Colombia in 2004

‘President Alvaro Uribe badly wanted to show Colombians his only recent success: Bush’s re-election. But the US President had only three hours to visit the only supporter of his strategic project in South America.’ – Colombian economist Hector Mondragon, on Bush’s quick visit to Colombia in November 2004.

‘President Alvaro Uribe badly wanted to show Colombians his only recent success: Bush’s re-election. But the US President had only three hours to visit the only supporter of his strategic project in South America.’ – Colombian economist Hector Mondragon, on Bush’s quick visit to Colombia in November 2004.

The image of Bush breezing through Colombia for three hours, treating the place like an afterthought, given the utter military, political, and economic dominance over that country, is telling. No one in Colombia, indeed no one anywhere, can afford to think so little about the US. But Bush’s underestimation of Colombia is a mistake, not least because of what Hector Mondragon points out: Colombia is certainly the most enthusiastic supporter of Bush’s strategic project in South America. The battle for Colombia’s future, a battle between Uribe, Colombia’s elite, and the US on the one side, and Colombia’s multifaceted and remarkable movements on the other, is one with consequences for the Americas and the world. 2004 was an important year for that battle.

The end of the year 2003 was an eventful time for Colombia. On October 25, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez put a complex referendum with proposals for constitutional change before the people of the country. It proposed IMF-imposed structural adjustment, ‘anti-terrorism’ ‘reforms’, and a drastic withdrawal of basic rights and protections for citizens against government and private abuses enshrined at least nominally in the constitution. These would empower Uribe for further neoliberal reforms in bilateral free trade talks with the United States, and to strengthen his powers to fight the civil war, a war ostensibly against the guerrillas but whose principal victims have and continue to be civilians and social movement leaders. Under the constitution Colombian presidents are limited to a single term: he also sought to change this to allow his own re-election.

Uribe had staked a great deal of political capital on the referendum. The Colombian media were full of extravagant claims of a purported 80% approval rating for the president. The campaigning was heavy. The democratic opposition launched an abstention campaign. The strategic reasoning: Uribe needed 6 million plus votes, more than 25% of the electorate, for the referendum to be valid. The safest approach would be abstention. This would make it more difficult for the government to manipulate the results and avoid the risk of a disciplined vote from the right defeating the ‘No’ voters. The government’s campaign had both overt and dirty components. The Colombian government and military has extensively documented links with right-wing, narco-trafficking, paramilitary death squads who carry out massacres in the countryside and murder of unionists, social activists, and poor and destitute people in the cities and towns. Human rights activists in the rural areas reported that the paramilitaries were doing some of their own campaigning. With military support, paramilitaries control many areas of the country outright, using terror. In these areas the paramilitaries threatened people with death for abstention or voting ‘No’ or campaigning for abstention or for the ‘No’ side.

The abstention side had numerous advantages, however. Parts of Uribe’s own Liberal party rejected the referendum. The social movements urged a boycott: according to the constitution, a referendum needed at least 25% of the electorate to vote in order to be legitimate. If most of the electorate refused to participate at all, the ‘No’ side would win by default, and Uribe’s constitutional reforms would be defeated. This is precisely what occurred. Those who would attribute this to mere apathy or a ‘silent majority’ in favour of Uribe, however, would have a hard time explaining what happened the day after the referendum: on October 26, Colombia had municipal and departmental-level elections. In these elections, leftist social movement candidates won many unexpected victories, including the mayor’s office of Bogota and the governorship of the important department of Valle del Cauca. They won these victories thanks to a large increase in participation: 5 million more people voted on October 26 than did on October 25. The repudiation of Uribe could not have been clearer.

For a moment there seemed to be even the possibility that Uribe’s government could fall. For close to two weeks this President, normally in the media several times every day, was silent and remained unseen. His superstar Minister of Justice and the Interior, Fernando Londono, the architect of the referendum, was taped telling the leaders of the Conservative Party that Uribe would have to resign if they withdrew their unconditional support. Londono, a lawyer for multinational corporations, has been implicated in some high-level corruption scandals. When the speech leaked, Uribe forced his resignation, keeping him in the Cabinet as a Minister without portfolio, and denied the tape’s veracity. Some social movement leaders feared the kind of ‘self-coup’ (‘auto-golpe’) that President Fujimori had enacted in Peru. But Uribe’s regime proved to be more resilient. The opposition leaders, surprised by their own success, were unable to mobilize quickly enough to remove the government.

Paramilitary reprisals for the loss of the referendum began immediately. The Colombian worker’s union central, CUT, registered death threats against their leaders beginning on October 30: “YOU WILL PAY WITH YOUR LIFE FOR THE LOSS OF THE REFERENDUM”, said a phone message to CUT’s human rights director Domingo Tovar Arrieta. The CUT reported assassinations against unionists on November 3, November 5, November 12, November 14, Novemer 16, in different parts of the country. In addition to reprisal, paramilitaries continued their campaigns to displace campesinos and indigenous peoples from their lands through violence and massacre, with the indifference and complicity of the Colombian government and military. The Kankuamo indigenous of the Sierra Nevada began to try to raise attention of the forcible displacement, attacks, and pressure they were facing from paramlitaries working for various parties with interests in megaprojects in their territories, particularly oil and gas. The ‘Peace Community’ of San Jose de Apartado, for example, was under constant paramilitary pressure, and continues to be. Likewise the Embera Katio indigenous people, engaged in a political battle against the government and multinational corporate project (Urra) that is building a second dam on their rivers (the Sinu and Verde) – in addition to the one that is already devastating their lives and livelihoods – reported a constant paramilitary presence and threat. The Organizacion Feminina Popular, the women’s organization strongest in the largely paramilitary-controlled oil town of Barrancabermeja, made a report at the end of 2003 of 120 murders and 61 disappearances in that year. A month after their November communique, another unionist, Jesus Rojas Castaneda, was murdered by paramilitaries in front of his pregnant wife on December 5.

The Colombian government uses paramilitaries in order to maintain some semblance of plausible deniability in its war against the social movements. In late 2003 and throughout 2004, a reversal of this trend began, as the Colombian army itself began to commit crimes directly and with impunity. Immediately after the referendum the national army committed various arbitrary raids, arrests, and detentions. Quoting from one report by the Joel Sierra Human Rights organization: “On 5 November 2003, at approximately 2am, a unit of the national army in a black Toyota 4.5 van belonging to a wealthy farmer from the village La Victoria, entered the villages of Oasis and Islandia and raided three houses without a warrant. In the first house raided in the village of Islandia, they entered shouting at the residents. Sei±or CIRO ANTONIO SUAREZ was sleeping in a hammock in the living room when they came and punched him out of the hammock and threw him onto the floor. They continued abusing him physically and verbally, accusing him of being a guerrilla. Then they dragged his wife from the house and, in front of her children, they punched her and pushed her about and then took her off into the mountains so that she would tell them where there was supposedly a hidden store. The soldiers stole clothes and money from the Association of Parents of Families for the village school. In addition they kidnapped a little girl of only 11 years old, YOLEIDA ARISTIZABAL, until her father presented himself to them. Ten hours later she was released.” The report describes similar incidents in other areas, as other reports do about other areas. The Ruta Pacifica de Mujeres, a women’s peace organization, reported at the end of December 2003 that five armed men had raided their offices and carried off their computers.

While the military and paramilitaries were engaging in repression, Uribe’s regime was engaging in the theatrics of ‘peace negotiations’, to provide people with something to think about besides his resounding referendum defeat. The universally known fact that Colombia’s military and paramilitary are two branches of the same organization, working for the same ends, for the same interests, and increasingly using the same means, did not stop the government from engaging in ‘peace negotiations’ with the paramilitaries. Nor did it stop the Colombian or international media from reporting these negotiations with great fanfare. On November 25, the Bloque Cacique Nutibara held a televised ceremony in which 855 handed over 112 weapons. The well-known paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso provided a statement by video.

