Colombia land grabs

An article in the Guardian describing how mining, timber and other companies pay some armed groups to chase peasants away from their land and grab the land for their commercial activities.

Locals have even less love for palm oil companies. They swept in in the 1990s on the heels of rightwing paramilitaries who killed and evicted peasants from their fields of corn and yucca, claiming they were guerrilla sympathisers.

Thousands of farmers, displaced and desperate, sold their land to companies that planted thousands of hectares of palm, which is used to make margarine, crisps, chocolate, soap, cosmetics and biofuel.

Armed groups have seized around 5.5m hectares during the past two decades, with indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities bearing the brunt, the relief agency Cafod said. "Current policies promoting the exploitation of natural resources, most recently biofuels, increase the risk that land belonging to displaced communities will end up, by dubious or illegal means, in the hands of businesses."

State loans have funded the palm expansion, with some firms returning the favour by funding President Alvaro Uribe's election campaigns. He promotes the plantations as a way to bring the countryside into the 21st century.

The army, officially neutral, appears to side with plantation owners. The Guardian accompanied one peasant, Jorge Lopez, 64, as he tried to reclaim his land after a 12-year absence. Soldiers first tried to block him, then summoned the palm company foreman.

The government, embarrassed by international scrutiny and criminal investigations into 23 palm companies, recently ordered some firms to return land to peasants.