The CRIC Denounces: Indigenous Resistance Through Testimonial Accounts in Colombia's Cauca Region

by Mario Rojas Acostas

With its brief, sharp declaration ‘El CRIC denuncia’ (The CRIC denounces), three one-word lines of black, lower case, sans-serif type positioned beneath splattered blood on off-white paper, this 1979 pamphlet by the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Cauca Regional Indigenous Council or CRIC) makes its objective—the denunciation of government terror and violence— immediately known. Its stark simplicity both invites and repels our gaze, evoking a crime scene. Indeed, inside the shocking cover, the reader is confronted with one testimonial account after another depicting crimes committed by the Colombian government and military against the Cauca’s indigenous people, including kidnapping, unlawful incarceration, coercion, and torture. Exactly why were the CRIC targeted in this way in the 1970s?

One answer may have its roots in Colombia’s long twentieth-century political conflict between conservatives and liberals, epitomized by but not limited to the ten-year civil war known as La Violencia (the Violence), from 1948-1958. This war pitted farmers, many of whom were indigenous people, on opposing sides against each other, backed on one side by Colombian Conservative party paramilitary groups, and on the other, by paramilitary and guerrilla groups backing the Colombian Liberal Party and Colombian Communist Party. Possibly in response to the enduring legacy of this earth-shattering conflict and to their long-term experience of being swept into political conflicts while never granted full citizenship rights by Colombian governments, indigenous communities began organizing in the decades following La Violencia in order to demand better lives. Because Spanish colonization of the Americas brought with it the 'encomienda system', which granted Spanish settlers the right not only to lands they claimed for the Crown but also to the labour of the inhabitants of those lands, many indigenous people in the Andean region of Colombia have since colonial times lived and worked as peasants. The establishment of cabildos, or administrative councils that governed municipalities and represented landowning heads of households before the Spanish Crown, had a long-lasting impact on Colombia’s administrative organization and today the name cabildo is used by indigenous municipalities in order to be represented in Colombia’s governing bodies, which still reflect to an extent their colonial origins and enact colonialist, paternalist attitudes towards indigenous people. As such, indigenous cabildos were first incorporated into leftist and state peasant organizations during the first half of the twentieth century. However, by the 1970s, indigenous peoples of Colombia began to organize into regional and national organizations with specifically indigenous agendas. Among the first of these was the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC), who published this pamphlet in 1979, a time when the Colombian military was actively torturing 'leftist suspects’.

Founded in Toribío on 24 February 1971 by a federation of seven indigenous cabildos, the CRIC faced intense repression from landowners that prevented its full establishment until September of that year. It has since grown to comprise 90% of the Cauca region’s indigenous population: one hundred and fifteen cabildos and eleven associations hailing from the communities of Nasa, Guambiano, Totoroez, Polindara, Guanaco, Kokonuko, Kisgo, Yanacona, Inga, and Eperara, among others. Its initial seven-point program was as follows:

• Recover the lands from the resguardos (territories originally granted during colonial times by Spain to indigenous people).

• Expand the resguardos.

• Strengthen indigenous cabildos.

• The elimination of rent to landowners.

• Make known any laws protecting indigenous people and demand their just application.

• Defend indigenous history, languages and customs.

• Train indigenous educators.

In subsequent conferences, three more points were added to the agenda:

• Strengthen economic and community enterprises.

• Defend indigenous territories’ natural and environmental resources.

• Strengthen the Family (unit).

In addition to being drawn into conflicts between political ideologies, it can be seen how the CRIC’s ten demands would meet resistance from the modernizing project of extractive capitalism imposed upon the Americas by the Global North. The CRIC thus continues to fight to raise awareness of the violent, unlawful methods used to supress indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing. In the years following the diffusion of this pamphlet, the CRIC went on to co-found the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) in 1982, taking its organisational experience beyond the Cauca region so that indigenous communities throughout Colombia could more effectively demand rights at the national level. Most recently, the CRIC was found standing alongside thousands of union members, teachers, and students during the October 2020 national strike to protest President Ivan Duque’s policies, the murder of human rights activists, and police violence in response to 2019 protests. Hermes Pete, leader of the CRIC, was quoted as saying, ‘Not even the pandemic will stop our movement’. The CRIC’s peaceful collective action enabled some 10,000 indigenous people, mostly from southwestern Colombia where the Cauca region is found, to protest.

