Jackson: U.S. Energy Company Drummond Accused of More Colombian Crimes

Authentic Journalist and Narco News copublisher Stephen Flanagan Jackson has again come forward to report on the alleged crimes of the U.S.-based Drummond energy company. Last year, as we reported here, Jackson went to court “seeking the lifting of a bizarre gag order imposed on Colombian miners, unions, and family members of those who were assassinated, in their lawsuit against the Drummond Company.” He won his case, in a victory for both the families of the victims of paramilitary assassins in Colombia, and for free speech in the U.S.

Now, Jackson is back with new reports in The Birmingham News and the online Alabama journal The Locust Fork on new allegations against the Drummond  Coal Co., revealed in a lawsuit from another energy company. According to the suit and interviews Jackson he conducted in Colombia with executives the Llanos oil company, Drummond has plotted to steal oil rights in northern Colombia with help from its friends in the Uribe administration. Jackson reports in The Birmingham News:

Albert van Bilderbeek, a majority owner and executive of Llanos along with his brother Hendrik, allege “racketeering in a scheme” involving the president of Colombia to illegally divert the oil rights to Drummond, which obtained the concession in December 2003.

The van Bilderbeek brothers charge in the suit that Garry N. Drummond, the coal giant’s chief executive, was involved with Colombia President Alvaro Uribe, Uribe’s top aide, and Ecopetrol, the Colombian mineral-rights agency, in a plot to steal Llanos’ oil rights in Las Nieves (The Snows) region. This area stretches for 250,000 acres surrounding Drummond’s Colombia coal mines near the border of oil-rich Venezuela.

The Llanos suit brings up charges that mirror those of the families of the murdered union activists: that Drummond relies on the right-wing paramilitaries responsible for most of Colombia’s human rights abuses to ensure its dominance. From Jackson’s story in The Locust Fork:

In the Llanos case, van Bilderbeek alleges that Drummond is in a “symbiotic and cooperative” relationship with both the regular Colombia military and the paramilitaries at Drummond’s huge open pit coal mine in Colombia.

“Drummond pays the paramilitary out of a slush fund account,” the Llanos lawsuit claims.

If these charges are true, they would be yet another nail in the coffin of credibility of U.S. policy towards Colombia. While publicly the U.S. claims to fight “drug trafficking” and “terrorism” in Colombia, that country’s biggest narcos and most brutal “terrorists” – the paramilitaries – enjoy the implicit support of both the U.S. government and U.S. corporations.