Colombia: Beyond Petroleum

bristol | globalisation | news report Friday September 28, 2007 21:33 by Guayusa Andina and Guayabo Pastuso in Colombia - Espacio Bristol-Colombia espaciobristol at redcolombia dot org

Bristolians from Espacio Bristol-Colombia report first-hand on BP’s devastating impact

The first report from Bristolians Guayasa and Guayabo, who are currently in Colombia for a year providing international accompaniment (i.e. being a sort of human shield) and researching the impact of BP with local activists.

This week, we released the report from last month’s solidarity mission to the oil-rich region of Casanare, where BP operates and where the Colombian army and paramilitaries continue to kill peasant farmers - either as a consequence of their protests against BP’s devastating social and ecological impact or, it would appear, simply because they are surplus to the requirements of the oil industry.

This week, we released the report from last month’s solidarity mission to the oil-rich region of Casanare, where BP operates and where the Colombian army and paramilitaries continue to kill peasant farmers - either as a consequence of their protests against BP’s devastating social and ecological impact or, it would appear, simply because they are surplus to the requirements of the oil industry.

To give you an idea of the situation, so far this year human rights organisations have documented eleven murders by the army in just two of the local municipalities where BP is present. If that sounds alarming, it’s worth bearing in mind that the climate of fear means that many murders are not reported and that the task of interviewing victims’ families in all nineteen municipalities in Casanare is way beyond the capacity of the few organisations working in the region.

The mission was convened by Colombian organisations working in Casanare, as well as Espacio Bristol-Colombia and Colombia Solidarity Campaign, and aimed to highlight the humanitarian and ecological crisis in Casanare and to provide accompaniment and support to communities in the region. People from nine different countries took part, including representatives of social organisations from various parts of Colombia who came to share their experiences of struggling for alternatives to the current model of development, dominated by multinational corporations like BP.

Two of us from Espacio Bristol-Colombia are staying in Colombia for the next year, providing international accompaniment (i.e. being a sort of human shield, to deter the army and right-wing paramilitary groups from doing anything nasty to Colombian social activists and communities) and researching the impact of the oil industry in Casanare. We’re working with COSPACC, an organisation that was set up by peasant leaders who have been forcibly displaced from the region - in some cases as a direct result of their protests against BP’s practices.

BP in Casanare
Many Indymedia readers will already be familiar with BP’s murky history in Colombia, which began to be exposed in the mainstream press in 1996. When the multinational 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 country’s population - is that the Colombian army has a bloody history 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 living 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 which BP provided for the army and police was “lethal” and that it 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 government 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”, entered into dialogue with British development agencies and, since then, has successfully convinced plenty of people that they are now a socially responsible corporation. Aside from the fact that this might arouse a niggling suspicion of greenwash, given that the company isn’t actually reducing it’s oil production and confesses to omitting a whopping 570 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year (roughly equivalent to the carbon dioxide emission of the entire United Kingdom), things certainly haven’t improved in Casanare.

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 President Uribe’s somewhat ill-named policy of “Democratic Security” has in recent years effectively given the green light to the armed forces killing 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.

The solidarity mission interviewed numerous people whose partners or children had been killed or arbitrarily detained during Uribe’s presidency, such as Roque Julio Torres’ mum. 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 well over 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.

Of course, we wouldn’t want to give the impression that BP is an especially mean and nasty 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.

Resistance and alternatives
The weekend after the mission to Casanare, Colombian social and human rights organisations held the fourth of a series of public hearings of the People’s Permanent Tribunal into multinational corporations’ responsibility for crimes against humanity in Colombia. 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.

Although the 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 hearing 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. In October, we’ll be participating in another Tribunal - this time on the issue of Climate Justice.

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.

Both Espacio Bristol-Colombia and COSPACC are part of the Red de Hermandad y Solidaridad con Colombia (Network of Friendship and Solidarity with Colombia), a space for coordination between autonomous Colombian and international organisations and collectives - mostly grassroots locally-based groups. Other Colombian groups in la Red include the Process of Black Communities - a driving force behind the climate justice tribunal - and the network of social organisations in the department of Arauca - who are struggling to defend their local models of production, based on harmony between social groups and the natural environment, from attack by the state and oil companies.

Groups in la Red work together around themes such as the impact of multinational corporations; the problem that the perpetrators of most human rights violations rarely get brought to justice; and a negotiated solution to the social and armed conflict in the country.

International collectives who are part of the network not only take action in their own countries in solidarity with groups working around these issues in Colombia, but also provide international accompaniment to social organisations in Colombia. It’s a different form of accompaniment than that provided by, say, Peace Brigades International, in that the network is organised around the concept of horizontal relationships between peoples and we get actively involved in the work of the people we’re accompanying and try to build collective processes of mobilisation and proposals for alternatives internationally. (Although no offence to PBI, who also do important work and whose more ‘neutral’ approach also has its own advantages).

If you’re interested in knowing more or getting involved, email us:
espaciobristol at redcolombia.org

We’ve also uploaded the Mission’s report with this article so, please read, disseminate and take action.

The Mission´s report 0.54 Mb