Nobody was fooled. Some commentators noted the paucity and poor quality of the weapons handed over by the notoriously well-supplied paramilitaries. Others noted the very low-level of the operatives who had come out. For the ‘peace process’ to have had a shred of legitimacy, it would have to have been fundamentally different. First, the facts would have to be acknowledged. Among them, a central fact noted in a report by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (CIDH) in December: the paramilitaries were not formed in opposition to the government, but were formed by the government, initially even given legal status along with open collaboration with the military. Today, though they are nominally illegal, they enjoy the same open collaboration with military and government officials. Second, according to the Americas charter of the OAS, a legitimate peace process requires indemnization, restoration, rehabilitation of the victims, truth, justice, and a third-party observed dismantling of the forces. Instead, Colombians were treated to spectacles of small numbers of paramilitaries handing over small amounts of goods to the state who they had always worked for, then getting back to business immediately. The paramilitaries from the Bloc that demobilized on November 25, for example, killed a municipal councillor, Juan Camilo Cardona, on December 14.

Uribe himself, now fully recovered from the referendum blip, drove home the point that there would be no peace or putting the days of atrocity behind for Colombians, in a speech to the army on December 5. “There should be no moment without combat,” he told the graduating class at the military academy. “Instead of consenting to the terrorists, combat them to extermination like the plague” He exhorted soldiers to calculate less and risk more. He wanted “every citizen civilian to support the armed forces”. The day before, the United States Congress and Senate had approved a plan for the Colombian government to engage in aerial fumigation in Colombia’s national parks, spraying herbicides on some of the most biodiverse and fragile ecosystems on the planet in order to ‘fight drugs’. The Army did not, at any rate, need Uribe’s prompting to get the message. The military that had named an anti-guerrilla operation ‘Operation Holocaust’ (The operation, in September 2003 in Catatumbo on the Venzuelan border, left 24 ‘guerrillas’ and 8 soldiers dead according to El Tiempo) followed Uribe’s speech up by posting a poll on their website asking readers whether they believed that the director of Human Rights Watch, Jose Miguel Vivanco, was ‘helping terrorism’ or whether he ‘was right’ in his criticism of the army’s appalling human rights record. Those polled didn’t give the answers the army wanted: the army ended the embarrassing incident by removing the poll. This didn’t stop Colombia’s military commander from adding bluster of his own: General Martin Orlando Carreno swore on December 20 that he would either catch or kill FARC’s commander or resign within the year. (Note: December 20, 2004 has come and gone). Uribe could also take comfort in the Senate’s approval of the anti-terrorist statute, enabling the government to allow things that were already happening: intercepting telecommunications, raids and detentions without warrant, lasting 4 years with possibility of extension.

The president’s aggressive intentions were checked, however, at a meeting in Cauca on ‘regional security’. Seeking an endorsement for his policy of ‘democratic security’ (summarized by his comments on ‘extermination’ and the need for civilians to put themselves at the army’s disposal), Uribe was surprised to be rebuffed by the indigenous authorities of Northern Cauca. He had convened what he called an ‘indigenous security council’. The agenda was set by the government so that the indigenous leaders would speak for the initial 20 minutes (providing a good picture for the cameras) and then Armed Forces and himself would speak for the rest of the day. Instead of putting themselves at his disposal, the indigenous leaders arrived at the scene, read a letter to the President rejecting his council and his ‘democratic security’ policies, and holding him directly responsible for any abuses by armed forces or paramilitaries that would occur in their territories and to their people. After reading the letter and delivering it in person to the President, they left the room and the President and Armed Forces commanders to talk amongst themselves. Leaving a furious Uribe behind, they promised him they would convene their own, genuine ‘democratic security’ meeting in their territory, with their own agenda, if the necessary conditions of respect and security were guaranteed. To the press, the indigenous leaders denounced the presence and abuses of the military in their territory and announced that they did not want to share their territory with any armed actors – not the guerrillas, not the paramilitaries, and not the army or police either. They had their own ideas about how to protect their security, their own organization, and at the end of the day, one of them told the national newspaper El Tiempo on December 15, they had resisted for 500 years Their right to resist would not be co-opted by a government with blood on its hands. Another unexpected blow came from the Congress. Alex Lopez, a union activist from Cali who had become a member of Congress, brought charges against the President for irregularities in his, Uribe’s, rapid privatization of the state telephone company, TELECOM. Uribe didn’t take this last gracefully. He reverted to type and accused Lopez of terrorism: ‘Let the people compare the contribution of my [Uribe’s] accuser [Lopez] to EMCALI [the public utilities company of the city of Cali] and my [Uribe’s] own contribution as President. If they must, I [Uribe] would prefer that they do their subversion with these parliamentary calumnies instead of bloodthirsty terrorism.’ In the Colombian context, such an utterance could be intepreted as a threat – or an invitation to paramilitaries to attack Lopez as a ‘terrorist’.

At the same time the paramilitary organizations were beginning to turn against each other over the spoils of mass murder. Reported by El Tiempo on December 11 as “combat between the army and paramilitaries” in which the noble armed forces were engaging in armed combat with those criminals (who had weeks before been courageous people who were demobilizing in favour of peace, and would return to that role immediately afterwards) who were preying on the people, the ‘combats’ left 24 ‘paramilitaries’ dead and 61 captured in Arauca and Cundinamarca. In reality these were fights between different paramilitary factions over resource-rich strategic corridors. The army intervened on behalf of one faction, and the media obliged in the story of the ‘combats’.

At the very end of the year there were other combats as well. In March 2003, the first clashes between the Venezuelan military and the Colombian army and paramilitaries took place on the Colombia-Venezuela border. The symbolism was striking: Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chavez, was at the head of a country trying to make a ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, strengthening the public sector, social programs, independent political organizations, and a foreign policy independent from the United States. Alvaro Uribe Velez, meanwhile, was the candidate of Colombia’s traditional landowning elite, military, and big business interests tied to the United States. Uribe had asked the US, without any irony, to do to Colombia what they were doing in Iraq. Chavez had gone on Venezuelan television and shown photos of the civilian victims of US aerial bomardment in Afghanistan. For their ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, Venezuelans were punished with a coup attempt in April 2002 and a ‘National Strike’ that devastated their economy. Now the Colombian military was being used against them, an attempt to start a war between Colombia and Venezuela that would be destructive of the aspirations of the people of both countries. The clashes continued in December 2003, as members of the Venezuelan National Guard were killed by Colombian paramilitaries in repeated incursions into Venezuelan territory.

The FARC reminded the country that Uribe’s bluster had not stopped them. On December 16, they had bombed a number of department stores in Barranquilla, killing one woman and injuring dozens of others. New Year’s Eve 2003, they ambushed and killed around 40 paramilitaries, according to El Tiempo.

The Associated Press summarized 2003 as a success for Uribe: homicide was down 20% and kidnapping 32% (2043, down from 2986) from the previous year – with only 22,969 murders, Colombia had its lowest murder rate since 1987. Only 850 terrorist attacks, compared to 1645 such attacks in 2002. The AP report also noted that mass detentions were up 85% in 2003 (7,000 had been detained in this way by the military). Other notes in the ‘success’ ledger: 900 ‘suspected’ paramilitaries and 1,919 ‘suspected’ guerrillas killed directly by the security forces – both significant improvements on previous years. The idea that these might be human rights violations, the possibility that these might be counted in the ‘murder’ category given the ease with which someone can be called a ‘paramilitary’ or a ‘guerrilla’ after he or she is killed, seemed to have escaped the AP (it is not clear, for example, that the at least 72 unionists who the union central CUT reports were killed in 2003, or the 30 political activists who the political party Union Patriotica reports were killed in the same period, fall under ‘suspected guerrillas’ killed and thus are considered by the AP to be an improvement for Uribe).

