Original source
He is one of only two Colombian union activists to be abducted by paramilitaries and live. Now BP and other oil firms face allegations they were complicit in human rights abuses.
It was just after 7pm when they came for Gilberto Torres, as he had long feared they would. The trade union leader had had a long day; he was weary and ready for home.
He had been receiving personal threats for some time; sometimes on the phone, occasionally in person. That was par for the course in strife-torn Colombia, with workers often at loggerheads with multinational oil companies, but they were on the increase now.
Torres, then 39, had organised an oil workers strike three months earlier to protest over the murder of another trade union leader, Aury Sara. He was worried, and had even asked the authorities to issue him with a handgun for protection.
As he left the El Porvenir oil-pumping station in Casanare to drive the 12km home, he passed a Mitsubishi Montero and recognised the distinctive van as belonging to security staff at Ocensa, the oil-pipeline company. He tooted his horn in greeting, as was customary.
Five minutes later, the van had turned around and was following his car. It rammed into him. As he looked up, he was staring at the barrel of a gun. His nightmare was just beginning.
His kidnappers were from the Self-Defence Forces of Casanare (ACC) – one of the most powerful and feared of the rightwing pro-government paramilitary brigades during Colombia’s vicious civil war. He was tied up and bundled into the back of the Ocensa van and driven off.
Torres chain-smokes through the lengthy interview, the first he has given to any media organisation outside Colombia. He looks like an ageing rock star, his long locks now streaked with grey, and he recalls his astonishing story with remarkable calm.
“We didn’t take any of the normal roads, always going through jungle and rivers. They made me get rid of everything, wallet, watch, necklace. The only thing I asked was not to take off my glasses.
“They told me everyone from the union were guerrilla motherfuckers, destroying the economy, blaming the multinationals that were giving us jobs. I was damaging the profits of the multinationals. That was not something they were prepared to tolerate.
“My kidnappers also took a supposed guerrilla from Farc. They hit him. They insulted him. They spat on him. They battered him until he confessed that he was indeed part of Farc.
With that admission, he sentenced himself to death. They shot him twice in the neck. They cut his head, his legs and his arms off. And, at the end, the commander with a machete started to puncture his corpse.
“I asked the commander why after killing him did he need to do all this. And he explained to me: ‘Look, engineer. The organs are like air bags and when you bury them, they go up to the surface with time. I understood then that this was going to happen to me.”
After being held for 42 days, he thought his moment had come. “They woke me up at 5am, with the chains and blindfolded, and took me to this hole. They put barbed wire on top of me and I couldn’t lay down. I was kind of dizzy from the pressure of the chains and I had wounds around my body so the ants and insects started to eat my wounds. These big red ants that literally were eating my flesh.”
It rained, and the water came up to his chest. He was convinced he was going to die.
Then, a miracle.
“The commander received a call saying: ‘Send the cattle to be cleaned up. It needs to be sent to the fair.’ So we went to the river. I washed myself, and when I was putting on my rags, the commander said: ‘Not today, engineer. You should wear your nice new clothes, as you are going to be in the media.’”
Unknown to Torres, his trade union colleagues had mounted a strong campaign for his release and were now threatening another expensive national oil strike. Even in Colombia, killing him now would be very difficult for those behind his abduction.
And so he was freed into the arms of the Red Cross. He fled first to Spain and now lives in the Dominican Republic. He is too afraid to go home, and his family has split up as a result.
This, then, was Casanare in the eastern foothill of the Andes, the lush oil-rich uplands where there had been one of the biggest finds in the western hemisphere in decades. Violence was endemic, and it went beyond the civil war raging between government forces and Farc rebels at the time.
BP’s arrival in this area in the early 90s wrought huge changes in the sprawling countryside. Other oil companies, such as the French multinational Total, the Anglo-French firm Perenco and Ecopetrol, Colombia’s national oil company, enjoyed the boom years too.
There was seismic exploration, the diversion of huge quantities of water to aid exploration, and the construction of a 515 mile (830km) pipeline in partnership with Colombia’s national oil company Ecopetrol and four other multinational companies. Ocensa was set up to build and own the pipeline. It would eventually carry 650,000 barrels of oil a day through the countryside to the Caribbean sea.
Thousands of locals were forced off their land. Oil companies paid a levy of $1 a barrel to the government, who then ordered the military to deal with the opposition. They were followed by their sidekicks, the pro-government paramilitaries, acting as sub-contractors, who offered their services for a price.
