Written by Siena Mann
If you’ve followed FORPP for a while, you have likely seen pictures of volunteers and mules covered in mud. This is because the territories of the Peace Community are dispersed throughout the municipality of San José de Apartadó, requiring long days of travel up and down steep mountain paths to reach the rural farms. While traversing the landscape is a challenge, you are rewarded by the majestic views. These days, as we return from the collective farms and head down towards San José de Apartadó, there’s a new addition to the skyline: Puerto Antioquia. From over 40 kilometers away, the under-construction port looms in the distance, measuring 54 meters high, and marring the otherwise verdant planes and natural coastline of Urabá.
Puerto Bahía Colombia, or Puerto Antioquia, is slated to open soon on the southeastern side of the Gulf of Urabá, near the urban center of Turbo. The project has promised to be a hub of dynamic foreign trade and new jobs, marking “a new era of development and prosperity” for the rural population of Urabá. The Puerto Antioquia website boasts of the creation of 1,600 new jobs in construction, 800 jobs for port employees, and 17 thousand jobs in indirect industries. In terms of imports, it will replace the port in Cartagena as the closest to a majority of Colombia’s population, reducing the distance travelled to Bogotá by 350 kilometers. In terms of exports, it touches the heart of Colombia’s agricultural economy, as Urabá is the epicenter of Colombia’s banana production. The port’s opening was anticipated on November 1st, but has been delayed until a future date. Now, the company projects that it will take another year and a half until its functioning at maximum capacity.
Local people in the municipality of Turbo and the surrounding Urabá region have reacted to the project with suspicion, noting the negative externalities for locals in other Colombian port towns and wondering if and how the expanding agricultural industry will benefit communities.
Bananas are Booming
65% of all bananas shipped from Colombia today are grown in Urabá, according to the Asociación de Bananeros de Colombia. And, the port promises to bring even more agricultural production to Urabá. According to the Cámara de Comercio de Urabá, “The potential for agricultural growth is enormous, because of the million hectares usable by agroindustry, only about 100,000 hectares are currently used” (El Colombiano). As such, it is no surprise that banana companies make up a majority of the Port Society (Sociedad Portuaria), as well as the principal investors and partners in the port project. The partners include: Agrícola Santamaría S.A.S., Agrícola El Retiro S.A.S., la Sociedad de Comercialización Internacional Banafrut S.A., C.I. Tropical S.A., and C.I. Unión de Bananeros de Urabá S.A. (Uniban).
While the banana industry brings important revenue and opportunities to the Urabá subregion, it also causes significant harm to the environment. A study by the Universidad Javeriana found that Banana farming has a direct link to the ecotoxicological problems affecting surface water bodies in the Urabá region. The extensive use of agro-chemicals are beginning to compromise the sustainability of water resources in Urabá, generating permanent impacts on rivers such as high pollution and sedimentation, which affect ecosystem dynamics. Finally, the study concluded that the banana companies are not showing sufficient interest in reducing pesticide use, forgoing more environmentally and community-friendly or agroecological alternatives.
(Image credit Mongabay)
At the same time, the banana industry in Colombia has a long history of labor exploitation beginning in the early 1900s. In One Hundred years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez immortalized the story of the massacre of banana workers in the Magdalena region when more than 25,000 UFC plantation workers went on strike to demand dignified working conditions. On December 6, 1928, at the behest of the company, the Colombian army unleashed an attack against the protesters, killing somewhere between 200 and 1,000 workers.
In Urabá specifically, banana companies have been embroiled in scandal. On June 4, 2024 a U.S. federal court in Florida found the multinational fruit company Chiquita Brands International liable for financing a Colombian paramilitary group. The civil case was brought by eight Colombian families whose relatives were killed by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia- AUC), and resulted in Chiquita making payments of $38.3m in damages to the families. This decision was possible due to a prior verdict in 2007 when Chiquita pled guilty to making payments to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, amounting to more than $1.7m to the AUC in the six years from 1997 to 2004 in two regions of Colombia where Chiquita had banana-producing operations: Urabá and Santa Marta.
One year later, on July 23, 2025, a Colombian court, the Juzgado Sexto Penal de Antioquia, ruled in favor of holding Chiquita brand executives accountable for their collaboration with the paramilitary group the AUC. The decision ordered the capture of seven executives of Chiquita Brands, the people responsible for the direct payments to the AUC, which during that time were made to the organization Convivir. While the defense argued that the Convivir, at the time, was a legal organization, the Judge decided it was a matter of due diligence for the company to investigate what was widely known and had been reported by human rights organizations: that the Convivir was functioning as a paramilitary group controlled by the Castaño brothers. This has been widely documented, including by the Truth Commission of Colombia, who found that the Convivir formed the basis of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) from 1997 onwards. The Convivir were the linchpin of the operation, because through them, powerful national and international businessmen could wash their money and “legally” transfer billions of pesos to the AUC.
Just this August, Gloria Cuartas revealed never before published images of the concentration of land by El Retiro, an agricultural company that operated in the 1990s and was a subsidiary of the multinational banana company Chiquita Brands and is listed by the Attorney General’s Office and the Truth Commission as an alleged financier of the AUC, a paramilitary group responsible for massacres, torture, and threats against civilian populations, among other crimes. El Retiro is, reportedly, one of the partners involved in the Puerto Antioquia megaproject.
