By Cindy Forster on July 7, 2022
Francia Márquez
Gustavo Petro, the progressive who won the presidential race in Colombia on June 19th, said right before the elections that “Sunday’s vote will break down exactly like that of the referendum in support of the Peace Accords,” which lost by a narrow margin in 2016. The referendum won in regions of the country that are historically Black and in cities with the largest Black populations, that chose the option of peace as did the capital, Bogotá. These are regions battered by decades of war. Both Petro and his ‘Afro-descended’ vice president, Francia Márquez, face incessant death threats. Centering the words of Black Colombians reveals the challenges that the country’s first leftist government will face. Petro’s victory also echoes the national elections of 2018 when the Right, that governs through terror, at one point was practically in a dead heat with the left. Perhaps the first task is to survive, given the realities of paramilitarism in Colombia. The origins of the parapolice forces take us to the emergence of guerrilla armies and the civil wars of the mid-20th century, when the United States recommended the formation of rightwing paramilitary networks. In time, these paramilitary armies received training from Israelis. Irregular forces became as numerous as the regular army, and civilians are their main victims.
Many news reports lack the sense of the nation that arises from the majorities in Colombia – and in particular, the discernment that emerges from the root of Africa in the Americas. The concept of marronage sheds light on Colombia’s present challenges. Marronage describes the act of emancipating oneself by one’s own hands: the necessity of casting off the oppression of empires and slave-masters. Today, the clamor for land and justice echo the realities of maroon existence – both Indigenous and Black – during the long centuries of Spanish rule. Marronage remains a political project for the present, an example in historical time of the achievement of political and economic liberation. In 2022, Francia Márquez of Yolombó, Cauca, embodies these values: “I belong to a process,” she says, “a history of struggle and resistance that began with my ancestors brought here in the condition of slavery. I belong to a struggle against structural racism, to those who keep fighting to give birth to freedom and justice.”
Four years ago, the second round of the presidential elections was beset by fraud, always favoring the Right, and plagued by a stream of attacks against leftist candidates. On the eve of the election, 385 community leaders in Colombia had given their lives in the two years since the signing of the peace accords – in addition to the thousands assassinated since the failed peace process of the 1980s. The electoral system in Colombia is riddled with vote-buying, corrupt party politics, and the customary violence of the Right. In the face of all this, the leftist candidate Gustavo Petro –a guerrilla in his youth– transformed the political terrain in 2018. The contest was hard-fought against Iván Duque, a subordinate of the godfather of the extreme Right, Álvaro Uribe the notorious mass murderer who is a civilian politician. Thanks to the “uribistas,” Duque won the presidency and the rich continued running the country as their personal fiefdom. Duque was obsessed with overthrowing the worker-president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.
Colombia and Venezuela are intimately related to each other across centuries. It’s curious that one-tenth of the Colombian population has migrated to Venezuela in recent decades. In light of the censored histories of Black campesinos in Colombia, one sees they share with Venezuelan campesinos the same ideological universe and the same enemies, with the difference that the aggressions in Colombia are much more lethal because that state is still colonial, while Venezuela practices a state socialism that is committed to the dignity of the dispossessed. Many thousands of Colombo-Venezuelans are building local communes in Venezuela on the basis of shared power. For those who believe in creating solutions generated from the collectivity of the people, the Venezuelan commune is one of the most beautiful fruits of the Latin American revolution. In Afro-Colombia, the context of contemporary communal democracy dates back forty years. Thanks to the organizing of Black communities, the legal structure protecting ancestral and collective land rights was approved in 1993 for Indigenous and Afro-descended communities, called Law 70. It was awarded constitutional protection in the Constitution of 1991, which was the product of peace negotiations with the guerrilla group to which Gustavo Petro belonged. Law 70 is a new flowering of marronage. From the sixteenth century forward, across the length of the coasts and the lands beyond the reach of the slave-masters –beyond the control of the ancestors of people like former president Juan Santos (2010 to 2018) and the oligarchy of 54 families who always ruled with the whip– maroon rebels built fierce communities in resistance. Africans and their descendants sustained the colonial economy in Colombia, in the mines and on the haciendas, which explains why the oligarchy preserved slavery until 1851, decades after independence. Like Afro-Venezuelans, Blacks in Colombia massively joined the independence armies only to have full emancipation denied them. But across the first half of the nineteenth century, innumerable enslaved Blacks and workers subjected to other forms of servitude successfully fled the centers of white power. They settled in inaccessible regions where they built their own version of paradise. Vast territories were free of white control. Francia Márqueztalks about the strength of her own community through the prism of Ubuntu, the philosophy of African socialism. During the months of peaceful protest last year –that the government responded to with some 60 murders– the singular courage of the youth of Cali is explained in large measure by the depth of their Afro-Colombian roots.
