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Colombia
By Margaret Knapke
Among them: Oswaldo Gómez, Harvey Ramirez, José Luis Idrobo, Jaime Castillo. This is a mourning wall, its magenta paradoxical, asserting a stubborn Yes! to life out of deepest grief. The 18 returning my gaze are lost to their families now—along with more than 300 others disappeared since 1979 in the vicinity of Popayán, the provincial capital of Cauca in southwestern Colombia. Alirio Chamizo, Julian Valencia, Angel Gabriel García, Máximo Gómez, Avelino Tosme. Large black-and-white photos insist ¡Presente! These desaparecidos—disappeared persons—are present by force of love, memory, and their enduring work in the community. ASFADDES defies their being made invisible or irrelevant. Edelmer Hurtado, Nilson Hoyos, Nancy del Carmen Apraez, Carlos Alberto Apraez. A date and city follow each name, specifying when and where each person was last seen alive. (The exception: Those who killed Nancy del Carmen Apraez abandoned her toddler Carlos. Once found, he was adopted before his family could locate him. He now lives in Switzerland, where Nancy’s mother visits him.) Olga Lucía Espinosa, Edison Uzuga, Celimo Burbano, Julio César Idrobo, David Burbano. An ASFADDES slogan demands: “Por que vivos se los llevaron vivos los queremos.” “Because they were living when you took them, we want them back alive.” Family members shout the defiant slogan during an evening of testimonies before the mourning wall. I hear magenta in their voices. Desaparición forzada, the practice of forcibly disappearing people, is epidemic in embattled Colombia. The nongovernmental Association for the Families of the Detained and Disappeared was formed in 1982, in response to the disappearing of 12 students from the National University in Bogotá. In their recent retrospective, Veinte Años de Historia y Lucha (Twenty Years of History and Struggle), ASFADDES notes that forced disappearance and summary execution began to be institutionalized at that time, gradually attaining a hideous near-normalcy. Crimes that previously had rent the fabric of daily life were fast becoming part of a new weave. ASFADDES documented 7,000 forced disappearances nationwide through 2003; the accelerated rate for 2002 and 2003 was nearly five per day. Disappearing
Dissent Still other desaparecidos were politically uninvolved and apparently seized at random—while driving a bus, walking to school or selling tortillas, for instance—but their vanishing serves a purpose, too. For the intention of those who forcibly disappear others is to sow fear and confusion in the general population as well as among activists. They want a stunned and compliant populace. Forced disappearance is not kidnapping. (Colombia averaged 3,000 kidnappings per year between 1996 and 2003, according to government figures.) ASFADDES points out that kidnappers hope to exchange their prisoners for something of economic or political value—usually money, prisoners or concessions. By contrast, desaparecidos are valuable to their captors precisely for their enduring absence from their community, as well as the trauma and mystery around that absence. Most of the detained and disappeared are never seen again. Against
Forgetting Grieving a disappeared person is a peculiar anguish. Survivors have to wonder, “Is my loved one still alive? Is he being tortured at this moment? How can I protect her? How can I secure his release? Does she feel abandoned by me?” Such endless questioning can be a survivor’s undoing. But Manrique was clear: What she could not do for her husband, she would do for her community. Nineteen years later, she directs the Popayán office of ASFADDES, one of seven branches currently dotting the country; others are in Santafé de Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Bucaramanga, Barrancabermeja, Medellín, and Neiva. ASFADDES essentially works “against forgetting”—against forgetting both those who have been taken, and those who took them. An important vehicle for public “denunciation” is the group’s Gallery of Remembrance, which is taken to every public event possible. Photographs and token belongings represent individual desaparecidos. For one there is a pair of shoes, for another a book, for another toys and dolls. The gallery serves as antidote to collective amnesia—because, while forgetting can offer some relief, it also invites impunity and repetition. Protecting human rights requires unwavering memory. Less publicly, activists follow the legal process of each case, providing legal assistance and documentation, as well as accompaniment for family members of desaparecidos. To the extent possible, they also provide emotional, therapeutic and material assistance to the families, who sometimes find themselves displaced and homeless, as well as traumatized and grieving. It’s dangerous work. ASFADDES activists are often threatened and occasionally killed. The year 2000 was particularly harsh. In July, Elizabeth Cañas was shot and killed in Barrancabermeja. Six weeks later, activists Ruben Usuga Higuita and Wilson Usuga Higuita were disappeared in Medellín, along with their nephew. And then, in October, those same Medellín streets swallowed up Claudia Patricia Monsalve and Angel Quintero. In Popayán, the only indication Astrid Manrique gives that she might be aware of her peril is her heavy smoking. But she is aware. In fact, she has been the subject of repeated Amnesty International urgent action alerts, due to threats made against her. Threats in June 2001 were underscored by breaking all the windows of her house. Even so, she continues; Harvey Ramirez is presente in her work. U.S. Complicity
