¿El Estado colombiano perdió el Cauca?

0:07 I' m Roberto Pombo. Welcome to my questions. An average rush program sponsored by Cafán family compensation box. Cauca is one of the departments historically hardest hit by violence and drug trafficking. Guerrillas for military and drug traffickers make or have made a presence in this territory. Why this department has been hit so hard by violence. Racism is the reason for state abandonment. For this chapter. We spoke with journalist and former politician Alberto Casas, with the senator and former negotiator of Pase Humberto de la Calle, with effigenia Valencia de la Capitánía Afrocolombiana de Paez Cauca, with the writer Juan Esteban Constain, with Leonardo Correa, Regional Coordinator of Monitere Analysis and Information of the United Nations Office against Drugs and Crime. I am Roberto Pomo and this is chapter ninety- one of my questions. Welcome, you' ve had a debacle. This is a term I frequently use in this program. Almost everyone felt that feeling a fleeting impression of having been somewhere or having done something before when common sense tells us that this is not possible. It is believed that up to ninety- seven percent of the population has experienced Shabu at least once in their lives and sixty - seven percent experience it regularly. You feel a kind of tingling and a silent alarm telling you that that conversation with that person had it before. This

1:38 normal phenomenon began to frighten him. Recently when I read a story about a man for whom this ceased to be a mere momentary sensation to become a problem. This is the case of a man from the UK who presented a case of persistent jau and was so frequent that he avoided watching television, listening to radio and watching newspapers, because he felt and had already seen everything experienced before for several minutes, and sometimes even longer. The patient felt that he was reliving experiences. There was even a time when this poor man went to cut his hair, but when he entered the hairdresser he had the feeling of Deshaboo. Then the jabood of Jabon was experienced. This happened nine years ago, but since the news, more people have come up with the same problem.

2:27 Co- author of the report, Dora Christine Wells, at Sheffie Harran University, says more people are coming to light and several of them have sought it from the United States and Australia. And though this happened in two thousand and fifteen, the nineteen Covid seemed to revive him. According to an article published in the American Journal of Geriatical Psychiatry by psychiatrists in the United States, one of the effects left by prolonged covid is that of persistent jabul. However, it is a problem that almost always affects elderly patients who have others such as psychiatric units. I read this last caveat and felt calmer, but I quickly became concerned about something we suffered as a country. This is a widespread tee fu that we have been with for several decades, or some would say that even centuries and that we have not been able to solve. And it is the repetition of problems that seem to have fallen apart as if dozens of governments and reforms had not passed. One of these regions is the department of Cauca.

3:27 Among many other reasons, I noticed for an article in the Diario del Tiempo entitled Cauca Dies of Abandonment. It is a chronicle that narrates the arrival in jip through a road uncovered to a municipality of this department, in which the police station was attacked by one of the multiple illegal armed groups that fight their control and they are the ones who command in their territory. The text also states that their share of the country' s gross domestic product is one - four percent and that the Caucasians have had to go out on the streets to demonstrate state abandonment. But the saddest of all of the above is that this article was written in October of a thousand nine hundred and ninety- one. Although thirty- three years have passed, today a similar report could be written with some slight differences, such as that so many years after this department ' s economy represents one coma eight percent of the country' s gross domestic product. It is enough to see the sad recent events about the public order situation to feel that we are trapped in a loop in the time that is untiringly repeated looking for news about the cauca of recent months is to find the following. In March, the dissidences of the park known as the central state murdered the indigenous Carmelina in July of sixty- two years. This crime led to the lifting of the ceasefire agreed between government delegations and the guerrillas in retaliation.

4:49 Then came several attacks in municipalities of this department, as in Miranda, where a child was the victim of an explosive, or the attack with explosives at the po station and Banco Agrario in the municipality of Moralis, where two police patrolmen were killed. The President reacted and said through his account from x to uro quotes, the situation in Cauca is unacceptable. We will not allow the population to continue to be frightened by terrorist attacks. I have asked the Minister of Defence to move immediately with all the military colpura to Cauca and a permanent security council will be set up to close Comillas. Since then, the Government has declared a total offensive and ensured that no new fire will be agreed.

