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The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia

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The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia UC-Tate.qxd 4/27/2007 1:02 PM Page 31 Chapter 1 Colombia: Mapping the Eternal Crisis For most international observers, violence remains the primary evidence of Colombian national failure. For the past two decades, debates about Colombian national identity have focused on Colombia either as a coun- try in progress or as a failing state. Popular culture references consistently portray Colombians as criminal; the State Department warns U.S. citi- zens that travel to Colombia is dangerous. Inside Colombia, academics, artists, politicians, and cab drivers spend hours debating why, where, and how the country went so terribly wrong. By most measures, Colombia has been counted among the most violent places in the world, yet this is not the reason that it is a useful place in which to consider violence. Many other countries have experienced the dramatic spikes in political violence that are characterized by observers as a human rights crisis; the death toll in the Balkans and Central Africa during the 1990s dwarfs the number of Colombians who died in such circumstances. What makes Colombia’s case illuminating is not that it is the site of the worst violence but rather that multiple forms of violence exist in the context of a relatively wealthy, established democracy. Throughout the twentieth century Colombia has experienced periodic waves of political violence in which murder and torture were used to ensure electoral outcomes, guaran- tee property rights, and solidify economic power. Over the past three decades, Colombia has also had one of the world’s highest murder rates and entrenched organized crime. The kinds of violent acts committed in Colombia—political, domestic, common, and organized crime—coexist 31 UC-Tate.qxd 4/27/2007 1:02 PM Page 32 32 Mapping the Eternal Crisis and commingle, making the classification of violence and the production of accountability a highly contested public process. Despite the inability of the Colombian state to monopolize the use of force, to control national terri- tory, or to guarantee its citizens basic rights, Colombia has a wealth of dem- ocratic institutions, a stable economy, and a relatively well financed media and educational infrastructure. Colombians have traditionally enjoyed one of the highest per capita incomes in Latin America, and the country is defined as a “middle income” country by the World Bank (although poverty and inequality levels are growing) (Vélez 2002).1 The persistent levels of vio- lence combined with the wealth and educational levels enjoyed in major cities have created generations of policy makers, activists, and scholars devoted to analyzing and arguing over the causes and consequences of Colombian violence. Here I want to sketch the broad outlines of Colombian history in order to locate debates over human rights activism within the history of debates over violence, focusing on the categories used to classify the episodic vio- lence that has erupted since Colombian independence: partisan struggle, insurgent violence, counterinsurgency efforts, and organized criminal vio- lence. The dynamics of these types of violence have varied over time and by region: the changing nature of capital accumulation privileged certain actors over others, and the shifting structure of political institutions facili- tated new kinds of power accumulation. In my tour through discussions of Colombia violence, I draw on some of the most insightful studies, which have explored these changes in particular places over limited windows of time (Carroll 1999a, 1999b; Roldan 2002). For readers unfamiliar with Colombia, I paint with broad strokes the most prevalent evolving forms of violence over the past six decades. From this history, I turn to the example of complicated violence in one place, Trujillo, Colombia, where a specific set of murders came to be investigated and eventually categorized as human rights violations. I examine the factors that made this possible, fac- tors that are the focus of much of the rest of this book: the increasing pro- fessionalization of human rights groups (and their corresponding greater credibility and research capacity), the growing acceptance of human rights in the post–cold war era, and the new state human rights agencies. Despite the achievements of the commission established to investigate these mur- ders, which produced a consensus document finding local military com- manders and drug traffickers responsible, the case demonstrates the limits of human rights activism. Finally, I examine two frames according to which the international community responded to the violence during the 1990s: Colombia as a humanitarian crisis and the need for a culture of UC-Tate.qxd 4/27/2007 1:02 PM Page 33 Mapping the Eternal Crisis 33 peace. Each frame catered to different institutional interests and con- stituencies, and while some organizations employed both frames, many groups viewed the human rights focus on justice and accountability as an obstacle to humanitarian assistance and the search for peace. Basic Statistics on Violence in