The home of a poor farming family in the mountains of Cajamarca, in the central Colombian department of Tolima. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Helda Martínez
IBAGUÉ, Colombia , Apr 8 2014 (IPS)

“Things are getting worse and worse,” Enrique Muñoz, a 67-year-old farmer from the municipality of Cajamarca in the central Colombian department of Tolima, once known as the country’s breadbasket, said sadly.

“Over the past five decades, the situation took a radical turn for the worse,” activist Miguel Gordillo commented to IPS, referring to what is happening in Tolima, whose capital is Ibagué, 195 km southwest of Bogotá.

“Fifty years ago, Ibagué was a small city surrounded by crops – vast fields of cotton that looked from far away like a big white sheet,” said Gordillo, head of the non-governmental Asociación Nacional por la Salvación Agropecuaria (National Association to Save Agriculture).

“In Tolima we planted maize, tobacco, soy, sorghum and fruit trees, and the mountains that surrounded Cajamarca were covered with green coffee bushes protected by orange trees, maize and plantain, and surrounded by celery,” Muñoz said.

His voice lost in the past, he said the farms in the area also had “piggies, chickens, mules, cows; everything was so different.”

Gordillo said, “In the north of the department we had fruit trees of all kinds, and the rivers were chock full of fish. There’s still rice, some maize, coffee…but even the fish have disappeared.

“In short, in five decades the look of this agricultural region has changed, and today it’s all freeways, residential complexes, gas stations, and here and there the odd field with crops,” he complained.

As a result, everything changed for Muñoz. “My wife and I are now supported by our kids who work, one in Ibagué and two in Bogotá. On the farm we have a cow, whose milk we use to make cheese that we sell, and we plant food for our own consumption.”

Muñoz plans to take part in the second national farmers’ strike, on Apr. 27, which the government is trying to head off.

The first, which lasted from Aug. 19 to Sep. 9, 2013, was held by coffee, rice, cotton, sugar cane, potato and cacao farmers, who demanded that the government of Juan Manuel Santos revise the chapters on agriculture in the free trade agreements (FTAs) signed by Colombia, especially the accord reached with the United States.

The national protest was joined by artisanal miners, transport and health workers, teachers and students, and included massive demonstrations in Bogotá and 30 other cities.

Clashes with the security forces left 12 dead, nearly 500 injured and four missing.

Colombia has signed over 50 FTAs, according to the ministry for economic development.

The highest profile are the FTA signed in 2006 with the United States, which went into effect in May 2012, and the agreement with the European Union, that entered into force in August 2013, besides the FTAs with Canada and Switzerland. Another is currently being negotiated with Japan.

In 2011, Colombia founded the Pacific Alliance with Chile, Mexico and Peru, and Panama as an observer. It also belongs to other regional integration blocs.

“Colombia’s governments, which since the 1990s have had the motto ‘Welcome to the future’, lived up to it: that future has been terrible for Tolima and the entire country,” Gordillo said.

In the last four years, coffee farmers have held strikes until achieving subsidies of 80 dollars per truckload of coffee.

In this South American country of 48.2 million people, agriculture accounts for 6.5 percent of GDP, led by coffee, cut flowers, rice and bananas. But that is down from 14 percent of GDP in 2000 and 20 percent in 1975.

“Agriculture is doing poorly everywhere, and Tolima is no exception,” the department’secretary of agricultural development, Carlos Alberto Cabrera, told IPS.

“Rice, which is strong in our department, is having a rough time,” he said. “In coffee, we are the third-largest producers in the country, and we hope to become the first. There’s not much cotton left. In sorghum we are the second-largest producers. Soy is disappearing, tobacco too, and many products are now just grown for the food security of our farmers.”

In the search for solutions, “we have invited ministers and deputy ministers to the region, but their response has been that we should plant what sells, to stay in the market of supply and demand,” he said.

But Cabrera said that in the case of Tolima, the FTAs weren’t a problem. “We haven’t felt any effect, because the only thing we export is coffee. Rice is for national consumption, and sorghum goes to industry,” he said.

Gordillo, meanwhile, criticised that when ministers visit the department, “they say farmers should plant what other countries don’t produce, what they can’t sell to us. In other words, they insist on favouring others. They forget that the first priority should be the food security of our people, and not the other way around.”

Because of this misguided way of looking at things, he said, “our farmers will hold another national strike. People from Tolima and from many other regions of the country will take part, because the government isn’t living up to its promises, and all this poverty means they have to open their eyes.”

The government says it has fulfilled at least 70 of the 183 commitments it made to the country’s farmers after last year’s agriculture strike.

The farmers were demanding solutions such as land tenure, social investment in rural areas, protection from growing industries like mining and oil, and a fuel subsidy for agricultural producers.

The government says it earmarked 500 million dollars in support for agriculture in the 2014 budget.

In the last few weeks, the ministry of agriculture and rural development has stepped up a campaign showing off its results, and President Santos has insisted in public speeches that “a new farmers’ strike is not justified.”

The authorities are also pressing for dialogue to reach a national pact with farmers, as part of their efforts to ward off the strike scheduled for less than a month ahead of the May 25 presidential elections, when Santos will run for a second term.

Small farmers and other participants in a Mar. 15-17 “agricultural summit” agreed on eight points that should be discussed in a dialogue, including agrarian reform, access to land, the establishment of peasant reserve zones, prior consultation on projects in farming and indigenous areas, protection from FTAs, and restrictions on mining and oil industry activities.

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.”

A participant in the ethical and political trial wears a t-shirt defending the right to life and the right of local residents to stay in their territory. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Aug 22 2013 (IPS)

An “ethical and political trial on pillaging of natural resources” in Colombia condemned three foreign corporations, including Canada’s Pacific Rubiales Energy, which has dozens of oil and natural gas operations around the country.

Some 500 rural and indigenous activists came to Bogotá Aug. 16-18, in some cases travelling up to 20 hours from remote mountainous and jungle areas to participate in the hearings.

The “ethical and political trial” was organised by the Red de Hermandad y Solidaridad con Colombia (REDHER), the Colombia solidarity network, which brings together civil society organisations and national and international legal experts.

The three companies on trial were Pacific Rubiales, South Africa-based mining giant AngloGold Ashanti, and Emgesa, a subsidiary of the Spanish-Italian Endesa energy company, which is involved in the El Quimbo hydropower project in the southwestern province of Huila.

At the hearings, 25 representatives of communities affected by the companies’ oil, mining and hydroelectric projects, activists and researchers presented testimony and evidence of alleged violations of environmental, social and labour rights.

One of them was Marcos Arrepiche, a former governor of the Turpial–La Victoria indigenous reservation of the Achagua people in the central province of Meta. The province accounts for half of Colombia’s oil production.

Most of Pacific Rubiales’s 2012 output of 246,575 barrels per day of crude was extracted through its local subsidiary Meta Petroleum Corporation, according to the company’s annual report.

The oil pipeline connecting the Campo Rubiales oilfield with Monterrey in the neighbouring province of Casanare runs through the Turpial-La Victoria reservation, Arrepiche told IPS.

The legal battle he is leading reached the Constitutional Court, which in September 2011 handed down a sentence stating that the community should have been consulted before the pipeline was put in.

International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, ratified by Colombia, requires consultation of local indigenous communities prior to any project on their land.

But since it had already been installed, the court ordered the adoption of measures to mitigate the cultural, economic, social and religious effects of the construction of the oil pipeline on traditional native lands.

As a result, the community was given cattle, which neither mitigated the effects nor compensated the damage caused.

In addition, “around 800 tanker trucks drive through every day, affecting our lives and our crops,” said Arrepiche. “The spirits of the water are starting to leave. The water level in the Meta and Morichales rivers has gone way down.”

The road used by the oil tanker trucks is 360 km long, running from the Campo Rubiales oil field to Puerto Gaitán and Villavicencio, the capital of Meta.

But 190 km of the road are not paved, and “the dust thrown up from traffic on the roads hurts the pasture, and the cattle are unable to graze,” Ricardo Apolinar, an activist with the local NGO Corporación Choapo, told IPS.

In response to a request for an interview, Pacific Rubiales sent IPS an email stating that “the company operates under the strictest environmental, labour and social regulations, and is constantly audited by globally recognised independent institutions.”

“The relationship with the Sikuani ethnic group is one of ongoing dialogue in a spirit of utmost respect for their culture,” it adds.

There are several indigenous groups in municipalities of east-central Colombia, where Pacific Rubiales is active. The Sikuani are the group living nearest to Puerto Gaitán, the company’s main base of operations.

The native groups also complained about the effects of the nearly half-century civil war. The army and far-right paramilitary groups are active in the area.

“The paramilitaries and army try to recruit our boys,” said Arrepiche. “I fought hard for them to give me back eight young men who they had taken. And they abuse the girls, offering them money, and getting them drunk.”

After listening to the testimony, a three-member tribunal found the companies responsible, and declared that the state shared in the responsibility.

The tribunal was made up of Susana Deranger, a Canadian activist from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation; Eduardo León Navarro, a sociologist with the Consejería en Proyectos (Projects Counselling Service), an NGO; and Dr. Manuel Vega Vargas, a surgeon and doctoral candidate in history at the National University of Colombia.

Acting as prosecutor was lawyer Francisco Ramírez Cuéllar, president of FUNTRAENERGETICA, the Colombian mining and energy workers’ union.

There was no defence, since the accused did not respond to the summons.

The “moral verdict…is a step prior to civil or penal legal proceedings, within or outside the country,” Ramírez Cuéllar, who acts as a lawyer in some of the cases, told IPS.

“A group of lawyers in Colombia, Canada, the United States and Britain are evaluating the evidence,” he said. “In the near future lawyers from Australia and South Africa will also participate. Similar cases are moving ahead against Drummond, Chiquita, Del Monte, Cerrejón, and BP.

“They are slow processes, because the evidence must be sound,” he added. “But the complaints of the communities and the confirmation of the violence, poverty and environmental impacts caused by the multinationals are essential elements for putting them up against the wall.”

Although the companies did not respond, according to Ramírez Cuéllar “they have followed (the ethical and political trial) because they are interested in knowing how far we have gone in our investigations, and how much of a threat this is to them.”

Apolinar commented to IPS that when the companies consult affected communities prior to investment projects to seek their approval, in accordance with ILO Convention 169, they offer them “poultry farming projects, livestock, or crops on several hectares that end up dying because of the lack of follow-up care.

“The poverty level in indigenous communities is around 65 percent and many eat roasted cassava and ‘agua de panela’ (a drink made from unrefined cane sugar),” said Apolinar. “Where is the development that they are promising?”

The activist also complained that, since Pacific Rubiales is an important source of ad revenue for many media outlets, the public in Colombia receive virtually no information about the protests and denunciations against the companies.

IPS asked the mining and energy ministry and the national hydrocarbons agency about state controls over Pacific Rubiales.

In response, the hydrocarbons agency sent a socioenvironmental follow-up report showing that inspections have been carried since 2010, and that four requests for right of petition were filed by the community, over environmental and social damage.

The document sent to IPS says that in response to the requests for right of petition received earlier this year, the hydrocarbons agency’s social and environmental inspectors carried out new monitoring visits in July.

A report based on the results of the visits is to be sent to the company and to Cormacarena to complement the action plan and carry out the necessary monitoring, the agency added.

Cormacarena is the government unit for sustainable development of the La Macarena special management area, which administers a strategic 34,000-sq-km biological and geographic area that encompasses the Andean highlands, Orinoco plains, and Amazon rainforest ecosystems.

Pacific Rubiales is involved in oil industry activity in some municipalities in the area.

Activists in the areas affected by the company’s activities have also reported threats. Computers and part of the material compiled for the hearing were stolen from REDHER, and numerous threatening messages were received and websites of the participating organisations were hacked.

The Avaaz.org website urged supporters to sign a petition calling for guarantees for the organisations and individuals who took part in the ethical and political trial, and created the Twitter hastag #PacificnoesColombia.

Schoolchildren in Quibdó, the capital of Chocó, a province where displacement is on the rise. Credit: Jesús Abad Colorado/IPS

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Jun 4 2013 (IPS)

Drugs and arms traffickers are muscling in on Colombia’s Pacific coastal region, forcibly displacing local people, according to a new report by the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES).

One of the factors forcing people to leave their homes is “disputes and strategies to consolidate control over territories by the armed actors,” said Marco Romero, the head of CODHES, at the launch of the report titled “La crisis humanitaria en Colombia persiste: El Pacífico en disputa” (Colombia’s humanitarian crisis continues: The disputed Pacific region) on May 31.

Displacement in the region “is a consequence of its geographical location, as well as neglect by the state, which has benefited the drug trade. In addition the government policy known as ‘locomotora minera’ (‘drive for mining,’ a policy to foment large-scale mining) has increased production since 2009, and with it, the ambition of the armed factions,” Romero said.

Colombia’s internal armed conflict has dragged on since the early 1960s. Now the government of conservative President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are holding peace talks in Havana. But there are a number of other armed groups in this country, including drug trafficking syndicates and far-right paramilitary militias.

The report by CODHES, which is the most respected non-governmental source of statistics on displacement, says that last year 92,596 people were forced to flee their homes in the country’s Pacific region – 36 percent of the 2012 victims of forced displacement nationwide.

Since 1999, over 860,000 people have been displaced in the Pacific region, according to CODHES. The worst year for the region was 2012, when the number rose by 22 percent compared with 2011.

Nationwide, there were 256,590 cases of displacement last year, some 2,500 fewer than in 2011, when the number totalled 259,146.

But the number of cases of mass displacement in 2012 was 98 percent higher than in 2011.

“Mass displacement is the term used when a single episode of violence forces the migration of at least 10 families or 50 people,” CODHES researcher Paola Hurtado told IPS.

In the Pacific region, mass displacements have increased by 45 percent over the last two years.

Afro-Colombian and indigenous people, who live mainly in the western Pacific coastal departments (provinces) of Nariño, Cauca, Valle del Cauca and Chocó, are the most affected. In 2012, an estimated total of 51,938 blacks and 18,154 native people in this region were victims of forced displacement.

“The situation of Afro-descendant people is terrible,” Ariel Palacios, of the National Conference of Afro-Colombian Organisations (CNOA), said at the presentation of the report.

“Government protection policies are ineffective, and racism is rife in the cities. That’s why most Afro-Colombians try to relocate in small towns or villages, to mitigate the gravity of their situation,” Palacios said.

A newer aspect is intra-urban displacement, within or between cities, to which CODHES devotes part of its report, attributing it to disputes between criminal bands for control of small-scale drug dealing.

Romero said, “Paradoxical as it may seem, in the midst of conflict and the humanitarian crisis, the country is seeking peaceful solutions and reparations for the victims, with Law 1,448 and the peace talks between the national government and the FARC.”

He was referring to the Victims and Land Restitution Law, which began to be enforced in 2012 in response to the main injustice arising from the war, the other side of the coin of displacement: illegal appropriation of land.

The law “is a positive development because it accords recognition to victims and acknowledges that, if the state was not capable of protecting them in the past, it must do so now,” Gabriel Rojas, CODHES’s research coordinator, told IPS.

“It’s also positive that economic resources have been assigned,” amounting to some 30 million dollars, he said.

“However, we know, and the outgoing agriculture minister (Juan Camilo Restrepo) has admitted, that there are serious problems with organisational aspects and registration, which have caused difficulties and in some cases re-victimised people, who suffer anxiety knowing there is a law to protect them and yet, a year and a half later, implementation lags far behind,” Rojas said.

Colombia has one of the largest populations of internally displaced people in the world. Civil society organisations and official estimates put the number of displaced since the 1980s at over five million people in this country of approximately 46 million people.

The situation reached such a pass that in 1998 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) opened a permanent office in Bogotá.

IPS requested comments and statistical information from the government’s Unit for Care and Comprehensive Reparations for Victims, and was promised a reply, “which would not be immediate,” on condition the request was sent by e-mail.

“The lack of official statistics is becoming a problem. The last known figure for the total of Afro-Colombian people affected by forced displacement in 2012 was about 90,000, but there is no certainty,” Rojas said.

Left to right: Juan Camilo Restrepo, Josefina Stubbs and Alex Segovia Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Apr 25 2013 (IPS)

International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) initiatives working to overcome poverty and improve food security in the Colombian countryside can make a positive contribution to government efforts to tackle some of the most neglected problems facing this South American country.

“Rural development was forgotten in Colombia for a long time,” Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Juan Camilo Restrepo said at a seminar on Monday Apr. 22, organised by IFAD and his ministry to share experiences linking the situation in rural areas with peace efforts in this country that has seen nearly 50 years of armed conflict.

“That’s why we’re now making great efforts to give rural development pride of place. But there is a long way to go,” Restrepo admitted at the opening of the seminar on “Desarrollo rural y construcción de territorios dinámicos y pacíficos” (Rural development and construction of dynamic and peaceful territories).

Recent indicators show progress has been made against poverty, but it is still concentrated in the rural areas where one-third of Colombia’s 47 million people live.

According to figures released Apr. 18 by the National Administrative Department of Statistics, while the overall poverty rate declined from 40.3 percent in 2009 to 32.7 percent in 2012, the urban rate last year was 28.4 percent compared to 46.8 percent in rural areas.

“The country needs to work extremely hard to give rural areas the importance they deserve, with or without a peace accord,” said the minister, referring to the talks taking place in Havana between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, in which land reform is a key issue.

“The support we receive from IFAD, and events like this, contribute to increasing our resolve,” Restrepo said.

Josefina Stubbs, Latin America and Caribbean director of IFAD, said “Colombia today is at a crucial moment, redefining its frameworks, policies and laws for rural development.” That is why “this event is very important, as much for IFAD as for other development sectors here present,” she told IPS.

The Victims’ Law, in force since January 2012, provides for the restitution of lands taken by armed groups from campesinos or peasants and other people displaced by the conflict.

The government says it has already distributed over one million hectares and is waiting to recover another one million hectares of idle land to form a land bank. The authorities estimate that some 200,000 campesino families lack land to farm.

Another bill, the Law on Land and Rural Development, which Restrepo is promoting, is under consultation with indigenous and campesino communities before it is presented to Congress.

In this context, “strengthening dialogue with the Colombian government at this point is extremely important, because this country is trying to close the gaps of inequity and the large differences between urban and rural sectors, and very seriously re-thinking the processes of rural development in a way that would contribute effectively to poverty reduction,” said Stubbs.

IFAD’s experience in this field is vast. Through its Rural Opportunities Programme, shared with the government, “it has generated support covering 20,000 families and 400 businesses,” Roberto Haudry, IFAD country programme manager for Colombia and Peru, told IPS.

The Rural Opportunities Programme “is an off-shoot of another programme with which IFAD has contributed to public policies in Colombia through the strengthening of over 1,000 campesino enterprises involving some 120,000 families,” he added.

“The country is changing. It’s time to talk less theory and to put people to work with other people, with the state as a partner. We can have absolute confidence if small entrepreneurs are empowered to make changes in this country. Campesinos, young people and vulnerable sectors with a productive attitude will emerge from poverty under their own steam, with their own motivation and abilities, without intermediaries of any kind,” Haudry said.

This is what Teófila Betancourt has done. She is an Afro-descendant from Guapi, a small town on the Pacific ocean in the southwestern department of Cauca.

“We have worked for many years to improve people’s welfare, based on the recovery of traditional practices, food security, territorial solidarity and human rights, and we have made considerable progress,” she said.

There are 25 cooperatives in Guapi, with an average of 15 women each. They plant food crops for their own consumption, as well as aromatic and medicinal species, and they make jams, crafts and traditional musical instruments. They sell their produce in local markets and have gradually taken up the public space that had been occupied by vendors from other regions.

These producers have also opened a restaurant that promotes typical foods of the coastal region, and they offer accommodation to visitors.

Along the Pacific coast, there are 84 groups doing similar work. “We have been doing this for 22 years” and recently, “we have received support from IFAD through Fundación Acua (an Afro-descendants’ cultural organisation),” Betancourt said.

“They support us because they know what we contribute to the rural area of Guapi. And that’s why I’ve come here (to the seminar) today. Although I feel a bit like a fish out of water, I have learned that this is where we can find out exactly what the government is thinking and what it is doing,” she said.

Alex Segovia, technical secretary in the office of the president of El Salvador, described the experience of his country, where a 12-year civil war came to an end in 1992, and which is governed today by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the former guerrilla group that laid down its arms and took the path of electoral democracy.