5:31 This is what the Minister of Defense, Ivan Velázquez, said, which is not even the exclusive action against the security forces, but in that claim that some have affirmed this organization in the south- eastern part of the country, that a cessation be agreed again and in this there is an emphatic response from the Minister of Defence. There will be no further cessation with the Central General Staff in the South West. The public order situation is at a critical level and that is shown by the following situation, boys. At this moment the confrontation began. So, in case of armed conflict, we' re going to do the following, William, we' re going to protect heart and we' re going to protect life. We' re going to throw ourselves on the floor side by side and with your legs, you' re going to protect your stomach. In case there' s an explosion that makes us vibrate, don' t give us internal bleeding. This is the voice of a Spanish teacher at the educational institution, José María Obando in Corinth.

6:39 This is a drill in the event of a confrontation or a terrorist attack. But, as I was saying, we' re not talking about this being a novelty. Sadly, Cauca is a department that has historically been affected by violence. Some point out that in order to find the root of the violence, it would be necessary centuries ago to go to the colony, but the current conflict is more similar to that which began in the second half of the twentieth century, as in many other cases, for a land dispute. How this history of conflict began that the Cauca continues to live today. I looked for journalist Alberto Casa Santa María and this he told me. The conflict in Cauca has its origin in the land, because the state was very large and there was a lot of large landowners until in the first quarter of the 20th century there was a quintinist indigenous leader Lame, who is dedicated to defending the interests of peasants, indigenous people and Afros. That circumstance led him to prison and never reached a satisfactory agreement. Since then, the Cauca Department has been territorially suitable for the insurgency to be organized by the geographical location of the department.

8:09 Since a thousand nine hundred and eleven, this conflict has started and never, as I said, could be resolved. I believe that this is the same problem that we are currently living in, in which drug trafficking feeds guerrillas and guerrillas bring the insecurity faced by the department without the State having the capacity to solve it. The cauque has a particularity, which is that it is a department that houses the largest number of indigenous people in the country, more than 190, 000 people, who represent about twenty percent of the total departmental.

8:54 This population has been one of the most affected by the conflict and on the part of all. According to the National Historical Memory Center, the Cauque is the department with the largest number of indigenous victims. However, the indigenous population, while the most affected by violence, is not the only one. In the Cauca. The Afro- Colombian population is the fifth largest in the country. Violence, of course, has also been racist. But that is what I will talk about later, and that is that Cauca has been a department particularly affected by the armed conflict in general. According to figures of two thousand and eighteen of the DAN, the population of the department of Cauca is one million, two hundred and forty- three thousand and five hundred three persons and, according to data from the Victims Unit with a December cut of two thousand and twenty- three, there are five hundred and twenty- six thousand and eight hundred and forty- two victims of the armed conflict, that is, almost half of its population is victims of violence. A scandalous number.

9:48 The half- open truth verified that in the first five months of this year, in this department there were thirteen murders of social leaders, three murders of strong ex- combatants before the peace agreement, five murders of law enforcement agents, two zero displaced persons and more than five hundred confined. And although the armed conflict has been a constant in this department, the peace process with the FARK helped it decrease or at least for a short period, according to the figures of the National Institute of Legal Medicine, between two thousand fifteen and two thousand sixteen, the rate of residences of the department fell to nineteen four per hundred zero inhabitants. However, by two thousand and eighteen, the same number rose almost twice as high as a peak. In two thousand twenty- two with fifty- six one homicides for every hundred and zero inhabitants. And it is that, while the signing of the peace agreement with a breath of breath, several versions point to the fact that the failure to comply with the agreement caused the violence to return and increase. The figures for this argument are quite eloquent, according to a document that collects the risks for communities and human rights defenders in Eucauca, made by indepacious from November of two thousand sixteen, when the peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas was signed, until February of two thousand and twenty- two hundred and eighty- six peace leaders have been murdered in this department. During the same period, one hundred and forty- six murders have occurred against leaders and leaders who belong to and defend the rights of ethnic communities in that department. Indigenous people are the most affected and account for one