When Torres became a trade union activist after working as an engineer at a local oil plant, it was the most dangerous time in the region’s history to take any kind of stand. The army and their partners on the ground, the local paramilitaries, saw to that.
Trade unionists, community organisers and environmentalists had long been targets. Their number accounted for a disproportionate number of the dead in a brutal conflict that spanned four decades – UN figures suggest 3,000 union activists have been murdered in the past 30 years and 6,000 more are missing.
Torres is one of the luckiest men alive, he says. Only one other union figure who was abducted lived to tell the tale and now, 13 years later, he plans to have his day in court.
Today, in an unprecedented move, his lawyers will issue a high court claim in London for damages against BP. The David and Goliath case promises to be the mother of all battles and could, they say, pave the way for scores more claims.
Torres, backed by the small London-based human rights law firm Deighton Pierce Glynn, claims he was kidnapped and tortured by paramilitaries linked to the Ocensa oil company because he had organised the strike. He says they intended to kill him.
His lawyers are not alleging the direct involvement of BP, but that its close links with Ocensa, set up to build and own the pipeline to the Caribbean, render it liable. BP held 15.2% of Ocensa’s shares at the time. They allege that BP failed to take action to prevent the paramilitaries abducting, torturing and killing.
Sue Willman, partner in Deighton Pierce Glynn, said: “It is hard for BP to distance themselves from the kidnapping because it knew that
union leaders and environmentalists who spoke out against BP were routinely kidnapped and murdered, and people who spoke out at public meetings were murdered.
“BP knew about the human rights abuses because Amnesty International kept telling them. But they failed to take effective action to stop it then.”
BP said it would “vigorously” defend the action. It said that Ocensa was not under its control when Torres was abducted in February 2002.
Ocensa said it “did not commission, order or pay for Gilberto Torres’s kidnapping”. It claimed it was never responsible for displacement, kidnapping or murder in 20 years of operating in the Casanare region.
And Ecopetrol, which owned and ran on behalf of Ocensa the El Porvenir pumping station at the time, denied that it had any relationship with groups outside the law “and in particular with paramilitary groups”. It said it has always been willing to provide any assistance with the authorities to clarify the facts.
Gilberto Torres, who is bringing his claim against BP for alleged complicity in human rights abuses to London’s high court.
BP, which pulled out of the Casanare region four years ago, faced damaging accusations of collusion with the Colombian state-linked paramilitaries in the 1990s.
An official Colombian government investigation in 1998 concluded there was no evidence to support claims that BP employees were involved in taking photographs and passing names of environmental protesters to the military – one, Carlos Arrigui, was subsequently murdered by paramilitaries.
Lara Montesinos Coleman, a Sussex University academic who spent a year in Casanare investigating the impact of the oil companies in the area including BP, told the Guardian: “According to community leaders and family members I have spoken with, activists were killed or had attempts on their lives after meeting oil company representatives.”
“In 2004, Oswaldo Vargas was shot dead on his return home from a meeting with BP. This happened just months after Vargas had helped organise a civic strike in protest against the company’s activities. I interviewed surviving members of the community organisation he belonged to who said that, in the run-up to Vargas’s murder, they had received threats saying: ‘Don’t fuck with BP’.”
BP, in its 2002 environmental and social review, said: “Casanare is a difficult environment in which to work. Illegal armed groups, guerrilla and paramilitary, are present in the region, and in the past these groups have targeted multinational oil companies as military objectives.”
The safety of employees, contractors and the public are paramount, it said. “BP will always seek to ensure that any security arrangements do not infringe human rights, and are consistent with international standards for law enforcement.”
By far the biggest player implicated in the deaths and disappearance of union activists were the notorious United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), a loose union of pro-government paramilitaries, which at its height boasted 30,000 active members, with close links to Colombia’s army. The AUC was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the US State Department the year before Torres disappeared.
The local unit, which had abducted Torres, was the ACC. According to the paramilitaries, the instructions were to kill him after questioning him about his union activities.
Now, as Colombia emerges from years of civil war, the rule of law is returning and paramilitaries are finally being brought to book. In 2010 came the first of three trials of those responsible for abducting Torres. Their testimonies appear to corroborate Torres’s claim that Ocensa ordered his kidnap.
