tied her hands behind her back, made her kneel down, and then in front of the villagers shot her in the back of the head. Hinestroza resigned but continued to represent her clients. BP has offered £180,000 to 17 families affected by the ODC pipeline, but offers of less than £100 per person to other claimants who have been rejected: some 1,600 people are holding out for claims worth a total of around £20 million.”[35]
In rural areas, the presence of armed actors representing state, guerrilla, narco, or other interests severely impacted people’s daily lives. “Peasants and rural inhabitants have been deliberately terrorized by these uniformed, armed groups of men,” wrote María Victoria Uribe about the army, paramilitaries, and guerrillas.[36] Violence in Colombia, as manifested during La Violencia of the 1950s and the war between uniformed armed factions today, has taken the form of acts of terror against the population, including mass killings and the public display of mutilated and tortured bodies. “In these massacres, perpetrators carry out a series of semantic operations, permeated with enormous metaphorical force, that dehumanize the victims and their bodies. These technologies of terror seek to expel rural inhabitants from their homes in order to consolidate territorial control.”[37] Of all of the armed actors, it is the paramilitaries, operating with complicity and support from the army, that are the most effective at carrying out displacement, and it is they who are responsible for the lion’s share of attacks.[38] By 2014, the total number of people displaced in Colombia was estimated at 5,368,138, and the total number of victims of the conflict over the past fifty years reached 6,073,437.[39] In a 2014 piece about memory, which criticizes Colombia’s national cinema institute for not distributing the trailer of a film about the war in Colombia, Colombian-Mexican writer Camilo Olarte writes, “The blood of fiction is fine. It’s acceptable. What’s real, no. And this isn’t fiction: 220,000 assassinations, 81.5 percent of them civilians, almost all campesinos; 25,007 disappeared, more than double the dictatorships of the Southern Cone; 1,754 victims of sexual violence; 6,421 children recruited by armed groups; 27,023 kidnappings associated with the armed conflict between 1970 and 2010; 10,189 people mutilated by antipersonnel mines, almost the same number as Afghanistan, 8.3 million hectares dispossessed and abandoned.”[40]
In Colombia, in addition to fortifying the national army, paramilitarization has been beneficial to transnational corporations wishing to dissuade labor organizing. “As part of the protracted US-supported counterinsurgency campaign, paramilitary-state violence continues to systematically target civil groups, such as trade unions organizations, which are considered a threat to the political and economic ‘stability’ conducive to the neo-liberal development of Colombia. This has made Colombia very attractive to foreign investment as poor working conditions and low wages keep profit margins high.[41]” According to a 2010 report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, “Recent developments in Colombia [indicate] the deteriorating situation of human rights defenders in recent months, in particular the killings, harassment and intimidation of civil society activists, trade-union leaders and lawyers representing victims.”[42] The well-documented cases of Chiquita Brands, mining company Drummond, and BP have shown the links between paramilitary groups and US and transnational corporations.[43]
Making the link directly between payments from multinationals to paramilitaries and the violence and massacres that displaced thousands is dangerous and complicated. To learn more about the relationship between displacement caused by state and paramilitary violence and the operations of transnational corporations I met with Francisco Ramírez Cuellar, a spirited Colombian lawyer and former president of Colombia’s National Mineworkers’ Union (Sintraminercol). Today, Ramírez is the head of the Funtraenergetica, the United Federation of Miners, Energy, Metallurgical, Chemical and Allied Industries union, and maintains a practice in Bogotá. Ten years ago, he co-wrote a book about paramilitary activity and corporate gain, which was translated into English as The Profits of Extermination.
After a typical meal of sancocho and fish, during which a clever thief pretending to sell football memorabilia stole his cell phone, Ramírez and I sat down in a Bogotá cafe, where his voice boomed above the busy coffeeshop talk. I asked him what has changed since he wrote the book. “We intuited the use of paramilitary groups by corporations, but we couldn’t openly say it because we didn’t have convincing evidence. Well it turns out that it wasn’t just true, but that it was a permanent practice of, according to my calculations, 96 to 98 percent of the companies that are operating in this country.… In fact, after investigating in detail, we found that the paramilitaries created something called the North Bloc, and we calculate that 80 percent of the money to create the paramilitary North Bloc was provided by mining and oil companies, who produce coal and exploit gas and oil in the whole northern and Caribbean zone of Colombia.”
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.