The Council on Foreign Affairs, a mainstream foreign policy group in the United States, was not so sangiune. In a report that advocated free trade and neoliberalism, the Council nevertheless criticized the US emphasis on punitive approaches and military solutions in its ‘war on drugs’. The CIA shared some of the Council’s doubts, as a Freedom of Information Act document from 2000 released early in 2004 showed. The CIA’s analysis of ‘Plan Colombia’, a multi-billion dollar plan (mostly Colombian taxpayers’ money but some of it American taxpayers’) to buy US military helicopters and fumigate large tracts of highly productive agricultural land and ecologically sensitive territories, would not fulfill its promise of ‘stopping drugs’. Instead, the CIA warned, Plan Colombia would only cause the decentralization and proliferation of the illicit cultivation and the illicit narcotics industry. The US Ambassador admitted in 2004 that Plan Colombia had had a negligible impact on cocaine supply.

The year 2004 opened with a murder that would haunt the Colombian military.

It was one of those acts of violence against the indigenous peoples that normally happens with impunity. On New Year’s Day 2004, two young indigenous men, Olmedo Ul and Edinson Conda, were riding on a motorcycle in Northern Cauca late at night. They passed a number of parked non-military trucks filled with soldiers. Men in uniforms (later found to be government soldiers, though witnesses could not see that that night) signalled to them to stop as they passed. Then they shot them in the back. Olmedo Ul was killed. Edinson Conda was wounded, but survived. The indigenous of Cauca, who had told Uribe at his failed ‘indigenous security council’ months before that they would not tolerate armed actors violating their autonomy, were shown dramatically that they had been right. In 2004, they would fight hard to ensure Olmedo Ul had not died in vain.

Guerrilla leader ‘Simon Trinidad’, who had participated in negotiations with the government in the late 1990s, was captured in the first days of the year. He surprised the authorities when he refused to answer any questions on the grounds that he did not recognize the legitimacy of the Colombian state. In May, he was sentenced to 35 years. On the last day of 2004 he was extradited to the United States – in a surreal twist – to face drug and kidnapping charges. Extradition to the US has long been seen – even for right-wing factions in Colombia – as a line that the Colombian government should not dare to cross. Trinidad’s extradition, reported blandly in the North American press, could prove a fateful decision.

At least he was a member of the guerrillas. Though he was the only one extradited, he was not the only one detained: the tactic of mass detention continued to be used in an escalating manner by the state, who rounded up 90 people in various municipalities in the department of Valle del Cauca in January. These were held in harsh conditions in prison cells without trial or due process. The new tactic of mass detention was used alongside the old tactic of savage massacre. The Colombia Support Network reported two massacres in the first weeks of January, one in Antioquia and another in Catatumbo. The first massacre was described as follows: “On Saturday January 10 in the neighborhood of El Porvenir in the municipality of Remedios, Antioquia State, more than 200 armed men appeared at 10 a.m.. According to witnesses they were members from the Tacines and the Palagua Army battalions accompanied by paramilitary hit men. The peasants Caifas N. and Juan Carlos N. were assassinated. Then German Gil a 60 year old peasant had his beard shaved, was tortured and assassinated. All of his properties were stolen including 70 heads of cattle. The peasant woman Odilia Ochoa was brutally tortured and her properties stolen. The men also stole all the mules,chicken and domestic animals they found on their path. Ten days before, on January 2 there were combats between paramilitaries and members of the guerrilla groups FARC and ELN. It is assumed that this excursion is a retaliation against the civilian population. The rural areas of Remedios and Segovia live in a time of crisis. Although the Army and the police control the area, the paramilitaries blockade food and medical supplies. 80% of the population has been displaced to Medellin and Barrancabermeja. There are no schools, no teachers and no health services.”

Elsewhere, the army was disappearing people. The Jose Alvear Restrepo human rights organization republished a report by a local organization on the actions of the army in the municipalities of Norosi and Tiquisio in the department of sur de Bolivar. On January 26, the army kidnapped a woman and her daughter, forced the mother to wear a military uniform and a ski mask, and marched her around town with the army unit before releasing her. The next day, members of the Narino Battalion detained miners Giovanny Vega Atencio, Jairo Villalba, Nolberto Campuzano Zuleta and 13-year old Josneider Solano Zuleta. The areas from which these people were detained were bombed and shelled on the 28 and 29. On the 30th and the 31st, members of their families confronted army Captain Espitia who eventually told them that the three adults were guerrillas who had been killed in battle and offered no information about the child, Josnedier. The families got no answers from the national government either. The exact same tactic was used in Putumayo at around the same time: two peasants (Marco Antonio Agredo Plaza and Jarvi Payaguaje) and an indigenous child (Santiago Chasoy) were apprehended by the army on January 15. Their families were told days later that they were guerrillas who had been killed in combat, according to the family’s own report. Yet another mass detention took place on January 29: 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 guerrillas, was then put on national television along with 7 others from the community and weapons none of them had ever seen before, while the Army claimed to have won a major victory against the guerrillas, 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 assault on the public sector and public sector unions continued as well.

One union that had been particularly successful in resisting privatization of a public sector company was SINTRAEMCALI, the union of workers of EMCALI, the public utility company for the city of Cali (Colombia’s second city). By making an alliance with the public, recipients of the utility’s services, SINTRAEMCALI made the case that affordable utilities were only possible if they were public utilities. In 2003, they had used high-profile tactics like occupation of municipal buildings in Cali to stop privatizations – and would do so again. As elsewhere, the government and paramilitary assassins made them pay a terrible price. Ricardo Varragan, a SINTRAEMCALI unionist, was assassinated in a drive-by motorcycle shooting on January 16. SINTRAEMCALI bodyguard Deyton Banguera was assassinated on January 18. On February 6, a man was caught planting an exposive device at the entrance door to the SINTRAEMCALI union. He told authorities that “some men in a taxi threatened to kill him if he did not place it.” SINTRAEMCALI leaders had just – hours before – met with European Union, Colombian government, and Colombian military officials about questions of security and human rights.

On January 27 the Minister of Mines and Energy Luis Castro passed a resolution liquidating the state mining company MINERCOL. The mining union, SINTRAMINERCOL, pointed out the connections: “The process of liquidating MINERCOL is being accompanied by the growth in military and paramilitary operations in mineral rich areas, among them La Gabarra in the north of Santander and la Serrania de San Lucas in the south of Bolivar (municipalities of Norosi­ (Casa de Barro, Aguas Fri­as, Mina Seca) San Pablo (Vallecito, San Juan Alto), and Simiti­ (El Parai­so)), places where the farming and mining population is restricted in its movements and the victim of continuous bombardments, machine-gun attacks, burning of farmhouses, and the denial of access to foodstuffs and medicines, which is a way of suggesting that they belong to, or are collaborating with, insurgent groups.”

Mass arrests by the army, paramilitary massacres and assassinations were among the ongoing effects of Uribe’s ‘democratic security’ policy. Even as the sham ‘negotiations’ for the ‘demobilization’ of the paramilitaries continued (simultaneously with the massacres by the same ‘demobilizing’ paras) paramilitarism was being given an official boost of massive size in the form of one of Uribe’s 2002 election promises. Uribe had promised to build a network of ‘civilian informers’ to help the army and police ‘fight terrorism’. The number of these informers was now in the tens of thousands. Uribe’s dream was for a million of them. The prestige of paramilitaries took a blow, however, at the end of January when Italian police raids captured over 100 important mafia figures along with tons of cocaine. The arrests revealed extensive links between the narcotrafficking organizations of the Italian mafia and the Colombian paramilitaries, by way of the paramilitary leader who had made a televised address to the nation just months before, Salvatore Mancuso.

Late January also brought a bigger killer of Colombians than the paramilitaries and guerrillas combined to the fore: preventable disease. With 8 people killed in a few weeks, an outbreak of yellow fever sent the government scrambling for vaccines. Venezuela sent 500,000 units of vaccine. Brazil sent 1,250,000. Colombian analysts from the social movements pointed out that, for all the publicity surrounding the yellow fever outbreak, malaria – also transmitted by mosquitos – kills several thousand Colombians a year. The Colombian government once had public health and rural preventive care programs in the 1960s that helped the fight against malaria: these fell victim to neoliberal economics. With peasants being thrown off of their lands because of paramilitary massacre and aerial fumigation, they move deeper into the jungle, encountering mosquitos and contracting malaria. Between the reduction of preventive care and treatment and an increase in displacement (Colombia has well over 3 million internally displaced people today) malaria is a major killer. Hector Mondragon wrote: “Little by little in Colombia and other South American countries the conditions for new epidemics of yellow fever are being created. International organizations have recommended the vaccination of all children older than one year in order to prevent urban epidemics. Colombia is not among the few countries that have followed this advice. In Colombia, mass vaccination only occurs in municipalities where cases have occurred, and their neighbors.” The immediate crisis passed, but the underlying causes, as Mondragon points out, remain.

