Peasant-Farmer Activists Imprisoned in Colombia

2.10.07

ARAUQUITA, COLOMBIA: Around 5pm yesterday afternoon, police raided the headquarters of the Peasant-Farmer Association of the Cimitarra River Valley (ACVC) in the city of Barrancabermeja. Simultaneously, security agents arrested ACVC board members Andrés Gil, Oscar Duque, Evaristo Mena (all three far away at a meeting in the village of El Cagüí) and Mario Martínez (at home in the city).

The Colombian state’s intimidation machine was in full effect for this huge “security” operation. The Administrative Security Department (DAS, Colombia’s equivalent to the FBI – see this Narco News report) carried out the raid and arrests. According to a communiqué last night from the ACVC, around 50 soldiers accompanied the DAS agents for their raid on the 10-person, downtown office. Facing objections when they arrived to arrest the three leaders in El Cagüí, “the agents fired into the air.”

A DAS spokesperson in Bucaramanga, where the four are currently being held, would not answer questions or reveal what charges the men were facing. The public prosecutor’s office was not answering calls. It should be no mystery why the DAS chose Saturday night for the raid, with most government offices closed until Monday morning.

The ACVC is among the most well-organized and powerful rural associations in Colombia. Now 11 years old, it is comprised of rural communities throughout the region known as the “Middle Magdalena,” an enormous valley system in the country’s northeast, between where the Magdalena River (Colombia’s Mississippi) is born in the Andes and where it empties out into the Caribbean. When Colombia’s departments were being defined this culturally united area was to become one of them, but economic interests instead carved it up between neighboring Santander, Bolívar and Antioquia.

It is a region that has seen some of the worst of Colombia’s conflict – from being one of the birthplaces of the paramilitary phenomenon in the 1980s to a major target for aerial herbicide fumigations since the beginning of Plan Colombia. Barrancabermeja, the country’s oil capital and Middle Magdalena’s largest city, was long a left-wing stronghold. But paramilitary massacres around the city beginning in 1998 led the way in 2001 to a full-scale, block-by-block invasion by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), simultaneously expelling guerrillas and setting up a short-lived but effective reign of terror against the city’s nonviolent, progressive organizations and political parties. Thousands of peasant farmers were forced form their homes in the regions where the ACVC was strongest.

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