“This debate is very important because rural development is combined with the urgent need for peace,” Miguel Fajardo, the head of the Centro de Estudios en Economía Solidaria (CEES – Centre for the Study of the Solidarity Economy), told IPS. He described the achievements of cooperativism in three provinces in the department of Santander, in the northeast of Colombia.

“There are signs of change linked to justice and land restitution in rural areas, and without a doubt minister Restrepo is presenting carefully thought-out reflections on issues that had practically vanished from the agenda over the past 20 years or more,” said Fajardo, a sociologist.

However, he expressed “uncertainty” about the advance of the mining industry in locations like Páramo de Santurbán, an area of rich biodiversity with a wealth of water resources, and in the region of Vélez, “which have been granted in concession to multinational corporations, with the result that the regions have become impoverished.”

Restrepo told IPS that “Colombia began a peace process in spite of ongoing armed conflict, which is not usual, but even within the conflict one must begin to think about what the post-conflict reality is going to be in every sense, and particularly in terms of rural development.

“Let us remember that real peace comes after an accord has been signed, when a country’s institutions achieve the administration of that peace and its adaptation to the times,” he said.

Campesinos from around the country flocked to Bogotá to demonstrate for peace and demand relief and protection. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Apr 12 2013 (IPS)

Wearing a dusty hat and a smile that lights up his face, the septuagenarian José Alicapa does not shrink from the overwhelming bustle of the Colombian capital, which he reached after a 13-hour bus drive from the western province in Caldas.

He and hundreds of other small farmers from across Colombia came to Bogotá this week to demonstrate for peace and demand that the government of Juan Manuel Santos give them support and protection to enable them to continue producing food in the crossfire of the half-century armed conflict that pits the armed forces and far-right paramilitaries against leftwing guerrillas.

Their demands include title deeds for those who work the land, technical assistance, subsidies, credit, development programmes and facilities to give them access to land.

“Campesinos (peasant farmers) are fundamental to production. That’s why I think the entire country should be declared a reserve where the rural population is protected,” Professor Tomás León Sicard, director of the ecological agriculture programme in the Environmental Studies Institute of the National University of Colombia, told IPS.

León Sicard was referring to the need to implement a 1994 law that hasn’t yet been codified, which would establish reserve areas for indigenous, black and campesino communities with certain conditions of autonomy and security.

That is precisely one of the key points on the agenda of the peace talks taking place in Havana between the Santos administration and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

“Even though they are the main victims of the conflict, campesinos continue working, in shocking conditions. They’re still in the countryside, producing around 70 percent of the food that Colombians eat,” he said.

Alicapa reflects that perseverance in the face of myriad difficulties. “On my land I grow coffee and bananas, but the last hailstorm caused a lot of damage,” he told IPS without losing his smile, more worried about the possibility of the bus leaving without him.

Fulgencio Yangües, of the Association of Farmers who are Victims of the Conflict, was more emphatic. “The government does not live up to its promises, and year after year we remain forgotten victims, displacement (of the rural population from their land by the conflict) continues, and the violence rages on,” he told IPS in a march on Tuesday Apr. 9 in Bogotá.

The latest report by the National Planning Department (DNP), based on statistics from 2011, indicates that poverty reached 46 percent in rural areas that year, and extreme poverty 22 percent.

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 0.88.

Agriculture represented 5.9 percent of the country’s GDP in 2011. By comparison, mining and quarries accounted for 14.3 percent.

A study carried out at the private University of Los Andes found that 77 percent of the land is in the hands of 13 percent of owners, and 18 percent of small-scale farmers do not hold formal title to their land.

The severe problems in the countryside were reflected by protests and a strike by coffee growers demanding relief in late February and early March. They lifted the strike only after the government announced that it would pay producers 80 dollars per sack of coffee beans.

But Finance Minister Mauricio Cárdenas clarified that this will “only be for this year, while coffee production recovers.”

But coffee producers have been in crisis for years in Colombia. The National Federation of Coffee Growers said that since 2004 the country has had to import coffee, mainly from Ecuador and Guatemala.

Today, up to 70 percent of the coffee consumed locally is imported, according to spokespersons for the Movement for the Defence and Dignity of Coffee.

After the coffee growers’ strike, rice farmers threatened to take similar action. But the government headed off the strike by offering economic supports and stiffer measures to curb contraband, especially from Ecuador.

“All of the difficulties arise from the concentration of land, but redistribution is apparently unlikely for the time being,” said León Sicard.

“The last agrarian reform process was carried out by President Carlos Lleras Restrepo (1966-1970), but the ‘Chicoral Accord’ of 1972 accelerated the colonisation of the tropical rainforest, which at the same time brought campesinos into contact with the coca trade. So these problems have been around for a long time.”

The Chicoral Accord with landowners limited the expropriation of idle land by the state and facilitated the colonisation of formerly protected areas.

“In Colombia we have a large range of conditions: rainforest, tropical, sandy and muddy soils, flat lands, steep slopes, and increasingly variable climates. But the policies now in effect don’t take into account the specific characteristics of each area,” he said.

“Today, 99 percent of agricultural practices favour methods using sophisticated machinery which, along with the use of pesticides and agrochemicals, demonstrates the powers and interests that lie behind them,” said León Sicard.

“Who builds the tractors, and who sells them? It’s not exactly the people who favour the campesinos from the highlands. So what transnational corporations are behind this? It’s a complex issue,” he said.

As a solution, the professor suggested “agroecology, which has brought very significant results in Cuba and Brazil.

“But in that area, Colombia has made much less progress than any other country of the Americas. Our dream is for this issue to be taken seriously and dealt with in a committed fashion in the peace talks,” he added.

Buildings near the coast, like these on the Bocagrande promenade, will no longer be permitted in Cartagena de Indias. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Helda Martínez
CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, Colombia, Feb 1 2013 (IPS)

The government of this historic walled city, a bastion of tourism on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, is widening beaches and building dual carriageways on its north side to protect against the ever-worsening impacts of climate change.

Construction projects close to the Rafael Núñez international airport were begun in August 2010 and are due to be completed by 2014, but they are already sparking complaints among the artisanal fisherfolk in the area, who perceive them as threatening their livelihood.

The projects include widening Santander Avenue, in order to improve mobility, create a cycle route and help protect the coast, according to an open document posted by the local government of Cartagena de Indias in December 2009.

The widening of the road and the beach will cause “minimal (environmental) effects, according to the findings of more than 100 professionals in different disciplines, including marine biologists,” engineer Jaime Silva, the general coordinator of the infrastructure works being carried out by the private Consorcio Vía Al Mar, told IPS.

The dual carriageway already extends for seven kilometres out of the city of Cartagena de Indias, named after Cartagena in Spain and home to one million people. It originates in the neighbourhood of Crespo, where there is a tunnel 600 metres long, with an additional 400 metres for the entry and exit ramps.

Cartagena has almost 49 kilometres of coastline on the Caribbean sea. To combat erosion, its beaches are to be made 60 metres wider and protected with a rock wall for a distance of 2.3 kilometres. Furthermore, nine new sea walls will be created along this coastal stretch adjacent to Santander and Primera de Bocagrande Avenues.

“In coastal cities like ours, when sand has been eroded and material has to be dredged up from the sea, authorisation is needed from public bodies” at the national level, marine biologist Francisco Castillo, adviser to the Cartagena de Indias Planning Secretariat, told IPS.

These permits allow dredging of the sea bed, and sand to be brought from dunes several kilometres inland, to be used for widening the beach.

The project is part of a plan called “Integrating climate change adaptation into city planning in Cartagena de Indias”, which is aimed at countering problems like the gradual rise in sea level, more intense rainfall, frequent swells, flooding and other climate alterations that have been experienced so far this century.

“Permits are based on technical studies of the dunes, and bathymetric studies to measure the depths of the sea bed. It’s something like taking out a loan from the sea bed, to put sand on the coastline, and create a soft protective layer that guarantees the width of the beach,” said Castillo.

The fisherfolk do not need special studies or reports to know that the project affects them. They know it from their daily experience of fishing for a living.

“The construction works are harming us, because previously we had beaches. The water used to come up to here,” fisherman Pedro Pineda told IPS, indicating a line now covered with sand and heavy machinery, at the edge of an old sea wall.

But the sea walls lost strength and utility over the years because of “lack of maintenance”, and need replacing, Castillo said.

Eduardo Jiménez, who has been a fisherman for 40 of his 50 years, also said that “the works do us an injury, because just think, even with the present sea walls, when there is a swell, we can’t fish. And the swells come up at any moment.

“We knew they were going to carry out engineering works but they didn’t consult us beforehand. Lately they have talked to us, over in La Boquilla (an adjoining village) where I live, but people are not content. In any case, now, we have to go farther away to fish,” Jiménez said.

Nowadays, “on a good day,” he earns the equivalent of 10 dollars, he said.

“The fisherfolk and beach vendors, as well as all the local residents, were informed in an efficient and timely manner,” engineer Silva affirmed.

“We remain ready to respond to any questions from any person,” he said, and stressed that Consorcio Vía Al Mar is hiring construction workers, cleaning crews and security guards from among fisherfolk and those who used to work giving massages or selling products on the beach.

But “sometimes the work is very hard, or boring for us who are accustomed to the sea and the open air. Many of those who were hired first have already quit,” Pineda said.

Silva, for his part, pointed out that fisherfolk and other local people were being offered stable jobs until the works are completed.

He also said that the project has responded positively to proposals by workers, including informal labourers, residents and traders, and that the area is one of the zones of greatest economic growth in Cartagena in the last decade.

“Opposition and uncertainty have arisen largely because of a lack of sufficient information. But this is being solved in an effective manner, by planning and correcting social aspects,” said Castillo.

The planning adviser underlined that only at the beginning of the 2000s did the city begin to turn its gaze — however timidly — to the sea and its coastal development in the comprehensive way that was needed, including taking account of global warming.

“In revising urban planning schemes for the next few years, we will be working hard on the issue of flood risks,” he said.

“On top of the construction works, clear and convincing guidelines will be established to prevent any building on land at risk of flooding, virtually on the beach, as goes on today,” he said.

“I hope they finish it, because it’s a good thing,” a passerby walking along the edge of the beach told IPS.

“It’s true that people are uneasy about the delay in different works, like the mass transport system and the underwater outfall pipeline (to carry urban wastewater out to sea), which has been delayed for over a year,” Castillo admitted.

“But it’s normal, with large projects involving the sea and rough conditions, that planning schedules are sometimes upset, although in this case the timetable is going well,” he said.

“Cartagena is a city surrounded by the sea and made up of islands, like Manga, Manzanillo and Barú, which makes its urban and social features more complex,” the marine biologist said.

But Castillo was confident that “when these projects are completed, they will convince the community that Cartagena de Indias is growing out of its parochialism and becoming (part of) real geopolitical strategy in the Caribbean.”

Deserted beach at Punta Canoa. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Helda Martínez
CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, Colombia, Jan 25 2013 (IPS)

An ambitious programme of infrastructure works to overcome the risks of climate change in Cartagena de Indias, a city on the Caribbean coast in northern Colombia, has generated controversy, with authorities predicting benefits while parts of the affected population voice criticisms.

Plans for adapting to climate change in Cartagena were first outlined back in 2004, and continue to advance in spite of the voices raised in protest. While the authorities applaud the plans, many local people have their doubts.

What both sides have in common is their joint interest in reducing the negative effects of climate change, which is causing an estimated rise in sea level of two to five millimetres a year.

Experts calculate that coastal waters in Cartagena de Indias have risen between 15 and 22 centimetres over the past 100 years, and by 2100 will rise another 80 cm or even one metre.

Marine biologist Francisco Castillo, adviser to the Cartagena de Indias Planning Secretariat. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

“The changes happened most suddenly eight years ago, when there were heavier rains, larger swells, recurrent hurricanes, flooding and heat waves, with consequent environmental changes,” marine biologist Francisco Castillo, an adviser to the Planning Secretariat of Cartagena de Indias, told IPS.

Originally titled “Integrating climate change adaptation into city planning in Cartagena de Indias”, the plan has the support of the local government and is coordinated by the Ministry of Environment, Housing and Territorial Development, the Institute of Marine and Coastal Research (INVEMAR) and the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN), an international alliance of organisations.

Construction projects to protect the city from the vagaries of the weather include nine sea walls, five breakwaters and two flood barriers, several of which are already being built.

But the most impressive and significant venture is the widening of Santander Avenue, which crosses the city, and the installation of a main underwater outlet pipeline, which will replace 30 wastewater pipes that are presently in use.

Benefits of tourism?

Capital of the northern province of Bolívar, Cartagena is home to nearly one million people in an area of 709 square kilometres. It has a 48.7-kilometre coastline on the Caribbean Sea and its economy is based on the chemical industry, trade, free zones and especially tourism.

The wide range of hotels; the contrast between the colonial centre, with its defensive wall, and the modern city with its high-rises; and its evocation by renowned artists like writer Gabriel García Márquez and painter Alejandro Obregón, are some of the elements that make this city a prime attraction for thousands of domestic and foreign tourists.

But its aura as an international tourist centre partly hides the city’s stark social and economic disparities. The dire poverty of a considerable proportion of the people stands in shocking contrast to the wealthy minority, who indulge in a highly consumerist lifestyle.

“The project’s construction and operating stages will create jobs for the low-income population, providing a better quality of life,” said Castillo.

Workers are needed now for these climate adaptation projects. In many cases, the jobs will go to fisherfolk, who will be trained in construction work and paid a steady wage, in principle for four years, providing them with greater security than artisanal fishing can guarantee.

Pipeline causes division

Flood damage in Cartagena de Indias. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

The contradictions between labour security and environmental issues are highly visible in the village of Punta Canoa, 21 kilometres from the urban centre of Cartagena, the planned terminal of the underwater outfall pipeline carrying the city’s wastewater.

“For seven years, most of us have protested, because we didn’t want the outlet pipeline to be installed here, and I still feel the same way,” Ramiro Ramírez, a 54-year-old fisherman, told IPS at his home in Punta Canoa.

“I protest because I know the sea, and I know that the currents will bring faecal matter back onshore. The smell is already unbearable. But many people, who at one time even got violent with the workers of ACUACAR (Cartagena Water), now have a job, or one of the 12 fishing boats they gave away. No one is saying a word now,” Ramírez complained.

IPS confirmed Ramírez’s version of the situation. He is the only one to have protested about the latest project. The porter at ACUACAR, a local man wearing a uniform, was quite direct: “I can’t talk because I work here now.”

Two fisherfolk about to push out to sea in a boat fitted with an outboard engine also refused to comment.

The underwater outlet pipeline is part of the Master Plan for Water and Sewerage for Cartagena that was begun in 1996 but, owing to its importance and effects, was included in the climate change adaptation plan to ensure its execution.

The pipe has a diameter of two metres and is 4.3 kilometres long, running under the sea bed for 2.6 kilometres, according to ACUACAR.

Aerial view of Ciénaga de La Virgen, a mangrove swamp. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

The pipe is expected to benefit the population surrounding the Ciénaga de La Virgen, a lake and mangrove swamp that used to receive 60 percent of the city’s wastewater, causing massive fish die-offs until 2000, when the La Bocana channel was dug to let seawater in daily to renew the lake water.

“That’s all very well, but the lake will not be able to recover immediately. It needs to be dredged to remove the waste that has piled up for over 30 years,” Eduardo Jiménez, another fisherman, told IPS. “Now the problem will just be passed on to Punta Canoa.”

In Ramírez’s view, “There is nothing to be done, because there is no dialogue with the authorities.” He described his concern about the waste: “It will not be unsightly. But it will be muck treated with chemicals that will harm” fish populations, he said.

“And we will also have skin problems, because hospital waste will also be pumped out here, as well as waste from almost 30 smaller outlet pipes in Cartagena,” Ramírez said sadly, glancing at his three-year-old grandson who will likely bear the lion’s share of this environmental pollution in the years to come.

Ramírez is partly right, according to Castillo. “Wastewater treatment is not being done in primary, secondary and tertiary stages, as would be the ideal; but pre-treated material is being expelled 1.8 kilometres away, where it is dispersed and neutralised by the temperature and salinity of the sea. For now, ACUACAR is sending waste into the sea for the seawater to biologically finish off the treatment,” he said.

“ACUACAR has a fixed deadline to finalise the complete process,” Castillo said.

“I dream of what Cartagena will be like in 2015, with the outfall pipeline fully operational, a coastal protection system in place, a completely unpolluted Ciénaga de La Virgen, and all the fabulous beaches in tiptop condition,” he concluded enthusiastically.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

(END)

IPS spoke to people Sunday in Bogotá’s Bolívar square about the peace talks that began Monday in Havana. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Nov 19 2012 (IPS)

Scepticism, fear of expressing an opinion and a dash of hope make up the cocktail of responses from Colombians asked about the possibility of the decades-old civil war finally coming to an end as a result of the peace talks between the government and the FARC guerrillas, which began Monday in Havana.

“I really hope so,” María Jaramillo, a 40-years-old accountant, told IPS. “God willing. But I think it’ll be difficult, because nothing is easy with the guerrillas. Of course if peace is achieved it would be an enormous accomplishment, because many peasants would return to their land, all the bombing would stop, and the country would grow.”

Some of the other people interviewed by IPS in Bogotá’s central Bolívar square were more sceptical. Political science student Elizabeth Núñez said she did not believe the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) were really seeking peace, “although nothing is impossible.”

“So far, to judge by what the guerrillas are saying, it’s the same as ever. As if they had no intention of respecting the results of the dialogue,” Núñez told IPS, before the FARC negotiators announced a unilateral ceasefire on Monday in Cuba.

The actual start of talks in Havana is the culmination of six months of secret preliminary contacts between the government of conservative Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and leaders of the FARC, the left-wing rebel group created in 1964 in the central province of Caldas by peasant farmers in response to injustice on the part of the government and the courts.

Santos announced in August that peace talks would be launched as a result of the preliminary negotiations held with the support of the governments of Cuba and Norway, which are now guarantors of the talks, and of Venezuela and Chile, as observers.

The “general agreement for the end of the conflict and the construction of a stable, lasting peace” that emerged from the preliminary talks basically proposes that the FARC will abandon armed struggle if the government agrees, among other things, to bring to a halt major mining and infrastructure projects in rural areas, and to carry out an ambitious comprehensive agrarian development plan.

The peace talks formally began in October in Oslo, with an agenda that encompasses land reform, including alternatives for illegal drugs; the future legal political participation of the guerrillas; an end to the armed conflict; and assistance for victims.

However, the content of each point on the agenda has not been clearly worked out, and radical differences have emerged. For example, the land restitution programme, the Santos administration’s flagship strategy, which the president sees as a major stride forward in the area of land reform, is criticised by the guerrillas as a measure that will actually benefit the business elites and foreign corporations.

Many Colombians, meanwhile, prefer to keep silent in this polarised nation.

When IPS approached a random selection of people in the square, which is surrounded by the cathedral, parliament, the Supreme Court, and city hall, nearly a dozen declined to talk, saying they didn’t have time, even though it was Sunday.

But many others did respond. “Peace! We have been needing a peace process for the past 20 years. The deaths of so many soldiers, guerrillas and civilians would have been avoided. That’s why I hope there will be no interferences in this process,” responded Arturo, 50, who said he was a secondary school teacher.

“But we also know about the economic interests behind the war,” he added. “Peace would take resources away from the army, and would end the business of the others (the insurgents), which is also lucrative. I think the conflict will still stretch on for a number of years.”

“One factor is the polarisation that was aggravated by (right-wing) president (Álvaro) Uribe in his two consecutive terms (2002-2010), by fanning radical hatred,” university professor Armando Ramírez, an expert on public opinion, told IPS.

“To this is added the generalised lack of understanding, all the way from primary school up to university, of the real significance of democracy, public opinion or civil society…and the media efficiently contribute to the disorientation by favouring the establishment’s arguments,” said Ramírez.

“On radio and television, most political programmes address this issue like show business: there are anecdotes, curious aspects, and short reports devoid of context, while serious newspaper stories and columns target experts or academics, not ordinary people,” he said.

Andrés Felipe Ortiz, a member of the non-governmental Observatorio de Medios en Derechos Humanos, Medios al Derecho, agreed with Ramírez. “People depend on information to have an opinion, but the press is not clear, and polarisation is exacerbated, so people conclude that the (peace) process won’t go anywhere,” he told IPS.

“Santos called for prudence, and that’s valid, but it’s not the same as concealing things,” he said. “It’s clear that the media do not help people understand things that are of mass interest. Nor is there any sort of teaching on human rights or international humanitarian law. Journalists document things, they don’t explain.”

