Agro-fuels and gold-mining: the human consequences

With Frog-Lover the fourth member of Espacio currently in Colombia – see her blog www.bioduels.blogspot.com

A leader of Colombia’s largest paramilitary group once described paramilitary strategy in terms of clearing the ground for a model of “development” geared towards corporate interests.

He explained that once the paramilitaries had eliminated potentially subversive members of the population, imposed an authoritarian social structure, ensured that land once owned by peasant farmers became the property of large landowners and begun employment, health and education programmes in conjunction with state bodies, these right-wing death squads would stop being a “loose cannon of the State”, having “put in place the necessary structures for the victorious expansion of national and multinational capitalism and the ‘modernising’ State will be able to install itself with the cooperation of the private sector, non-governmental organisations and the “organised” communities.’ (Carlos Castaño, quoted by Colombian economist Libardo Sarmiento in 1996).

He was referring particularly to paramilitary strategy in the Magdalena Medio region of the country, where Espacio’s Frog Lover has been based for the last few weeks, providing solidarity accompaniment to communities there.

The region was taken over by paramilitaries – in full complicity with the “official” state forces – in the late 1990’s.

Although Colombia’s armed conflict is often misrepresented as being primarily to do with drugs, the well-documented, institutionalised links between the armed forces and paramilitaries, the recent “parapolítica” which revealed close ties between numerous top politicians and paramilitary groups and the numerous testimonies of collaboration between multinational corporations and paramilitary groups point to a different logic driving the conflict: the violent imposition of a model that geographer David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession”, which is being imposed, with differing degrees of violence, the world over.

When the paramilitaries arrived in Southern Bolívar, they made it clear to communities why they had come. In one part of the region – where local people make a living as small-scale gold miners – the paramilitaries killed one of the leaders of the Farmers and Mining Federation of Southern Bolívar, decapitated him and played football with his head before putting it on a pole looking towards the mining zone and telling the inhabitants that they were coming for the mines and they were going to hand them over to people who would work them better and make more rational use of them.

Today, gold mining in the region is controlled by multinational corporations, such as Kedahdah Anglo Gold. One of the current leaders of the Federation is Teófilo Acuña, who will be in Bristol on Wednesday, was last year was imprisoned at the order of the army battalion responsible for protecting the multinationals’ interests.

Monocultures of oil palm – a crop used for agro-fuels (also known as biofuels) as well as in the fast food industry – are another important interest linked to paramilitarism in the region as well as to international policies designed to keep capitalism going and provide what Bristol Rising Tide aptly desribe as a “false technical fix” for climate change.

In a country where eight million people are reported to by dying of hunger, the imposition of monocultures in place of local food crops is itself lethal – quite apart from the violence used to dispossess people of their land.

In the town in Southern Bolívar where Frog Lover has been living, it is planned that 16,000 of the available 24,000 hectares will be used for growing Oil Palm.
This does not leave much space for food crops. And much of this ‘available land’ is only available once wetlands have been drained, affecting fish and bird populations as well as destroying the livelihoods of local fishermen.

Frog Lover has met farmers in the region surviving on one meal a day since being forced off their land by a palm oil company, people working for palm companies paid poorly and paid late, and many who are angry and saddened that in such a fertile area they are having to import food from elsewhere.

The village of San Cayatano is one example of the misery caused by agro-fuel monocultures.

When Señor Numa, the owner of a 900 hectare farm died 23 years ago, the villagers waited five years for his relatives to claim the land before they started to farm it. They were there for fourteen years: around forty families, again growing staple foods.

It is still unclear whether the men who arrived claiming to have bought the land from Señor Numa’s sons actually ever did, although it is understood that they aquired the land for growing Oil Palm. What was clear were the threats behind the request for these families to leave the land. People were offered small amounts of money and were told that if they didn’t leave the good way, they would be leaving the bad way. Given the paramilitary presence in the area, people took this pretty seriously. The last man left was taken by the paramilitaries to be killed, but managed to escape.

That was three years ago. ‘Misery’ was the word used to describe life for them since. Unemployment is especially uncomfortable when there are eight children to feed. One meal a day becomes normal. Hunger universal.

