We are, at last, installed in a flat in Bogotá. Although it’s not enormous, it’s in a beautiful old colonial house and opens onto a tiled patio overhung with foliage and bright pink flowers. The patio is also home to Tatan, a six-month-old German Shepherd who has proved to be an exceptionally friendly neighbour through his frequent attempts to hump my leg, chew my wrists and even tear off articles of clothing. Guayabo Pastuso is not quite as much a target of affection, although he claims that this is because I lead the dog on (he’s jealous of course).
Flat-hunting was a thoroughly demoralising process. Whilst the government are going all-out to seek foreign direct investment, it would appear that this only applies to selling off large parts of the country – renting a few square feet is far more of a challenge. Most landlords require not only a Colombian guarantor who owns property in the country (for which we had plenty of offers), but also that an independent agency undertakes a study of our solvency. The latter, however, is something of a farce as they insist that you give exhaustive details of all income, even if it comes from outside the country, and then only confirm income from Colombia and tell you what they could have told you without paying £15 for the privilege – that, since you have nothing in the country, you must pay a whopping deposit of 12 months rent, plus monthly rent payments on top of that.
In the end, Guayabo Pastuso’s ability to befriend older women saved us and we were directed to Bertha, who was more than happy to rent us a flat on the basis of a month’s deposit and my letter of introduction from the university. Far better than a commercial landlord as everyone in the house talks to each other (a sense of camaraderie has, I think, been fostered by the challenge of getting through the patio unscathed and unsoiled by the dog) and Bertha has been plying us with extra blankets since Bogotá is facing its worst weather in years.
Work has been going a little slowly so far as a result of flat-hunting and the seemingly unending amount of other administrative tasks we’ve had to do in order to get settled here. We’re both working with the Red de Hermandad y Solidaridad con Colombia which is a space for coordination between Colombian and international social organisations around themes such as the impact of transnational corporations, the problem that the perpetrators of most human rights violations (namely the state forces and state-linked paramilitaries) act within a climate of impunity, and a negotiated solution to the social and armed conflict in the country.
At the moment, we’re working primarily with an organisation set up by campesino leaders who’ve been forcibly displaced by the army and paramilitaries from the eastern departments of Casanare and Boyacá – several of whom were directly affected by the violence against social organisations organising against BP’s activities that some of you may remember was exposed by The Guardian in 1996. As well as providing “international accompaniment” (i.e. being a sort of human shield to deter the army or paramilitaries from doing anything nasty to people the Colombians we’re working with), we’re working with two others on a book into the effects of BP’s oil exploration activities in Casanare. Fortunately, a big chunk of the chapters Guayabo Pastuso and I are working on overlaps with my PhD research, but, even so, we’re going to be working like a pair of small bison for the next few months as the book has to be with the printers in December and we’re also meant to be in Casanare for a few days each month (plus there’s the minor issue of PhD chapters to write but I think it’s in hand…)
For those of you who aren’t up to date on BP’s murky record in Colombia (and who have been lax enough not to have kept your own personal press archive for the last 11 years) the story in brief is as follows….
When BP got to Colombia in the early 90’s, they signed a deal with the Ministry of Defence to contract the 16th Brigade of the army as their own private security force. The trouble with this (beyond the idea that a national army should protect foreign capital rather than the national population), is that the Colombian army has a rather long history of particularly nasty acts of violence against civilians, and the 16th Brigade has an especially dire human rights record, including murder, “disappearances”, torture, rape and forcibly displacing rural communities who happen to be surplus to the requirements of the oil industry and who will insist on farming when their land is on top of oil reserves.
BP also admitted to having employed the British-based private security company Defence Systems Limited to provide counter-insurgency training to the Colombian police and army units charged with the protection of BP’s installations. Whilst this might sound like a sensible precaution when some of Colombia’s leftist guerrillas have a tendency to blow up oil pipelines in protest against the appropriation of Colombia’s natural resources by foreign corporations, those of you who like to relax with a cup of cocoa and a counter-insurgency manual on a Saturday night will know that “counter-insurgency” tactics are often used to suppress the activities of the civilian population. Colombia is no exception here, and employees of DSL have confirmed that the training BP provided for the army and police was “lethal” and included the surveillance and intimidation of community leaders campaigning against the ecological damage being wrought by the company, as well as of workers who were trying to organise a union.
The result of all this, in the context of Colombian state policies, which favour multinational corporations and provide a climate of impunity for members of the armed forces and paramilitaries responsible for human rights violations, is that hundreds of people in Casanare have been killed or disappeared by the army and paramilitaries since BP arrived in the region and active social organisations have been destroyed.
Of course, when all of this came out in the media, there were more than a few slapped wrists within BP. The company rebranded itself as “beyond petroleum” and, since then, has successfully convinced plenty of people that they are now a socially responsible corporation. Things haven’t got much better in Casanare, however. It´s hard to know how many people have been killed this year, because fear means that murders often don´t get reported – but between January and May this year 11 extrajudicial executions at the hands of the army were documented in just two of the municipalities where BP operates.
The only big change is that it is now increasingly the army who are killing people, without the assistance of the paramilitaries. This is because a number of paramilitary groups have demobilised (often only to go on and form new paramilitary groups in urban areas), and President Uribe’s somewhat ill-named policy of “Democratic Security” has in recent years effectively given the green light to the armed forces to kill civilians under the guise of “counter-insurgency” activities and most of the civilians murdered by the army in Casanare have been presented as guerrillas killed in combat, with the army’s attempts to tamper with the evidence including changing people’s clothes to make them look like more convincing insurgents.
