River politics and silent disappearances in Buenaventura, Colombia

This article contains graphic descriptions that some readers may find disturbing.

Long on the margins of South America’s shipping hubs, the industrial city of Buenaventura on Colombia’s Pacific coast is seeing massive changes. Port expansion is ushering in a new era of maritime trade. Nearly 700 square kilometres are destined for new shipping infrastructure, including a liquefied gas port and expanded container storage. President Gustavo Petro’s vision for an 850-kilometre-long Pacific railway would connect Buenaventura with the rest of the country. But this ambitious development is seen by some as undermining justice for victims of armed conflict, as violence remains unresolved and the priorities of global capital override community interests. 

In the northwest of the Valle del Cauca department, Buenaventura is home to just under half a million people. Tracing the shoreline, homes sprawl over the water, walkways jut out among the reeds and shallows in stark contrast to the sterility of global shipping infrastructure. Villages sprawl inland toward remote jungle along the rivers that pour into Buenaventura Bay. 

The region’s river communities have endured some of the worst horrors perpetrated against civilians during the height of war. The memory of paramilitary massacres, such as in the rural settlement of Sabaletas and the city barrio of Punta del Este, still resonates. Over half a century of conflict later, communities remain torn between the shadow of former guerrilla groups and the amalgamation of new criminal organisations, each vying for control in a rapidly developing Pacific region that is increasingly in the grip of foreign capital.  

Where have the disappeared gone?

Buenaventura began dredging the San Antonio estuary in 2018 to allow the passage and docking of ships. But the port’s expansion and commercial activity threatened to disturb the remains of missing persons and interfere with the search and recovery process in what is considered one of Colombia’s largest mass graves. 

By 2021, victims’ families and human rights organisations successfully pressured the Special Jurisdiction for Peace to grant precautionary measures to the estuary. Similar measures were taken at La Escombrera city dump in Medellin, recently confirmed as a mass grave since excavations for missing persons began last July. 

The suspension on estuary dredging was extended for another ten months in February, but as the deadline approaches, the future of search and recovery is uncertain.

"Enforced disappearances are an open wound, a debt owed by the State," Justicia y Paz wrote in July, echoing the words of former President Juan Manuel Santos on the "moral debt" owed to victims of violence leading up to the introduction of the "Victims and Land Restitution Law." Far from a legacy of the past, enforced disappearances are still a reality, with the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances describing systemic shortcomings in Colombia’s legal framework and ineffective coordination of recovery and victim assistance.

Armed groups and state forces alike are implicated. Many people have been taken to "chop houses" (casa de pique) and disposed of in clandestine cemeteries, as they are known, inland. The National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences recorded 879 missing persons across Valle del Cauca just last year, the highest in all of Colombia’s departments. This August, the institute recorded 364 additional people as missing. 

"Paz Total is in crisis," Milbea Andrea Díaz of Justicia y Paz said in Spanish earlier this winter. A truce between the local rival criminal groups Los Espartanos and Los Shottas had just been broken, armed conflict was escalating across the country, and President Gustavo Petro turned sharply to a militarised response.

Buenaventura remains one of the most militarised cities in Colombia. Long swept into the machine of war, children and adolescents are still recruited by armed actors, and civilians are caught in the crossfire. Bogotá-based peace and development institute Indepaz reports the FARC dissident Jaime Martínez’s column, Coordinadora Nacional Ejército Bolivariano, the National Liberation Army, and Clan del Golfo as active, exerting pressure on local governance, and competing for control in the Pacific Bonaverense corridor.

"There are heavy consequences for civilians from the exponential increase in armed groups that are at this moment debating, discussing, and positioning themselves to control territory," Andrea Díaz said this winter. "We condemn the fact that the government has not shown serious interest in advancing peace negotiations for the city."

Amid human rights reports citing "collusion and tolerance of the Police and the Marine Corps" with local armed groups, the IACHR has gone so far as to call the humanitarian situation in Buenaventura "one of ‘terror' and confinement due to the presence of illegal armed actors in their territory."

The harassment, murder, and disappearance of community leaders is commonplace. Emilsen Manyoma, a leader of the peace organisation CONPAZ, and community leaders Abencio Caicedo and Edison Valencia, are but a few alleged to have been dumped into the Micay river. Vocal opponents of Buenaventura’s port expansion have been explicitly targeted, including prominent community leader Temistocles Machado, assassinated in 2018.

In response to an armed raid last year, the IACHR granted protection to community leaders in thirteen Afro-Colombian settlements in the Yurumaguí river basin. But even then, Colombian authorities have consistently been criticised for taking an individualised approach to protecting human rights defenders–not going much farther than bulletproof vests, armoured cars, and an occasional escort, and neglecting state forces’ own complicity in violence against vulnerable communities. 

According to Colombian constitutional law experts Sindy Castro Herrera and Marlyuz Barragán, individual security measures often overlook the needs of ethno-racial, cultural, and rural communities. "These measures, besides being costly, are designed to protect politicians or businessmen who move in urban areas," they write. "They are not adapted to rural contexts where it is difficult to pay for gasoline, the maintenance of a van or the food and hotel of a bodyguard."

