Imagine you live on the banks of a wide river that connects your house to the Pacific Ocean. All around, the jungle embraces you and in the sky from time to time the sunsets form a swirl between clouds with orange traces. You spend your life, sometimes in silence, sometimes in noise. One morning you are disturbed by a roar of blasts, you are not the target, but the trench. Thirty-one years go by, and the rifles don’t cease.
Written / Maritza Palma Lozano – Translate /Gabriela Villacis – Illustration / Stella Maris – Photographs / Santiago Ramírez Marín
In the sub-region of San Juan, Chocó, called as such as it is connected to the San Juan River, the continuity and intensification of the armed conflict is evident after the peace agreement signed in 2016 with the FARC guerrillas. The fact is not surprising, but for the communities every bullet, every confrontation, every new actor wanting to control the territory is a cause for uneasiness. In the words of Juan Houghton, political activist and social researcher, “the guns were removed from the communities, for a while, but the life that was associated with the existence […] of the war was maintained. All those values associated with the war, all those structures, those forms of exchange, of cooperation, of confrontation that were developed during the war were maintained, so when the new armed actors arrived it was very easy for the war to be reactivated and for these groups to grow and become key actors in regional politics in extremely short periods of time.” Houghton is now closely familiar with the case of the department of Cauca, another region affected by Colombia’s endless war.
In Chocó, the armed groups that continue to recycle the war structure established years earlier by the Northwestern Bloc or Ivan Rios of the FARC are now the ELN’s Western War Front and the paramilitary group Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (AGC). All in turn have recycled the drug trafficking war. The media Verdad Abierta explained the guerrilla and paramilitary advance in Chocó since the 2000s:
The paramilitaries arrived in southern Chocó not only to fight the guerrillas but also to prosper in the drug business. It should be clarified that the presence of the guerrillas had been timid in southern Chocó. In fact, the guerrillas were not even strong in southern Chocó. The ELN arrived in Itsmina and surrounding areas looking for their share of the gold economy, and since the 1990s they had been appearing along the Carmen del Darién-Quibdó road. The FARC, which was strong in northern Chocó, only reached the south when its Mobile Bloc, Arturo Ruiz, moved north from Buenaventura in the early 2000s.
Although the AGC became public in 2008, paramilitary control was previously exercised by the Autodefensas Unidas de Córdoba y Urabá (ACCU) and the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC); while the FARC had been operating since 1971, between the late 1990s and 2006 the Ejército Revolucionario Guevarista guerrillas were present, and the M19 and the EPL made a brief appearance before their demobilization in 1990.
Implicitly, until 2020, the ELN and the AGC had a delimited territorial control that did not touch each other, but during 2021 the AGC paramilitary presence has increased, while the National Army’s attack against the ELN plays in its favor.
The Ombudsman’s Office warns that 27,701 people have been confined in Chocó as of 2021, while 5,943 have been displaced, in addition to 209 cases of intra-urban displacement.
Elizabeth Moreno, president of the General Community Council of San Juan, explains that as leaders they “denounce the chronicle of a death foretold”, but the state response is null and in the best of cases insufficient or limited to militarization, “a situation that puts us even more at risk considering that where the public forces are, the armed actors always arrive”. Elizabeth is reiterative in explaining that the crisis in San Juan is not only caused by the armed conflict, but also by extractive and mining megaprojects, territorial dispossession, threats due to natural disasters, state neglect and “the state’s permission for these things to happen in our territories […] Sometimes, as leaders, we cannot speak out, we cannot denounce because we are putting the tombstone on ourselves.”
WHAT ABOUT FORCED CONFINEMENT?
The resurgence of forced internal displacement and confinement in Chocó during 2021 has affected nine municipalities, including Litoral del San Juan, Medio San Juan and Istmina. In the latter two, in June there were displacements and confinements in Monte Bravo, Panamacito, Potedó, Cocové and Trapiche (Istmina); in August in Dipurdú del Guácimo, La Unión, San Miguel, Fugiadó and Isla de la Cruz (Medio San Juan) and in September in San Miguel, Isla de la Cruz (Medio San Juan), Unión Chocó and San Cristóbal (Istmina).