In Bolívar square, there were also people who believe the peace talks should be joined by the demobilised United Self-Defence Units of Colombia (AUC), the far-right paramilitary militias created by large landowners in the 1980s, allegedly to fight the guerrillas, and who took part in a demobilisation process under the Uribe administration.

“It’s obvious that we should give ourselves a chance at peace,” Carlos Blanco, a lawyer who said he was an adviser to “an organisation that defends the demobilised” paramilitaries, told IPS. “But it’s also obvious that in this process, the AUC should be represented, because their demobilisation was autonomous and voluntary.”

The AUC “were created as a political platform that collapsed, because the initial rules of the game were modified and the chiefs were extradited,” he said, referring to the paramilitary leaders who were extradited to the United States on drug charges, such as Salvatore Mancuso, who is serving time in a U.S. prison and has asked to take part in the current peace talks.

“We will achieve peace when the different sides give in and the victims and victimisers sit down across from each other and forgive each other,” said Ismael Rodríguez, a 31-year-old airline employee.

Nobody will ever know if Jhon Jairo Echenique decided to take his own life out of remorse, fear or mental illness. But the suicide followed his arrest for the stabbing and burning with acid of his 19-year-old former girlfriend Angélica Gutiérrez.

A law student, Gutiérrez was attacked at home. Neighbours took her to hospital where she died. Echenique, the prime suspect, was arrested in the Caribbean city of Cartagena de Indias in northern Colombia. Hours later, he used his shirt to hang himself in his cell.

Legislator Gloria Stella Díaz. Credit: Helda Martinez/IPS

The tragedy unfolded over the Jun. 30 – Jul. 1 weekend in Cartagena, a city of one million people where, so far this year, five women have been murdered and 213 injured in attacks, leading to the arrest of 196 men, according to police statistics.

Figures from the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) say that on average, 245 women suffer some form of violence every day making gender violence the most widespread form of human rights abuses.

One form of violence that is becoming increasingly common in this country is the throwing of acid or other corrosive substances on a woman’s face or other parts of her body, often leaving the victim so horribly disfigured that she has no hope ever of living a normal life.

“Perpetrators, often with malicious intent and cruelty, seek to leave a mark on their victims as a constant reminder of the reason why they were attacked – generally an incident prompted by jealousy, a separation, or similar conflicts that could have been solved peacefully,” legislator Gloria Stella Díaz tells IPS.

Díaz, who belongs to the Christian party, Movimiento Independiente de Renovación (Independent Movement for Complete Renovation or MIRA), has introduced a bill in parliament aimed at protecting citizens against acid attacks.

Acid attacks are not limited to domestic violence. In a recent case in Bogota, the victim, a teenage boy, suffered second- and third-degree burns in an attack classified as urban violence involving homeless persons.

Another recent case in Bogota was that of a woman attacking another whom she suspected of having an affair with her husband. The perpetrator was sentenced to nine years in prison.

“One (attack) was committed purely out of cruelty, and the other because the victim refused the aggressor money,” Díaz commented during an IPS interview.

“Victims of such attacks have now decided to speak out and are backing the bill with their signatures; they’re even willing to attend the parliament session to lend their support under the slogan ‘No More Silence; Punishment for the Perpetrators’,” Díaz said.

The initiative is part of a campaign called ‘Faces With No Traces of Impunity’  aimed  at changing  existing laws that treat acid attacks as personal injury offences meriting a nine-year sentence that can be reduced for good behaviour.

“With this bill we propose to change how this very serious crime is defined, classifying it as a separate offence that would allow harsher penalties and longer sentences,” Díaz said.

The bill proposes a minimum of 12 years in prison, for the act of throwing acid. But, if the target of the attack is a woman, a minor or a public figure whose livelihood depends on his or her image, the attacker could receive a sentence of up to 20 years.

“Another aim of the proposed law is for the state to implement a system of integral assistance services, including legal and psychological counselling, job placement and anti-discrimination campaigns. The state would cover the cost of reconstructive and plastic surgeries,” Diaz said.

In an effort to prevent such crimes from going unreported, the bill seeks to make it mandatory for hospitals or medical facilities, both public and private, to report all attacks to the police so that a criminal investigation can be initiated.

If the bill is passed into law, the sale of corrosive substances would also be controlled. This would mean that “when a crime (involving such substances) is reported in any city, it will be possible to establish who and where they were purchased, thus helping identify the perpetrators.”

The situation in Colombia is not as serious as in countries like Afghanistan or Pakistan, that led filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy to produce ‘Saving Face,’ a short documentary on the plight of two Pakistani women who were victims of acid attacks.

Diaz said she would like to see Obaid-Chinoy’s film which claimed an Oscar at this year’s awards. “It’s a very real tragedy,” she said, stressing that the situation needs to be addressed by all sections of society.

The bill, which has been approved in an initial session, must undergo three more before it can become law. Diaz is optimistic that it will be passed during the next legislative session that begins on Jul. 20.

“There’s political will and support from many sectors, including the attorney general’s office which has already appointed a prosecutor specialising in crimes of this type,” she said.

Media, she said, must also report acid attacks “with sensitivity, raising awareness for prevention and firmly supporting this initiative, so that aggressors will know that they will be punished. And it has to be done without sensationalism.”

The entry into force of Colombia’s free trade agreement with the United States was met by student protests and opposition from a segment of the business community, small farmers, and trade unionists.

Enrique Daza: "It is easier to list the sectors that won’t be hurt by the FTA." Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

The trade deal, signed in 2006 after two years of negotiations, went into effect Tuesday after a lengthy process of modification of Colombia’s domestic laws to bring them into compliance with the agreement.

In response to the protests Tuesday, the authorities closed down public universities, as well as bus stations in Bogotá.

The day was also marked by a bomb attack against the armoured car of Fernando Londoño, a former interior and justice minister of the government of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), which killed two of his bodyguards and injured him as well as some 30 passers-by. Another car-bomb had earlier been deactivated.

But the Colombian government celebrated the start of the free trade agreement (FTA) signed by then presidents Uribe and George W. Bush (2001-2009). President Juan Manuel Santos said the accord signed with the United States, which is already Colombia’s main export market, would boost this country’s economic growth by nearly one percent a year and create 500,000 jobs.

The FTA, which will be implemented in stages, will gradually eliminate tariffs on virtually all products traded between the two countries. It also contains provisions that regulate investment, agriculture, industry, services, telecommunications, intellectual property, public procurement, and environmental, labour, sanitary and cultural questions.

But activists, students, farmers and other critics of the FTA say Colombia yielded in a number of areas, in exchange for nothing.

To back up their arguments, they point out that President Barack Obama said the trade deal would help “achieve my goal of doubling U.S. exports.”

“But (Obama) says little to nothing about increasing imports,” Enrique Daza, the head of the Colombian Action Network Against Free Trade, told IPS.

Last year, Colombia’s exports to the United States amounted to 21.7 billion dollars, or 38 percent of this country’s total sales abroad, while imports from the U.S. stood at 13.6 billion dollars – 25 percent of Colombia’s total imports.

The FTA will have a “scandalous effect on agriculture in Colombia, especially, immediately hurting the production of cereals, because huge shipments will enter our country (from the United States) tariff-free and at subsidised prices,” Daza said.

He added that the problem is aggravated by the fact that “the government does not fully control the entry of imports because it does not have a unified customs information system.

“This means that the authorised quantity could come in through each port, multiplying the amount of tariff-free goods entering the country,” Daza said.

A 2009 report, “Impact of the U.S.-Colombia FTA on the Small Farm Economy in Colombia”, financed by Oxfam, says: “In short, Colombia guaranteed unconditional access to its domestic market for principal U.S. export products such as rice, corn (maize), wheat, barley, soybeans, beans, oil seeds, chicken, pork, high quality beef, dried milk, and whey, among others.”

“However, in contrast, the United States conditioned the entry of an important Colombian product, sugar, to a duty free quota, and did not guarantee the elimination of non-tariff barriers,” say the authors, Luis Jorge Garay, Fernando Barberi and Iván Cardona.

Under the FTA, 79,000 tonnes of tariff-free rice and 27,000 tonnes of chicken will enter Colombia from the United States in the first year alone, to the detriment of local farmers.

“Colombia’s consumer goods industry, which for years has suffered problems from the opening up of the economy, will continue to be hurt,” said Daza. “As a result, the big local industries will prefer to sell out to multinational chains, as occurred in the case of the Bavaria brewery,” which was the second-largest in South America and was acquired in 2005 by UK-based beer maker SABMiller.

Economist Juan Pablo Fernández, an adviser to the left-wing Independent Democratic Pole party, told IPS that small-scale producers of goods such as car parts, machinery and home appliances “will become mere importers, in the best of cases.”

Activists estimate that 350,000 small-scale beef and dairy farmers will be hurt by competition from beef imported from the United States.

Meanwhile, cut flowers from Colombia, which cover nearly 80 percent of demand in the U.S., will be directly affected by the strengthening of the peso against the dollar which, according to Daza, “is essential to the FTA, which states that intervention in the domestic foreign exchange market is considered anti-competitive.”

To all this is added the crisis facing the coffee industry. “We don’t have enough beans, so coffee is imported from Guatemala and Vietnam, to meet domestic demand,” he added.

With respect to which sectors will be affected by the FTA, Daza said “it is easier to list the ones that won’t be hurt, such as some importers and those who will profit from the economic activities of the state, like businesspeople who are already benefiting from trade globalisation policies.”

And Colombia is in an even more disadvantageous position because in eight years of negotiations it did not upgrade railways, rivers or ports in preparation for the changes to be brought by the FTA.

In other words, said Daza, “the negotiators of the agreement threw the country into the jaws of the multinationals.”

The treaty will also lead to an increase in poor-quality jobs in the informal sector, which is “the way to boost profit margins, like what has occurred in the flower business, palm oil plantations and small-scale mining,” he added.

The Oxfam report, meanwhile, states that the negotiation of the FTA did not even take into consideration issues that were described at the start as essential, such as Colombia’s decades-long civil war, “the importance of the welfare of the rural population to the economic, social and political stability of Colombia,” and “the need to create profitable alternatives to illicit crops.”

The negotiation, the authors say, “was governed exclusively by commercial interests.”

* With reporting by Constanza Vieira (END)

Analysts in Colombia have varied in their degree of optimism, but they generally agree that the release of the last 10 police and military hostages held by the FARC guerrillas, some since 1998, was a peace signal.

Monday’s release of the captives closed the chapter of the FARC’s (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) attempt to swap hostages – who they considered prisoners of war – for imprisoned insurgents. The governments of France, Switzerland, Spain and Venezuela all played a role as brokers in this process at one point or another.

The release of the last military and police captives was first announced in a Feb. 26 statement by the FARC leadership. Although some observers immediately described the declaration as “historic,” others took a more cautious approach, saying they would wait to see what happened.

In their message, the rebels also said they would put an end to kidnappings for ransom, one of the group’s sources of financing. According to the non-governmental organisation País Libre, the FARC is still holding some 400 kidnapping victims for ransom.

According to analyst Ariel Ávila, head of the Armed Conflict Observatory of the Bogotá think tank Nuevo Arco Iris, the underlying point is that the FARC “have decided to seek peace.”

Ávila said the release of the hostages sent a concrete message Monday to the government of conservative President Juan Manuel Santos: “The ball is in your court. You asked us to end kidnapping, so here you go.”

But the FARC also said in the late February communiqué that, if the government continued expanding military spending and attacks, “there will be more prisoners of war on both sides” – in other words, members of the security forces will continue to be seized if the number of captured rebels continues to climb.

However, Ávila said in response to a question from IPS that members of the military and police captured in combat by the FARC in the future will not be held captive for lengthy periods of time, but will be handed over within a few days or weeks to humanitarian organisations like the Red Cross.

This kind of operation involving the humanitarian handing over of troops in the hands of the guerrillas has taken place periodically ever since the FARC and the smaller rebel group National Liberation Army (ELN) first emerged in 1964.

The long road to freedom

With mediation by facilitators from France, Switzerland, Spain and Venezuela, the FARC swapped more than 350 rank-and-file members of the military and police for 14 imprisoned insurgents in 2001.

Since then, the guerrillas have only held officers and non-commissioned officers, to pressure for new hostage-prisoner swaps. But they have also taken civilian hostages, mainly politicians, the best-known of whom was former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.

At one point, the FARC had a list of more than 70 military, police and civilian captives held exclusively for the purpose of seeking an exchange with the government.

But the administration of right-wing former President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) refused to negotiate, focusing instead on military rescue operations. Some were successful, such as the one mounted to release Betancourt and 14 other captives in 2008.

But others failed, prompting the FARC to make good on its standing threat to kill any hostages if an attempt was made to rescue them.

After the June 2007 death of 11 regional lawmakers in confusing circumstances in the jungles of the western province of Valle del Cauca, Liberal Party leader Piedad Córdoba, a congresswoman at the time, announced that she would dedicate all her efforts to achieving the release of every single hostage held by the FARC.

Then-president Uribe designated his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chávez, and Córdoba as facilitators in hostage release negotiations with the FARC, a role they played between August and November 2007.

In 2008, Córdoba created the group “Colombians for Peace”, whose initial goal was to seek the release of the politicians held captive in the jungle, but which also brought about the unilateral release by the FARC of members of the military and police.

Their efforts ended up achieving the release of 10 civilian and 10 military and police hostages, prior to the last 10 hostages freed on Monday Apr. 2.

Her efforts ended up costing Córdoba her political career. In 2010, inspector general Alejandro Ordóñez removed her from the Senate and barred her from holding public office for 18 years, on charges that she collaborated with the FARC.

But Córdoba continued her humanitarian efforts until she even managed to convince the FARC to promise to stop kidnapping people for ransom.

Successful operation

For five months, the former senator helped prepare Operación Libertad (Operation Freedom), enlisting the active support of prominent international figures like Guatemalan Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú, who was in Colombia to attend the hostage release.

The operation began at 10:30 local time Monday morning, with a loaned Brazilian air force helicopter flying approximately one and a half hours from Villavicencio, capital of the central province of Meta, to a rendezvous point in the jungle, where it picked up the captives.

Seven hours later the helicopter was back in Villavicencio, where the airport was packed with the hostages’ families, peace activists and reporters. Fifty minutes later, the former captives and their family members were flown to the capital.

In a 10-minute televised speech, Santos celebrated the success of the operation, thanked the participants – without directly mentioning Córdoba or Colombians for Peace – and reiterated the need to secure the release of all civilian hostages.

The president emphatically stated that the search for peace was the business of Colombians – indicating that his strategy would not include involvement by foreign mediators.

Córdoba, meanwhile, said the FARC had confirmed that it would stop kidnapping civilians for ransom, and that it was interested in peace talks.

Cleaning up a stream that used to be a garbage dump and restocking it with fish, or helping demobilised far-right paramilitaries reintegrate into society by returning to school, are some of the early outcomes of a project involving community radio stations in a remote area of northwest Colombia.

The project is called “Con-vivencias al dial: Radios para el encuentro” (roughly, “tuning in to shared experiences: radio stations bringing people together).

These social and environmental success stories stand in stark contrast to the long history of violence in the municipality of Tierra Alta, in the province of Córdoba, which has claimed countless victims, including Sergio Restrepo, a Jesuit priest killed by paramilitaries in 1989, after whom the community radio station that is a part of the project is named.

The agreement for the demobilisation of paramilitary groups, negotiated by the government of rightwing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) and paramilitary commanders, brought about an improvement of the general situation.

But “there is still tension in the local area, and it will take 10 or 12 years to eradicate it, by developing educational and employment programmes, especially for young people,” Víctor Pantoja, a member of the programming committee for the Sergio Restrepo radio station, 105.0 FM in Tierra Alta, told IPS over the telephone.

“It’s also true that the messages of ‘Con-vivencias al dial’ are beginning to have an impact,” he said enthusiastically.

Of course, the initiative will not reach all 56,000 paramilitaries demobilised over the past decade, nor all of the victims of the armed conflict in this war-torn country.

But it is teaching radio production and broadcasting skills while producing 120 10-minute programmes that will be distributed to the radio stations participating in the project.

The plan was instigated by the Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies (MINTIC) and the Colombian Agency for Reintegration (ACR) – the government agency in charge of demobilisation and reinsertion strategies – with support from the Japanese fiduciary fund managed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

“The Japanese fund contributed 113,000 dollars, the ACR 150,000 dollars and the ministry 130,000 dollars,” María Fernanda Ardila, the deputy director of methodologies, monitoring and evaluation at MINTIC, told IPS.

“The main goal is to provide tools for community radio stations to support social reinsertion processes and play the role of mediators in bringing about peaceful coexistence,” Esmeralda Ortiz, a journalist who has worked in community radio since 1990, told IPS.

Ortiz, who works in the Ministry of Culture, has been coordinating the project, which is to last one year, since August 2011.

“The Ministry of Culture’s mission is to create contents that are consistent with the social reality of the specific cultural contexts in the different regions, and programming that strengthens nationality, identity, social participation and democracy,” said Ortiz.

To develop the plan, 20 municipalities were selected out of 1,067 studied, with a particularly violent history resulting from the forced displacement of persons and later mass demobilisation, in the context of the decades-long war in Colombia between leftwing guerrillas and government forces and their paramilitary allies.

The municipalities are located in the provinces of Atlántico, Bolívar, César and Magdalena, in the northern Caribbean region; Antioquía, Córdoba, Sucre and Santander, in the centre and northwest; and Casanare, Huila, Meta, Cundinamarca and Tolima, in the east, centre and west of the country.

Participants in these 20 municipalities are developing their skills and capabilities, in order to produce the radio programmes on their own in the future.

In the municipalities of Soledad and Planadas, in Atlántico and Tolima provinces, respectively, the main goal is to discourage young people from joining illegal armed groups.

The community radio station participating in the project in Soledad is Madrigal 88.1 FM Stereo, and in Planadas it is Musicalia Stereo 106.0 FM.

“The radio programme has been very, very, very useful. The skills training courses are very interesting,” Efrén Silva, an observer for the NGO Cruzada Social (Social Crusade) in Planadas, told IPS over the phone.

“This project is like a light for us, because we have been living in the midst of war here since 1940, and we have been perpetually afraid of saying anything,” Silva said.

Planadas is in the south of the western province of Tolima, near the Cañón de Las Hermosas, a remote river canyon taken over by the insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). It was in this area that the Colombian army killed the top FARC commander, known as “Alfonso Cano”, in a military operation in November 2011.

“I would say that 60 percent of the population of about 40,000 people has come together because of the project. Women, children, teachers are all participating, and many musicians come here once a week to make music and entertain people,” said Silva.

“People are so keen on the project that one member of a community action group walks for two hours to get to Planadas, because, he says, he is convinced of the importance of the work that can be done through the radio station,” said Ortiz, the coordinator.

“I am surprised by the mass participation of young people in most of the municipalities. But the thing is that local people want not only music, but also to know what is happening in the country, and to find out about ways of solving their problems without violence and with respect for different ways of thinking and doing things, and there is a great deal to be done in that area,” she said.

Once the radio programmes are made, in addition to distributing them to the community stations, “we will take them to be broadcast by the national police radio station, university stations, and as many other stations as possible,” said Ortiz.

“We have so many stories to tell about people who used to be armed combatants, but who are now working for the community,” she said.

“For example, in Montes de María (a mountain range in the northern provinces of Sucre and Bolívar) former combatants are clearing minefields, and demobilised women are now running soup kitchens for the elderly,” she added.

* This story was produced with the support of UNESCO.

“In the Andes, and all over the world, mining on mountains should be banned. Distinguished scientists and papers in the most prestigious journals are saying this,” a regional planning expert in Colombia told IPS.

Engineer Fernando Mauricio Castro illustrates the regional impact of mining using a map of Tolima. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

The expert in question is forestry engineer Fernando Mauricio Castro, in charge of planning for CORTOLIMA, the top environmental agency overseeing natural resources and their sustainable use in the central Andean province of Tolima, with its capital, Ibagué, located 202 km southwest of Bogotá.

Castro’s criticism was aimed at the South African mining company AngloGold Ashanti (AGA) which has been prospecting and exploring in this mountainous area since 2006.

The company’s gold mining operations were authorised by the state Colombian Institute of Geology and Mining during the administration of rightwing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), which has been criticised for issuing mining licenses even in national parks and other protected or especially fragile areas.

The mining concession granted to the South African corporation, which is the world’s third largest producer of gold, is one of 9,011 legal mining permits listed in the Office of the Comptroller General’s report “Estado de los Recursos Naturales y del Ambiente 2010-2011” (State of Natural Resources and the Environment 2010-2011).

