'Stolen Land' Wins Cuban Top Prize, Colombian Indians Criticize Documentary Approach

Colombian filmmakers Margarita Martínez and Miguel Salazar have won the 2010 “best documentary of the South” award at the 32^nd Cuban film festival that ended in Havana recently.

The documentary depicts the story of how “a fiercely proud people, the Nasa, [in the south-eastern Colombian district of Cauca] fight for the land stolen from their ancestors while fending off the violence encroaching on their nation. Their charismatic leader is Lucho Acosta, 39, an imposing tactician descended from Indian warriors. He knows from experience that violence only breeds more violence. But facing nearly insurmountable odds, Lucho’s beliefs are tested to their very core. The future of the Nasa hang in the balance”.

The dispossession of native Indians and Afro-descendants is a huge social problem in Colombia. The country has the second highest number of internal refugees, something like a tenth of its population. The biggest land grabbers are large agro corporations that grow African palm trees and the big individual landlords, both of whom hire paramilitaries to drive peasants off the land. These paramilitaries, in turn, have close ties with the military and the government, local and national. Resistance, peaceful or otherwise, by the Indians have been met with severe violence, though the Nasa community keeps to peaceful struggle.

However, indigenous groups doing the fight have put out an unusually strong statement criticising the filmmakers, saying that “this entire documentary revolves around one person. All is done by him and for him. This portrayal is not an error insofar as it is the on-screen construction of a narrative. However, what is serious is that it is done in the name of a process, the costs of which the whole process will pay. Margarita Martinez and Miguel Salazar acquired the permission of the indigenous authorities to make a documentary about the indigenous process in Cauca. In the end, they created one against it. It was a trick. The simple fact of fabricating an individual figure that shines above a collective struggle, appropriating it, is a fault against a collective and centuries-old struggle”.