Barrancabermeja: paramilitary terror and the struggle for Colombia's oil.

• Author: Weinberg, Bill
• Position: Thinking Economically

Colombia's most important oil refinery at Barrancabermeja has been under occupation by the military since June 2003. The army's Energy and Transport Battalion No. 7, created in 1995 ostensibly to protect oil infrastructure from guerilla attack, took control of the refinery following protests by the oil workers. It was not wages or benefits which were at issue, but the future of the state-owned Colombian Petroleum Company, or Ecopetrol, which runs the facility.

Represented by the Syndicated Workers Union (USO), the refinery employees launched a permanent vigil at the plant gates to protest the lock-out of unionized workers and military seizure of the plant. They were dispersed days later by National Police troops, who fired tear gas and water cannons, sparking days of street fighting. The confrontation came days after Colombia's President, Alvaro Uribe, signed a decree reorganizing Ecopetrol and the nation's oil industry.

Says Juan Carlos Galvis, Barrancabermeja president of the Central Workers Union (CUT), Colombia's main labor federation, which covers the USO oil workers, "Uribe's reform was a blow to the heart of the company. This is setting the groundwork for privatization. We could compete on a global level with the multinationals. But the state has no commitment to investing in Ecopetrol. Uribe follows the mandates of the International Monetary Fund, and is paving the way for the FTAA. He can't admit this because it would be seen as a surrender of national sovereignty. But his agenda is to deliver national resources to foreign capital. It is savage capitalism, without a human face."

And Galvis says that this agenda is enforced in Barrancabermeja not only by the official security forces of the army, navy and National Police, but by the unofficial ultra-right paramilitaries, who have an invisible but near-total control over Colombia's central oil town.

Petrol and the paramilitaries: A totalitarian agenda

Galvis should know. Since he started receiving death threats in 2001, Galvis has had a personal round-the-clock bodyguard contracted by the Administrative Security Department (DAS), Colombia's equivalent of the FBI. On August 22, Galvis was leaving the office of Barrancabermeja's municipal workers union shortly after noon. He stepped into his car with his two bodyguards. As they were passing a local school, two men on a motorbike opened fire; the bodyguards returned fire, and the gunmen fled. "It only lasted a few seconds, but bullets...