Blood Money: Doing Business in Colombia
The indigenous Barí people protecting their land from petroleum company drilling and exploration.
Colombia is a wealthy country, with a large number of very poor people. As in so many places around the world, the wealth of Colombia has been extracted from the poor.
Colombia has huge tracts of fertile agricultural land, as well as petroleum, natural gas, coal, timber, emeralds, and various precious metals, including one of the largest gold deposits in the world. If you take a map of Colombia and mark the location of minerals, petroleum and the best agricultural land, you will find precisely where the worst of the violence has occurred, and from where the greatest proportion of the population has been forced to flee for their lives.
This is not a coincidence.
Colombia is also one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a member of a union. Over 2,000 trade unionists have been killed in the last decade because they asked for higher pay or safe working conditions.
This, also, is not a coincidence.
The war in Colombia has been a war for control of resources, and for control of the people producing the wealth from those resources. While rural poverty has increased over the last decade, concentration of land has also intensified, with 61% of agricultural land now in the hands of 0.6% of the population.
The paramilitaries have been responsible for much of the displacement and almost all the union killings, and have become the major force in coca cultivation and drug trafficking. The Comptroller General of Colombia notes that drug traffickers and paramilitaries now "own" almost half the agricultural land in Colombia. They also possess a significant portion of the non-agricultural land. As well as controlling organized crime, paramilitaries control many sectors of the legitimate economy, including mining and trade of emeralds, and some oil and gold producing areas.
Canadian companies are significant investors in Colombia, particularly in the oil, gas and mineral sectors. In many places in Colombia, exploration or development of these sectors inevitably means doing business with the paramilitary structures - in effect with organized crime syndicates. Paramilitaries, and by extension those who do business with them, glean profits from the horrendous crimes they have committed, while making it even less likely that the people who were dispossessed of their land will ever be able to return.
Displaced people are organizing with other victims of the violence. They are pressuring the Colombian government to establish an authentic truth process to uncover all war crimes, as well as an end to impunity and reparation to the victims, including the return of land. In the meantime, Canadians should ensure that we do not profit from the proceeds of crime, and that our business interests do not become an obstacle of Colombian victims' search for justice and reparations.
Inter Pares is a founding member of the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability, which is calling on Parliament to develop legislation to hold Canadian companies and their directors accountable in Canada when found complicit in human rights abuses in their activities overseas.
For more information on the CNCA and its activities, see 
www.halifaxinitiative.org/index.php/Issues_CNCA.
What they say:
Colombia is more peaceful now since 30,000 paramilitaries have laid down arms under federal demobilization programs.
What we see:
According to Amnesty International, the paramilitaries continue to exercise complete social, economic, and political control over many parts of the country, including the health and education system, public works, private security firms, shipping and ports, as well as criminal activities such as prostitution, extortion and gambling.² Only one gun was turned in for every three paramilitary fighters who went through the demobilization process to return to civilian life,³ and the political and economic structures of the paramilitaries have not been dismantled. In the past six months, five of Inter Pares' Colombian counterparts have received death threats from groups that describe themselves as the "new paramilitaries."
² Colombia. The Paramilitaries in Medellín: Demobilization or Legalization? Amnesty International, September, 2005.
³ A quick look at the last OAS report on the AUC demobilization, Center for International Policy, 2006. ( http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/blog/archives/000318.htm)
| Reviewed February 5, 2007 |  |
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