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Humanitarian delegation finds plight of uprooted Afro-Colombians 'appalling, but spirit strong'
6/4/2004
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[ Church World Service]
The condition of Colombia's 10.5 million Afro-Colombians is "appalling, but their spirit and hope are strong," reports a humanitarian delegation just returning from the Latin American country.
Co-led by New York-based humanitarian agency Church World Service and the U.S. Office on Colombia, Washington, D.C., the seven-person delegation, met last week (Sun 5/23 - Wed 5/26) with Afro-Colombian activists and community leaders, with Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos Calderon, and the Director of the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights' office in Colombia, Michael Fruhling.
The delegation of advocates, policymakers and ecumenical leaders say they intend to galvanize U.S. response to the hundreds of thousands of Afro-Colombians who have been displaced from certified lands, who have almost no access to public services, and who live in wrenching poverty.
"The squalor that Afro-Colombians endure is unconscionable in a twenty-first century reality and their disenfranchisement is profound," says Church World Service (CWS) Executive Director and CEO Rev. John L. McCullough. "And their situation is made worse by the reality that so few people outside of Colombia even know that they exist."
In what the UN is calling the worse humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere, about three million Colombians have been displaced in recent years. More than 30 percent of those uprooted people are Afro-Colombians.
Colombia's 40 year-old internal armed conflict pits left-wing guerrillas against right-wing paramilitaries and the Colombian Armed Forces. While the State Department calls the Colombian government's human rights record "poor," it is the guerrillas and paramilitaries who are responsible for the vast majority of the country's human rights violations.
Afro-Colombians make up about one fourth of Colombia's population and have been in the country for over 400 years, descendents of African slaves.
Afro-Colombians from Choco and other areas, particularly on the Pacific Coast, have been routed from their lands by left-wing as well as right-wing militants, sometimes with the aid of the military.
One young Afro-Colombian man from the Ecumenical Network in Colombia told the delegation about his family's experience in the Choco community of Cacarica during Operation Genesis seven years ago.
16 at the time, the young man said, "They killed many," he said. "Some were beheaded, women raped and cut open. It was something we never expected. During the incursion, you couldn't hear the sound of nature because nature too was shocked at what was going on."
In all, he told the group, 23 communities-some 4,500 people-- were attacked and driven from the 103,000 hectares* to which they held title. For four years the community was dislocated to Turbo and lived in the Coliseo del Turbo until their return to Choco three years ago.
The 1,500 people who returned now live in two humanitarian zones, Hope in God and New Life. Each group has only 12 hectares to farm. One lives in the shadow of the military; the other, the paramilitary.
Afro-Colombian lands are now being deforested and planted in African palm by business interests that have the sanction of the military and paramilitary.
Forces have killed the community's livestock, burned their crops of rice and corn, and threatened to tear down a wall that the community built to protect the humanitarian zone.
Bishop Thomas Hoyt, President, National Council of Churches USA, head of the Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church in Louisiana and Mississippi and an African-American, was a member of the delegation. Hoyt comments, "We talked with people whose communities had experienced massacres, and because of the climate of impunity, they weren't heard. Their attackers are still walking free."
Census seen as key to inclusion for Afro-Colombians
CWS' McCullough reports that in the last Colombian census, only .5 million were counted of what is reported to be an Afro-Colombian population of 10.5 million. "The result is their disenfranchisement from government services, economic prosperity, and most importantly, security from the ravages of the nation's paralyzing internal armed conflict."
McCullough, an African American, says "The census results and the condition of Afro-Colombians we encountered are clear indicators of some of the most blatant institutional racism I've ever seen."
Vice President Santos Calderon: 'Formulating policies to benefit Afro-Colombians'
Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos Calderon told the CWS-USOC delegation on Tuesday (5/25) that Colombia's 1991 constitution has led to increasing recognition of Afro-Colombians and that his government is formulating policies to benefit Afro-Colombians, including counting beneficiaries. "The 2005 Colombian census will document numbers of Afro Colombians for the first time," Santos Calderon told the group.
