Lack of government protection hurts Colombia's displaced

[Judi Lynn]

Lack of government protection hurts Colombia's displaced
Source: AlertNet
Date: 21 Dec 2010
Source: alertnet // Anastasia Moloney

ALTOS DE FLORIDA, Colombia (AlertNet) - Perched precariously on a ridge on the outskirts of Bogota, the hilltop slum of Altos de Florida is home to thousands of Colombians who have fled their homes to escape decades of conflict.

Here, and across dozens of other slums dotted all over south Bogota, more than 35,000 internally displaced refugees (IDPs) struggle to scrape a living or find jobs that are hard to come by.

"To get food for our children we have to beg at the traffic lights," said Petrona Mosquera, a displaced mother of four, who lives in a ramshackle home made of bits of wood and scrap metal.

"There are some women who have to sell their bodies to put food on the table," she added.

Mosquera, who was driven from her home because of paramilitary violence over a decade ago, was one of many people who petitioned U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Antonio Guterres for help during his visit to the Latin American country last weekend.

More:
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/VVOS-8CCNWK?OpenDocument

[Peace Patriot]

1. 5 MILLION displaced people in Colombia, not just 35,000...

I realize that the article is referring to just one area of internal refugees--Bogota--but the national crisis is MUCH bigger than that, as attested by many human rights groups. In addition, about a half a million poor people have fled over the borders into Venezuela and Ecuador, creating big displacement problems there as well (not to mention contributing to border destabilization). The Colombian military and its death squads--funded by you and me--have slaughtered thousands of civilians in its "scorched earth" policy against FARC guerrillas. Indeed, their 70-year civil war and the U.S. "war on drugs" are basically just an excuse for decapitating political opposition to Colombia's fascist government, including the murders of trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, community activists, journalists, peasant farmer organizers and others--and the displacement of 5 MILLION people, by means of state terror. The Colombian military and its closely tied death squads (about half and half) are responsible for the vast majority of extrajudicial murders in Colombia, the FARC guerillas for very few.

It is THE worst human displacement crisis in the world, and one of the necessary preliminaries to U.S. "free trade for the rich"--i.e., the creation of a helpless, starving, massive work force with no land on which to grow its own food and no rights. Made-to-order slave labor.

I've just been reading about the English "enclosure" movement in the 1600-1700s--an enormous land grab by the rich few, who confiscated all the common lands in England, where the poor had been able to subsistence farm and feed their families and communities for millennia, thus creating a huge slave labor pool for the colonies, the shipping trade and the navy and army--and eventually for the first phase of the "Industrial Revolution"--poor rural farmers enslaved in coal mines and garment factories. The "enclosure" movement was the origin of modern capitalism, all built on the rich owning all the land and "enclosing" it (in England with hedges and ditches, which the displaced poor were forced to construct, even as they were being evicted and impoverished). The "Commons" was taken. The time immemorial practice of sharing farm land, grazing land and food was destroyed, and the horror of "enclosure" was then replicated throughout the Americas, where native civilizations which ALSO revered "the Commons" were brutally supplanted by rich Europeans staking out every bit of land and fencing it in. (The book I'm reading is entitled "The Many-Headed Hydra.")

The many new leftist governments in Latin America are fighting, and in some cases, reversing, this dreadful corpo-fascist diaspora. And the campesino (peasant farmer) movement--a huge worldwide movement, with powerful contingents in Latin America--has been a big component of all the leftist electoral victories. But it is, hands down, THE biggest problem in Latin America, evident virtually everywhere at some stage of the disaster. Peasants can feed their families with a few acres of land, on which they grow beans, corn and squash (the real "Holy Trinity"), based on millennia of agricultural knowledge and wisdom. Evict them from their small plots, in massive numbers, and you have social mayhem, which capitalists--both legal and illegal--seize upon to make themselves rich.