Social Movements: All Causes are Our Own

By Manuel Rozental. Originally published in ALAI. 7 November, 2007
Translation: Micheal O’Tuathail

The introduction of the Indigenous and Popular Mandate [2] of September 2004 in Cali put forward the struggle of the peoples and social movements of Colombia. “The challenge that unites us” [3] is the recognition that it is not a struggle of demands within a social order but one of a confrontation between two paradigms, two ways of understanding life that are opposite and incompatible.

The Death Project, which is currently destroying Mother Earth [4] through its insatiable desire for accumulation by exploiting life, is being confronted by the ancestral wisdom of the peoples who originated the Life Plan, those for whom life is an end in itself and the purpose of society is to promote and defend it, promoting equilibrium and harmony. Affected by contradictions and surrounded by difficulties, some peoples within the indigenous and popular movement named this term to act accordingly and have called on other peoples and processes to weave a jigra [a traditional hand-woven bag] of unity in order to make another necessary country possible. Those claiming ownership of a truth, such as that which is named in the Mandate, fail to understand it and deny it. No one can own the truth. Truths are beings that have their own lives, and they spread on their own, through the pathways of the conscience.

This article is not about any Colombian social movement in particular, though it names them; it is about the struggle between a Death Project and the Life Plans of peoples. Since the conquest, the indigenous movement has resisted, recovered lands and processes, struggled for autonomy, and finally, come to contribute to the collective weaving of alternatives without claiming to possess the answers. That simple and beautiful truth is a word that lights the path; now is the time that it be made into collective consciousness and actions, so that it may become freedom.

Revolution – Counter-revolution

In The Last Colonial Massacre [5], historical evidence brings its author, Greg Grandin, to conclude that Latin America is going through a permanent counter-revolutionary process. This counter-revolution is characteristically preventive: it is prepared and implemented in order to avoid a reaction from resistance processes. The revolutionary character of resistance is not defined from ideological positions but from the defense of freedom and self-determination facing the aggression of capital.

This revolution-counterrevolution dynamic is a result of the colonization of territories and the oppression and exploitation of peoples and wealth for the benefit of particular interests that serve the interests of regimes and institutions and their insatiable desire for accumulation. From the conquest until now, in each phase (colonial, republican, neoliberal, etc.), crucial counter-revolutionary strategies have been used to establish regimes on demand. Grandin studied history through the lives of social movement leaders, the Guatemalan resistance, uncovering from there the essence of continental resistance as grounded in history. Strategic flexibility, historical adaptability, and the systematic accumulation of experiences and knowledge are inherent to capitalist intervention. Since the conquest, the stability of regimes has depended on coercion and consent garnering the greatest legitimacy possible without sacrificing maximum accumulation.

Grandin’s conclusions are particularly valid in Colombia. Our history is the story of an armed robbery. The thief (a dynamic system projected by powers that develop their contradictions while competing for what they consider their own) wants more and more, and in every period, it seizes labor, exploits nature, and expropriates the wealth of peoples. It was once colonial, later multinational, and now it is being transnationalized. It disguises and hides itself in order to persuade. It usurps positions, dictates norms, makes promises, and invests calculatingly and only in return for greater benefits. It counts on partners and accomplices who identify with its interests and steers enormous resources acquired though robbery, repression, and the exercise of power spanning over more than five centuries. It accumulates knowledge, power, and force in order to rob. It is founded in hegemony. It is law, order, institutionalism, official truth, hidden lies, information and news, a source of employment, the only possibility for wealth and wellbeing. Having achieved hegemony, it exercises official terror – that is, the “right to the legitimate use of force” – complimented with the implementation of a dirty war perpetrated through death squads or paramilitary groups, essential for it to maintain itself. These repressive forces “serve and protect”, acquiring the legitimacy they need to subjugate peoples, which is their latest historical function.