Meanwhile, smallholders nearby have been persuaded by falling crop prices into growing Oil Palm through the EU-backed policy of “strategic alliances” between peasants and corporations (alliances that disguise grossly unequal power relations and the fact that the peasants take the risks while the company reaps the profit).

For the first three years, while the palms are growing, the farmers get a loan of 400 000 pesos (106 pounds) per month from the company – San Lucas – to cover the upkeep of the 10 hectares. It actually doesn’t cover much. At least two people are needed every day for keeping the area weed free. (If you are reported for having livestock on the land, the payment stops) If the workers are not family, they need to paid 40 000 pesos per day. If they are, they need feeding.

On top of this, when repayments start after 5 years, the 400,000 pesos per month will have to be paid back to the company.

Some farmers use herbicides, also supplied on credit from the company.

Most of these farmers currently have a loan of around 25 million pesos (6600 pounds) and many see losing their land as a real danger as a result of their debt. When their trees start bearing fruit, they will be at the mercy of global prices and the amount that San Lucas chooses to pass on to them.

It is not a company that has so far inspired much confidence. Three years ago they made an agreement with the community to sort out the local road which is impassible in the winter – children struggle to school knee deep in mud and arrive 2 hours late according to the teacher. The company also undertook to put in a drainage system to help against flooding. None of this has been done, and in fact the problem with flooding has been far worse as the drainage system from the company’s own land directs more water onto the old airstrip, and another palm oil company at the other end has blocked where it used to drain away.

This Tuesday, 15th April, mandatory biofuel blending comes in, meaning that 2.5% of fuel sold at the pump must contain biofuel. Espacio members in Bristol will be with Rising Tide at Tesco, Eastville from 4.30 – 7pm on Tuesday 15th, highlighting the impact of the agrofuels in solidarity with communities who are struggling to keep their lands. See: http://www.bristol.indymedia.org/article/688168

communities build their own ‘plan de vida’ amidst army murders

Casanare isn’t the only part of the country where the army is killing members of populations who don’t fit into a development model geared towards resource extraction by multinational corporations.  Last week we traveled to Catatumbo in the north-eastern region of Santander to hear evidence that social organizations had collected into murders by the army in the part of Santander near the northernmost part of the boarder with Venezuela.

This is an interview with a member of CISCA, the Committee for Social Integration in Catatumbo, which is made up of representatives of peasant farmer and indigenous communities and is building a local level model of society and economy called a Plan de Vida (Plan for Life).

TELL US ABOUT THE HISTORY OF THE SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN CATATUMBO AND ABOUT WHAT’S HAPPENING AT THE MOMENT IN THE REGION
We’re peasant farmers in Catatumbo who arrived in the region in search of work, through a process of land occupation.  Catatumbo is on the border with Venezuela and has rich deposits of coal and oil as well as great biodiversity.  The Catatumbo river runs through most of the region and is the main source of the Maracaibo lake in Venezuela.  The land is shared between farmers and the original inhabitants, the Barí indigenous people who have lived on thos land for centuries and who today work closely as a community with the campesinos – both in food production and in acts of resistance, so that both the Barí and campesinos can live on the land.

Through this, the Catatumbo Committee for Social Integration – CISCA – was born, the aim of building social proposals for remaining on the land and in defense of life, which integrates everyone in Catatumbo – teachers, workers, peasant farmers, the Barí people, women, children, old people – so that we can follow the dream of continuing to live in Catatumbo and oppose the Colombian state’s intention to remove the people who live here in order to exploit natural resources – to empty the region of inhabitants in order for the state, along with transnational corporations, to remain with riches like coal and oil and to implement new cultivation strategies, such as crops of oil palm, cocoa, caucho and higuerilla, which they have been proposing to us but which we haven’t accepted.

