Bogota, Colombia – Suspected far-right gunmen have killed a
prominent Indian activist in the western Colombian countryside as he
prepared to leave for a national native conference, an indigenous leader
said on Sunday.
Luis Angel Charrua was gunned down together with at least two other men near
the village of Rio Sucio in Caldas province on Saturday night by suspected
members of the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia – known
by the Spanish initials AUC, said national Indian leader Armando Valbuena.
Police and army officials said that they could not confirm the killings,
because combat with illegal armed groups had made it impossible to reach the
area so far.
Charrua was a founder of Valbuena’s National Organization of Indigenous
Peoples of Colombia – ONIC – , which in August made a plea to the United
Nations (news – web sites) for help to prevent the “extinction” of Indians
caught in the cross-fire of a 37-year war.
Colombia’s 84 indigenous groups are falling victim to killings, kidnappings
and attacks carried out by illegal armed groups on the left and the right
fighting in a war which has killed 40,000 civilians in the last decade.
Denouncing Charrua’s killing, ONIC leader Valbuena accused President Andres
Pastrana of complicity by failing to stop the killings.
“We insist that Andres Pastrana’s government has a clearly defined policy
of genocide toward our peoples,” Valbuena said, speaking at the national
indigenous meeting in the central province of Cundinamarca at which Charrua
had been expected.
INDIANS RECRUITED, KILLED
Indians are forcefully recruited into Marxist guerrilla groups or right-wing
paramilitary vigilante militias, and ancestral lands have become the scene
of fierce territorial battles, forcing thousands, including entire tribes,
to flee.
According to figures from the United Nations, 10 Indian leaders were killed
in the first six months of 2001. Many more have received death threats or
have disappeared.
The majority of the attacks have been attributed to the paramilitary United
Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, which targets suspected leftist
collaborators, and the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia –
known by the Spanish initials FARC.
But in at least one recent incident in Cauca province, unarmed Paez Indians
managed to shame a group of FARC guerrillas into abandoning an attack on the
lonely village of Caldono, local media has reported.
Indians have also condemned Pastrana’s U.S.-backed “Plan Colombia”
offensive against drugs – which combines economic assistance to grow
alternative crops with a massive spraying campaign against cocaine’s raw
ingredient, coca leaf.
The Indians say the chemical used in the spraying, glyphosate, is destroying
crops in their lands and has forced thousands of impoverished Indian
peasants who grow coca to try and scratch a living deeper in the jungle.
According to ONIC, there are about 1 million Indians among Colombia’s
population of 40 million.