As William Robinson explains [6], the current robbery is transnational and sophisticated. We live in a transition period towards the implementation of ‘global’ plans. The thief conquers by combining strategies, technologies, and policies, through diverse interest groups that compete in alliances, economic blocs, and tense conflicts in order to control resources, goods, and markets. They penetrate through the borders of countries, reaching every corner of world, transnationalizing every setting to integrate entire continents and submitting all peoples to new processes of production and accumulation. Hegemony has been achieved. The thief is reorganizing to exercise power from commercial and financial corporate conglomerates in whose service work the processes of accumulation. Corporations are controlled by elites that rotate their control of high government offices in the most powerful countries and multinational institutions. From there, they dictate and implement policies and steer the major sources of economic, military, and media power. These elites share an ideological identity and compete for the power they accumulate and control in varying degrees. So strong is the desire for control over strategic resources, labor and productive processes with maximum productivity at a minimum cost, and goods and capital markets, like the counter-revolutionary strategies, that it drives the process of transnational burglary and explains the current reality and trends. This is why terror, propaganda, and legislative recipes articulated and applied in diverse transnational settings are essential strategies of the armed robbery for economic accumulation in this phase of ‘global’ capital.

As Naomi Klein brilliantly documents in her most recent book [7], this armed robbery employs strategies of ‘shock’, which include delivering or benefiting from large scale attacks that shake and shock the populations of whole countries and regions to the point that they are left utterly vulnerable and dependent. They take advantage of this situation to apply their preferred prescription: “Economic shock”, a legacy of the Chicago School. Milton Friedman’s well-known prescription is understood as follows: “structural adjustment” to include commercial and financial ‘liberalization’ and the opening of the economy to global markets; ‘deregulation’ to remove the state from economic decision-making and the imposition of ‘labor flexibilization’; and ‘privatization’ of public companies and resources in the interest of accumulating private capital free from limitations such as the right to collective well-being. In this context, there is the necessity of ‘electric shock’ – that is, repression, terror, and torture applied across the board to ensure the preemptive destruction of the resistance of social movements. The strategy against peoples and social movements is currently being transnationalized under the ‘war on terrorism’. Terrorism is promoted by capital in order to justify the war and further bloat the enormous ‘security’ industry. The counter-revolutionary project displaces the confrontation between social movements and oppressors on the political-ideological terrain; this confrontation is pushed into the terrain of war in a bid to justify and legitimize aggression.

The Colombia Model

Colombia constitutes a particularly cruel yet efficient model of the armed robbery; the country is in a state of ‘permanent shock’ through the destruction of social movements to establish capitalist hegemony:

To begin with, Colombia has an accumulated history of ‘capitalist hegemony’, which has put down, controlled, and destroyed social movements for decades. Colombia is the ‘genocidal democracy’ [8] par excellence. Economic power has always utilized terror and violence, fundamental strategies to achieve its ends. To legitimize itself, it applies terror, communication devices, and propaganda framed by a parliamentary legalist regime with the semblance of a stable democracy. Electoral processes are repeated and carefully controlled (by economic powers, propaganda, and terror) in such a way that the ‘winners’ are those involved in exercising hegemony and defending an ‘institutional democratic order’. A war without an alternative is imposed on the people, whose involvement in alternatives is cited to legitimize repression. They are put down with terror, a circus of lies, and impoverishment, all of which force them to rummage in search of bare sustenance and keep their heads down in order to survive.

Second, the model has overcome crises and violent adjustment periods that correspond with transitions between the phases of capitalism and struggles of popular resistance, all the while accumulating the experience necessary to adapt without losing its essential characteristics.

The ‘Colombia Model’ reflects accumulated experiences in capital’s struggle against social movements. It is critical to recognize the exemplary heroism of resistance in Colombia. The sacrifice, creativity, diversity, and resurgence persist in spite of merciless persecution in disadvantageous conditions and under constant pressure. The model is just as strong as the resistance of peoples who have opposed it. It has been able to consolidate itself while social movements have been at a loss to do the same. Ours is a history marked by the phases of capital and reactive cycles of conflict whose result has seen social movements struggling to negotiate the conditions of their submission and exploitation, especially now that the economic model has been adapted and consolidated. The Colombia Model might not have come about if not for enormous external support (particularly that of the United States) extended to those in power to maintain a correlation of forces favorable to their interests and to impede the advancement of social movements. Popular resistance has confronted the model at every step, illuminating its contradictions and challenging the power structure to the point that it has created profound and diverse crises at critical junctures that have forced it to maneuver and concede concessions in order to survive. In the latest instance, crises have reinforced the model and have thus not liberated peoples from exploitation. Presently, the result has been a country in the hands of a few, who are beholden to global capitalism and have accumulated forces and capacities to subjugate peoples and reduce social movements to fighting for reforms and less denigrating conditions of exploitation, aspiring to a freedom that seems evermore distant and undefined.

