In a series of attacks from September 5-10, Colombian Armed Forces used live ammunition, grenades, tear gas, and clubs against peaceful indigenous protesters at the La Emperatriz estate in northern Cauca, Colombia.
An attack on September 5 was ordered by Cauca Governor Juan José Chaux Mosquera, after the indigenous protestors refused to be evicted.
According to the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) and the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN), residents reported that government forces blocked ambulances from removing the wounded and prevented health workers from treating the injured. An ACIN administrator who was trying to help a person wounded by grenade shrapnel was dragged from an ambulance, beaten, and arrested.
A second government attack on September 9 and 10 left 21 community members injured and 13 youths detained. Maximiliano Conda, the indigenous governor of the Huellas reserve was badly beaten and had to be hospitalized for head injuries.
Members of the Nasa indigenous group, from the Huellas reserve in the Caloto municipality, began their occupation of La Emperatriz on September 2 to reclaim their ancestral lands. Also known as the Páez, the Nasa are the second largest indigenous group in Colombia, accounting for 300,000 of Colombia’s one million indigenous peoples.
The Nasa held the sit-in to demand that the national government comply with a 1991 agreement in which it promised to allocate 15,600 acres of land to them, including La Emperatriz. The agreement was reached following a 1991 paramilitary massacre of 20 indigenous men, women, and children at the neighboring estate of El Nilo, but the government had returned only 9,000 acres to the Nasa, according to the Resource Center of the Americas.
"[President Alvaro] Uribe Velez’s administration negotiates with paramilitary groups and rewards them for their massacres with lands and impunity, meanwhile they refuse to negotiate with the victims and instead order them to be displaced and massacred," the Association of Indigenous Chapters North of the Cauca (ACIN) said in a press statement.
The attacks ceased when indigenous authorities reached the local commander of the armed forces and negotiated the return of the detainees and medical care for injured protesters.
The Nasa continued their land rights protest at La Emperatriz until September 13 when the Nasa met with Colombian government officials in Calí. Sabas Pretelt de la Vega, the Colombian Deputy Minister of the Interior and Justice, signed an agreement recognizing that the Colombian government had violated various land distribution treaties (the El Nilo Agreement of 1991, the La María Piendamó Agreement of 1995, the Novirao Act of 1996, the Conciliation Resolution of 1997, and President Ernesto Samper’s promise of 1998) with the Nasa. The government also committed to complete a study of the best methods for redistribution of arable land in the region to indigenous peoples.
