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August 18, 2003 A Terror State Called Democracy Despite the horrors faced by those fighting for better societies across the world, there are few countries on earth where trade union leaders can only access their offices by climbing out of a bulletproof jeep surrounded by bodyguards holding semi-automatic weapons and walking through a metal room equipped with electronic steel gates in order to start work in a bomb-proof office. This is not a description of a poverty-stricken central African state but one of Latin America’s “oldest democracies,” a country with some of the most desirable commodities and richest soils in the world, and in which the U.S and British governments have extensive investments. This is Colombia.
It is difficult to get beyond the belief that this terror must
only target a handful of radical union leaders who place themselves
in total opposition to the government. So we might want to picture
the university porter who was going about his duties on campus when
two motorbikes drove up and opened fire on him—two bullets
to the head, three to the body. Or the schoolteacher shot five times
through his windscreen as he drove home with his wife. Another teacher who works in a school on the outskirts of Bogotá has been persecuted for the past 15 years. Her house has been raided many times. Like all persecuted trade unionists, she is accused of being a guerrilla—a tactic that normally means you are being set up for “cleansing” operations. Her two teenage daughters have also been targeted. She described matter-of-factly how her husband was kidnapped and then killed by paramilitaries. Her daughters were not even able to go to the cemetery to see their father’s grave. Teachers and lecturers are not the only members of society targeted—progressive lawyers, priests, students, any form of trade unionist, or just small farmers who happen to live in the wrong area have also been victimized. The Arauca department has been turned into a militarized zone by the government—what one teacher described as a “laboratory for war.” He told us that in the first eight months of militarization, 3,000 people have been arrested, there have been 1,300 raids on people’s homes and 90,000 people have had their personal details entered into a security database. Colombia is a country in which protest is being outlawed, in which anyone who questions authority is labelled a terrorist. Anyone who tries to defend public education, workplace rights, or simply the right to live places him or herself in the line of fire. One of the teachers I met believes she was targeted because she performed social work in poor neighborhoods. She is horrified by the so-called “social cleansing” operations now happening in her region. She can no longer go out at night or weekends. Social divisions are now so deep in Colombia that the British NGO War on Want’s solution to conflict and war—a war on poverty—has been perversely turned on its head: Some wealthy students from Bogotá are calling for a “war on the poor” to save Colombian society—a chilling reminder of the “social cleansing” operations already underway in parts of this country that target street children, prostitutes, homosexuals, petty criminals and transvestites. Disappearance is an even more effective instrument of terror and oppression than assassination. According to a representative of a group of relatives of disappeared persons, who have themselves become a target of the paramilitaries, disappearance is “a form of torture for the victim’s whole family.” Without a corpse, families cannot lay their loved ones to rest and begin the grieving process. On a more practical level, there is no payout from life insurance premiums and the family’s income is often decimated, leaving remaining family members not only tortured by the disappearance, but also destitute. As one relative said, “For each single person kidnapped, the life of a whole family is ruined.” In the past five years 5,000 people have been “disappeared” at the hands of paramilitaries. Most of the disappeared are eventually found dead—their bodies bearing the marks of the most horrific torture imaginable. The government’s typical response is that these stories are all lies, and that the disappeared have either run off to join the guerrillas, been kidnapped for ransom or have run away with a lover. It is difficult to imagine a more cold-hearted response to the disappearance of a family member, but it is a response that enables the government to abide by its responsibilities under international law.
