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August
30, 2004
The
Struggle of the Nasa People of Colombia
The
Disappeared Mayor
By
JUSTIN PODHUR
On August 22, 2004, a commission of
leaders left the indigenous community of Toribio, part of the
municipality of Toribio in the Department of Cauca, Colombia,
to go to a community called Alta Mira in the municipality of
San Vicente del Caguan, in the Department of Caqueta. The commission
was led by the mayor of the municipality of Toribio, Arquimedes
Vitonas. The indigenous of the northern part of Cauca have their
own system of government, and so another member of the commission,
Plinio Trochez, was known as the 'governor' of the community
of Toribio--governors are chosen by the community each year and
perform various community and executive functions. The indigenous
of northern Cauca, called the Nasa, also have built an indigenous
university in the mountains of Toribio, called CECEDIC--indeed,
Arquimedes Vitonas, the mayor of Toribio, is a graduate of the
school. The coordinator of CECEDIC, Gilberto Munoz, was a member
of the commission. Former mayor of Toribio, Ruben Dario, was
also present. He is currently the governor of a neighbouring
indigenous community called San Francisco. They were all in one
car. The driver of the car was Erminson Velasco. The car belongs
to the mayor's office.
I know the car. Six months
ago Arquimedes himself drove it to take me and some others up
from Toribio into the reserve of Tacueyo, which in February 2004
was under siege as the military tried to dislodge the FARC from
their positions in the mountains. The community of Tacueyo was
struggling, living on food aid and help from other Nasa communities
below. As the mayor, Arquimedes was our protection, an official
presence to whom the army could not deny entry and retain plausible
deniability. The conversation at the military roadblock was tense.
The commander acted as if he cared about the welfare of the community.
"The important thing is that the people remain calm,"
he said, seemingly unaware that the presence of the military
besieging the community might be less than soothing. Arquimedes,
who is a small physical presence but an immense and impossible-to-intimidate
psychological presence, acted as if he believed the commander:
"That's why we are going, to reassure the people."
Back to August 22. The commission
was traveling to San Vicente del Caguan so that leaders from
northern Cauca could share their experience and advice with the
indigenous of Caqueta. The Nasa of Cauca, after all, had very
long and successful experience in participatory municipal development
and development planning. They had won national and international
awards: just in February, the United Nations Development Program
had awarded Toribio's 'Proyecto Nasa' a prestigious Sustainable
Development Award (1). Arquimedes Vitonas and Gilberto Munoz
had been recognized as 'Masters of Wisdom' by UNESCO. Munoz was
the first activist from the indigenous movement to become the
mayor of a municipality, one of the leaders who began the unfinished
project of taking back the machinery of local government from
the corrupt elite and returning it to the community. The majority
of people in the community of Altamira, where the commission
was heading, were originally from Toribio and had had to leave
years before.
Three days later, on August
25, the Secretary of Government for the Department of Cauca (while
various municipalities in Cauca, like Toribio, are in the hands
of the indigenous movement, the governorship of the Department
of Cauca passed from the indigenous movement into the hands of
a hardline supporter of Colombia's hardline president in recent
elections) called the municipality of Toribio to let the mayor's
office know that the mayor and the entire commission had been
kidnapped. According to the Secretary, this kidnapping had been
done by "an unestablished armed group." The Secretary's
source? Batallion Codazzi, based in the city of Palmjra in the
Department of Valle del Cauca. The Secretary told the municipality
that the information had been received on the morning of the
24th. The Secretary did not explain the full day's delay in telling
the mayor's office that the mayor had been kidnapped.
After the indigenous councils
of northern Cauca (Asociacion de Cabildos Indigenas del Norte
de Cauca, ACIN) sent their first communique about the kidnapping
on August 25, they received a note of clarification from the
government of Cauca. It turns out that their information had
been incorrect: the information had come from a different battalion.
From the note from the Secretary of Government of Cauca:
"On Tuesday August 24
the Secretary of Departmental Government of Cauca was informed
in the hours of the night about the possible disappearance of
the commission by Colonel Trujillo, commander of Batallion Pichincha.
Immediately the security organisms of the Secretary of Government
established a channel of communication."
Battalion Pichincha has a long
acquaintance with the Nasa of northern Cauca. On December 31,
2003, a soldier from that battalion assassinated a youth from
the community, Olmedo Ul, who was riding his motorcycle past
a military checkpoint. When no one from the battalion owned up
to the crime, when no one was investigated or punished for the
murder, the Nasa decided not to allow the impunity and enacted
their own judicial proceeding against the battalion itself. The
community has a constitutional right to enact indigenous justice
in indigenous territory, and it attempted to exercise that right
in February 2004. Colonel Trujillo was summoned to the meeting--and
made a promise to Arquimedes Vitonas's office that he would attend.
I was there on February 19, when the Nasa judged the battalion
in an assembly of thousands of people (1). The colonel didn't
attend, and on television that night various figures from the
army announced that they rejected the jurisdiction of the indigenous
over the case.
The kidnapping, and the department
of Cauca's handling of it, leaves some unanswered questions.
