7-16-05, 12:12 pm
'Welcome to Talking Point. I’m Bridget Kendall and today we’re bringing you a very special program from Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, in Latin America. Colombia has got a reputation for violence and attempts by the government to battle against left wing guerrilla insurgents on the one hand and right wing paramilitary groups on the other are complicated by the fact that both armed groups are thought to be deeply embroiled in drugs trafficking and production.' (BBC Talking Point, 2004)
This is the image of Colombia that the BBC presents to the world. It creates the illusion that this ‘democratic’ Colombian government battles against fascists, communists, and drug cartels. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is an oppressive regime that uses these lies as a smokescreen. The BBC has collaborated.
The main Colombian magazine, Semana presents the same picture. It boasts that the Colombian president – President Uribe – is 'an expert in negotiation,' who 'studied the peaceful resolution of conflicts at Harvard,' and is 'an excellent administrator,' who ‘reduced the number of State employees in the Antioquian region from 14,000 to 5,700 people.’ His martial spirit materialises at military parades and beauty pageants; the national flag is swirling behind him and the national anthem is playing; his eyes fill with tears as he gazes into the neoliberal future. 'Hard hand; big heart' is his slogan – his call to battle – in the crusade against the terrorism that he and his associates create.
The president appeared in person in one of the Colombian Big Brother reality shows. The prettiest contestant reached orgasm. ‘It’s a privilege’, she gasped. A nice young man salutes. Three of them line up in the garden under the stars, place their hands on their hearts, and scream to the heavens, ‘Thank you, señor presidente, for believing in us.’
But President Uribe is Big Brother. He has roots in drug traffic and death squads. In 1991, the U.S. Department of External Affairs reported that he ‘worked for the Medellin cartel’ and was ‘a close personal friend’ of the infamous drug lord, Pablo Escobar. Between 1995 and 1997 – in his role as governor of the Antioquian region – he recruited hundreds of paramilitaries. CINEP – the main Colombian human rights research organisation – blames these paramilitaries for 939 political assassinations and the torture of 94 dissidents. The British Council on the other hand awarded him a scholarship to study law in England. He is also a senior associate member of Saint Antony’s College, Oxford. These British institutions have cleaned his international image. They collaborate with this murderous regime.
His government refuses to fund the social services until there is peace. Instead his regime funds the Armed Forces and paramilitaries and maximises profits through murder, political oppression, and mass detentions. His Minister of Defence boasted that 125,778 dissidents were rounded up in his first year of office. On the 1st of May, this year, eight members of his riot police formed a circle and kicked a 15 year old child to death in the centre of the capital, in broad daylight, in front of his companions. His regime decrees that paramilitaries – death squads – should be immune from prosecution. The one condition is that none of these assassins denounces the politicians and businessmen that hire them. More than 5,000 paramilitaries have been relocated in the main cities and ‘zones of rehabilitation’ that coincide with oil installations and mineral resources. Local populations live in dread. The government has also recruited millions of paid informants. Neighbours are supposed to report ‘suspicious behaviour’ in mobile police stations – ‘denunciation centres’ – that are placed at strategic points in the cities. There are soldiers and police everywhere. They have total impunity. The main message of this regime is that you must murder or spy or die. This neoliberal government has privatised the right to live.
In spite of – or rather because of - these careful precautions, Colombian human rights statistics are horrendous. CINEP attributed 1,339 political assassinations to the Armed Forces and paramilitaries in 2003. Amnesty International claims that around 70,000 Colombian people have been murdered for political reasons in the last 20 years. Compared to the statistics that the Intercongregational Commission for Justice and Peace produced – 9,000 political assassinations in Argentina in 8 years of dictatorship, 2,666 political assassinations in 17 years of dictatorship in Chile – this ‘democratic’ Colombian State that has murdered 70,000 political opponents in 20 years has transcended all notions of horror.
The Colombian Ministry of Trade boasts that the nation exported around 3.4 billion dollars of oil and oil products, 1.4 billion dollars of coal, 800 million dollars of coffee, 700 million dollars of flowers, 400 million dollars of bananas, 200 million dollars of sugar and 80 million dollars of emeralds in 2003. It also produced around 2 billion dollars of minerals and its total exports were around 13 billion dollars. It has the largest open cast coal mine, and the biggest gold reserves, and is the main source of emeralds on the planet.
