Colombia: Old and New Patterns of Violence

COLOMBIA: OLD AND NEW PATTERNS OF VIOLENCE ULRICH OSLENDER The peace of the rich, is a war against the poor Graffiti on a wall in central Medellín, 2003. n 15 October 2005, Orlando Valencia travelled with a group of nine Oother people on a dirt track road in Colombia’s north-western Chocó Department. Near the small town of Belén de Bajirá their car was stopped by police. Orlando and two fellow travellers were taken to the local police station for interrogation. This most likely did not come as a great surprise to him. His outspoken activism against the unlawful, forcible implementa- tion of African Palm plantations in his native Curvaradó region had se- riously annoyed the agro-industrial companies eager to exploit the lands in this tropical rainforest environment. As a recognised community leader, Orlando had indefatigably denounced the impunity with which right-wing paramilitary groups at the service of these companies threatened local populations and killed community leaders. He had been invited by the US- based human rights NGO Lutheran World Relief (LWR) to address their Partnering for Peace conference due to be held in Chicago on 21 October that year.1 However, the US Embassy in Bogotá had refused him a visa. So he returned to the Curvaradó region, accompanied by fellow community members and a representative of the Montreal-based activist group Projet Accompagnement Solidarité Colombie (PASC). The latter – together with volunteers from International Peace Brigades – provides an international presence in three ‘humanitarian zones’ set up in the region to protect Afro- Colombian civilians against murder, kidnapping and torture by military and paramilitary forces. This protection was not to be enough for Orlando that day in October 2005. Shortly after he left the police station, he was forced onto a motorbike by persons known to be paramilitaries. Ten days later his 182 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2009 lifeless body was found with a bullet in its head. His hands had been tied. He leaves behind his wife and their seven children. As shocking as this cold-blooded killing was, it is unremarkable in the wider Colombian context. Cases of extreme violence – including massacres and torture – have become so common that their extraordinariness is hardly questioned anymore. As Daniel Pécaut, one of the best known experts on violence, or violentólogos – argues, violent events in Colombia are so varied and diverse that organised and random violence have entered into a recipro- cal relationship that has led to a state of generalised violence.2 Violence is in fact so ingrained in the very constitution of society, from national govern- ance to everyday lives, that it may appear trivial, or banal. In Pécaut’s view, this ‘banality of violence’ tends to obscure the existence of situations of real terror.3 We may be shocked by events of extreme violence. But we are not surprised (any more). The cold-blooded murder of Orlando Valencia is shocking, all the way from its conception to its execution. But it is only another tip of the iceberg of the all-pervasive, systematic regime of terror that many local populations are subjected to in Colombia. Since 1996, Orlando’s native Curvaradó region, for example, has seen 13 instances of the forced displacement of entire communities as a result of paramilitary terror, in- timidation, selected killings and massacres. At least 115 community members have been assassinated or ‘disappeared’ over the last ten years. Orlando’s case is representative of the wider strategies of oppression with which dissent is dealt with. As Nazih Richani says, the ‘dominant economic groups look upon violence as an efficient mechanism with which to crush the opposition. This attitude has shaped the political behavior of the dominant social groups toward the working classes, the peasants, and Left-wing political parties’.4 Violence meted out to labour unionists, for example, has reached truly apocalyptic dimensions – every second trade union leader assassinated in the world each year is Colombian. This ‘death of trade unions’ is symptomatic of the relationship between neoliberal deregulation, state policy and paramilitarism.5 The persecution of labour unionists by paramilitary groups, the outlawing of labour unions in the public sector, and the deregulation of the labour market all pursue the same strategy. Its aim is the weakening or disappearance of organisations that resist policies friendly to transnational capital. It is this link – the political economy of violence and the way it is played out on the ground in specific locations – that I want to focus on in this essay. The armed conflict in Colombia is usually portrayed as one of Marxist rebels versus right-wing militias and the Colombian army, with the civilian population caught up in the crossfire. Discussions of the political and eco- COLOMBIA 183 nomic dimensions of the conflict often look at the role played by the illegal drug trade and natural resources such as oil and