‘We have been abandoned by every single President’
Daniel Nelson
A crowd patiently waits in the town square for the President who has agreed to discuss complaints about post-conflict development. Finally a helicopter appears – and flies on because the President has changed his mind.
Colombia’s peasant farmers have been let down again.
“Colombia has developed over the backs of the people it has abandoned,” says one of the characters we follow in the documentary Baja Fuego (Under Siege). “We have been abandoned by every single President.”
Key elements of the peace agreement that ended the half-century insurgency, which is the film’s starting point, are a plan to end coca cultivation (partly by encouraging a switch to avocados), steer investment to poor areas, and introduce reforms in rural areas.
It rapidly becomes evident that the government is not delivering its promises and conflict over land is erupting again, but this time it’s not ideological: it’s an even more frightening free-for-all: “We no longer know who is who.”/ “Before it was horrible. Now it’s terrible.”
The documentary presents a vivid picture of people’s hopes and fears, helped by the strengths of its central characters: a couple who see hope in the signing of the peace agreement, a young Peasant Guard, and the leader of a community social organisation. It’s gripping, too, because the film covers a period of rising tensions and deaths as well as everyday concerns, culminating in an uprising that cuts off the Pan-American Highway for weeks and provokes clashes between campesinos and riot police.
It’s a powerful, one-sided film about people who want a better future for their children, improved living conditions, good roads and clinics, but have been let down by the government, brutally treated by the army and militia gangs – and subjected to workshops: “Everyone comes here telling us that they want to make workshops. Last week we had five of them … but it’s all chit-chat, nothing concrete.”
The central characters are honest and clear-sighted: “The problem that is behind these 50 years of war is not solved” – and that problem is land: “Without land reform there is no peace.”
Sadly at the end of the film, after all the disappointments, the waiting, the anxiety, the protests, the discussions, the government, under cover of Covid, suspends the coca substitution programme and replaces it with brutish eradication by the military, with no alternative plans for families hit by the loss of earnings.
It ‘s another betrayal.
* Baja Fuego (Under Siege) is showing the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, 18-26 March. There will be a Q&A at 8.30pm on 21 March with filmmakers Sjoerd Van Grootheest and Irene Vélez-Torres and HRW researcher Juan Pappier.