In response, on October 22, the General Community Council of San Juan (Acadesan) stated in a public release: “since June of this year, and with greater intensity since August, the armed groups have increased their presence and dispute for control of the territory, generating situations of confinement, restricting fundamental rights such as free mobility, access to essential goods and services for at least 1,391 people; forced displacement of 965 families (1,227 people).”
The displaced communities soon return to their territories, not because there are guarantees or the danger has ceased, but there is no other option. If the sound of bullets does not cause them to turn their eyes towards their communities, neither the sordid displacement would do. Meanwhile, there are other populations that do not even conceive the possibility of leaving their territories, considering that, if they do so, the armed groups will take the only thing they have left: their land.
In this context, another phenomenon arises: forced confinement. During the pandemic, the whole world understood a little of how difficult it is to be forced into the confinement of one’s home without having the minimum conditions to satisfy one’s human needs. By changing the COVID for the war, there are currently 58 Afro communities and 10 Wounaan indigenous reservations under confinement.
“The confined people live in a point of anxiety that generates emotional instability because we do not know what will happen at night, because we do not know what will happen in the early morning, what actor will disturb our sleep, disturb our tranquility,” Elizabeth points out and adds that being confined also implies self-imposed curfews so as not to circulate in the river after sunset, apart from not being able to work in the crops. “The people in this region live on a daily basis, from what they grow, from what they hunt, from what they fish […] if they don’t allow us to get to where we have the hills, the Chinese potato, banana, rice and corn crops, food security is also compromised.”
Leonelson Tascón Chiripua, teacher of the Taparalito community, rural area of Litoral del San Juan, explains: “we have been culturally weakened because to get materials it is no longer easy to go to the forest, for example, to go to cut the Jagua wood we have to go there and work and bring, but the old people have not been able to go out for fear, also to get the body paint, one looks for the nearest place and brings it in the day, [because] for us the paint is protection.” He concludes: “we have resisted within the territory; leaving the territory free makes it easier for them to enter”.
According to a report by the Victims Unit, during 2021, 107,105 victimizing events have occurred throughout Colombia, affecting 129,390 people, of which 106,655 correspond to the confinement of 82,142 people.
THE NOISE OF THE DOGS
On September 19, armed men from the AGC arrived in Unión Chocó and San Cristóbal, two Wounaan indigenous communities. After feeling enclosed and in danger, the inhabitants sought to communicate with entities that would dialogue with the AGC and allow them to leave. During the night, using their own boats and those of other communities, 584 people from Unión Chocó and 359 from San Cristóbal were displaced. The families were distributed among Unión Wounaan, La Lerma, Puerto Olave, Macedonia and Istmina. They are still there as of December 2021.
German Membache, a teacher from Unión Chocó, says: “we are very affected because we had to leave domestic animals, we have pigs from the Pitulo Chirivico indigenous school. We had to leave them, some others brought the animals, but most of the families left their hens and crops, which will surely be damaged.”
On October 14, as part of the caravan for life and peace, some indigenous leaders, among them Germán Membache and Hugo Neth Bailarín Chamarra, together with a representative of Acadesan, arranged for a boat to visit the two evicted villages. On the way there was the uncertainty of finding members of the AGC, but on the way back there was the satisfaction of some inhabitants of Unión Chocó for having recovered some hunting dogs and belongings. On the way along the river a deep silence and nothing but emptiness embraced it all, it was San Cristóbal town. Indecision struck because reaching Unión Chocó meant going further inland. Finally, the men found themselves meandering until they ran into the noise of the dogs, unstoppable, hungry.