how they fuel the conflict by providing economic opportunities for the diverse armed actors.6 Yet these debates often fail to examine the wider global forces that significantly shape the violence and terror on the ground. I think it is important to examine the Colombian conflict within these wider strategies of globalisation, one of which is the expansion of a global economy of expropriation. For David Harvey, for example, the contemporary moment of ‘new imperialism’ is characterised by new cycles of ‘accumulation by dispossession’.7 According to his analysis, one strategy for capital to overcome the crisis of overaccu- mulation (a condition whereby capital surplus lies idle with no profitable outlets in sight) is to seize common assets and turn them to profitable use. Today, then, we witness a new wave of ‘enclosing the commons’, pushed through by ‘policies of dispossession pursued in the name of neo-liberal orthodoxy’.8 These processes are also responsible, in my view, for the escalation of the armed conflict in Colombia in regions that had hitherto been at its margins. The Pacific coast is one such region that was until recently considered a haven of peace, insulated from Colombia’s cartography of violence, but has now become fully integrated into it. Below I examine this region as a lens through which the wider context of violence can be viewed and under- stood. I want this to be an ‘embodied’ narrative, in which the voices of the victims are heard. I do not claim impartiality in this account. I emphatically side with those whose lives are being destroyed by the logic of a capitalist world order in which nothing is unconnected. As a researcher interview- ing dozens of activists in Colombia, who have been subject to all kinds of violence, I became committed to making their struggle known, albeit through my own interpretations and with my limited ability to convey it. This essay, then, does not provide yet another historical account – nor an all-encompassing explanation – of how violence developed over the last two centuries in Colombia.9 Instead I want to focus on current trends and par- ticular manifestations of violence, and how they illustrate and may explain the wider underlying patterns of domination and repression that provide the structural context for all kinds of violence on the ground. The first section will briefly introduce the wider perspective in which violence has become shaped in Colombia over the last decades. I will then outline some of the contemporary patterns of violence, particularly those against organised labour. The remainder of the essay will then look at the Pacific coast region as an arena in which ethnocidal violence against Afro-Colombians is linked to capitalist expansion and development policies. 184 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2009 LA VIOLENCIA IN PERSPECTIVE Most narratives of violence in Colombia refer at some point to the noto- rious period of bi-partisan-induced national slaughter between 1946 and 1966 that has become known – for lack of a more fitting expression – as La Violencia. It cost the lives of over 200,000 Colombians, predominantly in the rural areas. La Violencia began as a sectarian conflict between the Liberal and Conservative parties, with campesinos constituting the majority of combat- ants and casualties. It saw the most brutal killings and massacres imaginable. People were cut in pieces with machetes, or burned alive. Pregnant women had their bellies slashed, their foetuses thrown into the air and pierced on bayonet points. ‘Don’t leave the seed’, was the order of the day. New modes of killing were practiced, such as the infamous corte corbata (the ‘necktie cut’), in which the victim’s tongue is pulled through the slit throat and left to hang like a tie. Maria Victoria Uribe has studied at length the technologies of terror de- ployed during La Violencia, which she interprets as sacrificial displays aimed at dehumanising the victims.10 For those who can stomach it, she provides an inventory of techniques of manipulation perpetrated on the victims’ bod- ies. She has since traced the same techniques in the killing sprees committed by paramilitary groups today. The collective assassination of unarmed and defenceless people, she argues, has in fact become a recurrent cultural prac- tice in Colombia, infused by the semantics of political terror: The obsession with manipulating the Other’s body characteris- tic of La Violencia has now been replaced by a faunalization that mimics the industrial slaughter of cattle, entailing a diminution of the meanings ascribed to the Other’s body. Acts of barbarity, shamelessly publicized in television news broadcasts and newspa- pers, have transformed Colombians into beings filled with fear: fear of war, of violence, of blood, of losing one’s own family, even of watching the news on television.11 These acts of barbarity have also transformed entire regions into landscapes of fear, where the armed groups’ impact is visibly inscribed.

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