There’s extensive oil palm in lower Catatumbo [see our previous posting http://www.bristol.indymedia.org.uk/newswire.php?story_id=26987&search_text=Tribunal ], which reflects the fact that the area was under paramilitary control since 1999.  After the so-called paramilitary ‘demobilization’ in 2004, [http://www.espacio.org.uk/backgroundtocolombia.htm] the oil palm crops were increased, as has the interest in oil and coal exploration and extraction by transnational companies and the Colombian government.  There is an important relationship between the paramilitaries and the current exploitation of natural resources [http://www.espacio.org.uk/backgroundtocolombia.htm] and the repercussions this has had on the lives of those of us who live in the region.

WHAT US YOUR ORGANIZATION’S PROPOSAL AND WHAT HAS THE STATE’S RESPONSE BEEN THE DEMANDS AND REQUESTS THAT YOU’VE PRESENTED?

We are in a region that has been abandoned by governments and hasn’t achieved the indicators of development that all human beings deserve as part of human dignity.  This abandonment is reflected in appalling roads to access the region, no possibility of selling our products, isolation, denial of the right to education, denial of the right to health – and to even talk of housing just highlights the impossibility of having a dignified home.  Because of this we’ve organized ourselves and begun to build a proposal called a Plan for Life (Plan de Vida), where the different communities begin to reflect about what it is we want, what we ought to have, what our rights are and to understand that there is a state that is responsible for what happens to us or what stops happening.  So, with the participation of the communities, the different villages, the Barí people and campesinos, we’re building a Plan for Life – a plan so that we can stay on our land, have life and live in Catatumbo.

However, the government has ignored all the iniciatives coming from the region and given us a military presence.  The only state presence in the region is Mobile Brigade No 5 and Brigade No. 30, and it’s being announced that from November Brigade No 21 will also be in operation.  Which is to say, a strong militarization for a region inhabited by only 250,000 people and made up on only 8 municipalities.  This offer of the state to the communities, in form of military presence, has mean numerous atrocities in the form of an increasing number of extra-judicial execution, which so far this year have amounted to more than 30.  There are 30 dead inhabitants of the region, who have had nothing to do with armed conflict, but who are presented by the military as guerrillas killed in combat.

We’re worried by the number of deaths and the way campesinos are being attacked.  We can’t walk on the paths alone any more because at any moment we could be shot and a ‘guerilla’ reported killed in combat, when it is a campesino who was going to market for their family, who was harvesting crops or just working on their farm.  This situation has been ongoing since February this year and represents a systematic decision to kill those who live in this region of Catatumbo.  To recount some cases…  Eliécer Ortega … is detained by the army and later appears in the Ocaña morgue reported as a guerilla killed in combat when he’s a campesino from the region. Carlos Daniel Martínez … the army arrive at this house and find him alone, a man of almost 50, and he’s killed in the morning and reported as a guerilla killed in combat.  The same in the case of the two young men who were detained by the army, murdered and thrown into the Catatumbo river – the bodies were found in the lower part of the river.  This could continue, there are more than 30 cases.

This is a great worry, because the army Brigades are ‘successful’ by killing campesinos and reporting them as killed in combat.  We want to tell the national and international community about all of this because what is happening to us is a decision to get rid of the people who live in the region of Catatumbo.  We know about the conflict in the region but we demand that they respect the civilian population, the non-combatants, the campesinos, the indigenous people, those of us who live in the region…. The only thing that we have is a bit of land to work and on which to raise a family.  We are not using arms, we are not saying anything other that that we want to live in the region and build a project for staying on our territory.

The national army is committing these atrocities against the population, and we have reported this to government bodies – the Vice Presidency of the Republic, the Ministry of the Interior and also to the Brigade commanders.  In the municipality of El Tarra, the community, the families of the victims, of those who have been executed by the army reported this behaviour to the high command of the Mobile Brigade No 15.

We believe that there should be some mechanisms so that the Colombian government and army understand that we have a right as Colombians to live in this region and to be allowed to live peacefully in Catatumbo.

ACCORDING TO YOUR ANALYSIS OF THE SITUATION, ARE THE OUTRAGES THAT ARMY IS COMMITTING AGAINST THE POPULATION A RESULT OF THE NEED TO REPORT KILLINGS OF GUERRILLAS AND SHOW RESULTS AGAINST THE INSURGENCY OR ARE THEY PART OF A STRATEGY TO EXHAUST AND DISPLACE THE POPULATION IN FAVOUR OF THE INTERESTS THAT YOU MENTIONED – OIL AND COAL EXTRACTION AND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF INDUSTRIAL MONOCULTURES?

