by Todd Gordon
there have been 828 homicides, 142 forced disappearances, 117 people injured, 71 people tortured, 355 death threats, and 150 arbitrary detentions, every year. In addition there have been 433 massacres, which when added to the homicides gives a total figure of 6,625 homicides during those eight years.618
In the mid-2000s, the violence was compounded by an abysmal social situation. GDP per capita was US$7,900 in 2005.619 Yet, 64 percent of the population lived below the poverty line, 23 percent in absolute poverty. The worst rates were to be found in mining zones.620 Eleven million of the country’s 43,593,000 citizens did not meet their basic food requirements.621 Adequate health care, education, and employment were exclusive privileges of a small elite.
What Hristov has called the “spectre of paramilitarism” haunted the roll-out years of armed neoliberalism in Colombia, and facilitated repeated rounds of peasant dispossession and land concentration.622 Colombia maintains a rural population of close to 15 million, roughly 38 percent of the citizenry overall. Sixty percent of the rural populace lives off of a variety of agricultural livelihoods, while the “remaining 40 percent depend on service-related employment, artisan mining, fishing, tourism, labouring in extractive multinational corporations, and other jobs.”623 Between the 1980s and 2000s, large landowners increasingly “contracted and sponsored paramilitaries,” to assist in depeasantization of the rural areas, and illegal confiscation of land with ambiguous property titles.624 Between 1984 and 2003, a massive land grab was orchestrated, such that landownership of five hundred hectares or more grew from 32.7 percent of Colombia’s agrarian land mass to 62.6 percent, all of which is in the hands of a mere 0.4 percent of landowners. Roughly 2 million small peasants own fewer than 1.3 million hectares collectively, while 2,300 large landowners control 39 million. According to sociologist Nazih Richani, “it is plausible that many of the 2,300 owners constitute a hybrid social class of cattle ranchers, narco-bourgeoisie, land speculators, and agro-industrialists who make up the reactionary configuration that staunchly resists land reform.”625 Much of the ongoing dispossession of peasants and concentration of landholdings has been propelled by paramilitary violence. “Between 2002 and 2010,” historian Forrest Hylton points out,
in an increasing number of regions, the paramilitary Right took over the state by combining all forms of struggle. In 2002, their allies occupied one-third of congressional seats, while in 2006 they won 22 out of a total of 32 departmental governorships; between 1999 and 2007, 5.5 million hectares of land were usurped or forcibly abandoned. While cattle ranching took up 40 million hectares of land and agriculture occupied 4 million.626
Under Uribe and Santos there have been new labour market reforms to make the hiring and firing of workers easier, and public sector workers have seen their wages stuck below the rate of inflation. General sales taxes have been increased, hitting the poorest most severely, while royalties and taxation on national and transnational capital have been reduced in various ways. Alongside these trends, there have been systematic cuts in public spending destined for health and education, as well as reductions in resources transferred from the federal state to municipal and departmental governments.627 As a result of neoliberal restructuring there has been a deepening of poverty, social exclusion, and worsening inequality. In the words of Jaime Rafael Nieto López, the country has witnessed a hollowing out of citizenship (desciudadanización) whereby it has become impossible for large sectors of the population to exercise the rights of citizenship enshrined in the 1991 Colombian Constitution.628 The social panorama in the neoliberal era has been made that much worse by the consequences of war. The armed conflict has compelled close to 5 million people to leave their lands, villages, and homes through myriad processes of forced dispossession and massacres of civilian populations. A recent report from Human Rights Watch also notes that the armed conflict in Colombia has led to the abandonment of roughly 6 million hectares of farmland by small peasants, which were then illegally usurped by large landowners. According to Human Rights Watch, there are more forcibly displaced people in Colombia than any other country in the world. On top of this, the conflict has allowed for the redirection of state spending from social welfare, education, housing, health, and productive collective projects, toward military pursuits (US$80 billion over the course of the two Uribe administrations).629 In the last ten years much of the peasant population has been dispossessed of close to 6 million hectares of productive land by new and old landowners integrated into the narco-paramilitary networks that cut across various regions of the country.
