Featured image: Inside the United U’wa Resguardo on the cloud forests along the Colombia-Venezuela border. Photo: Jake Ling
This is the final installment of “The Guardians of Mother Earth,” Intercontinental Cry’s four-part series examining the Indigenous U’wa struggle for peace in Colombia.
The vast wetland savanna called Los Llanos stretches thousands of miles into Venezuela but it begins on the U’wa’s traditional territory at the base of the foothills below the cloud forests and paramos surrounding the sacred mountain Zizuma. For the last few years the worst fears of local environmentalists fighting on this forgotten frontline of climate change have come true: excessive exploitation of (though maybe that’s redundant since the categories already give a way to find stories about indigenous issuespetroleum in the Casanare region on the eastern border of the U’wa resguardo helped cause the desertification of large tracts of land in the swamps and grasslands across the province. An estimated 20,000 animals have died of thirst as traditional water holes evaporated and cracked under the strain of complete ecosystem collapse. Now, the only sign of life in places that once teemed with native species such as capybaras, deer, foxes, fish, turtles and reptiles, is the occasional vulture.
As Highway 66 snakes around the base of the mountain range, it passes several fortified military outposts guarding bridges and monitoring the flow of traffic towards Cubará in the Boyacá Frontier District. These bridges that once conquered the massive flows streaming down from the paramos above the clouds in the west now overlook small streams of water between riverbed boulders as Colombia plunges into a severe drought.
One of the many rivers that flow from the mountains in U’wa territory that are now almost dry as Colombia plunges into a severe drought. Photo: Jake Ling
Seventeen years ago, in the final week of April, 1999, an international event was organized known as U’wa Solidarity Week. It was the early days of climate change awareness when the world was just beginning to understand Global Warming and its potentially devastating effects on the planet. The international campaign against the oil multinational Occidental Petroleum had hit critical-mass after the kidnapping and assassination of Terry Freitas, the 24 year old co-founder of the U’wa Defense Working Group, and the two renowned native american activists Lahe’enda’e Gay and Ingrid Washinawatok, by FARC guerillas in eastern Colombia. Protests against Occidental Petroleum in support of the U’wa were being held in eight cities across the United States as well as in London, Hamburg, Lima and Nairobi. Meanwhile, in the background, the burgeoning power of a very young cyber-network called the Internet had created a space for the remote U’wa nation, heralding a new age of activism that facilitated vital connections between grassroots indigenous movements and environmental activists abroad.
Berito traveled to Los Angeles with another U’wa leader, Mr. Nuniwa, where the two men were received by organizations such as Rainforest Action Network, Project Underground, Amazon Watch and half a dozen other groups that planned to converge on Occidental Petroleum’s Annual Shareholder Meeting on friday, April 30th, 17 years ago.
At a dinner before the shareholder meeting the two U’wa leaders held hands to say grace with the two-dozen American activists around a feast of primarily vegan salads and vegetarian stews for the activists and dishes of meat for the chiefs. With the assassination of the American activists still painfully fresh in the minds of the the protest movement, the U’wa leaders proclaimed that after his death Terry Freitas had visited the dreams of the Werjayá, the shamanic healers of the U’wa in charge of communicating with the superior powers that flow through nature. In the dream Freitas was clutching a white snail shell, a symbol of spiritual purity and peacemaking, and the Werjayá declared the apparition of a god. The two U’wa leaders Berito and Nuniwa invoked their ancestors at the dinner table and summoned the spirit of Terence Freitas.
The following Wednesday, halfway through U’wa Solidarity Week, about 200 or so people marched from the University of California, where Freitas had studied, to Occidental’s headquarters a mile away. Many of the protestors were led away by the police.
“Why don’t they just finish us off for good, so we don’t have to struggle?” Berito told the Wall Street Journal, while his colleague Mr. Nuniwa expressed surprise that their march lasted as long as it did, considering the extremely aggressive tendencies of Colombia’s riot police.
The movement placed an advertisement in the New York Times — endorsed by Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Earth, Oilwatch, Oxfam-America, Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, the Center for International Environmental Law and others — warning Occidental shareholders of the political and environmental risks of the mining project: “U’wa territory will not be spared the oil wars raging in the nearby Arauca area, where a violent attack on Oxy’s pipeline occurs every eight days. Meanwhile, those familiar with U’wa culture warn that their suicide pact must be taken seriously. U’wa oral histories recount an event four hundred years ago, when an U’wa band leaped from a cliff rather than submit to the Conquistadors.”
