On July 5 the Interamerican Human Rights Court demanded that the Colombian government adopt provisional measures to protect the indigenous Kankuamo people. This decision was the result of a case brought to the Interamerican Human Rights Commission against the Colombian state in October 2003 by the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia and the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ collective.
The court demanded that the government seek out and punish those responsible for the forcible displacement of so many Kankuamo. Since the 1990s, the state and paramilitaries have killed at least 166 people. Today they are in a lot of danger, as 300 families have been displaced. 50 Kankuamo people were killed in 2003 alone.
In other declarations, SINALTRAINAL, the food worker’s union that represents the bottling workers at the Coca Cola bottling plants among other workers, made a declaration with the “Caravan for Life” of internationals who joined Colombian unionists earlier this month. They cited the successes of the campaign against Coke and the need for continuing work to support Colombian unionists, who hold the world’s most dangerous job.
And, while remembering the explicitly political state-backed violence of paramilitaries who try to bust unions and clear territory for multinationals by murdering organizers and community leaders and massacring people, it’s important to remember the social violence as well. I received a testimony from a friend in Cali, Colombia, about an incident a month ago.
Cristian Felipe Gomez Renteria and Ricardo Ortega Gonzales, 16 years old, two kids from one of Cali’s poorest neighbourhoods, who were picked up by a municipal police patrol on their way home from visiting friends. The parents and friends of the kids went from police station to police station trying to figure out where the kids were, being told at each stage to look somewhere else. They were called at home and told their children were dead and where to find the bodies. The bodies, when they were found, showed signs of torture. The group who filed the report, with Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Cali, and the regional Ombudsperson, provided written testimony and photos of the children (I don’t have those, only the report). Of course there has been no investigation, which is what the community group that filed the report really wants, so nothing definitive can be said other than what the parents and friends of the kids attest happened.
The violence is usually political, but the goals are social, and sometimes it is simply that brutal: literally picking up poor children, murdering them, and dumping them.
This democratic social cleansing is the model for repairing the damage done by the dictatorial regime in Venezuela, should the referendum in August succeed. On that subject, James Petras (who I like, though not about everything) has a piece about the referendum and Carter’s vile role in Counterpunch. This section by Petras contains what everyone needs to understand about Venezuela, the knowledge that has motivated all of my (miniscule) efforts to work on Venezuela:
If Chavez is defeated and if the Right takes power, it will privatize the state petroleum and gas company, selling it to US multinationals, withdraw from OPEC, raise its production and exports to the US, thus lowering Venezuelan revenues by half or more. Internally the popular health programs in the urban “ranchos” will end along with the literary campaign and public housing for the poor. The agrarian reform will be reversed and about 500,000 land reform recipients (100,000 families) will be turned off the land. This will be accomplished through extensive and intensive state bloodletting, jailing and extrajudicial assassination, and intense repression of pro-Chavez neighborhoods, trade unions and social movements. The apparently “democratic” referendum will have profoundly authoritarian, colonial and socially regressive results if the opposition wins.