Under these conditions, we arrive at the current period, one of neoliberal aggression that imposes the dismantlement of much fought-for rights and resistance struggles that span history. The establishment regards the majority of the population as disposable. The state is a feeble protector, with minimal wealth redistribution functions, social security, defense of fundamental rights, and the development of productive capacity and internal markets: it is becoming a transnational state, serving the interests of global corporations and handing over territory and resources. This transition is generating a crisis through the merciless implementation of elite-inserted structural adjustment plans handing over the national territory, wealth, resources, and labor to neoliberal globalization. The intentions of this plan are eloquently uncovered and exposed in a document produced by the government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, Visión Colombia 2019 [9], which states, for example: “ultimately, democracy is nothing more than the capacity to independently accept the results”.

The wars on terrorism, paramilitarism, and narcotrafficking, the aggressive legislative agenda, the government’s foreign policy, the establishment of US military bases and the “Democratic Security” policy, the negotiations of FTAs, the opening and handing over of resources, riches, savings, and labour to corporate power, the transformation of the countryside into monocrops for biofuels, the greatest and most profound humanitarian crisis in the continent, the worst human rights situation, and the implementation of Plan Colombia, and the articulation of other plans and initiatives for continental integration (PPP, IIRSA, etc.) are all expressions of this process of adjustment and enactment. The paramilitary project, supported from the US, is the adaptation of the Colombia Model to this transition period. It consists of the appropriation of the state by death squads [10] and local and national elites in the process of transnationalization for the extraction of wealth and value in the service of their corporate counterparts. It is a model that is projected from the Colombian national territory to the Andean region, the continent, and other contexts where global capital can be served by the lessons of this experience of combining horror and permanent war with laws and elections. In Colombia, the long-range plan of transnational capital is being implemented while serving the interests of governments, institutions, and individuals. The plan will surely be implemented as long as the resistance does not reveal its authors in order to stop them. The transnationalization of Colombia is coming about within a continental context marked by the strengthening of social and popular movements who empower political parties and bring them to power as a form of resistance to the neoliberal model. The development of the Colombian conflict and the luck of social movements in this country are transcendental for the future of continental resistance. The capacity to change the adverse correlation of forces, to understand, resist, and generate alternatives, depends on whether this model of terror and lies will continue to impose its death project from Colombia, or if it will be stopped in such a way that a country of owners without peoples becomes one of peoples without owners [11].

Coercion serves the economic project. The extermination strategy has been intensified, and its objectives continue to hit hard and selectively. Massacres, selective assassinations, disappearances, massive displacements, the entire dirty war, and the legal and constitutional reforms all respond to the annexation project euphemistically called “free trade”. For this, much fought-for rights are revoked and fundamental liberties crushed. Progressive impoverishment, unemployment, casual work and underemployment, and the dismantlement of already reduced social security through the implementation of structural adjustment, condemn the majority to complete vulnerability while they establish the conditions for the impossibility of peaceful social struggle and the criminalization and persecution of social protest. The Colombian territory is being divided up by megaprojects, multinational extractive operations, the cultivation of biofuels, and integration initiatives and plans. This explains the impoverishment of the rural population, the forced displacement of more than 3 million people, the decrease in food production and higher prices, dependency, and hunger. The horrifying statistics and abundant documentation speak for themselves [12].

Manufacturing Consent

Consent is maintained through a sophisticated propaganda device to penetrate the imagination, confuse reality, and distort memory. Hegemony’s version is imposed. Poverty, the official version tells us, is the poor’s own fault: they oblige the state to spend money on them. Thus it is argued that spending must be reduced in order to reduce poverty. The redistributive spending of the state is cut while military spending is increased in order to repress people with force. The war itself depends on the investment of public resources for the benefit of private companies who generate enormous profits for a few owners in whose pockets wealth is concentrated. That wealth is accumulated with the cost of exploitation and unemployment that deepen the social conflict and promote the war.

