An Open Letter from the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, ACIN, to U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama.

Santander de Quilichao, Cauca, Colombia

Dear Mr. President-Elect,First, please accept our sincerest congratulations. We congratulate you for having won because of the noblest aspirations of your people. We believe your election expresses the deep desire for change felt by the majority of the American people: change in the economy and society, change in international relations, and from there, we hope, a change in the relation between the United States of America and the indigenous peoples of the world.

During your historic campaign, you publicly noted some of what Colombians currently face: you acknowledged the murders of trade unionists by the regime and stated your reservations about a Free Trade Agreement with Colombia, which our people have decided against through a democratic referendum, about which we have written before. We thank you for this, and now want you to know about the specific situation facing Colombia's indigenous peoples.

In the past six years we have lost 1,200 people to assassinations by armed groups, both legal and illegal: right-wing paramilitaries, guerrillas, police, and members of the Armed Forces. These murders have created insecurity, and this insecurity has been used to strip us of our rights with what we call the 'Laws of Disposession', legislation and other institutional norms that legalize the loss of our lands, our fundamental freedoms, and our rights. These 'Laws of Disposession' dispose of Colombia's mines, hydrocarbons, water resources, intellectual property, and national parks – all of these are brought under the ultimate rule of the Free Trade Agreement with the US. The FTA will mean that if Colombia tries to change the laws to allow its people to share in its resources, or take any independent action, then we will be obliged to compensate investors. We will have to submit our laws to international arbitration outside our own legal jurisdiction.

But in our view, the ultimate law is respect for life. In our view, the FTA puts commercial logic above the respect for life itself, not to mention international humanitarian law, and agreements such as the ILO's Covenant 169, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Worldwide. These covenants, as well as the respect for life, have to date been ignored by the government of our country, as well as by your government.

Unfortunately both of our governments, yours with Plan Colombia, and ours with the so-called 'Democratic Security' policy, have done great harm to indigenous peoples and to Mother Earth, while multinational corporations have profited from the petroleum and gas contracts, mining concessions, privatizations, and low wages.

We hope that you will contribute to change all this. We hope that you will listen to our words. We have lost many lives defending these words. Words that we have walked and words we have backed up with our civil resistance. These are the words that we have shared throughout Colombia since October 10th, through the Minga of Resistance, a national mobilization we convened as indigenous peoples, in association with other peoples and processes.

We believe that the spirit of change in your people cannot be contained. We believe it is a powerful force and we hope it will join with the force of our words and with the need for change that has been crying out throughout Latin America. We invite you to come to listen to these words here in Colombia, and we are ready to articulate them there, if you invite us. Here or there, it is the same planet and our mission is the same: to protect it, to save us all.

Finally, we call on you to join with us in fulfilling our responsibilities to Mother Earth and to history. The first one, our collective Mother, has given all of us life. The second one, History, has reflected our growing pains and our errors. History has not matured into systems that reconcile it with the rhythms, pulses and mandates of Nature. We believe the very reason human beings and our societies exist is to create the harmony between History and Mother Earth.

As children of Mother Earth, we speak to you as to a brother or sister. As indigenous, we speak to you as peoples, obliged from creation to seek harmony between History and Mother Earth. To reconcile ourselves with nature is not an option, but an imperative. By transforming life into merchandise, by making sacred the accumulation of wealth, by enshrining greed, we believe our societies have entered a crisis, including the economic crisis currently faced by your country. The destruction of our peoples in Colombia is a consequence of that Historic error that has placed greed before life.

Brother President-elect Barack Obama, we do not write to ask or demand anything for ourselves, because we know that the death of our peoples and the destruction of our cultures for greed, signifies the beginning of the end for Mother Earth itself.

Before we disappear with our collective Mother, we have decided to speak and to walk our words. In the name of life, of change, let us listen to one another and make the effort to find a way to create harmony between our peoples and life. Let us create the conditions for new History. One where the sacred ends of promotion and protection of Life and Beauty can never again be transformed into means for private accumulation of power at the service of greed.

