Milenio Semanal, August 17, 2003

On a Monday in late June, one of Colombia’s many holidays, farmers, teachers, catechists, and organizers from throughout the municipality of Cajibío in the northeastern corner of the department of Cauca gathered to share their stories of struggle with our delegation of a dozen human rights activists from throughout the U.S.

In a country where anyone who speaks out against the political and economic order is branded a "guerilla sympathizer" and targeted for assassination by the right-wing paramilitary groups that commit the killings the government and corporations don’t want to dirty there hands with, the depth, vibrancy, and steadfastness of the culture of resistance in this farming area is no small miracle. Through the Campesino Movement of Cajibío (MCC,) people have come together to build farmers’ cooperatives, human rights groups, women’s groups, and schools that help foment resistance against the tide of violence and corporate control that is sweeping Colombia.

A sugar cane farmer who looks to be in his late fifties tells us that "These are the actions that we, the oppressed people have come to in resistance to system that is against us. I want to make known a process of resistance that has been going on for twenty years that is now becoming a backbone of the community here – we call it the Plan of Life."

The Plan of Life is a comprehensive strategy for sustainable agriculture, holistic healthcare, appropriate technology, community self-sufficiency, progressive and relevant education, nonviolent resistance, and cultural survival developed as the people of Cajibío’s response to Plan Colombia – the devastating U.S. plan of coca crop fumigations and military aid that is ravaging the communities and environment of southern Colombia.

ROOTS IN LIBERATION THEOLOGY

But the Plan of Life’s roots go deeper. The culture of resistance in Cajibío was born twenty years ago when a Swiss priest brought liberation theology to the region, with its message that Jesus is on the side of the poor and oppressed and its method of developing "base communities," local groups in which people learn to relate Jesus’s teachings to their own daily struggles and begin to organize for justice.

The Catholic Church has always been nervous about liberation theology, and when the people of Cajibío became politicized through the work of the base communities, the Church removed the priest and replaced him with a conservative pastor opposed to the teachings of libetation theology. The base communities were driven out of the public life of the church, but not out of existence. Many of the women who found their voice in the base communities became catechists, passing their vision on to the children of the community. One woman told us "Our work as catechists goes beyond singing and praying, our work is grounded in our country and our community, we work with the children to help them learn to love nature because we realize very little remains." Another added "For us the church is about the feelings and perspectives of the poor. For the Church, Jesus’s story is the story of the Passion, nothing else enters into it. For us it is something more."

The experience of working in these base communities gave many in Cajibío the spiritual and political grounding necessary to begin working to resist the threats their community faced: a global economic system that allowed large multinational companies to use chemicals to force the land to produce more sugar and coffee than it could bear to, sell off the ruined land, and dump the sugar and coffee on the international market, driving crop prices down and small farms out or business; and a civil war in which the government and right wing paramilitaries had set out to eradicate anyone suspected of sympathizing with any of the ideas the Marxist guerillas held, and the guerillas had long ago abandoned many of their principles and become willing to kill anyone who stood in the way of their military victory.

MOBILIZING FOR JUSTICE

In 1990, 300 people in Cajibío joined a national civic strike for justice, and occupied the mayor’s office. Twenty four of them were arrested and jailed, and in prison they developed the intial plans to organize the MCC. They articulated goals for a civic movement that would bring together groups from various social movements, each working according to its own methodology, to build a broad-based progressive movement that could gain electoral power.

In its early years, the MCC focused on developing faith-based progressive leadership in Cajibío, with a special emphasis on helping women take positions of leadership in the movement. The organization also developed community-based economic projects: a cooperative mill for sugar cane farmers, projects to help women develop cottage industries, a community-based micro-credit program to give farmers small loans.

In 1998, the MCC put forward a mayoral candidate in coalition with the Liberal Party.

But the late 1990’s also brought Plan Colombia, the escalation of the war, and more economic strife.