Germán clarifies why this is a revictimization. “In 2006 we were also displaced by the murder of two indigenous leaders in this area of Medio San Juan, we were in the municipality of Istmina for three months and this is the second time that we are suffering this situation. Really, from the indigenous communities of the department of Chocó we invite the national government to look at the needs that we are going through. We need a joint dialogue with the political sectors, we need the government to comply with the Havana agreement, we need the government to really look for what it has to do at least to reduce the impact of the violence we are suffering in Colombia.”
Hugo Neth, youth commissioner of the Permanent Table of Dialogue and Agreement of the Indigenous Peoples of the department of Chocó, adds: “since the war began in 1990 the problem has been very serious with the youth, why? Because the youth have been persecuted as an object, because they really have little development of ideas and they like everything that an armed group proposes. This leads indigenous youth – and not only indigenous youth – to make other decisions: perhaps to end their lives, or perhaps to be forcibly recruited by this illegal group. And he makes a call: “the responsible institutions must really put the magnifying glass on these communities, [because] every day we are being run over by a war that does not belong to us, in general in the department of Chocó, not only San Juan river, but Atrato and Alto Baudó […] We as Embera are affected at all times, we do not want to continue living like this.”
Indeed, according to the NGO Indepaz, “between January and September 2021, 106 displacement events were registered in Colombia with 27,727 victims” and “the Pacific region, comprising the departments of Antioquia, Chocó, Cauca, Nariño and Valle del Cauca, is the most affected by displacement events […] during 2020 and 2021.” This information is available in the November balance sheet.
WAR IS RECYCLED
One of the factors that sustains the war is forced recruitment. Helmer Quiñones, coordinator of the Advisory Team of the Special High-Level Entity for ethnic peoples for the Peace Accords, explains that young blacks are victims of all armed groups, from the Army to guerrilla and paramilitary groups. “Imagine growing up in a place where you can’t walk, where you can’t do, where the only ones you see well and who can walk and can proceed are the armed groups,” he mentions. He adds: “young people really have no jobs, they have no education infrastructure, they have nothing […] and finally by joining or not joining, they believe that they are going to be killed, while they join they mistakenly believe that they become powerful because they see themselves with a rifle, because they see themselves with a few pesos -imagine paying them less than the minimum wage if they even get some money- but there is so much misery, that they believe that this is a solution. Then they die, nothing happens, the mothers have no one to complain to and we have been like this for 30 years and basically the Afro-descendant youth is totally excluded. That is why we talk about genocide.”
On the other hand, Andrés* -we use this name for his protection- explains how the neglect of situations such as forced displacement and confinement are related to the conditions conducive to recruitment:
“What would happen if I lasted two weeks without food? What happens in my body, what happens in my mind, what happens in my emotions? How does it transform a human being to last two weeks sleeping on the floor? What happens when one can only eat a small plate of rice once a day for two weeks? What happens? […] It is not even understood that the prevention of recruitment is related to that. Some of those boys and girls who are starving there today, after living that infamy of going hungry, of going through indignity, of sleeping in the open, of not having clothes, of not having soap to bathe, of not being able to brush their teeth, a part of those children -because of that experience- in ten or fifteen years will take up arms, with rage, with desperation, with whatever motivation they have, and they may be the weapons of the guerrilla, of the paramilitary, of the Army, of drug trafficking, of organized crime, but they are sowing violence every time they make the population go hungry. […] Violence is latent and growing when the institutions decide that it is going to take a month, two months, three months to deliver precarious, insufficient, inadequate, humanitarian assistance.”
Other factors are the denial of armed actors and demobilization mechanisms that do not cover all groups or that are partial and lack follow-up procedures.
On the one hand, in Colombia’s recent history it has been reiterative, first, to deny the armed conflict, and then to call some actors – mainly paramilitaries – by different names or to underestimate the type of group they are, as has happened with the AGC. This group has been positioned in public opinion as Clan Usuga and more recently as Clan del Golfo. “The way of naming them has an intention, firstly not to recognize them as an armed actor with the characteristics of an armed actor in the framework of International Humanitarian Law – we are talking about an actor with thousands and thousands of men in uniform with rifles – and secondly to ignore their political construction in the sense of their role as a paramilitary actor”, adds Andrés*.