But the population suffers. The main Colombian citizens’ rights group reports that around 18.9 million Colombians suffer from hunger, 16.7 million don’t have access to doctors, 1.6 million children can’t attend school. More than 50,000 young Colombian women have been sold in brothels around the world. UNICEF adds that more than a million Colombian children suffer from hunger, that around 25,000 Colombian children prostitute themselves, and that 5,000 Colombian children are murdered every year. Eduardo Galeano – the Uruguayan dissident – asked the billion dollar question: ‘How many are denied the sun and the salt?’
Why?
The main reason for these human rights tragedies is that the transnationals use the Armed Forces and the paramilitaries to maintain control of the oil and mining regions. Father Giraldo, the head of CINEP, describes the process: ‘Paramilitaries ordered the inhabitants to lie down in the streets, identified Juan Camacho – member of the local union of small miners – pumped seven bullets into him, decapitated him, played football with his head, and stuck the skull on a stake that faced the mines.’ Two million people have fled for their lives. Thousands beg in the streets of the cities. Others live in squalor.
British petroleum – BP–Amoco – drains around a billion dollars of oil every year from the Casanare region and has used British mercenaries to train the police to ‘control’ the local population. The editor of a regional paper reports that all dissidents have been assassinated or silenced. There are secret mass graves. To criticise BP is an act of suicide.
Occidental has drained more than 800 million barrels of oil from the Arauca region, has dumped 5 billion barrels of contaminated water into a region of mysterious forests and sacred lakes, and has reduced the Guahibo people to malnutrition, alcoholism, and prostitution.
The U’wa people attempt to explain that, ‘Oil is the blood of Mother Earth; if She dies we all die,’ but no–one ever listens. The Colombian conglomerates also drain blood. The Ardilla Lulle group had around three billion dollars, the Sarmiento Angulo group had around 7.5 billion, the Santo Domingo group around eight billion, and the Antioqueno group had around 11.5 billion dollars in fixed assets, in 2002. The Ardilla Lulle group produces the soft drinks. The Santo Domingo group makes all the beer.
The Antioqueno group controls national production of coffee, chocolate, textiles, and construction materials. Antioquia has been the centre of colonisation since the Spanish Conquest 500 years ago. First they stole the gold. Then the ‘paisas’ created monopolies of Colombian tobacco, cotton, textiles, flowers, coffee, drugs, fashion, based on horrific levels of violence. The Colombian president is from the same region and culture and represents the same ruthless interests.
The conglomerates have their own banks and finance companies, lend at impossible rates of interest to their desperate clients, bankrupt local businesses, and squeeze millions of Colombian families into hunger, homelessness, and helplessness. Two conglomerates – Ardilla Lulle and Santo Domingo – own the two main television and radio channels. These stations promote the products of the conglomerates and hide the horror of the regime in an endless stream of improbable soap operas and manufactured dreams. They are crucial in the selling and marketing of the nation and people: in the creation of this monster with a human face. The Colombian drug lords earn billions of dollars. In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar – head of the Medellin cartel – ordered his child assassins to bump off the local policemen. His kids assassinated 120 cops in three months. Pablo murdered all the politicians that dared to oppose him, detonated 120 car bombs in the capital, blew a passenger plane out the sky, bombed the offices of the ‘secret’ police. These tactics paid off. A United Nations commission calculated that the cartels accumulated around 32 billion dollars between 1982 and 1998. Escobar’s mum has always maintained that her son was ‘a born businessman.’ The chief of his hit men – Otoniel Gonzalez Franco – has been released from prison. The United States Armed Forces use the Colombian Armed Forces against their own people. They train them in methods of oppression – assassinations and disappearances, massacres and mutilations, mass detentions and diabolical tortures – that are designed to annihilate the artificial threats of ‘communism’ and ‘drugs’ and ‘terrorism’ that these methods are designed to create. The U.S. creates conflicts inside – rather than between – countries, in order to maximise the sale of arms, and in order to legitimise their use. They use the myth of nationalism in order to clear the mutilated conscience of their soldiers, to use poor people to kill other poor people, in order to maintain control of natural resources. In the 1960s, President J. F. Kennedy called this ‘the Alliance for Progress.’ In the 1980s, the Colombian government, the Armed Forces, the drug cartels, and associations of ranchers and banana producers contracted British and Israeli mercenaries to train paramilitaries in the same aims and methods: to target political dissidents and to maximise profits. These death squads slaughtered around 266 union leaders and 1,336 members of labour unions in the 1990s. Last year, paramilitaries assassinated 17 leaders and 61 members of the main Colombian union. The United States Congress also donates billions of dollars in military aid. United Technologies and Textron of Texas charged around 300 million dollars for the helicopters that their mercenaries use to fumigate drug plantations. The herbicide has poisoned and decimated rural populations and crops in Colombia, indigenous people and Nature. These measures have succeeded. The U.S. and Colombian cartels and armed groups have more control than ever over cocaine and heroin production and distribution and the prices of their commodities in the United States are lower than ever.
