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<h1 id="reader-title">Plan Colombia Casts Shadow on Indigenous
Rights as Peace Nears</h1>
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<p>October 12, 2016<br>
</p>
<p>Marginalized Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities
in Colombia have been among the most battered by more
than five decades of internal armed conflict between the
military, paramilitaries and armed left-wing rebel
groups. They are also the communities that <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Most-Affected-Colombians-Voted-for-Peace-Who-Voted-No-20161002-0008.html"
target="_blank">overwhelmingly voted “Yes” to the
groundbreaking peace deal</a> recently defeated at the
polls and have much at stake in what comes next on the
road to a post-conflict Colombia. </p>
<p>With <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Peace-at-Last-FARC-and-Colombia-Govt-to-Announce-Final-Deal-20160823-0034.html"
target="_blank">peace on the horizon</a> and some
US$4.5 billion set to flow into Colombia over the next
10 years through <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Plan-Colombia-2.0-As-It-Develops-20160204-0030.html"
target="_blank">“Plan Colombia 2.0,”</a> the path to a
post-conflict era is marked by many hurdles. Many of the
challenges are new ones, including the quest for
ensuring truth and reconciliation for abuses during the
52-year war as part of building stable and lasting
peace. Others — such as ethnic communities’ fights for
legal land title and respect for Indigenous rights to
free, prior and informed consent for development
projects in their ancestral territories — are
longstanding. </p>
<p>Despite landmark agreements on victims’ rights and
rural reform, among others, covered in the <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/FARC-and-Colombian-Government-Announce-Final-Peace-Accord-20160824-0026.html"
target="_blank">historic deal</a> between the
Colombian government and the country’s largest guerrilla
group, the FARC, Black and Indigenous communities have
warned that the peace accords could also spur a new
elite-backed scramble for land and resources in
Colombia’s countryside — particularly in areas where
rebel disarmament creates a power vacuum for the first
time in decades. </p>
<p>“As the peace accords are implemented, I think it is
going to generate many more problems that have to do
with the economic model promoted in the territories,”
Carlos Rosero, a leader of the network of <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Afro-Colombian-Strike-in-Choco-A-Historical-Reckoning-20160827-0011.html"
target="_blank">Afro-Colombian</a> groups known as the
Process of Black Communities, recently told teleSUR by
phone from Bogota. “Because it is an extractivist model
with an enormous cost that ends up affecting the
economic, social and cultural ways of the communities.”
</p>
<p>Rosero and other community leaders fear that the
“comprehensive rural reform” promoted in the peace deal
— though aimed at decreasing the vast inequalities
between rural and urban areas — will open the door for
national and multinational mining, agribusiness and
other corporations to bulldoze their human rights and
chip away at their already <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Afro-Colombians-Indigenous-Fear-New-Pitfalls-in-Peace-Deal-20160925-0011.html"
target="_blank">fragile traditional land claims</a>. </p>
<p>According to official 2015 statistics, the Colombian
government is sitting on at least 1,000 pending requests
for legal recognition of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian
title to their collective lands. Communities are already
organizing for a new post-conflict struggle after years
of stagnation on land rights demands in government
agencies, as well as decades of systematic territorial
theft and <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Colombia-Abysmal-Conditions-Await-Displaced-Returning-Home-20160324-0031.html"
target="_blank">mass displacement</a> that has
uprooted nearly 7 million people in the country. Another
220,000 victims have been killed. </p>
<p>And while peace may pave the way for the expansion of
neoliberalism and extractivism, the model is far from
new in Colombia, one of the most loyal corners of
Washington’s <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Dear-Washington-Post-Latin-America-Doesnt-Need-Intervention-20160414-0006.html"
target="_blank">“backyard”</a> in Latin America. As a
traditionally agricultural economy also rich in natural
resources, Colombia’s more than quarter century-old free
market policies, like elsewhere in the region, have
undermined the viability of local farming by flooding
the market with cheap imports and streamlined foreign
resource exploitation. As a result, neoliberalism in
Colombia has deepened inequality and fueled the
expansion of illicit coca crops, used in making cocaine,
as many small producers feel they have no other
profitable choice. </p>
<p>The United States has played an pivotal role in the
process, both through propping up the Colombian
government's counternarcotics and counterinsurgency
strategy with <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/telesuragenda/The-U.S.--Plan-Colombia-20160204-0008.html"
target="_blank">US$10 billion over 15 years of Plan
Colombia</a> and the controversial 2006 U.S.-Colombia
free trade agreement. Signed by former Presidents Bill
Clinton and Andres Pastrana and in 2000, Plan Colombia
dramatically ramped up militarization — while failing to
address <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Exclusive-Life-in-a-Colombian-Town-Run-by-Paramilitaries-20160406-0037.html"
target="_blank">paramilitary violence</a> — with dire
human rights consequences for social movements and
marginalized rural communities. </p>
<p>“Plan Colombia is one of the major reasons that ethnic
groups are disproportionately victimized by the
conflict,” Teo Ballve, professor of peace and conflict
studies at Colgate University, told teleSUR. “U.S.
military aid helped push the conflict into the heart of
their territories.” </p>
<p>Though billed as a counternarcotics program, Plan
Colombia was unsuccessful in curbing drug trafficking
and has become widely condemned as a <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-Wages-of-Plan-Colombia-Have-Been-Death-20160203-0009.html"
target="_blank">failure that ballooned human rights
abuses</a>, enabled right-wing death squads, sparked
land grabs, and ultimately prolonged the conflict.
