Traduction Trommons: http://trommons.org/
Fourteen families from the Nuevo Oriente district in the Turbo municipality of Urabá Antioquia were attacked this Tuesday, February 10, 2015, by a group of approximately 80 men. The attackers, some of whom were masked, entered the village carrying sticks, machetes, and, it appears, handguns.
During the incursion, which occurred around 7:00 p.m. according to a report made by the Fundación Forjando Futuros (Forging Futures Foundation), the group intimidated and struck several of the residents, the majority of whom are land claimant victims who had returned without institutional support. The masked men also destroyed homes and threw tear gas into one resident’s house.
According to the testimony of one of the affected campesinos (farmworkers), who asked that his identity be protected, days before the incursion, men in uniforms who identified themselves as police officers from Chigorodó called the campesinos to a meeting at the end of which the officers took the residents’ machetes away.
«On Monday [February 9, 2015] the Chigorodó police called us to a meeting at Jaime Uribe’s farm [close to the place where the claimants had built their huts] saying that they’d received a call telling them that we were armed and that there were spies among us. But they didn’t find anything and they left with the machetes that they had taken away from us when we first walked into the meeting,» reported the affected farmworker.
The campesino reported that he was in his hut when the group of men arrived and began threatening him and shouting at him to leave his home. «I told them that I was staying and so they said, ‘leave immediately or we cannot answer for your life.’ When I left they took my things and threw them on a piece of land on a neighbor’s farm. Then they went to the neighboring houses and tore them up. An indigenous man was going to record them with his cell phone but they took it away from him and never gave it back. But they [the attackers] did take photos of the campesinos and the houses.»
The place where the incident occurred is located in the vicinity of one of Fabio Moreno’s farms in the area in which 4 topographers from the Fundación Forjando Futuros were threatened on October 21, 2014, while they were preparing to carry out a topographical survey of the properties that are in the process of being claimed.
The attacks are systematic
In addition to the incident that occurred in Nuevo Oriente, there were also reports made this Tuesday, February 10, 2015, by several claimants from the Macondo district, also in the Turbo municipality, who stated that uniformed Army personnel entered the rural community of Cuchillo Negro and threatened the residents with eviction.
The Army’s actions violate the judicial decision issued by the Judge of the First Civil Court of the Specialized Circuit for Land Restitution in Quibdó, who on December 12, 2014, ordered that NO more evictions be carried out in the communities of Macondo, Blanquicet, and 36 other districts in the Turbo Municipality that make up the Community Council of La Larga Tumaradó.
In the verdict, the judge recognized the campesinos that had returned without institutional support as victims of displacement and dispossession and as the legitimate claimants of the land.
It should be added that last week, prior to a planned assembly of the claimants to discuss the ruling, ex-president and current Senator of the Republic Álvaro Uribe Vélez posted a series of tweets attacking the Fundación Forjando Futuros and accusing the Macondo claimants of being invaders.
In his tweets, Uribe Vélez defended businessmen from Urabá that currently possess the properties that are being reclaimed by the victims. Among those businessmen are: Adriano Palacios, arrested on March 27, 2014, for land dispossession and accused of financing paramilitaries according to records from Justicia y Paz (Justice and Peace) ‘free version’ hearings; Humberto Duque, whose farm in Guacamayas was being patrolled by 40 paramilitaries according to confessions made during Justicia y Paz proceedings; Joaquín Suárez and Fabio Moreno, the latter of whom is the owner of the Monteverde farm where the incursion took place this Tuesday, February 10, 2015.
