U'WA FAMILIES NEAR OXY DRILL SITE THREATENED WITH EVICTION! “U'wa culture, like the oil in the ground, is also non-renewable.” Roberto Perez, President of the U'wa Traditional Authority. In This Post 1. Breaking News 2. U'wa Communique May 15, 2001 3. UN Says Paramilitaries Most Involved in Drug Trafficking 4. “US drug war aids Colombian paramilitaries” THE GUARDIAN [London] 5. “Bush's dirty war” THE GUARDIAN [London] 6. URGENT: TAKE ACTION AGAINST THE REGIONALIZATION OF PLAN COLOMBIA! For background info and organizing resources on the U'wa struggle including the Spanish version of the Communique, check out the following sites: www.ran.org www.amazonwatch.org www.moles.org www.uwacolombia.org To get involved in local solidarity work for the U'wa contact Rainforest Action Network at 415-398-4404/1-800-989-RAIN or organize@ran.org ________________________________________ 1. Breaking News The U'wa received two letters last week from local government officials demanding that U'wa families occupying a farm near Oxy's drill site “must be evacuated and relocated immediately to a secure area” because of landslide risk. In a response letter, the U'wa adamantly rejected and denounced this order, stating that, “The U'wa have known that [Oxy's] project was not viable--technically or culturally . . . due to its social, environmental, and territorial impacts. Now those involved in the project come to us surprised after we have predicted the impacts.” While seasonal heavy rain is normal in their territory, the U'wa are suspicious of who will benefit if the families are forced to leave and the role Oxy's exploratory drilling and road building plays in exacerbating a potential landslide. The U'wa have vowed they will not abandon their farms, and place sole responsibility on Oxy and the Colombian government if any harm comes to them over the next few months. Oxy is expected to know the results of their exploratory drilling soon-- a critical juncture that could signify the start of oil production or new exploration. The U'wa continue to call for the cancellation of Oxy's project and a halt to all military aid to Colombia. Meanwhile, in a public response to a profound increase in murders, kidnappings, disappearances, and threats from armed violence--all intensified by Plan Colombia--42,000 Colombian indigenous peoples and campesinos marched to the city of Cali last Friday in a “Festival of life.” With the sounds of flutes and voices calling for respect for mother earth and its people, they sent a clear message to Colombia and the world: “No to war, yes to life!” ________________________________________ 2.ASSOCIATION OF U'WA TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES DECREE No. 1088 of 1993 January 7, 1997 Resolution of Registry No. 003 General Office of Indigenous Affairs. Ministry of the Interior COMMUNIQUE TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY Cubará, May 15, 2001 The U'wa people inform the National and International Community about the current state of our TERRITORIAL, CULTURAL, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND SOCIAL process against the OIL EXPLORATION PROJECT IN THE AREA OF THE GIBRALTAR WELL UNDERTAKEN BY OCCIDENTAL PETROLEUM MULTINATIONAL OF COLOMBIA INC., AND WITH APPROVAL FROM THE COLOMBIAN GOVERNMENT. Since November 1999, the U'wa have mobilized CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE to protest the institutional and judicial violations that the Colombian government has sponsored since the SAMORE oil Block was granted to OCCIDENTAL PETROLEUM MULTINATIONAL COMPANY OF COLOMBIA INC. in 1995. In 2000, we continued with our protests. With the decided and definitive support of the social sectors of Arauca, Cubará; Boyacá, Toledo; North Santander; and the national and international communities, we have been able to achieve global awareness of the problem. In the face of our legitimate and legal demands, the Colombian government--with the use of the military and police--achieved its goal of allowing the entry of machinery and operators. It has been approximately twelve months since the company began the oil perforation stage. There is no date when the results, either positive or negative, of the potential expected hydrocarbons will be known. What exists at this time is: Decomposition of the social fabric, as manifested by the Sarare Board Association of Samoré, made up of 33 Communal Action Boards; Environmental Contaminations (water and noise pollution, etc.); Indigenous members beaten, arrested, attacked physically and morally; Violation of our sacred rights over the Earth, culture, sovereignty, a healthy environment, identity and difference, etc. All of the above is justified by the neo-liberal and pro-development politics of President Pastrana. In each visit to foreign countries, he sells our history, higher laws, and sacred territories, to irresponsibly become a part of Economic Globalization. Moreover, we would like to inform you that we the U'wa, a culture that doesn't sell its millennial historical principles, have continued our process of defense. Today our communities are abiding by the higher laws, for this reason we find ourselves in a spiritual fast to strengthen ourselves as a culture, as a community, as a people. We inform all our friends in Colombia and the World that we have initiated judicial actions against the Colombian government and Occidental of Colombia Inc. They must pay for their acts of brutality against