A political ally of President Alvaro Uribe is under investigation for allegedly doing business with illegal right-wing militias.
Juan Manuel Campo, a member of the Uribe-allied Conservative Party's executive committee, heads a company that ships 40 tonnes of plantain bananas a week to the US and Europe from land cleared of its rightful owners through intimidation by banned paramilitaries.
The federal prosecutor's office and the attorney general's office, which regulates public servants, opened investigations after residents of the swampy jungle zone just south of Panama complained to human rights organizations.
Officials in both offices told reporters this week that they're trying to determine whether Campo, 30, had benefited economically from ties with the militias.
The revelation comes amid a growing political scandal in which other close Uribe allies have been jailed on charges of creating and bankrolling paramilitary militias, which have committed thousands of murders and perpetrated widescale land theft over the past decade.
Formed to protect property owners from leftist rebels, the private armies degenerated into criminal gangs that developed lucrative, symbiotic relationships with much of Colombia's rural business and political elite.
The "para-politico" scandal broke open last month with the arrest of three members of Congress for allegedly forming paramilitary groups. Now Colombia's Supreme Court is questioning lawmakers -- including the brother of Colombia's foreign minister -- about their alleged paramilitary ties.
To date, no major politician ally of Colombia's president has been proven to have illegally benefited from ties with paramilitaries, which are deeply involved in drug trafficking and listed by Washington as "terrorist organizations."
A former congressional candidate active for nine years in the Conservative Party, Campo has been general manager since 2004 of CI Multifruits SA, which human rights groups say is illegally profiting from land violently usurped from an Afro-Colombian community near the Panamanian border.
Multifruits was founded in 2001, the same year paramilitaries publicly declared themselves lords of the Cacarica river basin where its crops grow.
In preceding years, paramilitary gunmen drove hundreds from the swampy jungle zone, claiming they needed to clear the area to defeat leftist guerrillas. The paramilitaries selectively killed people who resisted, and cemented near-feudal control.
In 1997, Ana Carmen Martinez was forcibly displaced from the Cacarica basin, where the communally owned land is supposed to be constitutionally protected, and has been living in the Caribbean port of Turbo, just outside the paramilitary zone.
She called the claim of a guerrilla presence "a pretext to rob us of our lands" and launch agricultural megaprojects including plantations of bananas and African palms.
Human rights groups allege that Campo and his business associates took commercial advantage of the forced exodus. Prosecutors learned of the allegations in the past few weeks and told reporters they'd launched investigations.
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