On 1st Anniversary, Puente Nayero Humanitarian Space Inspires Nonviolent Resistance in Buenaventura,
On 1st Anniversary, Puente Nayero Humanitarian Space Inspires Nonviolent Resistance in Buenaventura, Colombia PDF Print E-mail Written by Lisa Taylor
Friday, 24 April 2015 13:24
On April 13, 2014, an Afro-Colombian community of approximately 300 families known as Puente Nayero did something unprecedented in Colombia’s largest port city of Buenaventura: they formed an urban Humanitarian Space. Criticizing the collusion of state security forces with paramilitaries, community members rejected the militarization of their oceanfront neighborhood and began resisting multinational companies trying to displace them from their homes.
This April, the Puente Nayero Humanitarian Space celebrated one year of nonviolent resistance and organizing, taking time to look back on the past year’s achievements. Despite receiving constant death threats over the last year, Puente Nayero formed a leadership committee, petitioned for accompaniment from the Interchurch Commission for Justice and Peace (a Colombian NGO that documents and defends human rights) and joined the network of 120 communities known as Communities Building Peace in the Territories (CONPAZ) to organize and defend their territorial, cultural, and human rights. Committing to a practice of nonviolence, they succeeded in removing paramilitary presence from their street, dismantling a chop-up house that had been installed to dismember and terrorize people, and strengthening community support of the process.
However, according to community leaders, commemorating the Humanitarian Space involves much more than celebrating the accomplishments of the past year. In response to the recent assassination of merchant Wilder Giraldo Salazar – murdered for refusing to pay extortion taxes to paramilitaries – the Puente Nayero community used the one-year commemoration intentionally to strengthen their relationship with neighboring community Punta Icaco. Taking back Punta Icaco from paramilitary control has been no easy task, however, and various community members such as Joaquín Giraldo and his wife Rubiela Berrio have already received threats for supporting the nonviolent initiative by inviting national and international accompaniers into their neighborhood.
Displacement for development
The commemoration is furthermore a strategic moment to strengthen the community’s organizational process and, in particular, to solidify resistance to the mega-projects being planned and implemented in Buenaventura today. For Puente Nayero, paramilitary presence indicates a larger, more insidious phenomenon: the use of such violent non-state actors to effect mass displacements in Buenaventura, freeing up land for multinational corporations in the name of “development,” a proposal tacitly supported by the Colombian state. Various cases of links between paramilitaries and multinational actors have been documented extensively in Colombia, with well-known examples involving companies such as Chiquita Brands International, Coca-Cola, and Nestle.
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/5301-on-1st-anniversary-puente-nayero-humanitarian-space-inspires-nonviolent-resistance-in-buenaventura-colombia