The 24-hour delay in transmitting the news of the kidnapping
from the government of Cauca to the mayor's office in Toribio
is one question. The change of source of information from one
day to the next, from a battalion with no specific history in
northern Cauca to a battalion accused of abuse, murder, and impunity,
is another.
Just weeks before, the indigenous
of Cauca had publicly announced their decision to launch a mobilization
in mid-September against the continuing assault on their communities
by government, paramilitaries, and guerrillas as well. Their
mobilization will be a rejection of the constitutional 'reforms'
planned by President Uribe to facilitate the further restructuring
of the Colombian economy. Their argument is that these constitutional
reforms will destroy indigenous autonomy, security, and the rights
and freedoms the indigenous have won in long, terrible struggle.
Arquimedes Vitonas has a good
grasp of that long struggle. About two years ago, he visited
Canada to talk about the Nasa and their process. I asked him
about the land reform they had enacted in the 1970s and 1980s,
using strategies similar to those of the Landless Peasants in
Brazil (2). He gave an image of that historic struggle:
"First of all remember
that the land was ours. It was lost only in the 1950s and 1960s
during La Violencia. At that time, we were displaced by force
by large landowners, and these seizures of land were then legalized
by the government. When the indigenous returned from flight,
they found themselves workers of these large landowners. So they
began in the 1970s to recover the land.
"It is a long process.
First, there are community meetings. These happen between 1 and
4 a.m. as they are prohibited during the day. They are as secret
as possible. There is no writing, since to the authorities and
landowners in those days having a typewriter was far worse than
having a gun. During the meetings, 200 to 500 workers would get
involved through coming to agreements about decisions.
"The next step is the
occupation itself, which we do at dawn, taking over the territory
with the people by simply starting to work the land. There are
already set escape routes and people watching, however. So when
the police and army come, as they always do, we would run and
hide. The police would stay for three or four days, and leave--at
which point the people would return.
"After months of this,
maybe years of this, during which there are assassinations, attempts
to single out leaders, etc., the owner sees that he has to negotiate.
"There were also people
on the inside, fighting with legal instruments and legalizing
the conquests that the people had won on the ground. It is a
long fight, and many were killed, but we recovered the land."
Arquimedes would have been
quite young during this process. He is one of the current generation
of leaders, those who grew up living the violence of the civil
war but also living the power of the Nasa indigenous movement.
Padre Antonio Bonanomi (3) is an Italian priest who has been
part of the movement for decades, and watched the new generation
of leaders take over. He noted the difference between today's
leaders, leaders like Arquimedes, and decades before, when the
process was being reborn: 'The most beautiful part of a living
process is that it goes on.', he said. 'I know personally. I
used to be so important in this process: people used to ask me:
'Padre, what do we do?' Today they don't ask. They say: 'Padre,
here's what we're doing.'
Padre Antonio also captured
something of the spirit of the movement in Northern Cauca, one
of constructing dreams and democracy in the middle of terror
war zone:
'The Nasa are living two processes.
One is internal, built on dreams. The Nasa are always dreaming.
They have workshops, projects. They believe all this will pass.
Their historical experience tells them the rest will pass. We
won't pass. They say, it's tough, but La Violencia was worse,
the war of 1000 days was worse, the spanish conquest was worse.
Their resistance, their patience, is in this context. I hear
a bomb going off and I get stressed--they are not. Instead, they
are planning: they are occupied, but they are having their development
planning assemblies. For them, the conflict will pass. For me,
I say--how can we have autonomy when we are occupied? They say--we
act as if we are free. We are occupied. But the occupiers will
eventually leave, and we will continue to plan and dream."
In a public talk in Cali in
February 2004, Arquimedes described their spirit in a similar
way: "With this war, they can kill many of us, but they
cannot kill all of us. Those of us who live will continue with
our work. Those of us who die, will have died defending our process."
He knew that the process was
something well worth defending. The Nasa have become the ethical
guide of Colombia's social movements. Their resilience has helped
them survive, and build, despite years of paramilitarism, neoliberalism,
and murder. They can trace their resistance back to La Gaitana's
rebellion against the Spanish hundreds of years ago, to Manuel
Quintin Lame's struggle for the land in the 19th century, through
to the current strengthening of their movements in the past few
decades. They have lost thousands of people in these struggles.
Battalion Pichincha killed Olmedo Ul last year. Cristobal Secue
fell to assassination by FARC in 2001. Mario Betancur was killed
by the ELN in 1996. Alvaro Ulcue, one of the founder of today's
Nasa organization in Toribio, was killed by landlords and security
forces in 1984. Two years ago, the FARC pronounced a death sentence
on every mayor in Colombia, if those mayors did not resign. Shockingly,
they included the indigenous mayors of Toribio, and launched
an attack on the town. The FARC has not made any further statements
against the movement's mayors, but nor have they officially revised
the policy: so mayors, including Arquimedes, remain 'military
targets' according to FARC. Arquimedes' brother was disappeared
from the indigenous territory years ago.