Consumption, entertainment, and fear work together to hide the truth with an illusory, official version. People are entertained while they are being killed and exploited. The president orders to “fight, fight, fight” while he asserts that, in Colombia, there is neither a war nor an armed conflict. And there are many who believe him. Power is a permanent act of propaganda served not only by the mass media and manipulated official information and statistics; the state itself, courtesy of the executive, provides public spectacles such as “community consultations” and invests in pet programs like “Families in Action” and “Ranger Families”, programs of the executive’s discretion that replace the already dismantled social security system and essential public services. The regime, supported by enormous budgets presented as “foreign aid” from the United States, pays for expert contractors to apply their accumulated international experience in fabricating realities [13]. The official language that hides, entertains, and subdues is the lie, which is used to generate, be an accomplice to, and reproduce, and promote the official version. As paramilitary terror massacres and intimidates, escorts megaprojects and transnationals, and accumulates power across the entire country, the victims listen to the president triumphantly boast that his government “dismantled paramilitarism”, garnering public support because, according to him, it deserves to be recognized as a political actor. Power mounts “false positives”: attacks and murders organized by the state that cause victims and are acts of propaganda asserted with arguments laced with blood and terror designed so that the official version cannot be questioned, thereby justifying the policy of “blood and fire”. The propaganda works: the president has been re-elected, the government maintains popularity above 75 per cent in the midst of fear and misery. Football has more viewers, and Shakira and Juanes generate more mobilization than the 3 million displaced and reports from the victims of the regime. Those who dare to speak the truth are accused of lying, branded with epithets like “miserable” by the president himself, murdered, disappeared, or forced into exile [14, 15]. The propaganda machine is so sophisticated that it takes advantage of condemnations of the regime to promote it as democratic and transparent. For example, the process investigating the paramilitary infiltration of the establishment is presented as official evidence of the regime’s commitment to justice. The numerous condemnations of the state for crimes against humanity in international courts are written off as things of the past and settled, using public funds for inappropriate, insufficient, and reluctant compensation, which constitute, according to the government, its dedication to justice. Torture, disappearances, and selective assassinations are blamed on the victims. Official propaganda denies responsibility while it singles out, defames, and accuses. When it must confess, it does so only to demonstrate its commitment to truth and justice [16].

The Insurgency

Colombia is a country at war, a war in which the defeated are the people and the social movements and the winner is the transnational project that takes advantage of it and sees it as a means for imposing its interests and policies.

Insurgent movements are a constant in the history of the Colombian conflict. Their presence is explained and justified as a reaction against the establishment. The guerrillas are social actors that exercise and promote the armed struggle as resistance and, from their perspective, the only viable alternative to resolve the Colombian conflict. The insurgent movements have been diverse in their orientations, ideological positions, presences, and strategies regarding the use of force. Their political-military tradition, permanence in time, reading of reality from the revolutionary war perspective, structure, and experience have all contributed to their defense of the use of arms and war as inevitable and necessary for changing the correlation of forces in order to assume power. Their military capacity, in particular that of the FARC-EP, and widespread presence in the entire national territory, are both determinants in the dynamics of their relations with the general population, social and popular movements, and the establishment. History explains and helps one understand their intolerance towards social movements that will not lay down or clearly back the armed struggle. The insurgency exercises an open opposition, confrontation, and even persecution of people and movements that question their actions. The dynamic of permanent war, the magnitude of the forces within it, the characteristics of the territory, and above all, the historical phases of the conflict with the establishment have led the insurgency to vary from acting as political movements in arms or insurgent armies with political discourses and objectives; that is, between ideas supported by force and force supported by ideas. The unfruitful processes of dialogue, followed predictably and inevitably in order to deepen the war, have extended and deteriorated the conflict and at the same time raised obstacles that appear insurmountable for finding a negotiated peace, while the same dynamic persists. The permanent use of violence against the people tends to radicalize the insurgency in the use of force, swelling its support bases and ranks. Pain, thirst for revenge, social injustice, powerlessness, and the deterioration of living conditions that result from the aggression of the transnational project push people towards the ranks of the guerrilla. Just as those who criticize the establishment are branded “terrorists” or “guerrillas in disguise”, those who do not submit to the orientations of the guerrilla are branded paramilitaries and become military objectives. The indigenous and popular movement is a victim of this trap, which has taken the lives of many leaders and keeps the population down through threats and persecution. The resistance of peoples and social movements facing the project of the establishment is simultaneously a demand for autonomy from the armed actors. The Indigenous peoples have been very clear in this position, and it has cost them dearly. A movement for a Humanitarian Accord is beginning to surge. Its most visible voice is Professor Moncayo [17] (who walked more than 1,000 kilometers to Bogotá to demand it). He is also a spokesperson for the majority of those who reject oppression and state policies and who are also victims of the guerrilla, those who cannot be called terrorists by the government. They demand social justice, organize resistance, and unequivocally reject the insurgency and its actions against the population. Rebellion cannot be the exclusive and excluding terrain of the insurgency; it is a fundamental right of the population and social movements that are trying to defend and exercise it in the midst of threats.