Uribe’s strategy of “democratic security,” inherited now by Santos, has been predicated on the notion of deepening the war against the guerrillas until their defeat and submission is complete. In Colombia, under the ideological guise of democratic security, there was no longer a political armed conflict, but rather a “terrorist threat,” which meant that there was no possibility of dialogue with the “terrorists.”630 At the same time, the Uribe regime negotiated the ostensible demobilization of right-wing paramilitary groups that had been organized under the umbrella organization Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (Self-Defence Units of Colombia). This demobilization was predicated on granting paramilitaries immunity from their crimes and protection of the loot that they had acquired through the blood and fire of dispossessing peasant communities from the rural areas.631 Uribe’s program of democratic security struck tremendous blows against the FARC. Many of the FARC’s rural fronts were dismantled or reduced, and its urban structures in the principal cities were demolished. It is estimated that between 2008 and 2009 close to 12,700 rank-and-file members of the FARC surrendered to the authorities, as well as more than a thousand mid-ranking cadre. This forced a retreat of the FARC to the border regions, such as the departments of Nariño, Putumayo, Cauca, and Arauca. Territorial dispersion significantly reduced the combat capabilities of the guerrillas. While the FARC has been effectively neutralized, the ELN has also been reduced to passive resistance, avoiding military combat with the Colombian armed forces when it can.632
Despite inspiring resistance by Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities against violent dispossession over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as struggles by workers and the urban poor, the panorama remained bleak in the first decade of the twenty-first century:
Militarily strong Left insurgencies, imperially supported police and armed forces, and a semi-autonomous, increasingly powerful coalition of private right-wing narco-armies weakened the radical-popular movement. Patterns of counterinsurgent terror against civilians…were reinforced during the cold war, and repackaged under the anti-terrorist rubric after 11 September 2001. Not for the first time, in response to struggles for peace and justice, terror and official amnesia have become the lingua franca of Colombian politics and society.633
The important points to emphasize, from the anti-imperialist perspective advanced in this book, are that Canadian mining activity in Colombia is presently resurgent, and that such activity is deeply implicated in the war economy of violence and dispossession from which it benefits. This emphasis is especially vital to develop in light of the Canadian state’s consistent manipulation of the political realities in contemporary Latin America. On a visit to the region in 2009, Prime Minister Harper made a thinly veiled allusion to Hugo Chávez’s government in Venezuela, warning that the rest of Latin America has to avoid a return to “the syndrome of economic nationalism, political authoritarianism and class warfare.” By contrast, embracing Uribe’s record in Colombia, Harper stated,
When we see a country like Colombia that has decided it has to address its social, political and economic problems in an integrated manner, that wants to embrace economic freedom, that wants to embrace political democracy and human rights and social development, then we say, “We’re there to encourage you and we’re there to help you.”634
Indeed, in 2011 the Canadian Council for the Americas, the principal organization focusing on
Canada’s foreign economic relations with Latin America, named Uribe “statesman of the year in 2011”—the same year it gave Peter Munck, the Canadian mining magnate of Barrick Gold infamy, a lifetime achievement award. According to Hylton, “Uribe’s [administration was] a semi-authoritarian form of parliamentary government that [did] not respect individual rights or international law.”635 Uribe was the preferred candidate of the paramilitaries in both the 2002 and 2006 elections. Prior to ascending to the presidency, Uribe spent two years as governor of Antioquia, two years in which the anti-guerrilla militias known as Convivirs (Rural Vigilance Cooperatives) displaced roughly two hundred thousand peasants.636 In the banana zones of that department the homicide rate increased under the governorship of Uribe: “in 1995, it doubled to 800; in 1996, 1,200; and in 1997, 700. In 1998, the year after Uribe’s departure, it dipped to 300.”637
Beginning in 2012, during the first government of Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2014), political developments offered up the possibility of a general accord being reached between guerrillas and the state, the termination of conflict, and the construction of a stable and lasting peace which would end sixty years of war.638 The balance of forces has shifted profoundly over the decades since the FARC took up armed resistance, as Colombian society has been radically transformed. Today, the majority of the population is urban, and the principal demand of the popular classes has shifted from land to housing. The urban populations want an end to the conflict. New urban social movements have erupted in the principal cities, none of which are controlled by Liberals or Conservatives.
Another development has to do with transformations internal to the country’s dominant classes. The preferred model of accumulation in the twenty-first century involves the crude extraction of natural resources—hydrocarbons, mining minerals, and agro-industrial mono-crops—rather than the older models of agriculture, rooted in peasant exploitation. The vision of the leading edge of the ruling classes—whose fullest expression today is President Santos—is that the state must divert some of its resources presently locked in a massive war budget toward the building of infrastructure designed to facilitate the acceleration of accumulation through the extraction of natural resources, via the foreign direct investment of multinational corporations.639 According to the analysis of Uruguayan sociologist Raúl Zibechi, the de-escalation of the open war between the state and the guerrillas—both the FARC and the ELN—has made visible a new war-in-formation, the one being waged by multinational capital against indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples in the countryside. The Colombian Constitution of 1991 recognizes the ancestral territories of Afro-descendents and indigenous populations under the designation “reserves” (resguardos). As a result, six hundred indigenous reserves have been created, occupying a third of Colombian territory. Many of these are located precisely in the areas in which the expansion of extractive capitalism is destined to target, making indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations frontline antagonists of the new war-in-formation. Indeed, by 2011 over 80 percent of legally-recognized indigenous reserve land already had mining concessions, granted by the central government, within their territories, and oil development projects had targeted a further 9 million hectares of indigenous reserves. 640