the U'wa culture. Our Traditional Authorities also find themselves in permanent assembly against the science of the white world through spiritual fasting, meditation, seclusion, maintaining the harmony with Our Mother Earth, etc. Soon we will be sharing the results. We, the U'wa, continue to defend the absolute ownership of our lands in Santa Rita, Bellavista, Vega Rica, Santa Rosa, properties that were acquired in accordance with and ordered by the laws of the white man. The Colombian government, the head of Minister of the Environment, Juan Mayr Maldonado, and the President of the Republic of Colombia, Andrés Pastrana Arango, continue to lie to the international and national community when he informs them that no difficulties exist with the U'wa community. In reality, we do have environmental problems, problems of recuperating the territory of our Reserve, health, and educational problems, and other projects that directly affect our territory. We energetically reject the way in which the Colombian government facilitates the entry of multinationals into indigenous territory¾ by using the judicial and administrative institutions, and state security in order to take away our sacred rights, to vanish us from what is ours. At present time, the National government irresponsibly and without consultation granted an Environmental License for the Capachos Project on indigenous land, located in the Tame municipality in the state of Arauca, which is operated by the Spanish transnational company REPSOL EXPLORACIÓN COLOMBIA S. A. Finally, we would like to say that we are in the process of cultural and territorial defense. We have national and international claims in which we have demonstrated the flagrant violation of our human rights by the Colombian government and its authorities and at the same time we solicit the reestablishment of our rights. We request that our national and international friends (Environmental and Human Rights NGO's, students, teachers and academics, workers, unionists, young people, seniors, Indigenous communities and organizations of the world, etc.) continue to support us in this difficult process, where capital and the power of money wants to consume us to the point of destruction, but we the U'wa will give our lives defending our mother earth. Cultures with principles cannot be bought. We, the U'wa, zealously defend the higher laws. ________________________________________ 3. UN Says Paramilitaries Most Involved in Drug Trafficking (El Rescate Bulletin Tuesday, May 15, 2001) UN anti-drug representative in Colombia Klaus Nyholm said on Thursday, May 10 that the paramilitaries are more deeply involved in drug trafficking than the guerillas. Such is their involvement, he said that, “there are parts of the country where it is difficult to distinguish who are drug traffickers and who are paramilitaries.” Although the FARC guerillas tax drug production in areas under their control, Nyholm does not consider them drug traffickers because “we still consider the guerillas to be a group with political objectives”. Nyholm said that the ELN guerillas have never been particularly involved in drugs, primarily because they do not control drug-producing territories. Because of that, he thinks the ELN has the greatest commitment to breaking the drug-and-conflict cycle. “Drug traffickers in Colombia do not want peace,” Nyholm said, “and as long as they are operating it will be difficult to achieve national reconciliation.” ________________________________________ 4. US drug war aids Colombian paramilitaries "Since the human-rights waiver was granted the paramilitaries have doubled in size. The number of massacres has increased." THE GUARDIAN [London] Thursday, 17 May 2001 By Julian Borger in Washington and Martin Hodgson in Bogota A leading US Democratic senator has denounced Washington's billion-dollar anti-drug policy in Colombia as an expensive failure which has boosted rightwing paramilitaries while achieving negligible' results. Condemnation of the policy came amid reports that the area in Colombia used for the production of coca, the raw material used to make cocaine, dramatically increased last year despite extensive crop-spraying and military operations. In a broad attack on the US's Plan Colombia, an ambitious anti-narcotics strategy to which it is contributing more than a billion dollars, Senator Patrick Leahy criticised the exemptions granted the Bogota government from human rights conditions on the disbursement of aid. The senator said: "We give more aid to the military. They give more aid to the paramilitaries. The paramilitaries are involved with atrocities. Guerrillas are too. Drug lords seem to flourish, but the paramilitaries are now working as sort of semi-drug lords too." "Since the human-rights waiver was granted", he said, "the paramilitaries have doubled in size. The number of massacres have increased." Responding to the senator's criticism, the secretary of state, Colin Powell, denied that the US was supporting paramilitaries, and insisted that Washington was committed to the maintenance of human rights in Colombia. We speak candidly to the Colombian government', Mr Powell said. And in my conversations with my Colombian colleagues, I make the point that human rights are an essential part of our strategy.' Critics of Plan Colombia say that it is being used to fight leftwing guerillas, rather than to solve the underlying social and economic pressures which push