After fleeing rural massacre, former tobacco farmer sells coffee in the city

[Judi Lynn]

After fleeing rural massacre, former tobacco farmer sells coffee in the city
Source: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

Date: 07 Dec 2009


CARTAGENA, Colombia, December 7 (UNHCR) – Grimaldo Hernandez looks wistfully at a photograph of the football team he used to play for in a northern Colombia village. "Three of them are dead, eight are displaced," he said, pointing at the 18 young men in the snapshot.

The image brings back bitter-sweet memories of a rural life in El Salado, where 41-year-old Grimaldo grew tobacco like most of his neighbours, brought up a young family and played football at the weekend with his pals.

The course of his life changed forever over a few days in February 2000, when paramilitaries attacked the village in Bolivar department, leaving at least 60 people dead, including this three teammates. Scores of inhabitants, Grimaldo and his family among them, fled to urban areas to escape the violence.

A growing number of the people that UNHCR helps around the world, both refugees and internally displaced people like Grimaldo, live in urban areas, where they face many new challenges and must often fend for themselves.

Grimaldo found refuge in El Pozon, a rough, tough shantytown on the outskirts of Cartagena, Bolivar's sprawling capital on the Caribbean. The authorities have registered some 60,000 internally displaced people (IDP) in Cartagena, most of them living in impoverished suburbs like El Pozon.

When Grimaldo, his wife and two children (a third was born in El Pozon) arrived nine years ago, there was no running water, no electricity, no street lights and no sewage system. The future looked bleak, but the former farmer was determined to find employment.

"I tried to do several things. I worked in an ironmonger's shop. I worked on a farm not far from the city," he recalled. But he was spooked when one of the farmer owners took a shot at a worker, mistaking him for a robber. "When I saw that, I thought to myself: 'I didn't escape from a massacre to be killed here by mistake.' And I left," Grimaldo explained.

He ended up selling small, steaming hot cups of tinto, Colombian slang for coffee, on the rutted streets of El Pozon, where there is a potential market of tens of thousands of people.

But while he was starting to bring in a regular income, things at home were difficult. "For the first two years after the displacement, my son Javier – who was nine at that time – was angry and violent a great deal of the time. He had problems at school, he grabbed other kids by the neck," Grimaldo noted.

Javier seems to be still suffering from the trauma of the attack in El Salado. "A couple of months ago he was coming home and saw a couple of policemen in front of our door. He couldn't speak for a couple of minutes. He told us that he thought 'I'm dead,'" the boy's father added.

More:
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/SKEA-7YHHPY

[Peace Patriot]

1. If you look at a map of the Colombia/Venezuela border region (near Bolivar

where Grimaldo Hernandez's village was "cleansed"), you begin to understand why villages and peasant farmers in this region of Colombia have suffered such massive murder and displacement. And the numbers mentioned here--60,000 "registered" displaced peasant farmers in Cartegena--are only the tip of the iceberg. It is probably twice that in Cartegena alone. (Many displaced people do NOT register with the government for fear of retribution.) I've seen a human rights report estimate of 3 MILLION displaced farmers in Colombia. It is considered one of the worst crises of displaced people in the world. And tens of thousands of them have fled over the borders into Venezuela (from the Bolivar region of Colombia in the north) and into Ecuador (to the south), most of them fleeing the Colombian military and its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads. In Venezuela and Ecuador they get humane treatment--a great burden on these leftist governments. In Colombia, they get killed.

For a long time, I thought that these land-cleansing operations were, a) to clear out the "riff-raff" so the big drug lords could move in, and/or, b) to clear out the "riff-raff" so that global corporate predators like Monsanto could move in. But looking at the map, I see another and even more ominous reason. Venezuela's main oil reserves and operations are right over the border from Bolivar province, Colombia. The area is likely being cleansed for joint US/Colombia MILITARY operations.

And now we see this secretly negotiated agreement between the US and Colombia for SEVEN new US military bases in Colombia, NO LIMIT on the number of US soldiers and 'contractors' who can be deployed there, total diplomatic immunity for US soldiers and 'contractors' no matter what they do there, and US military use of all civilian airports and other facilities in Colombia. Venezuela's Zulia province and the Lake Maracaibo region (Venezuela's main oil region, which reaches up along the border with Colombia to the Caribbean) is adjacent to Colombia's Bolivar province, and may well be the target of a US war plan. The Bushwhacks put the US 4th Fleet (mothballed since WW II) back into commission in the Caribbean, last year. The Pentagon has now secured its US military base and port facilities in Honduras (through the recent rightwing coup), and are putting two more bases in Panama (adjacent to Colombia, to the NW of Venezuela). They thus have Venezuela's northern oil region surrounded. Also, rightwing politicians in Zulia openly talk of secession from the national government (the Chavez government), which may be the war strategy that the Pentagon has in mind (local fascist "patriots" declare their "independence" and invite the US military into their region to fight the Venezuelan army).

It is no wonder that the Chavez government took control of ports, airports and important roads in this region, about six months ago. And no wonder, also, that Venezuela began sealing its border with Colombia, recently, upon the announcement of this secretly negotiated deal for a South Vietnam-type US military buildup in Colombia. ADD US soldiers and operatives to this border area, already rife with border incidents, and you have a "Gulf of Tonkin" in the making--the Pentagon manufacturing an incident to justify a war.

Grimaldo Hernandez's sorrows and sufferings are an omen of what may be the US war machine's "Waterloo"--an oil war in South America. They've cleansed his native area of millions of peasant farmers. They've invited the US military into the country, big time. And there's all that oil--one of the biggest reserves in the Americas--right over the border, in a country whose leader has been unfairly demonized with relentless disinformation and psyops going on five years now. And I see no hope at all that such a war can be stopped on this end. We, the people of the US, are totally helpless to prevent it. We don't have a democracy when it comes to the Pentagon and the war profiteers. They can drag us into it, against our will, and make us pay for it, when they lose. And I do think they'll lose this one. Nothing like peoples' passion for independence and democracy to motivate them against great war machines. Those passions are very alive in Latin America today, as they were here, long ago.