By the beginning of February, the Nasa indigenous people of Cauca were preparing political action against those responsible for the murder of Olmedo Ul by the army on New Year’s day. On February 10 the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, ACIN, announced their intention to try the ‘intellectual and material authors’ of the murder of Olmedo Ul. They notified the commander of the local battalion (the 8th battalion ‘Pichincha’), Juan Vicente Trujillo, and told him to be there for the public trial on February 19. Their action had a constitutional justification: the 1991 constitution allows indigenous peoples to enact traditional justice in indigenous territory. Since Olmedo Ul was murdered in indigenous territory, they had solid grounds on which to try the perpetrators, and starting with commander Trujillo, perhaps they would find the very President of the Republic carried some responsibility for the crime(s) committed there? The Nasa, the people organizing the trial, have a system of justice based on resolution of conflict in public assemblies, acknowledgement of whatever crime or transgression was committed, and restitution. Along with restitution, however, there is symbolic punishment with a stick called the ‘fuete’. In calling the army to account, ACIN was well aware that they were taking a risk, and acknowledged it in their communique. Indigenous people in Colombia knew what they risked. The Kankuamo, in a different part of Colombia (Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta) were receiving a humanitarian commission to their territory in those days. While that commission was at large, the army picked up Juan Daza Carrillo in front of his children. They told the media that Daza was a guerrilla who they had captured. Later they changed the story and said that Daza was a guerrilla who they had killed in combat.

ACIN’s announcement came at the same time as Uribe was preparing his visit to Europe. European aid, european investment, and above all, political support for his project was at stake in the visit. While the United States would provide helicopters and counterinsurgency advice, Uribe hoped that European countries could give his government some international legitimacy. Unfortunately, the Italian police raids against the mafia that had just taken place, revealing a whole web of connections with the Colombian paramilitaries, didn’t help Uribe’s case in Europe. Indeed, Silvio Berlusconi, who shares a great deal with Uribe politically and in terms of style, was too embarrassed by the mafia incident to receive him in Italy. His speech at the European Parliament was no success, as Member of European Parliament Richard Howitt reported: “The protest against Uribe in the European Parliament has gone off successfully today. White ‘Peace in Colombia’ scarves distributed by the Belgian NGO co-ordination were worn by around one-third of MEPs, who walked out of Parliament’s Chamber as Uribe was called to speak. Put together with those who chose not to attend, there were only about one-quarter of MEPs left to hear his speech. Uribe was clearly rattled by this demonstration.” Uribe had, however, made an important deal with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, in which Colombia was to purchase dozens of tanks for deployment on the border with Venezuela. Raul Baduel, a Venezuelan Army commander, commented on the deal with great concern in an interview in March. The evidence was mounting that a war between Colombia and Venezuela, to try to derail Venezuela’s ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, was being prepared. The purchase of the AMX-30 battle tanks only increased Venezuela’s worries.

Uribe had hardly returned when ACIN’s February 19 assembly put the military on trial. Thousands of indigenous people and all the national press were in attendance. Conspicuously absent, however, was battalion commander Trujillo, who had given his word that he would attend and face justice. The evening news were dominated by the story. As reporters canvassed the country’s highest level military commanders on their reactions to the trial, none of them said a word about the guilt or innocence of the army in violating human rights in Nasa territory. Instead they denied that indigenous people had jurisdiction to try military officers in indigenous courts. If the idea was to delegitimize the Nasa politically, however, it failed. The very day of the trial the Nasa were receiving the international acclaim that had eluded Uribe: their participatory municipal development planning process had won a United Nations Development Programme sustainable development prize, the Equatorial Initiative of the UNDP. The prize was granted to ‘Proyecto Nasa’, the project of the municipality of Toribio. Toribio is the centre of the indigenous movement in Northern Cauca. A generation of leaders of that movement have received their education at CECIDIC, the indigenous university there. Proyecto Nasa is the name of the development plan (Or Life Plan as the Nasa call it) the municipality, a plan that uses the same types of decentralized participatory planning methodologies applied in the better-known ‘participatory budgeting’ exercises of the Worker’s Party in Porto Alegre, Brazil, when they held that municipality. Two of the leaders of the movement in Northern Cauca were in Malaysia receiving the UNDP prize when the trial of the army took place. There were celebrations in Toribio on their return. The mayor of Toribio, Arquimedes Vitonas, one of the young generation of Nasa leaders, expressed some of the spirit of that moment at the celebration party when he said that the Nasa had to “take advantage of these moments. Because moments pass, and don’t return.”

The Nasa had struck a symbolic blow against the abuses of militarism and paramilitarism. Colombia’s unionists launched another battle in their struggle with the Coca-Cola corporation, whose Colombian bottling operations use paramilitaries to break unions by killing the unionists (8 were killed in this way since 1996). On March 15, Coca-Cola workers from the SINALTRAINAL foodworkers’ union began a hunger strike in eight major Colombian cities. The vice president of one of the local unions marked the severity of the occasion with the comment: “If we lose the fight against Coca-Cola, we will first lose our union, next our jobs and then our lives.” The hunger strike was a response to a change in the Coca-Cola corporation’s tactics in Colombia. If before the bottlers were using paramilitary murder to break the unions, in 2003 they decided simply to close up. In September 2003 the decision was announced to close 11 of the company’s 16 Colombian bottling plants, pressuring workers into voluntarily resigning and releasing the company from its contractual obligations to relocate the workers in other jobs. Relocation for the workers was the demand of the hunger strikers. Over the next few days workers reported the kind of low-level intimidation that usually precedes paramilitary attacks – surveillance, phoned threats. An open, signed threat from the paramilitary organization arrived on March 19. The company waited 11 days, after which the health of some of the strikers had deteriorated significantly, before agreeing to a meeting. The workers stopped the hunger strike in exchange for dialogue on relocation and a public announcement by the company that their demands had been legitimate (this latter to prevent paramilitary retaliation). It did not work. The paras would not let a success against the corporation go unpunished. SINALTRAINAL reported on April 20th that: “At 7 am on April 20, 2004, various armed men with machine guns entered the home of the brother of Coca-Cola union leader Efrain Guerrero’s wife in Bucaramanga, and fired indiscriminately at the family, killing Efrain’s brother-in-law, Gabriel Remolina, his wife Fanny and wounding three of their children. One of these children, Robinson Remolina, is in grave condition in the hospital.”

If the indigenous and the unionists sought to press their political and ethical advantage, the Colombian government and its paramilitary auxiliaries kept up the repressive onslaught. Paramilitaries committed assassinations – a political activist in Putumayo on March 1, a peasant leader in Tolima on March 3 – while the army kept up its strategy of individual and mass detentions. Families of men detained in Popayan’s San Isidiro prison reported on March 1 that there were at least 45 such political detainees inside. But this number was as a grain of sand compared with the sheer scale of mass detentions under Uribe’s ‘democratic security’. The Jose Alvear Restrepo human rights collective published figures that in Uribe’s first year of office 125,778 people had been detained – a rate of 334 a day or 14 per hour.

