Colombian Farmers Occupy Town to Protest Drug War

The following story, originally published in Spanish on Indymedia, is the latest example of popular resistance in Colombia to the drug war, and specifically to the brutal policy of aerial fumigation.

Fumigated Rural Communities Take Over Downtown Cantagallo

By César Jerez
Agencia Prensa Rural
September 26, 2005

Around 300 people, including several woman and children, from the 22 outlying rural zones of the town of Catagallo, have been occupying the municipality’s downtown area since Saturday, September 24...

The protest action is being realized, according to participants, because of the grave situation of health and nutrition that the local peasant farmers are currently enduring as a product of the indiscriminate fumigations of Plan Colombia. The farmers are demanding an end to the fumigations.

The fumigations, managed and imposed on the Colombian government by the United States administration, have put approximately 50,000 people in the Cimitarra River Valley (in southern Bolívar department, in the region known as the Magdalena Medio) into a situation of hunger and illness.

The fumigations have been going on in the area for three months now. The peasant farmers say that they are indiscriminate, as “in addition to the coca, the food crops, cattle pastures, jungles and water supply are also fumigated.”

Peasant farmers from surrounding communities such as Chaparral, Yanacué, Palagua, Alto Paragua, San Lorenzo, Patio Bonito, Mira Lindo, Las Brisas, Sepultura and Isla no hay como Dios have now been in the town’s elementary school for three days, waiting to reach agreements with the local and national government on an end to the fumigations, emergency food aid and healthcare, as well as structural investment that would permit them to begin to substitute other crops for coca.

(Note: While this story has not been published elsewhere, César Jarez is well known to this correspondent as an honest, authentic journalist with experience working in the area in question.)

Narco News will continue to follow this story as it develops. Grassroots resistance to the drug war is beginning to happen more and more across Colombia despite the danger such actions face in this country’s climate of war and repression.