The Dark Side of Plan Colombia: How the U.S. is Subsidizing Death and Drug Trafficking on Stolen Lands

(Alternet.org, The Nation) - As Congress prepares to debate new Plan Colombia funding, it’s time to investigate how money for biofuels is linked to violence and bloodshed.

Research support for this article was provided by the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with additional support from Project Word, a Massachusetts-based media nonprofit organization.

On May 14 Colombia’s attorney general quietly posted notice on his office’s website of a public hearing that will decide the fate of Coproagrosur, a palm oil cooperative based in the town of Simití in the northern province of Bolívar. A confessed drug-trafficking paramilitary chief known as Macaco had turned over to the government the cooperative’s assets, which he claims to own, as part of a victim reparations program.

Macaco, whose real name is Carlos Mario Jiménez, was one of the bloodiest paramilitary commanders in Colombia’s long-running civil war and has confessed to the murder of 4,000 civilians. He and his cohorts are also largely responsible for forcing 4.3 million Colombians into internal refugee status, the largest internally displaced population in the world after Sudan’s. In May 2008, Macaco was extradited to the United States on drug trafficking and “narco-terrorism” charges. He is awaiting trial in a jail cell in Washington, DC.

Macaco turned himself in to authorities in late 2005 as part of a government amnesty program that requires paramilitary commanders to surrender their ill-gotten assets — including lands obtained through violent displacement. Macaco offered up Coproagrosur as part of the deal.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Alternet.org, Teo Ballvé, The Nation. Posted June 2, 2009 ]