11:22 hundred and sixteen such cases, or forty per cent. Perhaps the saddest fact as if the others were not hopeless, is that in that period four hundred and fourteen peace- signatories people who left the weapons to build peace, have been killed in the cauca. Algeria is the municipality that has been the most victim of this type of crime, with ten passers- by signatories murdered and many of these death numbers have not been given for isolated crimes. Between November of two thousand sixteen and February of two thousand twenty- four, sixty- two massacres have been perpetrated with two hundred and fifteen victims in Cauca. According to the analysis of the public reason, the theft of the resources of OCAT Paz, the oblivion of the national plan of substitution and the lack of progress in the substitution of coca crops, which doubled after the signing of the peace agreement, are largely the reason for the resurgence and multiplication of the armed groups in this department. The Government of former President Duque came with the task of consolidating a peace process that he opposed as a congressman. But in addition, it was a peace process that little was possible to implement. In June of two thousand twenty- two, the Crock Institute published its sixth report on the implementation of the peace agreement, which analyzed the period between December of two thousand twenty and November of two thousand twenty- one, and found that, of the more than five hundred provisions derived from the final agreement, thirty percent were complete, nineteen percent in the intermediate state, thirty- seven percent in the minimum state and fifteen percent had not yet begun its implementation in the first year

12:56 of current government. The figures in this regard have not improved. One of the conclusions of the seventh version of this report is that levels very similar to those of the previous four years have been maintained. In two thousand twenty- three, only thirty- two percent of the provisions had been completed. Nineteen per cent are in intermediate state, thirty- nine per cent in minimum state and ten per cent had not begun execution. Compared to its previous version, progress has not been much. How much the breach of the peace agreement with the FARC has to do with the violence that the Cauca is experiencing today. I asked the senator and former negotiator by the way, Humberto de la Calle, and this answered me. I think we' re losing Cauca. I would like to say by this that the conflicts of public order in Cauca have come from much earlier and there has been an almost permanent confrontation, but now there is a new situation. It is a war between illegal groups that war with each other against a relatively powerless, somewhat stupefied State. Then, frankly, it seems to me that this is a new, unprecedented situation and that, therefore, it really demands a meditation that, hopefully this would be truly national about new strategies in relation to the loss of control of the territories.

14:16 It seems to me that the government was right to try to innovate the negotiation methodology, which is where the so- called grassland arises. But what we are seeing now is, frankly, a situation of uncontrollability, confined populations, and the registration of illegal groups. In short, there really is a much deeper and more delicate thing here about how to seek an order without prejudice to the process of change. I think that should be the central element. Cauca is a department in dispute over several armed groups according to the foundation pass and reconciliation. In this facility there are four armed groups, the central state or dissidences of the Fargas, which has presence in thirty- six of the forty - two LLN municipalities in twenty- five municipalities, the Second Marquetalia in twelve and the Cterist self- defenses of Colombia, also known as the Gulf clan of the Gaitanist army of Colombia. In one municipality and in the midst of this dispute over the territory is the civilian population most affected. President Petro' s government' s grass project, to which we already devoted a chapter to seventy- five, I recommend it is ambitious. He was born with the purpose of starting peace processes with some armed groups, for political purposes and submission to as many other armed groups as the paramilitaries. Despite the ambitious aim of consolidating peace in the country, it has not been easy, as can be seen. But beyond confrontations and terrorist attacks, these armed structures have gained ground

15:52 in society because they exercise control over the daily lives of the Caucasians. They engage in communicated projects, build roads to distribute school materials. However, they are also linked to drug trafficking. They divide communities and eliminate leaders who oppose them from their power over the population. They are that in March at the handing over of an ambulance that acquired matters of communal action of San Juan de Micai, corregimiento del tambo. With own resources he attended a group of people who were not invited to cut the tape from appearing in the photos. It was Nefson Enrique Ríos, known as Glasses, and other members of the central state. The expectation with the table of dialogue with this guerrilla was very high, but the breaking of Caesar fire. The offensive by the national army and the constant terrorist attacks of this group wiped out the illusions of the Caucasians.

