Colombia:
oil-palm plantations, violation of human rights and Afro-descendent
communities’ quest for true dignity
When you talk about the violation
of human rights, you must talk about Colombia. When you talk
about the huge expansion of oil-palm plantations, you must talk
about Colombia. Both issues go hand in hand in that country
One of the solutions put forward
to face the climate change crisis is the promotion of agrofuels,
including oil-palm. This proposal not only does not address the
unsustainable production, marketing and consumption models that
have landed us in this critical situation but also conceals the
fact that the oil palm, far from being a “green” fuel,
is a “red”
one, tainted with blood.
In 1959 the Curvaradó
and Jiguamiandó basins in the Colombian Choco biogeographical
region were designated as Natural Reserves. However, in 1996 the
army and paramilitary forces launched an attack in the area and
enabled oil palm growers, cattle ranchers and loggers to expand
their agribusiness.
Oil palm plantations and cattle
ranching took over 23 thousand hectares of collective territory
belonging to Afro-descendent communities. Either through direct
actions of the regular army or indirectly through paramilitary
strategies, hundreds of crimes were committed: the massacre or
forced disappearance of over 140 people, in addition to the ransacking
and destruction of property, community members being persecuted,
threatened and forced to abandon their land.
Human Rights organizations
and families of forcibly disappeared people have provided figures
for the whole of Colombia, amounting to more than 4 million people
displaced from their lands by armed operations over the past
15 years together with over 15 thousand forced disappearances.
Close on 7 million hectares of land have been illegally appropriated
by paramilitary forces or drug traffickers over the same period,
in most cases after forcing displacement of the inhabitants.
These State and paramilitary
terrorist actions are all part of a strategy seeking not only
to seize territories, but also to use them to establish destructive
commercial processes. In the Curvaradó
and Jiguamiandó basins, dispossession of land was accompanied
by vigorous felling of primary forests in an area covering over
10 thousand hectares, the drying up of five rivers, pollution of
water courses from agrochemicals used in the oil palm plantations
that also caused severe health problems, particularly in the case
of women and children.
Over 120 years ago, the abolition
of slavery led to a diaspora to what is known as the Bio Pacific
Choco. People settled in tropical forests, places of great beauty
hosting an enormous variety of species, plants, birds, butterflies,
flowers, wild animals, primary tree vegetation and insects. These
places became truly free spaces where the settlers mingled with
the indigenous peoples and later with Mestizos. Finally they
became a tribal people, recognized as such because their “social,
cultural and economic conditions distinguish them from other
sections of the national community and whose status is regulated
wholly or partially by their own customs or traditions or by
special laws or regulations.” (1) They are acknowledged
as members of a “Black community”
and “Afro-Colombians” or “Afro-descendents.”
This identity embraces issues
related with a sense of belonging to the community, which is
linked by the river and rooted in an ancestral territory with
which they have an almost umbilical relationship: the territory
is their mother and father because it nourishes them. They understand
it as a comprehensive web, not only involving the land but also
the human beings, the social network, the community organization,
ways of subsistence, of internal conflict solving, of mobility
when facing events that threaten their lives, and their own relationship
with biodiversity. Their territory guarantees their customs and
ways of living, communal property and environmental protection.
Enforced displacement is therefore
a violation of the integrity of these communities’
existence and has caused injury in personal, family and collective
terms. It has damaged social and cultural practices, ways of living
and of territorial occupation, ways of relating with the earth,
animals, water, cooking, organization and their interaction with
the outside world.
Though facing innumerable violations
of their human rights, even in the midst of an internal armed
conflict and the implementation of illegal major works and agribusiness,
in the Humanitarian and Biodiversity Zones Afro-descendent communities
have developed innovative civil resistance processes.
Humanitarian Zones are places
inhabited by a human group affirming their rights as part of
the civilian population. These places, specifically intended
for the protection of human and collective life as well as of
ecosystems, are a means of returning to the territory and of
confronting the criminal structure’s claims. Humanitarian
Zones’ members freely share a Life Project to defend themselves
from institutional militarization and from becoming victims of
potential armed conflicts.
Biodiversity Zones are areas
for the protection and rehabilitation of collective or private
territory ecosystems and for the assertion of family groups’ right
to food when their lands have been devastated or are at risk
of being destroyed by the agribusiness, major works or exploitation
of natural resources.
In these places, the communities
practice freedom of expression, democratic discussion involving
women and children, and production methods that ensure food sovereignty.
They repossess and heal their territories.
While at the Climate Summit
all kinds of devices are being contrived –
REDD, agrofuels, geo-engineering and others – to put off
the real measure that sooner or later will have to be taken: that
of halting the extraction of fossil fuels, with the recovery of
their territories from the hands of agribusiness and mega-enterprises,
these communities are truly contributing to curbing climate change.
At a time of large scale violations
of human rights, of ecocide, starting by climate change itself,
these criminalized, outcast, stigmatized Colombian communities
bear witness to their rights in an autonomous and liberating
practice of true dignity.
1. Article 1.1 of ILO Convention
169 and Convention Number 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples:
a manual, Project to promote ILO policy on indigenous and tribal
peoples. Geneva 2003, page 7.
Extracted and adapted from
the reports: “Resiliencias colectivas. Se mata con hambre,
se mata con balas, y se quiere matar el alma”, (Collective
resiliences. They kill by hunger, they kill with bullets and
they want to kill the soul.” Danilo Rueda, Comisión
de Justicia y Paz, http://tiny.cc/rbqAT; and “Derechos
Humanos y Palma Aceitera Curvaradó
y Jiguamiandó” (Human Rights and the Oil Palm Curvaradó and
Jiguamiandó). From Ver 236, http://colombia.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/37083.php
