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RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Kolla Indians Denounce Abuses in Land Conflict

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 13 2004 (IPS) - In the latest episode of conflicts over indigenous land rights in Argentina, Kolla Indians in the northwestern province of Salta complained this week that they were brutally beaten by employees of a sugar company that is laying claim to their traditional land.

“The older members of the community were beaten the worst. My father was kicked in the head and passed out,” Gabriel Flores, leader of the “Igua Pui Genda” Kolla community in the department (state) of Orán, Salta, 1,600 km north of Buenos Aires, told IPS Thursday by phone.

“The community isn’t going to forget this,” said Flores, referring to the brutal Aug. 5 attack.

Flores said some 40 private security guards from the San Martín del Tabacal Sugar Mill and Refinery, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Seaboard Corporation, came to the village of around 60 indigenous families and began to hit local residents with their cudgels.

The president of the sugar mill, Guillermo Jakúlica, says the land where the village is located belongs to the company.

But the Kollas say the company has presented no legal title to the land, where the indigenous community has always lived. Flores, for example, said his grandparents are buried there.

The governor of Salta, Juan Carlos Romero, “knows perfectly well what is going on here because he himself holds shares in the sugar refinery. The state has completely failed to take action in the face of this abuse,” said Flores.

The beatings were denounced this week in Buenos Aires by lawmakers sitting on the congressional Human Rights Commission, who accused the owners of the sugar mill of violently attempting to evict the Indians, with no legal authorisation.

The Kollas said El Tabacal employees are cutting down the trees around their village, to plant sugar cane.

On Aug. 5, El Tabacal private security guards demanded that the Kollas leave the area, arguing that the land belongs to the sugar mill. Led by the company’s security chief, Marcelo Romero, they began to beat local residents and destroyed fences and other property.

The guards then filed a police report themselves, which led to the arrest of 10 indigenous people.

In the incident, 12 members of the Kolla community were injured, two of whom were hospitalised until Tuesday because of blows to the head. The local Catholic priest José Auletta backed the indigenous community’s denunciation, and complained that the police tried to arrest him as well for “illegal occupation” of land.

The day after the incident, the attackers approached the village again in a threatening attitude. But the young Kolla men faced up to them. “When they saw us all appear, they left,” said Flores.

However, sugar mill employees continue bulldozing the forest just a few metres outside of the Kolla village.

The land occupied by the Kollas in Orán is publicly owned, but the indigenous people consider it their ancestral land, where they have always lived. The area, located between three rivers, is swampy and subject to flooding, which forces them to move elsewhere during the rainy season and return during the dry season every year.

The Argentine constitution, as amended in 1994, recognises native peoples’ right to communal ownership of their traditional land, and stipulates that indigenous people must be included in decisions involving the use of natural resources in the areas where they live.

However, their constitutional rights are frequently trampled, partly because indigenous communities have not been issued collective title deeds to their ancestral lands, which leaves them vulnerable to any claim by the state or private interests.

This year, the Italian clothing company Benetton, which owns 900,000 hectares in southern Argentina, got the courts to evict a group of Mapuche Indians living on what was supposedly public land.

Similar situations have occurred in the northern provinces of Chaco, Formosa, Misiones, Salta, Santiago del Estero and Tucumán.

In June, the provincial government of Salta auctioned off 25,000 hectares in a nature reserve that is home to impoverished campesinos (peasants) and indigenous people.

The local authorities got the provincial legislature to remove the reserve’s protected status, and sold most of the land to agribusiness interests. The new owners will cut down the forest to plant transgenic soybeans, to cash in on the country’s soy boom.

Local residents and environmental activists have brought legal action in court to keep the land from being sold off and prevent eviction of the people who have lived in the area their entire lives.

The San Martín del Tabacal sugar refinery, which according to Flores owns all of the land around the towns of Orán, Irigoyen and Pichanal, has been trying to seize the Kolla community’s traditional lands since 1996.

Father Auletta and Flores said the company paid some indigenous families to leave the area, which, they argued, amounts to recognition of the Kollas’ right to occupy that land. “If the land belonged to the company, it would be the courts that would have to evict us, using the police,” argued Flores.

Sugar mill employees pretending to carry out a census periodically urge the Indians, most of whom are illiterate, to sign papers in which they may actually be yielding their rights to the land.

This week, the Argentine government presented a report on segregation of indigenous people, immigrants and refugees in Argentina to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.

As it generally does, the Committee also received an alternative report drawn up by non-governmental organisations, which refutes the official document’s claims of state compliance with a number of commitments, especially in the chapter on indigenous land rights.

Members of the U.N. Committee questioned the lack of statistical information on Argentina’s indigenous people and their living conditions, and asked for explanations about the continuous conflicts over land that occur despite the constitution’s recognition of indigenous land rights.

The indigenous population in this South American country of 37 million is estimated at between 800,000 and two million. But these are unofficial estimates because indigenous people are ignored in government statistics.