As protestors picketed the building hosting the shareholder meeting, inside Occidental’s chairman and CEO Ray Irani, seethed as the U’wa leader Berito lectured him for 45 minutes. Berito sang a sacred song in the U’wa tongue which he told protestors the previous night at dinner would be about “Mother Ocean and her breath, the wind, which sweeps up our words to the gods.” The 1,000 or so shareholders in attendance applauded the U’wa leader. Chairman Irani’s response was to declare: “The fact of the matter is your problems should be discussed with the Colombian government, not here… It doesn’t matter what Occidental does or doesn’t do.”
U’wa leader Berito Cobaria battles Oxy CEO Ray Irani at the oil multinationals Annual Shareholder Meeting 17 years ago. Drawing by Bolivian artist Pablo Ruiz
The Sinsinawa Dominican nuns, who held 100 Oxy shares, proposed that the oil multinational hire an independent firm to analyze the potential impact on the company’s stock if the U’wa people’s pledge to commit mass-suicide was fullfilled. The proposal, which Terry Freitas had helped draft, went on to win approval from 13 percent of Oxy shareholders, totaling over 40,000,000 shares, exceeding the expectations of the activists and forcing those opposed to consider the consequences.
After the meeting, Chairman Irani and the other directors made a stealthy exit out a side door where their limousines waited on the opposite side of the building to the protestors. Irani told the Wall Street Journal, “The U’wa use these activists very effectively.” Meanwhile Oxy Vice President Lawrence Meriage complained that the campaign was a concoction of certain activists up in the Bay Area and suggested the U’wa were being manipulated by U.S. environmentalists dead set against oil exploration, as well as the Colombian guerrillas that his company helped finance since the 1980’s. “We feel as a company that we’re caught in the middle,” said Mr. Meriage.
“We demand an announcement by Occidental that it is canceling its project on our ancestral land,” said Berito, “There is nothing else left for the company to do.”
As outrage over Occidental Petroleum’s behaviour in Colombia continued to grow, the oil multinational pushed ahead with their plans to exploit the petroleum block on U’wa territory. The next year, in February 2000, several hundred indigenous people and thousands of Colombians mobilized to block roads and prevent heavy machinery from arriving at the drilling site. The demonstration ended in tragedy as Colombian security forces violently dispersed the protestors with beatings and tear-gas leading to the tragic death of three U’wa children who drowned in the river while trying to flee government troops.
Occidental Petroleum pulled out of petroleum block on U’wa territory in May 2002, 10 years after the U’wa first threatened to commit mass suicide in protest. That same month, as senior members of the U.S. government publicly rallied against the FARC for the “terrorist murder” of Freitas, Gay and Washinawatok, President George H.W. Bush proposed $98 million in military aid to the Colombian government to protect Occidental Petroleum’s Caño-Limon-Covenas oil pipeline.
“We are dismayed to see the Administration’s cynical and exploitative use of Terence’s murder to justify further U.S. military aid to the Colombian armed forces,” friends and family of Freitas stated in response to the President’s proposal. “Employing Terence’s death as a means to continue perpetuating violence in Colombia grossly contradicts everything Terence believed in.”
“This isn’t about corporate welfare, it’s not about protecting Oxy,” a State Department official said. “It’s a security argument, not a U.S. economic interests argument.” The $4 million dollars that Occidental spent lobbying the U.S. government, however, certainly paid off for the company.
As the U’wa struggle slowly faded from the consciousness of the international community, the oil wars in eastern Colombia continued to escalate with the $98 million injection of U.S. military aid. Despite the U.S. State Department designating the AUC – the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia – as a terrorist group in 2001, these paramilitary death squads formed the vanguard of the Colombian Army’s surge into the ELN stronghold of Arauca province, along the Caño-Limon-Covenas pipeline.
The Colombian army, meanwhile, received additional funds totaling billions of dollars coinciding with the kidnapping and execution of thousands of Colombian civilians, whose bodies were then dressed up in guerrilla uniforms to artificially inflate body counts, a crime known as the “scandal of false positive.” Between 2000 and 2010 the Colombian military kidnapped and executed 164 civilians in Arauca, 122 in Boyaca, 301 in Norte de Santander, 209 in Casanare, the four provinces bordering the U’wa Nation’s territory.
