FOR Colombia Peace Update New Years 2009

Call on the State department to act [1] and make a donation to ensure that this vital peace work continues [2].

Happy new year! In this month's update you will find a lot of exciting news about the struggle for peace in Colombia:

Click here to learn more and read the letter from NGOs to Ambassador Brownfield and Attorney General Iguarán. [5]

"Speak Truth to Power" takes on a new dimension when you realize you are under surveillance! That is exactly the position we at FOR find ourselves in once again. In 2005, we informed FOR supporters that more than 10,000 pages of FBI files had been released to us, documenting decades of surveillance of the organization. Now, we have just learned that for two full years - since December 2006 - our Latin America program has been targeted and monitored by state agents. Specifically, the e-mail messages intercepted include FOR communication in the US and with Colombia!

This covert action is a direct violation of our right to privacy as a humanitarian activist organization. FOR's e-mail account was among more than 150 e-mail accounts of human rights organizations, journalists, academics, and labor organizations that were targeted. We've also learned that the Colombian military paid for computer hard drives "of interest to intelligence" agencies. The June 2007 break-in and stealing of FOR's Bogotá office computers [6] containing sensitive files on our work with members of Colombian peace communities may have been a direct result of this state-sanctioned surveillance.

FOR is meeting this attack on civil rights by calling on U.S. and Colombian officials for a full investigation, sanctioning of officials responsible, and the erasure of intercepts. Join us in exposing this militaristic intervention. Click here to write to the State Department's chief for human rights concerns. [7]

We also hope you will take this opportunity to show the Colombian and U.S. regimes that you support democracy, privacy, and self-determination by making a donation reaffirming your commitment to FOR [8].

Update: Ten days ago, we first announced the intercepts on our email [9] placed by the Colombian judicial police for the last two years, apparently using surveillance software provided by the United States, and asked you to write the State Department. More than 500 people sent faxes to Assistant Secretary of State Kramer! If you weren't one of them, click here to send your letter now [10].

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statement by the Pioyá Indigenous Council [11], November 27th 2008

Last night, the Nasa indigenous community, together with the Indigenous Guard rescued six officials from Jamabaló County and an Education Ministry representative who had been kidnapped by an illegal group on the road between Jambaló, Silvia and the city of Popayán. The seven were traveling in a mini-bus at 6pm when they were intercepted by four hooded and armed men who identified themselves as members of the FARC.

After intimidating them they were taken toward the Pioyá Indigenous Territory with purpose of taking them into the jungle. An hour later, the Jambaló community learned of events and immediately called indigenous authorities, who quickly began operations in the area to rescue those kidnapped. When the kidnappers realized they were being pursued by the community, they had to separate in two groups: three guerrillas took a couple and the other group took the rest in the vehicle, at about 9pm. The community continued in pursuit until they surrounded them, so that they were forced to abandon the captives. "The Indians are here, the Council is here, better to leave them," the guerrillas said when they felt the community near, said Emilce Muñoz, one of those kidnapped.

While this was happening, another group of men, women, youth and children, guided by the community's radio station, followed the trail of the couple until they caught up with them at midnight. The guerrillas tried to intimidate the community by firing shot in the air, but the resistance of a civilian community with its words and thought was stronger, and they managed to rescue the last two captives. After the pursuit, the subversives left behind a revolver, now held by the Pioyá indigenous authorities.

This is not the first time these events have occurred in indigenous territories, especially Pioyá, where the Nasa community has taken action to resist - the rescue of a Swiss citizen in 2003, rescue of helicopter using public funds in 2006, deactivation of anti-personnel mines in El Carmen settlement, eradication of marijuana this year, and now the rescue of seven kidnapped people.

In a public act, the events [of November 26] were denounced and the confiscated weapon was destroyed as a rejection of all the armed groups that provoke imbalance in our communities. Because we don't agree with an army that victimizes the civilian population with 'false positives' nor with guerrillas that say they are of the people while the attack the people's rights.

For a longer first-hand account in Spanish of these amazing events, click here [12].