The contents of this pamphlet, while unsettling, are a testament to the empowering effect collective action can have on colonized communities’ resistance efforts against the existential threat and epistemic violence of modernity. Marcos Avirama, CRIC president at the time, and then-secretary Taurino Ñuscue, lead this litany of anti-indigenous government actions with a three-page accusation and rallying cry:

"There has been no lack of mistreatment and torture when Third Brigade troops invade our lands or, as has recently occurred, commit new assassinations of leaders of our organization at the hands of bandits sent by landowners and, as has always been the case, no culprits exist, there are no arrests, and our dead, beaten, detained, tortured, do not get the justice the government has so often preached to us. (…) Compañeros: the fight for our demands, the pursual of our program’s seven points will make it so that the injustices committed against those of us who now suffer, directly, the attacks of this system so full of injustices, shall be overcome and that our fight shall keep on. Go forward, compañeros."

Following this denunciation and raison d’être for the organization, the first testimonial account comes from Avirama himself, who appeals to the readers’ humanity by introducing himself as ‘an indigenous person of the Coconuco, of agricultural profession, [who] work[s] to maintain six young children and my wife’. He then decries in graphic detail the experience he and his brother had whilst being detained and tortured by military agents, including how they were coaxed out of the CRIC’s offices by setting up a fake meeting with a lawyer named Carmen Eugenia Ruano. ‘Around 5pm’, he goes on, ‘some individuals arrived in a blue Toyota to take us to said lawyer, but immediately took us to the non-commissioned officer school Inocencio Chinca de Popayán’. After stripping him of his day’s earnings, his national ID, his handkerchief, and his pencil, they took Avirama to a dungeon and told him he needed to tell them everything he knew. At 11pm, the officers entered the dungeon and put Avirama up against the wall, blindfolded him, and took him away in a jeep, telling him they were going to take him to identify some indigenous suspects. Instead, they took him out of the car and beat him, asking him to answer questions he couldn’t answer about indigenous individuals.

They kicked me in the belly, the face and the head and they kept kicking me’. They then took him to a room and started shocking him with electricity, raising the voltage to 500 at one point. The account goes on in excruciating detail as to the torture methods used by the officers, including throwing him in a ditch supposedly made by the M-19, Colombia’s second largest guerrilla movement at the time, where they offered to make him a passport and some cash so that he and his family leave Colombia in exchange for information. Because he did not know what they wanted, Avirama was tortured in increasingly inhumane fashion for a month, lying to his family about his whereabouts whenever they inquired about bringing him food or clothing. This account is followed by a dozen or so pages of declarations by other Cauca indigenous individuals, members of the CRIC similarly detained and tortured by military officers without legal recourse.

Apart from the first-person accounts, the pamphlet also includes a poem based on a Paez myth about Juan Tama de la Estrella, a Cauca-region leader who succeeded in making the Spanish crown recognise indigenous lands in the early 18th century. A text imbued with as much power as the testimonial accounts, the poem serves as a reminder that the Cauca’s indigenous people have been resisting persecution for centuries, while also affirming the importance of oral tradition as a tool for the preservation of indigenous knowledge and, like the accusations, speaks a truth otherwise silenced by the official story.

In the great town of

Vitoncó

the son of the star

Juan Tama

read the coca leaves

and foretold:

even more difficult times will come

times of war and

derision where

any voice that raises itself will be

silenced

they will cut away

the earth

and the flesh

and will try to erase from time

our language

nevertheless

from the embers

from the waste

from the outraged land

from the cursed people

from oblivion

new men will rise

new hands will take up arms

and injustice shall be defeated

forever

The war music

of the flute

announced that the moment had arrived

and Juan Tama

say the ancient ones

vanished in the mountain

on the road that leads

to the Pataló Lagoon

to occupy his place

in the sky

. .