Occidental Petroleum’s direct financial and logistical support to the Colombian military included a specialized meeting room inside the Oxy-fortified compound for the 18th Brigade that operates in Arauca and the Boyacá Fronteir District of Cubara with the mandate of protecting the Cano-Limon-Covenas. Commander César Oswaldo Morales of the military’s 18th Brigade was imprisoned in 2012 for kidnapping and executing civilians years earlier in northern Colombia.
In an effort to deescalate the war, an agreement between the government and right-wing paramilitaries saw the AUC begin to lay down arms in 2003. The demobilization, which is widely viewed as a failure, led to the rise of neo-paramilitary groups called BACRIM that continue to threaten and target the civilian population and indigenous people who protest the contamination of their lands and waters by oil operations in the region.
In 2006, the BACRIM inflicted a reign of terror in the Catacumbo region of Norte de Santander, displacing 8,000 civilians over a few months to the north of the U’wa resguardo’s border. It was the same year that Colombia’s Interior Ministry cleared the way for state-run Ecopetrol to begin new explorations in the U’wa territory on behalf of the Spanish oil giant RepSol, as well as on another site inside U’wa territory to the west of the Gibraltar drilling site.
There is not a pipeline on the planet that has been bombed as many times as the Caño-Limo-Covenas. It is an engineering marvel that reaches deep beneath the war-torn province of Arauca and stretches 780 kms (480 miles) across the country to the Caribbean and the effluent discharged into the rivers and lakes that surround the oil well make them no longer fit for human consumption. The several hundred bombings that have ruptured the length and breadth of the pipeline have also polluted 1,625 miles of rivers with thick cancerous crude, leaving a devastating legacy for the local indigenous and rural populations.
The major river in the region, the Arauca that separates Colombia and Venezuela, is experiencing reduced flows due to the drought and many of its tributaries drying up. It has also been affected by oil spills after bombings of the Caño-limon-covenas. Photo: Jake Ling
This particular environmental disaster is a symptom of a larger problem in Colombia with roots that reach deeper into a much darker cause. Across the country indigenous men, women and children from tribal nations both large and small are being murdered and displaced to make way for mega-mining projects. In the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Kankuamo Indigenous Peoples were the victim of twin arson attacks on separate religious temples two days after they canceled consultations with the government to oppose 400 mining projects in the region that will affect 100,000 indigenous people. In the northern state of La Guajira, the multinational el Cerrajon mine is diverting 17 million liters of river water daily during a severe drought that has decimated rural people’s livestock and responsible for indigenous Wayuu children dying of thirst.
For the Wounaan Peoples on the pacific coast, 63 families have been displaced in the past year as petroleum exploration takes place on their ancestral lands. “We know that the peace process will open the way for megaprojects that bring international investments into our territory,” said one member of the Wounaan, “therefore we know that true peace will not come. For Indigenous Peoples the violence will not end with the peace process.”
The ability of the Colombian government to hold multinationals to account for crimes against the civilian population, Indigenous Peoples and the environment is limited while the country attempts to rebuild its crippled economy and frail state institutions after half a century of war. Despite this, predatory multinationals are currently suing the Colombian government for billions of dollars whenever it attempts to protect the environment: such as the $16.5 billion lawsuit that U.S. Tobie Mining and Energy launched against the government when it declared an area in the Amazon rainforest a National Park, where the U.S. company owns a mining concession; or the lawsuits launched by multinationals protesting the new law banning mining in the country’s paramos.
Seventeen years after her murder, Washinawatok’s words in her essay “On Working Towards Peace” now seem increasingly prophetic: “The roots of war and violence go deep, into the Earth herself. As an indigenous woman, I wish to simply state that until we make peace with Earth, there will be no peace in the human community.”
Written on the side of an U’wa school are the words: “nature is wise and as much as man tries he cannot overcome her.” Photo: Jake Ling
“In the late 90’s the U’wa struggle against Occidental Petroleum resonated with progressive social movements that were fighting corporate domination, the multilateral financial institutions like the World Bank and free trade agreements like NAFTA,” said Andrew Miller, Director of Advocacy at Amazon Watch. “The core U’wa messages have not changed, and once again we see synergies within the global conversations about climate change and the growing movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground.”
