Afrocolombians displaced: with the backing of the United States, corporations kill and steal for Black land.

ANA VALENCIA STILL TRIES to eke out a living as a miner in the hills near the headwaters of Colombia's Rio Salvajina. Her sisters are gone now to the nearest city of Cali, where they work as domestics. She's having a hard time hanging on.

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In this AfroColombian community, Palo Blanco, the men farm and take care of animals, while the women mine gold. "We do everything here, even a man's job," says Valencia. "My mother's a miner too. She's 77 years old, and she's been mining since she was 15. She's still out there."

As hard as mining and farming are, however, people like Valencia are fighting to stay. Today, though, the threat to Palo Blanco 's existence doesn't come only from poverty. The Anglo American Corporation plans to pulverize the mountain where Valencia and her community mine and extract the gold using industrial methods that will leave behind huge piles of tailings and pits filled with cyanide residue. If the project is allowed to proceed, Palo Blanco residents will lose their small diggings and the income they gain from them. Pollution will make it even harder to farm. The town might become just a memory.

"Development" projects like this one are backed by the Colombian government and pushed by the United States and international financial institutions. This spring, the U.S. Congress is expected to debate a free trade treaty that President George Bush has already signed with Colombia. It will remove legal protections for the land inhabited by AfroColombian and indigenous communities, cut the public budget for social services and privatize public enterprises like electricity. The North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico, for instance, allowed subsidized U.S. corn producers to flood the Mexican market, making it impossible for many small farmers to compete. Colombian workers and farmers fear these measures will lead to a huge loss of jobs and drive farmers from their land.

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Community leaders who stand in the way of foreign investment projects will likely disappear or die. While most displaced Colombians become internal migrants in the country's growing urban slums, that migratory stream will eventually cross borders into those wealthy countries whose policies have set it into motion. Since 2002, more than 200,000 Colombians have arrived in the United States.

Valencia (who asked that her name be changed for safety concerns) and her neighbors are defending land that is part of the historical territory of AfroColombians. In Colombia, Africans fled in huge numbers from the plantations established by the Spanish colonizers in the early 1500s, traveling south and west to the Pacific coast and the jungle-clad mountains inland. They called their runaway towns palenques. By the time Simon Bolivar and Francisco de Paula Santander raised the flag of liberation from Spain in 1810, slaves and former slaves made up three of every five soldiers in the anti-colonial army. Yet emancipation was delayed until 1851. By then, the rural AfroColombian communities founded by escaped slaves were as old as the great Colombian cities of Bogota or Cartagena.

Today, Colombia, a country of 44 million people, is the third largest in Latin America, and one of the most economically polarized. Luis Gilberto Murillo Urrutia, the former governor of Choco state, says AfroColombians make up close to 40 percent of Colombia's people, although the government says it's only 26 percent (or about 11 million people). While non-Black Colombians have an annual income of $1,500, AfroColombian families make $500.

Institutionalized racism has been reinforced by decades of internal displacement due to economic pressures and an internal civil war. From 1940 to 1990, the urban percentage of Colombia's population grew from 31 percent to 77 percent. AfroColombians joined this internal migration in hopes of gaining a better standard of living. Those hopes were dashed, and instead, Murillo says, "They joined the ranks of the urban poor, living in the marginal areas of big cities such as Cali, Medellin, and Bogota. Currently, most AfroColombians are living in urban areas. Only 25 percent, approximately three million people, are still based on the land."

Those who remain in rural areas find themselves caught in the country's deadly civil war between government forces, insurgents and right-wing paramilitaries (who are politically linked to Colombia's conservative politicians including President Alvaro Uribe).

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In 1991, AfroColombian and indigenous communities insisted that the country's rewritten constitution recognize their right to their historical territories. Law 70, passed in 1993, said these communities had to give their approval prior to any new projects planned on their land. Because of the law, AfroColombians in the coastal lowlands of Narino were able to file legal challenges to regain the title to their ancestral lands. In 2005, they recovered their first collective territories. Recovery is still far from complete, however.

Palmeira, the largest of the Narino palm oil planters, has ceded land planted in palms, but not the roads that lead to or through them. As a result, the territory's inhabitants still live from collecting wood. Most families can't read or write. There is no school or clinic.

In Palo Blanco, thousands of families have already been displaced by a series of hydroelectric projects run by the Spanish power giant, Union Fenosa. In 2001, the company proposed yet another project that would leave local people without the Rio Salvajina. But since the Colombian government is under pressure to respect international human rights, it has turned to the right-wing paramilitaries. Community activist Esperanza Rivas (who asked that her name be changed for fear of reprisal) says that's when she began seeing bodies thrown into the river in front of her house.

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"Leaders began to disappear," she recalls. "There were massacres, not just of people living in the area, but even those who'd fled to other places. Their bodies were dumped here. People were very frightened. And after the paramilitaries arrived and the resistance was weakened, [the company] came back with the proposal again."

Local communities do not control these large development projects--regardless of what the constitution dictates. The only Colombians who benefit are a tiny handful of brokers in Bogota. But the Colombian government sees foreign investment in these projects as the key to economic development and revenue. Government officials cut the budget for public services, while increasing military spending. The U.S. military aid program, Plan Colombia, underwrites much of that Colombian military budget.

In response, AfroColombians have built a grassroots organization, the Proceso de la Comunidad Negra, or the Black Community Process. Some of its leaders have traveled to Washington, D.C. to denounce the project in meetings with U.S. Congress members, trying to convince them to vote no on the proposed free-trade agreement.

Whether or not the treaty is ratified, the AfroColombian community is organizing to resist. In a 2000 confrontation with the paramilitaries, Valencia explains, "We all gathered together to put up a fight. We confronted the paras [paramilitaries] at this road, where they had bound a community member and were going to kill him. When we began to question them, they let him go. We saw that once we all united, we were stronger and lost our fear. When they came around again to beat us, we were ready to stand up for ourselves."

David Bacon covers issues of labor, immigration and international politics. See more of his work at dbacon.igc.org.