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Colombia, as a state, is in theory a democracy, but in reality is no such thing. The people of Colombia have a long history of struggling for self-determination, and to this day continue to work towards creating democracy at the local and national levels. However, such attempts are met with brutal oppression at the hands of the Colombian military and paramilitary forces. Forces whose training, funding, and political direction comes from the U.S. government and multinational corporations. Since 1998, this assistance has been called Plan Colombia: first as an anti-drug initiative under Clinton, and later as an anti-terrorism measure under Bush.
During our trip to Colombia, we traveled to Bogota, and to the Departments
of Antioquia and Arauca. In all three locations, we met with union leaders
who were trying to organize workers, not just for better work conditions as
we normally think of them, but for physical safety from threats to their lives.
We also met with farmers who were trying to form cooperatives, and who were
organizing their communities simply trying to survive. In Barrancabermeja in
Antioquia, we also visited with a newly-formed women’s group working
both in support of the union, as well as organizing around other women’s
issues, such as against privatization of the hospitals. In Bogota, we heard
from human rights lawyers, students, teachers, and members of the Communist
party. In Arauca, we had the dubious honor of illuminating interviews with
some representatives of the Colombian government.
As in the U.S.(and the similarity is not coincidental), official democracy
in Colombia is a joke. Through a peace process many decades ago, the two
opposing sides, the Liberals and Conservatives, agreed to simply swap power
every four years. These two parties, much like our Democrats and Republicans,
are slightly different flavors of the same wealthy oligarchy. The enforcement
of this two-headed one-party system made a lethal appearance in the 1980's
when, after a peace process, the revolutionary forces laid down their arms
to form the Patriotic Union, a political party. The party enjoyed wide electoral
successes throughout the country, but its members and leaders were steadily
assassinated, such that most of its members are either in exile or are dead.
This type of political influence on Colombian policies continues to this day. Following the PATRIOT Act created by our own government, the Colombian Congress has passed the new “Democratic Security Act”. Despite its name this act is anything but democratic. It legalizes the indefinite detention of suspected “terrorists,” eliminates the right to formal accusations, to bail, and to being considered innocent until proven guilty. During the delegation, we met with two union activists who had been framed and were being detained indefinitely for “terrorism” under the new Democratic Security Act. Every union and social movement organization we met with expressed concern about the new law. Activists and trade unionists in Colombia specifically blamed the “leadership” of the Bush administration for these new repressive policies. They said that post 9-11 the Colombian government has been given clear direction from the U.S. that they can use whatever means necessary in order to suppress social dissent.
Domingo Tovar, director of human rights for the CUT (Central Unitaria de Trabajadores), which is nominally similar to our AFL-CIO, told us on our first day in Bogota, “The government is the primary violator of human rights. The new anti-terrorism statute gives police the judicial power to investigate, capture and sentence. The violation of human rights will increase due to the application of Plan Colombia, the development of the Andean Region Initiative, the free trade agreement between the U.S. and Colombia, and the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. Because of that, please send a message to the U.S. to not continue this war on Colombia”.
As Tovar points out, the U.S. is supporting the Uribe government for its own purposes. The U.S. gives three million dollars in military aid per day to Colombia because the U.S. has plans for the country and the region. The U.S. wants Colombia to be a part of its free trade vision for the hemisphere. However, the Colombians we met with were unequivocally opposed to these free trade agreements and privatizations. In order for the FTAA and other free trade agreements to pass and be implemented as the U.S. government wishes, the democratic desires of the Colombian people need to be suppressed, be it through economic strangulation or physical threats and endangerment.
In Barrancabermeja in Antioquia, the women’s organization, MUDUEB, related that they were very concerned about a local low-income hospital closing, which provided the only medical care in the entire region to the poorest populations. Due to recent congressional measures, this hospital and many others in the country were being closed. Pedro Arango with the District Teacher’s Union (the Asociacion Districtal de Educadores) in Bogota gave us the example of the privatization of schools. The government is issuing contracts for many of its schools to private companies, who then run the school for profit, charging students to attend. Though the Colombian Constitution promises a free education for all children through secondary school, now, due to most schools charging a fee, more and more families are unable to afford to provide their children with an education. A democracy can not function if only the wealthy are healthy and educated.
Union members are perhaps the hardest hit of any sector in Colombia. It is well known that, with more than 160 union deaths during Uribe’s administration alone, Colombia is the most dangerous and deadly place in the world to do union organizing, again the assassinations, disappearances, torture, and threats are carried out by the U.S.-funded military and paramilitary forces. The union is a vital institution of democracy, especially in Colombia, where it provides one of the strongest and best organized voices for change. In most of their union struggles, the call is both for specific workplace demands, as well as for wider social demands. The teacher’s union and the student movement have been organizing and fighting privatization in order to save the public education system as well as fighting for their jobs and school conditions. Arango said that each time teachers go on strike or organize a militant mobilization, 20-50 of their members are murdered! The students we met with at the national university in Bogota told us of student organizers who had been disappeared from the university campuses, who had received death threats, and who had been murdered for organizing in support of public secondary and post-secondary education and in opposition to the Colombian congressional reforms.
