Interview: Afro-Colombian Farmers on Displacement and Resistance

Interview: Afro-Colombian Farmers on Displacement and Resistance
Written by Jake Hess
Wednesday, 05 January 2011 19:33

Five years after the alleged demobilization of army-backed paramilitaries in Colombia, violence and human rights abuses remain widespread in the countryside, displaced Afro-Colombian farmers and community leaders Juan Sanchez and Roberto Guzman* say. Activists working on behalf of Colombia’s internally displaced population are subjected to extrajudicial killings and death threats by paramilitary groups supported by the Colombian army and palm oil firms active in rural areas, Sanchez and Guzman report. "They say we're guerrillas and that they're going to kill us," says Sanchez.

~snip~
JS: The military came around to the different communities and told the people to get out of the area because they were "going to combat the guerrillas." We didn't want to leave because we weren't part of this problem. But they kept on insisting and saying that "if you don't leave, the people who cut heads are coming behind us"; they were referring to the AUC (an army-backed paramilitary organization). Massacres were committed and attacks continued in other parts of the region. We would see bodies floating down the river, and we would see birds that were eating the corpses. Both the military and paramilitaries kept threatening us that we had to leave. This was 1997.

That's how they got us out of the area. In 2000, 2001, we found out that the real objective of this operation wasn't to get rid of the guerrillas, but to get rid of us from the area in order to implement large-scale palm oil monocultures, cattle ranching, and other types of monocultures including teak and rubber plantations.

~snip~
In the Western media it's often argued that paramilitary groups were 'demobilized' during Alvaro Uribe's tenure and that Colombia is vastly more peaceful now as a result of this. Have the paramilitaries gone away?

JS: In 2005, there was a so-called demobilization effort, but what we say as rural farmers who live there is that there was no demobilization; it was a way to legalize these groups. Because those paramilitaries continue to operate and work in the same things they did before. The same people are now part of groups such as the Black Eagles, and criminal bands called the Rastrojos and Gaitainistas. There's a military post near the humanitarian zone of Canedas, and right next to it there's a paramilitary post, separated by a small river. There's a lot of collusion (between paramilitaries, the military, and police.)

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2846-interview-afro-colombian-farmers-on-displacement-and-resistance

and the displacement of 5 MILLION of them from their lands--THE worst human displacement crisis on earth--which has driven most of these small farmers into urban squalor, where they become a slave labor force for multinational corporations and the rich, and has driven others into rural squalor where they become a slave labor force for corporate agriculture and big, rich landowners.

That's slightly more than $1 BILLION U.S. taxpayer dollars per 1 million displaced peasant farmers. Very expensive horror--to serve multinational corporate/war profiteer interests.

I just read a great book called "The Multi-headed Hydra," which chronicles the birth of capitalism in the British "enclosure" diaspora, circa 17th Century, whereby the rich enclosed all of the traditional common lands, with hedges and fences, and violently threw the common people off of their traditional farm lands, often amidst great protests. These lands were called "the commons" and they were fertile farm lands held in a common by every village in England, where the poor could grow food. This land grab by the rich, and the end of "the commons," turned millions of people into "vagrants." New and draconian vagrancy laws then sent millions of these displaced farmers around the world as slave labor for the "colonies." It also fed slave labor into the factories in England and helped the British Empire's trade and naval ships kidnap people and force them into servitude as sailors, as British naval power further enriched the rich in England from the African slave trade, among other "commodities."

The notion that the nobles and other rich people should "own" all the land and could throw families off "the commons" who had used the common farm land for subsistence farming for thousands of years was the key to all of this, and to what is happening NOW, with U.S. policy in Latin America and other countries. In short, the notion of PRIVATE PROPERTY is the evil that has brought on so many other evils, to this day. And it is by no means a "natural" right, that the rich should "own" the land. It is highly artificial. It was incomprehensible to the native tribes that got hit with English and European colonization. Most American Indigenous societies viewed the land as COMMUNAL and viewed the food that the land produces are a human RIGHT--as the people in the English countryside had viewed it. They were astonished to see the British and other colonists come in and start fencing everything off--imposing "enclosures" in the colonial empire. The slave labor used to till the land was also artificial and maintained by extraordinary levels of violence and oppression.

We are also seeing a new theft of "the commons" today in the U.S. and in countries where oligarchies of the rich rule, as in the U.S.--the privatization of every last thing needed for general prosperity and for life itself--privatization of water systems, privatization of health care, privatization of energy, communications and transportation systems, privatization of schools, etc. And these greedy fucks--the super-rich and the multinational corporate--are now after Social Security as well, a pension system paid for by the workers themselves, all through their working lives, administered by the government. They want to loot, plunder and "privatize" EVERYTHING we hold and do IN COMMON. They seek a "dog eat dog" world in which each individual is completely alone and exploitable as slave labor or cannon fodder, and only the super-rich can club together in their own interest. They want to make everything that is PUBLIC into a PRIVATE COMMODITY that the rich can buy up, control and exploit. They have even privatized the voting machines in the U.S., with 'TRADE SECET' code that the public has no right to review!!!!

THAT is predatory capitalism, NOT democracy!

We see this unnatural privatization MADNESS in this story about the African-Colombian farmers, their land stolen by violence and given to the rich few--today, hundreds of years into predatory capitalism--funded by the alleged democracy, the USA. It is deja vu all over again and it cries out for a new, worldwide revolution such as the one that ended "indentured servant" slavery and then ended the African slave trade, and, indeed, the one that inspired most of the American-British colonists, the independence fighters with Simon Bolivar in South America and the French and other revolutions in Europe. Freedom is not LICENSE to exploit. It is NOT a "king's charter" to run roughshod over everybody, to monopolize trade, to enslave. Freedom is NOT the "right" to slaves!

Freedom is RESPONSIBILITY, mutual caring, freely organizing government in everyone's interest, freely agreeing to "the rules" of a responsible, caring society, in which everyone has a chance and you don't have to fear your neighbor. True freedom can only come from COLLECTIVE strength in asserting the "common good," however it is defined in a given society--the "common good" of a free education for all, or the "common good" of common farm lands, or the "common good" of Social Security. THIS is freedom--a free lending library system, free public schools, free use of the roads, free use of parks and beaches, free access to government and its services, and the benefits of mutually agreed upon, collectively funded safety nets like Social Security and Medicare. We all contribute. We all benefit.

Freedom is NOT a cowboy with a gun, or the country with the most weapons in service to its multinational corporations. The only choice that such force provides is the evil "freedom" to bully and kill. That is NOT real freedom. It is a soul-killing prison. But that is what the U.S. has now come to stand for in the world--the "freedom" to be greedy beyond belief, backed by the U.S. military and its largesse with OUR money.

They want to privatize Social Security and loot it, and they're GIVING AWAY BILLIONS OF OUR TAX DOLLARS to fascist murderers in Colombia to steal poor peoples' farms! THAT is why our government is bankrupt, not Social Security or any of our "commons." TRILLIONS of our tax dollars to such violent purposes, all told. The rich stealing oil, stealing land, creating slaves with no rights and no choices--paid for by us. That is not freedom for us either. It is disguised slavery. We the People of the U.S. have no say in it whatsoever.

Well, if we want to stop our tax dollars from funding fascist murderers in Colombia, and from being used for other horrible purposes, abroad and at home, in my opinion we need to look first to the "TRADE SECRET" voting machines--the most secretive and lethal privatization of all.