The dossier of palm planters
On how private firms, seemingly with the support of the AUC [a major paramilitary organization] displaced communities in the Uraba region and later legalized the taken lands.
Little has been said about the decision of the State Prosecutor's office to imprison 24 businessman, legal company representatives, intermediaries, palm plantation workers, and demobilized paramilitaries, who during a decade, with credits granted by the State and using the facade of companies that would work for the progress of the Uraba region, took possession of the ancestral lands of Afro-Colombians in the watersheds of Curvarado and Jiguamiando (in Choco state), calling on every sort of crime and terror to consolidate a paramilitary project that aimed to insert itself at any cost into the legal economy of the large landholders of the country.
The Espectador newspaper became aware of the investigation dossier and the decision taken by a prosecutor of the Human Rights unit this past 18th of May, and its conclusions are terrifying. The State Prosecutor's Office underlined that the so-called "Operation Genesis", undertaken by paramilitary groups and the 17th Army brigade in February of 1997, was the means to displace thousands of peasants in the Bajo Atrato valley and opened the way for the arrival of private companies that illegally colonized these peasants' productive lands with the objective of establishing agroindustrial oil palm plantations. These companies expelled farmers any way they could, they killed wherever they passed, they bought lands using the common threat: "Either you sell us the land yourself or we'll buy it from your widow", and in the end, they went to notaries to "legalize" the invasion of lands.
It was thus that in the year 2000 private enterprises arrived in the Choco state, companies like Urapalma SA, Palmas de Curvarado SA, Palmura SA, among others, whose executives took on the task of acquiring land at laughable prices, "backed up by false documents" that later served as collateral for bank credits offered them by the State. In other words, the paramilitaries wiped out the local communities, obliged them at gunpoint to leave their lands, and meanwhile the companies, constituted (according to accusations accredited by the State Prosecutor) by these illegal groups, used these extensive areas to develop multimillion-dollar businesses and, under the umbrella of this apparent legality, the Government ended up delivering money to them to promote these new projects.
"In this way, with their lands occupied and constrained to sell under the conditions imposed by the installed companies, the return of the uprooted people has been made impossible," signaled the State Prosecutor, who in a long chapter of the decision described the environmental damage generated by monoculture palm plantations. Even though the private companies installed themselves since 2000 in the Uraba region of Choco state, the complaints regarding the voracity of local paramilitary groups to possess these lands were only formalized in December of 2007, when the State Prosecutor formally linked the process to these 24 people. The file didn't get far, among other reasons, due to the complexity of the investigation and because it was necessary to detail how notary documents, bank registries, deeds, and other transactions were simulated and falsified to take advantage of the State.
Among the accused is Antonio Nel Zúñiga Caballero, legal representative of the Palmura company. Born in Barranquilla in 1949, resident of Santa Marta, his daughter, María Fernanda Zúñiga Cháux, is the president of none other than Fiduagraria [an investment fund]. When the scandal hit three years ago she was forced to quit her job, but another connection casts more doubts on her business ventures: the name of Juan José Cháux Mosquera, ex-governor of Cauca state, in prison for his presumed links to paramilitary groups and relative of Zúñiga Cháux. According to the State Prosecutor, no other part of the country has experienced the beginnings, rise to prominence, and transformation of the type "of private extralegal justice" that the AUC implanted in Choco (in particular the Élmer Cárdenas paramilitary block).
Through Law 70 of 1993, which granted lands to the ancestral communities of the Pacific coast, there began in Uraba a land titling process that was never completed. In November of 2000, Incora [the Colombian agrarian reform institute] formalized ownership of many of these lands to organized Afro-Colombian communities along the Curvarado river, with an area of 46084 hectares [about 115000 acres], and the same occurred with the communities of the Jiguamiando river, who were given 53973 hectares [about 130000 acres]. At this moment paramilitary violence was already out of control, the "Operation Genesis" of 1997 had the population scared, and selective killings were being carried out. The rule of force gradually displaced the Afro-Colombians and these virgin lands were taken by palm oil entrepreneurs, according to the State Prosecutor.
"Oil palm led not only to the illegal appropriation of land, it also enabled the repopulation of the zone with inhabitants loyal to the paramilitaries, either fighters in the AUC ranks or simply those that submitted to their interests," detailed the State Prosecutor, adding that the implementation of palm plantations was achieved "at the expense of the needy inhabitants of a zone that suffered the unimaginable devastation of its ecological riches". Not without reason the State's Prosecutor noted that it is not an exagerration to claim that together with kidnapping, drug trafficking, and extortion, "the crimes perpetrated in Jiguamiando and Curvarado constitute a hidden way of industrializing crime".
