The battle for Colombia

At a training session of the paramilitary group United Self-Defence Forces of Columbia in a jungle. - JOSE MIGUEL GOMEZ/REUTERS

The Colombian government is trying to compensate for its political weakness with violence and repression, while social movements in the country are building on past struggles, consolidating and attempting to outflank it politically.

THE President of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe Velez, was elected in 2002 because a hard core of 5.8 million voters in a population of about 44 million believed his promise that he would eradicate the guerillas by escalating the civil war in the country. The presidential election that brought him to power was preceded by parliamentary elections. After those elections, Salvatore Mancuso, one of the leaders of the Colombian paramilitary groups which, human rights groups estimate, are responsible for some 80 per cent of the hundreds of massacres and assassinations that happen every year in that country, boasted that his organisation controlled 30 per cent of the legislature.

Uribe was sworn in on August 7, 2002, when guerillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) shelled the presidential palace. In a horrific twist, the guerillas also shelled one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Bogota in the same attack, killing 19.

In his months in power, Uribe has wrought significant changes. He liquidated the Agrarian Reform Institute. He privatised an efficient state telephone company, TELECOM, after which the rates soared and phones became inaccessible to many. The prices of electricity and water have also soared. A labour "reform" was pushed through, leading to the firing of thousands, the depriving of workers of many rights and benefits, and the removal of billions from the public sphere. In preparation for this "reform", the labour movement was savagely attacked by state-sponsored paramilitary groups, with dozens of union activists assassinated since Uribe's arrival in office.

In the political sphere, Uribe has sought to legalise the paramilitary organisations by engaging in "negotiations" with them. Presenting these as negotiations between hostile parties is absurd because the paramilitary groups, as Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and many other agencies have documented, work closely with the Colombian Army and state. Despite this being nearly universally known in Colombia, November 2003 saw a high-profile, nationally televised "demobilisation" of a paramilitary group, at which 850 paramilitary members turned in 112 weapons. However, the demobilised bloc, called Bloque Cacique Nutibara (BCN), proceeded to assassinate a municipal politician in December.

Uribe's onslaught has not gone unresisted, however, and the resistance is not merely the armed (and, unfortunately, all-too-frequently misdirected, abusive, and predatory) resistance of the FARC. Instead, as in the rest of Latin America, popular movements have surged forward to claim a political space for themselves in spite of all the repression.

This surge has occurred on multiple fronts. On October 25, 2003, Uribe put a referendum before the people, seeking constitutional changes that would make possible, among other things, further privatisation, cuts in social entitlements, reduction in political protection of various kinds, and his own re-election (Under the Constitution, presidential tenures are limited to a single term). Uribe needed 25 per cent of the electorate to participate in it - some 6.25 million people. The social movements campaigned for abstention, and the electorate abstained: Uribe ended up with the same hardcore vote of about six million, not enough to pass the constitutional changes, which he is now seeking to introduce in other ways.

On October 26, there were municipal and departmental elections all over the country. Millions more participated in these elections compared to the referendum of the previous day. In these elections, the electorate brought candidates of the Left movement to power in many areas. Lucho Garzon, a highly respected union activist, is now the Mayor of Bogota. Angelino Garzon, another activist, is the Governor of the Department of Valle del Cauca. In the months since this major reverse for Uribe's agenda, both the social movements, which succeeded beyond anyone's expectations, and the government, which had believed that victory was certain, have been trying to regroup and take action. The government has sought to compensate for its newly exposed political weakness with violence and repression. The movements, by contrast, have been building, consolidating and attempting to outflank the government politically.

This battle is being played out in local spheres all over Colombia. One of the arenas of the battle is Cauca, a highly strategic corridor in southwestern Colombia, through which the Pan-American Highway carries the commerce of the South American continent. The northern zone of Cauca, mountainous and neglected by the state, has long been a stronghold of the FARC. In the valleys and cities, sugar barons, drug cartels and ranchers continue to wield their traditional money power, trying to forge alliances with multinational capital for mega projects in order to exploit the vast natural resources of the region (Cauca, for example, has tremendous water resources).