We await you.With great respect,

Association of Indigenous Couincils of Northern Cauca ACIN (Cxab Wala Kiwe-Territory of the Great People) Cauca, Mother Earth, November 10th, 2008 Santander de Quilichao

Replacement for General Montoya

By John Lindsay Poland

President Uribe announced this afternoon that the replacement for Army chief General Montoya will be General Oscar Enrique González Peña http://www.elespectador.com/noticias/judicial/articulo88095-oscar-gonzalez-nuevo-comandante-del-ejercito.General

González Peña was commander of the Fourth Brigade, based in Medellín, from December 2003 to July 2005, when the army reportedly committed 45 extrajudicial executions in eastern Antioquia, according to a report last year by a coalition of human rights organizations known as Human Rights and Humanitarian Law Observatory. (http://www.dhcolombia.info/spip.php?article362)

González Peña also commanded the 11th Brigaade in Cordoba in 2002-03, when the paramilitaries were operating freely in the area and the Army. In 2005, he commanded the Seventh Division, with jurisdiction over the brigades with among the worst human rights records in the Army: the 11th, 17th, 4th and 14th Brigades.

He attended the School of the Americas in Panama in 1980.That General González Peña also brings to the army leadership a history of extrajudicial executions under his command reinforces the observation we made earlier in the day – it is hard to identify Colombian army commanders who have not commanded units committing gross human rights violations. And most of them have received US training or assistance.

The Voices of Indigenous People Felt Throughout the Americas

By Natalia Cardona

This past week was a big week for Indigenous peoples in the Americas as a whole. They along with thousands of social activists mobilized during the III Social Forum of the Americas which took place in Iximulew (known in the mainstream as Guatemala) to share their experiences of resistance and struggle, their demands and proposals, to meet and get to know one another and to advance collectively in the building of Another American Continent which is possible and necessary. Meanwhile, in Colombia thousands of Indigenous people also took to the streets to bring attention to their plight and the humanitarian crisis they face. On October 12, the 516th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, Indigenous people in Colombia gathered to mourn all those who have been lost in the struggle to better their situation and to call attention to their proposals for change.

Protesting U.S. Policies
Colombian Indigenous Peoples are protesting the pursuit of militaristic and economic policies that have placed 18 of 84 indigenous groups at the brink of physical and cultural extinction and created a humanitarian crisis for the entire population. Among these policies are Plan Colombia and the U.S. Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA). These policies were promoted by the U.S. in tandem with the current Colombian administration. Their effects are systematic and harsh for the indigenous movement and indigenous peoples as a whole.

The Effects of U.S. Policy on the Humanitarian Crisis
Plan Colombia has led to the militarization of the rural areas and displacement of thousands of indigenous people. The fumigation that accompanies this militarization caused hunger in many communities as planes do not distinguish between food crops and coca crops. Also, many innocent civilians were killed over the past years and passed off by the Colombian military as guerrillas in an effort to show success in battles against guerrillas. The U.S.-Colombia FTA, which has not been passed in the U.S., already had negative effects for the Indigenous of Colombia. Laws which govern their rights and protect their culture and ties to the land are being dismantled in preparation for the implementation of the FTA.

They Will Not Be Silenced
The marches occurred despite violence perpetrated by the “demobilized” paramilitary groups. In South Western Colombia an indigenous man was killed by paramilitary groups known as the Black Eagles in an attempt widely seen by the communities as a way to discourage their march from happening. The man was killed in front of his family as he travelled between communities. The Black Eagles were unsuccessful 7,000 indigenous peoples remain in the march today. Additionally, 800 people from the Bari Indigenous group arrived recently in Cucuta to protest the effects of multinational corporations on their land and the ecosystem. In the Colombian-Venezuelan border the U’Wa peoples, who are also trying to prevent the exploitation of oil in their territory, were told the march was cancelled by members of the U.S. funded Colombian military. The U’Wa travelled through inner river channels to reach a local oil field 1,111 of them arrived there to cleanse the area and ask for forgiveness from mother earth. The U’Wa believe oil is the blood of mother earth and have threaten collective suicide should the process continue.

Proposals
Indigenous peoples in Colombia this week released a set of demands and proposals. They are asking the Colombian government to:
· Create and implement a set of measures to deal with the humanitarian crisis facing the Indigenous groups and their leaders,
· Reestablish and come into compliance with agreements the government made with Indigenous peoples,
· To ratify the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples,
· To repeal laws that erode the rights of Indigenous peoples, and
· For truth, justice and reparations for the victims of paramilitary crimes.

For more about the marches you can visit: http://www.onic.org.co/