Our last trip to the region, during late July and early August, was with a delegation of people from different Colombian and European organisations who came to highlight the situation in Casanare outside of Colombia and to help document recent murders as well as the social and ecological impact of oil exploration. We interviewed numerous people whose partners or children had been killed or arbitrarily detained during Uribe’s presidency, such as Roque Julio Torres’ mum, who I visited last time I was here in April. Roque Julio was only sixteen when he was killed on 19 March this year, and was already in fear of his life because he was witness to two previous murders at the hands of the army. He was with his father, Daniel, when the army arrived at their farm and tortured both Roque and his dad before shooting them in the head and saying they had killed two guerrillas.
The massacre in the municipality of Recetor was another chilling tale of what can happen to surplus populations who don’t fit in with the state and corporations’ plans for “development”. In early 2002, when the 16th Brigade of the army had arrived to “provide security” for the area, a paramilitary group took over the nearby hamlet of el Vegon and called the community together for a meeting. Despite saying that they weren’t going to harm anybody, days later the paramilitaries began to call people by name and “disappear” them. Precise numbers of disappeared people are difficult to define as fear has prevented many people from reporting the disappearances, but it seems that more than 60 people were disappeared in the space of a few months, before the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, apparently under an agreement with BP, moved in to begin oil exploration.
One of the people I interviewed was an elderly woman who now cares for her grandson after both of his parents were disappeared. The boy, who was three at the time, was initially taken along with his father – and tortured to make him stop crying – before being returned to his mother. She then went to look for his father, and an eyewitness who escaped reported that she was disappeared by the paramilitaries as well.
Of course, I wouldn’t want to give the impression that BP is an especially evil corporation just because it is implicated in this sort of thing. Many multinational (and indeed national) corporations operating in Colombia have been shown to have tight links with paramilitary groups, as well as the army. For example, lots of you will know of the international boycott of Coca-Cola that was called in protest against the murders of trade union leaders during negotiations with the company’s Colombian bottling plants.
The weekend after our trip to Casanare, Colombian social and human rights organisations held the fourth of a series of public hearings of the People’s Permanent Tribunal’s Colombia Session into multinational corporations responsibility for crimes against humanity. The People’s Permanent Tribunal is an international alternative justice mechanism which aims to establish legal responsibilities in situations of mass human rights violations where there has been no response from official institutions. Whilst this most recent hearing was focused on the crimes of the oil companies BP, Repsol and Occidental Petroleum, previous hearings have tried multinationals in the mining, biodiversity and food and agriculture sectors. Those of you who got the updates from my second trip to Colombia might remember that I attended the food and agriculture tribunal in April 2006, at which Nestle and Coca-Cola were declared responsible for the murders of 9 and 10 trade unionists respectively and Chiquita was found guilty for having trafficked bullets and AK47’s to paramilitary groups. Whilst the People’s Permanent Tribunal can’t actually sentence anyone, the judges are experts in national and international law and work within that framework in order to highlight the truth of the crimes and their causes, so they can’t just be covered up and erased from historical memory by the governments and companies who are responsible.
The Tribunal was also a forum for victims’ families to get together and see that they weren’t alone in the their struggles for justice, as well as a space for discussion of proposals for a “movimiento energético”, a social movement focused on energy production and provision and including different sectors of Colombian society (indigenous groups, campesinos, afro-Colombians, urban populations, workers, students and so on). As well as campaigning for popular sovereignty over natural resources (a concept different from traditional socialist demands for national sovereignty, as it recognises the diversity of Colombian peoples and the autonomous models of society and development coming from different groups), this nascent movement is also thinking about alternative forms of energy production that might help avoid increased social and ecological destruction as a result of climate chaos. It’s difficult to build alternatives when the dominant political and economic model is being imposed through such enormous levels of violence but, despite this, the activities of social movements in Colombia go far beyond simply denouncing the human rights situation.
A few days after the Tribunal, we managed to have a break with some friends in the department of Santander. We spent a very relaxed few days in spectacular countryside walking in the hills and swimming in rivers (and drinking rather a lot of rum), before rushing back to accompany another trip, only to find that it had been cancelled because of lack of money.
On this occasion it was just as well the trip was cancelled as Guayabo Pastuso’s stomach decided to put up a prolonged battle against the invasion of foreign bacteria (I shall spare you the details), but lack of funds has been an ongoing problem for work with communities in Casanare. We’re meant to be leaving again this afternoon on a trip that coincides with the commemoration of three years since the murder of Oswaldo Vargas, a community leader who had been campaigning for BP to remedy environmental damage and invest in social projects, but we still don’t know if the money´s going to be avaiable for us to go. It’s worrying because, alongside wanting to show support to Oswaldo’s family, we’re meant to be doing human rights workshops (so that people know the options available to them when they’re threatened and so on) as well as working with communities rebuilding their organisational processes in the wake of the violence against local social organisations.
Ho hum. Sorry it’s not terribly cheerful. Guayabo Pastuso tells me that I should live up to international expectations of the British and end on a positive note, specifically by telling you about the fact that we’ve managed to find a decent cup of tea in the café around the corner. After a few years in England, the bloody Catalan thinks we solve everything with a nice cup of tea and a hot bath, whereas (although I never thought I’d say it) I’m far more inspired by the wide availability of coffee with various types of liqueur in it. Alongside the live music and free theatre, alcoholic hot drinks are definitely one of the highlights of Bogotá.