Statistics and terrorists
In June of 2018, Gustavo Petro swept elections in the Caribbean and Pacific regions. A community leader explains, “Officially it is said we number 4,500,000 inhabitants of African descent, but we know we are many more, in fact around 26% of the population.” (Again, the interviews are anonymous to protect the safety of the speakers.) Colombia has the fourth largest population in Latin America, numbering around fifty million people, so the Black population represents 12,500,000 in the censuses conducted by Afro-descended communities. Disproportionately, Afro-Colombians have been displaced by political violence. The government ignores their existence. “Among the displaced population nationally,” in the year 2013, “from 36% to 38% chose the category of Afro-Colombian, Black Afro-Colombian, or dark-skinned Afro-Colombian” in the surveys conducted by Black community organizations. But in the surveys conducted by the government, “purposefully, when they create censuses of the displaced, and they describe a young woman who is light-skinned, they say she is mestiza, not Black.” Of course, most Colombians possess Indigenous roots wholly or in combination with ancestors from other continents, even though the state insists the Original Peoples were exterminated and only 4.4% of the population today is Indigenous. They likewise suffer political assassinations all out of proportion to their numbers. These demographic particulars can be counter-posed to the fact that 86% of arable land is held by only ten percent of Colombians. Such is the context in which the U.S. Embassy accuses campesinos of being terrorists when they decide to organize for justice. Individuals stigmatized in this way can be assassinated with impunity. Adhering to the same logic, for the most part the Colombian state has avoided consequences for command responsibility when their security forces have murdered civilians and then claimed them as subversives exterminated in combat – the perversely named “false positives” whose number totals some 6,000. These executions belong in the enumeration of the criminal acts of Álvaro Uribe, president from 2002 to 2010.
Álvaro Uribe is situated at the apex of a vast network of paramilitaries that extends across the hemisphere and serves transnational corporations as well as local elites. Decade after decade, these paramilitaries have penetrated Colombia’s political structures. Marco Rubio is among their closest allies, the far-right senator in Washington. They work closely with the highest spheres of the Latin American Right that operates out of Miami, tied to strategists of the ultra-right across South America. In Mexico, the arch-conservative National Action Party (PAN in the Spanish acronym) invited to the Senate a known terrorist and paramilitary, in his capacity as the official spokesperson of Venezuela’s self-proclaimed president Juan Guaidó. Guaidó was groomed by Washington with the object of overthrowing Venezuela’s elected government. The paramilitary lost his temper, shouting in the Mexican Senate as his hosts smiled nervously. In Colombia, evidence of his terrorist plans was filmed by a Venezuelan intelligence agent who had infiltrated paramilitary structures and recorded their intentions with a hidden camera. That footage was shown on the news, at which point the Colombian government felt compelled to expel Guaido’s spokesperson. As a rule, far-right politicians in Colombia cultivate their own paramilitary connections, and are able to conceal the crimes and cruelties that those individuals commit.
Less bloody proponents of uribismo ousted Petro when he was mayor of Bogotá, a city of 9 million. A politician who is a disciple of Uribe, Enrique Peñalosa, illustrates the renovation of the image of the Right, and its massification in the years before the last national elections. Peñalosa was reelected mayor of the enormous metropolis of Bogotá in 2016, winning votes on the strength of a dirty campaign that defamed and barred from office Gustavo Petro who was at that point the popular leftist mayor of the city. That was made possible thanks to Attorney General Alejandro Ordóñez, who rose to notoriety due to his removal of politicians from office on the basis of implausible arguments, evidently to serve the political aims of uribismo. Probably his most famous victim was the progressive Senator Piedad Córdoba, an internationally respected Afro-Colombian leader. She was barred from political office for eighteen years. Córdoba was the person responsible for the rescue of prisoners of war held by the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), both prisoners who were famous and common foot soldiers. According to the poor, the army of the government obtains the majority of its troops by means of forced recruitment. President Hugo Chávez was also critical in the long process of rescuing prisoners of war in guerrilla hands, which was the necessary precondition in order to initiate peace negotiations with the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia – Army of the People (FARC-EP).