Over the last several decades, the Colombian armed forces, backed by the U.S., have been strengthened organizationally and technologically, and have vastly improved their capabilities in combat and surveillance. At the same time, the FARC have been weakened militarily, while also losing much of their political legitimacy as a result of a shifting demographic to the cities and alienating relations with the rural indigenous communities that remain. In the present moment, the end of war would not signify peace for the popular movements in Colombia, but rather the continuation of their struggle in a more favourable scenario. During the earlier periods of open conflict, facing repression and death, many movements were still capable of carrying off huge mobilizations—such as the Minga Social y Comunitaria (Communitarian and Social Cooperative Gathering) in 2008, and the establishment of the Congress of Peoples, and other social-movement collectives on a national scale. In the current conjuncture, the indigenous struggle will continue, defending territory against the multinationals. The “peace” of extractivism, according to Zibechi, is inaugurating a new cycle of struggles from below.641
One signal of this potential new cycle came with the national agrarian strike of August 2013.642 The strike mobilized thousands of peasants across the country and converged around a set of demands that spoke to the overlapping interests of truck drivers, small-holder coffee growers, artisanal miners, and a wide array of small-holding peasant producers of different food crops who have faced a crisis in reproducing themselves amid the neoliberal transformation of Colombian agriculture since the early 1990s. The various sectors involved in the protests were able to articulate themselves organizationally through the formation of the Mesa Agropecuaria y Popular de Interlocución y Acuerdos (Roundtable for Dialogue and Agreement among Popular Agrarian Producers).643
The Santos government responded initially with repression (12 dead, 4 missing, 385 injured, 262 detained, and 660 cases of human rights violations), and then shifted to a shuffle of his cabinet (a cosmetic move, because new general elections were just around the corner), along with other token gestures and stalling tactics.644 The strike held firm nonetheless for over four weeks, and was also significant insofar as it brought together in a powerful new synthesis indigenous and Afro-Colombian struggle, within a wider constellation of popular forces in movement. In addition to these relatively novel bridges of solidarity across oppressed peoples, different economic sectors were also involved. While the small-holding peasantry and the landless were at the heart of the strike in August, their actions were actually preceded in July that year by the protests of artisanal miners. The nine principal demands of the small-scale miners included the stipulation that the Colombian state must provide official recognition of small and medium-sized artisanal mining through the formational of a new mining code, such that the police and military would cease to repress the day-to-day activities at the heart of their livelihoods. They also demanded that there be official recognition and respect in the new mining code for indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities engaged in artisanal mining, and a simultaneous freezing of concessions to multinational mining corporations within indigenous and Afro-Colombian territories.645
SPECIAL VIOLENCE OF EXTRACTION
If large-scale mining for export was already an important feature of national development strategy in Colombia in the 1990s, it was really only in the 2000s that the pace of extractive capitalism accelerated sufficiently to transform the landscape of the countryside in earnest.646 The new era was inaugurated with a new mining code in 2001, followed by a concerted effort by the Colombian government to shape a new regime of accumulation under Uribe’s successive administrations (2002–2010). Uribe’s twin strategic horizons for the advancement of mining involved, on the one hand, a series of legal reforms to ensure an attractive juridical environment and a flexible labour force for foreign direct investment. On the other hand, it involved a policy of state and paramilitary violence—under the rubric of “democratic security”—so as to free specific geographic zones of their populations for purposes of natural resource extraction when necessary, and to otherwise crush, or at least tame, resistance emerging from those popular sectors affected by the advance of multinational mining capital into their territories: indigenous peoples; Afro-Colombian and peasant communities; small-scale artisanal miners; and, once the mines were established, the workers that pumped their veins.647
The speed with which mining took hold of the imagination of state leaders and foreign investors was impressive. Between 2005 and 2010, the contribution to total exports made by mining and oil together tripled, accounting for almost 50 percent of exports at the end of that period. In absolute terms, this translates in mining and oil exports moving from a value of US$19 billion in 2005 to US
$39.8 billion in 2010. Private investment, almost entirely multinational capital, in mining exploration tripled between 2005 and 2010, and the area of Colombian territory conceded for exploration and/or exploitation increased by four times. Almost a third of all foreign direct investment between 2004 and 2009 was in the mining sector.648 Foreign direct investment in the mining and energy sectors combined rose by ten times between 2002 and 2010, moving from 42 to 57 percent of total foreign direct investment, or from US$466 million to US$4.5 billion in value.649 More than 8.4 million of Colombia’s 114 million hectares of territory are licensed for mining exploration, while nearly 6 million hectares are already licensed for mining exploitation, and 37 million are licensed for oil exploration.650 Canadian capital is a whale in this sea. By the end of 2011, Canadian companies accounted for over 65 percent of all companies engaged in mining exploration in the country, and more than 75 percent of all firms exploring for oil and gas.651
The shift to a regime of accumulation rooted in mining and oil extraction by multinational capital has quite fundamentally reconfigured the socio-ecology of what had been relatively remote geographic zones of the country, where small-scale artisanal mining and small-holder peasant farming persisted, where poverty levels were well above the country’s average, and where the presence of basic state infrastructure and social services was sparse. The social transformation of the countryside involved in the expansion and intensification of extractive capitalism necessitated violence, because it pitted the integrally conflictual interests of multinational capital against those of local communities sitting on the deposits of natural wealth.
