Paramilitaries displacing Afro-Colombians from their homeland for biofuel production

Readers of the Narcosphere may well be aware of some of the more problematic aspects of biofuel as an ostensibly "renewable" energy source, including food scarcity, deforestation, and soil erosion. Now, in yet another example of neoliberal interests dressing up the disenfranchisement of traditional and indigenous communities in "green" drag, a business reporter for the BBC relates how paramilitary syndicates in Colombia are kicking Afro-Colombian communities off of their traditional homelands for the sake of biodiesel production, destroying their sustainable way of life in the process. As the article states,

land use [i.e., on the part of the Afro-Colombians of Colombia's Northwest] is based on cultivating a few traditional crops for subsistence - such as corn, yucca and cocoa - or for hunting and fishing.

But, according to human rights organisations working in the north-west Choco province, and in dense forests along the Pacific, paramilitary gangs are seizing Afro-Colombian land to facilitate biofuel conglomerates.

The land is also being transformed, with elaborate network of highways, drainage canals and palm oil plantation sites. Tropical forests are cut down, water sources diverted, to aid the development of agribusiness projects.

The changes make it harder for the Afro-Colombians to ever recover their former way of life, observes Mr Caceido. "Once palm oil is planted we cannot hunt anymore because the animals have fled," he says.

"There is no more birdsong because the forests have been cut down. The soil hardens for lack of shade. Rivers dry up. Nothing else grows except palm."

The methods employed in the evictions are reported to be particularly brutal:

Dozens of peasant farmers who have refused to sell or relinquish their holdings, or who are community representatives, have been murdered.

One recent case is Ualberto Hoyos, a family farmer and community leader, who was murdered by two presumed paramilitaries on 14 October in an execution-style killing with a shot through the head.

However, Álvaro Uribe, the president of the Narco-Republic of Colombia, [and who serves as the top representative of that country's big drug barons and the land-owning oligarchy in that capacity], is apparently pleased enough with the state of affairs.  He is seeking to invest the Colombian economy even more heavily in biofuel:

The government says it wants the area planted with the crop to increase tenfold in the next decade to more than three million hectares, or some seven million acres.

Given the track record of the Uribe administration, such a plan will only yield more misery and human rights violations for ordinary Colombians.  Read the whole article here.