Entrusted with Stories: A Window on Colombia
Caqueza, Colombia.
VOLUME 29, NUMBER 1, FEBRUARY 2007
Over the past four decades, Colombia has been caught in a horrific conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and forced millions of people to flee their homes and seek the relative safety of metropolitan slums. For over twelve years, with our colleagues from Project Counselling Service (PCS), Inter Pares has supported displaced people to organize themselves, inform themselves of their rights, and strengthen their capacity to negotiate with the government for durable solutions to their situation. In Colombia, indigenous people are nearly eight times more likely to be forcibly displaced or to suffer human rights abuses, and it is not coincidental that the land they are being chased from is rich with natural resources.
To draw national and international attention to ongoing human rights violations, the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) organized the International Verification Mission. Delegates from Canada, Europe, Latin America, Colombia, and the United Nations were invited to witness the crisis faced by indigenous Colombians and to document their findings. Inter Pares approached the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) to participate in the mission, with the aim of building long-term links between indigenous people in Canada and Colombia.
Inter Pares staff member David Bruer travelled to Colombia with Beverley Jacobs, president of NWAC, as observers in the mission. They travelled to the north-eastern department of Arauca to hear the testimony of the U'wa people, whose territory is situated on some of Colombia's largest oil reserves. Below we share an excerpt from David's trip report.
The dust was thick in the air as we bounced along the road to the small indigenous community of Playas de Bojabá. There were ten of us in the back of the truck, including Beverley, who - like me - was trying to pretend she was enjoying the bumpy ride. From the front seat, Victoria, a member of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), smiled and assured us that this was a pretty good road for Arauca.
As we passed through the oil fields, we were stopped at military checkpoints every few minutes, where soldiers examined our documents. We passed the checkpoints easily, unlike many indigenous people who are detained and sometimes taken to the army base, where they may be tortured and accused of being guerrillas.
When our delegation finally arrived in Playas de Bojabá, the community leaders invited us into the school where U'wa people were waiting to testify about the impact of the conflict that the oil company's presence had brought to their land. We struggled with our anger and sadness as one person after another stood up to tell their stories, of how it was not their war, that they just wanted to be left alone on the land they had lived on for thousands of years. People told us how the guerrilla came to their community to "educate" them and then forcibly recruit young people to join their ranks. Others related how the paramilitaries had brutally murdered two youths who had been sent out to harvest fruit. "They say that the paramilitaries have turned in their guns," one man exclaimed, referring to the peace process between the government and the paramilitaries, "but everyone here still knows who they are, and they still do a lot of the same things they were doing before."
During our time in Arauca we visited several more indigenous communities. "We know you can't stop the war," said one man, "but you are witnesses to our stories. You can tell others, and if enough people know, maybe they will do something."
David Bruer of Inter Pares, Beverley Jacobs of the Native Women's Association of Canada, and Victoria Neuta, member of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia.
Back in Bogotá with its hustle and bustle, it seemed a world away from where we had been and what we had seen. Next on the agenda was the Indigenous Women's Forum, which brought together over forty women from across Colombia to tell their stories, and to share their experiences of displacement and living in the midst of conflict. The Forum was the result of work that Beverley and I had done with Victoria during the months prior to the mission to ensure that the voices of indigenous women were heard.
At the Forum, Beverley recounted her personal story of living with violence in her home and her community in Canada. She shared how, in the process of confronting the violence, she became a lawyer and a leader in a national organization of indigenous women. She spoke passionately of the violence that indigenous women face in Canada, about the situation of women forced into prostitution, and the appalling number of indigenous women who have been raped and killed without their cases ever being solved. Beverley told the painful truth about what is happening to indigenous women in Canada, but also talked about the many people working to address the situation. NWAC collaborated with Amnesty International to produce the report Stolen Sisters, bringing the situation to public attention.¹ NWAC's Sisters in Spirit campaign educates Canadians about the violence faced by indigenous women and proposes solutions. Colombian women were surprised to hear that indigenous women in Canada faced problems similar to theirs, and were inspired to hear what they were doing about it.
Beverley's words released a flood of stories and solidarity from the Colombian women. "We suffer because we are indigenous," concluded one elderly woman, "but we also suffer because we are women." Women spoke about the sexual harassment they suffer at the hands of all of the armed actors. They told stories of their daughters being raped by soldiers, and then ostracized by their own people for having brought shame on their community. A young woman cried as she related how her friend had been forced to clean the uniform of an army officer, and while washing it in a stream, was shot by a guerrilla patrol who accused her of helping the army.
As Beverley and I returned to Canada, we began discussing how to carry these stories across borders. We agreed that a first step would be to bring aboriginal organizations and Canadian NGOs together so that we could share what we had seen and heard, and find ways of building stronger links between Canada and Colombia. We came away feeling a responsibility to tell the stories with which we had been entrusted.
Weeks later, Victoria told me of the recent assembly of the Embera people, another indigenous nation in Colombia. She proudly recounted how women had stood up in public, many for the first time, and spoken about the violence they suffered, about the need for justice, and the need for the truth to be told about what they were experiencing. The issue had never been raised before at an assembly, she said, and she knew that part of the reason it was being raised now was that several Embera women had been at the Women's Forum. This victory reinforced for me the importance of Inter Pares' support to indigenous women in both Colombia and Canada to organize and ensure that their stories do not go untold.
In addition to the generous support of our donors, Inter Pares gratefully acknowledges the support and assistance of CIDA Americas Branch and CIDA's Indigenous Peoples Partnership Program.
¹ Canada: Stolen Sisters - A human rights response to discrimination and violence against indigenous women in Canada. Amnesty International, 2004.
What they say:
The conflict in Colombia is a war about drugs.
What we see:
The present conflict in Colombia began long before there was any large-scale production and marketing of cocaine. While the reasons people take up arms are complex, the conflict was clearly rooted in the tremendous inequity in the distribution of wealth and resources, and the complete impunity for those who abused people's human rights in order to maintain this system. Since that time, guerrilla forces have adopted tactics that violate the human rights they once defended. The wealthy elite in turn created paramilitary forces to protect their power. The paramilitary forces have come to dominate the drug trade, and the guerrillas have increasingly used money from the drug trade to finance their activities. Drug money has exacerbated the war, but drugs were not the cause. Extreme social inequity and impunity for human rights violations still exist, and must be addressed if Colombia is to achieve durable peace.
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