Colombian Peasant Leader Miguel Fernández

Join La Casa, the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies, Prof. Ann Farnsworth-Alvear and others for a special visit by Colombian peasant leader, Miguel Fernández.

The Colombia Human Rights Network, the Latin America Working Group and the Coordinación Colombia, Europa, Estados Unidos, are organizing Miguel Fernández’s visit to the United States. He is a member of the Committee for the Integration of the Macizo Colombiano (Comité de Integración del Macizo Colombiano - CIMA), a network of peasant organizations that work in defense of their territory and identity.

The Committee for the Integration of the Macizo Colombiano or CIMA, has communicated the words, principles, hopes and mandates of 13 municipalities of the department of Cauca and 9 of the department of Nariño. This has been a response to a historic and complex agrarian, animal husbandry, and environmental situation that has created a social crisis among the communities, especially peasant farmers, who live in this majestic territory. The Macizo, or massif in English, is the Southern Andean Mountain Range, with enormous geographic and ethnic diversity. There one finds the headwaters the Magdalena and Cauca rivers in its high elevation forests. The ecological conservation of the Macizo is important for the survival of animals and plants, and the indigenous, Afro-Colombian and peasant communities who live there.

The abandonment of the Macizo Colombiano by the state and by successive administrations is evident, in the disregard of the peasant farmer communities as deserving rights. CIMA hopes that recognition of their rights will provide them tools and means to improve living conditions in the countryside, starting with a integral agrarian reform, in which access to land would be a structural element.

CIMA has designed a Life, Water and Dignity Plan, with the communities, as a solution and guide to defend life and territory. The Plan is based on eight principles that revitalize them and weave together their work in various areas: agro-environmental, cultural, women’s education, Macizo youth, and human rights.

Miguel Fernández, among other things, is coordinator of the Human Rights and Peace area of CIMA, human rights defender, peasant leader, and labor leader; holds a Master’s degree in Human Rights and Peace Culture, and currently serves as a high-level officer of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT) labor federation in Cauca and regional delegate to the National Roundtable for Guarantees (Mesa Nacional de Garantías), a process mandated in the 2016 peace accords between the government of Colombia and the FARC armed insurgency.

 

Miguel will speak about the situation of human rights in Cauca, the environmental effect of multinational interventions, and the impact of the armed conflict on the communities.