Uraba/Cordoba

                                                      Uraba/Cordoba.

 The area in north east Colombia known as “the Uraba region” includes parts of three departamentos; north western Antioquia, north Choco and western Cordoba. Formally, it includes 24 municipios. Informally, people use the term to include a much wider region, including the lower Rio Atrato and parts of the Caribbean coast.

Geographically, the region borders the Gulf of Uraba on Colombia’s Atlantic coast, where the Rio Atrato reaches the sea. It is an area that is sparsely populated, but contains a number of indigenous peoples and many Afro-Colombians, who predominate [about 70%] in northern Choco.

The region is close to the border with Panama and has traditionally seen a great deal of cross border smuggling, as well as being a transit route into and out of the country and across to the Atlantic coast for arms and drugs. The Pan American Highway is planned to cross the region but currently the Highway stops in Panama before resuming further south. In the mid-1990’s ambitious plans were formulated for a second trans-oceanic canal to link the Pacific with the Caribbean, all of which increased the value of land in the region as well as the intense competition for land ownership. [Amnesty International estimates that average land values in Choco increased 1000% between 1996 and 2000].

Economically, Uraba - partly known as “the banana belt – has been developed through the presence of large banana plantations, many owned by absentee landlords and especially by the multinational, Chiqita Bananas [formerly the United Fruit Company]. Other large interests involve mining, logging and cattle ranching [especially further west in Cordoba]. More recently there has been the development of large palm oil plantations, which have often been established on land from which the local campesino population has either fled to avoid violence or been deliberately driven out by paramilitaries, working with local business organizations or large land owners.

Being remote from the centre of Colombian government, the region has historically seen little government presence, save for the military and this has led to neglect, a high level of poverty, the absence of social services, and considerable lawlessness. In the 1980s and early 1990’s the region increasingly came under the control of the guerrilla organizations, with the FARC [the 57^th Frente] and the EPL vying for control of key productive areas in the region and often fighting one another. Extortion, kidnapping and assassinations were commonplace, which eventually led local elites to form their own paramilitary organizations for protection, initially in Cordoba, where the Castano brothers were prominent in forming the Autodefensas Campesinas de Cordoba y Uraba [ACCU].

By the early 1990’s, the Union Patriotica, a legal, left wing political party led by former guerrillas from FARC and some of the EPL, predominated in the region, although party members and officials often came under violent attack not merely by their former comrades but increasingly by local paramilitaries, who finally combined into one national organization, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia [AUC] under the leadership of Carlos Castano, in 1997.

Between 1994 and 1997, the paramilitaries and the Colombian army together launched a ferocious campaign which drove the guerrillas out of many of their previous strongholds in the region and into the mountains, as well as deliberately creating a massive flow of internally displaced persons from the small villages and townships in Uraba. Associated with this campaign was the targeting for assassination of community leaders, trade union officials, human rights workers and anyone accused of being “on the left” – which often meant anyone who had worked previously with the formerly dominant guerrillas or with the UP. This attitude - that all local people in the countryside must be “guerrilla sympathizers” - persists to this day.

During the Presidency of Andras Pastrana, some of the local communities, encouraged by such church and international organizations as CINEP, Justicia y Paz, and Pax Christi [Netherlands] – decided to re-establish themselves as “peace communities”, either to try to create some form of security from the constant harassment and attacks by the military, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries, or to enable a displaced community to return to the homes from which they had been driven. These communities included San Jose de Apartado, one of the first peace experiencias to be set up in Colombia. Others involved campesino groups who were determined to return to the regions from which they had been driven, among them IDPs from Pavarando, who returned to establish the communities of San Francisco de Asis, Natividad de Maria and Nuestra Senora del Carmen. Other Afro-Colombian IDPs who had fled to Turbo and Bocas del Atrato, started in 1998 to return gradually and set up the communities of Esperanza de Dios and Nueva Vida in the valley of the Rio Cacarica under the umbrella organization CAVIDA,

 Each of these peace communities is described in detail in its own section of the Web Site