Critics argue that Plan Colombia was designed to fight
left-wing rebel groups, namely the FARC, but also
targeted rural and ethnic populations in its effort to
protect elite interests and foreign investment
opportunities in the face of local community opposition
and demands for reforms. Plan Colombia’s military budget
was also accompanied by an economic element aimed at
further liberalizing the Colombian market and limiting
public spending in favor of privatization. </p>
<p>Earlier this year, Presidents Juan Manuel Santos and
Barack Obama extended the controversial military aid
package with a <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Plan-Colombia-2.0-As-It-Develops-20160204-0030.html"
target="_blank">“Plan Colombia 2.0,” dubbed Paz
Colombia</a>. The plan looks to strengthen security
and continue the “war on drugs” with US$450 million
annually over the next 10 years in post-conflict
Colombia. </p>
<p>“In many ways, (Plan Colombia) 2.0 is trying to attend
to the human fallout created by the first version of
Plan Colombia,” Ballve explained. “It's yet another
example of the U.S. undoing with one hand what it's
doing with the other.” </p>
<p>According to Ballve, one of the ways Plan Colombia’s
strategy directly contradicted itself is revealed in the
fact that funding earmarked for “alternative
development” initiatives, particularly for agriculture,
often ended up in the hands of drug traffickers —
precisely the powers the aid package claimed to be
fighting against. “Agriculture and land deals are some
of drug traffickers’ favorite ways of laundering their
narco-dollars,” he explained. </p>
<p>One of the agricultural endeavors promoted by Plan
Colombia’s “alternative development” measures has been
palm oil production, an <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Palm-Oils-Corporate-Deception-Green-Washing-a-Dirty-Industry--20151201-0020.html"
target="_blank">industry notorious for displacing
campesinos and ethnic communities</a> and wreaking
environmental havoc with large-scale, chemical
intensive, monocultural plantations. In Colombia — the
largest palm producer in Latin America and fourth
largest in the world — <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Colombia-to-Intensify-Cultivation-of-Palm-Oil-20160208-0039.html"
target="_blank">palm expansion</a> has gone hand in
hand with violence. In recent years the Colombian
government, in concert with paramilitaries and big
agribusiness, has “violently removed” Afro-Colombians,
Indigenous people, and campesinos to make way for palm
monocultures, according to the food and development
policy institute Food First. </p>
<p>“If the U.S. does not put into place strict guidelines
and due diligence,” Ballve continued regarding Plan
Colombia 2.0, “much of the aid could end up actually
fueling, rather than abating, Colombia's cycles of
violence.” </p>
<p>A new iteration of this kind of institutionalized land
grab is what vulnerable communities fear as peace
unfolds and Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Afro-Colombians-Indigenous-Fear-New-Pitfalls-in-Peace-Deal-20160925-0011.html"
target="_blank">continue to struggle</a> for legal
recognition of their collective land rights. </p>
<p>“The rural development in the peace accords, focused on
the extractive model, will promote the entrance of new
economic interests that don’t favor the needs and rights
of the people and their lands,” Clemencia Herrera, a
representative of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples
of the Amazon, recently told teleSUR. “It could create
more competition for the resources on our lands.” </p>
<p>According to Omaira Bolaños, Latin America program
coordinator of the Rights and Resources Initiative,
along with bloodshed, displacement of Indigenous,
Afro-Colombian, and campesino communities has been one
of the most destructive outcomes of the conflict,
accompanied by economic, social and cultural
consequences. </p>
<p>“For a lasting peace to take root,” Bolaños wrote in a
<a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2016/10/07/rights-for-indigenous-and-afro-colombian-communities-is-crucial-for-colombias-peace/?utm_term=.8a0a6db1f4e9"
target="_blank">recent article</a> published in the
Washington Post, “the legal recognition of collective
property rights for indigenous and Afro-Colombian
communities would be an important step in addressing the
war’s damages and in continuing a process of
comprehensive land reform.” </p>
<p>After years of civil society being hammered with
militarization and destructive economic policies —
supported and enshrined in 15 years of Plan Colombia and
the 2006 U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement — the
signing of the peace deal between the Colombian
government and the FARC is mostly symbolic. And the <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Colombia-Votes-No-on-Peace-Accord-Countrys-Future-Uncertain-20161002-0007.html"
target="_blank">narrow win by the “No” camp in the
Oct. 2 plebiscite</a> on the accords makes the future
even more uncertain. </p>
<p>Time will tell the true legacy of the peace deal, and
concrete policies — pushed by grassroots organizing to
ensure political follow through — and a real reduction
of poverty, misery, and human rights abuses will be the
measuring stick. </p>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
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