A peculiar tactic by the Colombian establishment is to ‘reveal’ things that everyone already knows in high-profile mainstream outlets. Shortly after these ‘revelations’ – or preferably simultaneously with them – people are supposed to forget that they have been ‘revealed’. The obvious connections between what has been ‘revealed’ and the other events in the public sphere are never made. This was the case for some of the ‘revelations’ of links between the army and paramilitaries that surfaced in 2004. The mainstream magazine Cambio, for example, published a major revalation from Army General Uscategui, who stood accused of helping paramilitaries coordinate a major massacre years before in Mapiripan. Uscategui ensured the Colombian public that he had no intention of being the fall guy for the military: if his head rolled, so would others. “A trial would be glorious for me,” he was quoted in Cambio as saying. “It is very serious, because it involves a matter that we have spent our life denying, which is the link between the military and the paramilitaries.” Uscategui discusses the existence of a whole set of documents decisively implicating the military: “The Prosecutor’s office got a computer in a raid. There were 58 disks and not a lot of value. But office wasn’t foolish and they sent the computer and the disks to the American embassy, to Anne Patterson, who sent the computer to Miami. There a systems specialist decoded the data and found 300 documents that are a bomb. I have copies because I was there when they were produced and I can publish them: the pamphlets the paramilitaries took to the Mapiripan massacre are sitting there on the Paris Battalion’s computer… the rules of engagement for Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (the paramilitary organization) were prepared on that computer. For example they took a document on Disciplinary Regime for the Armed Forces, changed where it said ‘Armed Forces’, and handed it out to members of the AUC… there are the accounting documents for monthly payment including names for the whole Guaviare front of AUC, 93 men and women with their aliases, positions…” There were similar ‘revelations’ about another General, Rito Alejo, who was responsible for another massacre (Bijao del Cacarica), in 1997, but the process of justice was stopped before it could really get going by the Prosecutor General. None of the revelation that the military and paramilitaries were one and the same seemed to affect stories of the phony ‘negotiations’ between the government and the paras, however. Neither did the strange incident at Guaitarilla in the department of Narino on March 19, when army soldiers ambushed and massacred a convoy of national police. The police cars had cocaine in them. A lot of cocaine. Was this another turf war over spoils, the way the ‘army-paramilitary’ combats were?

Certainly the army’s massacre of a peasant family in Cajamarca in the department of Tolima on April 10, including a six-month old baby, two 17-year olds, a 14-year old, and a 24 year old, was no turf war. The army had prepared a checkpoint, ostensibly to intercept a FARC unit in the area, and opened fire on the first people who came along, according to the ‘Corporacion Reiniciar’, a human rights group based in Bogota. No shockwaves from that ‘revelation’ either. Nor from the capture of a major assassin, an employee of a major narcotrafficker named ‘Don Diego’ out of a junior officers’ (as in military officers) club along with 20 cellphones, 2 guns, 4 cars, and some $10,000 USD in cash. El Tiempo reported the arrest without fanfare, without following up on the obvious question – what was he doing there? Another revelation came still later: in May, Chiquita Banana company revealed that it had paid protection money to paramilitaries ‘organizations in Colombia to protect its employees there and voluntarily reported this to the U.S. Justice Department a year ago,’ the Wall Street Journal reported on May 11.

More odd evidence of some kind of split within paramilitary ranks kept piling up. The overall commander of the national paramilitary organization (AUC), Carlos Castano, a man who had confessed in an autobiography to responsibility for hundreds of killings and for narcotrafficking, who had spent his life building the paramilitaries into the right-wing killing machine they had become, disappeared. His wife gave an interview to El Tiempo on April 20 in which she described an attack on Castano in which some of his men had been killed. Her story was that Castano had been ambushed while checking his email. El Tiempo proceeded to inquire after the health of this mass murderer in rather tender terms. “Is he alive or is there a possibility that something has happend to him?” “Are you sure?” This touching concern was echoed by the catholic church, which was moderating the ‘negotiations’ betwen the government and the paramilitaries. The Bishop of Monteria, Julio Cesar Vidal, warned that the church would drop the negotiations if they did not receive some clarification of Castano’s whereabouts and well-being. Conflicting reports continued to come out. One of Castano’s scouts said he had been wounded in the fighting. Salvatore Mancuso, the other major paramilitary chief, stated that there had been no attempt on Castano, only some scattered and accidental crossfire. Shortly afterwards, the Israeli press published a note in which Israeli officials denied that Castano was in Israel, where he had, according to his autobiography, learned much about fighting terrorism at a young age. Such unsolicited denials could only suggest that Castano was, indeed, in Israel.

That wasn’t the kind of ‘foreign training’ the Colombian government was interested in. The government had arrested three Irish men in August 2001 on charges of training FARC, claiming that Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and James Monaghan were IRA militants. They were held for years, but the charges against them collapsed at trial and the men, known as the “Colombia Three” in Ireland, were acquitted of the terrorism charges.

In the midst of these strange happenings that ought to have cast tremendous doubt on the integrity of the Colombian government’s ability to keep its people safe, Uribe launched another bold plan called ‘Plan Patriota’ to ‘change the balance of power’ with the FARC, on April 25. The idea was for a major military offensive of 14-15000 men in the south of the country. In the event, the FARC weren’t dislodged and the plan amounted to more of the same. In Arauca the Joel Sierra human rights group communicated the names and circumstances of the murders and disappearances of a dozen people in that month alone for that region. A Nasa leader, Pablo Andres Tenorio, was arrested on phony charges on April 30 – the community immediately mobilized and prevented his disappearance into the system of jails or extrajudicial executions that was marked for him, physically taking him out of custody. Unfortunately they were not able to prevent the death of Aparicio Nuscue, victim of an attack on April 5 by the Army. He died in hospital a month later.

The Wayuu indigenous people, who live on the border between Venezuela and Colombia, in the La Guajira region, suffered from the brewing conflict and the presence of paramilitaries. The paramilitaries attacked in late April, arriving in the community of bahia Portete on April 18. The community gave the names of 12 murdered. They stated that 30 more had been disappeared. They told stories of rape and torture. More details only emerged a monthl later, as the refugees in Venezuela began to talk to the press about the murders. The massacre had its desired effect: the Wayuu fled some of their ancestral lands – many of them fled across the border to Venezuela. The community circulated its report in early May. On May 9, 56 Colombian paramilitaries were arrested in Venezuela. Some of the Colombians told the press that they were part of a terrorist plot to commit sabotage and assassination, the vanguard of a larger force. For their part, the Wayuu, a people who were never conquered and who are clear about their rejection of paramilitaries, the army, and the FARC in their territories, vowed to launch war against the Colombian government and the paramilitaries. Three of the paramilitaries involved in the massacre were killed soon after the massacre. Days later several dozen families of another indigenous people, the Wiwa, were forcibly displaced in the same region (La Guajira).

At the same time the Union Sindical Obrera (USO), the oil-workers’ union that had been hit so hard (having had 89 of its members murdered since 1988) in the city of Barrancabermeja, was staging a desperate struggle against the privatization of the state oil company ECOPETROL – itself created by a long struggle of workers in 1948. 3600 workers had gone out on strike on April 22 after 18 months of negotiations to try to stop privatization. The government claimed, as privatizers do, that the operation was ineffiicient. The workers showed how the government had already given away massive concessions to multinationals like Occidental Petroleum and ChevronTexaco, costing the company tens of millions. Their strike was immediately declared illegal. Sympathetic actions broke in various parts of the country and the strikers stayed out. The government sent troops to the oilfields. Legal repression was swift – USO workers were immediately locked out, 1000 workers were ‘disciplined’. 93 were fired. In the end they went back to work in exchange for some protections for the workers who had gone on strike. Without massive support, USO could not have succeeded against the government in such a key strategic sector.

