Home |
|
About JFC |
|
About Colombia |
|
Campaigns |
|
Resources |
|
Projects |
|
Delegations |
|
Current Campaigns |
|
|
End UK Military
Free Colombian
Stop the EU-Colombia Free Trade Agreement About Colombia
|
|
Simon Bolivar
Colombia was liberated from the Spanish in 1810 by Simon Bolivar - the Latin American independence leader who is now a national hero. The country is about the size of the UK, France and Spain combined and has a population of 45 million people.
The population is approximately 74% white/mestizo, 24% black/mixed race and 2% indigenous. Nearly 90% of the population are Roman Catholics and Spanish is spoken by all but some isolated indigenous groups.
Colombia is the only country in South America to have coasts on both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and, in the extreme south east of the country, it also reaches the Amazon River. The Andes Mountains run north to south through the west of the country while the eastern half of the nation is split between flat open plains and tropical jungle known as Amazonia.
|
|
Colombia produces petroleum (BP is the second biggest foreign investor in the country), coal (Colombia has the largest opencast mine in the world), emeralds (over half of the world's emeralds are Colombian), nickel, gold, copper, iron ore, natural gas, coffee, bananas, sugarcane, textiles, cut flowers and palm oil among other products. Over half of all exports go to the United States and the neighbouring countries of Venezuela and Ecuador.
For 40 years there has been a war in Colombia between government forces and leftwing guerrilla groups.
|
|
Jorge Gaitan
In the late 1940s Colombian entered a bloody conflict known as 'La Violencia'. This was primarily caused by the mounting tensions between the two leading political parties (the Liberals and the Conservatives) who had shared power for many years. 'La Violencia' became more intense after the 1948 assassination of the progressive Liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. The assassination caused riots in Bogotá and these subsequently spread throughout the country and claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 Colombians.
From 1953 to 1964 the violence between the various factions (predominantly factions aligned to either the Liberals or the Conservatives) decreased; first when General Gustavo Rojas carried out a military coup and then under the military junta of General Gabriel Gordillo.
Toward the end of this period the Liberal and Conservative parties agreed to the creation of a 'National Front', whereby the two parties would govern jointly. The presidency would alternate between the two parties every 4 years and they would have parity in other elective offices. The 'National Front' excluded all other political currents and this, combined with continuing social and economic injustices and widespread poverty, soon led to the creation of armed opposition groups that fought against the Government. These groups still exist today and are know as the guerrillas.
The Guerrillas
Since the 1960s various guerrilla groups have come and gone in Colombia although today only a few are still active. Of these, only two still have any real influence; the ELN and the FARC.
The ELN (National Liberation Army) was founded in 1966 by a mixture of Marxist intellectuals and students and Catholics who followed liberation theology. After periods of weakness in the 1970s they became a relatively powerful force in the early 1990s and at the height of their strength were believed to be around 5,000-strong. In the mid to late-1990s the ELN were hit hard by paramilitary (see below) offensives and lost control of many of the areas that they had historically dominated. This decline continued after 2000 and in the following years the group began to disintegrate in some regions of the country.
In 2005 the ELN and the Colombian Government began exploratory peace talks in Havana, Cuba, though these collapsed in 2007 and since then the group has continued to fragment in the field.
|
|
Manuel Marulanda
The principal guerrilla group in Colombia is the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) which was founded by Manuel Marulanda in 1966 as a communist insurgency. Marulanda, who became legendary for being the oldest guerrilla leader in the world, died of a heart attack in 2008 aged 79. Though strongest in remote and rural mountainous and jungle regions, the FARC operates all over Colombia and is estimated to have around 15,000 fighters plus an unknown number of militia members operating in towns and cities. Currently led by former student leader Alfonso Cano, the group is generally considered to be the largest and oldest guerrilla insurgency operating in the world today.
The FARC has withstood several army offensives over the years and continues to attack military and political targets in various regions of the country on an almost daily basis. Whilst some accuse the FARC of being a terrorist organisation, others maintain that the guerrillas are still a politically motivated group whose ideological position has changed little through the years. The FARC's declared aim is to overthrow the Colombian regime and replace it with a leftwing revolutionary government.
The paramilitaries
As the guerrilla movements grew through the 1970s and 1980s, the response of the Colombian Government was to begin implementing US-designed counterinsurgency campaigns. A key element of these campaigns was the creation of rightwing paramilitary groups. These were established by the army and their allies in the landowning and political classes.
Though originally intended as 'self-defence' groups (defending landowners and businesses from guerrilla extortion attempts) it became increasingly clear that they were in fact to become an integral part of the counterinsurgency strategy.
However, by the mid-1980s the paramilitaries started working increasingly closely with the infamous Colombian drugs cartels (firstly the Medellin Cartel and later the Cali Cartel) and as a result it gradually became more difficult, due to hidden and overlapping relationships, to understand who was controlling whom - a complicated web of the State and their military forces, wealthy landowners and businessmen, and the drugs barons, all seemed to control to a greater or lesser extent the various paramilitary forces.
By the 1990s, as the guerrillas became stronger and the influence of US counterinsurgency advisers increased, these complex relationships changed and the paramilitaries slowly transformed into a united national force. This force, known as the AUC, became increasingly integrated with the Colombian armed forces and, though the relationship varied in different regions, the army and the AUC grew so close that it was common for soldiers and AUC members to patrol together, share bases, transportation and communication facilities and engage in joint operations - including assassinations. Thus paramilitary operations became state-sponsored violence.
