Peace and Justice

On the last day of a recent trip to Colombia I meet Marleni, a woman from an indigenous nation whose woven shoulder bags I’ve long admired. 


The Kankuamo live in the highest coastal mountain range in the world, where green mountains saturated with equatorial rainforests rise abruptly from the coast to snowy peaks within sight of the sea. The earth was born in those mountains, the Kankuamo say.

Marleni is part of a women’s cooperative that makes and sells the traditional Kankuamo bags. She explains to me how the bags are made from a fibre spun from the bark of a mountain cactus, how the fibre is coloured with vegetable dyes and woven by the Kankuamo women using their hands and feet. We talk at length about life in the mountains, and happily I choose a bag.

The next morning, waiting to board a plane in Bogotá, I read in the Sunday paper that a paramilitary officer known as ‘El Paisa’ has been caught in Colombia’s coffee region. He is accused of having lead massacres of at least 200 Kankuamos. I read the words but in my mind I see Marleni’s broad smile. Inside I cry, silently, and without tears.

Paramilitary groups - or ‘auto-defense’ groups, as they call themselves - have long been the heavy, hired hand of the government, landowners and corporations. Where the interests of such groups collide with the land rights of indigenous groups or peasants, the paramilitary is sent in to write the law. According to Human Rights Watch they are responsible for two thirds of all human rights abuses in Colombia.

In the quest for national peace, it is said, the government of Alvaro Uribe is trying to disband paramilitary groups, offer them amnesty for their crimes, and facilitate their re-entry into normal society through work programs.

Last month president Uribe tried to pass a law that would make all paramilitary offences political crimes, and hence pardonable by the State. The Colombian High Court ruled against the law, stating that political crimes must be waged against a State. Because paramilitary groups have always acted with the tacit endorsement and in the interest of the Colombian government, their crimes cannot be deemed political, the judges said.

The issue of amnesty is a knotty one. The Colombian people want peace, and, on the face of it, disarming the groups that most terrorise the nation makes sense. Furthermore, entering the paramilitary is often a last-resort choice for young, bored youths who are denied education or employment.

The nature of their crimes (playing soccer with a child’s head, cutting the foetus from a woman before she dies from loss of blood) may suggest otherwise, but surely these people are human too, as much a victim of a system of oppression as those they kill.

Uruguyan journalist Eduardo Galeano writes: “The torturer is a functionary. The dictator is a functionary. Armed bureaucrats, who lose their jobs if they don’t do their tasks efficiently. That, and nothing more than that. They are not extraordinary monsters. We won’t grant them that grandeur.”



Nevertheless, paramilitary crimes are heinous, and above the rank and file are the bosses, commanders and captains who join the paramilitary for sinister, selfish and calculating reasons, or rise through the ranks because they enjoy what they do. The man who lead the killings of 200 Kankuamos was one of these.

Under the new amnesty laws he would have spent a maximum of eight years behind bars had he delivered himself to the authorities. Having fled from the law (partly because he had reportedly stolen nearly $1.5 million from the commander of his paramilitary block) he is now a criminal scapegoat for a criminal State. Even so, if he cooperates and admits his crimes he’ll likely spend no more than 20 years in jail. And the Kankuamo will have little to no say in his judgement.

The disbandment of paramilitary groups receives much scepticism and criticism from many Colombian journalists, academics and human rights groups, who claim that the paramilitary organisations do not disarm at all, as outlined in a recent letter to president Uribe from Human Rights Watch.

In the last ten years, an average of around 1000 Colombians have been forcefully displaced from their homes and lands every day, as a result of the country’s ongoing civil war in mineral rich rural areas. Colombian economist and activist, Hectór Mondragon, writes, “It is not merely a case of displacement because of war, but rather that there is war so there will be displacement.”



Millions of hectares of land have been stolen by paramilitary groups, some of it rich in minerals, some of it perfect for growing illicit crops. In the process of amnesty, the stolen lands are not returned to their rightful owners. Guns are (ostensibly) handed in, not crops, homes or livestock.

Amnesty International writes, “In practice, hundreds of thousands of people in Colombia could be faced with a lethal dilemma: either continue to be homeless or move back to their land and live with the very same people who tortured, raped and killed their loved ones and forced them to move out in the first place."



Colombians want peace. They also want justice, and they know that one can never exist without the other.