Northern Cauca is also home to one of the most politically sophisticated and strong grassroots movements in Latin America, that of the Nasayuwe (Nasa) indigenous, a population of around 1,10,000, organised into "cabildos" (councils), with a parallel government and a political project they call indigenous autonomy. Because of their success in building this autonomy, they have been attacked by the traditional elites, the government, the paramilitary groups, and, at times, the FARC, which is unable to allow space for a political project that is not its own. Their organisation, the CRIC (Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca), founded in1971 under the banner of unity, land and culture, has become the ethical and political guide of other movements in the country and a seed of the remarkable resistance there.

Part of the spirit of the Nasa's movement is expressed by the Mayor of Toribio (the town that is the historic heartland of this movement), Arquimedes Vitonas, who, in a speech in Cali in February 2004, told the assembled leaders of the Nasa: "With this war, they can kill many of us, but they cannot kill all of us. Those of us who live will continue with our work. Those of us who die will have died defending our process."

If Vitonas' comments capture the Nasa's steadfastness in the face of the attacks, the view from the central square in the Toribio captures the reality of occupation with which the Nasa are living. On each corner of the square, the national police have set up a guard post. Such posts dot the town, and heavily armed police with their M-16s are ubiquitous. Higher up the mountains, in the indigenous reserve of Tacueyo, there is fighting, as the Colombian Army tries to dislodge the FARC from territory the guerillas have held for decades. To get from Toribio to Tacueyo, one has to pass one or sometimes two military roadblocks. At the roadblock, the military officer acts respectfully to our group, chatting with the driver and expressing his concern for the civilian population. "The important thing," the officer says, "is that the people are calm."

In Tacueyo, the people are under siege. The thousand people who belong to this reserve have gathered in a "Permanent Assembly" at El Crucero. Above El Crucero are the FARC's positions. From below, the Army continues to push. The Army's behaviour on the ground, meanwhile, makes a mockery of the checkpoint officer's show of concern. Here at the assembly, the people have organised sleeping quarters, sanitation, food and indigenous guards. The guards are a Nasa innovation: unarmed guards, who communicate with hand-held radios and carry sticks as symbols of their authority, they keep watch at night and sound the alarm if there is an encroachment into their territory. They are gathered together here because when they are dispersed in their fields and homes all over the countryside they can be caught in the crossfire or can be targeted.

The Army constantly attempts to elicit the cooperation of the Nasa, in Tacueyo and elsewhere. Soldiers go to the supply stores and rooms, they offer children money to inform on the guerillas, and try to visit and make themselves visible with the indigenous, so the guerillas will see this and commit reprisals against the civilian population. In Toribio and Jambalo, it is not a stretch to say the police are using the population as human shields against the guerillas. They are building a permanent, fortified station in Toribio against the will of the community, which will have no such fortification against the fighting the police are trying to provoke.

When combats occur, armed forces casualties are evacuated by helicopter, civilian casualties receive no such treatment. This, the community reports, is a strategy to drive the Nasa politically towards the Army. The Nasa remain aloof: the Army then resorts to repression. They plant coca, poppy or marijuana in the houses of indigenous peasants and claim the Nasa are narcotics traffickers. Members of the community are falsely accused of being guerillas and carted off to jail without any due process. The roadblocks themselves are a threat: if the peasants are unable to get to their fields for long enough, they will become dependent on food from outside - food which can be blocked off at the Army's will by the roadblocks, a strategy the Army and especially the paramilitary groups use all over Colombia to break the resistance of communities.

PADRE ANTONIO BONANOMI is an Italian priest who has lived and worked at the mission in Toribio, and with the indigenous movement for over 20 years. Asked how the movement continues to build despite being militarily occupied, he replies: "The Nasa are living two processes. One is external, the violence of the armies and economic models brought from outside. The other is internal. It is built on dreams. The Nasa are a people full of dreams, full of hope. Their historical experience has taught them that the rest will pass. These armies, they come and go. I asked them the same question. They tell me: `Padre, the Spanish conquest was worse. The `War of a Thousand Days', at the turn of the 19th century, was worse. The violence of the 1950s was worse. The armies come and go, and the dreams remain.' So, in the midst of the violence, they are creating their development plan. They go off to Malaysia to receive a United Nations award for their ecological management of the zone. They will wait out the conflict, and build in the meantime."