For decades, that alliance has relied on the School of the Americas. Originally located in Panama after World War II and then moved to Ft. Benning, GA, in 1984, the SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers—more than 10,000 of them Colombian. In addition to combat operations, students have learned the use of civilian-targeted warfare for responding to perceived internal security threats. In December 2000, due to mounting pressure about SOA graduates’ human rights abuses and the presence of “torture manuals” on SOA campuses from 1982-1991, the School officially closed. In January 2001, it re-opened as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Critics charge that WHINSEC is still the SOA, its alleged reforms merely cosmetic, and the curriculum business-as-usual. Also in 2000, President Bill Clinton ratcheted up U.S. involvement in Colombia’s civil war with Plan Colombia, purportedly to fight the drug trade at one of its most fertile sources. Many Colombians— who call the Plan un Plan de Muerte or Plan of Death—are not buying that rationale. They are convinced the United States wishes to secure access to Colombia’s oil reserves and otherwise “globalize” the economy, whatever the costs to the people. Arguably, anti-coca fumigation has displaced indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities from their traditional lands and resources far more effectively than it has cut into coca production. And internal displacement, now more than 3 million in a country of 42 million, can only intensify the longstanding concentration of wealth. World Bank figures for 2000-2001 showed the wealthiest 10 percent in Colombia had 42 times the income of the poorest 10 percent. According to the October 2004 UN Human Development Report (which uses World Bank figures), as of 2004, the wealthiest 10 percent now have 57.8 times the income of the poorest 10 percent. Also in October, the UN Development Program asserted that 25.9 percent of Colombians are surviving on less than $2 a day; this figure is up from 21.8 percent in 1997. The Bush administration has extended Plan Colombia’s agenda with the Andean Regional Initiative (see p. 6) and the Andean Counterdrug Initiative. Since 2000, the United States has given more than $3.2 billion to the Pastrana and Uribe governments, over $2.5 billion of it as military and police aid. Unlike Clinton, George W. Bush acknowledges counter-insurgency as a principal objective in Colombia. In theory, the Colombian armed forces fight both guerrillas and paramilitaries—both of which have been deemed terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department. Human rights groups attribute the lion’s share of human rights violations, some 80 percent, to the paramilitaries (who are believed to be responsible for an even larger percentage of forced disappearances). But the paras don’t commit those abuses alone. Ongoing evidence shows that Colombian security forces provide intelligence and logistical support to paramilitaries, such as preventing access to areas where paras are about to conduct a massacre. In such cases, the one hand knows precisely what the other hand is doing—but only one hand gets bloodied. This violent sleight-of-hand allows Colombia’s military to appear as if it is cleaning up its historically sordid act—no small feat for a military long reputed to be one of the most abusive in the western hemisphere. Nevertheless, Congressional certification conditions for continued U.S. aid have never truly been met, as the Washington Office on Latin America, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International periodically point out. The Colombian government is required to hold accountable in civilian courts both military and paramilitary personnel charged with human rights abuses. Yet perpetrators are rarely brought to trial, and impunity runs as high as 97 percent. And even the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor acknowledges ongoing collusion between the military and paramilitary. The conclusion is inescapable (and might well alarm U.S. taxpayers): U.S. military aid is “aiding and abetting” some of the very terrorists—in fact, the most deadly ones—that Uribe’s government is supposed to be fighting. Colombian civilians, as the families of desaparecidos will tell you, bear the brutal burden of that contradiction. Resisting
Impunity Voices are soft after revisiting such loss; there are so many unanswered questions. Manrique’s stronger voice carries the chant. Her pain seems to drive her forward. She expects the Mural Against Impunity project, about to be launched in Popayán, to stir collective memory forcefully. ASFADDES families from Cauca, with the help of a Caucan artist, will create a public mural to “re-appear” their loved ones and call for a life of dignity for all Colombians. More, the mural will challenge the near-total impunity for violators of human rights in Colombia. With his “alternate sanctions” bill of August 2003, President Uribe sought to amnesty paramilitaries with token penalties and no prison sentences, effectively treating murder as misdemeanor. Both Human Rights Watch and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Office in Colombia criticized the bill for fostering impunity. Uribe introduced his revised Justice and Reparation Bill in April 2004, under which paramilitaries could receive “detention” sentences of five to ten years. Critics maintain that the Justice and Reparation Bill remains too para-friendly, that it would still allow demobilized paramilitaries to elude proportional payment for their crimes. In October, Rep. Wilson Borja Díaz and other Colombian lawmakers proposed stronger penalties, including mandatory incarceration of eight to 10 years for paramilitary leaders found guilty of committing atrocities. Additionally, their proposal, unlike Uribe’s, would require that convicted leaders forfeit ill-gotten property. Luis Carlos Restrepo, the High Commissioner for Peace in Colombia, has asserted that the government’s strategy is to change “from a retributive justice system focused on prison sentences to the justice of reparation, where the emphasis is on reparation for the victims.” Even so, the April bill still markedly fails to ensure “truth, justice and reparation” for victims, according to the Washington Office on Latin America. Clearly, the families of ASFADDES will never be amnestied from their grief, nor can they really be compensated for their losses. But within their grief they have found a vision for renewed community, and the courage to struggle for it. It’s a grief no longer merely personal. It’s a magenta-hued struggle they’ve invited us to join. Margaret Knapke has served three months in federal prison camp for civil disobedience at the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, GA. |
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enter
the Popayán office of the Association for the Families of the Detained
and Disappeared, and my eyes move irresistibly to the single, brilliant
magenta wall. Eighteen pairs of eyes look back, holding me fast.