COLOMBIA: ‘The South Is Going to Explode," Warn Activists

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Aug 2 2005 (IPS) - Peasant farmers from four civil war-torn provinces in southern Colombia announced the creation of a civil movement to oppose Plan Patriot, the U.S.-financed government military offensive against the leftist guerrillas.

“The southern part of the country is going to explode,” Héctor Torres, a delegate representing 29 rural community action councils on the Human Rights Commission of Bajo Ariari in the central province of Meta, warned at a press conference in the Colombian capital.

“With all of the human rights violations that the Colombian state is committing, our communities have decided that we must not keep silent,” said Luis Antonio Valencia from the province of Caquetá, to the south of Meta.

Campesino or peasant farmer communities in the provinces of Caquetá, Guaviare, Meta and Putumayo also complained in a statement issued last Friday that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main rebel group, and their enemies, the extreme right-wing paramilitaries, have been planting land mines in violation of international humanitarian law.

Valencia said rural residents in the province of Caquetá had decided that they would refuse to flee their land, despite military pressure to do so.

This South American country has one of the world’s largest numbers of people displaced by violence – around three million out of a total population of 43 million.

The idea is to form “a national campesino movement that will defend the campesinos in the south from the famous Plan Colombia (anti-drug strategy), Plan Patriot (counterinsurgency strategy) and U.S. meddling in our internal affairs,” the local leader said in an amateur video shot by community action councils in the town of Cartagena del Chairá.

In their statement, the rural residents accuse the security forces of “arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, verbal abuse and extrajudicial executions.”

During the launch of the new movement against Plan Patriot, victims of abuses simultaneously gave their personal accounts in Bogotá and Florencia, the provincial capital of Caquetá. A march was also held in Cartagena del Chairá, the heavily militarised district seat.

According to the delegates from Cartagena del Chairá, the army issued warnings against the protest march, in anonymous leaflets that said “Campesinos, if you take part in the march it is because you are allowing yourselves to be used by the guerrillas, in order for them to carry out terrorist attacks.”

The leaflets also warned of “consequences that the march could bring you.”

Plan Patriot is the largest counterinsurgency campaign undertaken by any government in the history of Colombia’s four-decade armed conflict. It also stands out from previous military offensives by its duration – 16 months so far – and by the fact that little information about it has been made available to the public.

After maintaining a relatively low profile for around two years, FARC – which controls or operates freely in at least 40 percent of rural Colombia – has once again begun to assassinate city council members in its areas of influence in the south.

In July the insurgent group brought the region of Putumayo to a halt, blocking highways and sabotaging power supplies. The offensive by the 17,000-strong rebel group triggered a crisis that forced the government to send in humanitarian aid.

Because of FARC’s “armed strike” in Putumayo, only four of the 70 campesinos from that region designated to back the creation of the movement against Plan Patriot made it to Bogotá last week.

The aim of Plan Patriot is to weaken FARC, in order to strengthen the government’s bargaining position in case of eventual peace talks.

Former U.S. army Southern Command chief Gen. James Hill told the Ecuadorian newspaper El Comercio in October 2004 that no military solution is possible in Colombia, and that sustained political reforms are absolutely essential.

Colombia is the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel and Egypt.

A total of 18,000 Colombian troops have been deployed as part of Plan Patriot, and its centre of operations is the Tres Esquinas base in Meta, which is off-limits to the press.

Colombian troops receive instruction from U.S. military trainers at the base, which is equipped with hi-tech U.S. intelligence equipment.

Plan Patriot began with an attack on rural areas in the south inhabited by local campesinos who support FARC, said Hill last year, when he admitted the existence of the U.S.-backed military offensive, which had been shrouded in secrecy.

The Jesuit Centre for Popular Research and Education (CINEP), which documents human rights abuses, presented a list last week of 594 “acts of aggression” against civilians committed in Cartagena del Chairá between January 2004 and June 2005, in the context of Plan Patriot.

CINEP holds the state responsible for 579 of the cases, holds FARC responsible for 10, and blames one case on both sides, while explaining that it was unclear who had committed the remaining four abuses.

The authorities are hoping to capture or kill a high-level FARC leader in order to make a psychological impact and reinforce the “democratic security” policy of the right-wing government of President Alvaro Uribe.

The rural guerrilla group emerged in 1964 in response to an earlier U.S.-backed campaign, Plan LASO (Latin American Security Operation), a counterinsurgency programme aimed at eliminating leftist opposition.

Under Uribe’s democratic security policy, civilian informants are paid, civil defence units are armed, and campesinos recruited as soldiers in the region are posted there on the premise that they can strike out more effectively against the guerrillas, whose members tend to come from the local communities themselves.

Plan Colombia was designed in conjunction with the U.S. State Department to ensure oil production and supplies and crack down on coca crops, used to produce cocaine. (Drug trafficking is one source of FARC financing.)

Plan Colombia is still being carried out, with aerial spraying of coca crops, using herbicides produced by U.S. corporations like Monsanto.

In 2003, 16 other U.S. companies received contracts for more than 150 million dollars through Plan Colombia, says Ricardo Vargas, director of Acción Andina, a Colombian- based organisation that researches the impact of counter-narcotics policies, in his book “Drug Trafficking, War and Anti-Drug Policy” published in mid-July.

The crop-spraying planes are accompanied by five helicopter gunships, and troops often descend on local campesino farms. The peasant farmers also complain that the spraying destroys their food crops and affects the health of their families and livestock.

In a visit to the jungle region of Caguan in the province of Caquetá in March, IPS observed that the troops behave like an army of occupation and treat the local population as potential enemies.

The guerrillas, meanwhile, sometimes block medical missions and are suspicious of programmes sponsored by civil society groups to help local campesinos abandon coca and turn to legal alternative crops and sources of income.

Since September, drug traffickers have stopped purchasing basic cocaine paste in Caguán, less and less money is circulating in the area, and most coca farmers have left to plant their crops in other regions of Colombia.

The campesinos who stayed are mainly those who did not originally come to the region with the aim of growing coca, although most of them did plant the crop during boom periods.

The statement released by the farmers who created the new anti-Plan Patriot movement expressed alarm over the hunger caused by the spraying of coca crops and blockades of food supplies.

It also complained of barriers thrown up against the entrance of medical teams and supplies, restrictions on freedom of movement, and constant accusations that local inhabitants in the four southern provinces are guerrilla sympathisers or supporters.

The campesinos urged the United Nations to verify their claims and complaints.

Protest marches on the capital will be held “if there is no show of national solidarity” with their grievances, said Torres, who did not expand on the threat. “And don’t call us coca farmers, because we’re not!” he vehemently told the reporters.