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Date: Thu, 24 May 2001
U'wa Families near Oxy Drill Site Threatened with Eviction!

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

Noticias sobre Colombia | Plan Colombia (ca) | Plan Colombia (en) | AGP