The Peace Accords were signed in 2016 with the FARC-EP, the oldest and largest guerrilla army in the country. It is evident that the Duque administration had no intention of respecting the promises of the Colombian state to guarantee the lives of demobilized guerilla soldiers, or those of the poor in the extensive zones affected. The accord governing agrarian justice has been ignored practically in its entirety. Duque has permitted the constant assassination of community leaders. The state has also blocked the accord that promotes the substitution of legally permitted cultivation to replace illicit crops; the later provide subsistence for the peasantry in many former war zones. Campesino leaders who have tried to defend this accord have suffered terrifying attacks. At the same time, under paramilitary control, drug crops are expanding to an alarming degree. A concentration of plantations producing illegal crops emerged along the border with Venezuela, a situation that facilitates the plans of Duque and the imperial north to blame Venezuela for drug trafficking, then invade without the permission of the United Nations. The destitution of Mayor Petro was achieved because he wanted to improve the system of public trash removal in a city of nine million, without injuring the means of subsistence of workers who collected trash with a horse and cart. Business people with ties to the Álvaro Uribe family attacked Petro as a class enemy, but more concretely at this point, he was an obstacle in the way of their plans to privatize garbage collection. A few years later Enrique Peñalosa and his neoliberal team, when they retook the mayoralty of Bogotá, tried to fire the better part of the 3,700 workers employed by the public sanitation company.
In 2013, the political maneuver of the uribistas to remove Petro had immediate success under the presidency of Juan Santos, who had been Uribe’s minister of defense. But the ruling of higher-court judges –at the InterAmerican level–overturned the sentence forbidding Petro to engage in political activity for fifteen years. Petro returned to the position of mayor of Bogotá. The uribista Right hoped to crush the party of Petro whose slogan was “A Humane Bogotá,” and ended up watering the soil that nourished the idea of “A Humane Colombia” in future elections. In 2018, in the second round of the presidential race, the platform for “A Humane Colombia” won in the capital, in the regions of Black majorities across the nation, and in the cities of more progressive tendencies. It is an outrage –though predictable– that their militants were assassinated in the election season. Four years later in the same geography, huge numbers of those who had not voted in 2018 decided to mark their ballots for Petro. The turnout of youth at the polls was striking. The vote for Petro represents the silenced country that does not believe in the white supremacy of uribismo, nor free trade as the path to happiness. Neither does it believe in the war machine of empire as the guarantor of freedom in Colombia, and even less in the supposed congenital criminality of the poor.
The Black majority regions that create leaders like Francia Márquez
Among the departments (or states) of Black Colombia, in Chocó, three out of four people identify as Afro-Colombian. They say that in Chocó, everyone has relatives in the “batea” – they pan for gold in the sands of streams and rivers, a back-breaking labor that sustains thousands of families. For centuries, this artisanal mining overlapped with maroon economies. Today, they face off against transnational mining capital that destroys mountains, valleys, aquifers, and human beings, with the sole purpose of extracting a few grams of gold dust to warehouse in their bank vaults. Artisanal miners’ protests –called strikes– have been constant in recent years. Transnational mineral extraction in Latin America expanded in this century at unprecedented rates, even considering that Colombia’s elite has always welcomed unregulated capitalism with special fervor. In the international arena, Colombia signed a number of free trade agreements and the most predatory, with the United States, took effect in 2012. The same government that was accused of having constructed political structures deferential to paramilitaries (called “parapolitics”), approved a law that defined artisanal mining as criminal.
In 2013, protest marches of artisanal miners converged on the city of Quibdó, capital of Chocó, at the moment when a community of campesinos displaced by state terror to the outskirts of the city was mourning the assassination of a Black youth. The young man died on the same day that a U.S. court declared innocent the police officer who killed Trayvon Martin, the African-American adolescent whose death was met with massive protests and the launching of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the Black department of Chocó, one of the most abandoned in the nation, thousands of campesinos joined the miners’ marches. Miners and campesinos alike suffer the onslaught of free trade. Like an enormous, sinuous serpent, the march of thousands of Afro-Colombians and Indigenous filled the streets of the city. It proceeded with utter discipline. Thousands also camped for the night in the main plaza alongside the artery of the river, where the cathedral was also overflowing with people seeking sanctuary for the night. They were all awaiting the arrival of Piedad Córdoba who was scheduled to offer words of solidarity. Afro-Colombian campesinos joined the march who only a few years earlier had returned to their lands from where they had been expelled with bullets. In the middle of a sea of paramilitaries, they are building small islands of peace they call Humanitarian Zones, where the presence of people with weapons is prohibited. Their bravery is astonishing – on these ancestral lands to which they possess title, that they have reoccupied against the will of the government and the range of armed actors on the right. In Quibdó, they chose to join the marches against the business elite in mining ventures and agro-industry, knowing that the state often opens fire on peaceful marchers. They protested in the conviction that unity in struggle is the last defense in the face of vast concessions run by multimillionaires. Their courage echoes that of their enslaved and maroon ancestors.