farmers into coca cultivation. Moreover, a Bogota newspaper, Cambio Revista, said that a survey jointly commissioned by Colombia and the UN and conducted by satellite, found that the area devoted to grow- ing coca grew 60% to 162,000 hectares (400,000 acres) in the year ending December 2000. A spokesman at the UN's Drug Control and Crime Prevention agency in Vienna, would not confirm the figures. However, according to several reports from Bogota, the survey found that far more cocaine was being produced in Colombia than had previously been thought. If confirmed, it would suggest that the widespread crop-spraying has dramatically failed to reduce production. Meanwhile, crop-substitution programmes aimed at providing local farmers an alternative to coca have yet to get off the ground, according to Colombian municipal officials and aid workers. Lisa Haugaard, of the Latin America Working Group, said that the small number of families who signed pacts with the government agreeing not to grow coca in return for subsidies had yet to receive any aid. Our concern is the fumigation part and the military part of Plan Colombia is moving ahead, but the alternative development part is lagging behind', Ms Haugaard said. Without humanitarian and alternative development assistance, coca-growing families may soon be facing famine, a local researcher said. Senator Leahy also questioned the safety of the pesticide being used for crop-spraying, glyphosate. While its manufacturer, Monsanto, says it is safe, it recommends that livestock be kept out of the area for two weeks after spraying and that people stay away until it dries. Community leaders in the Putumayo region, where much of Colombia's coca is grown, said that villagers exposed to the pesticide had developed rashes and fevers, and that it had killed off livestock, fish and birds. Copyright 2001 Guardian Newspapers Limited ________________________________________ 5. Bush's dirty war: Colombia's peasant farmers are being driven off their land. And we are helping. George Monbiot Tuesday May 22, 2001 The Guardian [London] George Bush has made no secret of the primary mission of his presidency: to remunerate the companies which supported his bid for power. To the oil industry he has given the Arctic wildlife reserve and the abandonment of American action on climate change. To the tobacco industry he has granted an end to the federal lawsuits on behalf of the victims of smoking. To the mining firms he has pledged to remove the laws restricting arsenic in drinking water. But what do you give to the industry which has everything? Which already receives some $200bn a year from the US taxpayer? You give America's arms companies what they most desire. You give them war. To this end, and in the name of national security, Mr Bush has been seeking to revive the hostility and suspicion which proved so lucrative until the disastrous events of 1989. He hopes to scrap the anti-ballistic missile treaty, destabilising the world's nuclear equilibrium. He is determined to extend Nato to all of Russia's western borders, causing the moribund but dangerous old bear to feel more threatened than it has done for a decade. Welcome as these incipient crises are, however, the war industry also requires immediate conflict. So the US has been seeking opportunities all over the world. None has so far proved as fruitful as its support for a scheme devised by the government of Colombia. The purpose of Plan Colombia, according to President Andres Pastrana, is to help eliminate the production of drugs, generate employment, boost trade and bring peace to a country which has been mauled by civil war for more than 50 years. The Clinton and Bush administrations have generously supplied this worthy scheme with $1.3bn, promising the American people that the money will be spent to assist the war on drugs. Eighty-four per cent of the funding will take the form of military aid. To control drugs, the US insists, first it must control the country. To this end,it has supplied 104 combat helicopters and trained three Colombian army battalions. But the army is not exactly the instrument of peace that Mr Pastrana has claimed. As Amnesty International has recorded: "Colombian army personnel, trained by US special forces, have been implicated... in serious human rights violations, including the massacre of civilians." The army works alongside Colombia's ultra-right paramilitaries, who are responsible for the assassination of thousands of trades union and peasant leaders and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. As one of Colombia's official human rights ombudsmen has noted: "The paramilitary phenomenon... is the spearhead of Plan Colombia: to create territorial control and to control the civilian population. This is a terror tactic." The US, with the help of the Colombian government, is waging yet another dirty war in Latin America. Far from eliminating drugs production, this war will only make it worse. Plan Colombia funds the aerial spraying of coca and opium fields with Roundup, the broad-spectrum herbicide patented by Monsanto. Roundup destroys almost everything it touches, wiping out legal crops alongside illegal ones, poisoning rivers, shattering one of the most fragile and biodiverse forest ecosystems on Earth, precipitating both acute and chronic human diseases. It is the Agent Orange of America's new Vietnam. (Agent Orange, interestingly, was also a Monsanto product.) Now the