So in 1999, the MCC united with campesino and indigenous groups from throughout the department of Cauca, and staged a mass mobilization. 25,000 people blocked the Pan-American Highway in Cajibío, and 40,000 people blocked the high way further to the south in the Macizo region, near the headwaters of four of Colombia’s major rivers. The Pan-American highway is the one route for multinational corporations to move goods overland from the U.S. to South America. As an organizer from the Macizo region said, "The Pan-American Highway is where development passes us by. And we need development – not imposed development, but development according to our own needs."

On the first day of the mobilization, the military attacked the blockades, destroying peoples’ tents and tarps and food. But aid came in from supporters around the department, and the blockade lasted twenty six days. The Colombian government was forced to negotiate and grant concessions to the protestors with the blockade still in place, something unheard of in modern Colombian history.

Feeling their strength, the social movements banded together to run a candidate for governor – Taita Floro Alberto Tunubalá, a traditional elder of the Guambiano tribe who became the first indigenous governor in Colombian history. Taita Floro, as he is affectionately known, remains in close contact with the social movements, but his power is increasingly limited by the administration of President Alvaro Uribe, which is increasingly centralizing and concentrating power in the hands of the national government.

BACKLASH

Infuriated and threatened by the mass mobilization and the election of Taita Floro, a group of business leaders from northwestern Cauca held secret meetings in Cali in the winter of 1999-2000 with the leadership of the Colombian Army’s Third Brigade to devise a plan to weaken the resistance movements in Cauca. In order to avoid being held directly responsible for attacks on community leaders, the Third Brigade recruited the right wing paramilitaries of the AUC ("Self-Defense Forces of Colombia") to carry out a series of massacres, assassinations, and disappearances intended to silence dissent in Cauca. Human Rights Watch reports that a year earlier, in 1999, the Third Brigade had been instrumental in establishing the Calima Front of the AUC in the department of Valle de Cauca, just north of Cauca. Soldiers received $500 a month for moonlighting with the paramilitaries, an enormous sum in a country where over 60% of the population lives on less than $2 a day.

In February of 2000, the Calima Front of the AUC publicly announced that it was advancing into Cauca and that . "Any citizen or civil authority who gives any type of assistance to subversives after our arrival in the department of Cauca will be declared a military target."

By late spring, the paramilitary offensive had begun, and the AUC had the full support of the military. According to Human Rights Watch:"Repeatedly, Colombian Army troops carried out operations that were followed closely by the arrival of large numbers of paramilitaries. Outside Timba, Cauca, one witness told Human Rights Watch, a June 2000 army offensive was followed within hours by the arrival of AUC paramilitaries, who drove up even as military helicopters continued to overfly the area and the ruts of the army's Cascabel armored vehicles were still fresh^. Timba residents told local social workers interviewed by Human Rights Watch that they had seen army soldiers and paramilitaries actually exchanging uniforms, so that soldiers appeared by day as army members and by night as paramilitaries."

By the end of the year, the violence reached Cajibío. On November 22, paramilitaries entered a village at the edge of Cajibío, forced all the residents into the village center, and took four men prisoner and executed them in the road to the cemetery. Two days later, they arrived in the village of Pedregosa, where they set up roadblock to keep anyone from entering or leaving the village, cut all the telephone lines, took five men prisoner, and executed them in a church in front of children who were receiving their first communion. A military helicopter hovered over the church throughout the massacre.

In December, hen residents complained to the government about the attacks, soldiers from the José Hilario López Battalion of the Third Brigade came to Cajibíon where they stripped and beat three young men and fired shots around the feet and ears of a community leader. The soldiers told the community ""For Christmas we are going to squeeze your balls and ruin the holidays."

A few weeks later, paramilitaries pulled nine men from a bus and one from a bicycle and shot them. The message was clear: the people of Cajibío would pay for their resistance.

