July/August 2011 Latin America Update

• Action alert: Stop Military Street Round-ups in Colombia
• Reclaiming the Cross on the Hill
• Organizations Lay Out Strategy for Continental Demilitarization
• FARC on the Run?
• The Paramilitary Spider’s Web in Urabá
• Borderlands Organizer Needed

What It’s Like to Be in a Street Round-up

We have written before in these updates about the military’s use of illegal street round-ups to fill their recruitment quotas.

 In mid-June, reports of major upsurges in street round-ups came in from around the country. The following is the testimony of a conscientious objector taken in one of these street round-ups as published by The Red Juvenil (or Youth Network):

Close to 1am on Friday, June 17, 2011 near the Parque del Periodista I, Carlos Andrés Castaño Cardona, was detained by soldiers of the national military for a search and verification of my military card.  When they discovered that I didn’t have this document, I was immediately put onto a truck with which they were using for a street round-up.  There were 24 of us youth that were detained in different places in the city including some youth that were recruited on the outskirts of town in Bello and Itagui.

We were taken to the facilities of the old Bombona battalion. There I protested to several soldiers that I was not in agreement with what happened. Their response was that the street round-ups that they were conducting were totally legal … They isolated us and didn’t let us call anyone with the argument that we could do it the next day.

In the morning we were taken to another part of the battalion to wait for the medical exams. … During the process of the exams we were forced to get naked in front of various people.  Upon being examined by the doctor, it was decided that I wasn’t apt for military service because of a problem with my spine.  The interview with the psychologist followed, who filled out a physical injury report, which basically said that I had voluntarily presented myself at the battalion.  When I complained about this, the psychologist refused to give me her name and only said that the form had to say this.  I asked her for some paper to denounce that I had been detained downtown, but she wouldn’t give me any.  She finished by telling me that I should keep the report she filled out because they were conducting street round-ups …and they would bring me to the battalion again if they found me in the street without that document.

Once they finished the exams they took us out of the building and left those of us who weren’t apt (there were 7 of us) by the guard.  They left us waiting there an hour before letting us go.

From the moment the soldiers put me in the truck I protested that I was a conscientious objector, but no one knew what this was and they didn’t believe me.  I was finally free again at 11am on July 17th, 2011.

FOR, the Swedish agency CIVIS, and two Colombian conscientious objector groups we accompany (the Red Juvenil or Youth Network and ACOOC or Collective Action of Conscientious Objectors) are currently working to set up a meeting with the Minister of Defense himself. In that meeting, we would like to display to the minister the level of international concern for this practice.

Please support those conscientious objector groups we accompany by sending a message to the Minister of Defense that you are concerned about the ongoing illegal practice of street round ups and that the Ministry of Defense should emit a statement to this effect.

Letter from the Field:
Reclaiming the Filo de la Cruz

By Gina Spigarelli

The Filo de la Cruz (The Ridge of the Cross) sits overlooking La Unión, the small rural Peace Community village  in Colombia where FOR has a permanent accompanimient program. The land that makes up the hill belongs to the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, individuals that make up that community, and other surrounding campesinos.  From the center of town in La Unión, one can reach the top of the Filo in a quick 10 minute walk. It is but one jungle covered hill that makes up the beautifully impressive country landscape surrounding La Unión.  As with every piece of land in this war zone, the Filo de la Cruz has a complicated history.

The hill received its namesake in the late 1990s, when the military murdered a young Peace Community member in the woods there. In honor of his life, the community placed a cross on the ridge; the cross was made of wood, and has long since fallen, but the name has stuck.

“Two years ago, when the military started camping on the filo, we had no idea they were planning to stay so long,” explained Juan. “For decades both legal and ilegal armed actors have passed through community property, often spending a night or two in hammocks on the filo and leaving traces for community members to later find.” This time was different, however. The military men on the filo didn’t move on after a night or two. They started to build an encampment.

