CPTnet
13 July 2010
COLOMBIA REFLECTION: Ancestry vs. legal title
by Alix Lozano
 
Once upon a time, a campesino community lived and farmed near the village of Buenos Aires in El Peñon, Bolívar, Colombia. These men and women, along with their families, occupied and worked the former estate of Las Pavas beginning in 1995.  This land belonged to their indigenous ancestors for hundreds of years, long before Europeans started issuing land titles.  In 2009, the Colombian government, like the Spanish colonizers before them, drove off the people with historic connections to the land.  The riches that the current people in power seek come from a palm oil monocrop that will later be used in beauty products for multinationals such as The Body Shop.
 
In these lands of Las Pavas lie the ancestral spirits of the campesinos' lost community.  According to anthropologists, the indigenous Malibués inhabited these lands for some four thousand years.  They mixed with Spanish colonizers and African slaves, forming a tri-ethnic race: Indian, black, and Europeans, whose descendants are today's campesinos of the area. The community has venerated and guarded the cemetery and their indigenous ancestral lands, but now bulldozers, chainsaws, and oil palm have destroyed them.  And the fate of Las Pavas lies in the hands of those who twist the
truth and the law at the expense of these people's livelihoods. 

The elderly, men, women and children of this community pray that in these times the Spirit will move in their favor, that it will move to restore the community's power to take possession of the land protected by their ancestors, and that their ancestral indigenous and black histories will inspire them all.  They pray that the intentions of the powerful be transformed so that the multinationals will leave them in peace Lord God made the earth and its bounty for human beings to provide for their families.