THE SPECTER of violence is nearly invisible outside the offices of the Regional Corporation for Human Rights, or Corporaci—n Regional para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos (CREDHOS), located in Barrancabermeja, an oil town in the heart of Colombia that is home to USO, the country’s biggest union. The streets below, viewed from the second-story balcony that juts out above a triangular intersection known as the Eighth Diagonal, buzz with the kinds of activity seen in any medium-size South American city. Taxis, minibuses, mopeds, and bicycles flow in opposite directions through the fork where the roads meet. Dozens of fruit carts, brightly hand-painted all the way down to their wheel hubs, squat side by side under two shade trees, which the small concrete island miraculously supports. An elderly man in a yellow hat steps from behind his cart, pours water on a rag, and starts to polish his oranges. Even the two young soldiers chatting with a young female vendor of scarves and handbags seem benign. But there are signs of the danger.
The thick steel grates and bulletproof glass that span the front of CREDHOS’ office are only the most obvious indicators of the danger there. Of the 130 community activists killed in the city of Barrancabermeja since the human-rights group was founded in 1987, five have been its own members. A member of Peace Brigades International, a non-governmental organization whose unarmed volunteers accompany threatened civilians in war zones, is on hand to make sure no one walks the streets below alone. A military-troop transport rumbles through the intersection, with half a dozen heavily armed men riding in the back. And off in the distance, rising above the street scene with mute indifference, are the smokestacks and gas flares of the state’s Ecopetrol refinery, whose entrance is 500 yards and a world away from the bulletproof doors of CREDHOS.
While union workers and the human-rights advocates who defend them live under constant threat of death with little or no protection from the state, Ecopetrol has not one, but two full battalions of the Colombian Armed Forces dedicated to ensuring the safety of its operations. In this regard, the Colombian state oil company is an appropriate symbol for the country as a whole — offering protection for profitable businesses while the domestic population suffers. German Plata is a project director for the Program for Peace and Development of the Middle Magdalena Region, named after the river that runs through Barrancabermeja. He lists the enormous natural wealth of his homeland, including Ecopetrol’s oil, and poses a rhetorical question: "For an area with so many natural resources, there is great poverty. Seventy percent of the people have unsatisfied basic needs. Why?" With little hesitation, he provides the answer. "Because this is an extractive and exclusive economy. They extract our resources and the benefits stay in the hands of a few." Of the $2 billion in oil wealth that Barrancabermeja generates each year, only $90 million stays in the local economy through Ecopetrol. The rest goes to foreign companies, such as the US’s Occidental Petroleum and Chevron/Texaco or England’s British Petroleum. Few realize that Colombia today is the 10th largest supplier of petroleum to the US. The numbers are similar for the cattle-ranching and African-palm-tree cultivation that mostly drive the rest of the local economy — the overwhelming majority of the money generated leaves Colombia.
The leaders of the oil-workers union believe that one of the goals of the global economic system, at least as far as the corporations are concerned, is the elimination of organized labor. "A death penalty has been declared against union workers here," says Mendoza. "When you kill a union leader, you destroy the union." As international scrutiny has intensified, paramilitaries have been forced to focus more on union leaders, as opposed to indiscriminate mass executions of workers. "Globalization is trying to deny us our human rights," says one of USO’s national-level leaders, whose life has been threatened and who also asks that his name not be published. "We have a very revolutionary history, and our union, especially, has been very hard hit by the state and the groups that operate outside ‘the law.’" He makes sure that the translation from Spanish reflects his belief that the paramilitaries threaten him and his colleagues with the blessing of the Colombian government. "The political project being carried out here by the ultra-right is a state policy. This is why you see so much complicity on the part of the state with those who carry out the assassinations." He refers to the high level of paramilitary violence in the region, which fell under the control of the right-wing squads just over a year ago. In addition to the presence in Barrancabermeja of the military battalions that protect Ecopetrol, there are two police stations and an attorney general’s office. Yet the paramilitaries "control the life of this place," according to CREDHOS executive director Regulo Modero.
"They have a permanent presence, permanent roadblocks," he explains. "But the public forces haven’t done anything about it. There’s no logical explanation for the fact that the most militarized region of the country is controlled by the paramilitaries." And they control it ruthlessly. The most infamous example in recent history occurred on May 16, 1998, when seven people were massacred by the paramilitaries on a soccer field. Another 25 were "disappeared" — taken away and never heard from again. According to Modero, they, too, were executed, cut into pieces with electric chain saws, and thrown into the Magdalena river that flows through the barrios on the outskirts of town. Modero insists that state forces were involved in the massacre, and that the paramilitaries entered and exited the neighborhood where they committed the atrocities through a military checkpoint.
Military leaders deny any involvement between their forces and the paramilitaries, insisting that US taxpayer dollars are funding drug eradication, not the murder of trade unionists. Colonel Gilberto Ibarra, of Barrancabermeja’s Nueva Granada Battalion, says that "in terms of the paramilitaries, the army commanders created a law to sanction the AUC sympathizers in the armed forces. They’re kicked out of the army." US officials are less emphatic in their denials, indicating that while there are no links "at the command level," there are still instances of collusion. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a high-level US embassy officer declares that "there is a dedication to root these people out." Others disagree. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Washington Office on Latin America issued a report last week stating that the "Colombian government’s progress against paramilitary groups has amounted to little more than rhetoric, unsupported by actions in the field designed either to break existing links between the military and paramilitary groups, prosecute the officers who support these links, or pursue those groups and their leaders effectively in the field."
Colombian economist Hector Mondrag—n, who risks his life by criticizing his government’s policies, said in a January 20 interview in Bogot‡ that "the farce of the ‘War on Drugs’ is reaching its conclusion." He, too, agreed that US backing of the Colombian military is driven much more by economic imperatives than by a desire to eradicate drugs, and that the "War on Terror" provides a better pretext for increasing US military involvement in his native land. It looks like he was right. On February 5, President George W. Bush, heeding calls from his Colombian counterpart AndrŽs Pastrana to widen US involvement in his country’s civil war "to assure a continued flow of oil," announced $98 million in additional military aid to Colombia. The money will go to train and arm soldiers to protect the 490-mile Cano Limon oil pipeline, which carries oil to the Caribbean coast for Occidental Petroleum and other companies, according to the Associated Press. US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman told reporters: "We are committed to help Colombians create a Colombia that is a peaceful, prosperous, drug-free, and terror-free democracy." The working men and women of Colombia would say that giving more aid to their military is helping to create just the opposite.
Patrick Keaney is a Boston-based human-rights activist and journalist who conducted interviews in Colombia from January 17–27, 2002. He can be reached at pkeaney@netway.com