In the city of Cúcuta, paramilitaries imposed a 10:30pm curfew on young people. Many night-school students have given up their courses in fear. Women students have been banned from wearing short tight tops and jeans. Offending students are punished by having acid thrown at them or having the bare skin of their stomach cut with a knife. These horrors cannot be seen in isolation from the economic policies of the government. In particular, labor reforms currently under discussion are aimed at flexibility in the labor market and pensions industry, privatization, a pay freeze and weakening the right to collective bargaining. The government has signed a development package with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that will increase the tax burden on the poorest while liquidating the social security system. Additionally, private companies are being brought into the education sector and in recent years the number of teachers has fallen from 312,000 to 280,000. Many teachers who have retained jobs have had their status changed from full-time, permanent employees to temporary contracts. In 1990, some 90 percent of university workers were employed on permanent contracts. This number has now fallen to approximately 10 percent. Colombia's mass media is controlled by a tiny handful of people and either ignores or distorts the conflict to make it appear that the main human rights issue in the country is the kidnapping of the very rich by left-wing guerrilla groups. This is also reflected in our own mainstream media. Given that one teacher is assassinated per week by paramilitaries with little foreign coverage, it is interesting that the international media recently picked up on the rare murder of a teacher by a left-wing guerrilla group. Former trade union leader and now Congressman Wilson Borja, who walks with a limp after he narrowly escaped an attempt on his life, sums up the situation in one phrase: “Colombians are so poor because Colombia is so rich.” Colombia possesses 16 of the world’s 22 most desirable resources, most notably oil and gold. Yet just over one percent of the population still own 58 percent of the land, while shantytowns rapidly expand to offer basic shelter to Colombia’s 2.5 million displaced people. Thirteen million Colombians earn less than $40 a month, 3.5 million children are outside education and half of the citizenry is unable to access healthcare. Meanwhile increasing amounts of money are poured into paying off the national debt and increasing the military strength of the security forces. President Uribe is desperate to sign up to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which will create the world’s largest single market and solidify Latin America as a source of cheap raw materials, labor and markets. Already the world trading system has seen Colombia’s food imports increase from one million tons in 1990 to eight million tons today. A country of incredibly rich soil where crops thrive now imports basic foodstuffs including corn. While the United States’ agricultural subsidies will be slowly phased out after 2005, Borja fears that by that time Colombians will already have lost their ability to compete due to mega-corporations buying up the country from bankrupt small farmers. In Aguablanca, outside Cali, families live cooped up in shacks, often two or three people to a 3-meter-by-3-meter area. The beds often consist of orange crates and their "homes" are usually covered with a small piece of polythene. Broken glass litters the ground where 360 children play in bare feet—many of them have sores and other signs of infection. There are no lights and no heat. There is a single water tap to serve 750 families. This tragedy is not the result of a flood or other natural disaster, or even a lack of government funds—it is life for thousands and thousands of Colombians who are forced daily to flee their homes, their friends and their possessions by violence in which the “democratic” state plays a key role. The government’s reaction to the desperate people of Aguablanca was seen in March when security forces came with bulldozers and demolished the settlement, including all the private possessions that the destitute had managed to bring with them. With no other option, the residents built the slum up again despite continuing harassment by the police on a regular basis. But it’s better than the fear that faced them at home. Four families who were told by the authorities that it was safe for them to return home were murdered shortly afterwards. As the attitudes of the Bogotá students who believe in a war on the poor and the paramilitary social cleansing operations have made evident, the poor in Colombia—a large section of the population—are treated as if their poverty was a consciously chosen option designed purely to inconvenience the rich. As graffiti on a wall in Medellín declared: “The peace of the rich is a war against the poor.”