16:45 At this point and with all that panorama, it only remains for me to ask myself he lost the state to the department of Cauca. This was answered by the Caucasian writer, Juan Esteban Costaín, because the answer, unfortunately, is that yes, in Cauca, the state has long lost control. It ' s not a recent phenomenon. It has been happening for decades, however, it is increasing day by day. We could say that in Cauca the paradox is fulfilled that it is a department that could not be worse. And yet it gets worse every day. There is a category of political science, a widely discussed concept, which is that of the failed State, a State that cannot fulfill its essential aims in the Cauca of the Colombian State. It is a failed State because in the dimension of sovereignty it lost control of territory and the monopoly of force and in the dimension of legitimacy it cannot guarantee to anyone the basic right of citizenship. Many of us come to the conclusion that in Cauca the only ways that work are the paths of fact, because there, moreover, all the conflicts of Colombian history, the conflicts of the land, the class conflicts, the ethnic conflicts overlap. It is a desolate situation

18:19 and sadly, the history of the Cauca state abandonment and the presence of armed groups is also crossed by drug trafficking. The presence of these economies in the department is long and their roots are strong. In the communities they found in marijuana and ancestral coca. Income possibilities according to the UN integrated crop and licit monitoring system. In two thousand twenty- two, Cauca ranks fourth in the departments with the largest area planted with coca crops and contributes eleven percent of the national totar. With twenty- six thousand twenty- three hectares increased four percent compared to the previous year of its forty- two municipalities in twenty- six and the presence of these crops the train of five percent. They are concentrated in Tambo and, according to data from the Colombian Drug Observatory, the trend of cultivation of hectares cultivated with drugs and visits is increasing in the 1970s.

19:11 Coca- related activities and views in Cauca began to take shape and end illicit crops. As it has not been taught, history would not be simple in its passage through Popayán. President Peto said that the central government was opposed to crop substitution. It was that we wanted to come true. One of the paragraphs that were written at the first point of cessation. A protocol will be given to the fire to initiate the process of substitution of illicit crops. At the second meeting we said let' s do protocol now. They said no, not the whole MC, but the Cauca. Ugly for some, because some still think, I no longer, of the old wars and struggles, even revolutionary, that have passed through Cauca. For Cauca, passed almost all of Colombia' s violence in all its history. But that has nothing to do with the failure to make a crop substitution protocol. Unless you don' t want to, it' s because you want to keep cluttering and in addition to coca leaf crops. In Cauca there is a particularity and is that it also has a high concentration of marijuana cultivation. According to a report of indepacity, the municipalities of Caloto, Corinth, Jambalo, Miranda and Toribu are the main productive enclave of marijuana in the country, and this activity ended up becoming the main sustenance of thousands of families struggling with the difficulties of traditional agricultural economies, impoverished in part by the economic opening of the 1990s, which weighed the import of food and the impulse of the groindustry. The municipalities of Corinth,

20:47 Miranda and Toribiu make up what is known as the marijuana triangle, in which it is estimated that there are approximately sixteen thousand to nineteen zero growers, each with an average production capacity of about five hundred marijuana a year. As in many businesses, marijuana had its time of bonanza, which caused these municipalities to receive more population, more houses were built, public services were installed and the cost of living rose. And as happened with the coca leaf, marijuana growers are in crisis today because of the low price they are paid and that cost of living that went up by the bonanza, today is unpayable for many. According to the indepacity report, indigenous authorities said that the territory is disharmonized on behalf of the marijuana economy and that today it is difficult to find time to work other crops because they got used to the high daily payments of marijuana crops against which an agricultural producer cannot compete. I looked for Leonardo Correa, Regional Coordinator for Analysis, Monitoring and Information of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to ask him about marijuana and coca crops and drug trafficking, the symptom or the result of state abandonment. To answer this question it is important to take into account factors that make the situation in that department very complex.

22:07 While there has been a low state presence, in some cases, illegal armed groups have also taken advantage of factors such as land tenure disputes or marginalization of indigenous communities to promote drug trafficking. But they are not drug traffickers, but illegal mining, among other activities outside the law. In the department of Cauca. Some more recent monitoring data on NC coca crops show that between the year two thousand sixteen and two thousand twenty- two, the area planted with coca in Cauca doubled from twelve six hundred hectares to twenty- six hundred hectares. In the department four productive enclaves are located and that is where the shrubs become up to two four times more productive, that is, coca. There it is clearly more productive than in the rest of the country. Another important factor to take into account is the new characteristics of drug trafficking that do not have a visible head that controls business, which generates a staggered scenario of violence among groups outside the law that dispute over territorial control and have converted the department of Cauca is a functional territory for illegality, accentuating the marginalization of communities, the violation of human rights and a sustained scene of uncertainty due to the interference of criminal organizations present in the territory. Of course, violence and drug trafficking are not the only problems in Cauca. As if that were not enough, poverty and hunger are also part of this crisis. According to the Dane figures in two thousand twenty- two, in this department, eighteen coma three percent of