Another example is the plight of SINALTRAINAL (the food and beverage workers union). Their members in Barrancabermeja gave personal testimony of Coca-Cola and the paramilitaries working together to destroy the union. They gave our delegation several examples of when community members who were known to be with the AUC (an infamous paramilitary group) were allowed into the plant to meet with Coca-Cola executives, even after the workers reported these meetings to Coca-Cola headquarters in Bogota. They also stated that Coca-Cola even provides free cases of drinks to the paramilitaries. After we returned from Colombia, we discovered that Coca-Cola had applied to the Colombian government to dismiss 63 workers, including 31 leaders of the union. This is in violation of their contract. William Mendoza, the union vice-president, whom we had met in Colombia, sent us an e-mail, saying that, "If we lose the fight against Coca-Cola, we will first lose our union, next our jobs and then our lives. It makes things very complicated for me - in terms of my security. This decision removes any political cost to the Paramilitaries who would assassinate me." I am happy to report that the union has achieved a partial victory: they arrived at an agreement with Coca-Cola in late August to relocate 26 union members, including William Mendoza, and retire 28 others with full pensions. However, William afterwards wrote, “We think that Coca-Cola will not yield in its desire to eliminate the union - it will invent another way to screw us” and cautioned supporters that “The company's willingness to repair the harm caused to the workers, their families, the environment, and the Colombia people depends on the strength of the campaign."
[Please see the accompanying article by Meredith Aby for more about the struggles and successes of the oil workers, who are also struggling against U.S.-supported repression of their democratic rights and the strangulation of their region.]
Campesinos, the rural working-class, are also suffering greatly from the violation of their democratic rights, including basic rights, such as life and liberty. We were advised by our hosts to secure a meeting with the head of the Department of Arauca’s military, for our own security and ease of travel. We did so, and to our disgust later, our status as foreigners and “pals” of the General was the only reason we were allowed to pass through some of the checkpoints at all. An average Colombian would have been risking disappearance, torture, assassination, theft and more, taking the small trip we did around Arauca in his or her own country. When we met with him, General Matamoros told us his favorite metaphore: “if it looks like a crocodile, has feet like a crocodile, and has a tale with a crocodile, you would say it was a crocodile. Similarly, if you hear someone talking against government institutions, calling for change, or acting like a guerrilla, you would say they are a guerilla” Later in the discussion, he admitted that it was difficult to impossible to tell an insurgent from a campesino. The day after we met with him, we heard that he had made the same analogy on the radio in reference to a human rights group which had come to meet with him, an act that marked the group’s members as legitimize targets for any military or paramilitary who heard the comment. Such comments reflect the lack of respect for freedom of speech and the right to dissent so important for a functioning democracy. Again we can thank the U.S. for this attitude. The General alluded to the fact that he had had training at the School of the Americas in Georgia, and lamented that there were only 20 U.S.-provided helicopters for the whole country, so they were not able to provide air support for all areas at all times.
Nor were these empty threats on the General’s part. In each community we visited, we were told about human rights abuses, tortures, threats, murders, and kidnappings carried out by the government-sanctioned armed forces (military, police, and paramilitaries), often, but certainly not always, against community leaders. In Santo Domingo, we were shown where three cluster bombs had been dropped on a village, killing several children and adults. The villagers had been waving white rags at the circling helicopters and fighter planes to indicate they were not involved in the near-by combat. In all, there were 18 killed, including 7 children, and 25 wounded. The army tried to claim that the deaths were caused by a car-bomb; an assertion the villagers know to be clearly false. A piece of the cluster bomb found at the site said “Made in the USA.”
In all the areas we visited, we were told how the military had taken over people’s houses, was using their bathrooms, watching their televisions, eating their food, making the owners cook for them. We saw plenty of evidence of this, particularly along the route of our road trips through the Magdalena Medio region: dozens of young men in fatigues lounging around the patios and terraces of homes that were most evidently not military barracks. I had one glimpse as we drove past of a young couple sitting in chairs off to one side in uncomfortable silence as the military made free use of their home. I couldn’t help but think about one of the reasons for which the American Revolution was supposedly fought, and which is immortalized in the 3rd Amendment: the forced quartering of soldiers in private homes without consent of the owner. In addition to the inherent abuse involved in taking over campesinos’ homes, the military is endangering the family both as suspected collaborators, and by keeping them in the proximity of a potential firefight. The Colombian armed forces also use economic power to control the campesinos. In several areas, whether they are farmers in Southern Bolivar in Antioquia, or in La Orqueta or Puerto Miranda in the Arauca Department, or wood-cutters in the Antioquia region around Puerto Nuevo Ite, the people we spoke with were desperate about their futures. They had been told to not leave the villages...not to go buy food, not to go tend their fields, not to go into the forest to cut wood, nothing. The campesinos were told that if they left, they would be considered guerrilleros and dealt with as such, a threat prohibiting any freedom of movement.
