The damage may be just beginning. In 2005 Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, citing surging markets in food and biofuels, urged the country to increase palm production from 750,000 acres to 15 million acres--an area the size of West Virginia. Critics point out that many of the new palm growing regions exhibit patterns of narco-trafficking and paramilitary violence similar to that in Chocó, including massacres and forced displacement. A report by the international organization Human Rights Everywhere found violent crimes related to palm cultivation in five separate regions--all of which fall within Uribe's initiative. Almost all of these regions have also been targeted for palm cultivation support by USAID.
(...) Oil palm, or African palm, is one of the few aid-funded crops whose profits can match coca profits. Since 2003 USAID's alternative development contracts have provided nearly $20 million to oil palm agribusiness projects across the country. Almost half the palm oil produced in Colombia is exported each year--mostly to Europe but also to the United States. The government now has its sights on the stalled US-Colombia free trade agreement, whose passage by Congress--seen as likely, with President Obama's explicit support--would allow Colombian palm oil to enter US markets duty-free. Although the oil finds its way into various US food imports, Colombia is banking on the burgeoning market for biofuels.
(...) 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.
(...) "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."
(...) In January 2003, ARD began administering $41.5 million for USAID's Colombia Agribusiness Partnership Program (CAPP). Urapalma was one of the first palm companies to send an application; the Macaco-linked Coproagrosur received its $161,000 grant the following year (a third of which was returned, unspent). ARD's quarterly reports show that Urapalma requested $700,000 in financing to cover the planting of palm on some 5,000 acres in Urabá--the epicenter of stolen land. The grant application began working its way through ARD's process.
(...) 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.

With soldiers under intense pressure in recent years to register combat kills to earn promotions and benefits like time off and extra pay, reports of civilian killings are climbing, prosecutors and researchers say, pointing to a facet of Colombia’s long internal war against leftist insurgencies.
(...) Reports of civilian killings rose to 287 from mid-2006 to mid-2007, up from 267 in the same period a year earlier and 218 the year before that, said the Colombian Commission of Jurists, a Bogotá human rights group.

chiquita in the dock for murder:
For lawyer Terry Collingwood, capital punishment has its place, especially if it means "the death of a truly evil corporation." The reference was to Ohio-based Chiquita Corp., which last March pleaded guilty to making 100 payments over seven years totaling $1.7 million to the right-wing, paramilitary Colombian Self Defense Units — AUC in Spanish. The payoffs began in 1997. Observers say the aim was to suppress labor activism, bar left-wing insurgents and control territory
(...) Rights groups blame the AUC for killing 10,000 Colombians over a period of 10 years
(...) Victims' lawyers say the AUC not only killed students, unionists and peasants allegedly associated with left-wing insurgents, but also seized land for the Chiquita empire and arranged for thousands of automatic weapons plus ammunition to pass across Chiquita docks at the northwestern port city of Turbo. The AUC had gained control of the area after expelling the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) during the 1990s.
(...) For Terry Collingsworth, "This is a landmark case, maybe the biggest terrorism case in history. In terms of casualties, it's the size of three World Trade Center attacks." Paul Wolf adds, "Chiquita's victims are living in dire poverty."

paramilitaries in colombia:
Those who arrived at El Palmar never left it alive. Some of them are buried in graves far from the houses in the ranch. Here there was a room called ‘the room of the last teardrop’. There they tortured them, humiliated them, says an inhabitant of San Onofre. Those who survived were driven to a tree where they hanged them, inside the farm, and chopped them up like animals so that they would fit into the tiny graves. Of the 36 graves found in 2005, only one had the remains of four persons. The others were of individuals with the depth of 80 to 120 metres and 60 X 60 centimetres in diameter. In San Onofre, says a man, the lights went almost every day at 6 p.m. and everyone kept indoors.
(...) The left-wing Colombian senator, Gustavo Petro, recently said that paramilitaries met at the sprawling ranch of President Uribe and that of his brother and another of their close associates in the Eighties. They would leave the farm at night to do their killings, he told the Colombian senate.

