Statement against militaristic and repressive policies in Colombia
WE DECLARE OUR OPPOSITION TO MILITARIST AND REPRESSIVE POLICIES IN COLOMBIA. WE DEMAND AN END TO THE ASSASSINATIONS OF LEADERS, BOTH MALE AND FEMALE, AS WELL AS OF YOUNG PEOPLE IN RURAL AND URBAN AREAS OF COLOMBIA.
Death, pain, fear, and desolation converge daily in territories where structural and institutional racism has taken root. The economic interests of small family groups, through legal and illegal means, establish the foundations of inequality and the concentration of land in the hands of a few—the same few who have defended monocultures and, currently, mining and oil extraction. These same few continue to use the state's armed forces to attack communities and villages, while everything is privatized.
In the mountains, in the jungles, in the rivers and in the seas, the traces of pain, blood, and bad deaths have been left, as the indigenous elders of the Emberá people would say. Now they must deal with disease and control the rate of youth suicides, which, according to them, has been occurring due to the increase in armed actions that have sown death in every place and increased the proliferation of evil spirits (Jaís), who, having a bad death, wander through the territory as lost souls, sickening the entire community with negativity.
The militarization of the state and other forces in these territories is deep-rooted and structural, its roots stretching back to the era of genocide against Indigenous peoples during the colonial period and the brutal enslavement of the African population, racialized as Black. The economic interests of small family groups laid the foundation for inequality and the concentration of land in the hands of a few—the same few who have championed monocultures and, currently, mining and oil extraction.
With the rise of drug trafficking, these social inequalities became more evident, and the struggle for territorial control continued to expand, as is the case with COVID-19, a pandemic that continues to bring to the surface structural racism, state abandonment, the prevalence of a false economic development that benefits minority business groups, and the ongoing persecution, threats, and systematic assassinations of human rights defenders, who continue to raise their voices and dignify their actions in defense of territories that are now at risk due to the advance of ruthless extractivism and the proliferation of illegal economies, sustained by the expansion of illicit crops, the production of cocaine hydrochloride, and its distribution along the waterways where countless Black and Indigenous communities are settled.
Today we mourn the deaths of five young Black and Afro-Colombian minors from the Llano Verde neighborhood in the Agua Blanca District of Cali. We join in the grief of their mothers and extended families, who have had to mourn the loss of Josmar Jean Paul Cruz Perlaza (16 years old), Leider Cárdenas Hurtado (16 years old), Luis Fernando Montaño (15 years old), Álvaro José Caicedo Silva (15 years old), and Jair Andrés Cortes Castro (14 years old). These young boys were simply children, swimming, eating sugarcane, and flying kites in the sugarcane fields, as the neighborhood lacks green spaces and adequate areas for recreation.
Likewise, we wish to express our opposition to the militaristic and repressive policies demonstrated on August 13th by the excessive force used by the National Army and the Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron (ESMAD) of the National Police. These forces, with their tanks and weapons, have been violently suppressing the dignified process of liberating Mother Earth carried out by the Nasa community members in the municipality of Corinto, in the northern part of the Department of Cauca. During this intervention, the Public Forces damaged crops on lands liberated from sugarcane monoculture, and the Army fired rifle fire at the population, resulting in the deaths of journalist Abelardo Lis and activist Joel Rivera.
In response to these events, the National Army has argued that the rifle fire was triggered by an attack from a group of FARC-EP dissidents in the mountains. These arguments merely reflect the proliferation of stereotypes that have long held that guerrilla groups are hidden within the political processes of Indigenous Peoples or Black Communities, and this is used to justify the deaths of Indigenous and Afro-descendant people to the official media.
The disinformation strategy has been so profound that political sectors aligned with the government of President Ivan Duque defend the actions of the Public Force and have also tried to divert attention from acts in which the violation of Human Rights has been proven, such as the event recorded on June 21 in which seven (7) soldiers sexually abused a 12-year-old girl, belonging to the Emberá Katío community of the Gito Dokabú Reserve in the Department of Risaralda.
The systematic assassination of social leaders and the rise in massacres continue to proliferate. On Saturday, August 15, eight young people were gunned down in the rural area of the municipality of Samaniego in the department of Nariño. They were socializing in the evening when they were surprised by armed actors who shot them in cold blood. A couple of days later, on Wednesday, August 19, another massacre was perpetrated against three young Indigenous people from the Awá community in the rural area of the municipality of Ricaurte in the department of Nariño.
In the face of these massacres and the various acts of victimization that have taken place this year (2020) within ethnic and peasant territories, we denounce that the extermination of Black, Indigenous, peasant, and urban popular peoples, individuals, and communities are strategies of dispossession employed by a global political model that recolonizes territories and wipes out those who are sowing life and creating communal alternatives to defend coexistence, dialogue, territorial peace, love, and joy.
It is no coincidence that sugarcane monoculture is present in three of the reported incidents: Llano Verde, the neighborhood where the five children were massacred in Cali, is the newest urban settlement, formed by families mostly from the Colombian Pacific coast, displaced by the Colombian internal conflict, and it borders the sugarcane field where the children went to eat some stalks. The lands where the indigenous community members were killed in Corinto, Cauca, are disputed by sugar mills, and the Samaniego region in Nariño, where the eight young people were murdered, relies primarily on sugarcane for its economy, along with coca, mining, and cattle ranching. Presenting these as isolated incidents is part of the strategy.
We call upon the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), and other national and international human rights organizations; as well as the Comprehensive System for Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition, to demand and guarantee access to justice and to accompany and protect the lives of the leaders, peoples, communities and territories, who with their staffs of office, birth and death rituals, songs, musical instruments, sowing of life in the midst of death, autonomous practices and alternative defenses of life, have become a threat to the interests of the private sector, monoculture and sugar mill traders, and entrepreneurs of coca, palm oil and mega-construction projects.
We hold the Colombian State and government responsible for the murder and victimizing acts against girls, boys, young people, leaders and female leaders who were murdered and criminalized in the indigenous, peasant and urban-popular territories of Colombia.
August 26th, 2020
CLACSO Working Groups
"Bodies, territories and resistances" and "Emancipatory practices and transformative decolonizing methodologies" / Axis: emancipations with land, peoples and territories of life
Afro-diasporic feeling and thinking, from a sector of the bioregion of the geographical valley of the Cauca River, in Cali
CLACSO Virtual Seminar
Autonomies, cinema and re-existences: praxis-theory, genealogies and aesthetics in the decolonization of methodologies
This statement expresses the position of the Working Groups Bodies, territories and resistances y Emancipatory practices and transformative decolonizing methodologies and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.
