Bogota - Two days of clashes between indigenous peoples and police have claimed at least one life and injured an estimated 50 people as native communities blockaded the main road between the cities of Popayan and Cali. The clashes on Wednesday alone injured 20 people, none of them seriously, a source at the town hospital said. The death occurred on Tuesday.
The demonstrators are demanding access to land and insisted that the government put an end to the violence that indigenous leaders suffer.
The ombudsman for the Risaralda province in centre-western Colombia, Luis Carlos Leal, told the RCN radio network that the clashes took place outside the town of Pueblorrico.
Leal said some 300 indigenous people had gathered there Tuesday, and more joined since then.
Unrest already started brewing on Sunday, when some 8,000 indigenous people gathered near the town of Piendamo, in the Cauca province. Their leaders insisted that Colombian President Alvaro Uribe appear in person to explain unfulfilled promises of land and ongoing violence against indigenous leaders.
Feliciano Valencia, human rights coordinator for indigenous communities in the Cauca province, claimed that some 1,000 Indios have been killed across the country since Uribe took office in 2002.
"This is our rejection of the extermination of indigenous communities and to the reiterated lack of fulfillment of handouts of land by various governments," Valencia said.
Police General Orlando Paez charged that leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had infiltrated the protest, and noted that some Indios were caught planting explosives.
"This indigenous people have no idea about explosives. And yet we have seen that they are planting explosives on a bridge upon orders from FARC," Paez said Tuesday.
An indigenous leader, Daniel Pinacue, dismissed the allegations.
Officials often dismiss social protests in Colombia as instigated by leftist rebels, allowing them to distract attention from demands and justifying a harsher reaction by the state.
Reports from Quibdo, the capital of the Choco province in north-western Colombia, said some 300 indigenous people joined the protest Wednesday and peacefully occupied the facilities of the ombudsman's office.
