Bleeding the Earth

 

The New Extractivism? A review

1.

In April, 1997, several thousand fighters from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, entered the Caribbean department of Bolívar, along the Magdalena River, their stated goal being the “cleansing of the area and (the) handing it over to multinational corporations.”

The AUC, short for Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, was a paramilitary army whose right-wing ideology had grown out of the network of rural businessmen and druglords who supported them. The official raison d’etre of the AUC had originally been to fight the communist guerrillas of the FARC and ELN, against whom the Colombian state had been waging a three-decade internal war. Yet making the departments of Bolívar and Magdalena safe for corporations meant far more than merely clearing out communists, and the broader agenda at play was more sinister than mere “self-defense.”