08.05.2002 (Alfredo Castro, ANNCOL Colombia) Due to the fact that paramilitary forces in Colombia have assassinated hundreds of human rights workers in recent years this courageous activist's real name cannot be used. Suffice it to say that Gloria has worked in the many regions of Bolivar department over a long period of time and intends to continue trying to do so for the foreseeable future.

ANNCOL: Can you give us a little background first and tell us why there are so many problems in the department and what the main types of human rights abuses are?

Gloria: Well, we have all sorts of abuses in Bolivar including massacres, assassinations, disappearances, rapes and kidnapping. There are also abuses of another sort in that people are illegally evicted from their land and have their homes and possessions taken.

The history of these abuses and the reasons for them are more complicated but I will try and give you a brief background.

For many years most of the regions in the south and centre of Bolivar, which is where I have worked mostly and which is a rural and mountainous region, were to a great extent peaceful places where the civilian population could get on with their lives without fear of any of the things that I just mentioned. There were guerrillas about but they didn't bother anyone and their relationship with local people was always quite good.

Then in the early 1990s the paramilitaries started appearing in certain areas in the south of Bolivar. Many of them had crossed over the river Magdalena from the city of Barrancabermeja where they were working with the military in trying to gain control of the city from the guerrillas who at that time almost controlled the whole place.

By 1999 they were strong enough to launch a full scale offensive into southern Bolivar and from the start this was coordinated with the army. I guess the paramilitaries had about a thousand fighters for the push into Bolivar at this time and this was partly through recruiting poor kids in Barrancabermeja, because unlike the guerrillas who pay no salary to their members the paramilitaries pay a lot of money if you join them, but also because they were keen to prevent the establishment of a peace talks zone for the ELN in the south which was being talked about at that time.

Anyway when it started it was awful. The paramilitaries first went into the region around San Pablo and Simiti where they and the army killed hundreds of people, burnt down homes and forced thousands to leave. They said that everybody was a guerrilla and if you complained you were shot.

This carried on throughout 2000 and they moved into more and more communities. The advance was a shock to everyone as although the guerrillas did try to fight them off the army gave them such a lot of support that the guerrillas were forced to head into the mountains. By 2001 they were all over the south of Bolivar except for in a few communities in the mountains where the guerrillas remain.

Once they had control the paramilitaries did two things. Firstly they set up front organisations like ASOCIPAZ and Movimiento No al Despeja that they used to campaign against the proposed peace zone. People were told that if they didn't participate in anti-peace zone demonstrations then they'd be killed and although the TV showed a lot about the protests they never told the truth about why the people were there.

The other thing that they did was to start pushing the small miners and farmers out of areas that the multinationals wanted. Then those great companies came in and now there are only a few jobs left for miserable wages. Before many families lived here and survived off the land but now the multinationals take all the materials and the profits for themselves so this too forces others to leave. And this is still going on. Just a few weeks ago the army forced hundreds of people to leave a group of communities around Tiquisio.

ANNCOL: I heard you mention Barrancabermeja briefly and I know that the city has suffered from horrendous violations the past couple of years. Can you give a brief update of what has been going on there more recently?

Gloria: Although Barrancabermeja is near to Bolivar it is not actually in this department - it is in neighbouring Santander. I myself have not been in the city recently as it is really very dangerous although I have many colleagues there and know that they have been having problems in recent weeks. Just last month for example the remarkable community leader Manuel Navarro was taken away by the death squads and we have heard nothing from him since.

To give you an idea of the gravity of the crises in Barrancabermeja, last year, in a city of 200,000, around 600 people were assassinated or disappeared and a further 1,400 forced to leave their homes in the city after being threatened and then refused protection by the security forces. It is also, and I believe that this is no coincidence, the most heavily militarised city in Colombia and is home to three army battalions plus a naval base.

Paramilitary death squads, that moved in with help from the army in the early 1990s, circulate openly in Barrancabermeja and work especially closely with the Nueva Grenada Battalion that is based there. They are also able to set up roadblocks and detain people in the city and have several important and well-known bases within the city limits including at Miraflores and Punta del Palo.

For some time now then the human rights situation in the city has been really very bad and to give you just one example of how bad in 1998 paramilitaries and troops from the Grenada Battalion murdered 36 civilians from a poor neighbourhood in just one night whilst other military units and the police did nothing.

Last year after much international pressure the government agreed to send 150 elite Special Forces troops into Barrancabermeja to stop the killings. But they got worse. The new troops simply joined with those already stationed there and the paramilitaries and continued to attack people. In the weeks after the new arrivals CREDHOS, OFP, the Social Solidarity Network and ASFADDES, all of which are good human rights and social organisations were all threatened and harassed and within a few days of the new forces beginning their patrols 20 people were assassinated. The new forces did nothing despite pleas from these people to help and it seems that it was all a propaganda exercise to show that the government was doing something.

More recently, on February 20th this year, paramilitaries, despite the many police and army patrolling the streets, were able to force many residents of one neighbourhood to assemble on a local games field where they were told that the paramilitaries are soon to launch a series of attacks against important social and union leaders in the city. One person named was Francisco Campos the director of CREDHOS which is the most important human rights organisation in the whole region and which has numerous international contacts.

CREDHOS, which has constantly denounced paramilitary crimes against the civilian population and against other NGOs and human rights defenders in Barrancabermeja and the entire region, has already suffered the assassination of seven of its leaders and another 19 of its activists have been forced to leave the area. I fear that with the latest paramilitary announcement we may soon see more bloodshed. And the security forces will do nothing - senior officers of the Neuva Grenada Battalion have also directly threatened CREDHOS workers.