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[13] A new 13-minute video from Witness for Peace documents the violence of war. Click here to watch now. [14]

After seeing this shocking story - just one of thousands - please take action today!

Demand that Congress immediately end all funding to the abusive Colombian military. Click here [15] to send a message to your member of Congress.

Please also send a message of support [16] to members of Jose's family--including Martha--who have risked their lives to speak out about her father's murder. The Giraldo family urged our friends at Witness for Peace to use their original video footage of the day their father was murdered. We are humbled by their courage to share their story, despite the risks to their own security.

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Presbyterian Accompaniment Program in Colombia [17], initiated by the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, in response to requests from Colombian Presbyterians.

FOR applauds this prophetic statement by the U.S. Presbyterian Church, and we urge other churches and faiths to follow the Presbyterians' example.

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Center for International Policy [18]

Social conflict has overtaken the center of the political stage, displacing President Alvaro Uribe, who merely repeats the script that brought him so much success in the war: the Indians, sugarcane workers, teachers, government workers, truckers, and anyone else who protests and mobilizes is being manipulated by the FARC guerrillas.

"If you watch what is happening in Cauca department, you can understand that a new political perspective has substituted social action for armed confrontation," says journalist and sociologist Alfredo Molano. In Cauca, in southwestern Colombia, tens of thousands of Nasa Indians along with other ethnicities have been on a "Minga por la Vida," a collective mobilization in support of life values, since Oct. 12. And an equal number of sugarcane cutters have been on strike for two months. Something is changing in Colombia.

So far in 2008, the government has hit the FARC rebel forces hard, but political initiative no longer resides in the president's Nariño Palace offices. In the street, ways of doing politics are being reconfigured into mass actions that cannot be denounced as terrorism, as the president and his closest ministers would wish. The temptation to criminalize social protest can lead to a grave failure for Uribe, because people are beginning to overcome their fear, and even the union movement is showing its face.

Strong denunciations of human rights violations are beginning to appear at the same time. Uribe was forced to retire 27 military officers in a scandal that cost the Army commander, General Mario Montoya, his job. It was proven that military troops kidnapped poor young men from urban peripheries and later counted them as dead "guerrillas" in the mountains. Three thousand members of the military are being investigated by the justice system. In the last televised U.S. presidential debate, Barack Obama told John McCain that as long as trade union members were being murdered in Colombia, the Free Trade Agreement would not be signed.

Hundreds of Protests

September and October have been filled with strikes, work stoppages, and demonstrations. Federal Justice Department workers carried out a prolonged strike for better wages and a department budget that would guarantee its autonomy. The government declared a state of "internal disturbance," an outlandish reaction showing the mindset of the government that thinks it sees guerrillas behind every union, every strike, and every protest. Shortly afterward, federal workers in the electoral system, the "Registraduría," followed suit, as later did teachers and truck drivers who had been on strike in August.

On Sept. 15, 12,000 sugarcane cutters went on strike and occupied eight sugar mills in Cauca Valley. The cutters, almost all of whom are Afro-Colombians, arise at four in the morning, work from 6:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. under a punishing sun, and return home around 8:00 p.m., after making 5,400 slashes with their machetes and inhaling smoke from the burning canes and the herbicide glyphosate used on the plantations.

They earn about $10 a day and must pay for their own social security, tools, work clothes, and transportation to the cane field. At dusk, long brown silhouettes can be seen along the Pan-American Highway between Cali and Popayán, staggering like zombies after a criminally brutal workday.

At the beginning of the strike, they described their miserable living and working conditions and won the support of a good part of the population that usually turns its back on demands by Afro-Colombians and indigenous people. The authorities were surprised by the long continuation of a strike they thought would be over in a few days. The demands are simple: the cutters want contracts and wages for days not worked when the mills are shut down and for days when they seek medical treatment, since accidents at work disable 200 workers each year. And they want to eliminate the mobile scales that tip in the owners' favor.

