by Levi Bridges
In Colombia, many indigenous people inhabit officially designated resguardos, or reserves, in highland areas where insufficient space fails to fulfill the agricultural needs of an increasing population. The lives of the indigenous Nasa are further complicated because they live in Colombia’s Cauca Department, a violent area where fighting between the army, the insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and right-wing paramilitary groups often leaves indigenous people caught in the crossfire. Together, violence and malnutrition caused by the land deficit have resulted in numerous Nasa deaths. Like many indigenous peoples in Latin America, the contemporary problems within the Nasa community began centuries ago. During the Spanish conquest, European settlers claimed flatter lowlands better suited to agriculture for themselves. Hundreds of years later, indigenous groups from Mexico to Bolivia barely eke out a subsistence living cultivating crops on the steep hillsides their ancestors were forced to inhabit. Such is the plight of the Nasa.
On December 16, 1991, the sun barely penetrated the clouds in the highlands of Cauca. More than 50 Nasa had gathered to discuss a land dispute on the El Nilo ranch. Years earlier, a previous landowner had permitted some Nasa to live and cultivate crops on unused portions of the land, but when the estate was sold, the new owners sought to expel them. As the daylight faded, and the owners had still not arrived, some returned home, while others gathered around small fires to share a hot plate of food.
Suddenly, the still quiet of dusk was broken by the intrusion of approaching vehicles. Without warning, gunshots and screams signaled the beginning of the supposedly nonviolent meeting which the Nasa had waited for all day. “The shots came from far away,” recalled Caroline Corpus de Dicuè in a court testimony just days later. “We could not see who was firing because it was already dark … another group nearby were boiling beans … they were the ones who were killed. We were … running uphill towards our house … later they burned our house and clothes … they burned the belongings of all the Nasa living in El Nilo.” On the following morning, the blood of twenty Nasa—men, women and children—stained the green grass.
Today, many believe that drug traffickers purchased the El Nilo estate and, with the compliance of local police, orchestrated the 1991 massacre that left behind eight widows and 40 orphans. Despite warnings from armed groups and local authorities that they could be risking their lives by remaining in El Nilo, the Nasa who inhabited the ranch sought to resolve the matter through a legal agreement between themselves, the new landowners, and the Colombian Institute of Agrarian Reform. Because of these prior admonishments, many Nasa now refer to the El Nilo massacre as Another Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a play on words of the novella written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia’s Nobel Laureate of Literature.
Read more