-25According to the expert witness, the high levels of humidity in the region made it difficult to build highways and roads. Mr. Molano stated that the opening up of the highway increased land values immensely. However, the increase in prices did not benefit the peasants, rather the contrary: the villages grew rapidly and other urban centers were founded. In the 1960s, the United Fruit Company, under its new name, Frutera Sevilla, came to Turbo and, within a few years, the highway between Chigorodó and Turbo became the extremely profitable Eje Bananero [bananaproduction center]. The livestock owners who had acquired land in the 1950s were faced with the alternative of growing bananas or migrating with their cattle to land on the edges of this area. The periphery areas to the north and east of the highway to the sea were converted into “cattle land,” and this led to land conflicts and new displacements. The growth of San Pedro de Urabá, Totumo, Pueblo Bello and Valencia was one of the most evident demographic effects of the period from 1960 to 1990. The expert witness stated that FARC followed the Soviet line, while a new “MarxistLeninist” communist party was guided by the policies of Maoist China. The two political and military tendencies gradually occupied the mountainous country of Abibe, San Jerónimo and Ayapel and were joined by many of the peasants who had been persecuted by law enforcement bodies as a result of their efforts to implement the frustrated agrarian reform. The people’s demands for public services, housing, health care, education and land were supported and, to a certain extent, emboldened by the appearance and consolidation of the FARC and EPL military fronts. Mr. Molano indicated that, in 1965, the Government authorized the Army by decree – later endorsed as a law in 1968 – to arm civilian forces. As the social conflict was increasingly channeled through the guerrilla, the tendency to use the civilian population to support the State’s military operations increased. Since the guerrilla was also supported by the civilian population, the latter became one of the central elements of the confrontation. Subsequently, with the increase in drug-trafficking, the irregular war found an inexhaustible source of logistic resources, which introduced another model: outright paramilitarism, financed by the drug-traffickers and assessed by Israeli intelligence forces. From the Magdalena Medio, this new type of security force came to the regions of Urabá and Alto Sinú with Fidel Castaño. Fidel Castaño became a landowner in the western part of Córdoba, in the municipality of Valencia, where he had his ranch, “Las Tangas.” This cattle-raising region was an area of great strategic importance for the guerrilla, because they collected war taxes from the businessmen and the livestock owners and it constituted a corridor towards the banana-producing center where they had significant trade union and political influence. In Turbo, the activities of Frutera de Sevilla and the trade unions took root. In the 1980s, social and political forces emerged that would ultimately confront each other in the following decade in a fight to the death. The elements that help explain the conflict are: the deplorable working conditions on the banana plantations; the repression of the land invasions in Córdoba and Sucre that resulted in the peasant colonization of Abibe and the invasion of land devoted to large-scale cattle-raising, and the activities of the Frutera; also the election of mayors who threatened to take away the traditional power of the established parties in favor or new forces. The social and political agitation, the declaration of civic and labor strikes, and the military strength attained by the guerrilla (both FARC and ELP) provided the justification, in 1988, for the Government to create the XIth Brigade in Montería, and