[News] Capitalism, Genocide & Colombia

[Anti-Imperialist News]

August 15, 2013

Dispatch From Catatumbo
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/15/capitalism-genocide-colombia/


  Capitalism, Genocide & Colombia

by DANIEL KOVALIK

I just returned from Catatumbo, Colombia where thousands of peasants are 
waging a life-and-death struggle against the U.S.-backed Colombian 
military and its paramilitary allies.   For over 60 days, the peasants 
have been demonstrating against the deplorable living conditions and 
economic circumstances in which they live, and in support of their 
proposal for a Peasant Farmer Reserve Zone of 10 million hectares.

Such a zone, which is provided for under the law, would allow the 
peasants to engage in subsistence farming free of the threat of 
encroachment by extractive companies desiring to mine or drill on their 
land.   This demand, along with the concomitant demand of the peasants 
for all mining and oil exploration and extraction in their region to be 
suspended, is critical to the peasants who are being driven to the verge 
of extinction.

According to the Luis Carlos Pérez Lawyers' Collective (CALCP), 11,000 
peasants have been killed in this region by state and para-state forces, 
most of them during the 2002-2010 term of President of Alvaro Uribe, and 
over 100,000 peasants, out of a total of around 300,000, have been 
forcibly displaced.   At least 32 mass graves containing the bodies of 
murdered peasant activists have been found in this region in recent years.

And, this mass murder and displacement is being carried out to make way 
for more oil drilling, African palm cultivation (for biodiesel) and for 
coal mining by North American companies.

I say that this mayhem is being carried out, in part, in order to make 
way for /more/ oil drilling because, in fact, much oil drilling has been 
taking place there for the past 70 years.   And, the peasants of this 
region have nothing to show for this many years of drilling.  As we were 
told a few times during out trip, after 70 years of oil exploration, the 
rural parts of this region do not even have a paved road.    (Our 
delegation -- led by Justice for Colombia and including participants 
from the USW and Unite the Union UK -- found this out the hard way 
during our 3.5 hour drive over a dirt road from Cucuta to a village 
outside Tibu near the Venezuelan border).

In addition, there is no sewage system, no running water and no health 
services.   Indeed, peasants injured in their confrontations with the 
military and police during the two months of demonstrations -- with the 
peasants defending themselves with sticks against the guns, tanks and 
other U.S.-supplied hardware of the military and police -- have been 
forced to flee into Venezuela for refuge and medical services.

In short, the oil and other extractive companies, beginning with Texaco 
in the 1930's, have taken and taken, and left the people with nothing.  
Now, the companies want even more, and it is the very existence and 
presence of the peasants which stands in their way.  And so, quite 
logically, the companies, with the help of the U.S.-backed military and 
paramilitaries, are aiming to literally wipe the peasants off the map.  
In other words, these forces are engaged in a calculated act of 
genocide.   Indeed, when a number of us remarked upon how almost 
everyone we saw and met with in our visit to Catatumbo were no more than 
teenagers, we were told that this was the result of the fact that their 
parents had either been murdered or displaced.   Left behind are 
villages populated almost entirely by children.

*Young Peasants of Catatumbo In Rebellion*

The calculated mass killing and displacement that is taking place in 
Catatumbo is a good example of the phenomenon discussed in the new book, 
/Capitalism: A Structural Genocide/ 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1780321996/counterpunchmaga> by 
Garry Leech.   In that book, Leech argues, and quite forcefully, that 
capitalism, left to its own devices, will inevitably destroy (1) those 
who stand in the way of the exploitation of natural resources; and (2) 
those individuals, such as peasants and subsistent farmers, who are 
engaged in pursuits which neither contribute towards economic "growth" 
nor produce surplus value or profit.  Of course, the peasants of 
Catatumbo fall into both of these categories simultaneously, and are 
therefore a double threat.