In light of the danger posed by the act of speaking the truth, the quotes from the interviews here are all anonymous. They are the voices of youth, elders, women, people who pan for gold in their ancestral territories, campesinos both women and men, and all of them are proud of their African patrimony. A community leader said “The big business functionaries say they’re not interested in our territory, after having said that only monkeys live in the coconut palms, that the sea is just meant for fish. And now they are scheming for our territories, they are greedy for our land, they want it all. They’ve already destroyed the riches in our regions. There was an era when they drove us from our homes in the 1950s, then again in the 1980s, and then in 1995.” Their lands were emptied in the 1990s, the population driven out by waves of massacres. It makes sense that paramilitaries conduct assassinations in close coordination with the armed forces of the government, given paramilitary origins in the organizing of elites. This same army is extensively mentored by the United States and, as is well- known, the empire relies on Colombia as its strongest ally in Latin America. Since 2000, Colombia has received over 9 billion dollars for military assistance from Washington. Plan Colombia represented the largest military assistance disbursed by Washington in the hemisphere, in third place globally after Israel and Egypt apart from the generalized wars that the United States put in motion in the Middle East. Another reality –this one denied by the State Department– is that the United States has the last word in regard to the actions of the armed forces in Colombia. In this chain of command, U.S. military officers follow the orders of the imperial state that pardons, and in effect gives its sanction to the crimes against humanity committed by its Colombian allies. A unipolar world, and all necessary wars to guarantee U.S. dominance, are constitutive of the objectives of North American foreign policy. The powers that oppose the platform of national sovereignty and dignity for the poor proposed by Petro and Márquez are not inconsequential. Afro-Colombians driven off their lands understand the tasks ahead with unique clarity. In the words of a survivor of various assassination attempts carried out by the hitmen of the Right: “The politics of Colombia’s government has involved the implementation of mining and development as the engine of growth. We are certain that if we fail to articulate a collective response, we are likely to disappear as a people. They want to destroy our culture, our ethnicities. They want to wipe out everything – our ancestral ways of knowing, our customs and ways of being.” The recurrent massacres that have taken place across rural Colombia have drastically changed the existence of the majority of Blacks. Before, Afro-Colombia was largely rural and profoundly tied to the land, it was self-sufficient, and its distinct cultures flourished. The mass killings produced the result that the government desired. Hundreds of thousands of Black families fled. Agro-industrialists seized their lands. Many of those who escaped the terror in the countryside sought refuge on the peripheries of majority Black urban areas, where they are treated like pariahs; they are treated far worse where the majorities define themselves as mestizo or white. “The people had to flee whether they wanted to or not. The war started in Urabá. Eighteen thousand people were displaced in Bajo Atrato, Urabá in 1997. The paramilitaries together with the army overran the countryside, they came in bombing the communities on the pretext they were combating the enemy, according to their version.” This took place right after Afro-Colombians won their rights to collectively held land, under the protection of the new Constitution. “That’s what happened, in the zone of Bajo Atrato they gave out the first land titles within the framework of Law 70 in the year 1996 and the first months of 1997. And that’s when the violence started, with waves of bombings.” Nationally, the army and paramilitaries despoiled campesinos of seven million hectares between 1995 and 2005.
The victims recount, “They came through massacring the population” – and the paramilitaries in Chocó and Urabá never demobilized. Reports that emerged during the cycles of peace negotiations corroborate that the paramilitaries continue as armed and violent actors. In addition, the transnational banana company “Chiquita” –at that time with its headquarters in the United States– paid paramilitaries to silence labor leaders, contracting the same individuals “who killed, raped, and disappeared some ten thousand people in Urabá and Córdoba.” On paper, the war ended in late 2016, but in reality, the elites now enjoy greater impunity because their principal armed adversary, the forces of FARC, relinquished their weapons and demobilized. The huge Chiquita banana transnational evaded legal consequences for hiring assassins on the argument that the evidence-gathering was illegal, because the proofs of the paramilitary contracts came from telephone conversations that were taped without company permission. Chiquita –like many transnationals– transfers their headquarters from country to country, not least to avoid lawsuits brought against them by their workers. Among the displaced in Colombia are more than a few former trade unionists who worked in the harsh conditions of the banana plantations. They received threats for the offense of demanding their rights as workers, escaped assassins paid by their bosses, then lost family members and neighbors in the massacres committed by the security forces. The Right, like the U.S. embassy, deliberately confuses the struggles of civilians with those of armed actors. A Black leader in the extensive networks of the displaced explains the geopolitical factor: “Guerrillas arrived in the department of Valle, then Cauca, and lastly Nariño. All these zones are purely Afro-Colombian. Essential economic interests are located there: all kinds of minerals, lumber, gold, oil. And plantations of palm oil. There are also vast extensions of crops cultivated for narcotrafficking. For the communities, all that remains is misery, and the destruction of our natural resources and for that matter, the entire environment. The only weapon we have is our ability to organize. Only by organizing have we made it to this point in the struggle.”
