On the 12th of December, the paramilitaries started a new offensive against several black communities in the Naya River, in the Pacific coast of Colombia. Reports came that the paramilitaries were entering the rivers of Naya, Yurumangi, etc., and would probably be doing more massacres in the next days. At the moment of writing these lines it is unclear if this offensive has been brought to an end yet.

In this same region, between 100 and 300 people were massacred last April. A couple of weeks later the paramilitaries killed another 25 people in the Yurumagi River. The massacres were announced beforehead by the army. When the killers were surrounded by the guerrilla, they were evacuated by army helicopters. It seems that this time the course of actions is following the same pattern.

According to GAD (Displaced Persons' Support Group) 1.5 million Colombians have been displaced by political violence since 1985.

In 1998, the then head of the U.S. Southern Command, told the Congress that oil discoveries had increased Colombia's "strategic importance". It is common in Colombia that communities settled in those areas of "strategic importance" for hundreds, some times thousands of years, get bullied in the form of massacres or fumigation, until they are displaced from their land, leaving it cleared for oil machinery to drill.

At present oil is Colombia's largest export, with earnings totalling $3.7 billion in 1999 (although most Colombians don't see any of these earnings). Last June Colombia announced its largest oil discovery since the 1980s.

Since 1986, according to Colombian Government sources, the country's guerrilla groups have bombed oil pipelines more than 1000 times. This is a very uncomfortable resistance that certain transnational corporations want to get rid of. And the best way to do this is to displace the entire population that supports them. How? Go on reading.

In 1996, British Petroleum, Amoco and Occidental joined Enron Corporation. Since then the partnership has lobbied for Plan Colombia and for an extension in military aid to the natinon's north to "augment security for oil developments operations".

Plan Colombia is officially a $1.3 billion plan to fight drugs - via fumigation and military assistance. The latter is on its way, while fumigations have intensively started already: over 38,000 hectares have been sprayed this year alone.

Stan Goff, a former U.S. Special Forces intelligence sergeant, retired in 1996 from the unit that trains Colombian anti-narcotics battalions, is quoted in www.americas.org: "We never mentioned the words coca or narco-trafficker in our training. (...) Look where American forces are - Iraq, the Caspian Sea, Colombia - places where we expect to find petroleum reserves." He is also quoted in October by the Bogota daily 'El Expectador': Plan Colombia's purpose is "defending the operations of Occidental, British Petroleum and Texas Petroleum and securing control of future Colombian fields".

Honouring Goff's words, fumigation only takes place where explotation needs securing - not where death squads have done their work already. Thus, regions like Orovar Cordova never get targeted by PC. Orovar Cordova is particularly rich in coca, and has various laboratories dedicated to coca processing. It is controlled by death squads.

Fumigation consists of planes spraying a chemical called Roundup, whose active ingredient is glyphosate, on coca crops. The planes fly so high they ensure surrounding villages, farms and rivers providing drinking water get poisoned too.

And it seems all too obvious that the aim is not 'really' to reduce coca production: In 1999, the General Accounting Office concluded that "despite fumigating 65,938 hectares of Colombian coca in 1998, the total number of hectares of coca under cultivation in Colombia grew from 101,800 to 122,500."

In a study published in 1993 by the USA Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, Californian doctors reported that glyphosate ranked third out of 25 chemicals that caused harm to humans. In 1996 the manufactures Monsanto withdrew claims that Roundup is "safe, non-toxic, harmless, or free from risk".

U.S. congresswoman Jan Schakowsky told 'The Village Voice' in July 2001 about the chemical spraying: "People told of rashes and intestinal problems. There is an increasing number of internally displaced humans. It has destroyed legal crops and livelihood."

The St. Petersburg Times published in its editorial on 29 August 2001: "Children are developing sores on their skins, and adults are stricken with diarrhea from herbicide contamination of their drinking water. Poor farmers complain that their potato and onion crops are dying."

So, rather than eradicate coca production, fumigation seems to be intended to kill peasant population - or at least to displace them.

Most times peasant communities organise in order to stay in their lands. In these cases they face another form of repression: their leaders and representatives receive, in the best of cases, harrasment, and in the worst of cases, torture or/and death.

The last news from Colombia come from the department of La Guajira, where communities are facing relocation as a result of coal strip-mining by Intercor, subsidiary of Exxon, best known in the UK as ESSO. Intercor demolished homes in the village of Tabaco in August 2001, with police and military assistance, to pressure residents to move out. Their lawyer, A.P. Araujo, reported on these demolitions as illegal. When judgement was given in favour of Intercor, Araujo was accussed of filing a false 'denuncia'.

He was detained on 20th December.

The connection of the title, then, has to do with cheap and easy oil for us rich westerners, and quick profits for these huge companies, at the expense of thousands of human beings being detained, displaced, tortured, killed, massaccred.