But that is beside the point. The principle purpose of the U.S. bases on Colombian soil is to control and cull the local population and to defend international oil installations and pipelines and mines. This trail of blood leads to the lovely seaside snap that appears in Semana magazine in December 2004. President Uribe is blushing, the sun is smiling, and so is President Bush. They are happy, and why not? The president of the most psychopathic nation on the planet is mumbling this sweet, memorable, magical sentence – ‘Uribe is my amigo’ – and promising his kindred spirit billions more dollars of military aid and arms.
Can it get any worse than that?
Political resistance
The FARC and the ELN are the main armed resistance to the oppression of the regime. They represent the sadness of the Colombian people. The FARC protects small farmers. The ELN targets transnational oil installations and mines. In 1964, the United States and Colombian Armed Forces dropped bombs and napalm on Marquetalia. The local population hid in the forest. 18 children died in one raid. Prisoners were slaughtered. This is the origin of the FARC and the ELN. Camilo Torres – priest and professor of social science – enlisted. Colombian soldiers shot him dead on his first mission.
In 1985, the FARC formed its own political faction – the Union Patriotica – that proposed to redistribute the land and nationalise the oil and mineral resources. The two main political parties – the Liberals and the Conservatives – ordered the army, police and paramilitaries to erase all trace of the U.P. In Segovia, Antioquia, in 1988, paramilitaries butchered 43 suspected Union Patriotica supporters – and their children – in one hour. The local river literally ran with blood. The murders continue. More than 5,000 of them – and their children and friends - have been assassinated to date. It is genocide. The intention is to annihilate all opposition to – and traces of - the atrocities of this regime.
Paramilitaries murdered the last editor of the communist newspaper – ‘Voz’ – but the present editor battles on. An act of god saved his life three years ago. The transmission from the main radio station, RCN, blocked the signal that was supposed to detonate the bomb that the paramilitaries had placed inside the premises. The bomb had enough power to blow up half the street. The newspaper organises an annual fair to discuss political and human rights issues and subsidise publication. In 2004, one of their comrades summed up the courage of the Colombian resistance: ‘They have killed a lot of us. They want to kill us too. They probably will. But there are always more of us. There are always more.’
Cultural resistance
Last December, the Embera people fled from their mountain refuge in the North-west of Colombia after a hydroelectric power station flooded their land. The program was sponsored by the World Bank. Embera leaders were murdered by paramilitaries. The daughter of one of these dead heroes explained that: ‘The Embera people feel the death of the river like the murder of a brother or sister. The dam has poisoned the fish and brought a plague of flies and disease. The sacred forest is dead’. Embera women have been pressured into prostitution. Their children wander barefoot through the cold, hard streets of the capital. One more indigenous culture has been decimated. How sad and terrible is that?
This is one more episode in more than 500 years of rape, torture, massacre, marginalisation, annihilation. Spanish murderers – ‘paramilitaries’ – rounded up the local people, set their dogs on them, tore them to shreds, desecrated their tombs, melted down the gold. Millions of indigenous people have been slaughtered to build Colombian cities and settlements and roads, ranches and plantations, oil installations and mines, missions and schools. Nature and Life have been mutilated and erased.
International bonanzas in natural resources – the theft of gold, dye, wood, furs, rubber, quinine, oil, titanium and uranium from indigenous land – have pushed these people from the coastal regions to the tops of the highest mountains; government troops have driven them from the sacred rivers and waterfalls and lakes and fertile regions into the murky depths of the rain forests. In Guatemala, in the 1970s, U.S.-trained troops tracked down the indigenous people – the Mayas - tied their hands behind their backs, tore out their entrails, and plunged wooden stakes into their hearts. Like vampires. For a couple of dollars you can visit the ruins of their temples. It’s a tourist’s paradise.
