrive together with changes, or it won’t arrive…it isn’t simply” a matter of laying down arms, synonymous with demobilisation.

On the contrary, for the elites, peace is synonymous with demobilisation, adds the source, a commander of FARC troops in a large region of Colombia, whose identity will be kept confidential.

The other side is lacking in “magnanimity,” he said. “When it comes right down to it, they won’t budge,” said the rebel leader, referring to the collapse of talks in Caguán.

The letter says the guerrillas will complain to Santos because he maintained the pro-mining policy of his predecessor, Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010). The rebel commander says drug trafficking money and the personal interests of the far-right ex-president – who is fervently opposed to the peace talks – come together in the mining industry.

At the negotiating table, the FARC will bring up the local conflicts generated by major infrastructure works, which are generally preceded by bloody operations of forced displacement of the local population, and which are opposed by the communities in the affected territories, the letter adds.

According to the agreement reached after exploratory talks held in Cuba from Feb. 23 to Aug. 26, the official negotiations will open in Oslo, but will be based in Havana, while meetings may also take place in other countries.

Previously, the two sides had held preliminary talks for a year and a half – a period during which top FARC commander Alfonso Cano was killed in combat, in November 2011.

Cano had been the chief FARC negotiator in the 1980s peace process that gave rise to the UP.

“We are looking at a real possibility” of an end to the conflict, although the road will be “difficult,” President Santos said.

Colombia and the world “have changed,” but this is also “a different accord,” Santos added.

Colombia is now the second-largest economy of South America, “millions of Colombians are leaving poverty behind,” and “the use of violence to achieve political objectives is a thing of the past,” and is not tolerated by any government in the region, he said.

The governments of Cuba and Venezuela, which publicly reject armed struggle, have played a key role in the preliminary talks.

Santos also said that “we can talk about peace thanks to the success of our armed forces and police.”

He stressed that military operations will not be suspended during the talks – an aspect that independent experts and the FARC see as the Achilles’ heel of the current peace effort.

“This is an agreement to end the conflict,” he insisted, although he warned that the success of the talks “must not be taken for granted.”

The talks “will be measured in months, not years,” Santos added, and the progress made will periodically be assessed. And if there is no progress, “we will not continue,” he stated.