It is when you meet ordinary Colombians from the neighborhoods of Medellín that you begin to sense the real terror that oozes from every pore of this society. Most of them are displaced from elsewhere in Colombia—driven from their homes under threat of death only to find new terror. Many of them are too afraid to leave their homes and the rest live under curfews imposed by the paramilitaries who control their communities. One woman from a Medellín barrio explained that her 20-year-old son had been arrested following a January 13, 2003, raid on her community. She has not received any information on his whereabouts. In this new security regime everyone, it seems, is fair game. Despite living in a “democratic” country, few feel they have any rights whatsoever. “The government doesn’t need to give us a reason for arrests,” one woman said. “They justify everything by talking about the insurgency.” Trade union reports from Colombia read like a horror story. “The most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist/oil worker/public service worker/teacher/lecturer.” According to several trade unionists, “There are even more dark times ahead.” But there is also something incredibly hopeful; if fear and terror stretch to the base of society here, then so do courage and hope. Despite the most dramatic frontal assault on social organization, ordinary Colombians refuse to allow the bonds of society to be broken. Trade unions, under attack in their own right, become social movements, protecting not just their own members but fighting poverty at the same time. New communities build up around displacement and disappearance. Victimized Colombians are surely amongst the bravest people in the world—summed up in the slogan “kill one of us, and ten more will fight back”—but it is not one or two people being targeted, it is a whole society. Fascism is not a word which should be used lightly, but it is a term heard again and again in Colombia to describe the direction of President Uribe’s policies. It is not just the United States pouring “security assistance” into Colombia. The British Government, which refers to Colombia as “one of Latin America’s oldest democracies,” has excellent relations with President Uribe, claiming he is “a President doing his best in a very difficult situation to restore order in his country.” The British Government has even provided military assistance to Colombia—though try finding out exactly what that assistance is and you will find that “open government” rapidly closes down. Because British companies are amongst the biggest investors in Colombia, the pressure brought to bear by the British public could prove critical to the situation on the ground in Colombia. When I met Wilson Borja in Colombia I remembered an urgent action for him that had come across my desk many months ago. Sadly, I had gotten used to ignoring many of these actions as they come so frequently. But meeting Wilson I realized that each urgent action that we take may not merely save the life of one person—as worthy a goal as that is in itself—but is an act of solidarity with the entire Colombian trade union movement. It helps keep alive the hope of social change and a better life for the destitute, yet courageous, people of this terror state that we call democracy. Nick Dearden is a senior campaigner with the British NGO, War on Want (http://www.waronwant.org). He visited Colombia as a member of a War on Want delegation in May 2003. This article originally appeared in Colombia Report, an online journal that was published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA).
Copyright © 2003 Colombia Journal. All rights reserved. |
One
teacher or lecturer has been killed every single week in Colombia
this year. From 27 teachers assassinated in 1999, 83 were murdered
in 2002. This makes organizing in FECODE—Colombia’s largest
union—virtually impossible in many areas of the country. Paramilitary
death squads—extreme right-wing armed militias that have documented
links to the official armed forces and the authorities—carry
out 95 percent of these abuses. A special paramilitary group called
“Death to Trade Unionists” has been established. A teacher
at the University of Navarre received a death threat from this group.
Why does this happen? “Because they know they can get away
with it,” one victim’s relative told us. Impunity from
prosecution is 95 percent in Colombia. 
Students
are also prime targets of the dirty war. In the last five years
between 60 and 70 student leaders have been disappeared. Chalk outlines
of bodies have been drawn on the ground at the entrance to the National
University in Bogotá, representing students assassinated
and disappeared by the terror infrastructure over the past decade.
At least two university student leaders have been killed this year.
In a particularly worrying development, students at the University
of Altantico in Antioquia were assassinated in front of a classroom
where they were being taught. “The student movement has been
historically affected by violence, but in the 1990s repression started
getting really severe,” a group of law students at the National
University explained. “It is directly related to resistance
within the small number of public universities against privatization
and militarization of the university system.” One example of
this militarization is the incorporation of universities into President
Uribe’s “informer network.” Reminiscent of policies
pursued in what are normally described as police states, Uribe is
aiming to build a million-person network of eyes and ears for the
Colombian state. 
While
talking to teachers in conflict-ridden Medellín, a U.S.-supplied
Blackhawk helicopter drowned out our conversation as it made its
way towards the city’s poor neighborhoods, home to hundreds
of thousands of Colombia’s poor majority. Colombia is now the
biggest recipient of U.S. military assistance outside Israel and
Egypt, and the military hardware is clearly not only being used
to fight the “war on drugs,” which provided the initial
pretext for the stepped-up aid. Helicopters have been firing shells
into densely packed urban neighborhoods. It is reported that in
one recent incident 20 civilians were killed—and no guerrillas.
The Colombian military appear to be implementing a U.S.-designed
Vietnam War counterinsurgency strategy: draining the water to kill
the fish. The fish are the guerrillas and the water is the unfortunate
civilian population. So far Uribe’s state of internal unrest
has unleashed a huge wave of raids, security measures and violence
throughout the country, but many more community and social leaders
have been killed than guerrillas.