Stop investing in Colombian blood: land activists appeal to the UK

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In Colombia, families are fighting to regain control of large-scale palm and banana plantations seized by armed groups. (Photo: Matt Gonzalez-Noda/Christian Aid)
Guardian | 10 November 2014

Stop investing in Colombian blood: land activists appeal to the UK

by Sam Jones   

In January, shortly after talking to Colombia’s attorney general about the progress of her case, Yomaira Mendoza received the first of many phone calls. “They asked me whether I knew I already smelled of formaldehyde,” she says.

The following day, Mendoza got a text telling her she’d won a $2,400 (£1,500) prize and needed to pick it up from a nearby town. Aware that the same ruse had lured her fellow land rights activist Manuel Ruiz and his 15-year-old son to their deaths two years earlier, she ignored it.

Five days later, as she left her home at dawn, Mendoza was almost run down by a man on a motorbike. “I thought nothing of it because there’s a lot of drunks around on Sunday mornings,” she says. “But he came back and tried to knock me down again. I realised he wasn’t a drunk.”

Though the threats would increase in their frequency and ferocity, they were not Mendoza’s first experience of the paramilitaries and criminal businesses who have occupied her family farm in the Curvaradó region of north-western Colombia for 17 years.

Decades of fighting involving government troops, leftist rebels and rightwing paramilitaries are estimated to have claimed at least 220,000 lives in Colombia since 1958 and fuelled countless land grabs by armed groups.

“Before the paramilitaries came in 1997, Curvaradó was a quiet, peaceful place,” says Mendoza. “It was an area that hadn’t seen any killings, let alone massacres. All the families who lived there could work the land and you could travel from the country to the town to do your shopping without any hassle.”

Within hours of their arrival in her village, the paramilitaries had shot one man under the mistaken impression he was trying to flee. They killed two more people the next day. Before long, the daily death toll had reached four or five. Sometimes the victims were left hanging from the trees; others were decapitated.

After enduring the violence for two or three months, Mendoza’s family – which had worked their land in Llano Rico since 1982 – fled to the city of Medellín. The violence, however, proved impossible to escape: in 2002 her brother was seized by paramilitaries who tortured him before murdering him.

Five years later, Mendoza and her husband, José Eustoquio Cifuentes Rojas, found themselves back in Curvaradó, trying to support their relatives in the city. One day, they were spotted on Mendoza’s family land chopping down trees to sell. The man who had taken their farm told them to pay a fine but they refused.

On 7 January 2007, Rojas was shot dead in front of his wife and two sons. “No one’s ever told me why they killed him,” says Mendoza. “And the person who killed him was killed to stop him saying anything. The truth is I think he was killed because of what happened on my parents’ farm and because they wanted us out of there.”

Her struggle to find out who killed her husband and to reclaim her family’s land is far from unique. Three years after the government of President Juan Manuel Santos passed the Victims and Land Restitution Law – which aims to hand back the millions of hectares of land stolen during decades of violence – many of the farms and fields of Curvaradó remain occupied by criminals and paramilitaries who use them to grow bananas, African palm and coca, or for mining, logging and cattle ranching.

Despite the presence of Colombian troops and foreign humanitarian volunteers, and the completion of a two-year census to identify the rightful owners of the stolen land, progress is agonisingly slow and calls for justice are met with familiar threats.

In March, Mendoza received yet another text. “[You’re] fighting for land,” it read. “There’ll be more than enough to put on top of you.”

After the police declined to trace the texts, claiming it would be illegal under a new intelligence law, Mendoza fled to Bogotá. But she was not safe there, either. Following further threats, she eventually left Colombia.

She and her fellow exiled activist Enrique Cabezas recently travelled to the UK with a blunt message for British businesses and politicians.

“In Colombia, businesses and farms are being used to launder money by the drug traffickers,” says Cabezas. “But the palm plantations and mines are sponsoring all the murders. They drive people off their land and kill them so they can mine it or plant it. There’s been no justice whatsoever for those killed since 1997. I want the British government, British companies and companies from other countries who are investing money in the apparent development of Colombia to think about the cost of those investments in Colombian blood.”

His calls are echoed by two NGOs that work with land activists in Colombia. “Yomaira and Enrique’s experiences are extreme, but given that their situation and that of many others in Colombia is exacerbated by national and international companies investing in projects on disputed lands, we would encourage the British government to ensure that UK companies consult meaningfully with potentially affected communities and are aware of all the facts prior to embarking on major projects that involve land use,” says Gaby Drinkwater, Christian Aid’s senior policy and advocacy officer for Latin America.

Rob Hawke, advocacy officer at Peace Brigades International UK, points out that campaigners for land restitution in Colombia are paying with their lives, with at least 43 killed since 2008. He adds: “It is important that the British embassy stands by its commitment to support human rights defenders like Yomaira and Enrique by pressing Colombia to ensure that adequate and effective protection measures are in place, and that all attacks are properly investigated.”

A spokeswoman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said the UK believes that the “land restitution agenda matters in Colombia”, but recognises that challenges remain. “In recognition of this, our embassy in Bogotá runs several human rights projects to help improve the land registry process, increase access to protection measures, and raise awareness of the UN guiding principles on business and human rights.”

She noted that more than 200,000 victims had received reparations under the victims law between January 2012 and the end of last year, adding: “The EU-Colombia free trade agreement signed in 2012 contains significant commitments relating to responsible business conduct, incorporating, for example, high standards of labour rights, environmental protection and sustainable development.”

Mendoza and Cabezas are not impressed by the pace of restitution or by politicians’ promises. And, although they know only too well the price of speaking out, neither intends to fall silent of their own accord.

“All the members of my community are now displaced around the country,” says Cabezas. “If a businessman is getting rich off their land while my friends’ kids are going hungry or having to work as prostitutes in the city, then that is something I cannot accept.”

Mendoza, meanwhile, feels she was too quiet for too long. “If we all keep our mouths shut, the impunity will go on and on and on; there will never be justice,” she says. “It’s a risk we have to take. We know that we’ve all got to die sooner or later. And that’s OK. That’s the decision I’ve made.”

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