The Dispossessed. Aviva Chomsky
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it, all of our dead will remain dead forever. We may have to bury them but that doesn’t mean we are ever going to forget them” (p. 174). In The Dispossessed, people like Osiris help us not only to remember the dead, but motivate us to do what we can to change the conditions that led to their killings.
1 According to the first definition offered in the Diccionario de la Lengua Española, 21st edition (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2001).
2 David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley: University of California, 1993).
3 María Helena Rueda, “Chronicles of the Banished: Displacement and Popular Identity in Colombia,” GSC Quarterly, no. 4, Spring 2002, Social Science Resource Council, Washington, D.C.
4 For the sales ranking of the book, see http://www.losandes.com.ar/2002/0403/suplementos/cultura/nota68154_1.htm. Quotation is from a review of Desterrados by Luis Barros Pavajeau, La Esquina Regional, diciembre 2002–febrero 2003, at http://www.laesquinaregional.com.
5 Antonio Caballero, “Niños infelices,” Semana, July 19, 2001, at http://www.semana.com/archivo/articulosView.jsp?id=18946.
6 “Hidden Motives for a War,” NARCO News Bulletin, August 7, 2000, at http://www.narconews.com/exiled.html.
7 See Alexander Cockburn, “Radical as Reality,” Green Left Weekly (Australia) at http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1991/37/37p13.htm. The quotation is attributed to the 1927 memoir of Valeriu Marcu, Lenin: 30 Years of Russia (Berlin: Paul List/Verlag, 1927).
8 “The term ‘displaced’ denounces the intention to mask one of the most tragic and bloodthirsty episodes of our time. The truth is that people do not move: they are moved, exiled, expelled, forced to flee and hide. Another method used to conceal this fact consists in seeing it as if it were the result of clashes between two new actors: the guerrillas and the paramilitary. Nevertheless, population expulsions are but an old resource used by the system, which, by pointing to illegal armed groups as the original source of the problem, exonerates the Regime and above all the Armed Forces from all responsibility.” See Alfredo Molano, “Desterrados,” en Papeles de cuestiones internacionales, no. 70, Spring 2000, Centro de Investigación para la Paz, Madrid.
9 Mabel González Bustelo, “Desterrados: Forced Displacement in Colombia,” in this volume, p. 232.
10 Cited in Nectalí Ariza Ariza, “El Conflicto Colombiano y la Coyuntura Internacional, at http://www.ccoo.illes.balears.net/asociaciones/pau/observatori/colombiaanalisis.pdf.
11 González Bustelo, p. 209.
12 See “International Union Body Makes Breakthrough with Colombian Authorities,” February 3, 2004, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, at http://www.icftu.org.
13 González Bustelo, p. 210.
14 See a summary of the relevant data in Norwegian Refugee Council, “Profile of Internal Displacement: Colombia,” February 2004, 35ff.
15 Ricardo Vargas Meza, “The FARC, the War and the Crisis of the State,” NACLA Report on the Americas 31(5), March–April 1998, p. 23, and “The Wars Within: Counterinsurgency in Chiapas and Colombia,” op. cit., p. 6.
16 Quoted from “Colombia: Briefing to the 60th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, at http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/01/29/colomb7124_txt.htm.
17 Juan Forero, “800 in Colombia Lay Down Arms, Kindling Peace Hopes,” New York Times, November 26, 2003.
18 Tristin Adie and Paul D’Amato, “Colombia: The Terrorist State,” International Socialist Review, no. 10 (Winter 2000), p. 21.
19 Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), pp. 116–17.
20 Jenny Pearce, quoted in Adie and D’Amato, p. 22.
21 Alfredo Molano, “Violence and Land Colonization,” Violence in Colombia: The Contemporary Crisis in Historical Perspective, Charles Bergquist, Ricardo Penaranda, and Gonzalo Sanchez, eds. (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1992), p. 199.
22 Alfredo Molano, “The Evolution of the FARC: A Guerrilla Group’s Long History,” NACLA Report on the Americas 34(2), September–October 2000. While the FARC and ELN remain active today, the majority of EPL members surrendered their arms in the early 1990s to participate in “above-ground” political activity.
23 Before 1986, the central government in Bogotá appointed local government officials. The national congress allowed local government elections in 1986 and the change was ratified permanently in the 1991 federal constitution.
24 Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 356.
25 See Garry Leech, “Fifty Years of Violence,” Colombia Journal Online, at http://www.colombiajournal.org/fiftyyearsofviolence.htm.
26 Ibid.
27 The Alliance for Progress was one of the Kennedy administration’s responses to the 1959 Cuban Revolution: A program of loans to encourage economic development and private enterprise in Latin America. For more on the program, see John Gerassi, The Great Fear in Latin America (New York: Collier Books, 1965).
28 Quote in Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999), p. 50.
29 Lawrence Korb, quoted in Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 3.
30 All figures from “Los Estados Unidos y Colombia, 2003: Una mirada a las cifras,” Consultoria para los derechos humanos y desplazamiento (CODHES), available online at http://www.codhes.org.co.
Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia
I decided to write this book about three years ago when I opened the door to my apartment in Barcelona on a sad and dark afternoon in February. The silence struck me in the face and the emptiness, I confess, made my convictions waver. The statements I’d made to my readers, my children, and my friends, in order to respond to the death threats I received from the paramilitaries, were all behind me. They were neither the only nor the most dangerous threats. Paramilitarism is a time-worn strategy of a powerful sector of the Colombian establishment that has been used to frustrate attempts to achieve a civil solution to the country’s armed conflict. Almost every campesino in Colombia can say that his father or his uncle or his grandfather was killed by the army or police, by the paramilitaries, or by the guerrillas. It is the diabolical