Well worth reading: The Dark Side of Plan Colombia

The Dark Side of Plan Colombia
Wednesday 27 May 2009

by: Teo Ballvé | Visit article original @ The Nation

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Paramilitaries and La Violencia

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In the late 1980s this part of Colombia became a base for paramilitary groups, or "paras," founded by three brothers from the Castaño family: Fidel, Vicente and Carlos, who came up through the ranks of the infamous Medellín cartel of Pablo Escobar. The Castaños received generous logistical and financial support from businessmen, wealthy landowners, drug traffickers and members of the army. They collaborated so closely with the Colombian military's dirty war against guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that a 2001 report by Human Rights Watch referred to them as the army's "sixth division." Fueled by zealous anticommunism, warlords like the Castaños slaughtered thousands of innocents accused of harboring guerrilla sympathies.

By the mid-1990s, human rights reports show, the paras turned their violence to an economic purpose: gaining lands and businesses, eliminating opponents and protecting their most lucrative activity, drug trafficking. The Castaños and their allies became Colombia's undisputed cocaine barons, earning them top spots on the US government's most-wanted lists. The warlords began a bloody march into Urabá.

First, leaflets appeared warning all guerrilla collaborators to leave, and towns were riddled with paramilitary graffiti. Uriel Tuberquia, one of Enrique Petro's campesino neighbors, recounts that in the months before the paras arrived, rumors coursed through the community that the mochacabezas (decapitators) were coming, a reference to the gruesome way paramilitaries would dismember the bodies of their victims.

When the paras finally came, they killed Tuberquia's father as he grazed his cattle. "They shot him from behind, at long range," says Tuberquia, staring into the palm fields. "My dad never got a proper burial. He's just buried there, somewhere, underneath all that palm."

In October 1996 the paras had a macabre coming-out party in Chocó, with the murder of eight campesinos in the tiny town of Brisas on the Curvaradó River, an hour's walk from Petro's farm. What followed was a crescendo of terror locals simply call la violencia. In February 1997 the military, backed that year by $87 million in US support, teamed up with its "sixth division" to hammer northern Chocó. Army helicopters and fighter jets rained bombs and high-caliber gunfire on the jungle communities, while the paras "cleaned up" behind them. Military and paramilitary roadblocks cropped up everywhere. International human rights groups documented massacres, torture, murders and rapes. Paramilitaries capped off the year by slaughtering thirty-one campesinos a week before Christmas.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, the 1997 offensive forced some 17,000 people from their homes. In the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó basins alone, 140 farmers have been confirmed killed or disappeared, all but four by soldiers or paramilitaries. By 1997 Petro had already lost his brother and two sons to la violencia-one killed by the FARC. Paramilitaries repeatedly warned him he'd be killed if he didn't leave his farm. He tried to stay on, but after another son left, Petro abandoned the land.

"They said they came here to clean out the guerrillas," recalls Petro, "but it was us, the campesinos, they cleaned out." In interviews, several survivors tell me that when the violence began, paras came to their farms with the same chilling offer: "Sell us your land, or we'll negotiate with your widow."

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USAID officials refer to Urapalma's proposed project as a "strategic alliance" and typically call such efforts "community driven." "Without our support," said an embassy official, "farmers would have a weaker ability to negotiate fair alliances with the industrial processors." But according to documents from the Colombian attorney general's 2007 investigation, obtained by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, palm companies in Chocó set up these partnerships to legitimize illegal land acquisitions after the fact-often through fraud and coercion.

The investigation files include an affidavit by Pedro Camilo Torres, a former Urapalma employee who from 1999 to 2007 handled the company's loan applications, including the USAID grant proposal. His affidavit charges that Urapalma created campesino "front" organizations to secure phony land titles and gain access to public funds.

The most notorious case of fraud involves Lino Antonio Díaz Almario, who allegedly in 2000 acquired 14,645 acres-an impossible fortune for a poor campesino-and immediately sold these lands to the Association of Small Palm Oil Producers of Urabá, an organization started by Urapalma. But Díaz had been dead since 1995, when he drowned in the Jiguamiandó.

Urapalma's proposed USAID project, as summarized in an ARD report, referred to "Afrocolombian Associations." According to Torres's affidavit and eyewitnesses cited by the attorney general, all of Urapalma's campesino organizations were set up by Teresa Gómez, whom the US Treasury identifies as the "financial manager" of the Castaños' vast narco-paramilitary federation. She managed at least two other paramilitary-affiliated NGOs and is wanted for the murder of a campesino leader in Córdoba province who had clamored for lands seized by the Castaños. Phone calls and messages left with Urapalma's staff over months were not returned.

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Permanent Displacement

Life has not improved much for Petro or his fellow refugees. In April the government returned 3,200 acres-just 6 percent of the stolen land-to some farmers along the Curvaradó River. Twelve years after they were forced to flee, the rest remain displaced. The government says it is pressing the palm companies to return the remainder of the lands voluntarily, but locals have heard such promises before. Meanwhile, the companies are shipping out palm kernels by the truckload. Petro has only a fraction of his farm left, part of which he turned into a makeshift "humanitarian zone," a village of wooden shacks called Caño Claro, populated in recent years by as many as a dozen displaced families at a time.

More than 2,500 people still scrape by in a handful of these humanitarian zones, which dot the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó river basins, though none enjoy legal recognition by the government. In some cases, all that separates these refugees from their palm-covered former farms is a cratered dirt road patrolled by paramilitaries, now in civilian clothing, and army soldiers. Children scamper around the camps with bloated bellies from illness and malnutrition, their families torn from their source of subsistence. Of late, reprisals and violent threats toward those demanding the return of their lands have increased.

One day last October campesino leader Walberto Hoyos was shot and killed execution-style near the Curvaradó River, his neck and face pumped with bullets by a paramilitary gunman. The next morning, the residents of Urabá woke up to find their towns riddled with fresh graffiti and leaflets announcing the formation of a new paramilitary group, an eerie reprise of events leading up to la violencia.

More:
http://www.truthout.org/060309K