To the Nasa, building autonomy means building on the base of the struggles of the past. The first hero of the indigenous movement here is La Gaitana, a woman who led her people to war against the Spanish conquistadores in 1536 and united the tribes to fight hand to hand, making the Spanish pay dearly for their conquest. The second is Juan Tama, who around 1670, used the Spanish laws that acknowledged indigenous ownership of the land in the "Leyes de Indios": Juan Tama learned the laws and won the indigenous rights and the title to land reserves. These gains were reversed with Colombia's independence in the 19th century, as the nationalists sought to `develop' the new country by destroying the indigenous.

In 1910, Manuel Quintin Lame appeared on the scene, again struggling for the land, this time using a mix of non-violent political struggle, education, and the laws of the independent Colombian state. Quintin Lame laid the foundations of today's indigenous movement with patient underground organising over decades, for which he was punished: by the time he died in 1968, he had been in jail 100 times. What these leaders had won, however, was undermined by what is called in Colombia "La Violencia", a war between Liberals and Conservatives, which began in 1948 and resulted in the displacement of millions of peasants from lands that ended up in the hands of wealthy landowners. The indigenous were disorganised and disunited, working as debt serfs to the owners who had stolen the land from them, their communities controlled by the traditional elites and their traditional parties.

In the late 1960s, the indigenous began to struggle to win their lands back. Like the Landless Peasants Movement (MST) in Brazil, the indigenous of Cauca won their land back by non-violent occupation. They suffered tremendous violence: some 1,500 of them were murdered in the struggle for land. But by the end, in the 1980s, they emerged with an indigenous organisations for all of Cauca, the CRIC. Today they are organised under the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN) for the northern zone as well. They also emerged with control over their ancestral land reserves, and collective title to the lands.

Instrumental in this process was a Nasa priest who studied outside of Cauca and returned in 1975. Alvaro Ulcue helped spur the land recovery movement, the youth movement, and virtually every other aspect of the movement through the 1970s and 1980s. The landowners and the security forces assassinated him in 1984. The assassination, however, did not stop the movement. Nor did the assassination of Jambalo's first indigenous Mayor, Mario Betancur, in 1996 by one of the guerilla groups, the Army of National Liberation (ELN). Nor did the assassination by FARC of yet another indigenous leader, Cristobal Secue, in 2001. The latter two murders were investigated by the communities themselves. They concluded that the murders were committed as attacks by the guerillas on the project of indigenous autonomy.

In the late 1980s, with the lands under their control, the Nasa found that their indigenous organisations and their political initiatives were being stymied by the traditional elites and parties who still controlled the municipalities. They formed the "Civic Movement" to take over the municipalities. They lost three times, and the first indigenous Mayors were elected in the mid-1990s. Today, Toribio and Jambalo have indigenous Mayors from the movement. The reserve lands and the territorial autonomy of the indigenous were formally recognised in Colombia's Constitution of 1991. The movements have used the spaces won in the municipalities and their constitutional rights to the reserves to develop the region using a decentralised planning methodology.

An outgrowth of Paulo Freire's methods of adult education, it involves the training of facilitators and the use of assemblies to create development plans, establishing priorities and setting projects for the community to allocate municipal budgets and transfer payments to the indigenous reserves. This type of planning is done at the reserve and municipal levels. In February, the municipalities held their annual assemblies, where the priorities were set. For the municipality of Toribio, the assembly took place at the indigenous university of CECIDIC, a diverse university with programmes in agriculture, economics, trades and law.

