Blood on the Palms: Afro-Colombians fight new plantations.

Written by David Bacon
David joined an AFSC delegation to Colombia last year to research for this article.

This article is from the July/August 2007 issue of Dollars & Sense magazine.

On Sept. 7, 2006, paramilitary gunmen invaded the home of Juan de Dios García, a community leader in the Colombian city of Buenaventura. García escaped, but the gunmen shot and killed seven members of his family.

The paramilitaries, linked to the government of President Alvaro Uribe and to the country's wealthy landholding elite, wanted to stop García and other activists from the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Process of Black Communities, or PCN), who have been trying to recover land on which Afro-Colombians have lived for five centuries. The PCN is a network of over 140 organizations among Black Colombian communities.

García later told Radio Bemba, "when the paras [paramilitary soldiers] came looking for me, I could see they were using police and army vehicles. They operate with the direct and indirect participation of high government functionaries. So denouncing their crimes to the authorities actually puts you at an even greater risk."

South of Buenaventura along the Pacific, in the coastal lowlands of the department of Nariño, oil palm plantations are spreading through historically Afro-Colombian lands. The plantation owners' association, Fedepalma, plans to expand production to a million hectares (about 3,861 square miles), and the government has proposed that by 2020 seven million hectares will be used for export crops, including oil palms.

Helping planters reach their goal is the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In what the agency describes as an effort to resettle rightwing paramilitary members who agree to be disarmed, USAID funds projects in which they are given land to cultivate. The land, however, is often located in historically Afro-Colombian areas.

On paper these resettlement projects may appear to be effective components of a national peace process. On the ground, however, what typically happens is that the paramilitaries take on the task of protecting the plantation owners' (and the government's) investment. And Afro-Colombian activists who get in the way pay a price in blood.

Afro-Colombian families displaced by development projects, especially the expansion of oil palm plantations, and by Colombia’s paramilitary and military groups who protect the projects, have created a squatter community, the November 11 barrio, at the edge of Tumaco, a coastal city in Nariño department. The city authorities have used trash, garbage, and even medical waste to create raised pathways between the houses. Water for dozens of families comes from a single tap. [Photo credit: David Bacon.]

See full article in the July/August 2007 issue of Dollars & Sense magazine.