The Human Rights Crisis
Whilst the declared role of the paramilitaries was to combat the guerrillas, their growing involvement in the drugs trade and their unwillingness to actually engage the FARC on the battlefield in fact meant that their primary military objective became civilians. Those suspected of sympathising with the guerrillas or who opposed the interests of the paramilitaries, or the politicians or businesses behind them, were the principal objectives.
|
|
Jaime Pardo Leal, the leader of the Patriotic Union, killed by the Colombian military
But widespread use of assassinations was not the only violation of human rights that occurred. Thousands of people were forcibly disappeared, torture and death threats became common and the paramilitaries perpetrated massacres almost on a daily basis from the mid-1990s onwards - particularly against members of communities deemed pro-guerrilla or anti-government. Huge numbers of people have also been imprisoned and many hundreds of political prisoners still languish in Colombia's jails.
Forced displacement too became a common occurrence as millions were forced from their homes and lands by the paramilitaries who then stole the land and, in many cases, the natural resources which lay beneath it. Today, with 3.6 million Colombians having fled in this way, the country has the second highest displaced population in the world.
Impunity for such crimes is almost absolute and this issue remains at the core of the country's human rights crisis. Successive Colombian administrations have allowed the perpetrators of widespread and severe human rights violations to escape punishment and this lack of action by the State has given a virtual green light for the abuses to continue.
|
|
President Uribe
In 2002 Alvaro Uribe Velez, a Liberal Party politician who had left his party to run for the presidency as an independent, was elected by 24% of the eligible voters. Uribe promised to implement firm security policies that would bring an end to the Colombian conflict and guaranteed to defeat the 40-year-old guerrilla insurgency once and for all. His message, which was widely heard after the tightly controlled Colombian media gave him their full backing, rang a chord and President Uribe received high approval ratings. But, as so often in Colombia, all was not as it seemed with the new President.
|
|
Pablo Escobar
Uribe was later elected as a Senator for, and then Governor of, the region of Antioquia where the Medellin Cartel was based. During this period a US Defence Intelligence Agency investigation describe Uribe as "a Colombian politician and Senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin Cartel at high Government levels….Uribe has worked for the Medellin Cartel and is a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar. He has participated in Escobar's political campaign…."
Perhaps unsurprisingly due to the links between the drugs traffickers and the paramilitaries Uribe also grew closer to those involved in the AUC paramilitary alliance. During his period as Governor of Antioquia, Uribe openly supported and financed local vigilante groups known as CONVIVIR. According to Human Rights Watch many CONVIVIR groups "were directed by known paramilitaries" whilst others "threatened to assassinate Colombians that were considered as guerrilla sympathizers of which rejected joining the [CONVIVIR]".
When Uribe's term as Governor ended in 1997 Colombia's Constitution Court banned the CONVIVIR though by then the damage had been done - the paramilitaries, operating through legal channels established by Uribe, had solidified their relationships with military commanders and political leaders throughout the nation. During the 2002 presidential elections the paramilitaries described Uribe as "our candidate" and threatened to massacre communities that did not vote for him and prevented opposing candidates from campaigning in regions under their control. Many argue that this was the paramilitaries paying Uribe back for his early support.
Under Uribe the Colombian conflict has intensified and with it the violations of the rights of the civilian population. Whilst his supporters correctly argue that the President has brought a degree of security to some regions there has been a high price to pay: Forced displacement has increased, extra-judicial executions have gone up, the numbers of political prisoners in Colombian jails has soared and more trade unionists are being murdered each year.
Recent developments
Though President Uribe has refused to negotiate with the FARC, claiming that they are terrorists who he will defeat militarily, he has had no such qualms about talking with the paramilitaries. During his first term he began what has become known as the 'Paramilitary Demobilisation Process' which led to the vast majority of paramilitaries apparently surrendering their weapons in return for an amnesty for their crimes.
Critics accuse Uribe of legalising his old friends in the AUC whilst ignoring the rights of victims to truth, justice and reparation. However, the President argues that he has made Colombia a safer place by disbanding the paramilitaries. The reality is that the paramilitaries continue to function - both trafficking drugs and assassinating and attacking government opponents - all over Colombia as they have done for many years.
In another development in late 2006 a scandal, known as the 'Para-Political Scandal', broke which implicated a large number of Uribe's political supporters. More and more evidence came to light, much after the discovery of a laptop computer belonging to a paramilitary commander, that people extremely close to Uribe, including the head of the presidential intelligence service, were in fact in an alliance with the paramilitaries. Although ongoing the scandal has already revealed that numerous pro-Uribe members of Congress were working for the paramilitaries.
|
|
Carlos Gaviria, the leader of the Democratic Pole
Narcotics, the 'War on Drugs' and Foreign Military Intervention
No background to Colombia would be complete without mentioning the role played by the drugs trade. For two decades now Colombia has been the world's largest producer of cocaine and, as a result, has been one of the principle targets for the US-sponsored 'War on Drugs'. However, despite billions of dollars of counter-narcotics assistance, production of cocaine has remained constant and prices on the streets of North American and European cities have actually fallen rather than risen.
Coca Plants
In Colombia the main tactic used to fight drugs has been the huge US aerial fumigation campaign whereby plots of coca (the raw material used for cocaine) are sprayed with poisonous chemicals in an effort to destroy them. The tactic has not worked though much land has been poisoned and thousands of small farmers forced from their land as a result.
|
|
British soldiers in Colombia
