From: Colombian Labor Monitor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 09:12:13 -0500 (CDT)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: CLM: Daily News 25 July 2001
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COLOMBIAN LABOR MONITOR
www.prairienet.org/clm
Wednesday, 25 July 2001
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* DAILY NEWS *
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ASSOCIATED PRESS -- Wednesday, 25 July 2001
Colombian Indians Accuse Government
By Margarita Martinez
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wednesday, 25 July 2001
Colombian Indians Accuse Government
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By Margarita Martinez
BOGOTA -- Indian leaders are being gunned down. Warring factions are
encroaching on the reservations. A U.S.-financed drug eradication
offensive is dumping herbicide on Indian land.
Yet although indigenous rights are enshrined in the constitution the
government is doing nothing to protect Colombia's 800,000 Indians, says a
group representing the nation's 65 tribes.
''Our survival and Colombia's cultural diversity are at risk,'' Armando
Valbuena, director of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia,
said in a phone interview Tuesday.
If indigenous people, who now account for only 2 percent of Colombia's
population, disappear, ''the government will be to blame,'' he said.
The indigenous group accused President Andres Pastrana's government of not
taking seriously a 5-year-old commitment to hold periodic meetings to
resolve problems confronting the Indians.
The government only sends low-level emissaries to the encounters, which
are held too infrequently, the Indian group said Monday in a message to
Pastrana.
Unless Pastrana promises within 30 days to improve the situation, the
Indian group said it would boycott the talks for the rest of his
administration, which would be a public slap in the face. There was no
immediate response from Pastrana, whose term ends in one year.
In the past decade, 365 Indian leaders have been assassinated, the Indian
group said. So far this year, 37 Indians have been killed in civil strife
that has extended into the reservations.
On June 2, gunmen believed to belong to a right-wing paramilitary group
abducted Kimy Pernia, a leader of the Embera-Katio tribe who gained
international recognition for campaigning against a hydroelectric project
that threatened his tribe's ancestral lands. He remains missing and is
feared dead.
''The situation is dramatic, because each of these communities makes an
enormous effort to educate a leader, and the death of one leaves an
enormous vacuum,'' said Francisco Rojas Birry, who is the vice president
of the Senate in parliament the first Indian to occupy that post.
Furthermore, Indians have been seeing their crops of coca and poppy, which
produce cocaine and heroin, and some of their food crops shrivel under the
U.S.-backed aerial eradication campaign.
The fumigation offensive, which also targets white-owned lands, was
criticized Tuesday by the top U.N. anti-drug official in Colombia. ''It's
not fair ... because in our view the peasants and the indigenous people
are not criminals,'' Klaus Nyholm said at a news conference in Bogota.
Indians in the southwestern states of Cauca and Narino have threatened to
begin blockading the Pan-American Highway next Tuesday unless the
fumigation, financed as part of a $1.3 billion aid package from
Washington, of their lands is halted.
Copyright 2001 Associated Press
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