by Dawn Paley
In rural areas, the presence of armed actors representing state, guerrilla, narco, or other interests severely impacted people’s daily lives. “Peasants and rural inhabitants have been deliberately terrorized by these uniformed, armed groups of men,” wrote María Victoria Uribe about the army, paramilitaries, and guerrillas.[36] Violence in Colombia, as manifested during La Violencia of the 1950s and the war between uniformed armed factions today, has taken the form of acts of terror against the population, including mass killings and the public display of mutilated and tortured bodies. “In these massacres, perpetrators carry out a series of semantic operations, permeated with enormous metaphorical force, that dehumanize the victims and their bodies. These technologies of terror seek to expel rural inhabitants from their homes in order to consolidate territorial control.”[37] Of all of the armed actors, it is the paramilitaries, operating with complicity and support from the army, that are the most effective at carrying out displacement, and it is they who are responsible for the lion’s share of attacks.[38] By 2014, the total number of people displaced in Colombia was estimated at 5,368,138, and the total number of victims of the conflict over the past fifty years reached 6,073,437.[39] In a 2014 piece about memory, which criticizes Colombia’s national cinema institute for not distributing the trailer of a film about the war in Colombia, Colombian-Mexican writer Camilo Olarte writes, “The blood of fiction is fine. It’s acceptable. What’s real, no. And this isn’t fiction: 220,000 assassinations, 81.5 percent of them civilians, almost all campesinos; 25,007 disappeared, more than double the dictatorships of the Southern Cone; 1,754 victims of sexual violence; 6,421 children recruited by armed groups; 27,023 kidnappings associated with the armed conflict between 1970 and 2010; 10,189 people mutilated by antipersonnel mines, almost the same number as Afghanistan, 8.3 million hectares dispossessed and abandoned.”[40]
In Colombia, in addition to fortifying the national army, paramilitarization has been beneficial to transnational corporations wishing to dissuade labor organizing. “As part of the protracted US-supported counterinsurgency campaign, paramilitary-state violence continues to systematically target civil groups, such as trade unions organizations, which are considered a threat to the political and economic ‘stability’ conducive to the neo-liberal development of Colombia. This has made Colombia very attractive to foreign investment as poor working conditions and low wages keep profit margins high.[41]” According to a 2010 report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, “Recent developments in Colombia [indicate] the deteriorating situation of human rights defenders in recent months, in particular the killings, harassment and intimidation of civil society activists, trade-union leaders and lawyers representing victims.”[42] The well-documented cases of Chiquita Brands, mining company Drummond, and BP have shown the links between paramilitary groups and US and transnational corporations.[43]
Making the link directly between payments from multinationals to paramilitaries and the violence and massacres that displaced thousands is dangerous and complicated. To learn more about the relationship between displacement caused by state and paramilitary violence and the operations of transnational corporations I met with Francisco Ramírez Cuellar, a spirited Colombian lawyer and former president of Colombia’s National Mineworkers’ Union (Sintraminercol). Today, Ramírez is the head of the Funtraenergetica, the United Federation of Miners, Energy, Metallurgical, Chemical and Allied Industries union, and maintains a practice in Bogotá. Ten years ago, he co-wrote a book about paramilitary activity and corporate gain, which was translated into English as The Profits of Extermination.
After a typical meal of sancocho and fish, during which a clever thief pretending to sell football memorabilia stole his cell phone, Ramírez and I sat down in a Bogotá cafe, where his voice boomed above the busy coffeeshop talk. I asked him what has changed since he wrote the book. “We intuited the use of paramilitary groups by corporations, but we couldn’t openly say it because we didn’t have convincing evidence. Well it turns out that it wasn’t just true, but that it was a permanent practice of, according to my calculations, 96 to 98 percent of the companies that are operating in this country.… In fact, after investigating in detail, we found that the paramilitaries created something called the North Bloc, and we calculate that 80 percent of the money to create the paramilitary North Bloc was provided by mining and oil companies, who produce coal and exploit gas and oil in the whole northern and Caribbean zone of Colombia.”
Since then Ramírez’s investigations have uncovered evidence of individual cases of collaboration between paramilitaries and energy sector corporations, including Drummond, Glencore, BHP Billiton, Xstrata, Anglo American, Perenco, British Petroleum, Pacific Rubiales, as well as Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte, which have large, land-intensive operations for the production of African palm for biofuels. “In our calculations, the operations of these companies over the last twenty-five years has produced 2.5 million forcibly displaced people in the zones they operate in. In our initial calculations 60,000 people have been killed, 11 percent or 10 percent of those 60,000 were workers affiliated to unions,” said Ramírez, who survived eight assassination attempts and two bombings between 1993 and 2007. He told me about a handful of cases in which oil companies collaborated in the formation of paramilitary groups, which he said were often financed using money obtained through drug trafficking.
