The Dark Side of Plan Colombia: How the U.S. is Subsidizing Death and Drug Trafficking on Stolen Lands

By Teo Ballvé, The Nation. Posted June 2, 2009.

By 2001, when the paras announced they had gained definitive control of Urabá, Petro and the other campesinos were scattered. Some were hiding out in the jungle; others had left Chocó entirely. Though paras prevented them from visiting their farms, the campesinos heard rumors that their lands were being planted with palm.

Gustavo Duncan, a security analyst at the University of the Andes, in Bogotá, says the paramilitaries' turn to palm was the obvious business decision: "Palm was a perfect way to consolidate their militarized social control over a territory and invest capital accumulated from drugs into a profitable business." According to an affidavit by a former Urapalma employee who cooperated with the attorney general's investigation, the main bridge between the Castaños and investors was Hernán Gómez, an early ideological mentor of the Castaño brothers and husband of Urapalma's current CEO. The affidavit states that Gómez, who did not return multiple calls to his home, helped the Castaños recruit wealthy narcos with experience in the palm business to invest in Urapalma.

As farmers began trickling back to their homes after 2001, many found their lands razed and planted with palm saplings. Companies like Urapalma had posted signs on the land with big block letters: Private Property. A permanent paramilitary presence terrorized the area.

Petro spent five years without seeing his farm, taking refuge in the nearby town of Bajirá. He returned only in 2002, to a devastating sight. "All the work of my youth was gone," he says. "One hundred ten head of cattle, nine horses, my wife had tons of chickens, pigs ... everything gone." Urapalma had plowed his pastures for palms. A year after his arrival, he says, shortly after he began working his land again, "the paramilitaries came to kill me." Petro had left for town that morning, and so he avoided harm. But he returned to find his home ransacked and covered in graffiti. The paras' slogans are still visible on the walls of his dilapidated house.

USAID and Palm

Three months after the paras vandalized Petro's home, Urapalma submitted a grant application to the Bogotá offices of ARD Inc., a thirty-year-old rural development contractor based in Burlington, Vermont, with offices in forty-three countries. On its website ARD describes itself as guided by "Vermont's ideals of leadership in environmental affairs and local participation in government." USAID, a major source of ARD's revenue, has $330 million in active contracts with the company.

In January 2003, ARD began administering $41.5 million for USAID's Colombia Agribusiness Partnership Program (CAPP). Urapalma was one of the first palm companies to send an application; the Macaco-linked Coproagrosur received its $161,000 grant the following year (a third of which was returned, unspent). ARD's quarterly reports show that Urapalma requested $700,000 in financing to cover the planting of palm on some 5,000 acres in Urabá -- the epicenter of stolen land. The grant application began working its way through ARD's process.

USAID officials refer to Urapalma's proposed project as a "strategic alliance" and typically call such efforts "community driven." "Without our support," said an embassy official, "farmers would have a weaker ability to negotiate fair alliances with the industrial processors." But according to documents from the Colombian attorney general's 2007 investigation, obtained by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, palm companies in Chocó set up these partnerships to legitimize illegal land acquisitions after the fact -- often through fraud and coercion.

The investigation files include an affidavit by Pedro Camilo Torres, a former Urapalma employee who from 1999 to 2007 handled the company's loan applications, including the USAID grant proposal. His affidavit charges that Urapalma created campesino "front" organizations to secure phony land titles and gain access to public funds.

The most notorious case of fraud involves Lino Antonio Díaz Almario, who allegedly in 2000 acquired 14,645 acres -- an impossible fortune for a poor campesino -- and immediately sold these lands to the Association of Small Palm Oil Producers of Urabá, an organization started by Urapalma. But Díaz had been dead since 1995, when he drowned in the Jiguamiandó.

Urapalma's proposed USAID project, as summarized in an ARD report, referred to "Afrocolombian Associations." According to Torres's affidavit and eyewitnesses cited by the attorney general, all of Urapalma's campesino organizations were set up by Teresa Gómez, whom the U.S. Treasury identifies as the "financial manager" of the Castaños' vast narco-paramilitary federation. She managed at least two other paramilitary-affiliated NGOs and is wanted for the murder of a campesino leader in Córdoba province who had clamored for lands seized by the Castaños. Phone calls and messages left with Urapalma's staff over months were not returned.

See more stories tagged with: plan colombia, colombia, usaid, farc, patrick leahy, alvaro uribe, carlos mario jiménez, paramilitaries, paras, chocó, la violencia, gustavo petro

Teo Ballvé is a freelance journalist.

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