fake tan and ‘corporate responsibility’

We’re still up to our eyeballs in work and the rain hasn’t stopped. A couple of weeks ago we went back to the oil region to investigate an NGO that the oil companies set up and which trains rural community members in a more ‘entrepreneurial’ approach to farming, amongst other things. This was a wee bit nerve wracking as we had to go on our own (don’t ask – the Colombian organization we’re working with was meant to be coming to do research do, but things didn’t quite get organized according to plan). By now, we know what to do if we meet any of the armed actors in the region but nonetheless we were somewhat nervous.

I went sporting dark contact lenses and fake tan so that none of the farmers recognized me from previous trips to the region as I was trying to pass myself off as a right-leaning academic without any links to social movements. It must have worked because we spent part of the day with an NGO-worker who’d sat in on at a human rights workshop that I’d spoken at in the spring and he didn’t bat an eyelid. Guayabo Pastuso was also quite disturbed by my appearance and said he felt like he was having an affair my sister. He came along under the guise of concerned-partner-of-right-leaning-academic and did an excellent job of retreating to the loo every half hour in order to text our exact whereabouts to the social organization we’re working with in Bogota, just in case, although in the end everything was fine.

As one might expect, the oil companies have put tiny amounts of money into this rather dubious NGO in comparison with the huge amounts of funding given to the army in the region (who continue to extra-judicially execute civilians). I came close to blowing my cover when the NGO staff told us how the army had taken control of security in the region and there was no violence there now, just as we were passing the home of Roque Julio, the sixteen-year-old who the army tortured and killed, along with his father, on 19 march this year, but managed to keep smiling sweetly. Ho hum…