Colombian Peasant Leader Speaks Out Against U.S. Intervention:
An Interview with Miguel Cifuente
Members of the Colombia Action Network Thistle Parker-Hartog and Meredith Aby interviewed Colombian peasant leader Miguel Cifuente, the executive secretary of the Cimitarra River Valley Peasant Association. The interview is broken up into two parts. This is the first part; the second part is here.
In July, a Colombia Action Network (CAN) delegation of student and anti-war activists went to Colombia to investigate the effects of U.S. military aid. Evidence given to the delegation shows that paramilitary death squads coordinate their activities with the U.S.-backed Colombian military.
For part of their stay in Colombia, the CAN delegation was hosted by the Cimitarra River Valley Peasant Association (Asociación de Campesinos del Valle del Rio Cimitarra). Together with the peasant association, the delegation met with campesino (peasant) leaders and took testimonies from campesino communities in the department of Antioquia.
Fight Back!: How has Plan Colombia, the U.S. military aid package in place since 2000, affected the situation of the campesinos?
Miguel Cifuente: Plan Colombia has an element called fumigation [the arial spraying of chemicals to kill crops]. The fumigations are devastating. There have already been three fumigations. It is the fourth fumigation that they are doing in the regions now, and fundamentally it violates four rights. The right to food, because all of the staple crops are fumigated. The right to health, because this gives us a grave health crisis - skin, gastrointestinal, vision conditions, and they especially hurt children and senior citizens. Those military operations and fumigations displace people, and they are violating our right to have our land. And the pollution in general is violating the right to have a healthy environment. It hurts the water, the fish, the chickens and the cows. This is a crisis.
On the other hand, Plan Colombia contains a component of judicial reform [a legal arm]. Today we have four of our members of the previous board and two other activists from our communal groups who have warrants out for their arrest. The government, with its frame-ups, has said that they are guerrilleros [rebels], and so today they have an arrest warrant for rebellion and robbery.
Fight Back!: What is the situation faced by campesinos with the presence of government-supported paramilitaries in their communities?
Miguel Cifuente: The paramilitaries, in the different military bases in the populated areas that make up part of the region, control the foodstuffs that enter and leave the region. There are a series of constant targetings on the part of the commanders of the bases where they accuse us of whatever action the guerrilla [forces] take. They say that because of us, the guerrilla come in and carry out an attack and that it is our fault because we had organized in that community. And they have accused us publicly of the actions of the guerrilla. [Accusations of being a guerrilla or a guerrilla sympathizer endanger activists, often resulting in death threats and attempts on their lives from the military and paramilitary.]
There is a parastate and paramilitary component that for the last four years has been putting up food, health and movement blockades throughout the region. So, five or ten minutes from the military bases, there are paramilitary checkpoints where they enjoy an absolute social control. They charge 10% of the products that enter or leave the region. They put a stamp or a signature on the product receipt. If it doesn’t have this stamp, it can’t pass.
They have lists here at all the checkpoints, and the people that are on the lists simply disappear. In some cases, the body will show up; in other cases, you never see them again. In these four years, we have arrived at a calculation of about 500 campesinos that have been victims of those disappearances or murders. From those checkpoints, the campesinos are under constant threat.
They stage razed-earth raids to take all of the goods of the campesinos’ farms, massacring and quartering [cutting off all four limbs]. Toward the end of January of this year was the last case that we have had of a quartered person, a man named Victor. They quartered him, and they stuck his head in a site so that the people would be terrorized and leave.
In the last two weeks of May and the first week of June there was a paramilitary operation in southern Bolivar where they murdered three people, beat up several others, burned 35 dwellings in the area of Jardin and Alto Canabraval. Supposedly they are in the process of a unilateral cease fire with the government, which is false. They are always carrying out these types of actions.
Editor’s note: There is currently a sham peace process between the Colombian government and the paramilitary forces, even though the paramilitary forces serve the interests of the Colombian government.
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