One government after another has been denounced for inaction on the pervasive violence targeting civilians in Buenaventura, favouring systemic inaction despite the severity and urgency of the region’s humanitarian situation.

Investing in disenfranchisement

While the Caribbean channels and the ports of Cartagena, Barranquilla and Santa Marta have established Colombia’s connections to international trade, Buenaventura is the country’s main Pacific port. In the wake of the Peace Agreement, Manuel Santos’ government notably launched the controversial Economic Activities Centre in Buenaventura, setting the city on a fast track for ambitious development and international investment. 

The promise of land restitution and the state’s "moral debt" owed to communities dispossessed by land grabs and war had barely faded before commercial land use was being pitted against collective land rights. The majority of land designated for the Economic Activities Centre development contradicts the collective titles asserted by councils in the Buenaventura district, including Caucana, Gamboa and Bahia Malaga. 

China has had a keen eye on integrating Colombia into its national Belt and Road Initiative, an economic and geopolitical development masterplan that connects China with international resource extraction projects and trade routes. Through Buenaventura, cross-Pacific shipping is now expected to link Colombia to Shanghai by way of Peru. 

Far from being peacebuilding anathemas, mega-projects aggravate conflict, causing forced displacement and interfering with the recognition of collective land titles. Colombia’s Constitutional Court has said as much. The extractivism and capitalist reforms of past decades launched Colombia into war in the first place. 

They also breathed life into the Black peasant movement in the 1980s. A movement around Black Colombian identities emerged in Valle del Cauca’s neighbouring department of Chocó and grew around the class-based struggles that united Black communities with Indigenous peoples and other marginalised communities. 

Afro-Colombian and Indigenous rights are protected under the Ethnic Chapter of the 2016 Peace Agreement. This cornerstone agreement includes safeguards for reparations to victims of violence and ensures agency over rural reforms and economic development. The Ethnic Chapter, however, has long been criticised for its lack of implementation, even as the Chapter emphasises collective protection measures for vulnerable communities. And despite efforts like Law 70 to protect collective rights and land ownership, Afro-Colombians remain marginalised, and some collective land titles stay in limbo. 

Vicente Vallies, researcher with Peace Brigades International, argues that the landscape of armed conflict in Buenaventura will contribute to human rights violations in port development, even if indirectly. A PBI report earlier this year mapped out Spain’s private sector activity in Buenaventura—including freight logistics and infrastructure companies like Buenaventura Ership Grup, TIBA Colombia, and Sacyr. Multinational companies and investors, he said at a briefing in February, risk cashing in on a pervasive climate of impunity. 

"People only think about the port, the population does not matter," he said at the briefing, adding that development has not historically benefited Buenaventura. Running on an "absentee extractive economy," the city’s revenues have typically been captured by the private sector and reinvested in Cali, Bogotá or Medellin. As in Colombia’s other isolated districts, Buenaventura’s current poverty rates are inconclusive, but estimates are at 82 per cent, with 43 per cent reported as living in extreme poverty.

Though privatisation has led to some of Buenaventura’s darkest days, systemic poverty is often cited as a reason to deepen the foothold of global capital in the city. Thousands of workers lost their jobs when the port was privatised in 1993, and were subjected to abusive employment practices by commercial port operators. 

According to testimonies collected by PBI, in Buenaventura, it is impossible to live without paying extortion fees that finance criminal and armed groups. "It doesn’t matter whether they are small business owners, fishers, everybody has to pay extortion," Vallies said. 

The UNODC reports that taxes by armed groups are routinely imposed not just on cocaine trafficked through Buenaventura, but also on banal sectors like construction materials and food. Outsourcing and international networks, they report, enable armed groups to control shipping logistics. Extortion is "indiscriminate," targeting companies, informal labourers and the general public. 

With Buenaventura’s development accelerating, some are trying to change this. Protecting the estuaries so that forensic investigations and body recovery can continue, and loved ones can find closure, is just the start. 

On August 1, members of Colombia’s Congress proposed a binding domestic law to obligate corporations to prevent human rights abuses and implement rigorous preventative measures in conflict-affected areas. 

"Binding regulations for the business sector are essential to protect fundamental rights in accordance with the Constitution and associated international law standards, including the requirement on businesses and the State to apply the core standard of free, prior and informed consent," stated María Arango, lawyer at Forest Peoples Programme. Colombia has historically taken the lead on national action plans for business and human rights in Latin America, and became the first country in the region to adopt such a framework in 2015.  

Colombia has also been a focal point for case studies in the development of a binding UN treaty on business and human rights. Working group members visited Colombia last summer to collect testimonies of human rights violations caused by foreign resource extraction and development projects. 

As Colombia’s wavering path toward peace has evaded the Pacific, communities in Buenaventura are determined not to surrender the memories and dignity of lost ones, and to hold Colombian authorities and complicit parties accountable for perpetrating crimes and for silencing the stories of affected communities. 

One question will not be silenced: where are the disappeared and why have they been taken?

Image by Vladimir Oprisko.