According to Andres* this paramilitary group has deep roots in the ACCU, demobilized in 2006, who left “people with low profiles in the Urabá area, [and] some places in Chocó” who never demobilized and have access to weapons that were never handed over. Hence their strong reappearance in 2008, when “they distributed pamphlets in more or less six departments, and in a large number of municipalities, and made an armed strike,” he adds.
In Noanamá, on September 17, the AGC left a pamphlet stating that “the population can be certain and calm that the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (AGC) will never attack them,” instead, “these actions of the ELN include, among other acts that violate human rights and international humanitarian law, forced displacement, making the communities believe that we are the ones threatening them, stealing their belongings, raping women and prohibiting them all from working”.
In this regard, Andrés* also explains that “this paramilitary structure is going through a process of learning from its dynamic of the 1990s and 2000s, which was a dynamic of war to raze, to vacate entire territories in order to, among other things, favor dispossession for themselves and businessmen, and let’s say that this strategy of the 1990s and 2000s did not work out well for them. In many places they did not achieve what they had set out to do: they failed in razing, dispossessing, and setting up a whole new economy,” so “the paramilitaries of the 90s were not interested in winning minds and hearts, they needed to terrorize the population and empty the territory. This current moment of paramilitarism, of the AGC, does have a very clear logic of trying to win minds and hearts, and that implies limiting the use of violence.
In addition, we find the failed negotiation process with the ELN, which in Houghton’s words did not work because the Colombian government chose a piecemeal negotiation model and “because deep down they have never abandoned the thesis that at least some of these sectors can be defeated militarily.”
According to the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB), one of the greatest difficulties for the Colombian government in the peace process with the ELN is “the ELN’s reluctance to include terms such as the laying down of arms, which they see as surrender. The guerrillas propose to lay down their weapons once they see that the implementation agreements are fulfilled.” In addition, “the ELN insists that they will not stop kidnapping until the political prisoners are released or the ceasefire is agreed to, and the concurrence of events such as attacks on oil pipelines, aqueducts and other infrastructure that harm civil society and seem to demonstrate the unwillingness of the guerrillas to reach the end of the armed conflict.” This is added to the fact that “the ELN is not a hierarchical organization, and its decisions are made by consensus through National Congresses, therefore at the table, the ELN representatives are not empowered to make decisions, everything must be consulted with the Broad Front (about 1,500 armed combatants and about 3,000 civilian members who are also part of the guerrilla), which makes the negotiations more complex.”
Leivinson Cruz Aguilar, member of the legal team of Acadesan says: “we are a territory of peace, a territory of reconciliation and we want those agreements that were signed in Havana to be really fulfilled, to be made effective. Mistakes were made, but sometimes mistakes are corrected as we go along, and one of the mistakes that were made is that when the FARC laid down their weapons, the government did not fill those spaces where the FARC was, and those spaces are now disputed and that is where the civilian population is caught in the crossfire.”
Thus, the peace process with the FARC was nothing more than taking water out of a broken canoe, in a context where the implementation of the Peace Accords has yet to reach territories such as the San Juan sub-region.
Houghton concludes: “we need to have a government that bets on ending the war assuming that it has to make changes in the political regime and addressing problems of socioeconomic inequality,” in addition to recognizing the actors of the war as political actors to achieve scenarios of interlocution and negotiation. “When you see that these people want to govern in order to obtain money, they want to control the territory, they want to rule in the mayor’s offices and other government bodies, they want to win over a sector of the population, you are not only talking about a criminal group, but you are also talking about an actor that clearly behaves as a political actor.”