The Vicissitudes of the Social Movements

As Héctor Mondragón duly points out [18], the impact of the dirty war and the Colombia Model on social movements is undeniable:

“As with how the extermination of more than 2,000 trade unionists permitted the demolition of the labor code through ‘labor reforms,’ the liquidation of public hospitals, the privatization of the utilities sector, Telecom, and the Cartagena oil refinery, and the elimination of ECOPETROL’s right to control 50% of all oil and gas exploitation, the current extermination of the indigenous leadership has become the basis for the demolition of hard-earned rights recognized in the Constitution of 1991 and in Law 21 of 1991, which accepts Convention 169 of the ILO.”

The neoliberal agenda moves forward, effectively “cleansing” active sectors and movements that are resisting and have not yet been dismantled. The campesino sector has been hit hard. Now, the statistics of the dirty war confirm that the death project is showing no mercy with the indigenous movement and with the movements that are defending the right to education. Wholesale aggression and “permanent shock” have forced the social movements into a position in which they are fundamentally reactive, fragmented, and sectorial. Through pressure mechanisms, aggression affects the agenda of social movements, distorting the character of resistance. The victims, defenders of human rights, fundamental liberties, public services, and labor rights are all being organized. Critical junctures and claims tend to carry more weight than the fundamental issues. Mistrust, sectarianism, and the radicalization of ideological positions provide obstacles for unity and closeness among movements. The dynamics of the market favor the institutionalization of social movements and, in turn, their dependence on national and international assistance (which tends to be bureaucratic and hierarchical) or on the enormous and diverse NGO sector, where they are forced to compete for resources, control, and specialization in specific thematic areas. The lack of sufficient political clarity, combined with strategies of propaganda, cooptation, and financing, generate confusion and distortions that have led social movements to displace the priority of resistance. The process lived by the exemplary Iniciativo de Mujeres por la Paz [the Women for Peace Initiative] [19], a broad coalition that was recently dismantled, could be an effect of these pressures.

In spite of representing around 20 per cent of the population, the Afro-Colombians are not a unified social movement, nor have they been consolidated into a force seeking possibilities to transform the reality. They are, with the indigenous population, the main victims of repression, exclusion, transfer, and subjugation. With the support of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras [20], one of the most admirable Afro-Colombian social movements, the communities of the Pacific Coast are leading an exemplary struggle for the defense of their culture and ancestral territories, moving toward forcing Colombian legislation to recognize their rights [21]. Once they began the process of seeking collective title to their territories, they became priorities for the armed actors, megaprojects, and biofuel cultivators. They have been put down by paramilitary aggression with massacres and massive displacement. The suffering, pain, and bravery of these communities elude description. The challenge of consolidating Afro-Colombian unity based on their history and identity is enormous and seems far off. All forces arrive acting with varying degrees of success in dividing and debilitating these communities that, once united in their common history and the articulation of their social movements along the lines of resistance, pose a fundamental force for popular struggle.

