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The Cacarica Community (CAVIDA)
In December 1999 -- after three years of forced displacement and peaceful resistance, demands to the government, organization, and struggle while living in refugees’ shelters -- the community formally got collective land titles for 206,000 acres. On 28 February 2000 2,500 people of the Cacarica River Basin began the "return with dignity" to their homelands in a three-stage process that was completed without official backing on March 2001. More than 80 members of the Cacarica community have been assassinated or disappeared from the time of the displacement in February 1997. Now their challenge is to build a Project of Life amidst the war while telling the truth in the face of the repression of the State, the paramilitary project and the erosion of the rule of law.
After that incursion, the community spent a month in daily meetings, organized by families and in general assembly. What came out of the meetings was a decision to erect a "Fence of Life" that clearly delimits what they - since then - call the "Humanitarian Zones" With the fence, they are attempting to defend their lives and continue to resist in the midst of war. They are the owners of 206,000 acres, as recognized by the titles given by the government, but the military invasion has constrained them to live on a mere 48 acres: 24 in the Esperanza en Dios settlement, 24 in the Nueva Vida settlement. The Fence of Life delimits them. On June 7-10, 2001, during the same incursion, the armed men dressed in military gear and sporting paramilitary armbands spoke about "progress". They told them to sow coca and African palm. They told them that working in a collective fashion brought poverty, they told them to each live separately, on separate plots of land, and that they would soon have money.
The Ombudsman Office requested the National Government to guarantee the security of the displaced communities of the Cacarica River Basin, grouped in the community organization CAVIDA. In 1999 and after staying two years in the Turbo coliseum and El Cacique Ranch in Bahía Cupica (Chocó), they returned to their territory, with previous agreements between the National Government and the community, with the accompaniment of a Verification Joint Commission.
The established agreements among the Government, the communities and the Verification Joint Commission, contemplated the construction of dwellings, a productive project, the unclogging of sewers and the permanent presence of the Ombudsman Office as part of the integral protection scheme. Most of these projects have been carried out with national budget resources and have been supervised by the “Red de Solidaridad Social” (Social Solidarity Network), the Ministry of Transportation and the Banco Agrario (Agrarian Bank), among others. Moreover, such families decided to adopt internal coexistence rules where they manifested their desire to stay outside the armed conflict and not to dialogue with any of the conflict’s actors. Recent declarations of the Army’s Commander, General Jorge Enrique Mora, according to which these settlements are centers of assembling for the Farc guerilla, have preoccupied the Ombudsman because they don’t correspond to reality and, on the contrary, could put the communities that live there, at risk. The government bodies that are part of the Joint Commission (Human Rights Presidential Program, Ministry of Interior, Social Solidarity Network, Ombudsman Office, Public Prosecutor of the Nation Office, representatives of international bodies and NGO´s, among others) have visited in several opportunities such settlements, know the situation of their inhabitants and can confirm the agreements acquired by the different entities of the Government and the community itself. Some of the people displaced in 1997 did not form groups in CAVIDA, but are still in Turbo, while others returned by their own will. This last group was not part of the settled communities’ process of Esperanza en Dios and Nueva Vida and this has generated a division between them due to the fact that the state’s aid was only directed to the families of the community organization CAVIDA. The Ombudsman requests the National Government to facilitate an approach between both groups of displaced people and favor the security conditions to allow these communities to live in the same territory within a pacific coexistence. Ombudsman Office
The settlements "Esperanza en Dios" and "Nueva Vida," against which General Mora has filed complaints, shelter the families from the Chocó region that returned to their place of origin two years after surviving a bloody operation of the 17th Brigade in 1997 and a merciless paramilitary incursion in the same year. This pair of towns, of mystic and utopic names--like the biblical name of the attack against them, "Genesis"--take up only 24 hectares. The community, however, because of its degree of cultural cohesion and its ancestral will to defend its rights and dignity, receives from the Colombian State, from several of its ministries, from the People's Ombudsman's office and a network of international organizations of a humanitarian character--UN High Commission for Refugees, Doctors of the World, brigades in solidarity from 24 countries, Christian churches from the United States and Europe, NGOs like Justicia y Paz, in addition to many others-- resources for survival, productive projects and ecological preservation. But above all, these entities from so many places fulfill with the 320 families--the majority of whose members are minors and children--a task of accompaniment to protect their decision to remain on the margins of the armed conflict. It is worrisome, thus, that an authority at the level of General Mora Rangel accepts and divulges with such certainty stories which expose these families, who hold on to the hope of working quietly or at least staying alive, to a predictable danger. Can a group that still remembers clearly the bombings, shootings and machete blows, which caused so recently the loss of loved ones and the flight through the countryside to humiliating places of refuge, be tempted by weapons or sympathize with armed organizations?
Furthermore, it is worthwhile to imagine how such a small community could work with an armed group, hiding weapons and people for them, without so many national government workers and members of foreign organizations who spend time there picking up on these mysteries. General Mora will then see if he'll have to extend his accusations to those guests. Furthermore, barbed-wire fences do not necessarily mark a concentration camp into which one must penetrate to save prisoners. The fence that surrounds those settlements is symbolic and has been given the name "the Web of Life." It is there to indicate to any armed group, those that rove about, anxious to get inside, that the inhabitants on the inside do not carry even a needle and that they are working. The ironic aspect of this situation is that this community owns 103,024 hectares, of which they have been allowed to occupy only 24, from which some now want to expel them. In whose way are those returnees, so few in number, such good people, in so small a space, to merit such stigmatization? Maybe the timber companies that prey on all those forests, corrupt government workers, finance criminals, and of course consider the forest knowledge of the natives to be their enemy? Cacarica is the proof that the expulsion of entire communities from their territories is not a massive collateral damage brought on by supposed
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In February 1997 -- during “Operation Genesis” -- paramilitary troops operating in unison with government forces entered the region, killed dozens of inhabitants, and threatened to kill others unless they abandoned their homes.
During the irregular military aggression to the community over the week of June 5-12 2001, 21 members of the community -- 13 of them minors -- were reportedly being held by army-backed paramilitaries, and an estimated more than 200 paramilitaries appeared in the “Esperanza en Dios” “Nueva Vida” settlements. On June 11 the community made a broad call for a "Human Chain" of international observers to protect their project of life and territories.
Due to the permanence of the factors that originated the displacement in 1997 in the region the communities grouped in the CAVIDA process voluntarily decided to form two settlements called "Esperanza en Dios" (Hope in God) and "Nueva Vida"" (New Life), where they built a barb wire fence around them to prevent the armed actors to enter to their living and farming areas, which were defined as humanitarian areas.
It is going to be difficult for the [Colombian] Army Commander, General Jorge Enrique Mora Rangel, to prove his accusations against the 320 families from the Chocó region that inhabit the Cacarica river basin. The high-ranking official should be more selective with his informants, because the person that fed him information about the supposed conversion of that community into a subversive epicenteris someone who was sanctioned by the community for his lack of honor.
Definitely not. The people of Cacarica did not return for revenge, nor to lend themselves to plans of war. The culture of the Chocó region--black and indigenous -- has other ways of processing its mourning and rituals. This region has never been violent, at least never in the way of those who enter it from the outside.