Colombia: Land theft put at 7m hectares

[Judi Lynn]

Source: BBC News

29 May 2011 Last updated at 18:11 ET
Colombia: Land theft put at 7m hectares

The Colombian government says almost seven million hectares of land has been stolen by armed groups involved in the country's civil conflict over the past 25 years.

Agriculture Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo said hundreds of thousands of families were driven from their land.

He said paramilitaries, rebels and drug dealers had used violence and fraud to take the land.

Colombia this week passed a law which aims to return the land to its owners.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13591860

[Judi Lynn]

1. SOA Watch in Colombia ( re: who takes the land, and how)

SOA Watch in Colombia
Written by Liz Deligio and Charity Ryerson, SOA Watch Illinois
SOA Watch visited Colombia in July as a member of the Ethics Commission of the human rights group Justicia y Paz.

The Commission publicizes human rights abuses in a number of specific communities in Colombia, where a brutal war continues to rage. More than four billion dollars in U.S. military aid, accompanied by military training for the Colombian armed forces at the School of the Americas, is fueling the war.

The approach of the SOA/WHINSEC of “solving” social problems with military violence has left an indelible mark on the country: millions of people have had to flee their homes and thousands have been killed over the past years. The Colombian military has the worst human rights record in the Americas. The military continues a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign that has killed thousands of Colombians and displaced millions (this year, Colombia surpassed Sudan as the country with the most internally displaced people).

Liz Deligio and Charity Ryerson, as SOA Watch members of the Ethics Commission, traveled to Colombia from July 23 - August 1 to visit with impacted communities. The Ethics Commission is a gathering of members from the Colombian and international communities who have joined in solidarity with impacted communities in Colombia. The Commission gathers twice a year to hear testimony from communities about the systematic human rights violations they experience as well as what they envision for reparation. The Commission traveled to the Chocó region in the north of Colombia.

In northern Antioquia, the African palm oil business has forcibly displaced thousands of mestizo, afro-descendiente, and indigenous families from their own lands. In concert with the police, military, paramilitaries, and local government offices, the palm oil companies have murdered and displaced community members and falsely claimed legal right to the territory.

More:
http://www.soaw.org/presente/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=76&Itemid=74

[gbscar]

5. CODHES, not SOAWatch, is the NGO that actually tracks displacement figures on the ground in Colombia

I've just made a longer (probably too long) post on the subject that can be accessed through the following link:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=405&topic_id=52465&mesg_id=52506

Still, I'll leave a couple of isolated phrases, quotes and links here for the sake of the record.

----

The SOA Watch article has no statistics and implies that land theft is equal to displacement.

Land theft is, yes, very often produced through displacement but also includes non-violent takeovers or purchases of land.

Drug lords have been using both violent and non-violent methods to acquire land, long before multinationals. To say they aren't an important player, both in alliance with other groups (such as said multinationals) and by themselves, in land theft would be ridiculous.

----

CODHES, not SOA Watch, is the Colombian human rights NGO that tracks displacement on the ground.

They have done this for many years and CODHES is also the original source for the "five million" figure, as indicated below:

"Internal displacement currently affects 8 to 11.6% of the national population. According to CODHES, in 2010, 280,000 people were newly displaced, adding to previous displacement to create a total number of 5,200,000.

Government figures for 2010 differ significantly from CODHES's. The total, cumulative figure also varies significantly, as the governments registers a total of 3,600,000 to December 2010. 2008, 2009 and 2010 government figures are influenced by the decision of the Consejo de Estado that invalidated Decree 2569 of 2000, and by the Constitutional Court’s Auto 011."

Source: http://www.internal-displacement.org/idmc/website/countries.nsf/(httpEnvelopes)/A7E1B7BD7528B329C12575E500525165?OpenDocument">here.

Contrary to SOA Watch's position, CODHES figures indicate that displacement isn't exclusively carried out by Colombian soldiers.

English-language reference to a CODHES report from 2000:

"During the year 2000, the forced displacement of civilians continued to be used as a military control strategy in the armed conflict. Some 48% of the cases of internal displacement were carried out by paramilitary groups, while 29% were the work of armed dissidents. Displacement caused by unknown parties rose to 16% of the total, which would seem to indicate that the protagonists in the conflict do not always want to claim responsibility for the acts of violence that cause and attend displacements."

Source:
http://www.cidh.org/annualrep/2000eng/chap.4a.htm#_ftnref42

English-language reference to a Civil Society Follow-Up Commission (including CODHES and run from its offices) report from 2008:

"According to Acción Social, the government agency for IDP policy, FARC and the guerilla National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or ELN) have been responsible for 23 per cent of internal displacement, and the paramilitary groups no more than 12 per cent. The national verification survey by the Civil Society Follow-Up Commission found, in contrast, that guerrilla groups were responsible for 33 per cent of displacement, and paramilitary groups for 37 per cent.

The sharp difference in the percentage of cases of displacement attributed to paramilitaries may be explained by the fact that people feel more comfortable declaring the cause of their displacement to a civil society group than to the authorities, especially for those who might fear retaliation from paramilitaries (Comision de Seguimiento a la Politica de Publica sobre el Desplazamiento Forzado, 4 June 2008)."

Source: http://www.internal-displacement.org/8025708F004BE3B1/(httpInfoFiles)/5BCA28006BFAA8ADC12575E8005CBF23/$file/Colombia+-+July+2009.pdf">here.

Civil Society Follow-Up Commission documents (in Spanish) in .PDF format, hosted on the CODHES website:http://www.codhes.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=98">2008, http://www.codhes.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=168">2010.

-----

Even if we were to assume these figures from CODHES and the Commission aren't perfect...the guerrillas almost certainly have a greater responsibility for displacement than what is often acknowledged around here, but it is probably misleading -at least without trying to bring up other overlooked evidence and additional statistics at some other time- to suggest they are important players in land theft. Land concentration isn't part of their strategy, at least never an equivalent level to that of paramilitaries, multinationals, druglords and others.

Which contributes to demonstrating that land theft and displacement, while closely related, aren't always one and the same. SOA Watch also gets this wrong. Then again, this hardly makes either of these processes feel any "better" for those victims affected by any, let alone both, of them.

So I wonder...if the BBC article is "bad" because it does leave certain significant details out and gets others wrong, then is SOA Watch "good" even though it also leaves other facts behind and gets others wrong? Or are CODHES and the Commission quietly serving "fascist" interests by providing additional data as opposed to following the example of SOA Watch's statistics-less stance? I'll leave that conclusion to whoever is remotely interested in thinking about these issues with an open mind.

[Peace Patriot]

2. Colombian ag minister Restrepo omits the U.S.-funded Colombian military role in land theft

and the BBC lets him get away with it.

I'm glad you added the SOA Watch article to the thread, because they identify the main force behind the displacement of FIVE MILLION peasant farmers--and that is the Colombian military, using OUR MONEY to murder, torture, beat, rape, threaten and terrify peasant farmers, and OUR MONEY to pay U.S. corporations' toxic pesticide manufacturers to spray and destroy peasant farms, which mostly grow food, and poison children and animals, in which what I believe has been a consolidation of the trillion dollar-plus cocaine revenue stream into fewer hands and direction of that revenue stream to U.S. banksters and others (the Bush Cartel? the CIA?).

I think that that is what this is all about. The U.S. "war on drugs"--segued into the "war on terror" by the Bushwhacks--has been used to get control of--not to stop--the drug trade. And the Colombian military has been key to that effort.

The secondary purpose of clearing the peasants off the land is to prep this bloody ground for U.S. "free trade for the rich" (for transglobal corporations like Monsanto, Chiquita, Drummond Coal and Exxon Mobil) and to create a slave labor force in urban areas (for transglobal retailers), dependent on Burger King for food, while local organic food production is destroyed. This is standard operating procedure for "first world" exploitation of the "third world," but in this case with the U.S. "war on (promotion of) drugs/terror" as handy cover.

And the third purpose is to decapitate labor union and grass roots leadership. According the Amnesty International, 92% of the murders of trade unionists (often farmer workers and miners) in Colombia have been committed by the Colombian military itself (about half) and by its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads (the other half). They attribute only 2% of these murders to the leftist guerrillas. This gives us an idea of the PROPORTION of violence in Colombia--MOST of it committed by the Colombian military ($7 BILLION in U.S. funding) and its cohorts.

The BBC--in what has become its increasingly rightwing/corporate tone and 'journalistic' methods--is ignoring well-known facts and permitting a Colombian government rep to lie about them--without contradiction, without question, and without citing or quoting knowledgeable sources that could set the record straight.

We also need to ask what the U.S. military and its 'contractors' have been doing in Colombia while all these people were being murdered, terrorized and displaced.

Why did the U.S. (Bushwhack) ambassador William Brownfield seek and obtain a SECRET U.S./Colombia military agreement, in 2009, granting "total diplomatic immunity" to all U.S. military personnel and all U.S. military 'contractors' in Colombia?

And what are the facts behind the U.S. State Department "fining" of Blackwater, early this year, for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan"?

The fascists running Colombia may, indeed, be intending to restore some of the peasant land--although you gotta wonder how that's going to go in a country that has been run as a criminal enterprise for more than a decade--but, just as here, the real culprits--the constructors of this criminal enterprise--will go free. "We need to look forward not backward" on the crimes of the very rich and the very powerful is the operative principle in Colombia, as here. Alvaro Uribe--like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld--is still running around free, with protections from prosecution provided by the U.S. government, along with academic honors and prestigious appointments to "launder" his image.

This massive land theft in Colombia was NOT primarily the work of "paramilitaries, rebels and drug dealers." It was OFFICIAL policy--implemented in "pacification" programs designed by the Pentagon and the USAID. Where is the accountability for U.S. military funding, training, provision of "technical assistance," provision of high tech surveillance and drone aircraft, design of "pacification" programs and other aid to the Colombian military? Where is accountability for what U.S. military personnel and 'contractors' were DOING during this bloodbath in Colombia?

The BBC--like the rest of the corpo-fascist press--is whitewashing this tremendous scandal.

[w4rma]

3. Wow. That article gets it completely wrong. I think the BBC needs letters on this. (nt)

[Scruffy1]

4. K&R