The Dispossessed. Aviva Chomsky
hired paramilitaries to drive farmers out and replaced production of food crops with livestock. This is why Molano once described Colombia as “a country where a cow is worth more than a person.”10
Another aspect of globalization and neoliberalism is the role of international capital in the chain of events that forces thousands off their lands. Colombia is one of the richest natural-resource-producing countries in the world. Multi nationals investing in minerals, cash crops, petroleum, and other products contribute to the pressure to expel populations that get in the way of their unfettered access to the country’s resources. As González Bustelo shows, British Petroleum financed paramilitaries. In the late 1990s, Occidental Petroleum lobbied Congress to expand the area covered under Plan Colombia to places where the company had its investments. One study estimated that 84 percent of the displaced come from areas that produce 78 percent of the country’s oil revenues.11
If violence is part of doing business in Colombia, both international and Colombian firms feel no qualms about employing it to repress activities, such as labor and peasant organizing, that might impede their search for profits. Human Rights Watch and the AFL-CIO confirm that Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world for trade unionists to organize. Since 1991, more than three thousand trade unionists died at the hands of assassins.12 Likewise, “Forced migrations take place in areas where people are not politically active (as shown in their electoral participation) but very socially active (protests, demonstrations), proving the high social costs of the displacements,” González Bustelo shows.13 Especially targeted are areas with traditions of farmworker, peasant, and indigenous rights organizing.
The testimonies presented in The Dispossessed describe in the most personal terms how these larger economic and social processes play out in ordinary people’s lives. Paramilitaries enter the scene of “The Defeat” as a protection force for “Don Enrique Ortiz, a businessman who bought all the wood he could get his hands on to sell to Cartones Colombianos” (p.56), a major cardboard manufacturing multinational. Harvesting the wood in question was illegal, and “finding (out) about that little business … proved to be the beginning of the end for Diego and his friend Aníbal,” the protagonists of the story (p. 56). The drug economy—and the paramilitaries’ fight to control it—figures prominently in a number of the crónicas. The narrator in “Silences” recounts his participation in a strike on a banana plantation. The plantation bosses call in the local military commander who warns the banana workers that they might be taken for guerrilla sympathizers. The following day, the narrator finds the bodies of two union leaders hanging from a banana tree. The strike was crushed, and the narrator flees the plantation, remarking, “No one was ever punished for those murders, and the bosses never lost as much as a minute’s sleep over them” (p. 87). Yet, for this narrator, paramilitary violence didn’t intimidate him forever. “Silences” stands out as an account of someone who not only learns to cope with the violence, but to stand up to it. He becomes a campesino organizer who finishes his narrative on a note of hope and defiance: “As for me, I’m still with my people. We’ve stopped running and decided to resist. Without weapons or a thirst for vengeance but with the land we’ve worked and made something of together. The land that is us all” (p. 96).
The stories also document guerrilla relations with the rural population. They paint a picture that neither echoes the Colombian (and U.S.) government’s fulminations against “narcoterrorists,” nor excuses the guerrillas for their sometimes brutal treatment of their presumed constituents. It is notable that the narrator of “Silences,” who clearly identifies himself as a church-based activist, describes this dynamic in the field of peasant organizing: “When the church in its way, and the guerrillas in their way, threw in with the people, the paramilitaries and the army appeared” (p. 95). In other words, the narrator saw himself and the guerrillas to be fighting on the same side, the side of the campesinos. To the narrator of “Nubia, La Catira,” the guerrillas were defenders of campesinos, meting out frontier justice against bandits who preyed on coffee farmers. Nubia says, “The guerrillas were good people, not rude or bad-mannered…. The guerrillas taught me to read and write and I always wanted them to take me to their camp” (p. 179). On the other hand, we also see the guerrillas as inflexible and domineering. Ninfa, the narrator of “The Garden,” loses both her father and husband to guerrilla executions. In both cases, the guerrillas are deceived into thinking the condemned to be collaborators with the paras, but this is no consolation to Ninfa: “I’ll never forgive the guerrillas for not trying to find out more about what happened, about our mistake. We acted in good faith. The paracos tricked us, and, what’s more, they tricked the guerrillas as well into committing a crime” (p. 135).
Despite this, Molano’s informants leave no doubt that they believe the paramilitaries and their collaborators in the police and military to be the chief source of violence in the countryside. Statistics back up Molano’s informants. Right-wing paramilitaries account for two to three times the number of forced displacements than the guerrillas have caused, according to the United Nations. One 2001 report estimated that paramilitaries account for 79 percent of all human rights violations against civilian populations, compared to 16 percent of human rights violations attributed to guerrillas.14 These paramilitary actions contributed to conditions that caused the majority of 412,000 to flee their homes in 2002, and an additional 175,000 to flee in 2003, according to the nongovernmental Consultancy on Human Rights and Dis placement (CODHES). Given the prevalence of forced displacement in the countryside, it is understandable why each story revolves around a horrific act of paramilitary violence. “Whenever there were bodies in the river,” the child Ángela says matter-of-factly, “the paramilitaries showed up” (p. 73).
The clear collaboration between the official military, the police, and the paramilitaries is well-documented. In fact, some observers have likened the increase in para military activity to a “privatization” of the state’s repressive apparatus, providing the government with “plausible deniability” while it seeks to wipe out guerrilla and other challenges to its rule.15 A January 2004 Human Rights Watch report states the case unequivocally:
Although the Colombian government describes these ties as the acts of individuals and not a matter of policy or even tolerance, the range of abuses clearly depends on the approval, collusion, and tolerance of high-ranking officers. The Uribe Administration has yet to arrest paramilitary leaders or high-ranking members of the Armed Forces credibly alleged to collaborate with abusive paramilitary groups. Arrest statistics provided by the military are overwhelmingly skewed toward low-ranking members of paramilitary groups or individuals whose participation in these groups is alleged, not proven.16
By some estimates, the paramilitaries control as much as one half of the country’s illicit drug trade, producing revenue of $1–$2 billion annually. Therefore, the paras are not a ragtag band, but a virtual, and well-financed, state within a state.
Human rights activists charge that the Uribe government’s plans to accept surrenders of paramilitary leaders and the disbanding of their units are either a smokescreen for international consumption or a step toward the legalization of the paramilitaries and their open integration into the armed forces.17 The question posed by narrator Osiris, who loses a husband and son to the paras, remains unanswered: “Where do you demand justice when the authorities who pick up the bodies are the same ones who kill them? Who do you denounce the crime to if the authorities are all smeared with blood?” (p. 159).
When people are forced to flee, they end up in camps for displaced persons, other towns, or as country people living in the slums of major cities like Bogotá or Medellín. The Dispossessed captures their disorientation of living as strangers where they are often not welcome. Perhaps the most dramatic of these accounts is the story of the boy Toñito, told in “The Turkish Boat.” Fleeing a paramilitary massacre of his village in the Chocó region—a massacre that leaves him an orphan—he takes a riverboat all the way to the Caribbean port city of Cartagena. There, residing in the Mandela slum with thousands of other desterrados, he describes his life: “I lived with a gang in the street. We hustled anywhere we could” (p. 110). He and his gang run afoul of the local police and mafia, compelling him to stow away on a Turkish vessel bound for New York. Toñito barely survives that escape attempt, as the ship’s