During the national assembly of the Land Restitution Unit, when these images were revealed, she called for the return of these lands to local communities. Cuartas stated: “These assets must be returned to the communities. But how can assets be returned when you see Puerto Antioquia (the largest commercial port after Buenaventura, which is about to start operating) right in front of you?… It is not enough to return the land. The problem is not development in the territories. The problem is that we have to restore in order to start over, because the economic development model in the departments and municipalities has to be redirected to include the people.”
Here, Cuartas gets at a central concern: the interests of the agricultural industry and the plantation model they pursue do not benefit local communities. The port promises prosperity and development in the Urabá region, but the examples set by other port cities in Colombia paint a different picture.
The Price You Pay for a Port
Puerto Antioquia itself had to overcome a crucial legal battle in order to move forward, including charges from the Consejo Comunitario Puerto Girón that linked the acquisition of the land for the port with paramilitary actors. For those who aren’t familiar, community councils (Consejos Comunitarios) are Afro-Colombian entities that have held legal status since 1993 and are made up of representatives from the black community who administer the territory that the State has recognized as collective property of the community. These councils administer collective lands and ensure conservation and protection of the environment, culture, and land.
It was back in 2001 when the Community Council of Puerto Girón first presented their request to title their ancestral lands in Puerto Girón (Apartadó), Nueva Colonia (Turbo), and Zungo (Carepa). Part of the reason it took so long for the Puerto Girón Community Council to submit its petition is due to systemic violence from paramilitary groups, as is explored in length in this article. VerdadAbierta traces how the Community Council was irregularly treated by the then Colombian Institute of Agrarian Reform (Incora), which, without explanation, delayed their right to access lands, while granting titles in the same region of the petition to banana growers.
Another irregularity includes the 2004 designation of Clímaco Chamorro to handle their request. The assignment of the case to Chamorro, who is proven to have facilitated the mass dispossession of land from peasants in the mid-nineties, and seems to have worked against and slowed down the titling process in the Puerto Girón case. Incora also rejected the community’s petition four times, claiming the application was incomplete in 2006, 2009, 2010, and 2011.
In 2013, the Ministry of the Interior officially recognized the Community Council of Puerto Girón. VerdadAbierta, in their investigative report, found that the collective territory does, in fact, include private plots owned by a significant number of banana growers and businessmen, many of whom face serious allegations of land grabbing and financing paramilitarism.
It is precisely on this contested land, which black communities claim as their own, that Antioquia’s business elites have realized their dream of Puerto Antioquia. In 2018, then head of the National Land Agency (Agencia Nacional de Tierras- ANT), Carolina Galindo, vocalized the concern about how the procedural delays paved the way for the port: “As a result of this alleged delay, the community’s land was affected, benefiting third parties who obtained individual titles and carried out other dispossession maneuvers, thus expanding the banana and cattle frontier in the region and, underlying this, favoring the Puerto Antioquia port project.”
One final concern expressed by the community council is that they were denied their right to prior consultation for the port project. Prior consultation is a fundamental right and a mandatory procedure per Colombian law that should be carried out with ethnic communities whenever decisions are to be made regarding the exploitation of natural resources or the issuance of regulations that affect the ethnic population. However, the community was denied its right to prior consultation by the Directorate of Ethnic Affairs of the Ministry of the Interior in 2015. While the community council challenged this decision twice, they lost.
The town of Turbo, which hosts Puerto Antioquia, is small, with a population of 56,787, 87.3% of whom identify as afro-descendent, afrocolombian or black. And while the business community has promised that the port will bring jobs, development, and prosperity to locals, the track record in other port cities in Colombia paints a different picture.
In Buenaventura, for example, the internationalization of the port in the 90s benefited business interests and elites, while leaving locals to endure displacement, violence, and poverty. It is demonstrated that the international port became a strategic site for illegal armed groups involved in trafficking, and the local population suffered the consequences of their struggle for territorial control. While the World Bank places the Buenaventura port in the top 30 in the world, the majority of the population in Buenaventura suffers, with 82% living in extreme poverty. Buenaventura also faces some of the worst rates of violence in Colombia. So far in 2025, the city has a rate of 33.88 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, double the national rate of 17.0, and the highest in the state of Valle del Cauca.
And, this is not just true in Buenaventura. It is widely recognized that organized crime follows the installation of megaprojects (Hofmann, 2025; Alvear-Galindo et al., 2022; Paley, 2023) due to the combined effects of urbanization, economic growth, capital influx, and industrialization. Basically, megaprojects tend to generate multiple forms of violence: direct, structural, and cultural violence. It remains to be seen how Puerto Antioquia will impact the small town of Turbo and whether similar trends will present themselves in this context.
(Photo credit: Puerto Antioquia)
For now, there are several infrastructure projects that remain to be completed before the port is fully functional, the most important being the construction of a highway between Nueva Colonia and Riogrande. The first large vessels, with dimensions up to seven times larger than those currently arriving in the Gulf, could begin arriving before the end of the year. It will take time for the Urabá region to assess and analyze the effects of the port, from its economic advantages to the impacts on the local population and environment.