In addition, the report says, there are another 9,420 illegal mining operations, or 409 more than those formally approved.

Uribe’s successor, moderate rightwing President Juan Manuel Santos, has described mining as the chief among five engines driving Colombian economic development, termed by the government “development locomotives”.

“I agree with fighting the illegal mining outfits that use chemicals like cyanide and mercury, because they are a menace,” geologist and analyst Julio Fierro told IPS. “But well-organised, legal mining can also have a high impact. And AGA is among the largest and most irresponsible companies. It is not at all right to open up holes in the high mountains.”

Colombia is Latin America’s top coal producer and also has large deposits of gold, ferronickel and other minerals and precious stones. The mining sector, like the fossil fuel extraction industry, has grown to record levels in recent years.

Official forecasts indicate that mining output will grow at 8.5 percent a year over the period 2011-2014, and 40 transnational corporations are in-country for a slice of the action. AngloGold came to Tolima over a decade ago to conduct exploratory studies in the municipality of Cajamarca, with a population of 23,000, located 35 km west of Ibagué.

Cajamarca is situated at 1,814 metres above sea level, and is nicknamed “Colombia’s agricultural larder” because of the abundance of its farm produce. The area holds important water resources, with a cluster of at least 160 springs of water and the Coello River basin, as well as high moorlands, cloud forests, and forestry reserves for protective and productive purposes.

But in a protected area close to Cajamarca there is also the La Colosa gold deposit, with reserves estimated at 12 million ounces, one of the largest gold deposits in the world. The government and AGA are promoting what will be South America’s largest opencast mine, unless the project is halted.

La Colosa is a bone of contention between environmentalists and those who support mining development, and is seen as a test case for the kind of mining Colombia will have in the future, as well as for whether the government will honour its promise to revoke mining licenses in environmentally protected areas, granted by the previous administration.

Meanwhile, AGA has started to add to the area of land it owns by buying up plots from small farmers, so that in practice it has expanded its concession right up to the location of water supply pipelines that are vital to the local population.

AGA has kept a low profile in its activities and the regional media have maintained silence. “They do not publish information, neither do they promote needed debate. On the contrary, they highlight the resources that AngloGold will supposedly contribute” to the area, said Castro.

The engineer has been part of CORTOLIMA’s working group since it carried out an analysis of mining concessions in the region, which resulted in some unpleasant surprises.

“We found that both inlets of the aqueduct that serves Ibagué are situated in part of the mining concession,” he said. The city is home to 600,000 people.

“And that is not all. Since the capacity of the aqueduct is dwindling, we made great efforts to obtain the resources to build another aqueduct,” he added.

Some 900,000 dollars have already been invested in the project, out of 37 million dollars approved from national and regional funds. “But a mining concession covering the river has already been granted,” which could prevent construction of the new water supply system, complained Castro.

“It’s extremely worrying. Private interests are being given priority over the common good. It won’t be possible to acquire strategic grounds to protect and guarantee water to supply present and future populations because of the cost involved,” he said.

Some entire rural villages like San Cayetano, Buena Vista and Santa Teresa are situated within mining concessions, as well as the piped water supplies for many of the population centres in the area around Ibagué.

The social protest movement against the mine, made up of students, social leaders and over 25 social organisations, is still active, but “it is David fighting Goliath,” Castro said.

“It is true that valuable work is being done by those who do not agree with mining exploration in such fragile ecosystems,” he said.

“Sadly, though, it must be said that AngloGold’s large investments here indicate that it intends to stay, with no plans to leave. Therefore the most likely scenario is that in a few months’ time the ministry will issue the mining company an exploitation license,” he added.

To make matters worse, the mine will extract ore by the opencast method. “The mountains will have to be ground to pieces and whole layers of rock be removed to extract low quantities of gold. Then at an altitude of 3,000 metres, tanks and dams must be built to treat the ore with cyanide and so separate the gold from other metals,” Castro described.

The proposed mine site is “very close to the Machín volcano, which is in constant activity,” he said.

CORTOLIMA “is calling attention to the serious environmental impacts that (the mine) will have on the region, and insists that this project is incompatible with sustainable development. But the decision is up to the ministry,” he said.

All the environmental damage will only produce materials for luxury industries, experts and activists complain. “A study by the Environment ministry states that 90 percent of the gold is used for items of luxury consumption,” geologist Fierro commented.

President Santos, for his part, insists on the importance of legalising mining and protecting water resources.

“It is deeply distressing to see water sources and rivers become polluted. That is why we are going to put an immediate stop to illegal mining, and that is why I have come to tell you that the government is on your side,” the president said Jan. 6 in the mining community of Norosí, in the northern province of Bolívar.

But his statement has come under fire in Tolima, where exploration activities by AGA would damage the region’s greatest cluster of pristine water sources beyond recovery.

“Neoclassical economists always end up justifying environmental destruction. It’s happening now in Latin America, under governments of different political stripes. Therefore it is increasingly clear that there is an urgent need to develop resistance on a regional basis,” Fierro concluded.

Mirta Baravalle with other foreign delegates in Bogotá. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Helda Martínez and - -
BOGOTA, Dec 2 2011 (IPS)

The human rights situation in Colombia is extremely serious, and getting worse, reported an International Verification Mission made up of 40 delegates from 15 countries who visited the country this week.

Mirta Baravalle with other foreign delegates in Bogotá. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

There were 32 murders and 174 assaults on human rights defenders in 2009, according to the Information System on Attacks on Human Rights Defenders in Colombia (SIADDHH). But the number increased to 54 murders and 255 assaults between July 2010 and May 2011, the non-governmental group reported.

“Someday someone will have to answer for the crimes against humanity committed in Colombia,” said L’Anglais, who took part in the two International Caravans of Jurists made up of lawyers from around the world, in 2008 and 2010, and participated in an International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) mission. He is also a member of the Programa Somos Defensores (We Are Defenders Programme).

“Genocide is being committed in Colombia,” Mirta Acuña de Baravalle, one of the founding members of Argentina’s renowned Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo human rights groups, told IPS. In her role as activist, she has been invited to this country on numerous occasions.

The International Verification Mission culminated the International Campaign for the Right to Defend Human Rights in Colombia, launched in 2009 with support from 292 organisations across the globe.

The Campaign initially emerged in response to the threats posed to human rights defenders and others by the illegal wiretapping carried out for years by the president’s intelligence agency, DAS, against journalists, opposition politicians, activists, and even Supreme Court judges.

The wiretapping was followed by threats, attacks, murders, judicial persecution, sexual violence, and harassment of lawyers, social activists, reporters, trade unionists, and members of community associations of blacks and indigenous people.

The scandal over the wiretapping operations led to legal charges against former DAS directors María del Pilar Hurtado – now in exile in Panama – and Jorge Noguera, who was sentenced in September to 25 years in prison for ties with the far-right paramilitary groups. According to the verdict, he provided the paramilitaries with lists of names of academics, trade unionists and others, who were subsequently murdered.

Bernardo Moreno, who was the secretary of former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), is also in custody, while Uribe himself is under investigation by the Accusations Commission in the lower house of Congress, which has the authority to investigate current and former heads of state.

DAS was shut down in November but the investigation continues.

Another ongoing investigation is of 2,500 cases of “false positives” – the euphemism used to describe army killings of young civilians passed off as guerrilla casualties.

Under the so-called “body count” system, the military offered incentives like weekend passes, cash bonuses, promotions and trips abroad to get “results” in the counterinsurgency war.

The victims were mainly young men from poor neighbourhoods who were lured in by false job offers, taken away, and forced to put on camouflage fatigues like the ones worn by the insurgents, before they were shot by the security forces and tallied up as combat casualties.

When he took office in August 2010, President Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s former defence minister, called for peace and reconciliation, citing the protection of human rights as “an essential and profoundly democratic, ethical and human commitment.”

Santos has also made clear statements of respect for the judicial system, which Uribe had often questioned. In addition, he re-established relations with neighbouring countries, with whom his predecessor had quarrelled, and accelerated the approval of the Victims and Land Restitution Law, aimed at restoring millions of hectares of land seized from peasants in the war, mainly by the paramilitaries.

However, murders and forced disappearances of environmentalists and people fighting for the return of their land have increased.

Meanwhile, Santos’ initiative to foment mining industry activity has caused environmental damages and is seriously threatening collectively owned territories, according to Human Rights Watch.

The global rights group reported that 233 mining concessions have been granted to a total of 267,623 hectares of land in 117 indigenous reserves.

The 2010-2014 national development plan states that unprecedented levels of security were achieved in Colombia thanks to Uribe’s policies.

But the International Campaign for the Right to Defend Human Rights in Colombia says the focus was on recovering control of territory by military means, without any attempt to prevent human rights abuses or to provide assistance to victims.

“We cannot blame the Santos administration for what is happening…but as president, he must do much more to change things,” L’Anglais said

The International Verification Mission observers met Thursday Dec. 1 with representatives of the government.

Citing information provided by public institutions, Spanish lawmaker Mauricio Valiente told IPS that “for justice to be done, more prosecutors, investigators and resources are needed.”

But “political will is also necessary, as well as recognition of what is happening by government officials,” he added, alluding to a certain scepticism they observed on the part of Interior Minister Germán Vargas.

The Mission toured the country in eight groups from Monday Nov. 28 to Friday Dec. 2.

In January 2012, the observers will officially give the Colombian government their recommendations, compiled after “an effort that was sad but also gratifying, because the victims maintain their dignity and are doing everything they can to find solutions,” said Baravalle.

Excerpt:

The “occupation” of Bogotá by students, backed by parents and professors as well as social and cultural sectors, is continuing even after the Colombian government offered to withdraw its controversial bill to reform education if the protests were called off.

Protesting in the rain in Bolívar Square. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

The protesters turned down rightwing President Juan Manuel Santos’ request that they go back to classes. Some 200,000 university students demonstrated Thursday in Bogotá and other parts of the country for high-quality education with equality.

“We want something better than the proposals of neoliberal governments and the conditions imposed on the country by the free trade agreement with the United States,” approved by the U.S. Congress in October, Adriana Santos, a law student, told IPS.

A heavy downpour in Bogotá on Thursday Oct. 10 did not dampen the singing, dancing, speeches and embraces between students and their relatives, artists and professors, who marched from strategic points of the city towards Bolívar Square in the heart of the capital, the site of Congress, city hall, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace.

The protest movement is opposed to the bill reforming Law 30 of 1992 on higher education, which it claims it is an attempt to privatise the system by encouraging private investment and the creation of for-profit universities, while curtailing autonomy by granting the education ministry more control over public educational establishments.

Meanwhile, the strikers have invited Education Minister María Fernanda Campo to take part in a televised prime time debate on Nov. 15.

“We want the country to know about our commitment to the construction of an alternative, democratic, free education system in the service of the vast majority” of the population, MANE spokespeople said.

“We want the youth of Colombia and the children of the poorest workers to have access to superior quality education. If we want progress, we need good education,” they added.

“The withdrawal of the bill, rather than a democratic gesture, is a sign of the strength and effectiveness of the student movement,” Víctor Manuel Moncayo, professor emeritus and former dean of the state National University of Colombia, told IPS.

“We have not seen anything like this since the 1970s, when there was a very effective student protest movement that achieved autonomy and deposed more than one university chancellor,” he said.

The student and teacher protest got under way as soon as the first drafts of the proposed reform were made known, in August 2010, when President Santos had just taken office.

The government bill, in many people’s view, represents continuity with the policy of the rightwing government of former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), known as the “educational revolution”, which is essentially about privatisation, according to its critics.

The students asked to be actively included in drafting the education bill currently being debated, and have carried out demonstrations in Bogotá and other large Colombian cities since April.

“But there was no discussion or consultation over the draft. The ministry organised 28 forums but these were merely a mechanism to legitimise the government’s project,” said a student communiqué sent to Congress.

At first the protests were marred by scuffles and police crackdowns, but the students changed their tactics, and held a “hugathon” on Oct. 26 and a “kissathon” on Nov. 3.

“The MANE decided to change tactics by consensus, which is the way all our resolutions are decided and which has led to exciting days,” Viviana Rangel, the representative on the student council from the private Universidad Externado de Colombia, told IPS. The Externado is one of 26 private universities that have joined the protest “in solidarity with public universities, but also because the government reform affects our own sector,” said Rangel, who studies government and international relations.

In Rangel’s view, “the bill is directly linked with the free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States.

“Chapter 11 of the FTA calls for private investment in education. In other words, the profit motive prevails, which means that university fees can rise faster than the consumer price index, which used to regulate any increases,” she said.

“U.S. universities will also be allowed into the country, and they will train people to provide cheap labour for their economy, as well as dismantle other guarantees currently offered by private universities,” she said.

“Santos cannot give way easily, because he is deeply committed to the U.S. agenda,” Yamile Rojas, a law school graduate from the private Universidad Libre, told IPS.

Rangel said that within the context of neoliberal policies, the education reform stresses “student loans, which are a real nightmare for students and their parents. After five years of studying, the payments must continue for another 15 years,” she said.

Meanwhile, minister Campo is insisting that students must go back to classes, saying that if they fail the whole semester, the entry of new students will be limited next year.

The students’ reply is that it is better to fail a semester than to lose out on a lifetime of opportunities for themselves and future generations.

“Political power will be fought for metre by metre in the Oct. 30 local and regional elections in Colombia, because this is a country imbued with violence, with different armies disputing different parts of the territory,” said Alejandra Barrios, director of the election observation mission (MOE).

Murders, kidnappings, mass killings and forced displacement of people from their rural homes and land have marred the campaign, in which economic interests have become political spoils, said analysts consulted by IPS.

Between Feb. 2 and Oct. 20, 253 violent election-related incidents were registered in 233 municipalities, according to the MOE, a non-governmental group of analysts and academics from leading educational institutions in Colombia.

The organisation’s report, released on Oct. 20, states that in terms of violence strictly against candidates, the number of cases was five percent higher than in the 2007 regional elections.

In addition, the MOE reported that there is a risk of fraud in 534 municipalities, and a risk of violent incidents in 447 – out of a total of 1,119 municipalities.

For its part, the Interior Ministry reported that as of Oct. 19, 37 candidates had been killed.

In the elections, nearly 102,000 candidates are running for 32 gubernatorial posts, 1,102 mayorships, 418 provincial parliamentary seats, and 17,068 seats on town councils, Barrios told IPS.

“It is a very complex process” in this civil war-torn country of 46 million people, which is divided into 32 department or provinces, each of which has an executive and a legislative governing body of its own, she said. In addition, the large cities have a decentralised administration and local community councils.

The mining industry, one of the priorities of the government of conservative President Juan Manuel Santos, “is playing an important role in the current local and regional elections,” said Barrios.

For example, there are foreign companies waiting for government decisions on mining concessions in different regions, such as Anglo Gold Ashanti, which has been trying for years to operate in the central department of Tolima.

“The restitution of land is another central issue in the campaign, because many mayors and town councillors do not agree with returning to the original owners the land that was violently seized from millions of campesinos (small farmers),” the expert added.

More than four million people forced off their land by the nearly five-decade armed conflict between government forces, far-right paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas stand to benefit from the restitution of their land under the Victims and Land Restitution law passed in June.

The process is to involve more than two million hectares of land from which the owners were forced to leave by illegal armed groups – mainly the paramilitaries – large landowners and even government officials.

Another touchy issue in the regional elections is the question of illegal drug crops like coca, poppies and marijuana.

There is also the issue of the heavy rains that lashed the country in 2010 and this year, “which involved a large amount of resources to administer, added to which promises for reconstruction have become a matter that has been easily manipulated in the campaign,” Barrios said.

“We are talking about large amounts of funds, if we take into account the fact that flooding affected 90 percent of the municipalities,” she added. An estimated 2.8 million dollars were earmarked to compensate and offset the damages caused by the rains.

These are all interests that, according to the MOE, are in play in the midst of the conflict that involves three leftist insurgent groups with different dynamics – the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Popular Liberation Army (EPR), and especially the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which are “the most powerful, and tend to declare an ‘armed strike’,” designed to interfere in elections.

And on the other side are the so-called Bacrim (for “bandas criminales” or “criminal bands”) – a new name given by the government to ultra-right-wing groups that arose after the demobilisation of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary militias.

“The Bacrim emerged from the AUC, and mainly have a local reach, although some groups that have appeared are regional, in places such as Casanare (an oil-rich eastern department) or Guajira (a coal-rich northern department),” Barrios said.

She said she was referring to right-wing irregular “armies that have been maintained for nearly 60 years, for different reasons and with different origins, and which have backed different candidates, fomenting the association between illegal activities and politics.”

This history of violence surrounding elections is not new in Colombia. But only in 2006 did it begin to be studied more closely by organisations like the MOE and human rights groups.

“As citizens, and as members of serious social organisations, we realised that we were focusing on specific human rights issues, but were ignoring the red flags of electoral corruption,” she said.

Wholesale violence occurred between 1984 and 1992, with the slaughter of thousands of candidates and supporters of the Patriotic Union (UP), the leftist party that emerged from a peace agreement between the government of Belisario Betancur (1982-1986) and the FARC.

Persecution of the UP, which had been joined by regional movements of different political tendencies, the Communist Party, and dissidents from the Liberal Party, claimed between 4,000 and 5,000 lives.

In September 2002, after right-wing President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) took office, the UP was stripped of its legal status as a party, and surviving UP politicians continue to demand that its status be reinstated.

Other cases of electoral violence claimed high-profile victims like left-wing presidential candidates Jaime Pardo in 1987 and Bernardo Jaramillo and Carlos Pizarro in 1990.

“So we realised that every four years we were taking part in the same ritual of elections that were not held, precisely, in conditions of transparency or freedom or suitable conditions, but under the imposition of armed groups.”

However, “even the most heroic efforts to achieve clean elections have been insufficient,” said Barrios. “That is why we want to continue building democracy, so people understand how decisive their vote is.”

This month the government’s civil registry office presented a new voter registration card containing mechanisms aimed at preventing fraud and guaranteeing transparency, such as a bar code with encrypted information, to be read by a special device.

In one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the Colombian capital, 26-year-old Sandra Sánchez has created an oasis that offers meals, recreational opportunities, company and much more to hundreds of children and elderly people, in an example of solidarity and leadership that has transcended borders.

Sandra Sánchez, right, with a group of seniors at lunch time in the Oasis. Credit: Helda Martinez/IPS

In 2004, Sánchez established the Oasis Social Foundation in El Paraíso, a neighbourhood in Ciudad Bolívar – a poor district strung along the hills on the southeast edge of the Colombian capital that has been settled by hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the country’s nearly half-century civil war.

Sánchez’s family arrived 19 years ago in El Paraíso – which is located at the highest point of Ciudad Bolívar – when it was just barren hilltops, before it was gradually occupied by people who had fled the violence. “My dad built a small house out of guadua (a kind of bamboo that grows in Latin America),” the head of Oasis told IPS.

Reaching El Paraíso involves a 20-minute uphill bus ride through the sprawling working-class district of Ciudad Bolívar that is home to over one million of the 10 million people in the greater Bogotá area.

In Ciudad Bolívar, high levels of poverty and violent crime coexist with a spirit of solidarity that draws new displaced families to the area.

The “soup kitchens for life” programme “includes education on nutrition, and regular weight monitoring,” Sánchez explained the day this IPS reporter spent in Oasis.

The “house of values”, another Oasis programme, promotes collective knowledge, solidarity and non-violence, and offers adult literacy classes and workshops in art and other areas. “We encourage reflection on ethics, and we support dreams, like the one I had,” she said.

Another project that is just getting underway is the organic farm, which will supply the Oasis soup kitchens. The farm is located in a rural area in the municipality of Guayabal de Síquima, 68 km west of Bogotá, where the chill felt in hilly El Paraíso gives way to a warmer climate.

“We are seeking self-sustainability and food security, but also rest and recreation for the seniors and children we serve, many of whom have not even been outside of Ciudad Bolívar,” Sánchez said at the farm, surrounded by some of the people who are assisted by the programme.

There is also a special programme for teenage mothers, in this area where teen pregnancy rates are high and girls face, often on their own, a situation in which they need advice, guidance and support.

Solidarity from a young age

Sánchez’s neighbours found out about her vocation to help others and her leadership and organising skills when she was just a child. In 1994, at the age of nine, she was the first girl to be elected “personera” or student representative of her school.

As personera, she overcame any obstacle to obtain funds or repairs for her school. And two years later she was elected head of all of the “personeros” in Ciudad Bolívar, while she began to organise networks of student leaders and to represent her community in national and international meetings and events.

