BOGOTA (AlertNet) - Many of Colombia's indigenous people are at risk of disappearing unless the government does more to protect them from increasing abuses that have forced thousands to flee their homes, Amnesty International said.
The human rights group blamed the changing nature of the four-decade conflict between the military, leftist rebels, armed gangs and drug traffickers for leaving Colombia's 1.4 million Indians even more vulnerable to abuses.
"The human rights situation among indigenous groups has deteriorated over the last year," Marcelo Pollack, Colombia researcher at Amnesty International told AlertNet. "Unless the
authorities take speedy action to protect indigenous peoples in Colombia there is a real risk that many will disappear."
Amnesty said all warring factions, including right-wing paramilitary groups, drug gangs and Colombia's security forces, were guilty of committing human rights violations against
indigenous tribes such as kidnappings and the sexual abuse of women.
Fighting killed 114 indigenous people last year, a 40 percent rise in comparison to 2008, according to the National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia (ONIC). It estimates armed groups have killed more than 1,400 indigenous Colombians over the last decade.
Since the Colombian military stepped up its offensive against the rebels in recent years, the conflict has moved away from urban centres towards remote rural and jungle areas where
many indigenous groups live in designated reserves. This shift has made isolated tribes more exposed to attack by armed groups who operate near or on their lands.
"Part of the reason for the increase in human rights violations is to do with the way the conflict in Colombia has changed," Pollack said. "The conflict has been pushed to the margins, to rural areas where many indigenous peoples live."
AWA TRIBE HARD HIT
Colombia's Awa Indians, a tribe of hunter gatherers concentrated in the southwestern province Nariño, were particularly hard hit last year when more than 50 members of the Awa were killed in several attacks by armed groups, Amnesty said.
The Awa, like other tribes in Colombia, find themselves in close contact with armed groups as their resource-rich lands often straddle coca-growing areas, the ingredient used to make
cocaine.
Conflict over the control of coca production and strategic cocaine transport routes in and around indigenous reserves has caused mass displacement.
Colombia is home to an estimated 3.2 million internally displaced people, one of the world's largest displaced populations.
Although indigenous groups make up only around 3.4 percent of Colombia's population, they account for seven percent of the country's total displaced population, the United Nations says.
It is estimated that roughly 20,000 indigenous people were uprooted in Colombia last year.
Recently, the threat of rebels snatching children to fight in their dwindling ranks has caused increasing numbers of indigenous people to flee their homes and is a leading cause of displacement, Amnesty said.
Of Colombia's some 87 indigenous groups, at least a third face imminent extinction, ONIC says.
While laws in Colombia exist for the protection of indigenous people and their ancestral reserves, rights groups say the government is not doing enough to protect tribes and that crimes against them go unpunished.
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