And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 11:52:19 -0400
From: LISN <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: League of Indigenous Sovereign Nations of the Western Hemisphere
Subject: AP: Indians Caught in Colombian War
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 09:45:31 -0500
From: Colombian Labor Monitor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
===================================================
After Colombia's government begrudgingly accepted
centuries-old Indian demands, indigenous groups and
Marxist guerillas trying to take power increasingly
have gone their separate ways.
______________ ===================================================
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Saturday, 10 April 1999
Indians Caught in Colombian War
-------------------------------
By Jared Kotler
POPAYAN, Colombia -- Anger is brewing on the sprawling Indian reserves
that blanket misty Andean ridges rising above this whitewashed colonial
capital.
The somewhat surprising targets of the discontent are leftist rebels who
having been fighting for decades in the name of Colombia's poor and
oppressed.
Once respected in this historically combative western region, where
fierce Paez Indian warriors fought a 100-year war against Spanish
conquerors, Colombia's guerrillas are now considered a danger.
Indian leaders say increasing rebel incursions on the reserves are
sowing
violence, disrupting traditional life and drawing peace-seeking native
groups into a 34-year civil war they want nothing to do with.
``What indigenous people want is to have their territory, to live
peacefully, and not to be bothered,'' said a Paez activist, Jose Domingo
Caldon. ``For the guerillas -- and for the state security forces as well
-- that concept is a hindrance.''
At a statewide assembly of tribal authorities in late March, Indian
leaders agreed to present complaints to top rebel leaders, the military
and government peace negotiators.
``We can't sit passively before the actors of war and peace, because the
Indian territories are being converted into battlefields,'' said Caldon,
who is a member of the Regional Council of Indigenous People of Cauca,
whose capital is Popayan.
At a preparatory meeting held on a former rich man's estate north of
Popayan, now part of the 7,500-acre Ambalo reserve, Indian leaders
ticked
off grievances against guerrillas active in the region.
Paez official Camilo Eider Fernandez said 300 heavily armed rebels from
the largest insurgent group -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC -- have set up camp on his group's reserve and are
ignoring elders' pleas to leave.
``As long as the guerrillas are here, we all become military targets.
We're between a rock and a hard place,'' said Fernandez, who fears the
army will view his community as FARC collaborators and take reprisals.
Rebel recruitment also has Indians upset.
Alirio Morales, a Guambiano leader from the Quizgo reserve, said 10
Indian teen-agers from the area were recruited by FARC rebels in
February, only to be slaughtered two weeks later in a firefight with
soldiers.
The youths, ages 13 to 18, were sent out ``like cannon fodder,'' Morales
said. ``They hadn't even learned how to handle a rifle.''
Similar complaints are levied by embattled Indian groups in other
regions
of Colombia. Only the culprits are often not the rebels, but rather army
units and rightist paramilitary groups who battle them for territory and
popular allegiances.
Blanca Lucia Echeverria, the top Indian affairs aide to the national
human rights ombudsman, said all sides are now using Indian reserves as
battlefields, threatening or killing leaders suspected of aiding the
enemy, and recruiting young Indians -- often by force -- as soldiers,
messengers or spies.
``As the conflict escalates indigenous people are getting dragged down
with it,'' said Echeverria, whose office reported that 63 Indian leaders
were assassinated in 1997 alone.
In one case, she said, FARC guerrillas killed 15 members of a tiny
Indian
tribe in southern Caqueta state, the Koreguaje, after accusing them of
aiding rightist paramilitary groups.
Many Colombians were not surprised when an FARC rebel unit recently
killed three U.S. social activists working near the Venezuelan border
with the U'wa, a tribe fighting to keep oil companies off its lands.
``It was nothing new,'' said Sen. Jesus Pinacue, a Paez leader who is
one
of Colombia's two Indian senators. ``What's new is that they attacked
American citizens.''
The Indians under heaviest attack at the moment are the Embera-Katio, a
tribe of about 500 families living along rivers in northern Cordoba and
Antioquia states. United Nations monitors in Colombia say that since
July, rightist militias and the FARC have killed and tortured
Embera-Katio leaders, burned homes and forced dozens of families to
flee.
Underlying many of the conflicts are the armed groups' desire to control
key corridors and valuable resources located on or near Indian reserves.
``We are in strategic locations -- militarily, politically and
economically,'' said Rosalba Jimenez, a Sikuani Indian who heads the
National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Colombia.
The growing harassment of Indians is a setback for a country regarded as
a leader in South America in protecting native minorities. It has about
80 tribal groups estimated to encompass more than 700,000 people out of
a
total population of nearly 40 million.
Colombia's 1991 constitution made Indian languages official, set aside
seats in the legislature for indigenous people and ratified perpetual
Indian ownership and broad governing authority over reserves that cover
nearly a fourth of the country's land.
More than 80 percent of Colombia's Indians now live on 479 self-managed
reserves, which stretch across much of the Colombian Amazon and large
pockets of its Andean highlands and Caribbean coast.
After Colombia's government begrudgingly accepted centuries-old Indian
demands, indigenous groups and Marxist guerillas trying to take power
increasingly have gone their separate ways.
The trend is clear in Cauca, home to nearly a fourth of Colombia's
Indians and where in the 1970s indigenous groups and Marxist guerrillas
were loosely allied. At the time, police working with big landholders
killed Indian leaders by the dozens.
Indians in the region even had their own guerrilla movement -- Quintin
Lame, named after a revered Paez Indian who led rebellions early in the
century. The group laid down its arms in 1991 as the new constitution
was
being approved.
Today, Indian leaders say the struggle for their people's rights and
welfare is long-term and nonviolent. Many look condescendingly at the
rebel movements that have been fighting since the 1960s.
``The guerrillas can talk about 40 years of struggle,'' said Alvaro
Morales Tombe, an elected mayor from the Guambiano tribe. ``We're
talking
about more than 500 years.''
Copyright 1999 The Associated Press
_______________________________________________________________________
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Man did not weave the web of life;
he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
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