However, grassroots activists told the U.S. delegation that, when polled, many people won't identify themselves as Afro-Colombians.
"It's a sensitive point," says Rev. Nicholas Genevieve-Tweed of New York City's African Methodist Episcopal Church and one of the delegates. "A quarter of the population are Afro-Colombians, but people told us that for historical reasons, many are reluctant to identify themselves as such." Many Afro-Colombians consider themselves mestizos, of mixed race."
One Afro-Colombian group told the delegation, "If the numbers don't bear out that there are a large number of Afro-Colombians, the government won't allocate a lot of resources to us. If we don't do a lot of consciousness-raising concerning the census now," the group said, "it will be easy to discount the census."
"This is one place we as individuals can make a specific difference from the U.S.," McCullough said. "Colombia's upcoming 2005 census should be the subject of international scrutiny and monitoring, and we can urge congressional representatives and international bodies to ensure that happens."
On the ground, he adds, "non-governmental agencies in Colombia have the capacity to help Afro-Colombian grassroots leaders inform their people why being included is vital."
More complex than Plan Colombia and military strategies
U.S. Office on Colombia Executive Director Neil Jeffery says the delegation members were convinced that the situation in Colombia is more complex than the U.S. Plan Colombia allows.
"Military strategies from all sides will further undermine the lives and livelihoods of the innocent," warns McCullough.
But Vice President Santos Calderon told the humanitarian delegation, "A weak state cannot control human rights.
"We're doing interdictions of drugs and seizing property that is related to drug trafficking. We have to defeat the drug trafficking if we want to defeat those at the extreme right and left," claimed the vice president.
The safety and rights of Afro-Colombians are caught in those crosshairs
Both Vice-President Santos Calderon and Stewart Tuttle, Deputy Director of the U.S. Embassy's political section, spoke of the Colombian government's strategy of increasing government presence in communities throughout the country. They said the Uribe government has made strides, particularly at positioning police in many communities.
"More implied than explicit, however," adds CWS' McCullough, "was the sense from some Afro-Colombians that the administration's move toward greater police presence in their communities might be positive for stability- but can also be an opening for more paramilitary forces to come in."
"Many people in the U.S. look at Colombia and say," said Jess Hunter, Senior Associate with USOC, "there are no good guys. There are good guys, but they don't have guns. They're working on issues such as community development and human rights. We met many people working hard to improve the situation."
Michael Fruhling, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia, affirmed to the delegation in Bogota that "there are people in non-governmental organizations and in the government who are working hard on behalf of Afro-Colombians."
Nonetheless, reports CWS, violence continues and humanitarian workers are also being targeted.
Rather than succumbing, Afro-Colombians looking for ways out
Rather than succumbing to the violence," says McCullough, Afro-Colombians are "looking for a way out," relying on human spirit, creativity and ingenuity.
USOC Director Jeffery said the delegation visited a women's sewing cooperative "which has accomplished a great deal with very few resources. These women are in a particularly difficult situation, but they've gotten their act together and are really creating something."
In Aguablanca, a squatter settlement of Afro-Colombians and mestizos, gang violence rules in many streets. But the delegation met Cazimba, a group of young Afro-Colombians there, who are making music and money in the nationwide Proceso Titanio movement.
Proceso Titanio, is working to keep Afro-Colombian culture alive, to create income, and to gain acceptance for their culture. Titano's Palenque Productions has put together ten groups like Cazimba - in all, 100 singers and producers- who are creating, performing and recording underground rap and hip hop.
"The group we met in Aquablanca are brilliant, articulate young people," says CWS' McCullough, "with no opportunity to pursue their education and no jobs. And they're forming their own business."
"They're also rejecting music that denigrates women," added NCC President Hoyt. "They want to do something positive in their music. They said we're going to be famous one day. In the midst of their poverty there's still hope."
