Avatar: The daily struggle of Colombia's indigenous communities http://colombiareports.com/opinion/cantonese-arepas/8932-avatar-the-daily-struggle-of-colombias-indigenous-communities.html

At 4AM on the morning of January 30, 2010, three helicopters and a Kfir combat plane attacked an area in the northern part of the Colombian department of Chocó, where two hours earlier a spy plane had detected fire and smoke. According to the army, fire and smoke are telltale signs of guerrilla activity.

The attack, however, did not produce any guerrilla casualties, and the machine gun fire and bombs instead converged on a house with 5 people inside: José Nerito Rubiano Bariqui, his wife Martha Ligia Majoré Bailarín, their 8-year-old son Giovanni, and Martha Ligia’s niece Celina Majoré and her 20-day-old baby. Martha Ligia was wounded in one leg by a projectile, while José Nerito suffered a firearm-induced thorax wound which resulted in a broken spinal column, leaving him paraplegic. The new-born died three weeks later.

The army claimed the attack was an innocent mistake and President Alvaro Uribe stated that the armed forces are always careful not to bomb civilian areas. But the government's policy of offering "democratic security" to the privileged has resulted in too many of this kind of "mistake", as well as the extrajudicial killings, for such disclaimers to merit much credibility. Moreover, the inhabitants of the bombed area claimed this was not a simple error but a premeditated and concerted effort to sow terror in this community and surrounding ones.

The Uradá Jiguamiandó and the Emberá-Caito Indigenous Reserves are home to rich deposits of copper, gold and molybdenum. The Colombian government's unscrupulous obsession with Foreign Direct Investment resulted in the awarding in 2005 of a 30-year mining concession contract on a 16,000-hectare site to the infamous La Muriel Mining Corporation. The Mande Norte mining project, as is called, is the largest copper mining project in Colombia. Mining giant Rio Tinto has an option to enter a joint venture or profit-sharing arrangement with Muriel Mining.

Indigenous and afro-descendant communities, however, commenced legal actions on April 23, 2009, to stop the explorations. They claimed a lack of environmental impact studies, and, most importantly, a lack of prior government consultations with communities living on the collectively-owned land, which is in clear violation of Colombia's Law 70 of 1993 as well as International Labor Organization Convention 169.

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