stampa

invia

 

"Everything began on April 24, 1997.” Tall and thin with deep eyes, Marco Fidel Velasquez tells the story of the people of Parenchito, a town in Colombia’s Cacarica valley, Riosucio district, Chocò state. The Parenchito leader, a young man of African descent, comes to our editorial offices and sits down at a table with us. With measured tone and careful gestures, he repeats the painful sequence of events borne by his people. Events still underway, but stamped on them forever.

 

The story. I’m a member of a village formed after a brutal evacuation (“desplazamiento”) carried out by Brigade 17, assisted by paramilitary troops. There were eight thousand of us there that day. We had to leave our land, our houses, our lives, they told us, because they had to fight the guerillas and drug traffickers. But there is not a single coca plantation there. No one had ever cultivated it. We were not coca  farmers. But that’s the excuse they used to drive us away. Ours is a very strategic area, with access both to the Atlantic and the Pacific, so lots of guerillas pass through there. But none ever established any base at all. Nothing justifies what the soldiers did. They forced us to leave and scattered us among three towns: Turbo, Boca de la Traca, and Yacupica.  We were refugees for three years. Those of us who ended up in Yacupica were sent to Panama at first. Then there was an agreement between Panama and former President Samper, and after six months we were moved back into Colombia. Absurd, tragic abuses followed one after another.  The paramilitaries beat a farmer to death. I was one of the ones deported to Turbo. We were there for three years, during which  93 members  of our community were assassinated by the paramilitaries. Our resistance began in response to these killings, and from these and other irreparable injustices, our community gets the strength never to surrender.”

 

What are you resisting against?

Against military or paramilitary aggression, however you want to call it. Thousands of us farmers are forced to live in constant  anguish about how to get back to our land. We have finally succeeded, but many others are still far from achieving their dream.  So we formed our organization for indigenous self-determination, to help those who are still kept away from  their homes, to make up for what the State did to us  without pity, without considering the consequences.  It is total abandonment. The Colombian government has left us totally alone.

Now we have formed into a community of 1500 people, divided between two small farms. We are slowly getting organized. We have already survived so much abuse and injustice, we have no intention of giving up. We try to provide for ourselves. In our country, there is no guaranteed right to education or health care. There are no social services. They always answer our requests by telling us it’s our own problem, So we’ve helped ourselves on our own and thanks to a few foreign charitable agencies. We have high school graduates for teachers instead of professors. We are working on ways to provide health care. Anyone who knows something about medicine runs our prevention efforts. But you have to realize that children make up 45% of our population, so it’s very hard on our own.

The most important part of our experience is to demonstrate that despite being evacuated from our homes, we still treat each other with civility and we have organized ourselves to make up for our abandonment by the government.

 

Why does the state carry out these evacuations?

“Desplazamiento” is a strategy they came up with to get rid of the farmers who live on the lands they’re interested in. They use national security as camouflage, against the guerillas, against drugs, but that’s not the truth. The real reason is economics. Our land is in the perfect place to build a canal to unite the two oceans. There is a seaport connected to the Panamerican Highway. An extremely important strategic location. Naturally, it’s a very rich region, second in the world in terms of biodiversity, and we have gold, platinum, carbon, petroleum, and another resource that everyone wants and that makes us a potential world power: uranium. That’s why they drove us away.

 

Who are the paramilitaries?

The paramilitaries, called paras, are actually part  of the army. It’s extremely normal to see regular soldiers exchange uniforms with the paramilitaries, and vice versa. They’re all the same. In Turbo, there were police, soldiers, civil authorities.  So I wonder: how come they have never been able to catch a single killer? 93 people were killed.  How else can you explain this total impunity?

 

What about the formal demobilization of the paramilitaries?

It’s a very complicated problem. We don’t say the paras demobilized; we say they were legalized. It is not a step toward a peace process, it’s a sneaky way to legalize and give official uniforms to ruthless assassins.

When President Uribe came out with this proposal, he said he was looking for funds to help paramilitaries who repented and therefore deserved a chance. And I wonder: how can Uribe promise food to people who kill people? He said they would be handed over. But to whom, if they are all directly or indirectly state dependents? I saw a soldier, or rather, many soldiers in regular Brigade 17 uniforms, and after twenty minutes they change uniforms and become paras. Now they tell us they want to set up demobilization camps to send guerillas informers and farmer-soldiers who colluded with FARC  and ELN. They pass them off as re-education centers, but they are actually places to legalize the pasts of men who are maybe twenty-seven years old and have already been killing for twenty. They already have these camps, like in the Rifugio district.

 

So what is Uribe really doing to stop the civil war?

The answer is  all  in the phrase “Community State.” Uribe has come  up with a new political program for social development to mask his true intentions, which is to shut down the country with the excuse of the civil war  so he can follow his own interests. The 2002-2006 National Development Plan, called, “Toward a Community State,” is nothing but a screen to recruit young farmers as informers or soldiers in the civil war. And children are often directly involved in the conflict. Appealing to the Development Plan, which in theory should lead to better lives at every level of society, there are soldiers everywhere armed with chain saws and bags stuffed with money. They bribe the youngest members of our communities to cut down the border poles that divide up our land, promising that they’ll come back to mark  them out with barbed wire. They always say, “We’ll look after your community.” But it’s actually a way to weaken the farming community and slowly corrupt the young. That’s what this National Development Plan really is:  a wad of bills in the hands of bad, corrupt people trying to corrupt the most ingenuous farmers, undermining our foundations and increasing the war against the guerillas. Lots of young people are dragged into confessing to things that never happened, into accusing innocent people of helping the guerillas. They use money when things go well, and beatings when they don’t. They were even paying people to bring them little girls to rape.

 

Stella Spinelli

 

part two will be published tomorrow

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