Some discussion of Colombian oil is warranted. According to a report by the IPS’s Constanza Vieira published May 10, The country produces some 520,000 barrels of crude a day. This is 40% lower than the level of production in 1999, before ‘Plan Colombia’ brought all its security improvements. Despite this, the increase in prices due to the Iraq war would have more than compensated for the decreased volume in bringing revenues to the company – 1/3 of whose profits become state revenues. Colombia’s reserves are estimated at 1.6 million barrels – but could be far higher. In May, Garry Leech wrote about the political economy of oil in Putumayo, one of the areas of the country hardest hit by ‘Plan Colombia’: “At the outset of Plan Colombia, oil production in this remote Amazon region had been declining for 20 years after reaching a high of some 80,000 barrels a day in 1980. And while production still remained at the relatively anemic level of 9,626 barrels a day in 2003, a slew of new contracts signed between multinational companies and the Colombian government over the past two years promise dramatic increases. The remote municipality of Orito, where four oil pipelines interconnect, is the hub of Putumayo’s oil operations. Two pipelines carry oil from nearby fields currently being exploited by the state oil company Ecopetrol, U.S.-based Argosy Energy and Petrominerales, a subsidiary of Canada’s Petrobank. Another pipeline brings oil from the Ecuadoran Amazon where U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum and Canada’s EnCana have operations. The fourth is the Transandino pipeline, which transports oil from the other pipelines across the Andes to the port of Tumaco on Colombia’s Pacific coast.” Leech’s research shows that the multinational interests have been receiving the lion’s share of the benefits: “Colombian law stipulates that these royalties are supposed to be used for social and economic programs. Under the terms of an incremental production contract it signed in 2002, Petrobank has the rights to 79% of all the oil produced in the Orito field above a baseline production level of 3,200 barrels a day, which it currently exceeds by 1,400 barrels a day. Its partner Ecopetrol receives the remaining 21% of the oil. With Colombia’s sliding royalty scale, Petrobank pays 8% of the value of its 79% share to the national government, which turns over 9% of the royalty payment to the departmental government. Orito municipality then gets 31% of that 9%..

“…In 2003, Petrobank invested $50 million in its Putumayo oil operations. If Ecopetrol had used an equivalent amount from Colombia’s $2.1 billion IMF loan to fund the exploration and production itself, it could have retained all the oil instead of turning over 79% of it to a foreign company. The sale of this oil abroad would have covered operation costs, allowed Colombia to pay back the loan and provided the government with much needed revenue. Such an oil policy implemented throughout the country using IMF loan money to cover start up costs would allow Colombia to control its own valuable resources as do other countries with state oil companies such as Mexico, Venezuela and the world’s largest producer, Saudi Arabia. Clearly though, the IMF’s goal is not to support nationally focused economic projects. .”

Leech also pointed out that in 2001 the Colombian government waived previous regulations that foreign companies had to enter into 50-50 production partnership with Ecopetrol. Now the multinationals can keep 70% in new fields and more in existing fields. New regulations extended the length of production rights and lowered royalties. ECOPETROL was then restructured in 2003, split into three companies – one to negotiate contracts, one to handle duties, and a rump ECOPETROL as oil producer and refiner. In March 2004, Energy Minister announced in Texas that foreign companies could negotiate contracts without entering into partnerships with ECOPETROL. The state oil company remains the purchaser of most of the Colombian oil produced by the foreign companies. It’s a process designed to deny Colombians any benefit from their resources: the government gives the multinationals the concessions. The multinationals take the oil from the ground – and sell it back to ECOPETROL at global market prices, which then either sells it for domestic consumption or exports it at very little profit. This encapsulates the whole project of Uribe: to deliver the country’s resources to multinationals and destroy the opposition. USO’s strike, after 35 days, won a temporary respite: the government agreed not to privatize ECOPETROL, but the workers paid the price – 248 of the workers who had been fired for striking were not restored to their jobs.

Uribe returned to Europe – to Spain – at the end of May. As every tin-pot repressive politician in the world had tried to exploit 9/11 to crack down on political activity, so Uribe was hoping to exploit 3/11 – the terrorist attack in Madrid that left nearly 200 dead – to win international support for his ‘anti-terrorist’ crusade. But like his mentor and arms dealer Jose Maria Aznar, his attempt failed. Vigorous protests took place at his planned speech on May 23. What Uribe hoped would be a solemn moment ripe for political posturing turned into a disgraceful episode in which members of his entourage screamed at the people of the country hosting him that they, the Spanish who protested Uribe, were “narcoterrorists”. Uribe left the scene in a hurry.

The protesters probably did not even have the latest information on the most recent massacre, perpetrated directly by the military, just before Uribe’s trip to Spain began. On Friday May 21st a group of 200 heavily armed men entered the communities of Flor Amarillo and Cravo Charo in the Colombian department of Arauca and perpetrated a massacre. According to witnesses the men were a mixed group of paramilitaries and Colombian soldiers from the following army units: 5th Mobile Brigade, 43rd Counter-guerrilla Battalion of the 18th Brigade and the ‘Narvas Pardo’ Battalion also of the 18th Brigade. Upon arriving the men took away 13 local residents including Julio Vega, a local community leader and regional organiser in the agricultural workers’ trade union. On Saturday May 22nd 11 of the victims were found dead with signs of torture on their bodies outside the nearby village of Pinalito. The Colombian NGO Corporacion Reinciar had written to the Colombian Government on May 20th asking that they protect the communities. According to the NGO, the paramilitaries were threatening people and looting shops and homes, accusing residents of sympathising with FARC guerrillas. The Government did not respond. An anonymous source, a communique from “social organizations who will not leave the shadows” pointed out a coincidence — that the very day of the massacre (May 20), the commander of the armed forces Martin Orlando Carreno made a visit to the military base of Pueblo Nuevo. Pueblo Nuevo is a 30 minute car ride from the site of the massacre (Pinalito and Flor Amarillo of the Tame Municipality). Later, on October 7, paramilitaries would murder unionist Pedro Mosquera, Vice-President of the agricultural worker’s union FENSUAGRO, in the same region of Arauca.

At this time the Cali public sector union SINTRAEMCALI took another desperate action. Vicious repression might be a useful tool in the hands of the Colombian regime, but that regime has learned that repression alone does not work. In Cali, the workers had repeatedly forced the government into agreements and compromises. In between rounds of repression and action, the government’s goals remained the same: to hand the resources of the country and the public sector over to private and multinational interests. While the SINTRAEMCALI occupations of municipal buildings in 2003 forced the government to negotiate a deal, the government retained its power to appoint managers to the public utilities company EMCALI. The government appointed a man named Carlos Alfonso Potes, who, the union’s researchers discovered, was a shareholder in a private utilities company and who, according to the regional prosecutor, had been found guilty of corruption – which ought to have disqualified him from the post. These procedures were overridden by executive order. So the union moved to direct action again – 1600 people occupied the same municipal building, the Central Administrative Building (the CAM Tower), demanding that Alfonso Potes be removed from his post according to legal procedure, an affirmation of EMCALI’s status as a public enterprise, and various guarantees for the lives and human rights of the activists. After four days, the activists themselves decided to come out without their demands met and without being forcibly evicted, in exchange for some promises of dialogue. A week later, the reprisals began – on the morning of June 7, two SINTRAEMCALI workers were badly injured (one lost an eye and a hand) by a letter bomb at their work site, a water and sewerage plant.

Uribe was relatively silent on all this. He did make a bold statement against pacifists and international human rights observers, however. On May 27, he was quoted in the papers saying: “I reiterate to the police: if these [foreign human rights observers] continue to obstruct justice, put them in prison. If they have to be deported, deport them.” As usual, when Uribe talked, the Army moved – making an incursion in the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, a community that declares itself autonomous from all armed actors, days after Uribe’s speech. They checked the documents of the foreign observers, filmed members of the community, asked people detailed questions about themselves and their neighbours, and then just occupied the town center. Apartado had been hit repeatedly for its stance, and was to be hit again. On October 2, paramilitaries disappeared and killed 27-year old Yorbeli Amparo Restrepo, taking her off a bus with impunity in this constantly military-patrolled community.

Another major massacre, attributed to FARC, took place at La Gabarra in mid-June, of 34 peasants in the Colombian department of Norte de Santander. The peasants were apparently ‘raspachines’, those campesinos who occupy the lowest rung of the agricultural economy, harvesting coca leaf for small wages. They were doing this harvesting in a paramilitary-controlled zone. Survivors, quoted in El Tiempo, say it was done by the 33rd front of FARC. If the incident took place the way the papers descrie, FARC would have been following the strategy of the war, increasingly adopted by the FARC, to kill civilian ‘supporters’ or ‘sympathizers’ rather than combatants — in this case, as Wilson Borja (a very decent member of the Colombian Congress) said, they killed poor peasants who were victims of the whole system long before they were killed — in his words, “those who benefit least from the illicit business”.