A military encampment overlooking a Peace Community brings obvious concern to the citizens living in the valley below. “ It’s just not good for civilians to be so near an encampment,” Francisco* shared with me. “We immediately knew that  we would be in more danger than before. When the military plants themselves somewhere, they attract other armed actors.  This is exactly what happened and

we as a Peace Community were at risk to be caught in the crossfire.” Over a two year period, there were combats and bombings happening literally just outside of town. “They even had a dummy in military fatigues sitting right there, to draw fire,” added Fernando, motioning to a tree stump on the village-facing side of the hill.

The Peace Community, along with their international supporters, repeatedly published  newsletters  and action alerts expressing their concern over the proximity of the military to cilvilians in the zone. After an exceedingly dangerous combat in October of 2010, where the military and guerrillas were shooting next to the homes of small farmers, the community reached an agreement that they needed to do all they could to convince the military to leave.

“Originally we planned to go up to the filo and tell them to go,” Juan began, “but that would have been particularly complicated and we didn’t know excactly who was there. Instead we decided to continue  publishing complaints. Earlier this year though, when they started interrogating people on their way to work or down to town, we started to be more forward about telling them that we didn’t want them there and they were putting us in danger.”

“Two years is a long time in one place. We were all getting nervous that the military was actually going to come up and build a permanent base on the filo. For us this would have meant serious consideration of displacement,” Francisco said.

In May of this year, without warning, the military withdrew from their semi-permanemt position on the Filo de la Cruz. After a few weeks, the Peace Community planned a community work day to clean up the trash left behind. Walking up the filo and around the encampment, we saw old playing cards and deep trenches, tomato plants and improvised water tanks. There were tents and hammocks and mosquito nets- remenents of an abandoned jungle camp in a war zone.

Rosa explained the idea behind cleaning up the encampment, “We went up there to burn their trash and get rid of their mess. We cleared out the brush and left the área with few places to hang hammocks. We wanted to reclaim that land.  We really don’t want them to come back. When they are here they surround us. They make it hard for people to get to work and they pose a constant threat of combat. One feels bad knowing there is an encampment in their backyard.”

The Peace Community is happy that the military has left the encampment, but even today as I write this article, there are once again helicopters landing on the far side of the filo. When I asked around to see if people thought the military would be back to that encampment, some were more optimistic than others. The vast majority of people, however, gave the same response: “We hope not. We really hope not.”

* All interviewed Peace Community member’s names have been changed.

Declaration from Honduras Against Militarization

Versión en español

We —organizations and individuals from El Salvador, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, the United States, Canada, Italy, Spain, Mexico and Honduras, having come together in La Esperanza, Intibucá, Honduras on this day of commemoration of the two years of struggle by the Honduran resistance against the coup leaders, in response to the call made by MUCA, COFADEH, COPINH, OFRANEH, CEMH, Insurrección Autónoma, Artistas en Resistencia, ERIC and the Campaña América Latina y el Caribe, una Región de Paz: Fuera Bases Militares Extranjeras— issue this Declaration:

We declare our opposition to the militarization of the peoples of the world, particularly of the people of the Americas, which means the installation of military and paramilitary bases and structures, providing financial resources, legal frameworks, and ideological support that together carry out the role of strong arm cops for big business interests that pillage the resources of our people and Mother Earth, resources such as water, land, minerals, forests and the people who live in these territories.

We declare that the criminalization of the people’s movements and social struggles is carried out through repression in the form of torture, beatings, disappearances, killings and sexual violence and that these methods are part of the military strategies of the oligarchy and imperialism. Jails are the places where the children of poor women end up, and this situation is even worse in the case of emigrants in the United States.

We declare our repudiation of the return in many countries, especially in Honduras, of obligatory military service as a form of persecution of young people, who are precisely the ones against whom a large part of the military hate is directed.

We declare that the strategy of militarization while generating enormous wealth for the heads of the war industry generates greater poverty and violence against the people of the world, including the people of the United States. This strategy is the same in all countries and therefore the struggle against it is the same for all the people of the world.

We declare our rejection of imperial war operations against the peoples of the world, operations in which civilians, children and young people are killed and then written off as collateral damage.

