LWF Panel Denounces Armed Conflict in Colombia

Violence Mingles with Business, Drug Dealing and Mafia Structures, Human Rights Activist Says

LWI Council Press Release No. 06/2012 – “I was sitting at lunch with my children when suddenly they shot us through the wall.” That is how 50-year-old Ruth Sanabria, a Colombian human rights activist, began the story about her displacements because of the armed conflict in her country. “On the first day I was ordered to leave my house, otherwise they would kill my two children.”

Her personal story opened the keynote panel of The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) Council meeting in Bogotá, which included speakers from local partners with whom the LWF is working on the humanitarian crisis and armed conflict in Colombia. Sanabria, Father Sterlin Londoño, Ricardo Esquivia and Diego Perez Guzmán—all criticized the state’s role in the decades of sustained conflict between the military, paramilitary and guerrilla groups.

Sociologist Guzmán shared his analysis, according to which the conflict had now reached a new stage. At the start, ideological motives enabled guerrilla groups to gain a footing, but, then, in the second phase, drug trafficking led to mafia structures pervading government institutions. Both levels of the conflict had not been resolved, he said.

The new stage, he explained, was the trend for the last few years, which had seen more and more international corporations penetrating the crisis-riddled regions of Colombia and imposing their interests without consideration for human rights. “They pay guerrillas, the military or the paramilitary to assert their interests,” Guzmán stated. “That is the new economic war in Colombia.”

Militarization of the Land

Father Sterlin Londoño from the Roman Catholic diocese of Quidbó, a partner of the LWF Department for World Service program in Colombia, denounced the fact that the state gave priority to economic interests over human beings: “First the Afro-Colombians were promised that they would regain the collective right to their land. But when minerals and water were discovered there, the international companies came and wanted the land.”

Out of the 70,000 hectares of land returned to the people in this region, 50,000 hectares had now been reserved for the extraction of raw materials. The transnationals were going ahead without any consideration for the population at all. “They lay mines in the land so that people can’t work there anymore,” he added.

Londoño and human rights lawyer Esquivia criticized the fact that regulations were not complied with, or were changed at short notice. Esquivia drew parallels with the 1970s. When the land reform decided by the state met with resistance by the big landowners, the law was simply changed and the army and police sent to the region in order to fight the protesting farmers. In this way the state itself fuelled the conflict because it drove smallholders into the arms of the paramilitary and guerrillas.

Through the ongoing conflict, the Colombian state had massively expanded its army and police forces over decades. The panelists said they saw the land militarization as a dangerous development. “We are not the biggest country in Latin America, but we have the biggest army–an army that [sometimes] violates human rights and is connected with paramilitary actions,” stated Londoño.

For Guzmán, the conflict is also fed by the United States’ “war on drugs” or the so-called Plan Colombia. “Internationally they say that millions of US dollars going to foreign military [to push through its interests] is a thing of the past, but that is wrong. Today they are supporting the third phase of the conflict, consolidating the land.”

Peace Cannot Be Decreed

Despite the partly harsh criticism of the state institutions, the panelists underlined the need to work with the state in resolving the conflict and the willingness of civil society groups to do so. Guzmán emphasized the central role of civil society in the peace process: “We believe that we must start from below in building up a society and a country in peace. Peace cannot be decreed.” Victims and those who had suffered must be involved in the process.

Concluding the panel, the participants thanked the LWF for its support. At the same time, they called on the Lutheran communion not to give up its advocacy work and political pressure on their home country. LWF President Bishop Dr Munib A. Younan assured the partners in Colombia of the broad support and prayers of the Lutheran communion. “Wherever we are, we will be your voice—the voice of the poor and oppressed in Colombia.”

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