All photographs: Christian Aid / Paul Hackett

On the rare occasions that Colombia makes the news, the headlines rarely go beyond tales of drug barons and kidnappings. But there is another story that has received little coverage. It’s the story of the millions of Colombians who’ve been forced from their homes, fi rst by an internal confl ict and now by a vast land grab. It’s a startling fact that more people in Colombia have been uprooted from their land and are living as internal refugees than in any country other than Sudan. As many as 3.7 million people – or around 8.5 per cent of the population – have been forced to fl ee their homes during the past 20 years. The hardest hit have been those living in remote rural areas – the victims of what started out as a confl ict between opposing ideologies, with left-wing guerrilla groups taking on government forces supported by right-wing paramilitaries. The paramilitaries, who set themselves up as the armed protectors of big business, have now effectively become businesses themselves. Supported by parts of the Colombian state apparatus, they are forcing families to leave the land and then taking it over for their own use. During the past fi ve years, 200,000 people have fl ed their homes annually. The majority end up in and around the larger towns and cities across the country. The capital, Bogotá, for example, hosts around half a million displaced people. Both the paramilitary groups and the guerrillas have, for years, been fi nanced by the illegal cocaine trade. However, the former are increasingly moving into ‘legitimate’ agricultural businesses, most recently palm oil production. Found in around one in ten products on supermarket shelves, from cereals and ice creams to soaps and detergents, palm oil can also be used to make

biofuel for cars and power stations. Hence, with the world beginning to ‘go green’, demand for the oil is on a steep upward curve. The Colombian government hopes to cash in on this increasing demand and is encouraging the ‘push for palm’. It wants to see the area under cultivation rise from 300,000 hectares to 700,000 hectares in the next four years. But what isn’t clear is how much of this land will be stolen – and how much has already been stolen – from farmers. In 1991, one such farmer, Don Enrique Petro, lost two sons in the same week – one murdered by guerrillas and another by paramilitaries. Then, in 1997, he was forced to abandon his land by paramilitaries who said they would kill him. Later, they tried to make him sell the land at a knockdown price, telling him that either he sold it them or they would “negotiate with his widow”. One day, while he was away at the local market, gunmen riddled his house with bullets, painted death threats on his wall and stole his animals. “Afterwards, I went to talk to the paramilitaries and they said I had to go because I was collaborating with the guerrillas,” he says. “They told me they were watching me and that they would kill me and cut my head off.” Don Petro says the accusations of collaboration were just a pretext. “They were lying. It was so they could get hold of my land to grow African palm on it and make money.” Today most of Don Petro’s land is covered in African palm trees owned by a company called Urapalma.

The roots of the confl ict The latest confl ict in Colombia’s troubled history began during the 1950s and ’60s, as Marxist and other left-wing guerrilla groups sprang up in response to economic inequality and political

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