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.

Despite this pending legal action, USAID approved a second Gradesa grant in 2007, this one for $400,000 -- monies from a new five-year, $182 million contract with ARD. In a written response, a U.S. embassy official said that since USAID received no formal notice of the case against the Zúñigas, "there was no way that USAID could have been aware of the link between Gradesa and the Zúñiga investigation." The official said "no red flags were raised" in the due diligence process for Gradesa's second grant and that as the Zúñigas were no longer "shareholders, investors or managers" they did not qualify as "recipients."

Permanent Displacement

Life has not improved much for Petro or his fellow refugees. In April the government returned 3,200 acres -- just 6 percent of the stolen land -- to some farmers along the Curvaradó River. Twelve years after they were forced to flee, the rest remain displaced. The government says it is pressing the palm companies to return the remainder of the lands voluntarily, but locals have heard such promises before. Meanwhile, the companies are shipping out palm kernels by the truckload. Petro has only a fraction of his farm left, part of which he turned into a makeshift "humanitarian zone," a village of wooden shacks called Caño Claro, populated in recent years by as many as a dozen displaced families at a time.

More than 2,500 people still scrape by in a handful of these humanitarian zones, which dot the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó river basins, though none enjoy legal recognition by the government. In some cases, all that separates these refugees from their palm-covered former farms is a cratered dirt road patrolled by paramilitaries, now in civilian clothing, and army soldiers. Children scamper around the camps with bloated bellies from illness and malnutrition, their families torn from their source of subsistence. Of late, reprisals and violent threats toward those demanding the return of their lands have increased.

One day last October campesino leader Walberto Hoyos was shot and killed execution-style near the Curvaradó River, his neck and face pumped with bullets by a paramilitary gunman. The next morning, the residents of Urabá woke up to find their towns riddled with fresh graffiti and leaflets announcing the formation of a new paramilitary group, an eerie reprise of events leading up to la violencia.

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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