Peasant Struggle Moves Forward in Colombia
Featured image: peasants of Valencia de Jesús block the highways. Source: Nueva Democracia Colombia.
Nueva Democracia has published recently several articles on peasant mobilizations in Valencia de Jesús and Granizal. Numerous national highways were blocked in both areas. In the case of Valencia de Jesús the peasants carried out blockades on July 19 to demand solutions to various problems such as “the lack of access to potable water, the absence of permanent medical personnel in the local health center, the damage to houses caused by the landlord company Yuma amid the construction of the Ruta del Sol 3, and the main demand: the issue of access to land within the framework of the agrarian reform by the Petro government.” The problems faced by these peasants are caused by the latifundium. Large concentrations of land remain in the hands of very few big landlords and they have used and still use violence and paramilitary criminal groups to prevent that the peasantry from accessing their rightful ownership of the land on which it lives and works.
The peasants, fed up with waiting for the institutions and their impassibility, have organized themselves, called for meetings and taken action. The peasants have formed commissions, such as “peasant guard”, “propaganda”, “general logistics of the blockade” and “politics”.
After the beginning of the blockade, state officials arrived, but the blockade of the highways remained until agreements were reached, among them, according to Nueva Democracia: “the establishment of a dialogue table with the director of the hospital in order to solve the problem of medic personnel, on Wednesday, July 23. A call for a dialogue table with the National Agency of Lands at a local and national level where to find solutions for providing land to the community, assigned for July 30.”
In the case of Granizal, 150 peasants mobilized on July 15 and blocked the highway Medellín-Bogotá to demand among other things, “access to potable water (a demand that the families have since the neighborhood was established), improvement and paving of the paths, reconnection of water services (suspended after a recent landslide) and the right to decent housing, being this last demand the most urgent”. The peasantry faces the State’s disregard towards the people’s necessities.
This action and urgency for housing comes a month after a landslide of thousands of cubic meters earth has destroyed 50 homes and killed 27 people, affecting 1,600 individuals in 16 neighborhoods. The Colombian State and various municipal authorities have ignored the needs of the people until the people has mobilized. Those who have not ignored the needs of the affected have been the people themselves, as on the same day of the landslide, “hundreds of people expressed solidarity with the families and brought various types of aid such as clothing, food, blankets, and donations, among others. People’s activists and supportive individuals organized community kitchens and set up search brigades for the missing among the rubble of the houses, and they also organized work groups to clean different areas, such as part of the creek, to prevent the water from continuing to back up.”
