Combats, massacres, explosions, … news coming from Cauca. The acts of war in that department in southern Colombia are folklore, along with the large estates, the coca fields, the marijuana greenhouses, the machinery for illegal mining, the passage of armed personnel under different flags.
Generalized poverty is also part of the landscape, neighboring the wealth produced by stolen land and slave labor; The indigenous people coexist in resistance for centuries, with black survivors of centuries of slavery, along with those who have feudal nostalgia, and long to divide the department so that masters and vassals do not rub against each other. In Cauca, conquering surnames and lineages are displayed, colluding with those emerging from drug trafficking and illegal mining, they militate in the same party, against blacks and Indians.
Cauca has been in belligerence since pre-Columbian times, it was the scene of fierce campaigns of European conquest and native resistance, of slave settlement, as well as liberation struggles, and palenquera rebellions. Of course, of slave reactions, of new dispossessions… of reactionary wars, of guerrilla struggles, and a stubborn indigenous resistance.
Cauca is sacred territory of ancestral peoples, and it is a land of looting for gangsters; It is a fortress of slavery, and a sanctuary of freedom; The objective factors of the conflict flourish in Caucano territory, the old regime is established, and the new one germinates. War has been raging there for centuries, but peace at the end of the 20th century was forged among its mountains.
In this department, the landowners profess a single religion: Hoarding land. For centuries they have done so, organizing bands of mercenaries who, with the blood of the Indian and the black, celebrate the solemnity of the appropriation. In Cauca only the sale and purchase of land is valuable, because the life of an Indian is worth nothing.
It was necessary for Manuel Quintín Lame to rise up, the quintinada, to be defeated, imprisoned and object of ridicule, so that after his death the memory of his people would inhabit. The ancestral populations have achieved community recognition, a sense of ethnicity, a vision of the country, and for several decades they have been trying to recover, for collective enjoyment, the lands that have been taken from them, more in the Republic than in the colony.
The tradition of agrarian struggles has hardened the peasants, the blacks, the natives, who do not always coexist peacefully. The Violence of the 20th century was added to the old wars, and to this were the subsequent insurgencies. One of the “independent republics” was based there, that of Riochiquito, under the command of the legendary Mayor Ciro, Ciro Trujillo. After the official “triumph” over the rebellious peasants, poorly armed, poorly trained, but insulted, guerrilla history emerges in this department. The then newly created FARC multiplied fronts over the Caucasian geography, and clashes occurred at their cardinal points. In the 1980s all Colombian guerrillas had a presence in Cauca, including an indigenous self-defense group, the Quintín Lame Armed Movement.
The private armies of the landowners became paramilitaries, to maintain control over the stolen lands, and with the task of fighting the guerrillas. As the paramilitarism, subsidiary of the Castaño house of Antioquia, did not have sufficient military force to confront the guerrillas, it dedicated itself to terrorizing the indigenous population, whom farmers and thugs hate, although they killed blacks and peasants alike.
The various illicit crops have found fertile land in Cauca: coca leaves and marijuana, even poppies for heroin. Although the relationship of the natives with drugs is ancestral, mediated by ritual use, there are many who travel to this department to have an “experience” of drinking yage from the hand of some type of shaman. Gold is still extracted from the Cauca land, so much so that it replaces the income from cocaine… If it were located north of Colombia it would be the Wall Street of illegality.
Cauca is not only wealth, misery, and social conflict. It is also a strategic point for the country’s communication between the north and the south, to exit to the Pacific Ocean, or to join with the Amazon, or with the rest of the Andean zone; It is key to moving to the countries in the south of the continent. The rivers that run through the country from south to north are born there, and one of the few that runs from north to south, the Patía; It has all the thermal floors, jungles, mountains, volcanoes, desert, sea…
All violence has converged, including fratricides of indigenous people against indigenous people, black people against Indians, Indians against peasants, guerrillas against each other, paramilitaries against each other, all against the Indians. Historical units such as the National Guerrilla Coordinator, partial alliances, unlikely gatherings, such as guerrillas, paracos, and public forces against other guerrillas… and successful peace processes such as those of the April 19 movement, M-19, and Quintín Lame, with the Colombian government. In the 21st century, the peace agreement between the Santos government and the FARC brought peace to almost the entire department.
This did not last, because the Duque government carried out its purpose of tearing up the peace agreements, and all violence, as if by decree, was reinstated in Cauca. Illegal economies increased, the murder of social leaders intensified, adding to the extermination of signatories of the peace agreement with the former FARC.
Cauca was one of the decisive departments in Gustavo Petro’s electoral victory, and that fact exacerbated the development of crime. It seems normal to the country that there is fighting in Cauca, to the landowners it is normal to kill Indians, and to those in arms to kill civilians it is meritorious, but none of this could happen if there were not a very high level of connivance of crime with the public force. It is novel how the enemies of peace, detected forty years ago and now unmasked, who ask for bombings and corpses, come out to tear their clothes because their desire for the failure of Total Peace is beginning to be seen. Hypocrites! They are celebrating.
The Colombian extreme right, so scavenger, thrives on the murder of Colombians, and with advertorials in its media it disguises the usual failures as experts. Because, since the time of Laureano Gómez, they have incited violence to then sell security. They turned slaughter into a business, and conspired against peace so they could manage the conflict.
That is why the extreme right does not resolve the objective conditions of the Colombian armed conflict, it barely invokes the good or bad will of the armed actors. There will only be peace by democratizing land ownership, with agrarian reform; with technical support to the peasant, the black, the Indian; overcoming illicit economies with profitable productive establishments; bringing health, education, culture, public services to the Caucanos forgotten for centuries… Especially cutting the alliance of the Public Force with illegality.
Cauca is a theater of war, and of the absurd. Drug traffickers, guerrillas, paramilitaries, regional elites, economic unions all revolt there against peasants, blacks, and indigenous people, and against the national government, which for the first time in history is on the side of the farm workers. As strange as it may seem, this change of government side is the first step towards peace.