ANNCOL: Earlier you mentioned the relationship of the multinationals to displacement. Can you tell me a little more about the displacement of civilians in general and specifically the connections with the multinationals?

Gloria: We have been really hit hard by forced displacement in Bolivar and although it is extremely difficult to give exact figures because many people move away to live with family in other regions or go to find work in the capital rather than go to the displaced communities where they can be easily counted I can tell you that during every year recently displacement in the department can be counted in the tens of thousands.

There are various ways that the paramilitaries will displace people. Firstly is through fear. Maybe they will come to a community and kill a few people to show that they are serious and then tell the others that they will return in a few days and kill the rest. This obviously forces people to leave and when this happens over and over again in different communities in a region it will in many cases provoke mass fear and subsequent mass displacement.

Another way is that they will prevent supplies of food and medicine from entering certain communities whilst at the same time preventing peasants in those areas from leaving to sell their produce. They also destroy harvests and kill livestock. Essentially what they are doing is starving the communities off their land. Both this phenomenon and the mass fear method were utilized widely in 2000 and 2001 in the south of Bolivar in particular and they continue to be used today in certain regions such as the Cimitarra Valley and in other departments such as Norte de Santander, Choco, Cauca and Valle de Cauca.

ANNCOL: And the relationship that multinational corporations have with the displacement?

Gloria: Yes, as there is lots of gold, oil, marble and other raw materials here in Bolivar the land is obviously very valuable in some places. Before the multinationals can get their hands on what is in the land they need to own the land itself and this becomes very expensive if they have to buy it from all the individual small farming families. It is cheaper, and therefore the end profits for the people in New York, Washington and places like that are greater, to just expel the people from the land and then take it for themselves.

Therefore the paramilitaries force thousands from their land and the multinationals then take possession of it. We have companies from Spain, Canada, the US and Britain among others that have all benefited from this method - the mining companies are probably the worst culprits here although various oil companies also have very bad records.

The fact that the paramilitaries also target the people who represent the communities also benefits the multinationals, as when all the leaders and peasant associations are gone there will be nobody left to represent the people and help them fight for their rights. Then it will be even easier for the multinationals to grab the land, force people to work for low wages, etc.

ANNCOL: You keep mentioning the paramilitaries. Are they responsible for all of the abuses or do the guerrillas also commit human rights violations?

Gloria: I don't know about the rest of the country but where I work in Bolivar over 99% of all the violations are carried out by the paramilitaries, many times working with the army. Most abuses are simply ignored by the press as they do not like to report negatively about the paramilitaries although sometimes they and the authorities will blame the guerrillas if they feel that it is beneficial. However, upon further investigation we find that the accusations are almost always false and were made for propaganda purposes.

There are many examples of this but the one I remember best was in February last year when the paramilitaries massacred seven people in La Cristalina and it was blamed on the ELN. ASOCIPAZ, the paramilitary front group that I mentioned earlier, even put out a press release denouncing the ELN for their violating of human rights yet when human rights groups looked at it closely we found that it had in fact been a paramilitary crime.

What the guerrillas do is kidnap people and that is an attack against people's liberty and I believe it is wrong. Again though in many cases the government will blame the guerrillas for a kidnapping when it isn't actually them. In other cases when the guerrillas take a paramilitary away the authorities will claim that he is a civilian.

In mid-January this year for example the paramilitaries kidnapped a woman from the town of Calamar and the authorities blamed the FARC even though everyone knew it had been the paramilitaries. When six men went looking for her on the paramilitaries got them too and shot them all in the heads and again the authorities blamed the guerrillas. But if you go to Codazzi, or ask one of the human rights groups that document these things, and ask what happened to Carlos Bermejo, Jair Robles Mendez, Luis Sanchez, Deivis Martinez, Ricardo Arias and Julio Yobaldis they will all tell you it was the paramilitaries.

The truth is that the guerrillas obviously target wealthy people for kidnapping as that is who can pay the ransoms but here in Bolivar we don't have that many rich people, we are mainly peasants.

But to answer your question, here in Bolivar, it is the paramilitaries that assassinate people, displace hundreds of families and go into towns and massacre civilians. The people that the guerrillas kidnap come from the small percentage of wealthy people that we have, including drug traffickers. I myself do not know of any cases where the guerrillas have actually massacred civilians in Bolivar.

ANNCOL: Can you explain what the paramilitaries do when they enter a town?

Gloria: Let me tell you about what happened in February 2000 in a small town called El Salado that is in northern part of Bolivar. It will give you an idea of how the paramilitaries operate.

For some days the marines and the army had been patrolling in and around the town and then suddenly one evening they all withdrew. Then, the following morning, I think it was a Friday, the people awoke to find the town surrounded by about 300 paramilitaries who then came down into the central square and rounded up all the residents. The boss then sat at a table and chair in the basketball court that was in the square and began to call out names from a list that he had.

Some people stepped forward but others, who had stayed in their homes out of fear were not present and so some of the paramilitaries went searching for them house to house before dragging them out of their homes to the square. Other paramilitaries ordered restaurants and cafes in the town to bring all their whiskey and rum as well as their radios for music to the square and local musicians were made to play their instruments.

The paramilitaries held a party and then the killing started. People were tortured, killed and raped whilst the paramilitaries were dancing and singing. People were sliced up with machetes, had their throats and stomachs cut open and others were beheaded or strangled with metal wires whilst being tortured.