It was the multiple bomb attacks on the Caño-Limon-Covenas inside U’wa territory in March and April 2014, which not only showcased the indigenous nation’s vulnerability but also its strength. The subsequent 40-day protest in which petroleum engineers were prevented from accessing the bomb-site to fix the ruptured pipe cost the Colombian government $130 million dollars. The concessions that the state proceeded to make to the U’wa in exchange for stopping the protest included the dismantling of the gas exploration project in Magallanes; other points in the agreement have since been ignored.
A year later, the pipeline was bombed again on U’wa territory, contaminating the Cubogón and Arauca rivers and creating an environmental emergency that left the entire state of Arauca downstream without water. The Colombian government had still not fulfilled its side of the deal leading 40 organizations to sign an open letter to President Santos reminding him of the agreement.
At the end of March, 2016, two weeks after another twin-bomb attack on the Caño-Limon-Covenas, and only days after the U’wa mobilization surrounding the Cocuy National Park received the threatening photograph of the armed-sheep, Amazon Watch issued its highest red-alert to warn its network of concerned global citizens of the dangers facing the protestors. The International Urgent Action has so far received 5,000 signatures from people around the world supporting the U’wa’s demand of a direct dialogue with Colombia’s former Minister of Environment.
The requests were ignored; however, just two weeks ago, on April 25th, President Santos replaced the minister with Luis Gilberto Murillo, the former Governor of Choco province, who is himself a victim of the war after being kidnapped by paramilitaries. The new Minister for Environment is now presented with the opportunity to mend relations with the U’wa Peoples by handing over the administration of the Cocuy National Park, an act that would protect its precious ecosystems while providing a source of income to the communities via sustainable and responsible tourism. The government’s obligations under Colombian law, however, do not end there. The U’wa still urgently need access to better health-care facilities and clean drinking water to prevent the spread of tuberculosis and dysentery — two basic human rights that the international community can pressure President Santos to fulfill.
As the U’wa leader Berito recovers from tuberculosis in his wooden shack in the cloud forests on the eastern border of the United U’wa Resguardo, he is content at having officially changed his name late last year. The indigenous leader passed IC an original copy of his signed and stamped identification papers, issued to him a year earlier when he traveled to Bogotá to change his name from Roberto Cobaria, the name arbitrarily placed on him by Catholic missionaries. Now, the Colombian government must recognize him by the same name his people call him – Berito KuwarU’wa KuwarU’wa – the wise and powerful Werjayá whose life work has been to guide the people who know how to think and speak through the most violent and longest running armed conflict on the South American continent.
In the coming weeks or months when the FARC and Colombian government are expected to finalize a historic peace agreement, the war will not be over for the U’wa people. The Paramilitaries eventually dispersed, more BACRIM may be imprisoned, most of the FARC will probably demobilize, the ELN may lay down arms, the state military might be disciplined with court-martials, but the Colombian government will never give up its relentless thirst for the sacred blood of Mother Earth underneath the ancestral lands of the U’wa. Once again the U’wa are cornered on all sides with their backs against a cliff, but the question remains if the indigenous group will jump or if they will be pushed.
Berito discussing the threat of oil drilling at Amazon Watch’s 2010 Annual Luncheon. Photo: Amazon Watch
“The U’wa people are reaching out at a national and international level to ask for the unconditional assistance to our struggle that dates back many years,” Berito announced in 2014, before he became sick. “We refuse to be silent and we are going to mobilize ourselves and once again engage in protest actions against the extraction of oil which will damage our Mother Earth.”
Jake Ling is the founder of www.ecuadorecovolunteer.org and has worked with indigenous communities for several years on conservation projects in the Andes and Amazon. He writes for Colombia Reports and IC and he tweets at @chekhovdispatch
This is the third installment of “The Guardians of Mother Earth,” an exclusive four-part series by Intercontinental Cry examining the Indigenous U’wa struggle for peace in Colombia.
Featured image: U’wa children are now taught their native language in the resguardo’s bilingual schools, as well as lessons in Natural Law: how to protect, care and safeguard Mother Earth. Photo: Jake Ling
In the cloud forests on the eastern cordillera of the Colombian Andes there is no internet, and phone reception is limited to a few lookouts on the craggy cliffs above the tree line. As news from the U’wa mobilization in the paramos surrounding the sacred Mount Zizuma filter down to the base of the mountain range in the Boyacá Frontier District on the Venezuelan border, Berito rests in his wooden shack recovering from tuberculosis. As he slowly convalesces, the indigenous leader has time to reflect on the struggle that has defined much of his life and can take pride in this next generation of pacifist U’wa warriors who have taken up the fight to save Mother Earth in his absence.
