Protests against rural Colombia’s “profound crisis” continue

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Last week, peasant leaders from the Agricultural Dignity movement chained themselves up in Bolívar Square, in Bogotá, as part of the agricultural sector strike being staged across the country.

As the peasant farmers’ strike reached day 11 last Thursday, with protests in regions across the country, at least 44 people had been arrested and 63 had been injured.

The 20 agricultural workers who decided to chain themselves up in Bolívar Square said their objective was to draw the authorities’ attention and insist that their demands be met.

“We have been chained up since 11 o’clock on Wednesday morning, to press the government to fulfil its promises,” 50-year-old Armando Acuña, a peasant farmer from the department of Huila in southern Colombia, told Associated Press.

Acuña, who is a member of the Dignidad Agropecuaria movement, added that the government has only partially fulfilled no more than one of the six points agreed on in September 2013, following the previous strike held by the same farmers.

Small potato, onion and vegetable farmers from Colombia’s central regions accuse the government of failing to honour the agreements aimed at bringing down the prices of fertilisers, settling the farmers’ debts with banks and suppliers, and controlling imports from countries with which Colombia has signed free trade agreements.

Representatives of the Santos government argue that they have fulfilled the agreements made following the previous strike in September 2013, and have forked out thousands of dollars in assistance to small farmers.

The Finance Minister Mauricio Cárdenas said that the Agricultural departments’ budget in 2014 was around US$2.6 billion, triple what it was four years ago, that the farmers’ debts were being refinanced, and, as a result, the protest was unfair.

But according to a leader of the peasants’ movement, César Pachón, rural Colombia is undergoing “a profound crisis”.

Pachón blamed the crisis on the “neoliberal model, the free trade agreements and the lack of a serious agricultural policy”.

Colombia’s small farmers also called for a nationwide cacerolazo (pot-banging protest) in squares across the country.

Tens of students demonstrating in solidarity with the farmers clashed with the police for several hours in Bogotá.

Some 20,000 indigenous people also joined the strike at 17 points across the country, according to Luis Fernando Arias, president of the Indigenous Organisation of Colombia.

 

Source: PÚLSAR/AP

This article has been translated from Spanish.