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.

Urapalma never received the grant money in question, an outcome that Susan Reichle, USAID-Colombia's mission director, says vindicates the agency's "due diligence." Reichle says her team has developed a "land protocol and a whole process to really ensure, to the best of our abilities and through several layers of investigation, that this land is clean land." But, she admits, "unfortunately, you'd love to say it's 100 percent -- you're never going to be." Sean Jones, who became head of USAID's alternative development programs in Colombia in 2006, contradicts Reichle, pointing out that Urapalma's application stalled because the company failed to submit paperwork on land titles.

According to CAPP's quarterly reports, a joint USAID-ARD "review committee" had advanced the Urapalma proposal as far as the penultimate stage of the process -- the last step before awarding money -- by January 2005. Roberto Albornoz, who has headed ARD's agribusiness program in Colombia since the inception of the USAID contract, says his staff conducted due diligence but never turned up evidence of suspicious activities. He confirms that the project was "put on hold" in April 2005 only after Urapalma stopped submitting documentation. Albornoz says his staff did not learn of Urapalma's questionable past until they came across a magazine article published five months after the proposal was put on hold. When pressed as to why ARD screeners failed to suspect the company of illegal activity, Jones echoes Albornoz: "The allegations around Urapalma weren't coming up in the press at that point."

But the forced displacements and massacres in Urabá were already in the public record. In July 2003, a month before Urapalma's USAID application, the national daily El Tiempo reported that "the African palm projects in the southern banana region of Urabá are dripping with blood, misery and corruption." The Washington Post picked up the story two months later.

In declassified cables from the U.S. Embassy, U.S. officials in Bogotá sounded the alarm about the paramilitaries' stranglehold on Urabá as early as 1996. A cable from that year states, "The Castaños have profited greatly from their activities, reportedly acquiring thousands of acres of land in northern Colombia." The cable refers to growing paramilitary control of entire regions and specifically mentions Urabá.

In 2003, five months before Urapalma's grant request, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights singled out Urapalma for collusion with paramilitaries in Urabá: "Since 2001, the company Urapalma SA has initiated cultivation of the oil palm on approximately 1,500 hectares of the collective land of these communities, with the help of 'the perimetric and concentric armed protection of the Army's Seventeenth Brigade and armed civilians'" -- i.e., paras. Soldiers and paras undertook armed incursions, the court concluded, to "intimidate" communities into "join[ing] in the production of oil palm or evacuat[ing]."

Albornoz says ARD's screeners cross-referenced company records with Colombian and U.S. government databases of people linked to the drug trade. But the company had evident narco links: in its corporate registration papers, Urapalma lists as its founding investors two brothers from the Zúñiga Caballero family, which Colombian authorities charge is a paramilitary-connected clan with links to the Medellín and Cali drug cartels.

Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars

While USAID eventually tabled Urapalma's proposal, the agency awarded one grant to Coproagrosur, the company surrendered by Macaco, and another to Gradesa, which refines palm oil for domestic consumption and export -- much of it to the United States. According to ARD reports and USAID documents, the agency's grant to Gradesa helped support a project in Belén de Bajirá, Chocó, the Urabá municipality that is home to Urapalma -- and to the land formerly farmed by Enrique Petro. USAID appears to have supported Gradesa's involvement in refining palm oil from the Chocó killing fields.

USAID insists it has never funded a palm project in Chocó. Representatives from USAID, Gradesa and ARD deny that the Gradesa project was based in Belén de Bajirá, despite three years of references to the town in internal and public documents. USAID representatives say that the locale was referenced erroneously after Gradesa mistakenly mentioned it in a status report. "The error went unnoticed," USAID's press attaché explained by e-mail, "because our main interest centers on information related to hectares, families, employment and budget invested."

In any case, at the time USAID awarded Gradesa a $257,000 grant on December 19, 2003, corporate filings show that the same two Zúñiga brothers who'd invested in Urapalma, Antonio and Carlos, also sat on Gradesa's board. (Carlos appears on a Colombian government list of narco-traffickers as early as 1987.) In March 2005, Colombia's attorney general announced that he was seizing the Zúñigas' stake in the firm and filed criminal charges against the brothers for using Gradesa to launder narco-dollars. According to a Colombian narcotics official, that stake was 50 percent; a recent interview with Gradesa's CEO revealed that the brothers had owned this stake since the early 1990s, long before the USAID grant. The attorney general's case is now plodding its way through Colombian courts, the government's fifth attempt to pin drug-laundering charges on the Zúñigas.

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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