“When we start to educate, we need to educate two worlds,” Berito told IC. “One is of the west through its books, then there is the harmonious civilization of the spiritual, our own culture, which teaches peace with the environment and the house of nature.”
Education has been a key strategy to the U’wa leadership to ensure the tribe’s survival into the 21st century. Berito learned the importance of educating U’wa children about Natural Law, which predates and takes precedent over the laws of men, as the result of a childhood trauma: as a young boy, he was kidnapped by Catholic missionaries and forced to live in a convent until, after several years, his mother rescued him. The missionaries named him Roberto Cobaria, after the Cobaria river that ran past the mission. This arbitrary name followed him for most of his life as it was the name officially recognized by the Colombian government.
The 450 meter bridge that crosses the Cobaria River is what separates Berito’s house on the eastern border of the resguardo and the now reformed Catholic mission that once held him against his will. Photo: Jake Ling
The massive wooden convent that held the young Berito had enough rooms to house priests, nuns, cooks, cleaners, and at least 80 other abducted U’wa children. Today, however, this place that once perpetuated the cultural genocide of the U’wa has been transformed into a school that teaches their native language inside its classrooms with murals depicting their ancient mythology decorated along the walls. In the playground the unruly grass and patches of moss and lichens cover the cracked base of a neglected statue of the Virgin Mary, but the intergenerational scars left by the missionaries are evident in the survivors and their families.
“They took my mother when she was 6 or 7 years old and kept her there for about 16 years,” Luis Eduardo Caballero, the Fiscal (legal representative) of the U’wa Peoples, told IC. According to Caballero, the Catholic Church invaded from opposite ends of U’wa territory in the late 1940’s via the Andean plateaus of Boyacá as well as the lowlands beside the Cobaria and Arauca rivers. A rival evangelical organization called the Summer Institute of Linguistics, located a short drive outside of U’wa territory, was also involved in the systematic kidnapping of indigenous children.
“They prohibited our rituals, our fasts, our celebrations called the dance,” said Caballero, adding that the missionaries lured the children away under the guise of providing free education. Those inside the convent who spoke their native language were punished. “They weren’t able to make my mother stop speaking U’wa, but many others, yes.”
The Catholic mission that once perpetuated the cultural genocide of the U’wa has been transformed into a school that teaches the U’wa native language. Photo: Jake Ling
Murals depicting their ancient mythology are now decorated along the walls of the reformed Catholic mission. Photo: Jake Ling
As Berito grew to adulthood, he served as the governor of the U’wa and became a spiritual authority or Werjayá in the U’wa tongue, a shamanic healer in charge of communicating with the superior powers that inhabit nature: the rivers, the plants, the sun, and the stars. His childhood experience in the convent galvanized him to take the fight for his people’s rights outside the isolated cloud forests to the capital Bogotá and then beyond Colombia’s borders. It was only until December of last year, that Berito traveled to a judicial office in the capital to officially change his name from Roberto Cobaria, that which was placed on him by the Catholics, to Berito KuwarU’wa KuwarU’wa, the name used by his people.
The leaders significance as an influential elder statesmen for Colombia’s Indigenous Peoples has not gone unremarked. “Berito taught Colombia’s indigenous people and the world the importance of the globalization of resistance, how to defend the beloved Earth and how to fight against climate change.” said Luis Fernando Arias, the Chief Councilor of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC).
“Internationally, Berito is the most well-recognized face of the U’wa struggle.” said Andrew Miller, who accompanied the U’wa leader with Amazon Watch to meet Avatar director James Cameron in his Los Angeles living room. “Especially in the late 1990’s, Berito was a global ambassador of the U’wa’s beautifully poetic cosmology that captured many people’s imaginations. He struck up a bond with Terry Freitas, the young activist who helped galvanize the international movement in support of the U’wa, as well as people like Atossa Soltani, Amazon Watch’s founder.”
Terence Freitas was the co-creator and coordinator of the U’wa Defense Working Group that was essential in drumming up international support for the U’wa. The young activist transformed his bedroom at his mother’s house into the de-facto HQ for the U’wa’s international campaign against Occidental Petroleum in the late 1990’s. Even his mother was unaware of the extent of her son’s involvement until one morning she found Berito, the leader of 7,000 indigenous people from the isolated paramos and cloud forests of eastern Colombia, sleeping on the living room floor of her suburban Los Angeles home.