Working with national and international groups, the people of Cajibío were able to make their story well enough known that it became too politically costly to continue the campaign of massacres in Cajibío. But community leaders in Cajibío still receive death threats, and many have gone into exile or hiding. In May of 2001, 40,000 people marched from Popayan, the capitol of Cauca, to Cali to publicly denounce the assassinations, disappearances, and displacements that marked the AUC’s reign of terror.

Throughout the rest of Cauca, the paramilitary offensive has continued unabated. Human rights activists estimate that over the past three years, paramilitaries have killed between 800 and 1,000 people in Cauca. Over the past two years, the paramilitaries, seeking a role in Colombian politics, have stopped carrying out large massacres in order to try to improve their public image. But at the same time they have escalated their campaign of individual assassination – last year, the AUC assassinated 396 people in Cauca. Disappearances have also increased by a factor of 100%. Meanwhile, the military is involved in a brutal campaign to retake the Macizo, traditionally a stronghold of the leftist guerillas of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.)

As of August, 2002, the José Hilario López Battalion was still receiving U.S. military aid, including Blackhawk and Huey helicopters, despite the fact that U.S. law bans any foreign military unit with a history of human rights abuses from receiving such aid. Sources at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota declined to comment for this story on whether the Third Brigade continues to receive U.S. military aid and whether the Third Brigade is currently under investigation for its paramilitary links.

U.S. support for the Colombian military is chalked up to the "war on terrorism." As one community organizer from the Macizo said:"Often we are mislabeled as drug traffickers or terrorists. Nowadays with Bush, we are all terrorists. It is not just those who plant bombs or fly planes into the Twin Towers. It is those of us who cultivate our land and believe in the dignity of our lives and of our country."

LA LUCHA CONTINUA

Even in the face of such severe, repression, the people of Cajibío continue to organize for justice and autonomy.

Globalization has already devastated the Colombian economy – industrial sugar farmers in the U.S., subsidized by the federal government can produce sugar far cheaper than the campesinos of Cauca. International financial institutions encouraged Vietnam to enter the coffee business, and the Vietnamese dumped huge amounts of inferior but cheap coffee on the international market, making the bottom fall out of the coffee market. If President Bush succeeds in pushing through the FTAA (Free Trade Agreement of the Americas,) Colombia will be forced to accept more cheap crops from industrial growers in the U.S. and elsewhere, and to accept genetically engineered foods and seeds. One sugar farmer in Cajibío told us "The FTAA is trying to disappear us, the small farmers."

To make matters worse, many campesinos don’t legally own the title to their land, and President Uribe is implementing a perverse kind of agrarian reform – the government will only give legal title to campesinos who agree to join a corporation and use their land to aid in the mass production of unsustainable crops like oil palms.

Rather than acquiesce to the demands of the market and the government, the people of Cajibío are opting for self-sufficiency. They have adopted the goal of "food sovereignty" – producing crops that are suitable to the soil and to the needs of the community, eliminating chemical pesticides and fertilizers, using local varieties of seeds and locally bred animals. The idea is not only to farm sustainably, but to reduce the community’s dependence on products and money from the outside. That way if the market crashes or the military and paramilitaries blockade the roads, the community will be able to survive.

Community organizer, Marylen Serna, explains:"We will not grow organic coffee because the market demands it. But if we find it is good for our land and good for our health, then, perhaps, we will grow organic coffee. When we are talking about food sovereignty we are talking about the ability to produce with our own seeds and our own technology to feed our own families."

An elderly woman adds, "This s our little golden corner of the world."

In this golden corner of the world, people’s every day lives are the stuff of revolution. They have replaced their loyalty to the state with a loyalty to their families, their neighbors, their soil. Marylen’s husband, Jhon Henry Gonzales says:"We are resisting the model of development imposed by foreign powers, we are resisting the politics of pillaging our resources, we are resisting the eradication of the campesino economy, and we are rejecting war as a means of resolving social conflicts."

The vision, courage, and eminent practicality of Cajibío’s revolution may offer the best hope for healing Colombia’s wounds.