• by Helda Martínez * (bogota)
• Monday, October 05, 2009
• Inter Press Service

Organisations representing sectors of the Colombian population that have suffered from four decades of armed conflict, like indigenous and black communities, shared their experiences over the weekend in the 'World Peace Summit', which also drew prominent international experts on Latin America.

'We are facing a change of era: imposition, war and the use of force must give way to dialogue, reconciliation and peace,' Federico Mayor Zaragoza, honorary chairman of the conference and president of the Foundation for a Culture of Peace, said in a videoconference from Madrid at the opening of the Oct. 1-4 conference.

The meeting was held in Colombia, because in this country 'force needs to be replaced with words and negotiations,' said Mayor Zaragoza, a former director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and current chair of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.

Colombia has been caught up in a civil war for nearly half a century. Guerrilla movements in remote rural areas took up arms in 1964, and far-right paramilitary death squads have been active since the 1980s, although they were partially demobilised under an agreement reached with the government of President Álvaro Uribe.

The day the conference began, the deaths of at least 26 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, in a bomb attack by the air force and the army in the central province of Tolima, was reported. An undetermined number of peasant families were trying to flee the region after the attack, as ground troops moved in to squash the remaining insurgents in the area.

Civilians are often trapped in the crossfire, accused by the different armed groups of siding with the enemy.

A full 10 percent of the population of this country of 42 million has been displaced by the war, according to non-governmental organisations, although the government puts the figure at just over three million.

Colombia is the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid in the Americas, receiving 'more than five billion dollars since 2000,' John Lindsay-Poland, co-director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation Task Force on Latin America and the Caribbean, said at the conference.

In fact, Colombia is the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, after Israel and Egypt.

The funds are channeled through the Plan Colombia anti-drug and counterinsurgency strategy, which was launched in 2000. But 'the results confirm that it has been a waste of funds,' said Lindsay-Poland.

'Neither the area planted in coca nor the cocaine available on the U.S. market have shrunk, and cocaine prices are still the same, or even lower, than when Plan Colombia took off in the administration of (Bill) Clinton (1993-2001),' he said.

Colombia is still the world's largest producer of cocaine and a major source of heroin.

With respect to the Colombian government's fight against irregular armed groups, Lindsay-Poland said the FARC has been weakened while 'the right-wing paramilitaries, in connivance with the army, have consolidated their position in the state and the economy.'

The Uribe administration has now decided to open up military bases in the country to U.S. troops.

In their first meeting, on Jun. 30, Presidents Barack Obama and Uribe discussed an agreement for the U.S. military to use seven Colombian bases.

Through the agreement, which has the stated aim of facilitating U.S. assistance in the fight against drug trafficking and insurgents, Washington would recover the military presence it lost when the lease for the Manta air base in Ecuador was not renewed by President Rafael Correa, said Lindsay-Poland.

The analyst, who studies the effects of the U.S. military presence in Latin America, said the agreement on the seven military bases is 'the worst development' in U.S. policy in the Andean region 'since Plan Colombia got underway nine years ago.'

To highlight the climate of impunity surrounding U.S. military activity in Colombia, Lindsay-Poland cited the 2007 rape of a 12-year-old girl by U.S. soldiers at the Tolemaida base in the west-central province of Tolima.

The soldiers involved 'were removed from Colombia without facing any legal action in either country,' said Lindsay-Poland. 'Foreign Minister Jaime Bermúdez has given his assurances that U.S. troops will continue enjoying the same level of impunity under the new agreement.'

Most of the presidents who took part in the last Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) summit, held in August in Bariloche, Argentina, expressed concern over the agreement on the bases.

Venezuela, in particular, feels directly threatened by the accord. The Uribe administration, however, responded that President Hugo Chávez tripled military spending in that country from 1.1 to 3.3 billion dollars between 2003 and 2008, according to the British-based International Institute for Strategic Studies annual report, 'Military Balance 2009'.

Military spending in Colombia, meanwhile, officially stands at just over four percent of GDP, although local observers like José Fernando Isaza, president of the private Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, and Senator Cecilia López of the opposition Liberal Party say the government has modified the numbers to artificially reduce the proportion.

The number of military personnel in Colombia has grown 40 percent since 2002, and this country now has more troops in proportion to its population than Brazil, the leading military powerhouse in the region, Isaza reports.

The outlook is bleak for Latin America, and this is the toughest moment since the end of the Cold War, Adam Isacson, director of programmes at the Washington-based Centre for International Policy, said at the conference.

'The long-running Colombian conflict will claim more lives this year than last,' said Isacson. 'The tension with Venezuela threatens to expand from the political to the military arena. Weapons purchases in South America are on the rise. Drug trafficking and drug-related violence have claimed more than 5,000 lives this year in Mexico, and the coup d'etat in Honduras has revived the dark days of military dictatorship' in the region.

It is time for unceasing action by peace activists, agreed Isacson, Lindsay-Poland, and hundreds of representatives of indigenous, black, women's and peasant farmer organisations gathered in the 14 auditoriums in Bogota where the conference was held.

Videos shown by 'peace communities' from San José de Apartadó, Tiquisio, Cavida and Toribio showed the suffering of their people over the last two decades.

'We saw people going mad from pain: mass murders, displacement, years living in places like stadiums and later the return (to our village) as a peace community, where we have faced forced disappearance and harassment,' said a local leader who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons.

'I don't like to say anything,' she told IPS. 'I'm still scared.'

The peace communities were founded by victims of forced displacement who returned to their land and declared themselves neutral in the armed conflict.

The Páez or Nasa indigenous people in the southwestern province of Cauca are also carrying out their own peace initiatives. But in the territories of this ethnic group, 370 people have been killed in the last five years, many of them at the hands of the army, according to social activist Eibar Fernández.

Lindsay-Poland stressed the need to persevere in the search for peace, and urged Colombians to mobilise against the U.S. military bases, like people in Puerto Rico did at the navy base in Vieques, from which the U.S. pulled out in 2003.

'We cannot give up, convinced that Washington is always going to do bad things in the region. It is important to demonstrate and fight for peace,' added Isacson. He said that 'in Washington, no one wants Uribe to be reelected,' referring to the right-wing president's attempt to amend the constitution to enable him to run for a third term.

*With additional reporting from Constanza Vieira.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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