Cota, Colombia — Dressed with colorful tribal dresses, hundreds of
Colombian Indians gathered in this village on Monday to demonstrate against
a 37-year-old guerrilla war they say is causing their extinction.
“We are victims of a systematic genocide that is killing us off,” said
Armando Valbuena, president of the Colombian National Indigenous
Organization (ONIC), which says there are about 1 million Indians among
Colombia’s 40 million population.
Colombia’s 85 indigenous groups are falling victim to killings, kidnappings
and attacks carried out by left- and right-wing illegal armed groups
fighting in a war that has killed 40,000 civilians in the last decade. While
the exact number of Indian deaths is unclear, human rights groups say the
toll is disproportionately high for the ethnic group.
On Saturday, suspected right-wing paramilitaries killed a prominent Indian
activist and five other men in central Caldas province as they prepared to
leave for the three-day national conference at Cota, outside the capital
Bogota.
Valbuena said about 800 Indian leaders have been killed in the last 10
years. 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.
Indians are forcefully recruited into Marxist guerrilla groups or right-wing
vigilante militias, and ancestral lands have become the scene of fierce
territorial battles, forcing thousands, including entire tribes, to flee.
INDIANS DEMAND ROLE IN PEACE TALKS
Donning painted faces and invoking their gods of the earth, water and sun,
Indian leaders accused the government of “condemning them to oblivion” and
called for a larger role in government-sponsored peace talks.
“We want to defend our ideas, our culture and our land, but the government
is not interested in that,” Adelmo Ipia, governor of the Paez tribe told
Reuters.
Said Eulalia Yagari, a leader of the Embera tribe: “The government is
tolerating genocide. Stop persecuting us. We are harming nobody.”
President Andres Pastrana is engaged in 3-year-old peace talks with the
17,000-member FARC, but the talks have failed to end violence. Pastrana has
set Jan. 20 as the deadline for agreeing on a cease-fire, but the FARC is
currently refusing to meet government negotiators in protest over
paramilitary activity near their enclave and low-flying Air Force aircraft.
On Saturday, the Colombian government and the country’s second-largest
Marxist rebel force, the Cuban-inspired ELN, agreed to return to formal
peace talks, which broke down in August.
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