[09/14/2007] Latin American Farmers Speak on Rights Issues. By Pablo Albilal

Latin American farmers speak on rights issues
Pablo Albilal / Contributing Writer
Issue date: 9/14/07

Farmers from Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala and others spoke Wednesday at the River Lounge in the Student Activities Center on the College Avenue campus [of Rutgers University]. The panel discussed farmers rights.

Braulio Alvarez, a leader of the largest farmers group in Venezuela, lifted up his right pant leg and showed a scar on his shin that he said came from the back end of a rifle.

Alvarez said groups hired by landowners in his country had been sent to scare him away from his own land, by any means necessary.

"The decades of the 1950s and 1960s, we were repressed, pursued and incarcerated from armed bands of the government," Alvarez said.

In an effort to bring about awareness on the subject of farmers rights in Latin American countries, a coalition set out to tour New York, New Jersey and Vermont. Five panelists made up of farmers from Venezuela, Columbia, Guatemala, Brazil and Ecuador spoke Wednesday at the River Lounge in the Student Activities Center on the College Avenue campus to a crowd of about 50 people on the issue.

The panelists told personal stories about the struggles they faced in trying to maintain sovereignty over land they say belongs to them. Panelists also spoke about fair trade, land reform and the need to bring together people from different countries under the common goal of providing more rights for farmers.

William Kramer, an adjunct professor and researcher from the School of Management and Labor Relations, said the purpose of the event was to bring people from the grass roots who have done amazing things for their people.

Kramer founded the Farmer Solidarity Project, a Highland Park-based organization that is part of the 12-day tour.

"We are working toward agrarian reform. Access and control of all our natural resources is our right," said Maria Pilar Jurado, a representative of the National Association of Campesino Farmers in Colombia.

Juan Tiney, the general coordinator of the National Peasant Indigenous Coordinating Organization, said he has fought for native farmers right to harvest land in Guatemala. As a Mayan native, he has been a farmer since the age of 17. He described how indigenous people's lands were taken over to make sugar cane and other products for exports.

"We can see so many dry rivers as a result of the deforestation, destroying the biodiversity we used to have," he said, adding 75 percent of Guatemalans live in poverty. Tiney said 360 mines were opened to harvest minerals from the earth that destroy the land and environment.

"Transnational organizations will give only one percent of the profit, and not to the people but to the state," he said. "Yet the people deal with the pollution when the mines run dry and the companies flee and the deforestation - pollution of the sky and water is left behind."

When one student asked what people in the University community could do to help the situation the farmers said they were facing, Milton Fornaziere, a Brazilian leader of the Landless Workers Movement, said people could get involved in a variety of ways.

"You must combine academic work and activism, offer information to others," Fornaziere said. "Your knowledge must build ties to Latin America's reality."

Tiney agreed.

"We invite you to help," he said. "We don't want more war or more dead people."
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