An illustration from the banana industry is particularly compelling: “I’ll give you an example from the eastern plains of the country, from the Guaviare and Guainía departments. That area is today entirely planted with African palm, through front companies belonging mainly to Chiquita but also to Dole and Del Monte. What did Chiquita do? They moved in the paramilitaries they created and financed through narcotrafficking, which did as they pleased in the Urabá region, and that’s why there was the famous Mapiripán massacre.”
Though some of the facts of what took place in Mapiripán remain cloudy, much has emerged about what has become one of the country’s most emblematic paramilitary massacres. Between July 15 and July 22 of 1997, over one hundred members of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) paramilitary group took over the small town in the department of Guaviare. The paramilitaries arrived at an airport under military control and were transported to Mapiripán in army vehicles. Beginning July 15, paramilitaries killed at least forty-nine people, torturing and dismembering them before throwing their bodies into the Guaviare River. According to a statement by Mapiripán’s municipal judge, “Every day, about 7:30 p.m., these individuals, through mandatory orders, had the electric generator turned off, and every night, through cracks in the wall, I watched kidnapped people go by, with their hands tied behind their backs and gagged, to be cruelly murdered in the slaughterhouse of Mapiripán. Every night we heard screams of people who were being tortured and murdered, asking for help.”[44] The army didn’t respond to calls for help from villagers until July 22. According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, “The incursion of the paramilitary in Mapiripán was an act that had been meticulously planned several months before June 1997, carried out with logistic preparatory work and with the collaboration, acquiescence, and omissions by members of the Army. Participation of agents of the State in the massacre was not limited to facilitating entry of the AUC into the region, as the authorities knew of the attack against the civilian population in Mapiripán and they did not take the necessary steps to protect the members of the community.”[45] A second massacre took place in the rural hamlet of La Cooperativa, as the paramilitaries evacuated Mapiripán. At the time, AUC leader Carlos Castaño claimed that his men carried out the massacre in order to destroy a stronghold of FARC insurgency that controlled the entire cycle of drug production and trafficking.[46] But the events that followed seem to confirm Ramírez’s version, whereby companies dealing in palm oil are the major beneficiaries of the slaughter.
Four to five years after the massacres, Ramírez told me, “the companies came in to buy [l
and] and the farmers were obliged to sell. Those who were still alive. The rest ran away such that they were never indemnified, and through frontmen they ended up selling an entire region … and then the planting of African palm began.” In Guaviare, as elsewhere in Colombia, African palm was planted on lands belonging to displaced people once their lands were abandoned. According to a report about land grabs in the Chocó region, prepared by Colombia’s Inter-Ecclesiastic Justice and Peace Commission, “Paramilitaries, with the complicity and negligence of the 17th Brigade and Urabá Police, assassinate, disappear, torture and displace local inhabitants, while claiming to fight the guerrilla. Businessmen associated with these criminal structures appropriate the territories that traditionally belong to the Afro-descendant communities; authorities at the service of the businessmen try to legalize this fraudulent land-grab; and the national government supports more than 95 percent of the illegal investment. This leads to oil palm agribusiness being implemented on the ruins of the communities’ homes, cemeteries and communal areas.”[47]
It is well established that Chiquita had long been paying off illegal armed groups. In March of 2007, representatives of Chiquita Brands International pleaded guilty in a Washington, D.C., court to making payments to the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) paramilitaries.[48] Chiquita found representation for the case in high places: Eric Holder, who went on to become the US attorney general, led negotiations between the company and the US Department of Justice.[49] According to the Associated Press, “In 2001, Chiquita was identified in invoices and other documents as the recipient of a shipment from Nicaragua of 3,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 5 million rounds of ammunition. The shipment was actually intended for the AUC.”[50] According to the 2007 indictment, “From in or about 1997 through on or about February 4, 2004, defendant Chiquita made over 100 payments to the AUC totaling over $1.7 million.”[51] Over half of those payments were made after the AUC was designated a terrorist organization by the United States in 2001. It was poor and working-class Colombians who paid the highest price for the company’s payments to paramilitary and guerrilla groups: Chiquita funded the AUC during a period of seven years when over 4,000 people, mostly civilians in Urabá, were murdered by the paramilitaries, and another 60,000 were displaced.[52]
Chiquita sold off its Colombian assets in 2004 to Invesmar, a British Virgin Islands–based holding company that owns Banacol, a Colombian company that continues to supply Chiquita with bananas.[53] Displaced people returning to Curvaradó in Colombia’s north are again being threatened, and fear being displaced again by paramilitaries at the service of Banacol.[54] In addition to payments received from Chiquita, it is documented that the AUC helped finance its operations by running cocaine out of the Port of Turbo using Chiquita boats. “Éver Veloza García, former commander of the paramilitary Turbo Front in Northern Urabá, explained how paramilitaries evaded the control points of security agencies by tying narcotic shipments to the hulls of banana vessels at high sea. Indeed, authorities have seized over one and a half tons of cocaine, valued at USD 33 million, from Chiquita ships.”[55]