In spite of this reactive, dependent, and fragmented tendency, the social movements are identifying the neoliberal agenda of aggression, its pervasiveness, and the relationship that exists among its diverse impacts. Integrating initiatives (such as the Gran Coalicion Democratica [22], though it is not a social movement) continue to articulate the conscious resistance of the population facing a referendum cited by the president as a means for validating structural adjustment through popular support at the polls. The government could not obtain the quantity of votes required for the referendum results to be valid. The struggle against the FTA has continued to articulate resistance and mobilization to the point that it has yet to be approved in the US. Although there have been huge social mobilizations spanning the length and breadth of the country in recent years, there persists an enormous gap between the unifying discourse and concrete practices of social movements. Isolated actions have allowed the government to violently repress mobilizations, which ought to have generated solidarity or been avoided so that their objectives might have been achieved. In moments of crisis, there are social movements that assume a misguided political position and fail to associated themselves with the popular struggle or with other social movements. This could very well be due to desires to lead or to negotiate their particular interests with the establishment without the “inconvenience” of other processes. In practice, this position is self-destructive and damages the entire resistance process.

The Path to Follow

The transformation of the social movements into a political force with mass support that could change the correlation of forces has not been possible in Colombia. Every attempt in this direction (and there have been many throughout history) faces the repressive intolerance and bloody persecution of the regime. The most well known case is that of the Patriotic Union [Unión Pátriótica], whose militants and leadership were exterminated [23]. With this followed economic conditions, adversarial and mistrusting institutions, sectarianism, and differences that even today remain insurmountable. The results of the 2006 presidential elections established the Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA) as the party opposed to the regime, above the traditional parties, and the party of the left with the greatest amount of electoral support in the history of the country. The PDA is far from having consolidated itself as a force of the masses, and for the moment, it is a coalition of diverse political tendencies organized around an “ideology of unity” [24].

Judging by the lessons of history, the future of the PDA depends on the solid and coherent advancement of three components: 1. To define and defend a political platform that identifies it in principle and practice as a true opposition party to the regime and to capital, 2. To increase electoral backing and to occupy public offices of the state in a manner that is in line with that political platform, and 3. To consolidate and respond to the popular agenda that arises from a mass front shaped by social movements that are conscious, diverse, and have the capacity to understand it and lend it continuity. Historically, political platforms and mass-based fronts have ended up subordinated to the dynamics of the electoral system. Consequently, the popular project is submitted to pragmatism and conflict among leaders and factions that struggle and maneuver from positions of authority when occupying parliamentary and directive posts. That reciprocal relationship between the PDA and the social movements will surely define its future and permanence. The example of the FTA demonstrates an exemplary path to follow. While the cabinet of the PDA fought in the parliamentary arena against this agreement, it also worked in pedagogical processes to illuminate the impacts of this perverse project and was united in actions of popular resistance. If the legislative agenda of the cabinet organizes consciousness and mobilization, the PDA and the social movements will be strengthened. They need each other to both construct a viable alternative and defend themselves from the aggression of the regime.

While the regime maintains hegemonic power, it also faces a grave crisis of legitimacy due to the exercise of terror, the deterioration of the living conditions and quality of life of the population, the isolation of the country in alternative political processes, environmental destruction, corruption, the obscene concentration of wealth and power, and the handing over of sovereignty to corporate power. History provides clear clues regarding the path for social movements to follow in order to deepen the crisis and generate alternatives. These include:

1. We cannot change what we fail to understand. It is necessary to learn and understand the totality of capital’s plan of aggression and develop the capacity to see its impacts completely without getting lost in particular and disarticulated struggles from the pain of every process and people.

2. It is necessary to stop capital’s continued displacement of the political-ideological terrain in favor of armed confrontation.

3. [Social Movements] ought to design practical strategies and coherent actions in order to not allow aggression to force the resistance to have a character that is mainly reactive and fragmented with disarticulated agendas. Those who only resist are condemned to being the aggressor because they only understand the agenda of the oppressor. We cannot do it alone. We need each other in order to resist and transform the reality.