In the legal proceedings it was ascertained, thanks to declarations like that of the ex-paramilitary chief HH, that the architect of the AUC charge in the Choco and the subsequent arrival of successful palm companies was Vicente Castaño Gil, who knew that the future of the Uraba region was oil palm and that whoever controlled it controlled the region. Castaño said that that realization justified the use of any means for taking Uraba, because "palm is sown with blood". In his brother Carlos's computer was found an interesting memo that strengthened the investigation. In this file, Carlos Castaño wrote to Vicente that, if the palm project came to fruition, he would "be at the level of the big established businesses" of Colombia and that furthermore it would be key "to the treatment they'll give us in any eventual" peace negotiations.
But they had another obstacle, because those fertile territories were deeded to Afro-Colombian communities and "if we were to expropriate them we would have problems with the international community", according to HH. So a project was designed such that once the lands were taken by blood and fire, the scared peasants would sell their properties for any amount. The armed groups would then design false deeds or illegal notary papers to imbue their crime with an air of legality. Rodrigo Zapata was an active participant in this strategy. He was Vicente Castaño Gil's alleged accomplice, and it was shown in the trial that Zapata was the point man for legalizing lands in the zone with Incora and that he had business deals there in which the State "did up the papers for him".
HH said in a long declaration that Vicente Castaño was obligated to plant plantains for the displaced people in Bajira "to keep people calm and continue with our palm plantations", and that Vicente's idea was to go about obtaining "lots of loans from Banco Agrario". In his account, HH said that Vicente invited to Choco a group of palm planters from Santa Marta, and added that one of the leaders of the project to negotiate with local communities the lands that had already been planted to palm (as a way of legalizing the lands) was Urapalma's manager, Javier Daza. Regarding Antonio Nel Zúñiga, HH affirmed that in two opportunities he met with Vicente Castaño. Though Zúñiga said in his defense that he did it because the paramilitaries had killed his relative Julio Zúñiga, the State Prosecutor doesn't believe him and warns that the meetings had nothing to do with humanitarian reasons.
Other meetings between Hernán Íñigo de Jesús Gómez, Javier Daza, and Antonio Nel Zúñiga, which dealt with to paramilitary groups according to various witnesses, were documented by the State Prosecutor's Office, which mentions these men as the pioneers of the business incursion in the Bajo Atrato of Choco state in the instant in which community displacements were worsening. In the court file appears the following pearl: Zúñiga, thanks to the intermediation of the politicians Miguel de la Espriella, Luis Fernando Velasco, and Juan José Cháux, had an interview with the Castaño brothers, once in San Pedro de Uraba and the second time in Vicente's Las Tangas farm. His explanations are insufficient, as are those of his colleagues, who are in prison pending the proceedings.
The State Prosecutor stated that thousands of hectares that belonged to Afro-Colombian communities were legalized, in apparent complicity with government employees from Choco, from Incora and other institutions, all under the guise of entrepreneurial projects that were linked to displacements, murders, and expropriation of lands. HH put it in its full dimensions: "Some businessmen are as bad as or worse than drug traffickers, that ally themselves with anyone to achieve their only goal, money". Widows, displaced people, and victims of horrific crimes made declarations on the barbarity of the paramilitary soldiers. Some even claimed that in many meetings Army personnel accompanied them. Sor Teresa Castaño, sister of Carlos and Vicente, also was implicated. "Under the attentive and watchful eye of their sinister associate and promotor" the palm planters engaged in their criminal acts, concluded the State Prosecutor.
In the end, there were massacres, forced displacements, and invasions of the lands of Afro-Colombian peasants, in order to create an economic project born of the depths of crime. People don't forget that the 12th of December of 2001 the pregnant Inés Blandón Córdoba was murdered in a vile manner, people don't forget the youths Eulalio Blandón and Ermín Garcés. The paramilitaries stopped at nothing. Not even with cautionary measures in place from the Interamerican Court of Human Rights were the communities of the Pacific coast safe. The voracious banner of the oil palm took over everything. And barely a decade afterwards we are starting to learn about all that happened in Choco. The State's Prosecutor continues in its inquiries and the peasants continue to demand justice.
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