RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Women’s Peace Caravan Heads to Epicentre of War

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

MOCOA, Colombia, Nov 24 2003 (IPS) - Continuing reports of skirmishes and the dynamiting of oil pipelines and bridges in the southern Colombian department of Putumayo did not daunt the 3,000 women who arrived in the area – the epicentre of the civil war – from all over the country on Monday.

Continuing reports of skirmishes and the dynamiting of oil pipelines and bridges in the southern Colombian department of Putumayo did not daunt the 3,000 women who arrived in the area – the epicentre of the civil war – from all over the country Monday.

Delegates of 315 organisations from eight regions, along with international observers and reporters, drove in 96 buses to Mocoa, the provincial capital of Putumayo, in the foothills of the Andes mountains.

Moncoa Mayor Miguel Ruano named the members of the peace caravan ”guests of honour”, and declared Tuesday a ”civic day” in commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

Travelling with the women are international observers from Germany, Ecuador, Spain, the United States, France, Peru and Switzerland, as well as a delegation of the international organisation Clowns Without Borders.

The caravan plans to enter territory plagued by fighting between the army, leftist guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitary groups. The buses will drive to the port towns of Puerto Caycedo and Puerto Asís, in the west-central part of the war-torn department.

Putumayo is one of the hottest areas in Colombia’s four-decade armed conflict, and is the focal point of the government’s U.S.-backed aerial spraying campaign against drug crops.

An estimated 66,000 hectares of coca are planted in Putumayo, an impoverished region along the Ecuadorian border where peasant farmers in remote areas have no livelihood but their coca crops.

Within the framework of Plan Colombia – a U.S.-financed anti-drug and counterinsurgency strategy – U.S. advisers are commanding the spraying operations in this isolated region. The planes used to fumigate crops are accompanied by helicopter gunships.

Washington is providing more than 605 million dollars this year for the spraying efforts, which have come under criticism from local authorities and residents in the area, as well as national and international environmental and human rights groups. Activists and health professionals have documented extensive damages caused by the fumigation to human health, livestock, and food crops.

The peace caravan will drive Tuesday to the small town of Puerto Caycedo to celebrate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, a date that was marked 22 years ago by the first Feminist Encuentro (conference) for Latin America and the Caribbean, held in Bogota in 1981, and was officially established by the United Nations in 1999.

In the past three weeks, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main rebel group, has set fire to 20 oilwells near Orito, 40 kms west of Puerto Caycedo, also affecting installations such as a bridge, five storage tanks, three pipelines, and another pipeline shared with Ecuador.

The sabotage will prevent oil companies from extracting 6,000 barrels a day, until the situation is brought under control. Around 50 percent of oil production has thus been brought to a halt in Putumayo, where abundant oil reserves are not fully exploited due to the action of armed groups.

A military operation against the insurgents was staged to counter the acts of sabotage against oil infrastructure.

”We must capture en masse all of the individuals who are involved in these actions,” said Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who reported that the police and army had been ordered to set out after ”the terrorists of Putumayo.”

The FARC, which rose up in arms 40 years ago, has maintained control for several years over a broad section of Putumayo, where some 1,800 of its roughly 15,000 combatants are active.

About 600 members of the Self-Defence Forces of Córdoba and Urabá, which forms part of the 12,000-strong United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary umbrella group, have also been present in the region since 1998, and took over all of Putumayo’s major cities this year.

The police are present in 10 of the 13 municipal seats, and an army brigade and anti-narcotics battalion are active in the department.

In addition, the new networks of peasant soldiers and informers, two prongs of the counterinsurgency efforts of the right-wing Uribe administration, which took office in August 2002, have begun to cooperate with the army.

The organisers of the peace caravan furnished the authorities, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries with the details of the route they would take.

It took some of the participants six days to reach Putumayo. Busloads of women drove in from the Caribbean resort city of Cartagena, 1,640 kms to the north; Medellín and Quibdó, over 1,100 kms to the northwest; Bucaramanga, 1,240 kms to the northeast; Bogotá, Pereira and Ibagué, 800 kms away; and Neiva, Cali and Popayán, between 400 and 600 kms away.

The buses are not accompanied by any kind of escort and have no police or military protection, in accordance with the organisers’ wishes. The activists did, however, call for national and international solidarity, and invited the press to join them.

The stated aim of the peace caravan is to draw attention to the effects of the spraying of illegal crops, drug trafficking, and the war on women, their families and the local economy, and to the violations of international humanitarian law by all of the armed parties involved in the conflict.

While 37.6 percent of Colombia’s population of 44 million lives below the poverty line, the proportion is 79 percent in the remote Putumayo.

Before setting out on the march, the women told the press in a communique that they were not willing to ”give one more son, one more peso, or one more day to the war.”

The activists want to open up a ”humanitarian corridor” along the highways the caravan will take.

The paramilitary and insurgent groups, as well as the government forces, periodically block deliveries of humanitarian aid and food and the circulation of civilians in conflict-torn areas.

According to the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), that strategy is aimed at ”weakening the adversary’s social support base and strengthening territorial, political and economic control over areas suitable for growing illegal drug crops.”

The local human rights group estimates that 35,000 families, including 5,500 people in Putumayo, have been forced to flee their homes because of the spraying since 1999.

Colombia has one of the largest populations in the world of internally displaced people, who number between 1.5 and 3.0 million.

The government has not provided any humanitarian assistance to the families displaced by the spraying.

This is the third women’s peace caravan, which have gone ”where no one else dares to go,” Luz Helena Sánchez, a medical doctor and activist who is participating in the event, told IPS.

In 1996, some 1,000 women visited Murindó, in Urabá, a banana-producing province in northwestern Colombia that was at the time the region most heavily affected by the conflict and by human rights abuses like selective killings.

In 2001, around 5,000 women drove to Barrancabermeja, in central Colombia. The oil port, located on the Magdalena river, has a long history of civic and labour activism.

Just a few months earlier, the city had been under siege, with insurgents and paramilitaries fighting street by street for control amidst brutal mass killings and selective murders.

By the time the peace caravan arrived, the city had fallen into the hands of the paramilitaries, which are blamed for the large majority of massacres and gross human rights violations committed in Colombia.