Al Jazeera Tells the Untold Side of the Story
Al Jazeera Tells the Untold Side of the Story Alessandro Rampietti | Associate Producer, Al Jazeera English
Since I first met them, the Nasa Indigenous people of the war-torn region of Cauca in Colombia have become synonymous in my mind with courage and strength in the face of terrible danger. When I first travelled to their reservation in 2012 I was just beginning to wrap my head around how to tell the story of Colombia’s thorny and convoluted internal conflict for Al Jazeera. At the time, and to this day, the Nasa were weary from decades of fighting that had left hundreds of community members dead and tired of getting caught in the crossfire. The Colombian Army and FARC rebels, then the largest guerrilla group in Latin America, clashed often over the Nasa towns and villages as they fought for control of areas crossed by drug routes and illegal mining operations. But led by the Indigenous Guard, a volunteer force that uses wooden ceremonial batons to enforce its will, the Nasa were actively trying to oust all armed groups from their territory. It was immediately controversial. The Nasa have long been looked at with suspicion. Local media flooded the airwaves with pictures of the Indigenous Guard manhandling soldiers as they occupied and partially destroyed a mountaintop army base. Many vilified them.
A poll in Colombia’s largest weekly, Semana, found only 23 percent supported their cause. The government and others suggested the community was in league with the rebels that controlled the area. But that was not what we found. We followed the Indigenous Guard as they also dismantled guerrilla roadblocks, seized and destroyed their arsenals and captured FARC members. We were the first to tell the other side of the story, confronting Colombia’s mainstream narrative, and managing to go live over our phones in the middle of nowhere. Leading the Indigenous Guard was Alfredo “Lucho” Acosta, a larger than life figure who reminded me of Obelix, the giant with superhuman strength and a good heart from the French comic book series Asterix. He told us he believed the Colombian government only paid lip service to their constitutionally-sanctioned autonomy and that all sides were surprised by the power of their peaceful methods in an area devastated by violence. The nation’s 50-year conflict had been particularly brutal in this part of the country. The town of Toribío, where Lucho lived, had been attacked more than 500 times in the decade before the signing of the peace deal between the government and the FARC in 2016.
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