US administration wants to take this ecocide a step further, by spraying the jungle with a genetically engineered fungus which produces deadly toxins. When their livelihood has been destroyed, the peasant farmers and indigenous people have no means of survival but to flee further into the jungle and start growing drugs. Since the aerial spraying programme began, the area devoted to drugs cultivation in Colombia has tripled. But Plan Colombia is not a war against drugs: it is a war against people. Its ultimate purpose, as several international observers have pointed out, is to eliminate both leftwing guerillas and grassroots democratic movements, in order to facilitate the seizure of the country's most valuable land. The US envisages a new inter-oceanic canal through the north of the country, to bypass the congested Panama canal. Its companies have identified billions of dollars' worth of oil and mineral deposits. So, for the past five months, soldiers and paramilitaries have been murdering community leaders and expelling local people. The places identified for economic development by Plan Colombia are the places now being savaged by the paramilitaries. The European Union is well aware of these atrocities and of their coordination by President Pastrana's plan. At first sight, it appears to be contesting them. At a meeting on April 30, the EU resolved to spend 330m euros on "political support" for the "peace process" in Colombia. The money will be used to establish "peace laboratories", contest human rights violations and "relieve the social impact of conflict". The package looks uncontroversial and it received no significant coverage. But the public statements issued by the EU, the European commission and Chris Patten, the British commissioner who brokered the agreement, contain a number of curious omissions. "Plan Colombia" is mentioned nowhere. Nor is the US government. Nor are the atrocities committed by the army and coordinated by the state. The killings in the country are blamed solely upon paramilitaries and guerillas. Only when you read an account of the same meeting by the Inter-American Development Bank do you stumble across several interesting features missing from the European statements. The first is that the funding package is not a European initiative, but was provided at the request of the Colombian government. The second is that it will be supplemented by extra money from the US. The third is that Marc Grossman, a US under secretary of state, was sitting in the meeting. Trawl the European commission's archive, and you discover a further interesting feature: that the "peace process" to which the EU was referring is none other than Plan Colombia. The new funding represents the plan's "social component", attached to the US invasion in the hope of making it look like something rather different. Spain is prepared to go further still, and help the US to finance the Colombian army. The new European funding, in other words, provides the political credibility which President Pastrana and the US administration have desperately been seeking ever since they initiated their plan. Wittingly or otherwise, the European Union has helped the two governments to disguise a programme of state terror as humanitarian aid. Mass killings, ecocide and the seizure of resources do not have a financial solution, but a political one. You cannot buy human rights, least of all from a scheme that's responsible for their abuse. The only help foreign intervention can offer the Colombian people is intense diplomatic pressure, exposing the atrocities of their government and army, denouncing the scheme which coordinates them and isolating its supporters. Instead, we have chosen to collaborate. At its best, the EU's funding is a waste of money. At its worst, it amounts to complicity in crimes against humanity. How many of us would have agreed that our money should be used like this? ________________________________________ 6. URGENT: TAKE ACTION AGAINST BUSH'S 'ANDEAN INITIATIVE' From the streets of Cali to the halls of Congress, criticism and opposition to Plan Colombia--the $1.3 billion military aid package passed last year by the Clinton Administration--has swelled, forcing President Bush to carefully spin his newly announced “Andean Initiative” as focused on social and economic aid. But in fact, this initiative is the REGIONALIZATION OF PLAN COLOMBIA! While the 2002 aid request contains 24 percent less military and police aid for Colombia, this is almost exactly offset by large increases in military aid to Colombia's neighbors- Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, and Panama. The initiative would give Colombia and its neighbors nearly $1.1 billion in 2002, 54 percent of it military and police assistance. The “Andean Initiative” is by no means a shift away from military aid, as the Bush Administration would like us to think, but rather spreads the devastating social, environmental, and economic impacts of Plan Colombia to six other South and Central American countries! For a thorough breakdown and analysis of the Andean Initiative, go to www.ciponline.org/colombia CALL OR WRITE YOUR SENATORS, REPRESENTATIVES, AND THE WHITE HOUSE TODAY AND URGE NO $$$ TO THE 'ANDEAN INITIATIVE'!!!!!!!!! The White House: (202) 456 1414 Capital Switchboard: 202-224-3121. To find your Senators and Representatives, go to www.senate.gov and www.house.gov
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