We declare our call to the North American social movements to continue the struggle against militarization, with the understanding that it affects all aspects of our lives.

We declare as Hondurans that in this encounter we have suffered together the systematic and vicious aggressions against peasants, women, young people, sexual diversity and indigenous and Black populations, that our strength, organization and mobilization have not been weakened, but rather made stronger in the knowledge that they are afraid of us because we are not afraid.

We declare that the solidarity of the people of Latin America and the Caribbean with Honduras is vital to keeping our resistance strong and moving forward in spite of the death and violence that threaten us.

Finally, we declare the satisfaction of joining with brothers and sisters who are resisting the militarization by opposing it with creativity, hope, spirituality and the unity that is found in all regions of the world, and finding deep strength in the ever present energy of our Honduran martyrs.

As a result of this meeting we intend to:

• Strengthen the continental and regional campaigns against military bases and the on-going methods of occupation and criminalization.
• Strengthen people’s solidarity using every available mechanism including the involvement of the UNASUR (Union of South American Governments) governments as well as regional fronts and local actions.
• Propose to CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) that it prohibit as part of the principles of the organization the presence of foreign military bases.
• Maintain and promote June 28th as a day of rejection of military bases.
• Energize a campaign against the danger inherent in obligatory military service in Honduras.
• Make October 3 a day of celebration for the Honduran people as a whole, not merely for its armed forces.
• Conduct alternative community media campaigns centered on the struggles against impunity, for historical memory, for the freedom of the youth, and the rights of women.
• Carry out boycotts against items produced by the supporters of the coup and against junk merchandise which are part of the ideological corruption of our people.
• Engage people in a revolution of the mind.
• Prioritize artistic productions and gatherings as means to empower our struggle and our never-give-up resistance.
• Provide support for Human Rights Observer Teams in Honduras –an initiative of CICA (Collettivo Italia Centro America) and COFADEH (The committee of relatives of the disappeared in Honduras)
• Our gathering expresses its solidarity with the original peoples of the Honduran Moskitía, the Garífuna and Lencas communities, the El Aguán peasant movement, and the sexual diversity community, all of which have endured systematic aggressive violence.

Our gathering is thankful to our brothers and sisters of the COPINH (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras) for their marvelous effort at organization, logistics, and joint reflection which made it possible for all of us to come together, plan and lay out a path to peace and justice. We salute COPINH’s unwavering spirit of struggle.

We call upon ourselves as a national entity to follow up on the above commitments on October 21, 2011 at El Aguán.

Endorsed at La Esperanza, Intibucá, on June 27, 2011

FARC on the Run?

By Geoffrey Ramsey
Adapted from Hemispheric Daily Briefings

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced in early July that the FARC’s commander, Alfonso Cano, just barely escaped an air raid on his camp located in the south of the mountainous Tolima department.  Since then more details have emerged about the attack, which officials are claiming forced Cano to abandon his usually heavy security contingent. According to El Tiempo, the rebel leader is now on the run with only twelve men, with at least a thousand Colombian security forces hot on his heels. This has led President Santos to make some of his boldest statements yet concerning the guerrillas, saying “Sooner or later, Cano will fall — just like all the other FARC leaders.”

However, there is reason to view this announcement with skepticism. With nearly three quarters of Colombians believing that the security crisis in the country is getting worse, the government has found it increasingly difficult to sell its security policies to the Colombian public. According to Colombia Reports’ Garry Leech, the military has stepped up its propaganda campaign against the FARC, making statements that come off as entirely illogical. This includes recent remarks made by Admiral Edgar Cely to El Tiempo, in which the armed forces commander dismissed a recent round of FARC attacks as consequences   The paper reported that there have been 142 “terrorist attacks” so far this year while there were a total of 144 in 2010.

Colombian Defense Minister Rodrigo Rivera added to the official claim on July 6, claiming that these attacks are only acts of desperation.  Rivera said the FARC attacks, rather than a show of strength, should be seen as ndicators that the FARC are “Pablo Escobar-izing,” and becoming more involved in criminal activities. 