You may be interested in: La guerra oculta del río San Juan (Spanish)
COMMUNITIES CRY OUT
“We were there in Chambacú because of the situation of the child that the public forces killed in combat, in the bombing of Corriente de Palo, a thirteen-year-old boy who could have been the son of any of us here. And it is not fair that our children die, that our girls die, that our women are raped […] We also count, we count for the elections, we count for the country that profits, for the health institutions, for the educational institutions, for the state itself that receives resources in our name and keeps them,” said Elizabeth Moreno in front of people from the community of San Miguel gathered in the town’s church on October 15.
On September 16, the National Army bombarded just five kilometers away from Corriente de Palo to attack the leader of the ELN’s Western Front, Ogli Angel Padilla Romero (‘Fabian’). That day José Yuver Hurtado Moreno and three other minors died: a woman and two men, all three 17 years old, according to Forensics.
Carlos Victoria Díaz, member of Acadesan and inhabitant of Corriente de Palo indicates: “The armed conflict in Colombia is not going to end, it is not going to end because it was not born yesterday, but it is possible to achieve that those who are in the armed conflict, those who are in the war, they are not a tree, they are not an object, they are people just like the one who is talking, they enter the war from their own families, they have a mother, a father, a son, so they, no one knows more than they do, that just as it hurts them when they have an accident, it hurts us too when they put us in these conditions, so what I ask them is to dialogue.”
In San Juan, in recent months two people have been injured by antipersonnel mines. “We need the government to seek strategies and recognition of these damages, of these damages caused to the population, where the lives of our children are compromised, and today we demand justice for these families who have been affected and re-victimized by the armed conflict,” said Elizabeth.
There have been countless alerts about these events. The situation of displacement was warned by the Ombudsman’s Office since August through “Early Warning of Imminence 020-21, for the municipalities of Medio San Juan and Istmina (Chocó), which warns of the situation of forced displacement, confinement, homicides and high risk of confrontations – in violation of the precautionary principle of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) – on the Afro-Colombian population belonging to the Community Councils of Acadesan, Cocominsa and the Indigenous Reservation Unión Wounaan, La Lerma and Macedonia of the Wounaan People.”
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has published alerts, also since August, documenting confinements and subsequent displacements in this same area of Chocó. On August 20, they reported the confinement of 2,783 people and the displacement of 935 Afro-descendant inhabitants of Dipurdú del Guásimo – reported on August 15 “after three days of continuous clashes” – these people, in turn, were confined in the hosting communities (La Unión, Isla de Cruz and San Miguel). Meanwhile, on August 24, they reported the confinement of 2,694 people, which began on August 10, affecting 10 Wounaan indigenous reservations, both on the San Juan coast and in Buenaventura; and the subsequent displacement of 118 people on August 14 “in the communities of Puerto Guadualito and Union San Juan”. On November 4, OCHA indicated that “to date, there has been an increase of 24% in the number of victims by confinement in the department, which to date amounts to 33,376 people confined and in the same period of 2020 was 25,534.”
See Early Alert Ombudsman’s Office
Despite this, everything happens and remains the same. OCHA indicates that in August, the local authority of Medio San Juan carried out “the declaration of statements from the confined people” and the mayor’s office proceeded with “a first delivery of food to the confined communities.” However, the same authorities “declared that there is limited budgetary capacity to provide rapid humanitarian attention to the affected communities. This situation would be causing the return of some displaced families without safe conditions.”
For Helmer Quiñones it becomes a form of structural racism: “here apartheid means you have nothing.” Elizabeth Moreno concludes: “we know that for us Afro, blacks, the small things we have gained have been through the constant struggles of our ancestors to be able to occupy different spaces. There is Law 70 which has allowed us to be owners and authority in our territories today, but if we surrender, what will happen to the new generations? We have to be those pillars of strength that remain in time […] and we also have to think about generational changes, and it is from there where we have to start taking care, to watch over the activities and actions of our children so that they follow the paths of truth.”
This research was carried out with the support of:
