Seven Oaks Magazine.

Liliany Obando Villota recently completed a speaking tour across Canada and Quebec, in an effort to build awareness of the social and political struggles in Colombia. Obando Villota is the head of the Human Rights Department of FENSUAGRO, the Colombian National Federation of Agricultural Workers. During her visit to Vancouver, she met with a number of solidarity activists and trade unionists, and spoke at a public forum on Saturday, April 17 at the Russian Hall. Derrick O’Keefe of Seven Oaks Magazine sat down with her to discuss the conflict in Colombia and the state of social movements in Latin America.

Seven Oaks: The Colombian crisis is often presented to us as an irrational war, or as just a war about drugs. What are the social roots of the conflict in your country?

Liliany Obando Villota: Colombia lives under a social and armed conflict dating back 40 years. This conflict has internal and external causes. Internally, there exists a great social inequity, with the concentration of wealth and land in very few hands and huge numbers of people living under exploitation and facing extreme poverty. Over 60% of Colombia’s population is poor, without access to even the minimum guarantees of social security. Another internal root cause for this conflict is the lack of any avenue for open and free political opposition. Opposition in Colombia is harshly repressed through dirty war and intimidation from the different security structures of the state.

S.O.: In terms of intimidation, we know that Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world to be a union activist. What are the main challenges in Colombia for the trade union movement?

L.O.V.: One of the main challenges for every organisation working towards social justice in Colombia is to continue organising and resisting to hopefully achieve –in a not too distant future –a change in the current situation of exclusion and misery of the Colombian people and to build a new Colombia with social justice.

S.O.: What importance do you place on the call for a one-year international boycott of Coca-Cola, to bring attention to their complicity in the murder of union activists?

L.O.V.: The campaign against Coca-Cola is just one of the many campaigns that the labour movement is advancing in Colombia. Big multinational corporations, especially from the United States but also from other so-called developed countries, not only take away the natural resources and the wealth of all Colombians but are also seriously compromised with the financing of paramilitary groups who persecute and assassinate popular leaders from union organizations in Colombia. The same way that it happens with Coca-Cola, it also happens with many other companies, such as Occidental Petroleum. This is why we are advancing a wider campaign that includes all these corporations and their actions: The denunciation of Plan Colombia, as this plan covers the entire spectrum of military intervention and financing of paramilitary groups.

S.O.: What has been your experience with respect to solidarity from organizations in Canada, and what can activists here demand of the government?

L.O.V.: During our almost one month tour of Canada, we have had a number of meetings with intellectuals, with leaders of unions such as the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Teachers Federation and different Labour Councils; we also had the opportunity to talk with members of the Ontario NDP.

In this tour we have been developing three demands of a political character:
The first is to advance a campaign against the United States military intervention in Colombia through Plan Colombia. We are asking for support in this ongoing campaign to denouncing Plan Colombia as a US military plan of intervention in the internal affairs of Colombia as well as to denounce the plan of forced fumigations being done through Plan Colombia.

The second request is for help in pressuring the Canadian federal government to withdraw the Colombian insurgency from Canada’s list of terrorist organizations, because with this they are putting at great risk the lives of Colombians. This has increased persecution not only of insurgent organizations in Colombia but it has also greatly endangered the lives of all those who struggle for social justice in Colombia by open and legal means.

The third and last request is to put pressure on the Colombian government to agree to a humanitarian exchange of political prisoners held in state prisons for the prisoners of war in the hands of the FARC guerrillas. This exchange is important not only for humanitarian reasons but also because this would open a new door to initiate a process of dialogue between the insurgency and the Colombian government.

S.O.: How is the situation in Colombia related to other social movement in Latin America, such as the “Bolivarian process” in neighbouring Venezuela?

L.O.V.: The countries and people of Latin America are experiencing similar economic living conditions due to processes such as neo-liberalism and economic globalisation that continue to impoverish our people. Due to these facts, we have common situations as brother countries.

The United States, on the other hand, has an economic interest in the region via a plan known as FTAA (Free Trade Agreement of the America) to allow the US to control 800 million consumers living in Latin America. For this to become possible, the United States must eliminate from the region those elements that put up barriers to this purpose. This is to say, in Colombia there is an insurgency that resists –and has for many years –against the continued pillage of Colombia’s natural resources. There is also a great opposition, through diverse social and popular organizations, who equally defend the right to national sovereignty. These are obstacles for the objectives of the United States.

In Venezuela there has been a similar process with the Bolivarian Government of President Hugo Chavez as well as in Brazil, with President Lula, and the Landless Peasant Movement. In Bolivia there is also resistance from the coca growing peasants as well as in Ecuador with the resistance of indigenous communities who are very strong in that region.

S.O.: In terms of the FTAA, what is your opinion about the alternative proposal from the Lula government of Brazil known as ‘FTAA Lite’?

L.O.V.: It is clear for all social organizations –not only from Colombia –that the FTAA is not going to benefit the people from any of these countries. We are not going to have any possibility of competing on equal ground with the markets managed from the big multinational corporations. That is why from our organizations there is a total rejection of the FTAA.

With respect to middle ground proposals such as the ‘FTAA Lite’, we think the same way as with respect to the solution to the internal social and armed conflict in Colombia. We want structural changes and no simple reforms or warm water baths. This is like saying that there is a savage and perverse capitalism, and another capitalism with a nicer face. We do not believe in that possibility. In simple terms, capitalism is a system that exploits and oppresses people, thus we believe that we must build a different system that truly includes the different expressions of the population’s struggles in conditions of equal rights.