The weapon of detention is
used ruthlessly against them as well. In January of this year,
8 people from Toribio were arrested and shipped off abysmal conditions
in prison to the department's capital, Popayan, without a shred
of evidence or due process, on the charge of 'insurgency'. According
to Colombia's anti-terrorist laws, these people, now in jail
in Popayan, the capital of Cauca, have no rights to face their
accuser; no rights to see the evidence against them; no rights
to a jury trial. Instead, their fate will be decided by the state
prosecutor's office, in private. The families of the detained
collected 3,000 signatures in the community of people who swore
that these eight individuals had nothing to do with the insurgency.
Against this, the prosecutor general had the testimony of someone
in a ski mask Arquimedes was, of course, among the first and
the strongest in their defense.
The march the Nasa are planning
for September is a mobilization against war, against neoliberalism,
and against the constitutional counterreforms planned by the
government. They have been joined not only by the other indigenous
of Cauca, but also the indigenous organizations of Antioquia,
Valle del Cauca, Caldas, Risaralda, Huila, Tolima, and the organizations
of the Embera, Awa, and Quindio.
More than once when I was in
Cauca, people would ask me what things were like in Canada and
elsewhere in the world. Arquimedes in particular was interested
in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Colombian media are no
better than the North American media on that or many other issues,
and so he was surprised to hear about the settlements, the assassinations,
the checkpoints, the starvation, the prisons, the total control
of daily life of the Palestinians by Israel. He had only heard
of it as some kind of interminable religious conflict. The night
of February 24, there was a celebration in Toribio--the UNDP
had awarded the community a prize for having the best sustainable
development project. Two representatives of the community had
come back from the awards ceremony in Malaysia, and told the
community about Malaysia and the different projects that had
won. Arquimedes, as he had done more than once, put me on the
spot in front of the whole gathered community, saying: "we
have a special guest, from Canada, let's give him a moment to
hear what he thinks." I said that I had been to many different
places, seen the Palestinians struggle against the most brutal
and powerful military machine; seen an MST community in Brazil
and community assemblies and recovered factories in Argentina,
Zapatista communities in Chiapas, and even very brave and principled
people in Canada, but I had never seen the kind of strength,
unity, and solidarity at the grassroots level that I had seen
there, and that I had to thank them for that, because if I hadn't
seen it I would not have believed it possible.
When Arquimedes spoke that
night, he said simply that now is the time to take what we can
from this award, from the visibility we have at the international
level, and take advantage of this time to try to move forward.
Because, he said, times change, and sometimes they don't return.
If he were to read this, he
would probably reject what he would view as an excessive focus
on him, his personality, and his work. He would probably remind
me that the process is a collective one, that the power is not
in the leaders, but in the people, and that no one can claim
ownership from the movement's collective effort of resistance
and autonomy. Maybe he would remind me, too, of the saying the
Nasa live by: "Words without action are empty, actions without
words are blind, and words and actions outside of the spirit
of community are death."
Kidnapping him won't stop the
Nasa from resisting, building, or dreaming. But him and the others
should be returned immediately.
Justin Podur is a frequent writer and translator
on Colombia and Latin America. He can be reached at justin.podur@utoronto.ca
- Programa Presidencial de
Derechos Humanos y de DIH.
Dr. Carlos Franco
Calle 7 N° 5-54
Bogotá
TEL: (+571) 336.03.11
FAX: (+57 1) 337.46.67
E- mail: cefranco@presidencia.gov.co
E-mail: fibarra@presidencia.gov.
- Ministerio de Defensa Nacional
Dr. Jorge Alberto Uribe
El Dorado con Carrera. 52 CAN,
Bogotá.
Tel. (57 1) 315 01 11
Fax: (+57 1)222.18.74
E-mail: siden@mindefensa.gov.co,
infprotocol@mindefensa.gov.co,
mdn@cable.net.co
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de la Nación
Dr. Edgardo José Maya Villazón
Carrera 5 No. 15-80
Santa Fé de Bogotá.
Tel: (57 1) 352 00 76
Fax: (+57 1)342.97.23
E-mail: anticorrupcion@presidencia.gov.co
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la Nación
Dr. Luis Camilo Osorio
Diagonal 22 B No.52-01
Bogotá.
Fax: (+571) 570 20 00
E-mail: contacto@fiscalia.gov.co;
denuncie@fiscalia.gov.co
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Dr. Vólmar Pérez Ortiz.
Calle 55 No. 10-32
Bogotá.
Tel: (57 1) 314 73 00
Fax: (+571) 640 04 91
E-mail:secretaria_privada@hotmail.com
- Presidencia de la República
Dr. Álvaro Uribe Vélez,
Cra. 8 No.7-26, Palacio de Nariño,
Bogotá.
Tel: (57 1) 562 93 00
Fax: (+57 1) 566.20.71
E-mail: auribe@presidencia.gov.co
Notes
1) I have written about this
in detail. I was in Toribio when the UNDP prize
was awarded and when Battalion Pichincha was judged. See this
photo essay.
http://www.en-camino.org/
2) I interviewed Arquimedes
in September 2002.
http://www.zmag.org/
3) I interviewed Padre Antonio
on February 24, 2004, in Toribio http://www.encamino.org/
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