The Profits of Extermination: How US Corporate Power is Destroying Colombia
By Francisco Ramierez Cuellar
Introduction and translation by Aviva Chomsky
Common Courage Press
141 pages, $20
Order via <info@commoncouragepress.com>
REVIEW BY BARRY HEALY
Everybody with a concern about the effects of Australia's free trade agreement with the US should read this short publication from Colombian mining workers' union Sintraminercol. It records the neoliberal strategies employed to prepare Colombia for the imposition of the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
The methods "range from simple violations of fundamental human rights to war crimes and crimes against humanity", Francisco Ramierez writes. Through legal manoeuvres, corruption and violence, foreign companies have taken over Colombia's resources, kicking out and murdering anyone in their way. This is what Venezuela can look forward to if the US manages to reimpose its will on it.
Colombia should be one of the richest countries in the world; it is blessed with enormous natural resources. For example, Ramierez claims that possibly the biggest gold deposit in the world is located there.
Yet 64% of Colombia's people survive on less than US$3 a day (the official poverty line) and 23.4% subsist on less than $2 a day. Eleven-million Colombians exist on less than $1 a day — and 65% of those people live in the mining zones!
Why should poverty and mineral resources be linked? A map included in the book explains it. The key shows the location of the enormous range of mineral deposits in the country, and Colombia is indeed fortunate. There is coal, oil and gold — everything that the world is crying out for.
But the map shows three other symbols: one where paramilitaries operate, another for civilian displacements (internal refugees) and the last indicates massacres. There is an exact correlation between the wealth and the death; international companies extracting its riches have converted Colombia into one of the inner circles of hell.
With icy precision, Ramierez explains the process that brought about this catastrophe. It wasn't accidental, it was manufactured. It began with loan agreements imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that bypassed democratic oversight. Especially, Colombian laws protecting indigenous people's land rights, economic and political development have been nullified by these international arrangements.
Then, in the 1990s, sharp lawyers working for Canadian and US mining companies started writing a new mining code for Colombia. Corrupt officials went along with this and protesters were subjected to military repression. Finally, in 1999, US secretary of energy Bill Richardson announced that the US was willing to use military aid to protect strategically important investments in Colombia. Thus Plan Colombia was born, the "anti-narcotics" war that just happens to be based in the three most important mining and energy regions.
The repressive forces consist of the Colombian military, the US Drug Enforcement Agency and the irregular Colombian death squads. The companies profiting from their work include familiar names: the Bush family's Harken Energy, Occidental Petroleum and even Australia's BHP-Billiton.
US authorities obviously don't care how these thugs go about their work. In 1999, the president of Panama, Mireya Moscoso, publicly asked the CIA to stop stealing Panamanian helicopters to give to the Colombian paramilitaries!
Their methods are pure horror. In 1997, Juan Camacho Herra, from the Agro-Mining Association of South Bolivar, was murdered and decapitated by a death squad. They kicked his head around like a soccer ball before nailing it to a stake.
In 2001, Valmore Locarno Rodriguez and Victor Hugo Orcasita Amaya, both local union leaders at the US-owned Drummond Coal mine were dragged off a work bus and murdered. Later in the same year, Gustavo Soler, who had been elected into one of the vacant leadership positions, was kidnapped, tortured and killed.
Their names must never be forgotten. They represent the huge numbers of union activists murdered in Colombia; over the past 15 years a union leader has been assassinated, on average, every second day.
Ramierez reports that an indigenous person gets assassinated every five days, on average, mostly in the areas of natural resource exploitation.
Sintraminercol is fighting back in every way it can. As well as producing this report, it has initiated court cases in the US against some of the mining giants. And it is reaching out internationally to build solidarity. The Spanish edition of this book was funded by the Northern Ireland Public Service Association.
The publication of this book in Colombia was met with the ultimate acclaim: the death squads bombed the union's offices.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, July 20, 2005.
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