Statement on situational and structural violence in Colombia
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the OAS
International Court of Justice of the UN
Nation-states of Planet Earth
Women, Others and Peoples in Resistance of Planet Earth
International organizations
International Civil Society
Media
Assemblies for Good Living in Latin America
Democratic Confederations and Socio-territorial and Land Pacts in the Peoples of the World
Through this letter, we address you to request that you join us in appealing for respect for the lives of the different peoples, individuals, and organizations in Colombia who have mobilized since April 28th and are being brutally repressed for opposing the tax reform and structural policies that affect the possibilities for caring for and preserving Mother Earth and the good living practices and defenses of the majority in the country.
Acts of militarization in cities—disappearances, systematic massacres of young people (juvenicides), rape of female protesters, femicides, harassment, and incitement to violence—are clear indicators of the State tyranny that exists in Colombia and the perpetuation of human rights violations and the annihilation of all life.
The marches carried out are a response to the failure to fulfill the aspirational content of the constitution for a Social State of Law and to the different socio-territorial assemblies proposed and practiced by ancestral peoples, peasants, indigenous people, Afro-descendants, youth, girls, boys, women, teachers, small merchants who are paving the way in their ways of building peace and objecting to any form of militarization and legal and illegal violence.
The generation of chaos is the responsibility of a deaf and authoritarian government-state that maintains a colonial model in the present through its large-scale development projects, laws favoring the (neo-extractivist) usurpation of healthcare, pensions, cities, rural areas, and land grabbing. It perpetuates the logic of a (neo-)extractivist corporate state in its inseparable triad of dispossession, impoverishment, war, and corruption.
Permanent assemblies, the toppling of statues and colonial memory, artistic and musical acts of disobedience, carnivals, vigils, and banners are not acts of vandalism; on the contrary, they embody emancipatory practices against an unjust, colonial, racist, and patriarchal state. A state-government that acts against the people, who do not lose their joy, who denounce the monopolization of discourse and decisions in favor of an elitist, ecocidal, femicidal, racist, youth-killing, and infanticidal perspective. The practices of generations in motion are the response to dignify the past and open multiple possibilities for other pluralistic presents and futures.
Arguing that the public force must be in charge of protecting everyone's lives and private property is a discourse that justifies practices of discipline, repression, and revenge against acts of protest, media warfare, and the war against life.
Some proposals that have emerged in different territories eloquently demonstrate ways of addressing life's challenges through the healing of Mother Earth in her inalienable relationship with people, communities, and their territories. In contrast to dependence on an economy of scarcity, practices revealing economies of sufficiency are emerging in novel ways of inhabiting cities and rural areas, with crops that lower prices and the creation of food sovereignty within territories.
The creation of permanent assemblies, conversations, and working groups are creating self-determinations of eco-social pacts as places where other forms of government are being realized, forms that have been experienced in ancestral territories and that are now being reinvented in the context and upheaval in Colombia, amidst confinement and the pandemic.
The marches we are witnessing demonstrate the collapse of outdated state, national, and global structures through the creation of solidarity networks and structures, the affirmation of self-governments, and examples of self-recognition of the self-determination and co-determination of peoples through life policies.
We, the undersigned, demand an end to the massacres and violence in Colombia, a response to the structural demands of the mobilized groups, and the political prosecution of those responsible for past and present violence. We join the international demand for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to investigate Iván Duque for crimes against humanity. We express our solidarity and sisterhood with the struggle of the Colombian people and the peoples of Abya Yala. “You are not alone.”
7 May 2021
CLACSO Working Groups
Bodies, territories, resistances
Emancipatory practices and transformative decolonizing methodologies
Theoretical-political Decolonization axis; indisciplinarities and emancipations with land, peoples and territories of life
Signatories:
Indigenous Videographers Project of the Southern Border-Chiapas, Mexico
Group of Academics and Intellectuals in Defense of the Colombian Pacific (Gaidepac)
Transitional Fabric in the Geographic Valley of the Cauca River
Center for Independent Studies, Earth Color
Transnational Network of Other Knowledges
Network of Collectives - University of the Earth, Caldas and Southwestern Colombia. Network of Masters of Autonomous Cinema and Re-existences
Patricia Botero, Manizales, Colombia
Xochitl Leyva Solano, Chiapas, Mexico
Jorge Alonso, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
Arturo Escobar, Cali, Colombia
David Hernández Palmar, Wayuu Territory
Claudia Briones, Bariloche, Argentina
Marisol de la Cadena, University of California-Davis
Alcida Rita Ramos, Brasilia, Brazil
Natividad Gutiérrez Chong, Mexico City
Claudio Espinoza, University of Christian Humanism, Chile
Sonia Gau, Montevideo, Uruguay
Lola Cubells, Universitat Jaume I-Castelló, Valencia
Javier González Díez, Cañar, Ecuador
Inés Durán Matute, Mexico
Mariano Báez, Veracruz, Mexico
Patricia Viera Bravo, Mexico City
Axel Köhler, Chiapas, Mexico / Germany
Valentín Val, Mexico / Argentina
Pablo Uc, Chiapas, Mexico
Urpi Saco Chung, Peru
Sebastián Granda Henao, Brasília, Brazil/ Medellín, Colombia
Diana Coryat, USA / Ecuador
Mariel Verónica Bleger, Conicet, Bariloche, Argentina
Alberto Velázquez, Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico
Moura Rodrigues, Brazil
María Patricia Pérez Moreno, Mexico
Patricio Lepe-Carrión, Chile
Alejandro Peñaloza Castro, Mexico
Ingrid de Jong, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Claudia Magallanes Blanco, Ibero-American University Puebla, Mexico
Sergio Navarrete Pellicer, Oaxaca, Mexico
Júnia Lima, Brazil
Morita Carrasco, Argentina
Ximena Cuadra Montoya, Temuco, Chile
Laura Machuca Gallegos, Yucatán, Mexico
Axel Lazzari, Argentina
Alicia Itatí Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Alicia Naveda, San Juan, Argentina
Rita Lida Pérez Valencia, Chiapas, Mexico
Mariela Miranda, San Juan, Argentina
Lelis Jofré San Juan, Argentina
Martha Liliana Galindo Ramírez, Bogotá, Colombia
Carlos Andrés Duque Acosta, Cali, Colombia
Aldo Ramos, Netherlands / Mexico
Alejandra Ramos, RINEPI
Izabel Missagia, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Hector Mora Nawrath, Temuco, Chile
Ricardo Verdum, RINEPI
Sofia Venturoli, RINEPI
Fabien Le Bonniec, Temuco, Wallmapu, Chile
Mariela Eva Rodríguez, CONICET-UBA/ICA, Argentina
Cristhian Teofilo da Silva, University of Brasilia
María Rossi Idarraga, PPGAS-National Museum-UFRJ
This statement expresses the position of the Working Groups Bodies, territories, resistances and emancipatory practices and transformative decolonizing methodologiess and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.