The expulsion of people who have no desire to leave their ancestral lands bears faint comparison to migration in times of peace. “We are Afro-Colombian communities, and we know that our life is intimately tied to our territories. We’ve always lived in close relation with nature, along the banks of the rivers, at the edge of the oceans. To remove us from our territories and force us to live in the cities is when our sons and daughters, and we ourselves, begin the process of losing our identity. No longer do we identify culturally as we did in our communities, where you eat fish whenever you want it, you eat taro. In the cities you can’t cut plantains from the tree in your yard. When someone dies in our communities, we have the novena and mourn for nine days. The final night is a wake among everyone, but in the city, we end up abandoning this tradition – in the cities we ourselves end up treating it as ridiculous.”
In the words of a leader who is mother to a teenage boy, “Our compañeros or partners, our brothers and fathers, when they die, or to say it more accurately, when they’re killed, because in our community nobody dies a natural death anymore, and when they die, the women take on all the responsibility. As women, displacement has affected us in a different manner. Displaced Black women are raped. Many are widows. By necessity, when forced out of our homes, we live in the zones called crime zones, in substandard housing, where we confront criminal bands, gangs, drug addiction, prostitution, and we have to take on long hours in the workday. Our sons are exposed to danger. Invisible lines get marked out, where the youth cannot cross that line because he’ll be killed if he does, or he’s killed with no warning by the police, by the army, or by anyone. And our daughters, when they’re not raped, they have to prostitute themselves. They have to sleep with the first little gang member who likes the way they look, right, because if they don’t, they’ll kill them. When we take up the role of denouncing it, we face the revenge, the threats.”
A man displaced by the violence said, “The only thing the paramilitaries changed with the peace accords was their name. Supposedly, there were programs that would reintegrate them into civilian life. According to Álvaro Uribe, they surrendered their weapons, but that’s pure propaganda. They’re still committing their crimes, nothing has changed.” These crimes are not entirely theirs because terror enacted by the great landowners, the oligarchs, the empires of the United States and Europe, is carried out through the vehicle of paramilitarism and the singularity of the irregular forces is their extreme cruelty, with the purpose of crushing all resistance. Right-wing politicians, in alliance with their hired assassins, mount campaigns of lies. Shamelessly, they tend to win elections based on fear-mongering, that allows them to create new police forces. Colombia does not hold a monopoly on these practices given that the Right in Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti and Brazil apply the same formulae. Yet nowhere have they broken the will of the organized masses. In Urabá as in hundreds of other focal points of resistance in Colombia, people without weapons are defending communal democracy.
The omens for the Right are not encouraging. In Colombia the Supreme Court decided to investigate the evidence that Álvaro Uribe forced witnesses to lie under oath, in order to ruin his political enemies on the left and in particular, the courageous Senator Iván Cepeda. On July 24 th , 2018, Uribe resigned from his seat in the Senate as head of the most powerful political party in the country, and the most dangerous. It was not clear whether the parliament dominated by the Right would accept his resignation. But shortly afterwards, Uribe claimed that he had decided to defend his “honor” and “asked that my letter of resignation be held without consideration.” At the same time, he presented charges against the judges who opened the investigation, who belong to the only court in the country not under the control of the Right. The saga of the bribed witnesses continues and Uribe is now under house arrest on a very spacious ranch, having decided to leave congress after all, to have his case transferred to a friendlier judicial setting.
While no court addressed accusations of murder against Uribe, or charges relative to his responsibility for having established paramilitary structures, Senators Iván Cepeda and Gustavo Petro did exactly that in the Senate starting years ago. No one in Colombia has any illusions about the practices of the Right. But now, eleven million Colombian voters have joined their voices to the demands of a united political left. Campesinos and the impoverished classes of the cities, Afro-Colombians, and over 100 Indigenous nations including the Nasa, Embera, Zamba, Wayuú, Caribeña and Arawak peoples carry forward their histories in a way of thinking that reaches far beyond a simple political project, that is to say, theirs is a maroon vision.
Cindy Forster Chiapas Support Committee, Los Angeles. Latin American and Caribbean Studies professor — for citations, please send an email to [email protected]
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English