Colombia: Why They Kill the Awa

“We are People of the Mountain, children of the wild forest, and for these reasons they are going to have to take our lives” :-Eder Burgos, coordinator of Camawari.
The Government is using the massacres as an excuse to militarize the tribal areas.

…[T]he atrocity—this massacre, the ongoing massive displacement, and disappearances, all faced by the indigenous communities caught in the middle of this terror—is blamed on the victims. It is their fault, implies the Minister, because they refused to collaborate with the Armed Forces. He tries to convince us that, if the Armed Forces had been in the territory, the violence would not have happened. As a consequence, the complete militarization of the territory is underway with the pretext of protecting the Awá, who in turn run to the forests while some of their leaders, seeing no other option, call for the help of the Armed Forces. The Colombian corporate media, the government coalition and their spokespeople all echo these calls, and Colombians -terrified by the horror of this ongoing genocide, in turn call for the same.

The Colombian Pacific Coast and the lowlands, all of which include the ancestral territories of the Awá now suffering massacres and forced displacement, are zones of strategic interest for projects of capital accumulation, both legal and illegal, including monocrop operations of rubber, and palm oil, as well as the cultivation of coca and laboratories for the processing of coca leaves. As is the case for the rest of the country, these agribusiness projects demand the use of, and rely upon terror inflicted against the ancestral inhabitants of these lands. Their displacement coincides with the theft of their land.

Much more at the Upside Down World website