For the government and the Association of Sugarcane Growers, the main problem is that the strike forced the importation of sugar from Ecuador and Bolivia, paralyzed the production of ethanol, and raised the price of gasoline. In a show of little common sense, the minister of Social Protection told the parliament that the strike was not a social problem but a protest by criminals. Several cane cutters were detained, and it was decided to expel foreign journalists who were covering the strike.

The labor reforms approved in Colombia in 1990 and, especially, in 2002, completely deregulated the labor market. In 1992, for each temporary job, five permanent ones were created. With the establishment of the Associated Work Cooperatives (CTAs), labor's map was turned on its head: in the first 10 months of 2008, for each permanent job, 10 temporary jobs were created, according to a study by the National University.

With the CTAs, employers avoid paying fiscal costs and other taxes to the state and enjoy a huge reduction in labor costs. The U.S. Congress questioned the "dumping" of the labor force, among other issues, in order to freeze the signing of the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia.

The cane cutters redoubled their resistance to the owners, who had to spend 54 days negotiating with delegates from the Sinalcorteros Union. The cutters were unable to eliminate the CTAs or get an agreement on direct contracts, but they won a 12% increase in wages, control over the weighing scales, provision of tools, broader owner coverage of missed work for illness or accidents, and a work day ending at 4:00 p.m. The union came out of this strengthened: it went from 870 to 3,000 members.

Deterioration in working conditions and the constant increase in the cost of food is at the root of the re-launching of the work protest. That is why Molano, persecuted by a government that forced him into a six-year exile, insists that: "The current protest is the tip of the iceberg of a social movement that can move toward the democratization of the country." The national strike by the CUT union on Oct. 23, the first of its magnitude in years, can be taken as a sign of evolving changes.

The Great Indigenous "Minga"

The most important protest, which disturbs the government, began on Oct. 12-the Minga of Indigenous Peoples-a mobilization of collective and community work that seeks to reverse the situation of Colombia's 100 ethnic groups and was called by the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC), and Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN).

There are five demands: rejection of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, which they consider an agreement "between owners and against the people"; repeal of the constitutional reforms that subject indigenous peoples to isolation and death; rejection of Plan Colombia, "which infests our lands and sows them with displacement and death"; government fulfillment of its agreements after the 1991 El Nilo massacre-in which 20 Indians were killed from the Nasa tribe, the most mobilized and best organized indigenous group-and that include the transfer of thousands of acres of land promised by the state as compensation.

The indigenous mobilization began with the blocking of the strategically important Pan-American Highway by some 10,000 people who were brutally attacked by the armed forces, with two dead and some 90 wounded, mostly from gunshots. The communities retreated and occupied other sections of the highway. When the government refused to meet with them, they began a march toward Cali, joined by sugarcane workers and other union groups.

As on previous occasions, the Indians were catalysts for social action, since their demands are more political than those of other sectors, and they are better able to explain them. They denounced the fact that in the six years of the Uribe administration, 1,243 Indians were murdered from the 100-plus ethnic groups in Colombia, and 54,000 were displaced from their lands. The motto, "We are all cane cutters, we are all Indians," showed a new political and social connection in a country until recently polarized, and paralyzed, by war.

In Cali more that 20,000 indigenous people waited for Uribe to show up in order to begin a round of conversations, after having walked for a week along the Pan-American Highway. Uribe finally arrived as the Indians, tired of waiting, were leaving. That mis-encounter of Sunday, Oct. 19, was not improved by the Nov. 2 meeting in La María (Piendamó), where thousands of indigenous people have been gathered since Oct. 12 and have formed what they call a Land of Dialogue, Coexistence, and Negotiation.

After six hours of listening to presidential arrogance and providing data to show the continual violation of human rights in Colombia, the Indigenous and Popular Minga decided to "walk the word," to keep walking in support of life. They actually took the same path as all the indigenous peoples in the continent-after dozens of meetings, they decided to keep moving forward.

For the full text of this article, go to: http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5725 [19]

Translated for the Americas Policy Program by Maria Roof. Raúl Zibechi is international analyst for Brecha of Montevideo, Uruguay, lecturer and researcher on social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina, and adviser to several social groups. He is a monthly collaborator with the Americas Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org [20]).