“I noticed that he immediately bonded with Roberto, there was a link between them,” said Francois Mazure from the EarthWays Foundation that hosted Berito during his visit to Los Angeles. “Roberto was the father and Terry was the son.”
In 1997, after meeting with the directors of Occidental Petroleum in Los Angeles, Berito was kidnapped on his return to Colombia by gunmen who tried to force him to sign a drilling agreement. He refused and they beat him. In 1998, Freitas accompanied Berito to Al Gore’s office to meet the environmentalist vice president after the U’wa leader was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize. Unfortunately Al Gore, whose father sat on the board of Occidental Petroleum and owned a small fortune in the company’s shares, never pressured Oxy publicly.
A year later Berito invited Freitas and two native American activists, Lahe’enda’e Gay and Ingrid Washinawatok, to help set up schools to protect the U’wa language and culture and defend their way of life from the oil industry. Washinawatok was a world-renowned 41-year-old indigenous activist known as Flying Eagle Woman of the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin and a rising leader in the struggle for indigenous rights. She also directed the Fund for the Four Directions, which promoted the revitalization of indigenous languages and cultures. Lahe’ena’e Gay was a 39-year-old member of Hawaii’s Kanaka Maoli Nation, as well as the founder and director of the Pacific Cultural Conservancy International, which works to preserve cultural and biological diversity.
Freitas knew the risks. On a trip to U’wa territory a year earlier he reported being observed and followed on various occasions by individuals he believed were paramilitaries. During that same trip he was stopped by the Colombian military and forced to sign a declaration that absolved the army of any responsibility for his security. He interpreted the act as a threat. The shared vision of Berito, Freitas, Gay and Washinawatok to develop schools to teach the next generation of U’wa children a non-colonial curriculum; alongside lessons on Natural Law, which was set down by the divine spirit Sira entrusting the U’wa with the guardianship of Mother Earth, outweighed the risks.
As Berito guided the three activists on their way to the airport to leave Colombia, they were kidnapped by masked gunmen. While the U’wa leader was immediately released, the bodies of the activists were found a week later bound and blindfolded with multiple gunshot wounds in a Venezuelan cow field over the Arauca river.
Because the FARC was then in preliminary peace talks in the late 1990’s, presaging more recent events, the guerrilla group appeared to have little to gain and much to lose from the kidnapping and executions. Indeed, the FARC high command was quick to deny complicity, in order to protect those fragile peace talks.
The armed men at the road block where the group were kidnapped also did not fit the profile of the local FARC – they were allegedly much younger, not dressed in fatigues, and had their faces covered – leading some to wonder if they were a rogue group opposed to the peace accords. The stretch of highway through Arauca province where the group had been traveling was dominated by the paramilitaries, who at the time had been waging a campaign of extermination against trade union leaders, human rights activists and suspected guerrilla collaborators. Eventually, however, a rebel commander from the guerrillas acknowledged: “Commander Gildardo of the FARC’s 10th Front found that strangers had entered the U’wa Indian region and did not have authorization from the guerrillas. He improvised an investigation, captured and executed them without consulting his superiors.”
Washinawatok’s Menominee Nation and various other U.S. indigenous rights groups accused the U.S. State Department of destabilizing their own negotiations with the FARC for the release of the activists, which they had believed would be imminent. During the failed peace talks of the 1990’s, the US State Department had released $230 million in military aid to the Colombian army, and fighting in the north between the army and their right wing paramilitary allies against the FARC had left 70 people dead on both sides.
Meanwhile, Occidental Petroleum wasn’t just spending millions to lobby the U.S. government to increase military aid to Colombia – it was providing direct financial and logistical support to the Colombian military. The oil giant was also funding private security firms like Air-Scan, which carried out the cluster-bombing massacre of Santo Domingo on Occidental’s behalf, as well as the paramilitary death squads involved in kidnapping, torture, extrajudicial killings and massacres of civilians across the region.
Most surprisingly, however, was the U.S. multinationals’ links with Colombia’s marxist guerrillas, confirmed when Oxy Vice-President Lawrence Meriage gave testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000. He admitted that Occidental employees regularly made payments to members of the FARC and ELN. Meriage’s acknowledgement of Oxy’s work relationship with the guerillas came three years after the ELN and FARC were declared “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” in 1997, making it a crime to provide material support to these groups.