4. It is indispensable to recuperate the memory of struggle and accumulated experiences. The aggressors have done this. Resistance is a struggle from the conscience of peoples and a pedagogical force based on memory.

5. To struggle from the pain of every people and movement, but to promise to feel and share the pain of others, both in word and in action, are the basis of a unifying agenda for resistance that knows no borders.

6. If one lacks one’s own proposals, one must accept and negotiate those of others. Capital has plans, objectives, and strategies. It is time that the social movements also have them, so that they become viable alternatives.

Another necessary world is possible. Those who live in order to accumulate have sowed death and pain for Colombia. A different project (a counter-hegemony), in which life is an end and not a means for some to accumulate, is no longer an option; rather, it is an obligation of peoples in reciprocal solidarity so that there will be a future.

Manuel Rozental is a Colombian surgeon and communicator and member of the Pueblos en Camino Collective. He is a long-time activist working with indigenous communities in Northern Cauca, Colombia and the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN).
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1. Nuestra lucha es mucho más que un sólo tema de la agenda
[ 07/26/2007] [Source: Asociaciòn de Cabildos Indìgenas del Norte del Cauca-ACIN ] [Author: Tejido de Comunicación para la Verdad y la Vida]. http://www.nasaacin.net/noticias.htm?x=5455
2. Mandato Indígena y Popular del Primer Congreso Itinerante de los Pueblos. Santiago de Cali, Septiembre de 2004. http://www.nasaacin.net/mandato_indigena_popular.htm
3. Introducción del Mandato Indígena y Popular: http://www.nasaacin.net/mandato_indigena_popular.htm
4. Libertad para la Madre Tierra: http://www.nasaacin.net/libertad_madre_tierra.htm
5. Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago University Press 2004.
6. Robinson, William I. Una Teoría sobre el Capitalismo Global. Ediciones Desde Abajo 2007.
7. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Knopf Canada 2007.
8. Giraldo, Javier. Colombia esta Democracia Genocida. Equipo Nizkor 1994. http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/colombia/giraldo1.html
9. Departamento Nacional de Planeación, Colombia. Visión Colombia II Centenario: 2019. Planeta; DNP 2005
10. Unpunished and on the way to legalization (Law 975 of 2005), they act simultaneously as a political and economic power and as terrorists.
11. Tejido de Comunicación ACIN. Declaración final de la movilización Por el País que queremos. http://www.nasaacin.net/noticias.htm?x=5794 2007.
12. Comisión Colombiana de Juristas. Informe 2007. http://www.actualidadcolombiana.org/pdf/Informe_ACNUDH_Colombia_2007_version_entrecomillada.pdf
13. Coronell, Daniel. El gentil señor Rendón. Semana.com. 08/29/2005. http://www.nasaacin.net/noticias.htm?x=1334
14. Revista Semana. Escuche la confrontación Uribe-Coronell. http://www.semana.com/wf_InfoArticulo.aspx?IdArt=106790
15. FLIP. Estado de la Libertad de Prensa en Colombia. Enero-Junio de 2007 http://www.flip.org.co/veralerta.php?idAlerta=220
16. Among many cases, the murder of Jaime Gómez is telling. Gómez, Diana. Sí…Asesinaron a Jaime Gómez, 09/27/2007 http://www.nasaacin.net/noticias.htm?x=6127 y http://www.nasaacin.net/noticias.htm?x=6160
17. Gustavo Moncayo El Caminante de la Paz. El Colombiano. http://www.elcolombiano.com/blogs/caminodelapaz/
18. Mondragón, Héctor. Estatuto Rural Hijo de la Parapolítica. Indymedia, 6 July, 2007. http://colombia.indymedia.org/news/2007/07/69053.php
19. To know more about this extraordinary initiative, see http://www.mujeresporlapaz.org/vocesocho08.htm
20. PCN, see http://www.renacientes.org/
12. For information about Law 70, see http://www.renacientes.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=113&Itemid=94
22. About the Gran Coalición Democrática see http://www.actualidadcolombiana.org/boletin.shtml?x=268
23. Encuentro Nacional de Víctimas. See http://www.indepaz.org.co/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=525
24. Ver www.polodemocratico.net