The army Brigades are in the region under the pretext of counter-insurgency and of ending the guerrilla presence in the region.  However, we believe that underneath this military strategy there is an aim to guarantee the extraction of mineral and energy resources and natural resources in general… This military presence provides security for the oil companies, for the transnational corporations who are putting everything into coal extraction, those who are sowing oil palm, those who want to privatize the water, as well as providing a presence near the frontier to control the project of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.  It’s also a strategy to stigmatize those of us who live in the region, accompanied by the terror sown by the national army across the region of Catatumbo, village by village, saying that now the Black Eagles [paramilitary militias] are coming.

We think that this strategy of terror is being sown by the national army so that we are afraid, so that we leave.  In some cases, the army has directly asked the campesinos ‘why don’t you go, why don’t you leave the region’.  Which is to say that there is an interest in emptying the territory by whatever means – by criminalization, by legal cases against us, by detentions, by murders, by the strategy of terror, so that the people leave.  All of this goes hand in hand with whatever counter-insurgency strategy, so that there are the security conditions for the transnational companies to exploit the region’s resources.  That is how we understand it.

In the face of this horror, we ask the national and international community to be aware of our situation and ready to act because they are killing and displacing us in order to have a territory – a territory that is going to be practically wiped out as 15 thousand hectares of Catatumbo are being requested for open-face coal mining.  This will be an ecological disaster, it will end life in the region, end the culture of production and also certainly put an end to the Barí people, who despite having been in the furthest corners of the territory for years, the last bit that remains for them will be threatened by the exploitation of energy resources.

I want to thank you for giving us this opportunity to give your our voice and join it to the voices of the peoples of the world so that people know what is going on in the region of Catatumbo.  Here we are building resistance, building a project for life that will allow us to remain in the territory, that will allow us to bring up our families and participate in society….  The Colombian government may not be interested in the people, but only in resources and the riches of Catatumbo which can contribute to the enriching of transnational companies, but we are interested in life – for us the most important thing is to live life in harmony with nature.  For this reason, the indigenous people and campesinos of Catatumbo demand that the Colombian state respect our lives and our decision to remain in the territory.   We also ask for solidarity from all those who can hear us or read us, from those who know that we are building resistance, they don’t forget us, that they accompany us, that they are ready to act and help so that you are our voice in all places for the defence of life and the right to remain on the land.

A fraternal embrace from Catatumbo for everyone who is building resistance and the conditions for life in the world.

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…

beyond petroleum

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.

coke, nestle and chiquita tried for crimes against humanity

The weekend of 1st and 2nd of April was the first hearing of the People’s Permanent Tribunal’s Colombia Session, during which the multinationals Coca-Cola, Nestle and Chiquita Brands were tried for human rights abuses. The PPT is an international alternative justice mechanism which has the aim establishing the legal responsibilities in situations of massive violations of fundamental rights where there has been no response from official legal institutions. Whilst the PPT 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 they can’t just be covered up and erased from historical memory from by the governments and companies who are responsible.

After hearing the testimonies and examining a mountain of written evidence the judges found Coca-Cola directly or indirectly responsible for the assassination of 10 trade unionists and Nestlé responsible for the assassination of 9. Chiquita was found guilty of directly trafficking arms to the paramilitaries. Chiquita is the successor to the United Fruit Company, the US company involved in the Colombian army’s massacre of several hundred striking banana workers on 6th December 1928 and the disappearance of several hundred more over the following weeks – a massacre which provided the inspiration for events in Gabriel García Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”:

It hadn’t rained for three months and it was a time of drought. But when Mr Brown announced his decision a torrential rain poured over the banana region, taking José Arcadio Segundo by surprise on the road to Macondo. A week later it was still raining.
The official version, a thousand times repeated across the country through any method of communication the government found within its reach, ended up prevailing: there had been no deaths, the satisfied workers had returned to their families and the banana company had suspended activities until the rain had passed. Martial law remained in place, in case it was necessary to apply emergency measures because of the public calamity posed by the interminable downpour; although the troops were confined to their barracks.
During the day, the soldiers walked through the torrents in the streets, with their trousers rolled halfway up their legs, playing at shipwrecks with the children. At night, after the curfew, they broke down doors with their rifle butts, pulled the suspects from their beds and took them on a journey without return…. “Of course it was a dream”, the officials insisted, nothing has ever happened in Macondo. This is a happy town”. And so they erased from memory the extermination of the union leaders.

