Protests continue in northern Colombia, set to expand

Weeks of protests by peasants and coca farmers in the Catatumbo region in northern Colombia had yet to abate on 8 July, even as the national ombudsman urged the Government and protesters to maintain dialogue amid prospects of strikes spreading across the land. Protests and road blocks began in the Catatumbo region of the Norte de Santander department around 10-12 June in response to the state's bid to erradicate coca plantations; other protests were being reported in districts including San Roque in the northern César department, Ricaurte in the south-western department of Nariño and Guapi in Cauca, western Colombia. Some politicians have accused the two communist guerrilla forces of fanning peasant discontent - at least in Catatumbo - to protect their own, alleged drug-trafficking activities. The Ombudsman Jorge Armando Otálora Gómez urged the sides to talk and end the Catatumbo protests and that the Government take appropriate action ahead of strikes announced for 19 August by sectors including coffee growers, Radio Santa Fe reported on 8 July. Mr Otálora said 50 "community councils" representing Colombians of African descent in the Pacific-coast Chocó department had also convened a "mobilisation" for 17 July, apparently to do with the legality of local mining activities. The Interior Minister Fernando Carrillo Flórez accused the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) of using the Catatumbo protests as leverage in their ongoing talks with the state in Havana, which he said the state "will not permit," the national broadcaster Señal Colombia reported on 8 July, citing Mr Carrillo's comments to El Tiempo. The Minister said the protesters' demands coincided with the FARC "agenda" aired in Havana and were being "cheered" from there; "social demands are valid but we reject" he said that "armed actors" use them. The former socialist senator Pilar Córdoba in turn cited Catatumbo's enormous coal and oil reserves as a factor in the conflict, observing that local peasants no longer tolerated living in misery, Radio Santa Fe reported on 7 July, citing Ms Córdoba's comments on the website Twitter. Talks she stated were proving complicated as "the peasants know the Government will fail again" to honour pledges to improve their lot. Coca cultivation was the "consequence of rural misery," she stated, and the "solution, to fumigate them," useless. She depicted Catatumbo as a region with a 30-per-cent illiteracy rate, environmental degradation and pervasive violence for the ongoing war with the FARC and ELN guerrillas. Meanwhile she added foreign firms had for a century "fattened" their accounts with Catatumbo's oil.