People were specifically told not to make denunciations after they experienced assaults. In a village in Southern Bolivar, we were told that the military had taken a census when they came through the last time. They had written down the names and ID numbers of many members of the community. Those whose names had been written down were worried that they were marked for something. They don’t know what. Those whose names hadn’t been written down were worried that their presence would be questioned later. In both that village, and later in Puerto Nuevo Ite, we were told by campesinos that they had been required to sign blank documents or documents saying that they had no complaint against the military, and that they had been treated well. One man was made to sign such a paper after they had threatened him, cutting him with a machete on the neck.
Fumigations are yet another way in which the U.S. involvement is destroying Colombia and Colombian democracy, particularly at the local levels. In Puerto Matilde, we met with leaders of a campesino organization that has formed co-operative projects, including raising water buffalo, sugar, and rice. The farmers involved in the project agree to grow no more than 3 hectacres of coca per family, which they use as their only cash crop. We were told that this community has been fumigated every year for the last 3 years, and that they are anticipating the 2004 fumigation. They informed us that the fumigation is indiscriminate, that it destroys both legal and illegal crops. In the areas which have been fumigated, the campesino informed us that it is possible to plant coca again after 3 years. They do not know how long it takes before other, less hardy plants can be grown; as far as they know, never. We heard this scenario from campesinos wherever we met with them. After fumigation, they are forced to move their legal crops to other, un-poisoned areas, by cutting into the forest. In Puerto Matilde, they have the luxury of more land to cut into; in other areas, the only option is to abandon legal crops and turn to the hardier coca. Miguel Cifuente of the Asociacion Campesina del Valle Rio Cimitarra (Cimitarra River Valley Campesino Association) added “The fumigations are devastating. There have already been three fumigations. It is the fourth fumigation that they are doing in the regions now, and fundamentally it violates four rights. The right to food, because all of the staple crops are fumigated. The right to health, because this gives us a grave health crisis—skin, gastrointestinal, vision conditions, and they especially hurt children and senior citizens. Those military operations and fumigations displace people, and they are violating our right to have our land. And the pollution in general is violating the right to have a healthy environment. It hurts the water, the fish, the chickens, and the cows. This is a crisis.”
In reality it is quite clear that coca under the guise of the War on Drugs is not the real issue for either the U.S. or Colombia. Instead, Plan Colombia is about suppressing the insurgency and any social cry for change, silencing any voices opposing the sale of Colombia to the highest bidder. Miguel Cifuente deplored U.S. involvement in Colombia, saying, “In the event that you could suspend all manner of aid, I think that we Colombians could find a solution to the conflict that we have. We believe that the armed conflict, which has lasted forty years, has to be given a political solution, a political resolution. And it has to be the Colombian people who have to come up with that political solution. In the sense that the United States has interests of all types, like through the multinational corporations, in all the economic and natural resources and the social control of this country, this won’t do. The United States will never have the moral authority to participate in that process. So, I believe that we Colombians have to arrive at that political solution.”
The resistance is strong. Even in the areas where there is constant threat and torture, alternative cooperative and education projects are being run. Unions continue to struggle for the right to life and decent working conditions. Students and teachers continue to struggle for the right to a free education. Community groups are struggling against the privatization of basic services such as utilities and hospitals. People continue to struggle and survive and fight for their right to live in dignity, but they repeatedly informed us that our help is essential. They told us that our physical presence helped keep them safe, as did keeping their plight in the media spotlight. William Mendoza of SINALTRAINAL specifically informed us that our work around Coca-Cola has helped. He said, “We’ve felt international solidarity and the international pressure has decreased the threats to us. The company has had to give some means of security to us because of the international pressure. It’s because of this international pressure that we can continue our struggle.”
And ultimately, as U.S. taxpayers we have the capacity and the duty to pull
the monetary plug on the atrocities being committed against our Colombian sisters
and brothers, to put a stop to U.S. intervention in Colombia which is killing
democracy in the name of preserving it. We need to continue to educate people
in the U.S. as to the real effects of Plan Colombia. We need to continue to
build an anti-war movement in the U.S. to say no to U.S. intervention in Colombia.
Anti-War
Committee |