In 2002, at the age of 17, she won the prize for humanitarian action awarded by Madame Figaro, the women’s magazine produced by the French daily Le Figaro.

The catalyst for the creation of Oasis was the death of an elderly neighbour, María Pacanchipe, who died of hunger at the age of 68. “Her ulcer started to bleed because she didn’t have enough to eat,” Sánchez said. “She was my friend, and her death pushed me to talk less and act more.”

The case illustrated the problems faced in Colombia by elderly women, many of whom are steeped in poverty and neglect because they have no pension, no family, or have been abandoned by their relatives. “Women live longer, but in worse conditions,” Sánchez said.

In memory of Pacanchipe, she set up a day care for elderly women in her home, where they could chat, keep each other company, learn about their rights, tell their stories – even dance and sing. Elderly men soon joined them, and later children and their mothers started to come.

An Oasis blooms

A university course on leadership, the Le Figaro prize money and support from local, Spanish and French organisations enabled her to build the Oasis Social Foundation building.

“I am moved by generosity in the midst of poverty and need,” said Sánchez, recalling how people came together to lay the foundations of the building, which is now three stories high.

Margarita, 69 – who did not give her last name – eats every day at Oasis, warding off the loneliness of her humble home by taking part in the activities there. She says she feels fortunate to be able to stay in her home thanks to the support she receives from the Foundation.

Her eyes fill with pain when she says her only son left for the United States seven years ago and she heard no more from him after receiving a few letters – a story similar to that of many other elderly women, in a country where 62 percent of women over 65 have survived their husbands.

An autobiographical book on Sánchez’s fight against poverty, “Los olvidados de Bogotá” (roughly, The Forgotten Ones of Bogotá), published in 2003 inspired Marianne Roussy from Switzerland to make the documentary “El paraíso de Sandra” (Sandra’s Paradise) which was screened in Bogotá and Paris in 2008.

“I was impacted by her work, and by this community organising project carried out by people who did not just sit around complaining but joined efforts and are moving forward,” Marie Claude Dubail, a Colombian-French woman who raised funds from the Paris city government and French NGOs, told IPS.

“The work here has helped me a great deal because we have four children, and my husband, a watchman, doesn’t always have work,” Lidibia Salazar told IPS. Her displaced family came to El Paraíso five years ago, and she works as a cook at the Oasis, which employs eight women from the neighbourhood.

“We get here at 4:00 in the morning. The kids start coming for breakfast at 5:30, and lunch starts being served at 11:00,” she said. “We work until 4:00 in the afternoon, to leave everything clean and organised. We are above all friends; we all take care of each other.”

Young ambitions

Sánchez is about to graduate in law from the prestigious University of Rosario, where she studies on a scholarship. But her degree will not pull her away from El Paraíso, she promises.

Her case is not an isolated one in her neighbourhood, she says. “Life has changed for young people in this area. They dream more now about continuing their studies and going to the university. They don’t want to be street vendors like many of their parents.”

Oasis has a sponsors programme, who provide not only funding but other kinds of support.

“Company and affection are also important. Students at the University of Rosario, for example, are now aware of a reality that they knew nothing about before. And each one offers what they can. They gave grandmother Margarita a radio, and you can’t imagine how much that changed her life,” Sánchez said.

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTÁ, Aug 26 2011 (IPS)

The more than 1.2 million microenterprises operating in Colombia are responsible for around 50 percent of all employment. And many of these small businesses owe their existence to the microfinance system, according to a report by Visión Económica, a local business research group.

Street vendors are the main beneficiaries of micro-loans in Colombia. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

Small and micro-businesses are classified as those worth 147,000 dollars or less, with a debt capacity of no more than 120 minimum monthly salaries – the equivalent of 37,000 dollars – and with up to 10 employees.

Microenterprises employ an average of 2.6 people in Colombia, according to the Visión Económica report, published in July.

Small companies fuel demand for microfinance, because “they generally do not meet the requirements set by commercial banks, which do not lend money to people with limited economic resources either, due to the risk of default,” Jorge Varón, the manager of the development credit fund of the Colombians Supporting Colombians (CAC) programme, told IPS.

CAC, which emerged in 2001 with backing from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), works in municipal development with an emphasis on participatory planning.

USAID “supported us until 2005 in the development of social projects and in meeting the requirements to launch a microcredit programme, which began to operate in 2004. Today, we are autonomous,” said Varón.

Microfinance really began to expand in this South American country in 2007.

“Microcredit grew at a steady rate of 15 percent between 2007 and 2010,” says the Visión Económica study.

However, micro-loan funds in Colombia date back at least 26 years ago, to the emergence of the Women’s World Foundation (FMM) which actually grants microcredit “to both men and women,” Jhasnedy Niño, who works in the foundation’s office in 20 de Julio, a working-class neighbourhood on the south side of Bogotá, told IPS.

Varón also said “We lend to people of different ages and educational levels. But women do currently hold 69 percent of our loans.

“That’s why we also have an emergency loan programme, for heads of households. They are small amounts, between 28 and 286 dollars, to be paid back in one to five months,” he added.

Among the recipients of the small loans are women who make a living as vendors of food, clothing and other products, at sidewalk stands or small shops.

One such vendor is Marta Linares, who IPS ran into at the FMM office asking for information. “I want to know how it works. But it depends on the payments, because if they’re really high I can’t apply for the loan,” said the street vendor who sells plastic products. “I could pay a maximum of around 40 dollars a month.”

Varón said the CAC credit fund grants loans of between “28 and 14,300 dollars, at a monthly interest of 2.1 percent…with repayment periods of one month for ’emergency’ loans and between three and 36 months for other kinds.”

Interest rates for micro-loans in Colombia are regulated by national law and by decree 919, modified in 2008 to facilitate the expansion of microfinance and distinguish micro-lending from consumption lending

Clothing and shoe vendors, tailor shops, ice cream stands, bakeries, taxi, bus and truck drivers, hardware stores and food vendors are the biggest microcredit beneficiaries.

“In the space of six years, we granted loans to nearly 9,000 people,” said Varón. “We have 2,100 active loans, 90 percent of which were extended to people in levels one and two.” Colombia’s socioeconomic categories are one through six, with one being the poorest.

Most microcredit institutions in Colombia emerged outside of the capital, in provincial cities and rural areas.

CAC, for example, has its headquarters in Ibagué, the capital of the west-central province of Tolima, where it has offices in nine of the province’s 47 municipalities.

“We don’t have loans available yet for agricultural activities, but we have had a positive social impact,” Varón said. “Many people have managed to grow their businesses and improve their living standards. We are the alternative between commercial banks and informal lenders.”

The FMM also emerged in Colombia’s vast interior, in the southwest province of Cauca, and its headquarters is still in the provincial capital, Popayán. “We only expanded to Bogotá six years ago,” Niño said.

“In this office we have 6,500 clients, which is a large number. And it has remained high, which shows us that we are providing good services,” she said.

The Visión Económica study, for its part, concludes that “a positive relationship has been identified between access to financial services and poverty reduction, because (microfinance) helps people weather difficult situations that reduce the incomes of low-income populations.”

That is especially important in a country like Colombia, where poverty affects 46 percent of the population of 46 million, according to official figures.

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Aug 9 2011 (IPS)

“I give something, you give something,” an Emberá indigenous craftswoman displaying her beautiful handiwork on a sidewalk in the Colombian capital told this reporter, saying she would pose for a photo in exchange for selling a pair of earrings.

Emberá craftswomen on a street in Bogota. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

Would she like to return? She hesitated. “Maybe, I don’t know. We can sell our crafts here,” she added, before clamming up.

Of the indigenous people who have fled Colombia’s nearly five-decade civil war, which is waged mainly in rural areas, the Emberá are the group that most stands out for flocking to large cities.

There are some 300,000 Emberá, whose ancestors were nomadic, in 17 of Colombia’s 32 departments or provinces, but mainly concentrated in the west: Chocó, Antioquia, Caldas and Risaralda departments. There are also Emberá in neighbouring Panama and Ecuador.

They are the most widely dispersed native group in this South American country, according to the National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia (ONIC).

Indigenous people officially make up 3.5 percent of Colombia’s 46 million people. The immense majority live in remote mountainous or jungle areas, where they are often killed and forcibly disappeared and displaced in the armed conflict.

There is no agreement among experts and authorities on how many distinct indigenous groups have survived in Colombia. ONIC puts the number at 102, of which 87 are officially recognised.

Indigenous people comprise two percent of the victims of forced displacement, who number between 3.7 million according to official statistics and 5.2 million between 1895 and 2010, as reported by the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a prominent human rights group.

Depending on their culture and location, native people flee the war in different directions: in the mountains they escape to even higher ground; in the rainforest they flee to more inhospitable jungle areas; or they join the ranks of the urban poor on the outskirts of cities, like a number of Emberá have done.

There are an estimated 900 displaced Emberá living in Bogota.

There are several different language families among the Emberá, including Katío, Chamí, Waunana and Birá. “There are also the Emberá of the upper Andágueda river, in Chocó, which are a different linguistic group,” Gerardo Jumí, a member of the Chamí Emberá, told IPS.

Jumí, who has an undergraduate degree in the social sciences and a master’s degree in political science, was a senator between 2002 and 2006 and is now an adviser to the president’s programme on indigenous peoples.

He began his career as a teacher at the indigenous school in Dabeiba, a town in the northwestern department of Antioquia, and he is intimately familiar with the roots of the violence that affects the Emberá and that has pushed them, especially the Katío, to the cities.

He explained that although many survive in the cities by panhandling, they see what they do as a job, “because they don’t know the concept of begging.”

Summing up the history of the displacement of the Katío ethnic group in the 20th century, Jumí said “The Emberá settled in different regions to plant crops and raise livestock. In the 1970s, the Katío of Caldas (in west-central Colombia) found gold, which brought them wealth and better living conditions, but also violence.”

Landowners from the neighbouring department of Antioquia, with the backing of police, invaded their territory and seized the mine and surrounding lands from them.

Then the leftwing guerrillas, which emerged in 1964, arrived: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), followed later by drug traffickers and far-right paramilitary militias.

The Emberá, traditionally a peaceful group, tried to defend themselves with machetes, bows and arrows, and shotguns. But their economy was destroyed and the young people began to be recruited by the armed groups.

“Now there is talk about people trafficking and organisers of begging rings,” said Jumí, referring to people who force the indigenous refugees into such activities in the fleabag pensions where they tend to live in the cities.

The Interior Ministry has investigated the allegations and has taken measures against some of those organising the begging rings, but it is a complex situation.

Many Emberá live in “territories without a state presence, which can only be reached after hiking through the bush for a week or two. These are communities that lack the most elemental means of survival,” Jumí said.

They thus go from complete isolation from western civilisation to the hardscrabble existence of bewildered victims of forced displacement in poor urban neighbourhoods, further complicated by the fact that many of them speak little or no Spanish.

In their home territories, there is “so much violence, and the state is incapable of making any public investments,” he said.

Nevertheless, Jumí is hopeful. In October 2010, President Juan Manual Santos attended the Second Congress of the Emberá Nation, held in the western Valle del Cauca department to draw attention to the plight of the ethnic group and “emphasise the need for respect and guarantees for human rights, dialogue and prior consultation about” mining, oil, large-scale agricultural or logging activities, “that affect us, as the constitution states,” he said.

One key issue discussed was “that the Emberá deserve to return to their land, an idea supported by the ONIC, to which we belong. We called for shared political, moral and ethical responsibility,” Jumí said.

Can that be achieved? “A leader has to be optimistic and never stop fighting. The state has outstanding debts – it has failed to obey the mandates of the 1991 constitution and important Constitutional Court rulings, which recognise the autonomy of indigenous peoples and stipulate that they must be previously consulted about decisions that affect them,” he said.

One of the major advances made by the 1991 constitution was to recognise indigenous peoples’ right to collective property of their ancestral territory, and their right to self-government within their reserves.

Of a total of 796 reserves in Colombia, 20 percent belong to the Emberá, in different departments.

But “in the 20 years since the 1991 constitution came into force, there have been more political killings of indigenous leaders than ever,” said Jumí. “And Congress has shelved 18 different draft laws that would have carried out territorial rezoning. So this is just beginning, in the midst of the huge expectations created by President Santos’ promises” of land reform and restitution of land to the victims of forced displacement.

Besides the armed conflict, there are other threats facing native groups in Colombia, global rights watchdog Amnesty International said in a report published Aug. 5 ahead of International Day of the World’s Indigenous People, celebrated Aug. 9.

According to the report titled “Sacrificing rights in the name of development: Indigenous peoples under threat in the Americas”, “Indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasant farmer communities are particularly hard hit by the on-going human rights crisis in Colombia. These communities face killings, threats and other human rights violations and abuses committed by the security forces, paramilitaries and guerrilla forces.

“On the one hand, human rights violations and abuses are committed as part of efforts to secure military control of regions. On the other, they are often committed to advance powerful economic interests and undermine the capacity of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities to oppose the development of these interests on their lands,” the report adds.

“In January 2009, the Colombian Constitutional Court issued a ruling highlighting the situation of Indigenous peoples whose cultural and physical survival were at risk either from the dislocation caused by displacement and dispersion or as a direct result of violence and declining numbers,” it says.

The report states that “The false and dangerous dichotomy of development vs. Indigenous peoples’ rights is widespread in the continent. It is based on the flawed argument that extractive or other development projects that serve national interests by increasing national wealth and generating jobs cannot be ‘obstructed’ by Indigenous peoples who are ‘just’ a fraction of society.

“Thus, when Indigenous communities organise themselves to demand respect for their rights, the state and other actors accuse them of blocking the growth of the entire country,” says Amnesty International.

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Jun 10 2011 (IPS)

Human rights groups and small farmers’ associations will keep close watch in Colombia to make sure the new Victims’ and Land Restitution Law, signed by President Juan Manuel Santos Friday, is effectively implemented.

Marco Romero, president of the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES). Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

But while it has been widely welcomed, the new law has also drawn calls for effective enforcement.

The new legislation paves the way for legal titles to be restored to the original owners of lands misappropriated mainly by far-right paramilitaries with the support of large landowners.

The law sets a 10-year deadline for the restitution of the rights of more than five million victims displaced from their rural property, and of nearly seven million hectares of land that were seized from or abandoned by owners who fled the violence.

In the implementation of the Victims’ and Land Restitution Law “there are risks, because the social services and housing subsidies to which the average Colombian has a right cannot be considered reparations,” says Marco Romero, president of the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a leading Colombian human rights group.

“Full reparations must be guaranteed,” Romero, who is also secretary of the Commission to Monitor Public Policies on Forced Displacement, said when he sat down with IPS for this interview.

Q: What is the key feature of the Victims and Land Restitution Law? A: First, the recognition of the state’s responsibility towards the victims of the guerrillas, paramilitaries and government agents.

This is a major achievement in a country that tends towards cynicism, where rights are only halfway vindicated and reality is denied, along the lines of what former president (Álvaro) Uribe did. For Uribe the aim was to combat subversion by ignoring the victims, refusing to respect international humanitarian law, and denying that forced displacement exists, calling the victims merely “migrants”.

The restitution of land is also important. The state has recognised that people were massively dispossessed of 6.6 million hectares of land, and that this is the magnitude of the challenge.

Q: And the main shortcomings of the law? A: That in its design, it has fallen short with respect to reflecting international treaties and principles. Furthermore, in its implementation there are risks, because the social services and housing subsidies to which the average Colombian has a right cannot be considered reparations. Full reparations must be guaranteed.

According to our estimates, the reparations would represent a sum equivalent to 40 million dollars, without counting the moral damages.

It’s true that virtually no society could afford to pay the entire amount, but we must come as close as possible, because the victims deserve, for themselves and their children, education, including higher education, decent housing and incomes, and opportunities to contribute to society by moving out of the informal economy.

Q: In your view, what limitations will have to be overcome to implement the law? A: The law’s main enemy, ‘Uribismo’ (the pro-Uribe faction in politics) must be isolated, and the commitment of other political parties must be secured. In addition, Colombian society, which at times is autistic, must take on responsibility and learn about the issue, without flippantly stating that the victims are asking for too much.

Furthermore, the victims must be accompanied, especially in rural areas, because the restitution of land is taking place amidst the bullets.

Q: Is there a possibility of victims receiving reparations more than once? A: Yes. This is a dilemma, because restitution of land in the midst of the internal armed conflict makes it impossible to guarantee that no one will receive reparations more than once. As long as the conflict continues, the violation of rights is always possible.

Q: Will the Constitutional Court rule on this point and others, including United Nations recommendations? A: Because this is an ordinary law, the president has the authority to issue decrees to regulate the law in the next six months, on 15 different aspects, including the participation of displaced populations, the reparations programme, and the upgrading of the ombudsperson’s office, which will increase its capacity to accompany and support the victims.

The Constitutional Court would have a role to play in possible lawsuits. For that reason, in this six-month period, we have to closely monitor compliance with the law, in which social participation and mobilisation will be crucial.

But I do think that any ruling will be positive, because in the last 20 years the Court has shown that it safeguards rights and their protection.

Q: What do human rights organisations demand of the government with respect to how the reparations will be sustained in budgetary terms? A: We are asking for the issue to be discussed with experts who have an open mentality, because the neoliberals, including the minister of finance and public credit, Juan Carlos Echeverri, say there is no money, although they continue to pay out generous subsidies to ethanol producers and flower exporters, among others.

Comparatively, Colombia is a fiscal paradise. Which means it is possible to tap into financial capital, and to also obtain resources from those who push for free trade treaties, which should contribute to the costs of the reparations.

In human development reports we are always ranked as the second or third most unequal country in the Americas. So we ask: why so much generosity towards the rich, but not towards the victims?

Q: Will 10 years be enough, or will this sink into oblivion before then? A: That’s another challenge. Because we have the experience of law 387, of 1997 (on the prevention of forced displacement), that spent seven years in court proceedings, which led the Constitutional Court to hand down sentence 025 on the systematic failure to comply with a state-sanctioned law.

It’s a risk. But one humanitarian consideration is that the victims who are in a state of utter poverty cannot wait 10 years, because it would be inhumane. If the state does not live up to this, the vulnerability of the victims will be its responsibility.

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTÁ, Jun 10 2011 (IPS)

The Victims and Land Restitution Law, signed Friday by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, “is an important message for reconciliation in the country,” said lawmaker Guillermo Rivera, one of the sponsors of the law.

Liberal Party legislator Guillermo Rivera. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

One of the other personalities present was Yolandé Mukagasana, a Nobel Peace Prize candidate who lost her family in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and now works to support victims in different parts of the world.

The new law shows that Colombian society “is finally paying attention to the five million people who live in destitution and humiliation,” the Liberal Party member of the lower house of Congress, who was a staunch opponent of Uribe, said in this interview with IPS.

Rivera and Liberal Parry Senator Juan Fernando Cristo were responsible for the first version of the bill in 2007. They are both from regions involved in the civil war between state security forces, leftwing guerrillas and far-right paramilitaries.

Q: What is the key feature of the Victims and Land Restitution Law? A: The message it sends out. I think it basically expresses the will of Colombian society and its representatives in Congress, because it enshrines a state policy and grants recognition to the victims.

Laws have material and symbolic effects. In this case, the material effect will be the restitution of the land, the payment of reparations to the victims and their access to the law’s judicial guarantees.

The symbolic message is reconciliation, with Colombian society finally paying attention to the five million people who live in destitution and humiliation.

Q: The law was passed in a context of ongoing violence. Social organisations and leaders have denounced the murder of 49 rural activists since 2002, and 12 more since August 2010, when Santos took office, including Ana Fabricia Córdoba, the cousin of former senator Piedad Córdoba. A: We are concerned about the murders of social leaders and we believe government policies to protect them are urgently needed. But it is a mistake to mix up this law with murders committed by common criminals, because that would endorse the arguments of the right.

Q: Can this law be effective in the midst of such violence? A: To answer that we must reflect deeply: should victims have to wait until the end of the conflict, which began in the 1960s, for reparations? I don’t think so.

The conflict that has lasted so many decades, and has intensified in the last two decades, is crying out for the state to respond now. In the face of the violence, effective solutions need to be found urgently, in line with obligations under the constitution.

A strategy to combat the “bacrim” (“bandas criminales”, criminal gangs that were formed after the demobilisation of the paramilitary militias) is already in place, but we cannot afford more failures or delay an effective response. I recognise the government’s effort in passing this law, but the vacuums must be filled as soon as possible.