More than 800 U.S. soldiers and 18 thousand Colombian soldiers and billions of dollars of U.S. aid – fighter planes, helicopters, rocket launchers, cluster bombs, tanks, machine guns – are currently being used to fumigate the rain forests and flush out the FARC guerrilla group. The FARC have melted into the mist and the transnationals have gained control of the Northern Putumayo region that is rich in precious metals and – of course – oil! International companies privatise biological resources. There are plans to build a Panamerican transportation route through this natural paradise in order to drain the last drop of blood and cash. National Geographic magazine plans to record the genetic code of the indigenous people. Is this the end?
First the indigenous people fought fire with fire. The Caribe people fought like tigers against the Spanish murderers. U’wa leaders leapt to their deaths off the cliffs. Less than a hundred years ago, Quinton Lame tried to form an independent indigenous republic and initiated a series of land occupations. His resistance was crushed. Their latest proposals are based on the laws of Nature - on the right to plant their own seeds and to bring up their own children on their own land – on resistance to ‘the globalisation of alienation’. How long can they hold out?
Portugal, France, Holland and England transported about 150,000 people from Africa to Colombia to supplement indigenous labour. Indigenous people had almost been decimated. Less than one in five black people survived the slave ships. Most of them slaved in the gold mines and plantations. The rich colonial families rented the others out as labourers and prostitutes. In 1578, the regime declared that rebel slaves should be castrated or executed. But hundreds of them escaped to form ‘palenques’ – independent black communities – that shared the land between their members.
Black culture ebbs and flows around the Caribbean region. Haiti is the centre of voodoo. Their priests channel the power of the Catholic saints through the medium of dolls to penetrate the minds of their enemies. Cuba is the main source of salsa music: a fusion of African rhythms and social conscience and the North American ‘big band’ sound. The Panamanian singer, Ruben Blades criticises mindless middle class consumerism: ‘Drowned in debt to maintain their status, in their wedding receptions and their cocktail lounges.’ The Colombian composer, Joe Arroyo stands up for his black brothers and sisters in his album, Rebellion.
Jamaica is the centre of reggae music and Rastafarianism. The Rastafarians see the African continent in terms of Zion - the Promised Land – that has been robbed and raped by Europeans. The U.S. activist, Malcolm X inspires black resistance in the region because - as he said - ‘Black is beautiful’. In the Colombian territories of San Andres and Choco, black culture and resistance is represented in the dignity and sensuality and beauty of the inhabitants.
Colombian cities are ruled with a rod of iron. The North of Bogotá is a transnational hell of high rise apartments, MacDonald, Coca-cola, Cable TV. The Colombian middle class operates in a mental state that alternates between blissful ignorance and cold indifference; somewhere between cynicism and hedonism. Privatisation and corruption has demolished hospitals, schools, and human rights, in return for an IMF ‘loan’ of five billion dollars and a national ‘debt’ of around 33 billion dollars of arms and bribes. At night in the capital, the police bundle homeless people into their blinded vans, shoot them in the head or chest, and dump their dead bodies on the slopes beneath Monserrate, the main church. The Colombian Church is cold and indifferent. In Barranquilla, in the 1980s, hundreds of street people were murdered – and chopped up - inside the Universidad Libre. Their organs and limbs were sold to the medical students at cut-throat prices.
Districts such as Cazuca in the South of the capital are recruitment camps for paramilitaries. Last year, a local hit man was sentenced to 28 years in prison for the assassination of 37 people, including his 14 year old ex-girlfriend. He was indignant. ‘I killed at least 137,’ he insisted.
The Colombian government is not quite as democratic as the BBC claims. A weary farmer that we meet on a dusty road in the middle of nowhere sums up the current state of affairs:
I worked hard all my life to build my farm. It was beautiful. I had horses, cattle, chickens, fish. Then the guerrilla arrived and robbed me. Next, the paramilitaries. Last of all, the Armed Forces. They forced me to leave forever. They did such terrible things that I can’t talk about it. I have nightmares every night. They robbed me of all my illusions. But now I’m happy. My wife remembers our beautiful farm and cries herself to sleep. But no, not me. I’m happy. Every drop of air I breathe - or water I drink or morsel of bread - tastes good. Because I am alive. Finally I understand what life means. And how beautiful it is.