Borja’s lament expressed a sentiment different from the statements many politicians made about La Gabarra, in which the FARC were denounced for doing things that paramilitaries did daily without drawing any such criticism. But before long it was not FARC but Venezuela that was again in Uribe’s cross-hairs. The 46 AMX-30 battle tanks from Spain that Colombia was in the process of acquiring were suddenly back in the news, only now, no one was claiming they were for ‘counter-narcotics’ or ‘counter-guerrilla’ operations. El Tiempo instead blandly reported on June 18 that the tanks were to be deployed to the Venezuelan border, along with four battalions and a Special Forces group. This new border Brigade was to be in charge of defending the border and protecting the Wayuu indigenous people – who had been displaced by massacres from the paramilitaries and the army, the very army that was now supposed to protect them from Venezuela, where the Wayuu had fled for safety. The tanks were to arrive in August – right in time for the Venezuelan referendum that would decide whether Venezuela’s popular President Hugo Chavez would stay in power or not. Few believed it was coincidence.

Ten days later (June 29), however, another surprise came. The tanks were not coming after all. Suddenly, the border brigade was history. Venezuelan diplomacy had worked: the deal for the tanks had, after all, been signed by Spanish Prime Minister Aznar, who had lost elections shortly afterwards in the wake of the terrorist bombing in Madrid. The new Prime Minister, Zapatero, was left-leaning and saw no reason to honour Aznar’s belligerent arms deals. Thus Spanish weapons were denied America’s Andes war as Spanish troops were denied America’s Iraq war.

Uribe was suspiciously gracious in defeat. So gracious, in fact, that two weeks later, in mid-July, he went to Venezuela to meet Chavez, be photographed hugging Chavez, and make some bizarre jokes. The main item on the agenda was a $98 million, 205km natural gas pipeline to cross both countries to export natural gas through Central America. Perhaps Uribe and his American backers hoped to use megaprojects to win from Venezuela what they couldn’t win by aggression – namely, control of the resources and the economy. That strategy may yet work. To wash down the megaprojects, Uribe came with a healthy dose of flattery for Chavez: “Any work we can think of doing today was already been done by the Liberator (Bolivar)… today, 200 years later, we are trying to make these things happen, so that history doesn’t pass us by.” He apparently said it was time to leave rhetoric behind and said Chavez was “talking and doing, taking advantage of his vigor and dynamism.” He also had fun at his own expense on the tanks issue: “I don’t want the tanks any more; I hope that with the government of President Zapatero we can make a deal where, instead of selling us these tanks, they can sell us something more useful… The only thing I deplore is that I’ve lost the chance to have President Chavez as my teacher. How many tanks will you loan me, President Chavez? Please loan me some tanquecitos!” That was not to be the final word, however. Just days after Chavez won the referendum on August 15, there was another raid in the border region and 12 Venezuelans were killed by Colombian paramilitaries. In November, there were rumours that Colombia was planning to purchase combat aircraft for the Venezuelan border.

If the rumours turned out to be true, those aircraft would become a burden on a devastated economy. In the wake of Uribe’s referendum defeat in October 2003, the British journal the Economist gave Uribe advice. His government’s task, the Economist said, was ‘to shepherd unpopular tax increases through Congress… the referendum had included cuts in wages, pensions and the bureaucracy, aimed at saving around $1.1 billion (or 1.2% of GDP) per year. Instead, the government is now seeking to raise an extra $1 billion in taxes next year, by raising income tax, eliminating VAT exemptions, and levying a tax on pensions. That risks damping down a promising economic recovery. But it is essential to control the fiscal deficit, and to gainsay speculation that Colombia might default on its debt.’

That is precisely what occurred, as Uribe proceeded to get from Congress everything that he had lost in the referendum. As the Economist predicted, the economic recovery was damped. But more importantly, the fruits of recovery were distributed so that inequalties deepened and most never saw recovery at all. Colombia’s biggest firms reported increases in profits, but consumption of basic foods per capita had decreased. Throughout 2004, Colombia, like Peru and Ecuador, were negotiating bilateral free trade agreements with the United States. The US demanded everything – an end to any pretense of protecting Colombia’s agricultural economy, which meant an end to Colombia’s agricultural economy altogether. That fragile economy, in which 12 million of Colombia’s 44 million live, 85% of whom live in poverty, was already in a deep crisis because of land concentration. Small farms of less than 5 ha were 3.5% of the land and 68% of rural households. Meanwhile the top 1% held 42% of the land. Since the first neoliberal ‘opening’ in 1989/90, there were 700,000 ha less under agricultural cultivation, and Colombia now imported 7 million tons of agricultural products annually. As prices of agricultural commodities collapsed, many farmers – though by no means a majority – were forced to turn to coca leaf cultivation on some 120-180 000 ha, and on which 300,000 peasants depended. But US demands at the free trade talks had the potential to derail Uribe’s whole project. Colombian Senator Jorge Enrique Robledo published a column on December 23 in which he confirmed that Colombia’s agricultural economy was on the chopping block. US agricultural subsidies were not in the bilateral agreement. But Colombia’s remaining protections and quotas were to be removed, according to the portfolio published by Colombia’s representative at the free-trade talks, Felipe Jaramillo.

Colombian economist Hector Mondragon suggested during George W. Bush’s 3-hour visit to Colombia in November that the Uribe-Bush marriage is a troubled one. Uribe’s political base is the large landowners who want US help to liquidate peasant populations who stand in the way of lucrative speculation and megaprojects. Bush’s economic base are the oil companies, but no less the agricultural multinationals, who see in South America gigantic captive markets if only local agricultures can be wiped out. Even if Uribe and Bush agree that war is the answer to everything, Uribe’s landowner constituency stands to lose control of the basis of their wealth if ‘free trade’ goes the way the US wants. Furthermore, Bush’s war priorities are not the same as Uribe’s: Even if the US Congress had voted in mid-October to double the number of US troops in Colombia from 400 to 800 and private contractors from 400 to 600, the fact remains that the Bush people are obsessed with West Asia. Colombia, to them, is an afterthought.

As the year came to an end Uribe had more than just a troubled marriage with Bush. He had something close to an uprising to contend with. As in February, the Nasa pointed the way. They spent the year preparing for a major political action against the government. Their platform was simpleTheir platform was simple: respect for life on the planet – at risk in their view, for the autonomy of all peoples and consequent rejection of the militarization and paramilitarization of their territories; rejection of the ‘constitutional reforms’ that Uribe was putting through Congress despite the populace’s rejection of them in the referendum; and a rejection of the ‘free trade’ agreement – the Nasa, who had resisted armed colonization for hundreds of years, had no desire to be wiped out by free trade economics. Against all this they counterposed their ‘Indigenous and Popular Mandate for Life’, to build institutions to respond to the emergency: an indigenous popular congress, a permanent tribunal of the peoples (a kind of popular truth commission), an autonomous system of communication and exchange, and a ‘solidarity economy’. It was a break with the organizing of the past, in which the indigenous would make demands of the government. This march was not to make demands, but to put forth a proposal for change, directly to the country, and begin to make it happen.

The march took place in September, bringing tens of thousands of indigenous and others in a long march from Santander de Quilichao to Cali. In the weeks leading up to the march the Nasa were hit with blow after blow. On August 22, 2004, a commission of leaders left the indigenous community of Toribio, part of the municipality of Toribio in the Department of Cauca, Colombia, to go to a community called Alta Mira in the municipality of San Vicente del Caguan, in the Department of Caqueta (part of the zone ceded to the FARC during the peace dialogues of 1998).. The commission was led by the mayor of the municipality of Toribio, Arquimedes Vitonas, and included Plinio Trochez, an indigenous governor of Toribio, Gilberto Munoz, coordinator of the indigenous university CECIDIC and former mayor of Toribio, Ruben Dario, deputy governor of the reserve of San Francisco, and Erminson Velasco, who was driving the car. Everyone in the car was kidnapped. Initially the government, who had every reason to attack the indigenous leadership to try to derail the march, was suspected. It turned out that the FARC were the kidnappers. But when Alcibiades Escue, another important indigenous leader, was essentially kidnapped from his office in Popayan, it was by police – who took him to jail, on absurd charges of paramilitarism.