Colombia A central point of this book is that the production of statistics on violence is a profoundly political and contested act. The debates among and be- tween groups about which deaths to count in what category are explored throughout. Understanding the basic universe of figures being debated is important for understanding the wider context for these debates. Colombian homicide rates peaked in the early 1990s at more than 28,000 violent deaths a year (86 per 100,000 inhabitants). Since then the death rate has declined but still remains extremely high; during my research in 2002, the homicide rate was 66 per 100,000 inhabitants, almost eleven times that of the United States.2 Kidnapping is a major industry; half of all the kidnappings in the world occur in Colombia. Colombia is home to the longest-running civil war in the western hemisphere and currently suffers from the highest rates of political violence. According to the Colombian Commission of Jurists, on average, ten people were killed daily in politi- cal violence in 1990; by 2000 that figure had risen to almost twenty a day (CCJ 2001: 4). The Council on Human Rights and Displacement (Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos, CODHES), an NGO that re- searches the Colombian conflict and internal displacement, reports that the number of people fleeing their homes has climbed dramatically, to an all-time high of 412, 553 people in 2002, a 20 percent increase from the year before (CODHES 2003: 2). There are currently three Colombian groups on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations: the two Marxist guerrilla groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC) and the National Libera- tion Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN), and the largest umbrella organization of right-wing paramilitary forces, the United Self- Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC).3 Religion, Race, Ethnicity, Culture, and Geography Colombian violence does not fit into the model of internal conflict most prevalent during the post–cold war period, which focused on ethnic and religious divisions. Religious institutions, in particular, the Catholic UC-Tate.qxd 4/27/2007 1:02 PM Page 34 34 Mapping the Eternal Crisis Church, and ethnic divisions within society have shaped how violence was deployed and mobilized, but these factors were not the primary motor of the conflict. The vast majority of Colombians are Catholic, and the Catholic Church has played a privileged role in Colombian history, having been granted special rights, including control of the educational curricu- lum, by the 1886 Constitution (which was replaced in 1991). The church has also occasionally taken sides in the conflict. Historically, it was identi- fied with the Conservative Party, and the hierarchy backed the Conserva- tive government during moments of political violence. Despite the conser- vative hierarchy, many priests were involved in liberation theology and promoted grassroots organizations that were targeted for repression. While significant discrimination is practiced along racial divisions, Colombia does not experience significant violent ethnic or racial ten- sions. Unlike the Incan Empire to the south or the Aztecs and Mayans to the north, Colombia’s indigenous population lived in relatively isolated small groups and today account for only approximately 2 percent of the population, one of the smallest percentages of any Latin American coun- try. Despite their small population, however, indigenous communities control almost 25 percent of Colombia’s territories through the res- guardo system (comparable to the system of Indian reservations in the United States). This has contributed to the targeting of indigenous groups by all the actors in the armed conflict (Jackson 2003).4 Scholars have only recently begun to examine the racial dimensions of Colombian vio- lence, particularly in terms of the Afro-Colombian population. Colombia has one of the continent’s largest African-descent populations, approxi- mately 26 percent of the population. Between 1580 and 1640 as many as 170,000 African slaves were brought through the port of Cartagena de Indias, the only slave port in Spanish America besides Veracruz, Mexico, primarily to work in plantation and cattle ranching and gold mining on the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts (Arocha 1998). While slavery was abol- ished in 1821, total manumission was only gradually achieved over the next three decades (Lohse 2001). Afro-Colombians remain concentrated on the Pacific Coast, especially the department of Choco, where freed and escaped slaves established independent communities; over the past two decades, however, Afro-Colombians have migrated throughout the country, in part because of the internal conflict. Racial identity remains a slippery category in Colombia, and most Afro-Colombians do not iden- tify themselves as such, despite incipient efforts to organize around Afro- Colombian rights to combat ongoing discrimination (Wade 2002). In the current conflict Afro-Colombians are disproportionately victims of UC-Tate.qxd 4/27/2007 1:02 PM Page 35 Mapping the Eternal Crisis 35 forced displacement (Jeffery and Carr 2004).
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