Outside the Cave: A student speaker series of untold narratives CUNY International Law Society

Today our speaker Maricelly Malave is going to talk about her work with Witness for Peace in Colombia and give some some insight into the reality of the conflict in Colombia. 

For the last six decades, Colombia has endured a brutal armed conflict. In many cases, U.S. involvement and military aid have exacerbated internal disputes, leading to gross human rights violations and creating one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises with over 6.9 million people internally displaced and over 220,000 people dead. Over the course of Plan Colombia, implemented in the year 2000, the United States has sent over $10 billion to Colombia – mostly in counter-narcotics, fumigations, and military aid. But instead of reducing coca production or bringing peace, Plan Colombia often subjected the civilian population to more violence.

Witness for Peace first opened an office in Colombia in 2000, in order to document the human, social, and environmental consequences of US-sponsored Plan Colombia – a multi-billion dollar counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency package for the Colombian armed forces. Plan Colombia was intended to reduce Colombia’s cocaine production and bring peace and stability to a country experiencing an ongoing armed conflict between state security forces, various guerrilla armies, and paramilitary groups. Yet Plan Colombia’s overwhelming focus on military aid rather than social aid just made a dire situation even more precarious – fumigation and bombardment of vulnerable communities under the guise of counterinsurgency tactics just further increased mass displacement and human rights violations of especially vulnerable communities, including indigenous peoples, Afro-Colombians, and campesinos.

For more than a decade, Witness for Peace has documented one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises—Colombia is currently the country with the second largest internally displaced population in the world, following Syria. More than 6.9 million Colombians have been internally displaced by right-wing paramilitaries (often working in conjunction with Colombia’s U.S. funded and trained military), left-wing insurgents, indiscriminate aerial fumigations, large-scale extractive industries and agro-fuel production. At every turn, U.S. corporations have benefited from the violence and mass displacement, including Coca-Cola, Chiquita, Dole and Drummond Coal.

In Spanish, English translation coming soon.

Today we are going to explore the 2019 coup in Bolivia and explore this event from the context of pluri-nationalism, neoliberalism, and foreign interference and how the media helped the Añez government perpetrate state sponsored violence against opposition, mostly comprising of indigenous communities, in Bolivia. This is not the first time a pro U.S. president of Bolivia has sent state soldiers to oppress indigenous opposition that resulted in military forces perpetrating genocide against indigenous communities. In 2007, former president Sanchez de Lozada formally charged with genocide by the Bolivia’s supreme court for an attack he perpetrated against the Aymara community that resulted in military forces killing 67 men, women and children, and injuring 400 others. Former president Sanchez de Lozada currently resides in the United States that in 2012 former President Obama refused to extradite. Sanchez de Lozada grew up in the United States, was educated in the United States, speaks Gringo Spanish, and is a multi-millionaire mining executive.