Drug War Capitalism (12 page)

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 [land] 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.

Violence in Buenaventura exploded in 1999, when two blocs of the AUC entered the city supposedly to rid it of guerrillas; various massacres were carried out as the population was accused of collaborating with the guerrillas. Following the official demobilization of the AUC blocs in 2004 and 2005, the FARC re-entered the municipality, and a new wave of paramilitaries was not far behind. The violence returned with a vengeance. As government forces weakened the FARC’s ranks, other paramilitary groups entered the city, and today the government claims the ongoing violence is related to struggles between criminal bands trying maintain control over various areas in the city. The names of these groups change regularly: for example, in only two years, the Verdaderos Urabeños became the Campesinos del Pacifico, which became Los Gaitanistas, which became Los Chocoanos, which became La Empresa, leading to mass confusion in addition to terror. According to reports, paramilitary groups tend to be led by
paisas
(light-skinned Colombians from other regions, particularly from the state of Antioquia), while the foot soldiers are local Afro-Colombian youth. These groups have access to drug money, as the port facilitates an important outflow of cocaine (an estimated 250 tons per year).[69]

Fumigations and other activities under Plan Colombia pushed cocaine production out of Caquetá and Putumayo beginning in 2002, transforming Buenaventura and the Pacific region into cocaine producers and increasingly important transshipment points.[70] The city is heavily militarized, though soldiers and police collaborate with criminal groups and generally aggravate the violence. “It’s as if we have a little Haiti within Colombia. It feels like another country,” police officer Lt. Nikolai Viviescas told the
New York Times
in 2007.[71] Movement between neighborhoods, controlled by different paramilitary groups, is tightly restricted, and for a civilian to step foot into enemy territory is to risk death. Reports of people being murdered in broad daylight, killed by chainsaws, picked to death by screwdrivers, cut into pieces and dumped in the sea, and other barbaric, terror-inducing techniques swirl below the surface in private conversation and unpublished reports, but in general people are afraid to speak about what is happening. A list of clandestine mass graves is in circulation, but authorities have made no effort to excavate them. Extortion is the norm, and levels of violence are so intense that some residents are unable to go to the market for food. In some parts of Buenaventura, leaving is the only chance of survival.