Toribio, with its 30,000 inhabitants, had 3,000 at the meeting. The meeting opened with the staff of the municipality placing posters with indicators collected in village-level meetings two months earlier. There were dozens of indicators, ranging from production to educational outcomes to reports of human rights abuses within the community. In the first step, the members of the community had to revise the indicators and, if necessary, correct any errors. Then the 3,000 participants broke up into smaller groups to work by theme (the seven themes included education, institutional development, health, culture, human rights, family, and ecology and economy, treated together) and by reserve (the municipality consists of four reserves, Toribio, Tacueyo, San Francisco, and the urban centres). The 28 working groups set the budget priorities, decided projects, and submitted their decisions to the assembly. This decentralised planning has proved to be a highly effective method for management.

Toribio's `Proyecto Nasa', the overall plan, of which the development plan is a part, was one of the winners of the UNDP's Equatorial Initiative for Sustainable Development prize on February 19, 2004, in Malaysia for the best development project. The prize, given to six projects out of 600 entrants, was given for development plans to reduce poverty by conserving and restoring ecology. The ecological successes of the process can be seen by anyone travelling in the region: the land, after decades of abuse by sugar barons, ranchers and absentee landlords, is being reforested, restored to productive use, and brought back to life.

UNDERSCORING the paradoxical situation lived by the Nasa, the annual development planning assembly was an occasion to speak for the families of eight people from Toribio who were summarily arrested and jailed with no due process. A woman from the Tacueyo reserve explained how on January 29, 2004, her husband was pointed out by someone wearing a ski mask and taken to Popayan by a group of heavily armed police and military personnel. Hugo Prado Orozco, a marble mine worker, well known to the entire community as someone with no links to the guerillas, was then shown on national television along with seven others from the community and weapons none of them had ever seen before, with the Army claiming to have won a major victory against the guerillas by capturing high-level commanders.

According to Colombia's anti-terrorist laws, these people, now in jail in Popayan, the capital of Cauca, have no rights to face their accuser; no rights to see the evidence against them; no rights to a jury trial. Instead, their fate will be decided by the state Prosecutor's office, in private. The families collected 3,000 signatures from the community of people who swore that these eight individuals had nothing to do with the insurgency. Against this, the Prosecutor-General has the testimony of someone in a ski mask - and the eight continue to be in jail, in dreadful conditions.

Another paradox: the very day that `Proyecto Nasa' was winning the UNDP's sustainable development award, the Nasa held an assembly of 6,000 people in Caloto. This time, the assembly was a kind of "trial": according to the 1991 Constitution, the indigenous have the right to exercise justice according to their traditions for crimes committed within indigenous lands. The Nasa used this to raise the issue of the conduct of the Colombian Army itself.

On December 31, a member of the community, Olmedo Ul, was shot dead while riding past a military post on a motorcycle. No one has been punished for the crime. To the community, the issue is clear: that murder, along with many other abuses by the Colombian military, could not have occurred if the Army was not in their lands in the first place. Indeed, this random killing of a young man in Nasa territory is understood by the political organisation to be a kind of punishment for the Nasa's refusal to allow their project of autonomy - from the government and the insurgency - to be used as part of Uribe's counter-insurgency strategy.

The killing took place two weeks after the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca published a communique differentiating indigenous autonomy from the government's position. The `trial', like the UNDP prize, became national news in Colombia, with the commander of the Army going on television to state that the indigenous had no jurisdiction to try the Colombian military. Publicity generally helps provide protection for the Nasa, as it does for movements everywhere. It is for this reason that communication with other movements in Colombia and throughout the world has become so important for the Nasa, as it has for all Colombian social organisations. The strategy for destroying them has been to divide and isolate, something the establishment learned to do in this country of regions, of diverse indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and Mestizo ethnicities, and of urban/rural and class divisions.

Being just 1,10,000 of Colombia's 44 million, they cannot defeat Uribe's agenda alone; they might have to teach other movements how to build and organise a remarkable project in terribly adverse conditions. They are not alone, however - and by weaving their autonomy and resistance with others, they are opening up possibilities in Colombia and perhaps elsewhere as well.

Justin Podur is a journalist and translator based in Toronto, Canada. He visited Northern Cauca in February 2004.