Transnational mining companies benefit time and time again from the regime of fear imposed by the drug war and paramilitarization in Colombia. Coal was discovered in Guajira state in the early 1980s, and Carbocol, the state-owned mining company, was sold to Exxon, which later resold to some of the world’s biggest mining companies: Australia’s BHP Billiton, South Africa’s Anglo American, and Switzerland’s Glencore (today Glencore-Xstrata). “These mining corporations then accelerated their exploitation of Colombian natural resources. Settlements of the Wayuu people and Afro-Colombians were cleared to give the companies easy access to the land. On 9–10 August 2001 the village of Tabaco was destroyed, displacing 350 families from their homes. Two hundred police and soldiers fought the helpless villagers as Intercor bulldozers smashed down their houses, and forcible ejection was being backed up by the usual panoply of terror. The nickel mine Cerro Matoso, another Billiton operation, was in an area where the paramilitaries held the people in a grip of fear.”[56] Today, the Cerrejón mine, which expanded onto lands cleared by paramilitary activity, produces thirty two million tons of coal per year, and is the largest open pit coal mine in the world.[57]
Social control via military and paramilitary operations in the coal region is ongoing. “The climate of regional tension, especially that surrounding the mining projects in Cesar and the Guajira, is smothering, as there is a constant armed control that attempts to discipline the population, restricting, for example, the use of roads adjacent to the coal deposits,” reads a 2011 report by the Social Observatory of Transnational Megaprojects and Human Rights.[58] The Guajira was historically a region with coca production, and anti-narcotics as well as counterinsurgency efforts, and Cesar more recently has also entered the list of states with coca production.[59]
Displacement caused by paramilitarization and cemented by state military presence has also occurred in relation to precious metals mining. In the mid-1990s, state forces arrived in the south of Bolívar state, which has long been home to small-scale mining activities, surrounding communities and preventing the free movement of residents. “Simultaneously, there was a strong advance by paramilitary forces in the period from 1996–2001, which initially generated two mass exoduses of the population from the countryside to municipal centers. Then, in 2006, various areas exploited by small miners were militarized, and construction began on various military bases.”[60] South African company Anglo Gold Ashanti has active operations in the area, where small-scale miners have been killed in what they say are attempts to displace them from their lands. According to a 2010 press release by the Federation of Small-scale Miners of the South of Bolivar (FEDEAGROMISBOL), “These assassinations are part of a long string of acts of aggression against the people of the south of Bolivar, such as the assassination of Alejandro Uribe Chacón on September 19, 2006, and others that we consider to be actions which are part of a strategy to force us to leave our territories, as part of a larger more macabre alliance between the national government and the gold mining multinationals, such as Anglo Gold Ashanti, and palm companies such as Grupo Dabon, who are trying to take control of the natural resources in the south of Bolivar.”[61] Anglo Gold, which holds nearly 800,000 hectares in mining concessions in Colombia, “tends to have their technicians accompanied by military personnel in areas with mineral potential, including in the exploration phase.”[62] Or, as Ramírez boldly put it, “part of exploration is the creation of the paramilitary group.”
Though they no longer make headlines, violence and displacement continue to be hallmarks of Colombian society. According to the United Nations, “While there has been a drop in the rate of new displacements, an estimated 100,000 people were displaced internally in 2010, representing a net increase of 35 percent compared to 2009, according to the Government.”[63] The number of displaced measured by Colombian NGO CODHES the following year is more than double the 2010 number, at 259,146 persons.[64] In 2010 and 2011, at least 271 queer people were murdered, illustrating a pattern of violence against LGBTI people that is also evident in Mexico and Central America.[65] Between 2005 and 2010, 265 trade unionists were murdered, many by the same paramilitary groups spawned to fight guerrillas and protect narcotics traffickers.[66] And between 2008 and 2012, 142 human rights activists were killed and six disappeared.[67] Interestingly, as paramilitary murders began to drop off, killings by police rose: “Between the first and second halves of 2010, extrajudicial killings attributed to Law Enforcement grew by 68.18%. That equates to a daily rate more than double that of the previous Government. UNHCHR confirmed that this practice continued in 2011.”[68]
In terms of merchandise that enters and exits the country, Buenaventura is Colombia’s most important port city. It is also a place where forced displacement is still the norm, and a tragic example of how the phenomenon of paramilitary-initiated displacement is not confined to rural areas. Between 1999 and 2013, more than 6,000 people
were murdered in the municipality of 359,753 people. Over that period, tens of thousands of people were displaced. In a shocking example of what is happening there, over the span of just fourteen days in late 2012, more than 4,000 people were forcibly uprooted.
According to the 2005 census, 88.5 percent of people living in Buenaventura identified as Afro-Colombian or of mixed African heritage. Their ancestors were forced to leave Africa between 1536 and 1540 in order to exploit the resources of the Pacific Coast region. In addition, more than 40,000 people moved to the city after being displaced from their homes in rural Colombia.