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The local communities in Colombia fighting for their land back from an Irish company

Smurfit WestRock, an Irish-based company that is one of the largest paper packaging manufacturers in the world, monopolizes vast tracts of land in Colombia for its monoculture forestry plantations – but indigenous and campesino communities are fighting back.

By Tomás Ó Loingsigh

Since 2021, activists in the Colombian province of Cauca have engaged in a series of land occupations and actions in Cajibío, the centre of Smurfit WestRock’s operations in the area: “We are not going to fight among ourselves, we are going to recover the land from Smurfit.” 

A company headquartered in Clonskeagh in South Dublin is one of the largest manufacturers of cardboard packaging in the world. Smurfit Kappa, which recently completed the acquisition of US cardboard manufacturer WestRock, now dominates the global market for a commodity that though largely invisible, in ubiquitous – the boxes our cereals are packaged in, or the latest delivery, may well have been manufactured by Smurfit. Increases in demand for online shopping during the pandemic and a focus on recycled and recyclable packaging have also contributed to the company’s growth in recent years. The name Smurfit is itself familiar to many Irish people – Michael Smurfit, who inherited the company from his father, was long a central figure in the upper echelons of the Irish business world, and thanks to his philanthropy, his name now graces UCD’s School of Business.

Monoculture Agroforestry in the Global South

However, despite the company’s efforts to affect a green image on their website and other promotional material, not all of their products are made from recycled materials. The company owns or rents vast tracts of land around the world, mostly in the Global South, where monocrop plantations of pine and eucalyptus feed their demand for raw materials. The majority of these plantations are in Colombia, where the company manages approximately 40,000 hectares of forestry. For decades, local indigenous, campesino (smallholder peasant) and afro-Colombian communities have alleged that this monoculture agroforestry industry harms local biodiversity, affects water sources, and contributes to violence and lack of safety for vulnerable members of their communities. Like communities affected by Sitka spruce plantations here, they emphasise that these plantations turn once vibrant ecosystems into green deserts, devoid of life except for the serried rows of trees.

Jacob Rivera Tuberquia of the Coordinador Nacional Agrario (National Agrarian Coordination), a campesino organisation with over twenty thousand members explains to Rundale that Smurfit Kappa’s plantations affect “food sovereignty, affect water, water resources, fauna, flora, in fact, where there are large areas of pine and eucalyptus, there are also many violations of human rights, because this is a refuge or a hideout for the illegal armed groups, for criminal gangs. We have had cases where female comrades have been assaulted when passing through these areas”.

Campesino and Indigenous Resistance

Since 2021, activists in the Colombian province of Cauca have engaged in a series of land occupations and actions in Cajibío, the centre of Smurfit WestRock’s operations in the area. Joining together campesinos and Indigenous Nasa and Misak communities under the umbrella Territorio de Vida Interétnica e Intercultural de Cajibío (Territory of Interethnic and Intercultural Life of Cajibío) they have been engaged in a long running struggle with the company in the heart of their operations and demanding the return of the land to local communities. 

In the three years since the struggle began, however, two activists involved in the campaign have been murdered – Huber Samir Camayo, killed during a confrontation between activists and Colombian special forces at the site of one of the occupations in 2021, and Juvencio Cequera, an Indigenous Kokonuko leader, murdered at a land action in Sotará in 2022. That same year, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights defenders issued a statement denouncing threats to the life of Pedro Tumina Velasco, an Misak community leader central to the movement. 

Rivera tells me that the model of the Territorio de Vida Interétnica e Intercultural is a new one in the Colombian context, where cooperation between different Indigenous groups and campesino communities is rare and relations are more often fraught with tension. He explains how the organization arose: “[The campesinos] recognized that as peasants alone they cannot confront the company. Likewise, the indigenous people also saw that they cannot do it alone. Because in Cajibió, there are conflicts between indigenous people and peasants over land. There is very little land and what land that there is is in the hands of Smurfit. So they said, we are not going to fight among ourselves, we are going to recover the land from Smurfit.” 

A History of Violence and Dispossession

This most recent conflict with Smurfit is hardly new. As far back as 1986 local communities have been opposing the Colombian subsidiaries of Smurfit, and the company’s presence in Colombia has been shadowed by a string of deaths and disappearances of environmental activists, including Sandra Viviana Cuellar, who disappeared in 2011, and Gloria Sofía Zapata, Eder Alexander and Hernando Duque, who were killed in 1998, and who were all outspoken opponents of the multinational’s monocrop agroindustry.