23:37 the population lived in multi- monthly poverty in rural areas. The figures go up to twenty- three comma six percent in the rural area of Cauca. The majority of workers in households, ninety- five comma two percent, have informal jobs, seventy- three percent of rural households have low levels of education and thirty- seven comma six did not have access to an improved water source and, according to the Dane Labour Market Bulletin, in March this year, the capital of the department of Popayán was ranked as the fourth most unemployed city in the country, with a rate of fifteen comma nine percent. On the other hand, the map of hunger in Colombia, an initiative of the Banco de Alimentos y Es de Colombia, showed that among the municipalities with the highest risk of hunger in Colombia is almaguer in Cauca. Forced confinement by illegal armed groups is a silent and serious effect of the armed conflict. Those who must be sheltered in their homes must choose between going out for sustenance and food or being killed for violating a curfew. This has exacerbated the problem of food insecurity, as the departments hit hardest by mobility restrictions are those in the Colombian Pacific.

24:48 It is estimated that in Cauca there are 4, 000 confined inhabitants and the prevalence of food insecurity is thirty- two percent. Land invasions by some indigenous groups and very frequent blocks to Pan- American life have also helped to keep the situation from stabilizing. According to reports from guilds, sugar growers and Afro communities in the indigenous region, more than 8, 000 hectares of private land have been seized in northern Cauca for the past five years. There have also been incidents such as burning of machinery and cultures. The attention between entrepreneurs, peasants, Afro- transporting communities of indigenous people is increasing and these roads are being taken. In fact, the situation is only getting worse for many people. The abandonment to which the Colombian State has submitted to the Department of Cauca can be explained as a racist policy. The problem of land in these regions is old and it is a struggle that has given indigenous people, Afro - Colombian communities and peasants who gravitate as it is analyzed, reimagine a zin tang about inequality, the monopoly of land and limited access to fundamental and essential rights of the Afro- Colombian, indigenous and peasant majorities living in the department.

26:00 This is evidenced by the systematic killing of indigenous leaders and afru They also speak of racialized violence, the pointing of several politicians to these communities as guerrillas or insurgents, or the suggestion of a referent to divide the department into twists, one for the indigenous and one for the mestizos, as suggested by the locksmith for Rome. Valencia talks about racism still taking hold against this department, but I don' t want to be joking take the floor on this issue. That' s why I looked for effigenia Valencia, who is part of the Afro- Colombian capital of Cauca country, to tell me how much racism there is in state abandonment, what does Cauca live? This he told me, therefore, to see that on the subject of what is so much racism in and in the abandonment of the state, we mean that yes, as an Afro- descendant community, we have been discriminated against on the labor issue, on the educational issue, on the opportunities that, as an ethnic group we have before other synical groups as well, and because it is also noteworthy that from our brother' s government, Elias Larraondo, we have been gaining other spaces, but we still need to get the actions to that deep Colombia, to that deep Cauca, to those remote municipalities where the Black people still

27:33 need much support from the state government. The Colombian State, long ago, seems to have lost control and authority over the department of Cauca so that they sadly remain in the hands of armed groups that manage their economy and do social control. The civilian population has then had to wage a double struggle, on the one hand, against oblivion and governments and, on the other, against bullets and the seriousness of the violent. But Cauca is much more than violence and drugs. It is a department that brings together the Grand Duke be natural, social, Riendic culture. And if to this day the Colombian state seems to have lost its control, hopefully it is not a permanent situation as if we were living a chronic djago. I am Roberto Pombo and this was chapter ninety and one of my questions we see in the next chapter from this moment on. This chapter of my questions is available on all podcast platforms. This episode was made possible by Kafan. Family compensation box. Dirección Roberto Pombo, Producción General, juan Abel Gutiérrez, editorial advisor, Daniel san Peerrospina, scripts juan Abel Gutiérrez and Johnny Rodríguez. Field production, Marcela Salazar and Lucía Beltrán audio postproduction Carlos Bernar