"Anyone Who Tries to Organize People ... is Threatened"
Weekend Edition August 16-18, 2013
"Anyone Who Tries to Organize People ... is Threatened"
Colombia: the Aftermath of Counterinsurgency
by LESLEY GILL
“Gentlemen of the oil port,” the threat began, “we have come to stay.” Directed at the defenders of “faggots …guerrillas, … trade unionists…militant students puppies of the guerrilla, and presidents of neighborhood committees,” the note warned that “we are where you least expect, we know what you do, we have found the guerrilla cave where you meet, with whom, and when.” The author named individuals and organizations in Barrancabermeja, an oil-refining town in Colombia’s mineral-rich Middle Magdalena River Valley, and claimed that they were “scandalizing the city.” The statement ended with the ominous warning: “Don’t waste time with denuncias (denouncements) or going to the police, because this sentence is definitive and for death. The intelligent one will flee.” It was dated July 15, 2013, and recipients were given three weeks, until August 4th, to leave town or be murdered.
On three occasions between late June and mid-July, manila envelopes that contained warnings of imminent annihilation were delivered to various social justice organizations in Barrancabermeja from groups calling themselves the “Anti-Restitution Army of the Middle Magdalena,” “Los Rastrojos,” and “Los Urabeños.” And two people received telephone calls in which a muffled voice warned them that they would be killed if they stayed in town. Who was making the threats, how serious were they, and what should be done about them? Were different groups responsible, or was one group using several names? These were some of the urgent questions that preoccupied Barrancabermeja’s social justice advocates during the two weeks in July 2013 that I spent in Colombia, completing anthropological research for a book on the urban counterinsurgency war that had torn the city apart.
For U.S. citizens who have never visited Colombia or moved far from the defended, suburban precincts of the middle class, the thuggish language sounds almost comical, evoking less an invisible, terrifying menace than a cartoonish, B-grade television drama; but it is not an entertaining diversion in Barrancabermeja. There, death threats are an intermittent source of fear and anxiety for anyone who questions the status quo, even though the right-wing paramilitary groups that unleashed a reign of counterinsurgent terror on working class neighborhoods and controlled the city for many years allegedly demobilized in 2006. Nowadays, as the government negotiates peace accords with Colombia’s largest left-wing guerrilla organization–the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)–, it claims that paramilitaries linked to politicians, regional entrepreneurs, and state security forces no longer exist, although officials acknowledge that so-called “criminal bands” have filled the void created by the demobilization. This Orwellian shift in government discourse erases the enduring political nature of reactionary violence in contemporary Colombia by equating it with common criminality. The linguistic sleight-of-hand obscures how regionally based mafias of drug traffickers, traditional politicians, cattle ranchers, neoliberal entrepreneurs, and sectors of the security forces have used and continue to use privatized terror to decimate the opposition and accumulate wealth and power.
Violence retains a political edge in “Barranca,” as locals refer to their city. Established in the early 20th century as an oil-export enclave of the Standard Oil Corporation of New Jersey, Barranca gave birth to a militant, working class political culture that united oil workers, peasants, merchants, and poor urban residents who fought for land and labor rights in the 1920s and 1930s, better public services in the 1970s, and human rights in the 1980s and 1990s. Barranca is unlike other river ports and small towns in the region, where counterinsurgent political violence decimated a broad-based Left between 1980 and the early years of the 21st century. An independent, radical tradition of working class activism survives as a more influential minority political current than in other parts of Colombia, despite a relentless state and paramilitary campaign of terror that produced the death and displacement of thousands of civilians, expelled guerrilla insurgents, and installed the now-defunct United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia–a nationwide federation of paramilitary armies– as the de facto ruler of the city. The wave of violence that crashed over the city swept in neoliberalism on a river of blood.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/16/colombia-the-aftermath-of-counterinsurgency-2/
(My emphasis.)
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