I would emphasise that the violence will not be overcome by a law that provides for assistance, reparations and humanitarian aid.

Q: Will the law influence the search for peace? A: There are many challenges. In my view, it will be very important to closely scrutinise the individuals who make up the institutions responsible for implementing the law.

But the biggest challenge will be to form a victims’ federation, with spokespersons in local organisations, with dialogue and communication with the media and academic circles, which would have the political muscle to contribute to the fight against all the organised crime groups embedded in the armed forces and even politics.

Absalón Machado (an expert on agrarian and economic issues) pointed out that former president Carlos Lleras (1966-1970) strengthened his agrarian reform programme by helping to create ANUC, the national association of campesinos (small farmers).

At this moment in history, we have to make a similar effort, and very quickly. That is our real commitment.

Q: Another major concern is the overlap between the areas of land restitution, and the areas where the “bacrim” and multinational mining companies operate. A: All the enclave economies are a cause for concern: drug trafficking, the “bacrim” or “demobilised” paramilitaries – “demobilised” in quotation marks because they are still operating; and those who want to corner the entire income of territorial entities (municipalities, indigenous territories, etc.) and other phenomena that urgently require policies so the law can be enforced.

The law is reasonably well-designed, although it is true it has flaws that require corrective measures, as well as a huge campaign to provide information for citizens that will lead to the election of governments and politicians with absolutely no connections with any of those groups.

Q: The Colombian Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has made recommendations about the law. Do you agree with them? A: I agree with most of them. I proposed many of these ideas myself, but they were defeated at the time in Congress. For instance, I believe it should never have been said that a member of an illegal group, who as well as committing crimes was also a victim, should be recognised as a victim by the law. I could mention many examples that have been underscored by the High Commissioner and other officials.

This is why it is very important that all the media enthusiasm should not fizzle out this Friday, with the signing of the law.

I hope we will carry out the symbolic reparations creatively, so that together with organisations of human rights defenders, young people, academics and large numbers of other citizens, we may affirm that we live in a society that has a memory, where reconciliation is possible.

That’s why, when people congratulate me, I say that this is only the beginning and there is still much to be done.

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTÁ, Apr 28 2011 (IPS)

The Colombian government has been extolling a bill on Victims and Land Restitution which is being debated in Congress and is receiving extensive media coverage. But the demands of the victims themselves, forcibly displaced campesinos, are falling on deaf ears.

Displaced campesinos meeting to discuss land restitution plans. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

“So far, we have not been consulted about the provisions of the bill,” Orlando Burgos, head of the National Bureau for Strengthening Internally Displaced People’s Organisations (MNFOPD), an advocacy group for the displaced victims of the internal armed conflict, complained to IPS.

The land restitution law could benefit some 400,000 campesino families, a total of about two million people, who lost their homes and their farms in the violence that has been tearing this South American nation apart for nearly five decades.

The armed conflict, which began in 1964 with the emergence of leftwing guerrilla groups, took a new turn in the 1980s when drug traffickers and far-right paramilitary groups entered the fray, preying particularly on the rural population and escalating the forced uprooting of small farmers and their migration to the cities.

The land restitution plan is a cornerstone of rightwing President Juan Manuel Santos’ government programme, and Agriculture and Rural Development Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo is pushing for its implementation.

If the law is approved, legal titles will be restored to the original owners of the lands that were misappropriated by far-right paramilitaries with the support of large landowners and cattle ranchers, local politicians and members of Congress, many of whom have been sent to prison for their involvement since 2006 in the “parapolitics” scandal.

The term “parapolitics” refers to an unholy alliance of regional and national political elites, drug traffickers, the armed force and paramilitaries, acting in concert to consolidate power in their hands, according to Claudia López, co-author of a report titled “Parapolítica:La ruta de la expansión paramilitar y los acuerdos políticos” (Parapolitics: The Path of Paramilitary Expansion and Political Agreements).

Forcible dispossession of small farmers in rural areas has occurred frequently in contemporary Colombian history, linked to different episodes of political violence. The practice dates back to the second decade of the 20th century, when campesinos first formed associations to defend their rights.

In 1928, banana plantation workers for the U.S.-based United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International), went on strike for decent labour conditions. They were massacred by Colombian government troops in Ciénaga, in the department (province) of Magdalena on the Caribbean coast.

Leftwing senator Luis Carlos Avellaneda, of the Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA, the Alternative Democratic Pole), wrote in March in his blog that the worst period of bipartisan violence in Colombia took place “from 1948 to 1958,” between supporters of the rival Conservative and Liberal Parties. The decade is known simply as “The Violence”.

The conflict was sparked by the assassination of a populist Liberal presidential candidate during an election campaign. Some 200,000 people were killed out of the total population of 13 million at that time, “especially in rural areas, and some two million campesinos were displaced” by the violence, Avellaneda said.

The 1961 Agrarian Reform approved by the government of Liberal President Alberto Lleras Camargo (1958-1962) raised hopes among small farmers, who at the time comprised nearly 70 percent of the population.

The national association of campesinos, ANUC, founded in 1967, “reached one million members, and carried out land occupations on approximately 2,000 haciendas between 1971 and 1975,” according to Avellaneda, a member of the Senate First Commission that is analysing the Land Restitution bill.

However, under the administration of Conservative President Misael Pastrana (1970-1974), a 1973 “counter-reform” policy was adopted in order to dismantle what the agrarian reform had achieved. “Laws were repealed or reversed, dispossessions of rural farmers were resumed, and members of the campesino movement were persecuted and imprisoned,” the senator said.

According to a report published in February by the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a leading human rights group, “at least 5.2 million people have been displaced as a result of violence in the last 25 years.”

In the eight years of the administration of rightwing President Álvaro Uribe, whose term of office ended in August 2010, more than 2.6 million people were victims of forced displacement, equivalent to 51 percent of the official figure for the period 1997-2010.

“People were forced to abandon their home regions because their lives were in danger and their lands unprotected,” the CODHES document says, spelling out the historical precedents that will have to be overcome by the future law on Victims and Land Restitution, and underlining the demands for guarantees, participation and security made by leaders of small farmers’ organisations.

Burgos, of the displaced people’s defence organisation MNFOPD, said Senator Manuel Enríquez of the rightwing Party of the U has offered to back the PDA’s advocacy on behalf of the dispossessed. “We have entered into a dialogue with the senator, but we still have some doubts,” he said.

The main concern of the bill’s detractors is that “campesino leaders are still being murdered,” Burgos said. Since President Santos took office in August 2010, 21 peasant leaders have been killed, and a total of 60 were murdered last year, he pointed out.

Burgos remarked on a video broadcast Apr. 10 by Noticias Uno, a local television channel, about the murder of displaced campesino Álvaro Sánchez, allegedly by former paramilitaries who were officially disbanded in a 2003-2006 demobilisation process negotiated with the Uribe administration. The video shows Sánchez confronting ex-paramilitaries in the act of seizing his lands; their response was to shoot him dead.

“It’s unthinkable to try to put things right in Colombia without dealing with the fundamental causes of the conflict, and when so many economic interests are in play,” he said.

Burgos said that, shockingly, “the law, which contains 208 articles, is being put to the vote whole sections at a time, which clearly demonstrates the minimal attention being paid to a bill of vital importance to the country.”

He pointed out that article 61 of the draft law states that victims displaced since 1986 would be eligible for reparations, while article 76 says those displaced since January 1991 would have the right to land restitution.

“Does that mean that lands usurped between 1986 and 1991 will automatically become the legal property of those who seized them?” Burgos queried.

“We think the land restitution law should recognise the rights of all those dispossessed since 1980, when the strategy of forced displacement really escalated,” he stressed.

“We are requesting that proper mechanisms be established to avoid under-registration of people eligible for land restitution; that humanitarian needs be met in a regulated way; that the return of campesinos to their lands also be properly regulated; and that no new bureaucratic government entities be created. We think it is more appropriate that the existing bodies function efficiently.”

One favourable development in the recent debates is inclusion in the bill of benefits for victims of bands of criminals, which experts say are successors of the paramilitaries demobilised under the Justice and Peace Law passed by the Uribe administration.

The Victims and Land Restitution bill is facing a tortuous passage through Congress. The text approved by the house of representatives was sent to the senate, and any amendments made there will have to be reconsidered by the lower chamber. If the final text meets with the approval of the full parliament, it will be promulgated by President Santos and forwarded to the Constitutional Court, which will then have 60 days to issue an opinion.

The arduous passage of the bill could take until the end of the year. Meanwhile, campesino leaders and organisations representing displaced people and other victims will continue to insist that their voices be heard.

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Apr 7 2011 (IPS)

The announcement of progress towards making synthetic vaccines against 517 infectious diseases, and the award of an international prize for his work have stirred up lively controversy around Colombian pathologist Manuel Elkin Patarroyo, a malaria vaccine pioneer.

Manuel Elkin Patarroyo Credit: Manuel Elkin Patarroyo

Promising results using Patarroyo’s synthetic vaccines were published in late March in Chemical Reviews, the journal of the American Chemical Society, shortly after he received the Prince of Viana Prize for Solidarity 2011, awarded by the regional government of Navarre, in Spain, and the Caja Laboral, a cooperative bank.

“My main goal for the last 33 years has been to find a logical method for the development of synthetic vaccines,” the 64-year-old Colombian researcher told IPS at his Bogota laboratory.

He said his research team, which includes his son, Manuel Alfonso Patarroyo, chose “malaria as a model because of its advantages for research, as it is an acute illness that is easily diagnosed and can be treated with quinine.”

Furthermore, a suitable animal was available as an experimental model: the owl monkey or night monkey (Aotus lemurinus), which inhabits South America “from Panama to the north of Argentina, and has an immune system that is 90 to 100 percent identical to that of human beings.”

Chemical Reviews published results of the research carried out by his team of 68 people, including scientists and administrative staff, at the Colombian Institute of Immunology Foundation (FIDIC), based in Bogotá and Leticia, the capital of Amazonas province in the southeast of the country, near the borders with Brazil and Peru.

“We defined the chemical and physical principles of molecules (involved in immunisation) that remain typical, regardless of whether they belong to the malaria parasite, the tuberculosis bacillus, the hepatitis virus, Treponema pallidum that causes syphilis, the agents that cause meningitis, and so on,” said Patarroyo, who was granted Spanish citizenship in 1996.

“All these molecules follow specific rules, which allows us to say, on the basis of these findings, that vaccines can be developed for many infectious diseases,” he said.

Patarroyo became world famous in 1986, when he announced the creation of the first chemically-synthesised antimalarial vaccine.

Vaccine SPf66 – also the first vaccine against a parasite – was effective for preventing malaria in between 13 and 40 percent of the people tested, and in 1995 Patarroyo donated the patent to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

But the WHO shelved it, and today SPf66 is one of 32 inactive or discontinued vaccines, while 23 other projects are undergoing clinical trials in humans, according to the U.N. health agency.

Patarroyo pointed out that “malaria is still a huge public health problem that affects half a billion people a year and causes about three million deaths, especially among children under five.”

Distrust and accusations

“I don’t want to be argumentative,” well-known Colombian geneticist Emilio Yunis told IPS, “but I think there is a great deal of confusion about what Patarroyo and his team have done.

“Chemical Reviews is a very widely read journal, but as its name points out, it consists of review articles,” he said.

“Manuel Alfonso (Patarroyo’s son) has told different audiences that the new discovery is 95 percent effective,” Yunis said. “How was this result measured, in what species, when and why? What is needed is a vaccine that is effective in human beings.”

“I have told Manuel Elkin that the idea of synthetic vaccines is very important, but the idea and the proof are two different things,” said Yunis, adding that the media are also responsible “for a great deal of fuss and very little cross-examination.”

Added to controversies about what does or does not constitute exaggeration of results at the experimental stage are longstanding accusations about animal trafficking and the treatment of the monkeys.

Ángela Maldonado, the head of the Colombia-Peru Aotus Project, which is based in Leticia and, as she pointed out, “is affiliated with the Asociación Primatológica Colombiana (Colombian Primatological Association),” is one of the people who has been concerned about the monkeys over the last five years.

Contacted by IPS in Leticia, Maldonado provided a wealth of material via e-mail, including documents submitted to local and national authorities and a journalist’s video, that she said were evidence of trafficking in owl monkeys.

Animals for research should be bred in captivity, in order to avoid the illegal traffic carried on by indigenous people who hunt the elusive monkeys for sale, said Maldonado, who has a master’s degree in primatology and a doctorate in conservation from Oxford Brookes University in the U.K.

Among other legal actions, she filed a suit in August 2010 at the Regional Prosecutor’s Office, to which FIDIC has not yet responded. A second summons will probably be issued for Apr. 13.

“In November I provided the Environment Ministry and the environmental division of the Ombudsman’s Office in Bogotá with sufficient evidence of illegal trafficking (of monkeys),” said Maldonado, who claims FIDIC is using monkeys imported without permits from Peru.

“After experimenting on them and removing their spleens, they release them in Colombian territory in groups of up to 253 monkeys, causing a severe environmental impact,” she said.

“I have proof,” she stated.

“In February I delivered a complete report on the monkey populations in Peru and Colombia to several institutions, including the Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute, a centre of scientific excellence,” she said. “And in March I made a formal request for information (to which public bodies are compelled to reply) to CORPOAMAZONIA.”

CORPOAMAZONIA, or the Corporation for Sustainable Development in the Southern Amazon, a state biodiversity research centre, is the immediate local regulatory authority. IPS requested information from the centre, but received no reply.

Asked about the accusations, Patarroyo told IPS they are made by “a small group of biologists who make a great deal of noise, and who are financed by the U.K. in the service of obscure interests that I know nothing about.”

“As for me, I only discuss science,” he said.

“Faced with criticism of this kind, I abide by the law. I have been acquitted in two out of five lawsuits so far, and the third is coming up soon,” said Patarroyo, who quoted Albert Camus: “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

Apr. 7 is World Health Day, whose theme this year is “antimicrobial resistance: no action today, no cure tomorrow.”

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTÁ, Mar 16 2011 (IPS)

“Wholesale land titling” Colombia’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Juan Camilo Restrepo announced Tuesday, adding that titles would no longer only be handed over to individuals who file land claims, but to entire groups of people in specific rural areas.

The awarding of formal title deeds to farmers whose property was seized from them over the last half century of armed conflict has been a central focus of the government of conservative President Juan Manuel Santos since he took office in August.

According to official figures, there is no proof of ownership or land titles to 40 percent – nearly 1.2 million – of Colombia’s farms.

The government’s goal is to formalise land tenure over half a million hectares, in a country where the recovery and distribution of land is crucial, according to local and international organisations, which point however to shortcomings in the government’s plans.

Some 5.2 million people were displaced from rural areas of this South American country of 46 million between 1985 and 2010, according to a February report by the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a leading human rights group.

Restrepo explained Tuesday that a special article would be included in the National Development Plan currently under debate, which will bolster the land tenure formalisation process by shifting away from a system under which farmers must file claims to their land.

The measure, which the minister said has the backing of Congress, will make it possible to establish blocs of land in which all farmers who had lost their property would receive titles to farms.

Under the new system, it will no longer be necessary for each individual or family to file a formal claim.

Between October and March, titles to “more than 290,000 hectares, including land in indigenous reserves and Afro-Colombian communities,” were awarded, Santos said Mar. 10, when he presented a comprehensive policy for rural, agricultural and technological development for Orinoquia, another initiative forming part of the land legalisation and recovery programme.

Described as Colombia’s “last agricultural frontier,” Orinoquia is a region covering 310,000 square kilometres to the north of the country’s Amazon jungle, stretching from the eastern range of the Andes mountains to the Venezuelan border.

It encompasses the departments (provinces) of Arauca, Meta, Casanare, Vichada, Guainía and Guaviare and has a population of 1.1 million people.

The regional plan for Orinoquia is to involve granting titles to 70,000 hectares of land.

Santos launched the plan at the Carimagua Hacienda, a vast rural property in the central department of Meta, in a ceremony in which he was accompanied by Restrepo and other officials.

Carimagua, which covers 22,700 hectares of land, was acquired by the Colombian Agricultural Institute in 1970, to serve as a research centre. Of that total, 2,000 hectares belong to the army and 3,000 are used for research by the government institute. Of the rest, 17,000 will be dedicated to farming and 500 to housing for farmers.

The new use of the land contrasts with the aim of the administration of Santos’s predecessor, rightwing President Álvaro Uribe. In 2008, then agriculture minister Andrés Arias attempted to turn over Carimagua to private investors – planters of African oil palm – on a 50-year lease.

Arias argued at the time that the dividends would be used to provide assistance to displaced persons.

But the plan was denounced in Congress and thwarted by the action of legislators.

Besides the land in Carimagua, 15,000 hectares amassed by Pedro Oliveiro, a drug lord killed by the army in December 2010, will be distributed to displaced farmers. Oliveiro was also a powerful leader of the far-right paramilitary groups, one of the parties to the conflict that also involves government forces and leftwing guerrillas, principally the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Another 38,000 hectares seized by the government from former senator Habib Merheg, to whom they had been illegally awarded, will be handed over to farmers.

But the government’s enthusiasm over the land distribution plan contrasts with doubts expressed by different organisations.

For instance, a report to be launched in May by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) – the 2011 Human Development Report on Rural Development and Land, whose technical director is Absalón Machado – points out to the government that land recovery and titling will not be effective until the problem of violence, the root cause of forced displacement of people from rural areas, is resolved.

The report’s conclusion is backed up by the number of people leading land-reclamation efforts who have been murdered: 46 in 2010 alone.

And eight have been killed so far this year, Santos acknowledged in Carimagua.

In the ceremony, the president announced the creation of an elite group of investigators who will work to curb such killings, which is to begin operating in the next few days.

The UNDP report calls for overcoming rural poverty and making basic infrastructure and services available to marginalised populations.

Meanwhile, Congressman Iván Cepeda of the leftwing Alternative Democratic Pole party told IPS: “The campaign that supposedly benefits farmers by returning their land to them is a front for an aggressive agrarian, agribusiness and mining policy that will end up favouring big business and transnational corporations.”

During a Mar. 11 march on behalf of the displaced, organised by the Movement of Victims of Crimes of the State (MOVICE), Cepeda – the movement’s spokesman – said “the policy is presented as progressive, but it actually only favours big capital.

“The Santos administration uses circuitous, diplomatic language, but it does things that hurt the country, more daring than the previous government,” he said.

Alexander Ariza, a peasant farmer who works as a street vendor due to a lack of opportunities in the countryside, told IPS in Carimagua shortly after Santos left that “you end up feeling kind of negative towards the government, when they promise so much and deliver so little.

“I hope to God this is real, and that they won’t forget about it all when they leave. That they will help people like me, who having absolutely nothing,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTÁ, Feb 17 2011 (IPS)

“We want to shout out to the world, and no one will be able to keep us silent: forced displacement is still happening in Colombia, which is why we are asking for solidarity. We aren’t terrorists, we aren’t criminals; we are farmers whose dignity and rights have been stolen from us.”

CODHES director Jorge Rojas. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

He spoke with IPS, with visible anger and sadness, outside of the Presidential Agency for Social Action and International Cooperation (Acción Social), where security forces broke up another protest last week by farmers displaced by the country’s nearly five-decade armed conflict.

Some 5.2 million people were displaced from rural areas of this South American country between 1985 and 2010, according to a report released Wednesday by the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES).

This figure confirms that Colombia still heads the list of countries with the greatest number of people forced to flee their homes by political violence, as indicated in 2009 by the UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency.

The study “Consolidation of What? Report on Displacement, Armed Conflict and Human Rights in Colombia in 2010” was completed in the final stretch of the government of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), the authors say.

“Unlike his predecessor, President (Juan Manuel) Santos is fomenting social and political dialogue, including the question of peace on his agenda, and vindicating the victims,” they stress.

“It is early to know whether the shift will be permanent,” but the hope is to achieve “a non-military solution to the conflict that has been bleeding this country dry” since the early 1960s, the report says.

In the last 25 years, the war has forced “11.4 percent of the population to change their residence, because their lives, physical integrity or freedom were threatened,” says the 140-page report, published in Spanish.

Half of the total population of internally displaced persons fled their homes during Uribe’s two four-year terms in office.

Acción Social reported that 86,312 people were displaced in 2010, but CODHES puts the figure at 280,000, based on its daily monitoring of the phenomenon, fact-checking and verification of the information.

Statistics on violence and displacement in regions where the National Plan for the Consolidation of Territory is being carried out indicate that “32.7 percent of the people uprooted from their homes come from municipalities included in this policy to fight the left-wing guerrillas.”

