“In 2004, at 6am on Thursday, April 15, they murdered a teacher from the Kankuamo indigenous people. It was death number 382, in 10 years, in my people. That teacher was my father, murdered, tortured and humiliated”, recalls Oscar Montero, who is now a member of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) and leader of the Kankuamo people, located in northern Colombia. Since then, murders against the Kankuamo have risen to 450 and, in the last 48 hours, eight indigenous people from different peoples have been killed by armed groups in the country.
The latest homicides bring to 192 the number of deaths since the peace agreement between the State and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in November 2016. “We are being killed by everyone. The FARC kills us, the guerrillas kill us, the paramilitaries kill us, the public forces and the State kill us. There is a physical and cultural genocide against indigenous peoples”, says Oscar.
For him, the escalation of violence demonstrates a humanitarian crisis and an emergency situation that, however, is not new. “There is a continuity and systematicity in the extermination of people,” he says. What is different, as he points out, is that Colombia is supposedly going through a peace process. The murders, committed in a context of intense territorial dispute, have attracted international attention. This Friday (1st), rapporteurs from the United Nations (UN) called for emergency action to prevent the massacre from deepening.
Extermination as a State project
Oscar Montero, who was at Unicamp throughout the week in activities related to the Resident Artist and Researcher program (an agreement between the University and Santander), recalls that all 102 indigenous peoples in Colombia are at risk, 34 of which are on the verge of extermination. In addition to armed parastatal and guerrilla groups, he points out that the State's economic projects are responsible for the situation. “Extractivism, mining, monocultures, dams: all State development proposals put indigenous communities at risk.”
Despite the State's obligation to consult the people on projects that interfere in their territories, in accordance with Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, of the International Labor Organization (ILO), Oscar points out that it is a process viewed only in a administrative by governments. “When the community says no, armed men arrive. There is a strong relationship between the State and groups outside the law to remove indigenous peoples and appropriate territories illegally,” he notes. Another way to circumvent the consultation is to produce environmental licenses for companies pointing out the non-existence of indigenous people in a location, even if this is not true.
Indigenous territories, as he points out, are the most targeted as they preserve biodiversity, mineral and energy riches. “Everyone wants these territories, legal and illegal actors. The State, paramilitaries, guerrillas, criminal gangs and cartels want to seize the territories of indigenous peoples.” Facing threats, despite indigenous people setting up guards to monitor and protect their territories, is uneven. “On one side there are armed actors and, on the other, there are indigenous people only with sticks defending their territory.”
Racism, for him, is also one of the factors that worsens violence. “They don’t just kill us with bullets, but also with words, with racism, discrimination, the stigmatization that we are guerrillas or that we are collaborators with the State.”
Furthermore, the insufficiency of public policies aimed at indigenous groups is another driver that decimates people. In La Guajira, among the Wayuu, five thousand children have died from malnutrition in the last 10 years. The assistance programs, says Oscar, are deficient. “They do not have a differentiated approach and cultural adaptation to the reality of what the people need and there is no effective response to the country’s structural problems of social inequality”.
Resistance to the massacre
To resist extermination, not only among Colombian indigenous peoples, but among Brazilians and Latin Americans, Oscar points out some paths. The first, for him, is spirituality. “Each people has a spirituality that helps them understand and resist from the cultural and spiritual. This is fundamental.”
Second, it is necessary to strengthen the organizational issue, expanding unity between indigenous and non-indigenous sectors, carrying out mobilizations and complaints at national and international levels. Furthermore, it is essential to think about protection. Death, he explains, is thought of as part of a cycle. When natural, it is not a reason for sadness among its people. But bad death, when there is violent interference in the cycle of life, it is different, and it is necessary to join forces to stop it, as people have been doing since colonization on the continent. "Despite this, as I showed yesterday with the dance, we are happy people. We are people with a capacity for resilience. The people who took us are still alive in us."
Call to unity in defense of indigenous peoples
Oscar Montero carried out four activities at Unicamp, coordinated by the University's Directorate of Culture. There were three topics covered: indigenous methodologies and pedagogies; cultural and artistic issues and human rights. In addition, he held a workshop on the dance of the Kankuamo people. On Friday (1st), the last day of the agenda, he called for society to join the fight against the genocide of peoples. Watch: