The roots of the Colombia Plan

by Andrés Alsina

Alberto Yepes walked around Rome, worried because he was expecting that by Christmas he would have some bad news about the first episodes in the war to eradicate coca plantations in Colombia. At the Social Watch assembly and at every other possible opportunity, Yepes was doing everything he could with his poor English, his good intentions and his enormous tenacity to warn the international community that the Colombia Plan, sponsored by the United States, had no chance of putting an end either to the plantations or to the manufacturing of cocaine.

However, the plan may achieve something which seemed impossible: an increase in violence against the civil population in Colombia and its damaged civil organizations, an increase in the level of horror, displaced people and in the loss of sovereignty of an already degraded state. And, he predicts, in exchange, the influence of the United States will increase in a state that is already tottering. Still greater obstacles will hinder the social reforms that would enable peasant participation in power, the backdrop to 40 years of guerrilla warfare.

The 800,000 coca planters, who have taken up this occupation because they have been displaced, are the targets of this plantation burning, and Yepes believes that what will happen is that they will take refuge in the Amazon forest, deforesting more land than they had previously in order to cover their losses, and will start planting all over again. There are 650 million hectares of virgin tropical forest, so there is much to be deforested. This will not be good for the ecology, but the peasants, if they want to survive, have no other alternative.

In the past 15 years, 2 million people have been displaced from their land, surviving where and how they can, and if they can. No fewer than a quarter of these 2 million, out of a total population of 40 million, have been expelled from their homes over the past two years and are rootless.

The spiral of violence increases. Yepes considers that “the problem is that the war is waged using irregular methods and territorial control is exercised by means of terror. In Colombia everyone wants peace, at least outwardly. But if this implies negotiating and sharing power, they don’t want it.”

Is this the case? Sixty percent of the population lives below the poverty line, while, he says, there is an “abysmal” concentration of wealth. Half the land in Yepes’ country is in the hands of fewer than 1% of its owners. This dispossession happened violently and is the direct cause of the existence of displaced peasants. Thus the democratic priority is to find a negotiated political solution to the armed conflict, which also involves solutions to the social conflict, and this in turn implies reforming distributive structures to reverse this enormous imbalance. This negotiation should not be a problem between top level guerrillas and government officials, with the paramilitary groups as the unacceptable face of the repressive forces of the state against whom no case has ever been brought. In Colombia over the past 15 years 4,000 people have been arrested, “more than in Chile,” says Yepes laughingly in order not to cry.

More people die in Colombia in one week than in the territories occupied by Israel in one year. The victims are usually civilians. “ All over Colombia social organizations want to see the organizations of civil society and their autonomy respected,” insists Yepes. That is why, in negotiations to resolve the conflict, he wants the participation of civil society and humanitarian agreements to be drawn up to stop the victimization, using the worst kinds of violation, of civil society. Those who are part of civil society are always in the middle, always the victims and never the perpetrators, and are not even listened to.

“It is true that there is a relationship between guerrilla warfare and drugs; however it is partial and unavoidable. Eradication has been shown not to be the solution. In 1995, 30,000 hectares of coca were sprayed. Now, in the year 2000, the hectares planted total 130,000. The FARC collects what it calls a ‘tax on grams produced’ of 10%, and the paras (paramilitary groups) have processing laboratories.” And now civilians are not only frightened of paramilitary groups; the FARC has started harassing civil organizations, in the course of extending a war that does not allow for the existence of neutral groups.

However, for the negotiations to be viable, the participation of civil society is essential, says Yepes. “Today’s guerrillas are not willing to turn themselves in in exchange for simple measures for the social reinsertion of their forces. Even if we don’t agree with their methods and their way of treating the population, we must recognize the need to deal with the social roots of the problem.”

With all these concerns Yepes arrived at the Social Watch assembly, “because the internal conflict in Colombia will not be resolved by discussing only the internal issues. It is also a conflict geared to imposing globalization, which, when met by resistance, is imposed by violence”.

He will be killed, but it will be known. (box)

Alberto Yepes expects to die at the hands of paramilitary groups. This small, moustached lawyer from Medellín is already 37 years old, so it could be any time. This is hard to accept and must be even harder to live with. He enjoys life and has a warm sense of humor that must make easy his work of training leaders in social organizations (a way of increasing the numbers of people who will replace him and others like him). But he is always serious, endeavoring to gain time for the work to which he is literally giving his life.

The organization Yepes belongs to, Corporación Región, also prepares reports on the situation and tries to disseminate information on the situation in Colombia outside the country. It is a member of the Colombian Platform for Human Rights, Democracy and Development. Nothing seems to be enough.

The friends whom he met in Rome at the end of November at a Social Watch assembly were happy to see him again, because it means he has survived since the last time. They do not say this to him, because death is understood. As the Colombian saying goes, Yepes is “marked as a skeleton.” What worries him is that his daughter might not even remember him. She is already two and a half, so in this race against time, she is now on the threshold of memory.

Meanwhile, in his house in Medellín, Yepes and his wife sleep behind a door and five sets of bars, with a cell phone each next to the bed - “because the first thing the paramilitary groups do is to cut off the phone.” What defense does the telephone offer? “To be able to let someone know that they’ve taken you. At least it will be known”. Not like Juan Carlos and Catalina, two directors of the Association of Families of Detained and Disappeared People, of which he is also a member. They were taken this year and it only became known much later. This approach is consistent with his commitment to the only kind of life he wants to live. Yepes is less concerned about becoming a victim than with his determination to record everything, even in his own case.

Sometimes, coming back from one of the funerals and entering his home under six locks and keys, when opening the seventh, the one which unlocks his feelings, he cries. “How do I explain to my wife that the next one will be me? How can I look at my daughter, who perhaps will never remember me?”

He talks about himself only because people insist he does so, and he is convinced that he can contribute to the description of the daily horror. In “Politics and crime”, the intellectual Hans Magnus Enzenberger said about the genocide of the Jews that the mind cannot make a qualitative difference between the murder of (memory is imperfect) 300,000 people and 6 million people. Yepes reflects and disagrees. He considers that horror can be measured. A week before this conversation, paramilitary groups “arrived at the municipality of Soledad on the Atlantic, took 4 peasant leaders and cut them into pieces with a chainsaw while they were still alive. This is a dreadful measure of horror.” A week before that, he had been with a grandmother and her nine grandchildren, the eldest 17, at a settlement for displaced people. They are there because, in 1998, a paramilitary group arrived at their home, a cocoa plantation in the area of Urabá. “They took the mother and the father outside and hung them by the feet, by one foot each. And the children had to watch how their parents were cut up until only the rope was left. This is a great horror and there is no possible compensation. Who can compensate for this? Who? This makes reconciliation very hard. The 17 year old has been dumb since then and the other children want to live in order to kill the murderers. And to me, in spite of being on the side of life, it sounds perfectly understandable that they should want to do this”.

Why such sadism? “This is a message to others, so that they understand what may happen to them if they take part in the conflict on the wrong side. But in spite of this, submitting to violence cannot, cannot be accepted.”