The counterinsurgency programme was launched by Uribe in 2007 with the pretext of “meeting the goals of the government’s Democratic Security policies, shoring up investor confidence and making progress towards effective social policies.”

It has been implemented in 86 of the country’s 1,141 municipalities. The mining industry is active in 21 of the 86 municipalities, and in 14 others, large-scale cultivation of oil palm and biofuel crops has displaced production of food crops.

These productive activities are associated with the violent eviction of rural families from their land, the CODHES report states.

The Commission to Monitor Public Policies on Forced Displacement, set up after the Constitutional Court handed down rulings in 2004 ordering the government to protect the rights of displaced persons, reports that between 1980 and July 2010, more than 6.6 million hectares of land were violently seized by illegal armed groups.

The departments where most of the land was seized coincide with the regions where the National Plan for the Consolidation of Territory is being carried out, especially the western departments of Antioquia and Chocó, where rural families have lost 1.9 million hectares of land.

CODHES reports that 44 of the 86 municipalities included in the National Plan are among the areas with the highest rates of forced displacement last year, with six different violent episodes that affected 2,684 people and included 19 massacres in which 92 people were killed.

In that area, 176 targeted killings were also committed, of indigenous people, public employees, community leaders, a human rights activist and a journalist.

Communities returning to their land as part of the process of the restoration of rural property to displaced farmers have also been caught up in the violence, which cost the lives of 44 leaders of displaced communities between March 2002 and January 2011.

After they are forced off their land, the farmers tend to fall into poverty, usually swelling the populations of the shantytowns surrounding the country’s large cities. Up to 70 percent of the displaced are living in poverty.

“My husband was a cattle farmer,” Miriam López told IPS in 2009 during a four-month protest camp by thousands of displaced people in the Tercer Milenio park in the centre of Bogotá. “We had plow mules, and planted mandioca, plantains and cacao, and we traded our crops in (the northeastern department of) Norte de Santander.

“They killed my husband, and I had to leave it all behind, in the hands of others,” she said. “It was really hard. I would pull out the deeds to my farms and just sit and cry.”

Like López, many displaced people had property and were relatively well-off.

CODHES director Jorge Rojas said the report questions Uribe’s Democratic Security policies and National Plan for the Consolidation of Territory, because “in the first three years of its implementation, there have been many doubts about its effectiveness.”

The 5.2 million victims of forced displacement make Colombia the country with the largest number of displaced persons or refugees in the world, followed by Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan, CODHES reported.

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTÁ, Feb 7 2011 (IPS)

Social mobilisation against gold-mining is growing in Colombia, which is now one of the world’s biggest per capita polluters of mercury, used in artisanal mining, according to the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO).

“Development, foreign investment, the generation of jobs or promises for improved living conditions for locals cannot be used as arguments to jeopardise the water wealth of our páramos (highland moors),” the national retailers association, FENALCO, said in a statement.

The association informed the government of Juan Manuel Santos of its staunch opposition to the Angostura mining project, an open pit mine that is to produce gold and silver over the next 15 years, run by the Canadian firm GreyStar on the páramo of Santurbán in the northern department (province) of Santander.

“We do not support this activity, which will cause irreparable and irreversible damages,” Erwing Rodríguez, director of FENALCO in Bucaramanga, the provincial capital, told IPS by phone.

The Sociedad Santandereana de Ingenieros (Santander association of engineers), the Sociedad de Mejoras Públicas (Public Improvement Society) and other organisations backed FENALCO’s protest. “We are all opposed to short-sighted approaches,” Rodríguez said.

GreyStar denies that the mine will hurt the environment.

The U.S. firm “Drummond told me the same thing 20 years ago,” former environment minister Manuel Rodríguez said in a public hearing held in Bucaramanga.

The former minister was referring to the proven environmental damages caused in the northern province of Cesar by Drummond’s coal mining — a disaster compounded by serious allegations of violations of the human rights of local residents and mineworkers.

The violations prompted legal action in Colombia and the United States, and formed part of the objections standing in the way of approval of the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement by the U.S. Congress.

Colombia is one of the world’s biggest per capita polluters with mercury, in the artisanal mining sector, with an average of between 50 and 100 tons a year lost during the gold extraction process, according to a report by UNIDO, which points out that artisanal mining has expanded fast as gold prices have risen.

“It’s exciting that for the first time, a conglomeration of groups and people, including the upper-middle class, social organisations, leftist political groups and environmentalists, have come together around one goal: protecting our water,” geologist Julio Fierro told IPS.

The broad social movement in Santander has added its voice to the long-time struggle by environmentalists in Cajamarca, in the central province of Tolima, against the South African company AngloGold Ashanti.

“The effort has been constant,” Evelio Campos, director of Ecostierra, a local environmental organisation, told IPS by telephone.

The strategy is to draw wide attention to the devastating effects of mining on water supplies in an area with 160 sources of water, and on the surrounding ecosystems, which include fragile páramos and cloud forests.

“We visit the villages to explain to people the ecological, social and economic damages that the mining would cause,” Campos said.

This grassroots awareness-raising is bolstered by a half-hour daily radio show, and a half-hour weekly TV show aired by the local station in Ibagué, the capital of Tolima.

And “this month we launched a degree in environmental management in the state University of Tolima,” Campos added.

In addition, protest demonstrations have been held in the páramos of Nuevo Colón and Vijagual, in the northeastern province of Boyacá.

Fierro said “Another encouraging example is the mobilisation of Embera Indians and people of African descent against gold mining on Careperro mountain by the U.S. company Muriel Mining.”

The Constitutional Court has already “ruled in favour of indigenous people, peasants, blacks and other people who are bravely opposing mining activity,” Fierro said.

Protests have also been held to the south of Bogotá against polluting activities in quarries run by the army on the grounds of the Artillery School, and by the Catholic diocese of Bogotá’s Fundación San Antonio, Mexico’s Cemex company and the Swiss firm Holcim.

Colombia, one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, was also one of the world’s top gold exporters until the mid-20th century. But after that gold-mining declined until the recent boom.

This civil war-torn South American country is now the second largest producer of gold in Latin America, the world’s top producer of emeralds, and has the largest coal reserves in Latin America. It also produces silver, platinum, nickel, copper, iron, manganese, lead, zinc, titanium, salt, limestone, gravel, sand, clay, sulphur, talcum, gypsum, phosphorus and ornamental stones.

Along with the country’s oil and natural gas, these natural resources have attracted a flood of international investors over the last decade, who have benefited by the mining code adopted by the government of Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002).

“Investment was encouraged by the successful promotion of the industry by the following government, of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), which sent sizable delegations to mining fairs around the world, where it gave assurances that the armed conflict was over, which would allow the mining industry to develop,” Fierro said.

Colombia has issued contracts to some 10,000 mines, 4,000 of which are already in operation, but without sufficient oversight by the government, environmentalists complain.

The government itself admits that “there are only 40 officials verifying compliance with mining industry regulations, which is insufficient” in this country of 45 million people, the geologist said.

The Ministry of Mines and Energy announced a reform early this month that would increase controls over the mining industry, especially in illegal informal mining that is carried out in different regions, driven by extreme poverty and a lack of incentives for farming like a lack of roads to bring goods to market.

Mining in Colombia is also dangerous. The Colombian Mining Chamber reported that 134 miners died in 2010, while 27 have already been killed so far this year in two explosions in coal mines.

“The best thing would be to push for a popular referendum calling for an overhaul of the mining code and the implementation of policies favourable to the country, to the conservation of its natural and human wealth,” Fierro said. “In-depth changes are needed, and they won’t come about at the initiative of the government or the legislature.”

The referendum proposal should be promoted by the Red Colombiana Frente a la Gran Minería Transnacional, a coalition of over 50 social organisations that emerged in February 2010, he said.

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Jan 26 2011 (IPS)

Food prices are set to rise in Colombia, due to the combined effects of soaring international prices and local crop losses after nine months of devastating rains. The government expects food prices to rise three percent in February, while independent analysts forecast an increase twice as high.

“The global crisis is affecting us much more than the crop flooding, because the country imports 100 percent of the barley, lentils, peas and chickpeas it consumes, 95 percent of its wheat, 90 percent of soybeans and sorghum, and 75 percent of its maize, as well as other foods,” economist Aurelio Suárez of the non-governmental organisations Unidad Cafetera and Salvación Agropecuaria told IPS.

Suárez said some 300,000 hectares out of Colombia’s five million hectares of cultivated land were flooded during the last rainy season, which lasted from April to December 2010. But the Agriculture Ministry reported that 800,000 hectares were flooded, and that soil recovery will be slow.

Food price “inflation is due to importing high-priced foods,” said Suárez, “but the government and agribusiness associations want to manipulate the facts and blame the lack of food security and sovereignty policies on the rains.”

He was referring to the policies associated with the so-called Green Revolution, which introduced methods and technologies favoured by transnational companies into agricultural production in the mid-20th century. Added to this, according to critics of the system, the free-market economics of the 1990s replaced much local food production with vast plantations producing ingredients for biofuels.

“In Colombia, production of basic foods is declining, while oil palm, sugarcane and forestry plantations are continuously expanding,” Suárez said.

Between 2002 and 2009, during the administration of rightwing former president Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s food imports increased from six million to 10 million tonnes a year.

During the same period there was a series of scandals involving the misuse of funds intended for helping small farmers. Instead, they went into grants and loans to large landowners, through the Agro Ingreso Seguro (stable farm income) programme managed by then Agriculture Minister Andrés Felipe Arias.

One of Arias’ loudest critics over the corruption scandal was Juan Camilo Restrepo, who became agriculture minister in August 2010.

Restrepo, who vowed to rescue the rural areas of Colombia from a decades-long crisis, was appointed minister during what experts say was the worst rainy season in 50 years.

According to official statistics, the heavy rains and subsequent flooding, particularly in the north of the country, left 310 people dead, 62 missing and 300 injured, 5,600 housing units destroyed and 1,300 hectares under water. The government expects to spend seven billion dollars on the recovery effort.

Against the backdrop of these disaster statistics, additional imports of 40,000 tonnes of rice were announced, to be purchased from February onwards. Minister Restrepo stressed that supplies have not run out for any food product, but he did not rule out the possibility of further rice imports.

However, rice-growers in the departments (provinces) of Tolima, Huila, Meta, Casanare and Guaviare in the centre and southeast of the country are protesting against the rice imports. “Before March, they will mobilise en masse to demand the suspension of these totally unnecessary rice imports,” Suárez said.

“Three out of four plates of rice eaten in Colombia are supplied by these provinces,” he said, adding that the situation of dairy and coffee producers is “very bad indeed.”

Based on the apparently politically-influenced food import policy, Suárez reckoned that 75 percent of the food price hike is due to the impact of the global economic crisis.

He attributes the remaining 25 percent to the floods and to transport difficulties because of damaged roads.

“The global food crisis is due, among other things, to the shortfall of Russia’s wheat harvest and difficulties in Australia and other countries, bringing about the highest food prices in the last 50 years, according to the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations),” said Suárez.

Middlemen also have a role to play.

“Agricultural supply varies and depends on harvest yield and location, whereas demand is constant and spread throughout the country. A third agent is needed to overcome these contradictions: intermediaries who will stockpile, accumulate, store and transform food and determine prices,” he said. They increase the supply at times of greatest consumption, he added.

Saulo Martínez, a trader in the central Paloquemao fresh food market in Bogotá, told IPS: “Prices rise when demand increases, for instance in December. In January they fell, but we expect them to increase in February.”

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Dec 15 2010 (IPS)

“It sounds nice, but it’ll be tough to implement”; “the most important thing is to translate into reality”: These statements by rural women leaders in Colombia sum up the reaction of activists to the government’s decision to revive and refinance a special fund for projects in the countryside led by women.

Ángela Orozco in her garden, in bad shape due to the unusually long, heavy rainy season. Credit: Helda Martínez/ IPS

In addition, government projects aimed at supporting farmers have typically ended up benefiting large landowners.

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Juan Camilo Restrepo announced that the government would allocate 850,000 dollars to rural women’s initiatives in 2011, to begin redressing the neglect they have faced from the state.

The funds will be channeled through the Rural Women’s Development Fund (FOMMUR), which has been left without financing over the last four years.

The funds aimed at bolstering women’s participation in agriculture form part of a number of government initiatives, including the creation or revival of programmes, aimed at developing the rural sector in Colombia.

“The more than eight-year-old Law on Rural Women has not even been codified yet,” Restrepo complained. “Public policies to benefit rural women lack institutional development and there is a lack of coordination among the different state agencies involved,” he added, in an assessment in line with the complaints of associations of small women farmers.

“To make this change a reality, it is important to take into account the fact that rural women face a number of disadvantages characteristic of patriarchal societies,” Yulieth Tamayo, a member of the Colectivo de Mujeres Pazíficas, a group of women activists in the western agricultural province of Valle del Cauca, told IPS.

One reflection of this “patriarchal society” is that land is registered in the names of women’s husbands, fathers or brothers.

Another hurdle that disproportionately affects women is the requirement that farmers wishing to obtain government funds or credit must present a number of documents, for which they must travel to the nearest large city, or “even to Bogota” – – which is especially difficult, if not impossible, for women with young children, Tamayo explained.

To make opportunities for farmers more equally available to women, “projects for cultural and educational changes, as well as mechanisms for oversight of how funds are handled,” are needed, she argued.

“The announcement is fabulous, but they also have to offer support and advice on how to best use the funds,” said Ángela Orozco, a farmer in Usme, a rural area at the southern edge of greater Bogota.

Orozco, who comes from a peasant family displaced from the northwestern province of Antioquia by the armed conflict, puts great stock in preserving the customs and traditional farming methods of her forebears, and combines her work in the countryside with her profession as a schoolteacher.

In the gardens surrounding her house, she grows uchuva fruit (Cape gooseberry), onions, fennel, marigolds, beets, lettuce, cilantro and camomile, for her family’s consumption and for sale in nearby farmers markets.

And in Ciudad Bolívar, a poor neighbourhood strung along the hills on the south side of the Colombian capital that is mainly home to people displaced from rural areas by the civil war, she promotes the cultivation of fresh produce in child care centres and preschools, where children not only learn farming skills but grow food for their own meals.

Orozco believes that peasant farmers, especially women, must be empowered to take on leadership roles, as the only way for them to leave behind their longstanding neglect by the authorities and victimisation by different armed groups.

Over the last half century, the rural population in this South American nation has been largely abandoned by the state and has suffered the effects of an armed conflict that has basically been waged in rural areas, where the state security forces fight left-wing guerrillas.

But even before the emergence of the main insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in 1964, the countryside was caught up in the violence between the conservative and liberal parties, and later in the crossfire between not only the insurgents and the army, but also far- right paramilitaries, drug cartels and traffickers of emeralds.

And one of the main objectives of the conflict has been possession of land.

The result: one of the largest and most silent rural exoduses in the recent history of the world. Since 1985, some 3.3 million people in this country of 44 million have been forced off their land and deprived of at least two million hectares.

In 1950, 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas, compared to 26 percent — 11.7 million people — today, according to projections based on the 2005 census.

But although women and girls represent over half of the rural population (51 percent), “their significant contribution to the national economy, and to the country’s food sovereignty in particular,” is ignored, says Infogénero, a local NGO that mobilises women peasant farmers in defence of their rights and against machista and other kinds of violence.

Restrepo, who was named agriculture minister by President Juan Manuel Santos, in office since August, said women must be taken into account because of “their business sense, their sense of austerity, their ability and inclination to save, and the priority they put on the needs of their families.”

He also underlined that women in general are better at paying off loans, and “have a greater sense of community,” which means that protecting their economic and social rights has a valuable multiplier effect.

But on her farm, Orozco, like other farmers, remains sceptical. “Governments don’t care about peasants, which was proven by what happened with the AIS: they left the peasant farmers without funds,” she said.

She was referring to the scandal over the government’s Agro Ingreso Seguro (AIS –”stable farm income”) programme, in which farm subsidies and soft loans for farmers ended up in the hands of wealthy landowners, under right-wing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

The ongoing investigation of the corruption scandal has found that from 2007 to 2009, government funds allocated to large landowners were 27 times greater than what went to peasant farmers, 70 percent of whom live in poverty.

The beneficiaries of the AIS programme included agribusiness producers of cut flowers, palm oil, bananas and sugar cane, and transnational corporations like Coltabaco, Philip Morris’s affiliate in Colombia, which received 16.5 billion dollars in credit.

“The AIS programme will now be at the service of small and medium-size farmers,” Minister Restrepo promised. “And we are working hard to make micro-credit a tangible reality for the rural sector.”

He also predicted that “the big beneficiaries of this refocusing (of government farm policies) will be young rural entrepreneurs, and women who live and work in the country’s rural areas.” (IPS/LA DV IP AG BO HU WO/TRASP-SW/HM/EG/10)

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTÁ, Oct 20 2010 (IPS)

“When we women speak out, without showing fear, we pay a high price: living with that fear,” says one peace activist in Colombia. “The threats will not stop us from working for peace and social justice,” says another.

March towards Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá Credit: Courtesy of Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres

The best-known among them is Senator Piedad Córdoba of the Liberal Party, an Afro-Colombian feminist who was a mediator in the talks that led to the release of 14 captives held by the leftwing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

In her push for a negotiated solution to end the civil war, Córdoba works in association with non-governmental organisations like the Casa de la Mujer women’s centre and the Colombian Men and Women for Peace collective, which she founded. The collective maintains an ongoing dialogue by means of public letters with the FARC and with the second largest guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN).

“There’s no turning back from peace” and “our mission is to defeat the war” are Córdoba’s mantras. But she has paid a high price for her involvement in the peace effort: she was banned from serving in public posts for 18 years by a Sept. 27 ruling by inspector general Alejandro Ordóñez, based on charges that she collaborated with the guerrillas. However, the ruling can be appealed.

The Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres (Women’s Peace Route) was created in 1996, describing itself as “anti-militarist and a builder of an ethic of non-violence.” Its members, who range from feminist thinkers to rural workers in some 300 groups from nine regions, take part in convoys that travel through conflict zones with their message to those involved in the armed conflict.

“It is up to us to build peace,” Olga Amparo Sánchez, director of Casa de la Mujer, told TerraViva. In the second half of 2009, at least 11 of the organisation’s leaders were victims of threats, harassment and physical mistreatment. Another organisation in May reported threats against 90 more women activists.

“I often receive aggressive phone calls in my position as an activist,” María Arizabaleta, a member of the Ruta in the southwestern province of Valle del Cauca, told TerraViva. “In Valle we are 300,000 women strong,” added Arizabaleta, who has been an activist for 60 of her 76 years.

“When we women speak out, without showing fear, we pay a high price: living with that fear,” stated Pilar Tobón, a community negotiator with the Peace and Coexistence Programme of the Medellín city government, capital of the northwestern province of Antioquia.

Women activists fall victim to the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, and the armed forces.

Women and children “account for the vast majority of those adversely affected by armed conflict,” states Resolution 1325 of the United Nations Security Council. The tenth anniversary of the resolution is Oct. 31.

In this South American country of 45 million people, 75 percent of those internally displaced by the civil war are women and children, according to the National Assembly for Peace. Colombia is second in the world for its proportion of internally displaced persons, who number more than four million.

From July 2002 to December 2007, the conflict claimed the lives of 1,314 women, and another 179 were forcibly disappeared. Of every 103 victims of sexual abuse in the context of the conflict, 100 are women and girls, the report states.

The U.N. Security Council “resolution is important in formal terms, because it underscores the role of women in working for peace and calls upon the armed groups to respect the rights of women,” said María Eugenia Ramírez, of Mesa Mujer y Conflicto Armado (Women and Armed Conflict in Colombia).

What is missing, she told TerraViva, “is a commitment by the Colombian government to implement concrete measures, because it seems to have forgotten that it also forms part of the conflict, with its military forces.”

In terms of “humanitarian law, the insurgent groups are just as responsible as the government,” Ramírez added.

Esmeralda Ruiz, gender and human rights adviser at the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), said “what is urgently needed is a political commitment by the government to women’s organisations, as well as mechanisms and strategies that make their contributions to peace processes more visible. That is what the (U.N. Security Council) resolution is all about.”

Excerpt:

By Constanza Vieira and Helda Martínez
BOGOTÁ, Aug 9 2010 (IPS)

During the eight years that Álvaro Uribe governed Colombia, annual economic growth averaged 4.3 percent. Nevertheless, President Juan Manuel Santos, who was sworn in on Saturday, has taken over a country with the highest unemployment rate in Latin America.