Garcia changed little in his account except the name of the company and the town in which the massacre was carried out and the fact that the army’s commanding officer did concede that 9 people had been killed. On 16 January 1929 US embassador Jefferson Caffrey sent a memo to the State Department saying “I have the honour to inform you that the number of striking workers killed exceeds one thousand”. And of course the story doesn’t stop there, or with the dead left by multinationals such as Coca-Cola and Nestle, despite the ongoing official denials.

A few days after the tribunal I left Bogotá with Maria from the campaign against Nestlé in Switzerland for the town of Bugalagrande, which is home to a Nestle factory and little else. We stayed with the biggest trade unionist I have ever seen and were fed to similar proportions by his wife. So much for being in Colombia making me lose weight…

The Sinaltrainal branch in Bugalagrande is one of the biggest and the union have long been involved in projects with the community, such as building a sports centre, providing a low-interest loans facility and running a community kitchen which provides cheap but healthy lunches to families without the means to feed themselves adequately and also tries to raise people’s consciousness about the causes of hunger. Despite the vast quantities of milk, biscuits, chocolate and soup produced by Nestle in Bugalagrande, there are still people nearby without enough access to any of it. Throughout the 1990’s, the union also worked with peasant groups on a project people’s control over their own food production and consumption, but then the paramilitaries arrived and did away with the project and some of the people working on it. We listened to some chilling testimonies from people who’d be threatened and saw how the factory had polluted the river that runs through the town (they managed to kill all the swallows in the area a couple of years ago).
Over the last few years Nestle have increasingly been employing people on a casual basis (though Adecco – the worst temping agency I ever worked for – although here Adecco actually put psychologists in the workers’ houses watch how they spent their money, presumably so they can try to justify paying them less). Even those new employees with contracts get none of the benefits (such as access to healthcare) that the older workers get, and their salary is a whopping 35% lower. Whilst we were there, the union voted to enter a more confrontational negotiation with Nestle to obtain equal rights for the new workers – last time they did this, in the late 80’s, one of the leaders was killed and the main protagonists were sacked. So things could get nasty again in the next few weeks.

I’ve also been getting even more used to public speaking in Spanish, to the point that it’s starting not to bother me anymore…. The day after the tribunal, I had to give a 15 minute talk about the campaign against Coca-Cola in the UK. I had prior warning for this one, although at the meeting in Bugalagrande Maria and I were both called onto the platform and asked to say something without any warning whatsoever – I think I’m going to have to store up some eloquent and rousing sound bites for when I’m called on to speak without notice as I’m starting to run out of intelligent things to say. The Dame Edna disguise hasn’t come out again – bright pink really doesn’t suit me so I’m reserving the glasses for emergencies.

Easter week was very quiet, except for the occasional priest singing tuneless hymns in the streets. Everyone was either praying or off partying in other parts of the country. I worked with Maria on a proposal for the campaign against hunger, which Sinaltrainal launched at the forum after the food and agriculture hearing, although we managed to have some fun too at a goodbye party for a couple of friends who have got grants from the Cuban government to go to medical school in Havana and at a meeting with Sinaltrainal which deteriorated into beer-drinking session (I have to put this in because my dad seems to be worried that I’m being too well behaved – which is only because I don’t offer up information on my bad behaviour for public consumption of course). Penance followed the parties though and I spent the entire weekend in supplication to the god of PhD’s finishing off a rough draft of a chapter and lamenting Colombia’s lack of Cadbury’s buttons Easter Eggs – I mean, struggles for food sovereignty are all very well and I know Cadburys are a big mean company, but I do like the way they engrave little bunnies in the chocolate.