The Nasa communities, devastated for a moment, mobilized quickly. A rescue mission of 400 ‘indigeous guards’ traveled to Caguan and, eventually, successfully rescued the entire group. And at the end of the march in Cali, another large delegation of indigenous guards traveled to the prison where Alcibiades Escue was being held – the government announced that the charges against him had been dropped, and he was released to his community.

Neither the kidnapping of Arquimedes Vitonas nor the detention of Alcibiades Escue – both of which were reversed – were able to derail the indigenous march. If the ‘Indigenous and Popular Mandate’ succeeds in its goals and brings a referendum on ‘free trade’, Uribe’s whole project – and, indeed, the US project for the region – could fall. This was shown the more true because not only the march, but a general strike on October 12, which saw 700,000 stop work and 1 million demonstrate in the streets against the ‘free trade’ agreement, proved that the indigenous were not alone. The campaign against the free trade agreement led by Recalca, Salvacion Agropecuaria, MOIR, senator Robledo and many others brought the negotiations out of secrecy into the public light and mobilized large forces against the theft of resources and territory by US and corporate interests. The agreement, set to be signed in early January, has been delayed until March and may yet be derailed.

But if the movements were able to succeed in spite of repression, repression was able to continue despite their success. In the same days as the march, professor Alfredo Correa, a researcher on displacement, was assassinated on September 17 in Barranquilla (Colombia’s fourth city). On October 6, women’s activist Teresa Yarce was assassinated in Medellin. On October 16, uniformed police took and killed two youths, 16-year old Jonathan Jimenez and 17-year old Ancizar Castro, in Ciudad Bolivar. They were taken by police, then delivered to a hospital, where they died – the police then claimed they had died in ‘gang violence’. Ciudad Bolivar is one of the urban centres were a large number of internally displaced peasants (displaced by paramilitary massacres) end up. Some 55% of these are youth under the age of 18. These police murders were part of a more widespread campaign of harassment and violence against young displaced people in the city, and in Colombia’s urban centres more generally. In another region, Calamar, a street vendor named Eldevier Morales was detained on December 16, released several days later, and assassinated within hours of his release. The next day authorities did yet another trademark mass detention of 17 people, mostly human rights activists of one kind or another, holding them for days and then releasing them, according to the NGO ‘Corporacion Reiniciar’.

The department of Arauca continued to be attacked savagely. Justice for Colombia reported that Jose Joaquin Cubides, General Secretary of the agricultural workers union in the department of Arauca, was shot and killed on November 7 in the city of Fortul, Arauca. The Colombian army, specifically members of the 49th ‘Heroes de Taraza’ Counterinsurgency Battalion, had raided his house only three days before. The battalion is known to work with a local paramilitary death squad and is part of the 18th Brigade of the Colombian Army. On the same day commander of the ‘Navas Pardo’ battalion, which had just occupied the community of Corocito in the same Department, told a member of the community that if they did not hand over guerrillas, they would receive a ‘surprise’. The community, hardly in a position to apprehend and hand over guerrillas, worried – since 8 people had recently been disappeared by the military in the region. The next day, around the municipality of Fortul in Arauca, troops of the 5th Mobile Brigade of the Colombian Army used the civilian population as human shields while fighting with the guerrillas. The guerrillas themselves assassinated Mariano Suarez, a 70 year old indigenous elder from Chinchorro, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, according to the authorities as quoted in a communiqui© by ACIN.

On Christmas, paramilitaries under the control of Salvatore Mancuso committed a series of murders in Catatumbo. They installed a checkpoint on December 23, and kidnapped and killed two men. According to a report from the Colombia Support Network, ‘On the morning of December 25, the paramilitaries entered the town of Santa Ines and brought together all of the townspeople. After haranguing them for a while, they separated 6 town residents from the others, blindfolded them, and then murdered them. The identities of 4 of the persons killed are known ‹Leonel Bayona Cabrales, Samuel Perez Abril, Custodio Melo, and William Montano. Bayona was sadistically stoned by paramilitary soldiers who laughed as they threw stones at him, then beat him to death with a club. The paramilitaries also kidnapped Daniel Abril, who has mental problems, and a peasant named Justo Aguilar, and tortured them for several hours. They also stole 15 head of cattle, money and clothing from the town residents. According to reports from the town of Convencion, the paramilitaries on December 25 also kidnapped and killed two adult men, whose identity is still not known, between Convencion and the city of Ocana. The paramilitaries have also displaced residents of other towns near Convencion, preventing the displaced people from seeking refuge in the towns. These displaced people, who number nearly 1,000, lack food and medical attention.’

Mancuso’s paramilitaries are currently in ‘negotiations’ with the government and under ‘ceasefire’. Reuters published a story on December 13 about how these paramilitaries had handed over a number of ranches, houses, businesses, and boats to the government right in Catatumbo, on the Venezuelan border. 1400 fighters from the group had handed over their weapons days before the Christmas massacres in the region. In total, the paramilitaries handed over 6000 ha of land before going off to massacre peasants. Over the past 25 years, land transfer from the poor to the rich due to paramilitary massacre has been to the tune of 20 million ha. The ‘peace process’ with the paramilitaries has enabled 3 of every 10,000 internally displaced people to return to their homes (usually to await another paramilitary attack). A human rights group (CODHES) published a study at the end of the year (reported in El Tiempo on December 21) based on a survey of 1200 forcibly displaced families that 225,000 more people had been forcibly displaced in 2004. 50% of these had been displaced from zones totally controlled by the paramilitaries, 20% from zones in conflict between paramilitaries and guerrillas. The most telling figure in the study, however, was that between 1997-2003, paramilitaries acquired 5 million ha of land through violence. Handing miniscule amounts of that land back to the very state in whose service the violence was done makes little difference. The shell game continued with the lands of narcotraffickers as well: 200 families received lands from convicted narcotraffickers. In the same year 20,000 families had been displaced. Of the 4 million ha in the hands of the narcotraffickers, the government has promised to distribute 160 000 ha and has actually distributed less than 10% of that 4%.

The last word of 2004 was not given by the paramilitaries or by Uribe, however, but by the indigenous again. Six years after the territories of the Embera Katio of the Alto Sinu and Verde rivers were inundated by the hydroelectric dam of Urra SA corporation, they fought on against the megaproject that had undermined their livelihoods and destroyed so many of their lives (In 2001, Embera leader Kimy Pernia Domico was disappeared by paramilitaries for leading the fight against the Urra dam). The Colombian constitution had obliged a much more comprehensive review and consultation with the Embera before such a project: this gave the indigenous legal grounds on which to fight. In October, they occupied one of Urra’s office buildings, demanding a full review and ultimately a revocation of Urra’s license. Over 400 gathered in front of Urra’s offices in Monteria. After 15 days the government agreed to enter a negotiating process with them. As with the public sector union in Cali, so with the Embera – the government dragged out the negotiations while trying to undermine them in practice. Thus Christmas found the Embera in ‘Permanent Assembly’ once again, first in front of the offices of the Environment Ministry in Bogota and then, once the riot police attacked, in front of the offices of the indigenous organization ONIC. 372 people, among them 185 children, were out on the street, surrounded by menacing armed authorities, demanding their rights, refusing to be silenced.

This is not a bad place to end a story of Colombia for now. The system won’t abandon its machinery of death without a fight. There are more battles ahead. And there are people ready to fight them. Whether they can win or not depends on them, but hopefully not on them alone.

A note on sources

My sources are predominantly human rights reports and alerts by various Colombian organizations and support organizations; the Colombian press, specifically El Tiempo; and interviews and discussions with Colombian activists and analysts in and outside Colombia. I rely on the English-language press and the alternative English-language press for secondary sources and analysis. Write me if you have questions or comments.