Mobilization of Miners in Sur de Boliver, Part 1

I returned yesterday from an accompaniment that was supposed to be three days and turned into a week. On Wednesday of last week we learned that a leader in one of the mining communities in the Sur de Bolivar region of Colombia had been found dead, killed by the military.

This region is home to small-scale gold miners and subsistence farmers. The area is mountainous, really beautiful, sparsely populated, and poor. But large multinational mining companies are interested in the area, and the campesinos believe the Colombian government is trying to force them out. The area is highly militarized, but like other campesino areas of Colombia that I have worked in, the residents complain that the State is there in the form of the military, but not in the form of basic services, such as roads, schools, and utilities.

When we started to call around we learned that the army was accusing the deceased of being a guerrilla and that the miners were mobilizing in the small village of San Luquitas. Groups that we really trust, such as the Catholic Diocese of Marangue, one of our local partner organizations called Programa de Desarrollo y Paz, and the Defensoria del Pueblo, a department of the Colombian government charged with defending human rights, were going up there to investigate and to accompany the miners, and they asked if we would be a part of the accompaniment commission.

On Thursday I left with one other CPTer. We got to the regional capital, Santa Rosa, that evening, after 3 hours in a car and 2 hours in boat. Then we got up at 3:30 am on Friday, drove 3 hours through the mountains to the small village of La Toreda, and then proceeded to walk and ride--by mule--the rest of the way up the mountain. It was a lovely 3-hour hike, except that it was straight up, no switchbacks like our well-manicured national parks have. And there are guerrilla in the mountains, so one cannot stray far from the mule path. I walked part of the way and rode part of the way. Both were hard for different reasons. The walk left me out of breath, but the mule left my knee nearly unusable, because the stirrups were too short and the knee was left in an awkward position.

Around 10:30 Friday morning we got to San Luquitas. There were hundreds of miners there from several dozen villages, all gathered to discuss what they were going to do. They confirmed that Alejandro was not a guerrilla, that he was a miner and a leader in his community. Trust me, the campesinos know who the guerrilla are...that is why they get into trouble from the paramilitaries and from the military. Just for knowing. But if you collaborate with one side, you get killed by the other. So they cannot tell what they know.

I read the official military comunique about his death. It said that they had killed an unidentified armed guerrillero in the place and time that Alejandro was killed. By the time the comunique was released, the body had already been identified, returned, and buried. I heard a radio interview with a general two days after Alejandro was buried saying that the person killed in that time and place was not yet identified but was certainly a guerrillero. I interviewed personally the person who was with him one-half hour before he was killed on the road, who said Alejandro had just attended a meeting of miners, was in civilian clothing, and was on his way home to his wife and children.

The miners said that the death of Alejandro, a young man in his late 20s with two small children, was the most recent of years of abuses from the Colombian military, including threats, assassinations, disappearances, intimidation. They also said that the army had come through San Luquitas the day before, telling them openly that there were going to be more deaths. The people were really frightened.

So they decided to unify and organize. They decided to converge on the regional capital, Santa Rosa, to demand a meeting with national government officials asking them to investigate the death of Alejandro and to tell the truth that he was not a guerrillero. They created the Assembly of AgroMiners and planned to have their first official meetings in Santa Rosa. They decided to send one group to Santa Rosa immediately and another the next day. The two CPTers were to accompany the first group back down the mountain, and other accompaniers waited until morning for the rest.

This meant we had to go back down that mountain on the same day, after getting up at 3:30 am and basically not eating all day. I nearly did not make it. There were no mules this time, and the knee gave out completely. The leader of all the mining communities, Teofilo, stayed with me on the trail and helped me down the mountain. I made an embarassingingly late appearance at La Toreda, where everyone was waiting for us and the cars to take us back down to Santa Rosa. We finally arrived in Santa Rosa at 1:30 am, a 22 hour day.

As I understand it, the reason the miners wanted our accompaniment was that they were afraid of the army and what they might do to them on the mountain. It is risky to organize in this country. Colombian union leaders get assassinated in high numbers, hundreds each year. Most union leaders live with death threats. Colombians seem to feel that our presence provides a shield.

Reflection on the Colombia Accompaniment

This week CPT won an award from the Catholic Diocese of Barranca for our peace and justice work. It is a reflection of how much CPT is respected in this community and how valuable they consider our accompaniment work. How the local and regional human rights workers view our work feels important because it makes me feel like we are accomplishing something, even when we ourselves are not sure what that might be.

Human rights violations on the part of the Colombian army are staggering. Two of us did an accompaniment in another region this week which was a community process to verify human rights violations on the part of the army and report them. The community was afraid to do the verification process without our presence. We learned that the army came into town, accused some men of being guerrilla, and the men put their hands up in the air to surrender and the army killed them. This was verified by numerous witnesses. They also shot a child who was running away from fright.

I have reflected a lot on why I am here, what it means to me. Part of it is that we--meaning citizens of the US--are paying for this war. And it feels to me like this war looks like all the other wars that we pay for. We hear something in the news about US soldiers being killed, or so-called terrorist actions, but we never really hear about or think much about the real human costs of what we are paying for.

The cases of mistaken identity. The families forced to flee. Violations of women. Poverty. Refugee camps and homeless shelters. Random assassinations. I think that most of us do not know what our money is doing. We have dehumanized the "enemy."

CPT organized a workshop the last couple of days for women of the region to learn about the process of documentation of all the abuses against them in this armed conflict. Listening to women talk about what they have been through was powerful. They all told stories about spouses being assassinated by one group or another, or one of their children. Of displacements, and not being able to support their families in the city. Of verbal abuse from soldiers or paramilitaries. Of sexual assault.

I often feel inadequate. We are so few. I felt this way in Palestine as well...that if there were 5,000 of us, we could transform the conflict. Right now we are 5, and about to be 4. And the regular team members who are leaving for retreat do so very reluctantly, because people are dying and displacing here, and our accompaniment might prevent some of it.