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Mr. Barack Obama
President-Elect of the United States of America
Dear Sir:
We address you today with the conviction that your
triumph expresses the deep desire for change felt by the
majority of the people of the United States: a
change in the economy and in society, a change in
international relations, and a change, of course, in the
relationship between the United States of America
and all indigenous peoples. We congratulate you on your
victory and on such noble aspirations on the part of
your people.
We want you, the new president-elect of the United
States, to be aware of the situation of the
indigenous peoples of Colombia, how we have
suffered more than
1,200
murders in the last six years at the hands of
paramilitaries, guerrillas, and police and military
forces,
that is, at the hands of illegal armed groups and public
security forces; how the government has taken advantage
of this situation to institutionally strip us of our
rights, implementing a legislation of dispossession that
includes a rural code and laws that divest Colombia of
its resources –land, minerals, hydrocarbons, water
resources, intellectual property, and national parks–
and which will reach its ultimate expression and
consolidation if the so-called Free Trade Agreement with
the United States succeeds, as the country
will then have the obligation of compensating investors
if it changes its laws, and we will have to submit our
conflicts to international arbitrators that are under
the rule of foreign trade practices and not under our
jurisdiction.
The imposition of this market logic, to the detriment of
the respect owed to life, ignores, breaches and violates
every international agreement and convention established
by humanity to place the collective good that is life
above individual interests. Because of that logic,
agreements such as ILO Convention No. 169 and the
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples are ignored by our governments, both
our country’s and yours.
Unfortunately, the governments of the United States
have contributed greatly to our situation through the
Plan Colombia and its support to what Colombia’s
current administration calls the policy of “democratic
security.” Large transnational corporations have
profited with oil and gas contracts, mining concessions,
privatizations, and low wages, and are now after the
biodiversity of our territories.
To contribute to change all this, we want you, the new
president-elect of the United States, to
personally hear our words, words that have cost us many
lives and that we defend every day with our voices,
marches and civil resistance. They are the words that we
have been spreading since October 10 throughout
Colombia in the
Resistance Minga,
a great nationwide mobilization convened by us, as
indigenous peoples, in association with other peoples
and movements.
We want you, the new
president-elect of the United States,
to see for yourself how in a country where so many have
been and are still murdered, disappeared, kidnapped,
tortured and exiled, we oppose guns with words, we
respond to violence with our voices, we rise against
conformism with civic resistance, and we want you to
know that in spite of the bullets, the repression and
the lies, there are thousands and thousands of us
mobilizing.
We believe that the spirit of change in your people
cannot be contained. We believe that it is a powerful
force which we hope will join with the force of our
age-old words and with the need for change that is
clamored by all of Latin America. We invite you
to come to listen to these words here in Colombia,
and we are also willing to articulate them there if you
invite us so that we can bring our voices to Washington.
Here or there, we live in the same planet, and our
mission is one and the same: to protect the earth and
save it from the state it is in.
We must once and for all respectfully assume our true
place before Mother Earth and History. The first has
given us life. The second, an offspring of Mother Earth,
reflects the actions of human beings in societies and
systems that have not yet matured enough to achieve the
harmony and balance that is needed. It is as human
beings, as sons and daughters of the same Mother Earth,
that we address you now. We speak to you as indigenous
peoples, fruit of the Law of Creation that compels us to
seek harmony and strike a balance between History and
Mother Earth.
Reconciling the history of humanity with the rhythms and
processes of nature is not an option, but rather an
imperative that we cannot put off. Greed, the
transformation of wealth into something sacred and the
commoditization of life are behind your country’s
crisis, behind the economic disaster and the inevitable
end of life that results from an economy that destroys
everything so that a handful of people can satisfy their
avarice. The destruction of our peoples in Colombia
is the consequence of this error that today we call
crisis.
Brother president-elect Obama, we are not writing
to ask you for anything for ourselves, because we know
that the death of our peoples, the end of our cultures
at the hands of a mistaken greed, symbolizes the end of
all life. Before we all disappear, we have decided to
voice our words and march forward. In the name of Life,
in the name of the change that History demands, we ask
you to listen to Life, to listen to us, so that together
we may work to find a way to harmonize History and Life.
We hope you will join us.
So we propose a meeting of our peoples with you, the new
president-elect of the United States, to discuss
what we set out above.
Respectfully yours,
Asociación de Cabildos Indígenas del Norte del Cuaca (ACIN)
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