Oil companies behind violence in Colombia

In April a year ago, the Permanent Peoples Tribunal began a series of investigations into the role of transnational corporations behind human rights violations in Colombia.

Graciela Castro speaks about the murder of her brother, Hugo Horacio Hurtado Castro, 17, who had been in the woods near the oil facility Caño Limón playing with his younger brothers when he was shot by soldiers who gave no warning. Liliana Roa testified that paramilitaries killed her husband, Rito Antonio Díaz Duarte. Their town had put a toll on heavy vehicles carrying petroleum-drilling equipment that ruined the highway. The Army had demanded they lift the toll. Nini Johanna Cardozo. Her father, Tiberio Cardozo Dueñas, a civic leader in Cravo Norte, was one of a group tortured and killed by Army soldiers. Rubiel Vargas, below. His brother, Oswaldo Vargas, was assassinated by paramilitaries after his civic organization demanded that British Petroleum pave the roads and stop polluting the environment. WW photos: Deirdre Griswold

Its first three hearings, which took place in different Colombian cities, focused on (1) how foreign-owned agribusinesses have affected the farmers and the Indigenous peoples; (2) the role of the mining companies, and (3) the impact of transnational-controlled development on biodiversity and the environment.

On Aug. 3 and 4 of this year, the tribunal met again, this time in Bogotá, the capital, and heard testimony about the reign of terror in those areas of Colombia where huge oil companies have made big investments and are sucking out even bigger profits from the “black gold” that lies beneath the soil.

As described in our first article, dozens of people took the great risk of describing in detail to a large audience at the Teachers’ Union auditorium how their loved ones and comrades had been dragged out in the night and executed for no crime other than having served as leaders and activists of civil organizations—unions, farmers’ groups, rural cooperatives and Indigenous associations.

When it was all over, the judges and co-judges issued a stinging indictment of the Colombian government and military, the oil companies whose interests they serve, and the U.S. government for allowing these crimes to continue with impunity.

The Permanent Peoples Tribunal is based in Rome and has been in existence since 1979. The judges presiding at this session were law professor Dalmo de Abreu Dallari of Brazil, a member of the International Commission of Jurists; Marcelo Ferreira, professor of human rights at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Antonio Pigrau Solé, professor of international public law at the University of Tarragona in Catalonia in the Spanish state.

They were assisted by five co-judges: Natividad Almárcegui, a teacher with the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) of Spain; Domingo Ankwash, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Amazonian Ecuador (CONFENAIE); Deirdre Griswold, a member of the first Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal in 1967, who represented the International Action Center of the United States; Ralf Häussler-Ebert, a Lutheran theologian from Germany; and Ivonne Yáñez, an Ecuadorian ecologist and South American coordinator of Oilwatch.

This set of hearings focused on the role of U.S. giant Occidental Petroleum, British Petroleum and Repsol, a Spanish company. After hearing from dozens of eyewitnesses to state-sponsored crimes and from human rights experts, and having received in written form an enormous body of research on the conduct of these companies, the tribunal members at the end of the final session issued a detailed but preliminary judgment. The final judgment based on all four sittings of the tribunal will be made available at the end of this year.

The judges agreed that the three companies are following similar policies in Colombia, which amount to “the looting of the natural resources and systematic violence against the population. This has involved the destruction of their social fabric, the carrying out of assassinations and persecutions against their leaders as well as violations of the human rights of the majority and the destruction of indigenous groups.”

The document summed up the testimonies that had been presented:

“According to the accusations, the abuses by these companies, which are intended to exert control over the population and avoid any resistance to their activities, have used a combination of various strategies, among them pressures on the state to carry out policies benefiting them, such as the minimizing of state regulation, flexibility in their contracts, the privatization of energy companies, the granting of fiscal advantages, and the delivery of more petroleum and gas reserves to them; moreover, there is the militarization of social life, deepened by the application of Plan Colombia and by the direct support given by the oil companies to the armed forces, legal and illegal, and the promotion of corruption.”

Plan Colombia is the agreement between Washington and Bogotá that has poured billions of dollars into the Colombian armed forces, all in the name of the supposed “war on drugs.” Vast areas of the countryside have been “fumigated”—aerially sprayed with toxic chemicals—a method that does not distinguish between coca plants and a farm family’s cornfield.

The tribunal saw a moving film documentary about the effects of these “fumigations,” which leave the people covered with welts and lesions in communities where there are few medical facilities to treat them or deal with possible long-term health effects.

Since the killings and fumigations began, many impoverished Colombian farm families, made refugees by the policies of their own government, have fled to neighboring Venezuela. Much of their land is now being converted to cash crops.

The tribunal found that the Colombian government had “criminalized” social protest through arbitrary arrests and mass detentions under the charge of “rebellion.” It also has failed to prosecute those authorities responsible for heinous crimes such as kidnapping, torture and murder.

One of those testifying, Gustavo Petro, is an opposition senator in the Colombian Congress. He described the people behind the killings as “those who dress as senators in the morning, trade in cocaine in the afternoon and give orders to the paramilitaries in the evening.”

The tribunal concluded that the paramilitaries “have been able to count on the unrestricted support of the economic and political powers.”

In determining responsibility for the gross violations of human rights in Colombia, the tribunal found that, in addition to the Colombian state and the oil companies, the U.S. government also has played a very special role, “defending its presumed right to intervene in any country in order to preserve its security interests, including access to the sources of petroleum, and having contributed decisively through concrete plans, human resources, training and financing to the extreme militarization that surrounds the exploitation of oil in Colombia, as it has also done in other parts of the planet, with harmful consequences for the civilian population.”

There seemed to be virtually no coverage of the tribunal in the Colombian media, although European and Asian reporters were there (and this reporter from the U.S.). However, that doesn’t mean the Colombian government wasn’t paying attention to this event.

At one point, just as the son and daughter of oil workers’ leader Marco Chacón from Barranquilla were testifying about how their father had been assassinated, plainclothes police pushed their way into the crowded hall and stood on the stage facing the audience, cradling AK-47s. After the organizers protested, they finally left, claiming they had come “because the senator will be speaking”—something the senator had not requested.

Now that the tribunal and the many brave witnesses who came forward have done their work, it is up to the progressive movements, especially workers who are increasingly exploited by transnationals, wherever they may be, to bring international solidarity to bear against these monstrous corporations and their servants within the state.

Unofficial translation from the Spanish-language tribunal document

by Griswold, who served as a co-judge at the tribunal.

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