Nor have Smurfit, as figureheads of Irish domestic capital, ignored their position within international capitalism. For years, until the opening of the Irish Embassy in Colombia, the Irish diplomatic service in Colombia and the multinational shared an office in Bogotá. Indeed, the consular email of Ireland’s honorary consul in Colombia was the work email of a Smurfit employee, though all evidence of this has since been scrubbed from the Department of Foreign Affairs website. This close relationship between the Irish state and the multinational corporation casts doubt upon the Irish government’s self-appointed role as a supporter of the Colombian Peace Process, drawing on Ireland’s own protracted road to peace.

Access to Land – A Driver of Conflict

Conflicts over access to land have long been acknowledged as one of the main drivers of Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict that claimed the lives of nearly half a million Colombians. Continued unequal access to land remains one of the biggest threats to the country’s nascent peace process – itself already threatened by the ongoing disappearance and murder of hundreds of former FARC guerillas who had laid down their arms. Academic studies such as that carried out by Colombia’s Universidad Javeriana have pointed to large multinationals such as Smurfit as among the major beneficiaries of the forced displacement of people from their land, when peasants and indigenous communities often sold their land for below its value because of fears of paramilitary violence; at least one court case directly implicates a Smurfit subsidiary in the intimidation and forced displacement of one campesino family from their land. Today, Colombia remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world for land activists – at least 196 land and environmental activists were murdered there in 2023. In this context, the Irish government’s professed support for peace, while continuing to work hand-in-glove with the multinational, rings hollow. 

However, the possibility that the Irish government might challenge the company may be faint. On May 19th of 2021, as allegations of police brutality were circulating amid a wave of protests in Colombia, the Irish Embassy took to Twitter, not to call for restraint, but to express its concern for how the unrest might affect Smurfit Kappa. Police brutality had left 30 civilians dead and over 100 protestors with eye injuries, but the Irish Embassy called for an end to violence and street blockades not on the grounds of human rights, but so that “companies like Smurfit Kappa can start operating normally again.” Rather than share news reports of police violence and human rights abuses, the Embassy elected to share a press release written by the CEO of the Colombian branch of the corporation. The press release was focused on how the protests had affected the operations of the company’s plant in the town of Yumbo. A further tweet read “We are saddened and concerned to see the negative impact that the current situation is having on companies throughout the country, including the Irish company Smurfit Kappa in Yumbo, which has had to suspend operations there for 22 days.”

Speaking to Rundale, Marilen Serna, a peasant leader from Mujeres por la Vida y el Territorio (Women for Life and Land), is skeptical of the Irish government’s promotion of dialogue and coexistence between the multinational, and the communities whose lands it occupies, but has stopped short of supporting what the communities really demand. “They speak about dialogue, but no in-depth solution, such as what we are proposing – which is to give the land to the people.” 

Global Chains of Extractivism

As a major multinational operating in 40 countries with upwards of ten thousand employees, Smurfit Kappa is often touted as one of the major success stories of Irish business. Its monopolisation of land in the Global South, however, far from the eyes of shareholders and from its Clonskeagh offices, reflects the extractive practices of international capital. Communities and land such as those in Cajibío, Colombia are deemed as expendable, “sacrifice zones” which are deemed a free-fire zone for extractive industry. Serna says that “all this struggle, at first sight, seems to be a struggle for three thousand hectares of land, but behind this aspiration for land there is a very deep political struggle and it is against capitalism, against extractivism. It is the continuity of what happened with Spanish colonialism, with English, Portuguese colonialism, here – the eagerness that international and also national capital has to extract the maximum wealth  from the land, from the water, from the minerals, from ancestral cultures.” 

In 2022 Misak leader Pedro Velasco Tumina came to Dublin to confront Smurfit’s shareholders at their annual general meeting, held at an upscale hotel in Donnybrook. This year he returned to Ireland, this time accompanied by Nasa and campesino leaders, including Jacob Rivera and Marilen Serna, who spoke to Irish government figures and to Irish social movements such as tenants union CATU about their struggle. They told their listeners that the Colombian government under left-leaning president Gustavo Petro has expressed a willingness to buy out the company’s lands and return it to local communities, but Smurfit remains resistant.

In the context of an Irish company’s participation in a web of extractive capital stretching from Clonskeagh to the Cauca, the struggle of Colombian Indigenous and campesino activists across ethnic and cultural lines to reclaim the land they and their ancestors have lived on for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years stands out as one of the frontlines of the global struggle against extractive international capitalism. 

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