Josué Darío Orjuela Martínez, alias “Solín”, a multimillionaire paramilitary commander already serving more than 100 years for countless murders, kidnapping and extortion plots, told the judge at his trial – the second of the three – that he got his orders direct from Ocensa.
“They were the ones that asked us to execute this man – not that we kidnap him but to seize him … kill him … and make him disappear,” he told the court.
“This man organised too many shutdowns, too many unions, too many strikes and he was always against the station manager’s ideas.”
Summing up, Judge Teresa Robles Munar said that there was enough evidence to support the view that Torres being a trade unionist “was the determining factor behind the paramilitaries’ continuous threats and their subsequence action, in restricting his freedom of [vehicular] movement with the acquiescence of the multinational Ocensa”.
The judge called for an investigation into the role of Ocensa in the kidnapping. That has never taken place.
The Guardian has tracked down the extraordinary video footage of the last of the three trials in the archives of the special circuit court of Bogotá. It can be viewed today for the first time online.
Here, Orjuela, appearing as a prosecution witness at the trial of three other paramilitary members, told the court that “the corporation paid an ‘annual’ [fee] to the organisation [paramilitary leadership]”, adding that his boss, who planned the kidnap of Torres, which he, Orjuela carried out, asked for an extra cut amounting to $40,000 (£25,000) at the time.
“I think HK [the commander] received something personal … it was cash that they sent to HK and he took it as personal benefit. He didn’t report this to the organisation, he was the sole beneficiary of it. It was a very high amount … It was more than 100m pesos [about £25,000] if I’m not mistaken.”
Another kidnapper, Carlos Andres Lopez Garay, now serving 36 years, said of Torres that the petrol company – he is not clear at this point whether he means Ecopetrol or Ocensa – told us to “look after him because he was a big unionist and didn’t let them work”.
In response to the judge’s questions about the relationship between Ocensa and his paramilitary group, a third kidnapper, Arnovil Beltrán Medellín, stated that the company “provided” for the paramilitary organisation. When asked what the company provided, he said simply: “Money.”
In an earlier case, Judge Robles said: “It can be inferred from the evidence on file that the Ocensa company was complicit in [Torres’s] loss of freedom”. Torres was, she said: “threatening their economic interests”.
She called for an official investigation into the “alleged conduct of Ocensa’s directors or members at the time of these events, based on the vehicle used to commit the offence”. Ocensa said in a statement that the attorney general looked into the claims and after five years he has found no merit in them. The Guardian has been unable to confirm that.
To win, Torres will have to convince the high court in London that Ocensa was responsible and that BP was complicit. Other lawsuits may follow.
His survival, against all the odds, meant that his captors could be brought to trial. Their courtroom admissions suggest that oil companies provided them with cash. That, say Torres’s lawyers, offers fresh lines of inquiry that could reveal the complicity of multinationals in the disappearances of thousands of people in Colombia.
Willman said: “This is a historic moment for Colombia at the moment because of the possibility of peace, and the negotiations with Farc. But that peace can’t be at the expense of justice. This is a really crucial time when people are starting to be able to find out what is happened to their relatives.”
Terence Collingsworth, a human rights laywer based in Washington DC, tried to have Torres’s case heard in the US. A recent supreme court judgment blocked that avenue.
“Gilberto Torres’s case might very well be the tip of the iceberg in that we know more about the situation because he survived and because there’s been testimony from the participants. And what’s really surprising is that for the most part the Colombian government isn’t inquiring of the paramilitary commanders what other companies were supporting them.”
Collingsworth hopes that the Torres case could spark a culture change in corporate behaviour and accountability.
“The problem in a case like this is that for the most part the shareholders don’t seem to care about the fact that they could have profited from the tragedy that happened to Gilberto Torres. And that has to change.
“I’d like to see a case like this serve as an encouragement to shareholders to ask questions before they become investors in a company as to whether they might be buying into a company that has blood on its hands.”
The Guardian’s
Keep it in the Ground campaign promotes divestment from fossil fuel companies, on environmental and social grounds. The campaign is focused on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has a $372m (£237m) stake in BP, and the Wellcome Trust, which owns shares worth $191m. The Gates Foundation also has a $1.3m stake in Ecopetrol.
Additional reporting: Iman Amrani and Jane Fellner
For more information on crowd funding Gilberto Torres’s legal action, go to
www.crowdjustice.co.uk; for more information about BP corporate responsibility policies go to
www.bp.com