In Valle de Cauca, the delegation met with Dr. Saulo Quinones Garcia, Mayor of Buenaventura, and Oscar Gamboa, advisor to Governor Angelino Garzon on Afro-Colombian affairs in Valle de Cauca. Garcia and Gamboa detailed the region's lack of social investment, high rates of malnutrition, infant mortality, malaria, tuberculosis, and homicide.
With few jobs available, Quinones said young people in Buenaventura have five main options: army, paramilitary, guerrilla, prostitution, or drugs.
Gamboa, a renowned Afro-Colombian activist, noted that recently, despite social marginalization, Afro-Colombians are gaining position and influence within Valle de Cauca.
Quinones believes that with investment, the natural resources surrounding Buenaventura--especially its port--position the municipality for growth in tourism, fishing, and logging industries that would generate jobs.
'Without advocacy, they're going to kill us here.'
""What is happening with Afro-Colombians is only a microcosm of the terror that grips this nation of 40 million," McCullough cautions.
Colombia is the third largest recipient of foreign aid from the United States. "The largest part of that aid," notes McCullough, "is committed to the war on drugs, including fumigation and interdiction."
Carlos Rosero, a leader of the Proceso de Communidades Negras and the Afro-Colombian National Conference, told the U.S. group, "It's coming to a breaking point between President Uribe and those calling for true democracy. Without advocacy, they are going to kill us here.
"There is in essence a marriage between the police, the military and the paramilitaries," claims Rosero. "And there is the presence in various areas of the guerrilla groups.
UNHCHR's Fruhling commented that this year the guerrillas have been responsible for slightly more of the attacks and displacement.
"We insist," Afro-Colombian Rosero" says, "that there must be a negotiated solution to the conflict. It's clear that a military solution isn't the correct solution."
'Our daily bread:' imposed coca, fumigation, violence, displacement
Afro-Colombians are also echoing the cries of other rural Colombians that indiscriminate aerial fumigation of crops is not succeeding in destroying the coca crops.
Said Afro-Colombian and activist Elda Cabezas of San Miguel, "Fumigation is a U.S. initiative. Toxic chemicals are being used that aren't used anywhere else in the world.
"Coca has been imposed," she said. "Fumigation has been imposed. What is really happening in Colombia? Armed actors are killing and displacing people from their lands. In Putamayo, this is our daily bread."
"Members of the U.S. Congress should seriously consider the impact of such contradictory policies," CWS director McCullough urged, "where more than one hundred million dollars of humanitarian assistance through USAID is countermanded by nearly five hundred million dollars of military aid.
"It is this contradiction between attention to military aid over humanitarian assistance," he concluded, "that leads many Colombians to hold the United States as a major contributor to their years of misery."
McCullough says Church World Service now intends to "make every effort to bring this perspective to the attention of Secretary of State Colin Powell and will particularly seek to encourage African-Americans including the Historic Black Churches and the Congressional Black Caucus to be more activist about this situation within our Western Hemisphere."
Delegate Genevieve-Tweed, an African American, told the Afro-Colombians, "It is not only your plight. It is our plight. We share in a common challenge to which we all must respond. Thank you for helping me to understand the commonality of our struggle. I will work to help the U.S. government to understand."
Members of the delegation included McCullough, Jeffery, Bishop Hoyt, Rev. Tweed, Dr. Mischa Thompson, Foreign Policy Legislative Assistant for U.S. Congressman Gregory Meeks, USOC Executive Director Neil Jeffery and Senior Associate Jess Hunter, and Rolanda Hughes, also of CWS.
The Office on Colombia is an independent non-profit organization that seeks to educate U.S. policymakers, the media and the U.S. public about the impact of U.S. policy on Colombia.
Church World Service has been providing aid, development assistance, and advocacy for Colombians since 1985. CWS is a non-governmental organization and cooperative ministry of 36 Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican denominations, providing sustainable self-help and development, disaster relief, and refugee assistance worldwide.
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