Citing Indian physicist and philosopher Vandana Shiva, Leech explains 
that, under capitalism, "nothing has value until it enters the market.   
Shiva points out that under capitalism 'if you consume what you produce, 
you do not really produce, at least not economically speaking.  If I 
grow my own food, and do not sell it, then this does not contribute to 
GDP, and so does not contribute towards growth.'"    Rather, for such 
subsistence farmers, "'nature exists as a commons.'"   The commons, 
moreover, and those who work on it, are simply not permitted under 
capitalism.

As Leech and Shiva explain, those working the commons must either "be 
incorporated -- often through coercion -- into the ever-widening spheres 
of production and circulation," or they must be simply be destroyed.   
This process, as Leech explains, is what Karl Marx termed, "primitive 
accumulation," and it is quite a nasty process, wherever it is carried out.

Leech explains that, as capitalism was beginning to get into full swing 
in Britain in the late 1700's and early 1800's, the British Parliament 
passed a series of Enclosure Acts which privatized commonly held lands 
and "prevented much of the generations-old practice of grazing their 
animals and cultivating their crops on commonly held lands, thereby 
forcing them to move to the cities in search of jobs."

More recently, as Leech astutely points out, Mexico outlawed communal 
land titles for indigenous peoples in order to make way for NAFTA.   As 
Leech explains, and as many of us have argued for years, a major /raison 
d'être/ of NAFTA was in fact the primitive accumulation of the commons 
of millions of small farmers in Mexico.   This primitive accumulation 
was carried out by NAFTA's provisions which allowed heavily-subsidized, 
and therefore cheap, agricultural products from North America to flood 
the Mexican markets tariff-free.   Meanwhile, the IMF rules governing 
Mexico forbid that country from subsidizing its own agricultural producers.

As Leech explains, the results for 2 million small farmers in Mexico, 
who could not compete with the subsidized food from the North, was 
devastating, with these small farmers losing their livelihood and their 
land and fleeing into the cities, or illegally into the U.S.   Finding 
themselves displaced from their land, many were left with no jobs at 
all, found themselves exploited in low paying jobs with poor safety and 
health practices, or turned to the drug trade for employment.  The 
result for Mexico as a whole has been the destruction of the social 
fabric of the nation and increased violence, with cities like Juarez 
suffering violence levels comparable to nations at war.

While Leech does not focus on Colombia in his book,  he does mention 
that Colombia itself "has become Latin America's poster child over the 
past decade and its economic growth has been driven by the exploitation 
of the country's natural resources, particularly oil, coal and gold, by 
foreign companies."   Colombia now has the largest internally displaced 
population in the world at over 5 million.   As Leech explains, "[m]any 
have been forced from their lands by direct physical violence related to 
the country's armed conflict -- often by the Colombian military and 
right-wing paramilitary groups serving the interests of multinational 
corporations.  However, many others have become economic refugees due to 
the structural violence inherent in neoliberal policies that has 
dispossessed them of their lands in order to facilitate capital 
accumulation for foreign companies."

*Peasants Greet Us Along The Highway*

The peasants of Catatumbo have long been the victims of such direct as 
well as structural violence, but now they are fighting back to defend 
their land.   For 53 days, these peasants, armed only with sticks, 
blocked the main highway linking the cities of Cucuta and Tibu.  Shortly 
after our visit, the government agreed to negotiate with them directly, 
and the peasants ended this blockade for now.  However, they will begin 
it anew if talks fail.

While the Colombian Minister of Defense warned us not to travel this 
highway because of these protests, the peasants freely allowed us to 
pass.  Of course, as all of us understood, what the Colombian government 
was truly afraid of was that we would witness that it is in fact the 
peasants who are on the side of right; that it is they who are defending 
the land, the water and the rainforests for all of us.   And, this is 
why their struggle, and the struggles of others like them, must 
succeed.   In truth, our very lives and future depend on them.

/*Daniel Kovalik* is a labor and human rights lawyer and teaches 
International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20130815/7522f7db/attachment.htm>