Part 3: Northern Cauca, the Liberated Territory
Padre Antonio Bonanomi is an Italian priest who has lived and worked at the mission in Toribio, and with the indigenous movement for over twenty years. Asked how the movement continues to build despite being militarily occupied, he replies: "The Nasa are living two processes. One is external, the violence of armies and economic models brought from outside. The other is internal. It is built on dreams. The Nasa are a people full of dreams, full of hope. Their historical experience has taught them that the rest will pass. These armies, they come and go. I asked them the same question. They tell me: 'Padre, the Spanish conquest was worse. The 'War of a Thousand Days', at the turn of the 19th century, was worse. The violence of the 1950s was worse. The armies come and go, and the dreams remain.' So, in the midst of the violence, they are creating their development plan. They go off to Malaysia to receive a United Nations award for their ecological management of the zone. They will wait out the conflict, and build in the meantime."
(See the full interview)
To the Nasa, building autonomy means building on the base of the struggles
of the past. The first hero of the indigenous movement here is La Gaitana,
a woman who led her people to war against the Spanish conquistadores in 1536
and united the tribes to fight hand to hand, making the Spanish pay dearly
for their conquest. The second, Juan Tama, who around 1670 learned to use
the Spanish laws that acknowledged indigenous ownership of the land in the
'Leyes de Indios' to win the indigenous rights and title to land reserves.
These gains were reversed with Colombia's independence in the 19th century,
as the nationalists sought to 'develop' the new country by destroying the
indigenous. Then in 1910, Manuel Quintin Lame appeared on the scene, again
struggling for the land, this time using a mix of nonviolent political struggle,
education, and the laws of the independent Colombian state. Quintin Lame laid
the foundations for today's indigenous movement with patient underground organizing
over decades, for which he was punished: by the time he died in 1968, he had
been in jail 100 times.
Manuel
Quintin Lame, and others
What Quintin Lame and others had won, however, was undermined by what is called
in Colombia 'La Violencia', a war between Liberals and Conservatives that
began in 1948 and resulted in the deaths of thousands and the displacement
of millions of peasants from lands that then ended up in the hands of wealthy
landowners. The indigenous were disorganized and disunited. Their communities
were controlled by the traditional elites and their traditional parties, and
they worked as debt serfs to the owners who had stolen the land from them.
In the late 1960s, the indigenous began to struggle to win their lands back.
Like the Landless Peasants Movement (MST) in Brazil, the indigenous of Cauca
won their land back by nonviolent occupations. They suffered tremendous violence:
some 1500 were murdered in the struggle for the land. But by the end, in the
1980s, they emerged with an indigenous organization for all of Cauca, the
Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC). Today they are organized in the
Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN) for the northern
zone as well. They also emerged with control over their ancestral land reserves,
and collective title to the lands. Instrumental in this process was a Nasa
priest who studied outside of Cauca and returned in 1975. Alvaro Ulcue helped
spur the land recovery movement, the youth movement, and virtually every other
aspect of the movement through the 1970s and 1980s. The landowners and the
security forces assassinated him in 1984.
Ulcue's assassination by the elite did not stop the movement. Nor did the assassination of Jambalo's first indigenous mayor, Mario Betancur in 1996, by one of the guerrilla groups, the Army of National Liberation (ELN). Nor did the assassination by FARC of yet another indigenous leader, Cristobal Secue, in 2001. These latter two murders were investigated by the communities themselves, who concluded that the murders were committed as attacks by the guerrillas on the project of indigenous autonomy.
In the late 1980s, with the lands under their control, the Nasa found that their indigenous organizations and their political initiatives were being stymied by the traditional elites and parties who still controlled the municipalities. They formed the 'Civic Movement' to take over the municipalities. After losing three times, the first indigenous mayors were elected in the mid-1990s. Today, Toribio and Jambalo have indigenous mayors from the movement. The reserve lands and the territorial autonomy of the indigenous were formally recognized in Colombia's Constitution of 1991.