From the Los Angeles Times
Afro-Colombians Driven Off Land in Cocaine War
By Chris Kraul
Times Staff Writer
January 4, 2006
PEREIRA, Colombia — Armando Garces was reluctant to leave his mountain
village even after right-wing militia members had gone door to door
telling residents they had 48 hours to evacuate, or else. He didn't
like being ordered to abandon the only home he had ever known.
Then a daylong gun battle erupted between the paramilitary
fighters and leftist guerrillas over control of nearby coca crops and
transit routes. Garces' town, nestled in Colombia's Pacific coast rain
forest, was caught in the crossfire between the rebels above the town
and militia members below it.
"We hid under our beds all day, and the next morning we were
gone," said Garces, recalling the terrifying day in June when his
township, Bajo Calima, became a battleground in the nation's
long-running drug wars. "Everyone agreed it was time to look for some
other future."
So the 25-year-old woodcutter, his wife, two children and about
500 other residents joined the swelling ranks of Colombia's internally
displaced. More than 3 million people have been driven from their homes
by the civil conflict between armed groups vying for political
dominance and the control of crops, especially those linked to the
nation's drug trade.
Only Sudan has more internally displaced citizens than Colombia,
according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, a human rights group that
has tracked the displaced around the globe for the Office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Although Colombia has had a large displaced population for two
decades, its size has increased quickly in recent months, experts say,
and a disproportionate number of them are, like Garces,
Afro-Colombians. They are targeted because they lack political clout
and sophistication at a time when their rural homes have become
economically attractive.
Ricardo Esquivia, general coordinator of Arvidas, an advocacy
group for the displaced in Sucre state, said most AfroColombians who
own such land either lack full knowledge of their rights or the
political power to enforce them. One factor working against
Afro-Colombians is the 80% illiteracy rate in the areas where many
live, said Esquivia, himself an Afro-Colombian.
"They are historically vulnerable and relegated [to a lower
status] because they have never fully exercised their economic, social
and cultural rights," said Jorge Rojas, a leading advocate for human
rights and the displaced in Bogota, the capital.
Those rights include a constitutional provision that guarantees
land title to rural Afro-Colombian communities that have organized
loosely as a group and occupied their property for 10 years or more,
said Luis Murillo, a former governor of Colombia's Choco state.
Murillo, also an Afro-Colombian, estimates that 1 million
Afro-Colombians, or one-third of those living in rural areas, have been
forced off of their land.
The growth of the displaced has much to do with the changing
logistics of Colombia's multibillion-dollar cocaine trade. The success
of U.S.-sponsored spraying programs meant to eradicate coca leaf
production in Colombia's Amazon basin has caused a shift in coca
farming to more remote areas, including the coastal zone surrounding
Bajo Calima, where Afro-Colombians are concentrated.
The port city of Buenaventura near Garces' hometown and the
estuaries that drain into it have become the most important cocaine
processing and transshipment centers in Colombia, U.S. law enforcement
officials have said.
Garces and other residents were lucky to escape with their lives.
In past years, both paramilitary and guerrilla groups in towns such as
Bajo Calima have massacred thousands of people whom they suspected of
helping the other side or just for being in the way.
Since July, Garces has lived in a shantytown called Plumon on the
outskirts of Pereira, built into the side of a river canyon. It has no
running water or electricity.
Internal refugees such as Garces put enormous pressure on towns
where they have moved. "It's impossible to solve the housing problem.
We are incapable," said Pereira City Manager German Dario Saldarriaga,
whose town in the interior — about 120 miles northeast of Buenaventura
and 105 miles west of Bogota — is struggling with 15,000 displaced
residents, about half of them Afro-Colombian.
Pereira has built three new hospitals and is erecting nearly 1,000
housing units to accommodate the influx of displaced people, but needs
4,000 more houses to deal with the overflow. Meanwhile, crime has
skyrocketed, Saldarriaga said.
"Sometimes we feel overwhelmed, but it's much worse in other cities
like Medellin and Cali," he said.
Human rights groups inside and outside Colombia see a longer-term
risk in the government's inability to stand up for the land rights of
its citizens. Many say the voices of the displaced aren't being heard
in Colombia's nascent peace process.
Although kidnappings and killings have declined, the process that
President Alvaro Uribe began in July 2003 to try to demobilize
Colombia's armed factions doesn't do enough to ensure that the
displaced may someday return to the millions of acres of land they have
abandoned, said Lisa Haugaard of the Latin America Working Group, a
coalition of religious and humanitarian agencies in Washington.
Haugaard and others fear that a law passed last summer outlining
the terms of "reinsertion" of fighters into society will mean that most
of the abandoned land, which totals 10 million acres, will simply
remain in the hands of demobilized paramilitary fighters.
If that turns out to be the case, shantytowns such as Plumon,
where Garces lives, and Bosques de Otun could become breeding grounds
for a future generation of Colombian insurgents, she said.
"There is definitely a silence in the peace process on this
question of land rights. Yet it will be dealt with in conflict and in a
myriad of conflicting ways on the ground," Haugaard said.
Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota fear that the problem of
Colombia's displaced is a humanitarian time bomb and said the U.S.
Agency for International Development's $30-million annual aid package
is being redesigned to focus more on the needs of Afro-Colombians. That
redesign is partially the result of pressure from the Congressional
Black Caucus in the U.S.
"It's a huge crisis for a country already dealing with a lot of
other crises at the same time," said a U.S. Embassy official who asked
not to be identified.
Control of the drug trade isn't the only motive causing armed
groups to push rural Afro-Colombians off their land. In Sucre state,
where Esquivia works, about 60,000 have fled the countryside for the
state capital, Sincelejo, to escape the bloody fight for control of
avocado and palm plantations or simply for territorial dominance.
Adelina Zuniga left her 15-acre farm in Macayepa for Sincelejo two
years ago after massacres of suspected guerrilla sympathizers in her
town sent a chilling message. Having fled the countryside, her family
initially slept 15 to a room in a Sincelejo shanty. She has now emerged
as a leader of the displaced and pastor of a local evangelical church.
"People arrive with no place to stay, no work and bothered by the
local police. Almost all the old folks who came with us have died of
despondency. They go from being important to feeling useless. They see
no solution," Zuniga said.
The influx has led to social problems, including teen prostitution
and the growth of street gangs, said Esquivia of the Arvidas advocacy
group.
Until security improves back home, Garces plans to stay put in
Pereira's Plumon slum, where he has found work paying $2 a day picking
coffee and loading sacks of cement onto trucks. Besides, people who
have gone back to Bajo Calima have found nothing but a burned-out ghost
town.
"I'm not going back to the war," he said.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
