Report from Colombia

Jim Harney is a photojournalist who recently returned from two and a half months in Colombia. He can be reached at Hmvida@aol.com

The Bush Administration wants Congress to come up with $861 million as part of the Andean Regional Initiative (ARI).

The ominous ARI continues an already intense war on the poor under the guise of doing away with coca production. Actually, the war, under the name of Free Trade Area of the Americas, intends to open up space for transnationals to have access to the resources of the largest of the Andean countries.

ARI is Plan Colombia under another name: funnel money to the region’s military and continue a massive assault on the poor to uproot them from their land and to defeat a guerrilla force that has become the principle threat to the status quo. In a country where 52% live in poverty, US policy backs an undemocratic status quo that systemically excludes the nation’s poor. Sojourning the past several months in Colombia, I was visiting the battlefield of the longest war in the Americas.

The new ARI money would bring dividends for corporations who have their eyes on Colombia’s oil, gold, forests, and its geography—Colombia is capable of linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in a way ripe for a globalized economy.

Boy raking coca, South Bolivar © Jim Harney

The US policy labels drugs a National Security issue. But drugs are only a ruse to explain the need for US military hegemony in the Andean Region. No wonder the Pentagon plays a decisive role in defining the drug war and crafting legislation. ARI and Plan Colombia are modern day versions of "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Both exacerbate displacement of poor people by a program of fumigation. Already more than 2 million people have been uprooted due to the war; in the first quarter of this year alone, 3200 people fled their homes.

I lived with 125 refugees in Berrancabermeja after paramilitaries forced them from their homes. One activist that I met with told me that in a week paramilitaries killed three of her colleagues. More people died in that Colombian oil-port town last year than died in the Middle East.

Under US policy in Colombia, the nation’s 700,000 indigenous people face extinction. Most live in conflictive areas dominated by the FARC, the largest guerrilla organization, and paramilitaries accuse them of collaborating with the guerrillas. During Holy Week a massacre took place in Alto Nyha; twenty minutes from a Colombian Army military base, 500 paramilitaries murdered 100 people.

Mother and child, Cacaria © Jim Harney

The political and economic ramifications of this war touch countries that rim Colombia: Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Brazil has spent over a billion dollars on radar to monitor flights carrying drugs and has moved thousands of troops along the Colombian border. US aid refurbished the Manta airbase in Ecuador to accommodate intelligence aircraft and house 300 US military personal. The United States chomps at the bit waiting to take out Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, who refuses to kowtow to the great colossus to the North.

In response to the spreading violence, National Witness for Peace plans a Colombian Mobilization in Washington, DCon September 27th and 28th, to lobby against the Bush Administration’s attempt to push through the ARI. Here is your chance to urge representatives to cut support for a military solution to a fifty-year war, vigil in front of the Capital, pick up some know-how on how to bring the campaign back to the home front. Come stand with allies in the struggle from across the country and together celebrate the work of solidarity with the people of Colombia. For more information, call Joanne Ranney; Witness for Peace, 802/434-3233.

From an interview on WERU radio, Blue Hills Falls, Maine, in April 2001:

...this has been an incredible experience being able to talk with the people who are being affected by US foreign policy—to be present to people who are bearing the brunt of Plan Colombia. [I’ve seen] a lot of the fumigation, a lot of aerial spraying where they are dropping Monsanto poison on small farmers wiping out their coca crops and their food crops as well… With my own eyes I had a chance to see a child who had sores all over her body—the sores the result of the fumigation.

All of the water in the area had been contaminated and still the people have to drink that water. The people in La Isla decided on their own to come up with an alternative crop to coca—chickens and yucca. Aerial spraying killed most of their two hundred chickens and all the rest of their food….

In Cacarica people are about process. They call it El Proceso—to build a new life for themselves in an area that they once considered a paradise. Living in that paradise before 1997, they had food,they were able to go hunting, they had an abundance of fish, everything they needed. They have rich natural resources, the land is lush. They have an abundance of lumber, the size of which I’ve never seen in my life. They refuse to cut down trees and sell them to lumber companies because it would be a violation of their tradition. Their spirituality fosters a politics that leads to preserving the ecology of the area. If the lumber disappears, the water level of the rivers would go down. They wouldn’t have animals to hunt. They would have to deal with desertification...

—Jim Harney

A Call for Nonviolent Resisters!

"We need with extreme urgency international presence of women and men who will form a Human Chain to defend our Project of Life. Without your presence it won’t be possible for us to continue in our settlements. We want to stay in our land and continue together building our Project of Life in the midst of the war. Help us! Your presence, here in the settlements, is the most effective way for you to express your solidarity in these minutes!"

— Cacarica Community, 6/11/01

Support the Human Chain for Life in Cararica, Colombia, an ongoing Accompaniment Project to protect the resettlement of the African-Colombian community forcibly displaced in February 1997 from the Cacarica River Basin.

Colombia Support Network, 5045 South Laflin Street, Chicago, IL 60609; www.colombiasupport.net/

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