on fascisim in colombia, as gamonalismo:
[free trade in history] Not only did they consolidate their local power and the property of their haciendas, they also imposed an era of “free trade”, which really meant freedom of import, setting the growth of national industry back fifty years. That era saw the rule of the doctrines of English liberal economists as well as Colombia’s submission to the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, signed in 1846 with the US by the government of the gamonal of gamonales, landowner Tomas Cipriano de Mosquera, who not only opened the doors to free trade but also forfeited the sovereignty of the country to the megaproject of the Panama Canal which led eventually to Colombia losing Panama in 1903.
(...) [on needing connections] The gamonal is in the first instance a major landowner. His title originally depended on the Spanish Crown, which granted lands and gold mines, first to the conquistadors and afterwards, under the Bourbon dynasty, to slave traders and other businessmen who received the mines and haciendas of the Jesuits, who were expelled by the empire at that time. His wealth depended on the government in power, the articulation of economic power and international politics, and the links between local powers and big landowners. These elements have shaped the configuration of gamonalismo, from its beginnings to this day.
(...) Gamonalismo survived in spite of industrialization and severely limited the modernization of Colombia. Although peasant and indigenous movements expanded and won some victories between 1914 and 1946, the gamonales managed to retain their latifundia and ultimately to consolidate them by way of violence, namely “La Violencia”, between 1946 and 1958´.
(...)[capitalism needs democracy?]Another portion of the capital came from foreign investment in petroleum, mining, and banana enclaves that, rather than challenging the power of the gamonales, stimulated it and guaranteed its concessions and profits. Gamonalismo was the most efficient political agent and police force for foreign capital.
(...) [history of the paramilitaries; need for control] “La Violencia” of 1946 closed many hopes for democracy. The assassination of Colombia’s most popular leader, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, on April 9 1948, summarized the decision of traditional gamonalismo to maintain the status quo with blood and fire. Two hundred thousand people were killed in the process of displacing 2 million people from 350 000 small plots of land. Those who are today called “paramilitaries” were then called “pajaros”, illegal troops who worked with police and the regime and its own army to assault lands and peoples. For the politicians, access to armed bands was a source of power, and new fortunes were made by way of La Violencia, fortunes that made it possible to control local business and the international contraband trade in coffee and liquor.
(...) [this war on drugs] Colonization was offered as the solution for landless peasants and in the distant regions, without roads, communication, or services, the peasantry had resorted to illicit cultivation, first of marijuana and then of coca. Colonization, the solution for preventing agrarian reform, had become a problem: the peasants had money and gained power, organized, marched, and held strikes. The war extended into the regions of colonization, and under the pretext of the “War on Drugs”, the gamonales crushed the peasant resistance, allied with the mafia dons and seized control of narcotrafficking. This was the model in Puerto Boyaca, Puerto Berrio, Puerto Triunfo and a large part of southern Magdalena Medio, and extended throughout the country.
(...)[mafia and transnationals] These increasingly wealthy mafias became central characters in many self-defense teams and came to finance the training of the paramilitaries as an army, paying well-known mercenaries from the UK (like Peter McAlleese), South Africa, and Israel (like Yair Klein). These mercenaries had been (in Malaysia or Angola) continued to be (in Sierra Leone or the Congo) stars for the transnationals in the wars of other countries. The warlords trained by these men can be found in various parts of the world where profits can be had from gold, petroleum, diamonds, narcotrafficking, the theft of gasoline from government pipelines, or the theft of health care, housing, and any other public funds to which the imprisoned electoral system can provide “democratic access”.
(...) [justice and peace?] The parties affiliated with President Uribe are full of para-politicians, who in the congress voted in the “Law of Justice and Peace” that regulated the agreement between the paramilitaries and the government. Today in Colombia by virtue of the laws that were approved, the jail term a paramilitary faces for cutting hundreds of people to pieces is the same that a peasant would receive for growing a Monsanto-patented seed.
(...) [resistance] Against these objectives, there is a popular resistance that has expressed itself in mobilizations like that of May 15 2006, the popular consulta against FTA organized by the indigenous, the unity of peasant, indigenous, and afro-colombian organizations against FTA and the Rural Statutes, the marches of the teachers, the struggles of the oil workers and the strengthening of the Polo Democratico Alternativo as the opposition party. In 2003, civil resistance managed to stop in a referendum the constitutional reform of Uribe. Civil resistance has slowed the project of imposing a fascist constitution legalizing mass detention without judicial order. But civil resistance has not managed to stop the co-optation of local governments by the armed gamonales nor has it managed to stop the FTA or Uribe’s lamentable foreign policy. It is nevertheless the only hope for Colombia to break the hegemony of the gamonales and their transnational sponsors and join the movement of the majority of Latin America. Only civil resistance can prevent the war from being a profitable business for the warlords.
(...) [the future?] For the moment Uribe can count on a favorable point in the economic cycle, brought on by the laundering of the narcodollars of the paramilitaries. But when the economic cycle moves back down and the speculative force becomes a crisis again, uribismo could fall to popular mobilization. Agrarian reform will be an essential element of change because it will take the power base of the gamonales away and create the economic conditions to strengthen the internal market that the FTA seeks to destroy. The great failure of the 1991 constitution, which sought to combine democracy with neoliberalism and latifundium, should be repaired.