But this argument amounts to an attempt to sweep rising insecurity under the rug, and clashes harshly with the lived reality of Colombians. As El Espectador’s editorial board points out, the FARC conducted five major bombings on highways in the last two weeks of June, killing six police officers. While the incidents are a far cry from the assaults that the rebels carried out during their heyday in the 1990s, they demonstrate that the group still has capacity to carry out debilitating attacks security forces in the country.

According to a military report cited in El Espectador, the Colombian armed forces have killed 3,500 people engaged in criminal or rebel activity, 1,137 of which were FARC, ELN and EPA guerrilla fighters. Only 353 were members of the so-called BACRIMs (“bandas criminales”), the second generation paramilitary groups in the country that are believed to be the principal generators of violence.

But FARC operations are on the rise in Colombia, according to a new report from the Colombian group Nuevo Arco Iris. In the first six months of 2011, the group undertook some 1,115 “military actions,” which is a 10 percent increase from the same period last year.

The Paramilitary Spider’s Web in Urabá

With an investigation of nearly a year, the Colombian investigative journalism site VerdadAbierta.com untangles how the paramilitary Self-Defense Peasants of Cordoba and Urabá constructed their power in that region with a sophisticated political and economic structure that continued to operate after their demobilization, and was financed with government funds and, indirectly, by the US Agency for International Development as well.
 
If it were not that so many documents and testimonies confirm it, it would be hard to believe that the paramilitary strategy to politically and economically take over a region — that of Urabá in the Colombian departments of Antioquia, Chocó and Córdoba — had achieved such high levels of complexity and sophistication. The tangle of companies and organizations that they created was such that they got even the governments of Colombia and the United States to support their project, and that an association they created won an international prize.
 
The sinuous strategy had plenty of accomplices, and with them, it managed to rob lands from poor farmers, trained community councils, created non-governmental organizations, set up agribusiness companies that obtained contracts with multinationals, supported electoral campaigns, backed drug trafficking organizations, and took advantage of state resources. Their spider’s web linked to politicians and businessmen, and not only served their counterinsurgency project in the years before the paramilitary demobilization, but continued weaving connections and support as part of their programs for reinsertion into civilian life.
 
An exhaustive review of public documents for nearly a year, together with interviews and testimonies of ex-paramilitaries given to the Prosecutor General’s office, allowed investigators from VerdadAbierta.com to know the full depth of this network.
 
Though the authorities have all the information in their possession and it will be judges who establish to what extent the projects promoted by the Colombian government and Plan Colombia crossed the line of illegality, it is also clear that the calculated conquest of Urabá’s politics and economy by the paramilitaries’ organization was real and efficient.
 
In this special report, Verdad Abierta reconstructs how the paramilitaries implemented their military, political and economic project to consolidate political and economic power in Urabá, a region that was hard hit by the country’s armed conflict. The population there suffered the worst violations of human rights, from forced displacement and theft of their lands, to forced disappearances and brutal killings that included the practice of dismembering.
 
 [Continue here for the full Spanish version of this remarkable report]

Borderlands Organizer

Religious communities and leaders are working with border activists and organizers to reduce gun violence by creating a bi-national campaign to impede the illegal flow of assault weapons, sniper rifles and high-capacity handguns into northern Mexico. When gun dealers in the southwestern U.S. turn a blind eye to the practice of “straw purchasing,” whereby stand-ins for illegal gun traffickers buy guns in bulk that end up in the arsenals of Mexican drug cartels, they are contributing to the huge numbers of weapons that flow across the border, and to the growing insecurity, injury and death in communities in northern Mexico.

The organizer will function as an independent contractor, with a focus on building a bi-national coalition of communities of faith and conscience. Applicants can expect to spend approximately forty hours per month to carry out this work, and compensation will be $750 per month. More information, including a description of the project and a request for proposals, can be found at www.presbypeacefellowship.org. Send your cover letter with a CV and/or a description of your organizing background by August 25, 2011, by email to maggie@presbypeacefellowship.org