Northern Cauca

This commmuniqué from CRIC was translated by Elena Renderos.

05/22/2008
Author: ELDER COUNCIL – CRIC [Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca]

Interview with Manuel Rozental, Recorded July 27-2007
By Maria Olaya
Produced by Cailey Campbell
Far Too Canadian, Friday mornings from 7-9am on CFRU 93.3 FM in Guelph
www.cfru.ca

AUDIO OF THE INTERVIEW WITH MANUEL

AUDIO OF AN INTERVIEW WITH MAURICIO

Maria: We have with us on the line Manuel [Rozental] and going to talk with us about what is going on in Colombia and specifically in the North of the Valle of Cauca with the Nasa community marching [to] Bogota.

We are very pleased to report the following news. The maximum authority of the indigenous territories of Northern Cauca, the Indigenous Tribunal, has found, after the report of its Investigative Commission that worked for a year and four months on the investigation, that the accusations against Manuel Rozental are entirely unfounded, without evidence or merit, and that the accusations represented an attack on the indigenous movement.

This is from our friend Pablo Leal, in Oaxaca...

México, December 6, 2006

Dear friends and compañeros,

The repression against activists and militants who participated in the Oaxaca Commune is escalating. Two days ago, three leaders of the Popular Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) were arrested in Mexico City.

Those who have not been arrested are either in hiding or out of the city.
The EZLN has called for world wide mobilizations in solidarity with the Commune on December 22.

Despite all the violence, the over 300 political prisoners, the torture, the over 30 disappearances, the more than 10 assassinations, the Commune has not been defeated.

Bulletin 053, National Indigenous Organization of Colombia
Friday, May 12, 2006
www.onic.org.co

TO:
Communication media
People's Defender
Office of the Inspector General, Ethnic Affairs
National and international NGOs dedicated to human rights advocacy

Warm greetings.

The National Indigenous Organization of Colombia announces that on Monday May 15, 2006, we the diverse indigenous peoples will carry out a great National Mobilization Summit, with a call to wake up and not conform passively to projects of death that threaten the life of the peoples and national sovereignty itself.

This is a communique from ACIN about the May 15 Mobilization in Colombia.

All this is difficult to see, understand, resist, and change. It demands unity, creativity, intelligence, solidarity, commitment, sacrifice and much work, but also much joy and much desire for life. -- The Indigenous and Popular Mandate

The mobilization has begun. The demand for the right to a different country. In an uprising of consciousness, humble gifts are brought together to generate liberty, solidarity, and justice.

Colombia is not the country we have dreamed of. Today more than ever, we stand by what we stated in the Indigenous and Popular Mandate: “The state that should protect us persecutes us.” Recent events confirm this. Under the banner of the mobilization, the Black, Mestizo, and Indigenous communities of Suarez and Morales have marched to the city of Cali to demand fulfillment of the agreements that have gone unfulfilled for 20 years. In Cali they were met by ESMAD (public forces). There are wounded and detained. In recent days advisors of Piedad Cordoba and Carlos Gaviria have been assassinated. So have 10 campesinos in Meta. One group of social organizations has been threatened with death by "demobilized" paramilitaries.

by Justin Podur

Two pieces are attached to help understand and mobilize support for the democratic left in Colombia regarding the upcoming Congressional and Presidential elections; the initial one by Manuel Rozental is inspired by the one circulated by Senator Jorge Robledo. These pieces are simultaneously intended to be analytical and an invitation to supporters of democracy within and beyond Colombia to speak up and act to help mobilize a collective conviction from Colombian people towards a much needed popular transformation of that country.

The Struggle for Land in Colombia
by Hector Mondragon

En Espanol: http://www.nasaacin.net/noticias.htm?x=1780

If there had been justice and reparation for the victims of hundreds of massacres committed in the last twenty years in the Colombian countryside, as well as those committed between 1946 and 1958 and in previous waves of violence, the prin­cipal measure would be to return their land to the campesinos, indigenous people and afro-colombians who have time and again been thrown off Mother Earth by blood and fire.

As dawn came on 2 September 2005, two hundred comuneros - commu­nity activists - from the Indigenous Reserve of Nasa de Huellas dared to implement the decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Court established that the Colombian state should hand back their land as part of an integral reparation to victims of a massacre committed by paramili­taries on 19 September 1991 in the Nilo hacienda - large farmstead - that the indigenous people had occupied. Twenty of them, children included, were assassinated.

Competing definitions of democracy go head-to-head in Latin America in 2006

By: Jonah Gindin—In the Name of Democracy, a project of Pueblos En Camino

Late on the night of December 18, Evo Morales became South America's first indigenous President. No less frightening for his detractors in the United States,, he is an open admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. Evo is the most recent in a long line of left-leaning Presidents to be elected in Latin America, and with ten Presidential elections scheduled for 2006 there may be more to come. In Latin America the “dominoes” seem to be falling again. By this time next year, the political landscape could look very different.