Street hawkers in Bolívar plaza in Bogotá. In the background, the capitol, where President Santos was sworn in Saturday. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

“Economic growth in the Uribe era was far higher than the 1994-2001 average of 2.1 percent” and was quite stable compared to the rest of the countries of Latin America, said outgoing finance minister Oscar Zuluaga.

But that did not prevent this country from holding the region’s record in unemployment: 12 percent in July (after hitting 14 percent in January 2009, the highest level during the Uribe administration), according to official figures.

Unemployment soared despite the fact that “the minimum salary set for workers was increased just 16 percent during the two four-year terms,” economist Juan Pablo Fernández, a congressional adviser for the leftwing Alternative Democratic Pole, told IPS.

“It was employers, who gained an additional eight percent in profits per worker, that benefited from the tiny increase in the minimum wage,” he said.

And the rates for poverty and extreme poverty remain high, at 46 and 17 percent respectively — a far cry from Uribe’s pledge to bring poverty down to 35 percent this year, as part of Colombia’s efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals (a set of anti-poverty and development targets adopted by the international community in 2000).

The contrast was especially marked between 2005 and 2007, when the extreme poverty rate expanded 2.1 percent, despite 5.6 percent economic growth.

According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Colombia is now the most unequal country in Latin America, based on the Gini inequality index, which measures the degree of income disparity.

The Gini coefficient — where 0 represents perfect equality and 1 perfect inequality — is now 0.85 in Colombia, compared to 0.55 in 2002, indicating a growing concentration of wealth, ECLAC reported.

“The economic policies of the outgoing government basically favoured foreign capital, turning Colombia into a tax haven,” Fernández said.

The Finance Ministry reported that gross foreign investment represented 3.1 percent of GDP in 2009, up from two percent in 2002. “In monetary terms, that means it climbed from 2.1 billion dollars to 7.2 billion dollars in eight years,” Zuluaga said.

But Colombia has the most volatile exchange rate in the region, “which benefits the foreign market and keeps the country’s exporters of cut flowers, coffee, bananas, textiles and garments in a state of complete uncertainty,” Fernández said.

The Uribe administration’s policies favoured foreign capital to the detriment of national production, and as a result, “10 million tons of food are imported annually, in sharp contrast with the country’s identity as a major agricultural producer,” he said.

The economic model followed by Uribe led to a boom in maquilas — export assembly factories in tax-free zones — that use “very cheap labour,” the economist said.

Excerpt:

By Constanza Vieira and Helda Martínez
BOGOTA, Aug 6 2010 (IPS)

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe ends his second consecutive term Saturday with 75 percent approval ratings and strong international support reflected by his designation this week as vice chair of a United Nations-appointed international panel to investigate Israel’s attack on a flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza in May.

“Firm hand, big heart” was his campaign slogan when he was first swept to power in 2002 on a pledge to step up the war against the FARC guerrillas.

The motto that he has followed daily over the past eight years has been “work, work and more work.”

For the first time, Colombians saw a president travel the width and breadth of the country. His cultivated image as a “sincere” and “frank” man convinced many that he was the best leader the country had ever had.

He won reelection using methods considered illegal, carried out by third parties — a route that he attempted to follow again in his push for a constitutional amendment that would have allowed him to run for a third term. But the Constitutional Court cut that attempt short.

With the end of his term just hours away, he lashed out for the umpteenth time at the justice system, which has taken legal action against his close political allies and even relatives.

His government dipped into public security funds to spy on Supreme Court magistrates, human rights defenders, opposition lawmakers, and journalists, as a former senior official in the DAS, Colombia’s domestic intelligence agency, confessed.

The pressure he exerted for “results” in the counterinsurgency war and the system of military promotions and incentives put in place to encourage high “body counts” eventually led to the scandal over “false positives” — the term used to describe young civilians killed by the army and passed off as guerrilla casualties.

These cases were the most notorious expression of the biggest stain on his legacy: the dismal human rights situation in Colombia.

Another scandal was over the government’s Agro Ingreso Seguro (stable farm income) programme, under which some of the country’s wealthiest landowning families received millions of dollars in subsidies. The programme was designed to provide support to sectors of the economy affected by the free trade agreement with the United States, which never came through.

On the international front, Uribe leaves behind broken diplomatic ties with neighbours Ecuador and Venezuela.

Ecuador broke off relations in early 2008 following a Colombian cross-border raid that bombed a temporary FARC camp in Ecuador. The bombing cut short international negotiations with a rebel chief on the release of hostages held by the insurgent group.

Venezuela severed ties in late July after Uribe once again accused the government of Hugo Chávez of harbouring guerrillas in Venezuelan territory.

A hallmark of the Uribe administration has been an expanded military presence — financed in large part by U.S. military assistance — which has led to a perception of improved security.

According to the Armed Conflict Observatory of the Bogotá think tank Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris (CNAI), the military’s counterinsurgency efforts reduced the size of the FARC forces by 40 percent under Uribe, although the state has yet to recover control over half of the country’s territory of 1.1 million square kilometres.

The fighting, which has been pushed into areas that were not previously major combat zones, now affects 40 percent of the population, mainly in sparsely populated rural areas.

“In general terms, the FARC have maintained their military capacity and the security forces have consolidated their control over the central portion of the country,” the CNAI reported.

The Uribe administration nearly doubled the size of the armed forces, to over 445,000 troops. Defence spending amounts to 3.2 percent of GDP, according to the National Planning Department, or six percent, according to independent analysts.

In late 2009, the CNAI warned that the nearly five-decade long counterinsurgency campaign was once again bogged down. An agreement signed by Uribe to give U.S. forces access to seven military bases signals a clear aim to reach a military breakthrough in the war.

“The local economic and political elites continue to use illegal groups to maintain or expand their capital,” writes CNAI analyst Ariel Ávila, referring to the far-right paramilitary groups that were partially demobilised as a result of talks with Uribe.

In the meantime, the pressing public concern is urban insecurity, apparently related to the demobilisation of thousands of paramilitary fighters. (See sidebar.)

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTÁ, Jul 30 2010 (IPS)

“There are alarming links between increased reports of extrajudicial executions of civilians by the Colombian army and units that receive U.S. military financing,” John Lindsay-Poland, lead author of a two-year study on the question, told IPS.

John Lindsay-Poland and Alberto Yepes. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

The report, produced in conjunction with the U.S. Office on Colombia (USOC), studies the application in Colombia of the so-called Leahy Law, passed in 1996, which bans military assistance to a foreign security force unit if the U.S. State Department has credible evidence that the unit has committed gross human rights violations.

The Leahy Law is one of the main U.S. laws designed to protect against the use of U.S. foreign aid to commit human rights abuses.

“If the Leahy Law was fully implemented, assistance would have to be suspended to nearly all fixed army brigades and many mobile brigades in Colombia,” Lindsay-Poland said.

The report points out that most military training in Colombia is funded by the U.S. Defence Department.

Colombia, caught up in an armed conflict for nearly five decades, is one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in the world, along with Israel, Egypt and Pakistan.

The study reviewed data on more than 3,000 extrajudicial executions reportedly committed by the armed forces in Colombia since 2002 and lists of more than 500 military units assisted by the United States since 2000.

“We found that for many military units, reports of extrajudicial executions increased during and after the highest levels of U.S. assistance,” Lindsay-Poland said.

The results were obtained by comparing the number of reports of such killings in the two years prior to the start of Plan Colombia — the multibillion-dollar U.S. military aid package — in 2000 with the number of killings after the launch of that counterinsurgency and anti-drug strategy.

It also found that reports of alleged killings of civilians by the army dropped when assistance was cut.

“Whatever correlation may exist between assistance and reported killings, there are clearly other factors contributing to high levels of killings. Yet, while we could not fix the causes of increased reports of killings after increases in U.S. assistance, our findings highlight the need for a thorough investigation into the reasons for this apparent correlation,” the authors say.

“The U.S. government should respond to the questions raised by the report,” Lindsay-Poland said.

For example, “why U.S. officials neglect their duties under the Leahy Law, not only in Colombia but in countries like Pakistan, where the situation is very complex.”

The U.S. military presence in Colombia dates back to the 1940s, when leftwing guerrillas became active in the country. But it escalated to a new level in 1999 when Plan Colombia was agreed by the governments of then presidents Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002) and Bill Clinton (1993–2001).

Plan Colombia was complemented and extended in 2004 by Plan Patriot, signed by President Álvaro Uribe, whose term ends Aug. 7, and former president George W. Bush (2001–2009).

The two plans have undergone radical changes since 2009, according to Lindsay-Poland, when they reached beyond the initial aims of counterinsurgency and counternarcotics, with a view towards strengthening U.S. control in the region.

U.S. army Southern Command documents state the importance of establishing a base “with air mobility reach on the South American continent and a capacity for counter-narcotics operations until the year 2025,” he said.

Uribe offered the U.S. military the use of seven bases at strategic points in Colombia, including both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the province of Caquetá in the Amazon jungle, and the provinces of Meta, Tolima and Cundinamarca in the centre of the country.

Lindsay-Poland and other members of FOR tried to visit the Palanquero base in Cundinamarca, one of the seven, on Wednesday. But “they did not let us in,” he said. “They demanded authorisation from the U.S. Embassy. So what kind of autonomy are we talking about here?”

Furthermore, the agreement for U.S. military access to the bases has not been approved by the Colombian Congress, as required by law.

As a result, the Constitutional Court ruled the agreement unconstitutional on Jul. 22 and gave Congress one year to approve or reject it.

If the legislature ratifies the deal, the Constitutional Court will once again study it, to determine whether or not it is in line with the constitution.

The report presented by FOR and USOC coincided with the start of an investigation of reports of unmarked graves in the La Macarena cemetery, which is next to an army base, according to a Jul. 22 public hearing in that town in the central province of Meta, which was attended by opposition lawmakers and international observers, including European legislators.

At the hearing, witnesses said military helicopters flew in the remains of bodies to La Macarena, 340 km south of Bogotá. Human rights groups say the bodies were those of civilians killed by the army.

“This is happening at the end of a government marked by grave human rights violations, which have largely affected the most vulnerable groups in society, and which are reflected in the thousands of ‘false positives’, as the extrajudicial executions have been popularly known,” Alberto Yepes, director of the Observatorio de Derechos Humanos (DIH – Human Rights Observatory), told IPS.

The scandal over the so-called “false positives” — young civilians killed by the army and passed off as guerrilla casualties in the military’s counterinsurgency campaign –broke in the press in September 2008.

Although there are no hard statistics on the number of people killed, the report by FOR and USOC puts the number at over 3,000 in the last decade.

A group that calls itself the Madres (mothers) of Soacha, a vast working-class suburb stretching south of Bogotá, has filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights over the loss of their 16 sons in 2007 and 2008. The young men were recruited with the promise of jobs, but their bodies were found in morgues or mass graves hundreds of kilometres away.

Yepes said the complaint filed by the Madres de Soacha “is a way to pressure the state to modify this kind of behaviour.”

While activists and groups mobilise to pressure the armed forces to live up to the constitution, “the United States should assume its responsibility through better oversight, holding (authorities in Colombia) accountable and adopting corrective measures, so the money of U.S. taxpayers does not end up financing killings in Colombia,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTÁ, Jul 13 2010 (IPS)

In Colombia, western medicine has nearly succeeded in pushing midwives — “parteras” or “comadronas,” as they are known in Spanish — out of existence. But some tenacious practitioners are pushing for a law to formalise the role of midwife as a health worker.

Rosmilda and Liceth Quiñones on a visit to Bogotá. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

Daughter of 60-year-old midwife Rosmilda Quiñones, Liceth was three in 1991 when her mother founded the association, which she still heads. With the acronym ASOPARUPA, it has 250 members in the western departments (provinces) of Chocó, Valle, Cauca and Nariño.

At six, Liceth was already assisting her mother. “Midwifery is learned through the oral tradition and through practice,” she explained to IPS. When she was 13 she recognised when a placenta did not come out completely and knew it was urgent to get the mother and newborn to the hospital.

“Today we don’t work with anyone who hasn’t had previous medical check- ups. And we are clear that any complication must be dealt with by a specialist,” she said.

The 1,500 midwives in Colombia, according to a 2008 census conducted by the Valle Health Superintendent, are not certified or authorised to assist in hospital births.

Formal training is limited to first-aid workshops or other similar courses offered by the Red Cross and a national apprenticeship service.

They have learned to overcome the jungle distances of Valle and Chocó, where transportation is nearly all by river, which means dangers of floods and snakes. “We travel at any hour, with total commitment and the certainty that nobody survives economically from this job,” said Quiñones.

She makes her living with a centre for alternative medicine that provides services in bio-energetics and other techniques, and where she practices what she learned in professional nursing — a course of studies she did not finish due to lack of resources, later downgrading to nursing assistant.

Quiñones also brings in knowledge acquired in Mexico, and from midwives from Brazil, as well as from contacts and apprenticeships with midwives from the other corners of the world.

These women are convinced that natural birth is the most effective, but they do not reject modern western medicine. The doctors “don’t accept us in their hospitals, but we accept them,” she said.

The path to formalising midwifery in obstetric services is a midwifery law that would regulate it as a professional practice. The Senate approved the bill in 2009, and should be part of the agenda of the new legislature, to be sworn in Jul. 20.

Dilian Francisca Toro, a physician from Valle, now a senator for the conservative governing Social National Unity Party, presented the proposed law.

“The real work, the basis of this law, was done by Doña Rosmilda (Quiñones), Liceth and many women,” said Bogotá midwife Alejandra Montes, who holds degrees in law, political science and philosophy, and is now studying to be a nurse’s assistant.

In 2008, Montes founded the non-governmental Association of Urban Midwives (ARTEMISA), after spending seven years in different regions of Colombia with indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples.

Midwives exist in various forms across Latin American indigenous cultures, as well as in the African and European cultures represented in the region.

According to the Ministry of Social Protection, the maternal mortality rate in Colombia is 75 deaths per 100,000 live births. In the United States, the rate is 13.3, according to figures from 2006, worse than the 1987 rate of 6.6 per 100,000. The increased maternal mortality can be linked to the crisis of the U.S. health system. Midwives in that country are largely marginalised from institutional obstetric services.

“In France, England, Germany, Canada… midwives are permitted and needed in the births under optimal conditions,” said Montes.

In Argentina and Uruguay, the midwife is a university-trained professional who is integrated into the obstetric team of any hospital.

Seeking a deeper understanding of midwifery, Montes lived several months in Buenaventura “to observe them and to learn,” for her role as a university professor and researcher.

She noted that “70 percent of births with midwives are completely healthy, and the remaining 30 percent present difficulties that are inherent to the birth itself.” Most are detected in time for the necessary medical specialist to be involved.

“With each birth we have greater control” over the situation, said Quiñones.

Working with a midwife is an integral process that should begin during the first month of pregnancy and continue after the birth.

But in the cities, midwifery is seen as something “dangerous, dirty,” and prejudice is fed by ideas that it is “witchcraft, or is only needed in the absence of doctors,” Quiñones said.

However, if the law is passed, the companies that manage the medical services provided by the government will begin to utilise midwives because “they have the infrastructure established, and it will mean more revenues,” she surmised.

An option half-way between traditional midwifery and hospitalisation for birth is being explored in Bogotá by the private Procrear Foundation, led by physician Mauricio Espinosa.

The Foundation offers underwater birth services, with the support of a midwife and the supervision of Espinosa.

“It’s comfortable, warm, and gives you an immense sensation of freedom,” said Carolina Zuluaga, remembering the birth of her son Federico two and a half years ago.

“Juan, my husband, helped me to push, cut the umbilical cord, and we saved the placenta for eight months before returning it to the universe in thanks for our son,” she said.

Excerpt:

By Helda Martínez
BOGOTÁ, Jun 22 2010 (IPS)

Football, the most popular sport in Colombia, has been subject to heavy pressures from drug trafficking since the mid-1970s. A new study shows that the illicit trade continues to tarnish the upper echelons of this sport.

A big screen in a Bogotá plaza shows the 2010 football World Cup. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

Investigations in recent months led to the arrests of five people, in Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Miami and in the central Colombian town of Puerto Gaitán.

Notable among them are two former officials of the government’s Technical Investigation Corp (CTI), the entity that supports the national Attorney General’s Office.

Luis Caicedo and Claudio Silva were detained in April as part of “Operation Pacific Basin.” Caicedo lived in relatively humble circumstances in Buenos Aires, marking a sharp difference with the top Colombian drug cartel bosses.

From Argentina, he allegedly coordinated a network of illicit activities throughout the Americas, linked to the brothers Javier and Luis Calle, successors to drug boss Wilber Varela, who was killed in Venezuela and 2008.

Silva is believed to have served as a figurehead. The authorities have seized 118 properties whose titles were under his name.

Arrested in the United States for alleged obstruction of justice is Ricardo Villarraga, former official with the Colombian Administrative Department of Security (DAS), charged in 1994 for abetting the escape of Puerto Rican Fernando Montañez, arrested for drug trafficking.

The Attorney General’s Office links Villarraga, who has a son playing for Independiente Santa Fe, to the money laundering case, though his defence attorney denied that his arrest in the U.S. is related to drug trafficking.

Another arrestee also belonged to the DAS: Franklin Gaitán, who was in charge of the organisation’s security. The fifth to be arrested is Carlos Flórez, police captain, who is thought to have leaked information to the drug cartel.

The next target of justice authorities is Julio Alberto Lozano Piraquive, who is thought to be living in Mexico and was already sentenced in the United States to 20 years for “drug trafficking and money laundering,” which won him inclusion in the Red Notice of Interpol (International Criminal Police Organisation).

Lozano allegedly provided money to Independiente Santa Fe under the guise of investments. The investigation cites figures that surpass 25 million dollars between 2006 and 2008.

Involved in the plot are also former club presidents dating back to 1985, such as the assassinated César Villegas, sentenced for drug-related money laundering in the “Proceso 8,000”, which investigated the ties between the Cali drug cartel and the electoral campaign of former Colombian president Ernesto Samper (1994-1998).

Luis Eduardo Méndez, who headed the club from 2003 to 2007, was sentenced to 70 months in prison for helping Montañez escape. When Montañez was recaptured, he confirmed that Méndez had received money from drug traffickers.

In the middle of the scandal, the football club’s current president, César Pastrana, issued a statement assuring that none of the people mentioned has ties to Independiente Santa Fe, and reiterated willingness to provide all information necessary.

“The relationship between the ‘narcos’ and football has left innumerable inconclusive legal investigations” in Colombia, designer and football fan Camilo Alejandro González, told IPS.

Investigative journalist Fabio Castillo published a report in 1987 entitled “The Horsemen of Cocaine,” which laid out the ties that existed at the time.

“Atlético Nacional (football club) had as its principal shareholder Hernán Botero, seen in a large photo in which he held up a fistful of dollars during a football match that his team lost,” wrote Castillo.

“Remember that in the 1980s and 90s, most people wavered between desire and ethics. They wanted the team managers to create winning teams by hiring famous footballers, at the same time they ignored or hid the disappointment they may have felt about the participation of narco- trafficking money,” sociologist Fernando Morales told IPS.

“It was an era when many idolised Pablo Escobar (notorious Colombian drug lord, killed by police in 1993) because he built houses for the poor and supported neighbourhood football teams,” Morales said.

The 1980s and 90s were also an era of great football triumphs. In 1989, the Atlético Nacional club won the Liberators Cup (the prestigious South American club tournament) and in 1993 the Colombian national team beat powerhouse Argentina 5-0 in qualifying for the 1994 FIFA World Cup — a victory that fans continue to boast about.

The Colombian squad played in the FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) World Cups of 1990, 1994 and 1998.

In 1991, while serving time in La Catedral prison in Medellín, Pablo Escobar received a visit from the national team’s goalie at the time, René Higuita, famous for ability and his agility in the goal.

In 1994, footballer Andrés Escobar (no relation to Pablo) was assassinated in his home city of Medellín after scoring a goal against his own team, which meant Colombia’s elimination from the World Cup in the United States. “That loss sparked fury among those betting on the match, and surely some were linked to narco-trafficking,” said football fan González.

Other teams have experienced similar situations. Los Millionarios club belonged to drug trafficker Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, who was killed in a military operation in 1989. The clan of the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, extradited to the U.S. in 2004, owned shares in the América de Cali football club.

González, who supports Los Millionarios, is confident that the club’s new president, José Roberto Arango “will renovate it, selling some shares and the trademark, as well as bringing in new investors — this time legal ones.”

“A similar process can be seen at the América de Cali club,” he said.

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