Meriage’s testimony was also consistent with the actions and admissions by long-time Occidental leader Armand Hammer, who reports in his biography how Occidental’s Latin American security chief, former FBI employee James Sutton, was fired when he spoke out against the company’s payments to the ELN. “We are giving jobs to the guerrillas…” Hammer told the Wall Street Journal in 1985 “…and they in turn protect us from other guerrillas.”
An investigation by the LA Times found that Occidental Petroleum was funneling millions of dollars to the ELN guerillas as well as jobs and food for their members. “The rebels used the money to gain new recruits and weaponry,” the LA times stated, claiming the ELN were on the verge of being wiped out by the Colombian military in the early 80’s before receiving Oxy’s financial backing. “In effect, Occidental rescued the group that later turned against it.”
After his passing, Freita’s former girlfriend lashed out at Oxy in a letter to Vice President Al Gore, referring to the company’s friendly links with the guerrillas. Berito later testified to Amnesty International and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to complain about the incident that took the life of three of the U’wa People’s greatest friends and allies. An article in the LA Weeklyeulogizing the young activist after his death stated: “In May 1997, Freitas met the man who would change the course of his life: U’wa leader Roberto Cobaria.” Terry Freitas was 24 years old when he was executed.
The international campaign against Occidental Petroleum soon hit critical-mass. With many still reeling over the death of the three activists, protests against the oil giant were launched in London, Hamburg, Lima, Nairobi and several cities across the United States. The U’wa leader Berito Cobaria once again traveled from the cloud forests of eastern Colombia to the west coast of California where he planned to challenge Oxy CEO Ray Irani at the company’s annual shareholder meeting. Meanwhile as Occidental Petroleum funded all sides of Colombia’s brutal civil war, the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars of crude oil to the Caribbean coast continued.
The Rama people have lived on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua for thousands of years, long before the existence of the nation state. Nicaragua’s Law 445 recognizes indigenous ownership of traditional lands and natural resources; but for decades, settlers from the Pacific have taken vast amounts of Rama territory causing massive deforestation and threatening the Rama way of life.
In 2013 the Nicaraguan government passed Law 840 allowing the Chinese investment firm Hong Kong Nicaragua Development to construct an interoceanic canal without any public consultation or debate. Though the government hails the project as the means to lift the nation out of poverty, hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans would be forced from their land and the environmental impact could devastate the country’s rich ecosystem of lakes, rivers, and forests. Almost half of the 160 mile canal would cut through the Southern Atlantic Autonomous Region which is home to the Rama.
In 2014 it was announced that the proposed canal route would cut directly through the Rama village of Bangkukuk, removing the community from their land and way of life. Since then, government officials have been pressuring community members to sign land concessions without legal consultation. In response, community leaders and local officials have partnered with indigenous rights groups to combat this land grab by bringing their case to the Inter-American Court.
The film Bangkukuk is a collaboration between Art of Solidarity and village leaders aimed at sharing their story with the international community. This short trailer is just a glimpse into an upcoming feature-length documentary film that will give voice to the many communities, organizations, and activists at the front lines of the indigenous rights and anti-canal movements in Nicaragua.
SUPPORT THE MAKING OF THIS IMPORTANT FILM AT KICKSTARTER.COM
I want to tell you three stories of winning and losing, of selfishness and sacrifice, of this culture.
Story one. Last spring I gave a talk in a small farming community in northwestern Illinois. I drove there from my previous talk in Wisconsin, passing through prime agricultural territory, which is to say cleared and plowed and empty cornfield after cleared and plowed and empty cornfield. When I got to my destination, a delightful retired teacher took me to see the last remaining unplowed prairie in the county. It was more or less downtown, between a busy street and yet another field devoted to agriculture. As he led me across the slender tract, I couldn’t stop weeping at the sight of flowers who were once common and now barely hanging on, butterflies who were once common and now barely hanging on, a mother goose protecting her nest. My (human) host told me that even though this is the last six acres left—just six acres out of 360,000 in the county—the neighboring landowner refuses to stop applying insecticides and herbicides, which of course drift across the fenceline.
That evening, after he introduced me, I took the stage, sat down, and faced a roomful of members of this farming community. I thanked them for their hospitality, told them of my experiences of the previous twenty-four hours, then said, “I think the plow is the most destructive artifact humans have ever created. It destroys every living being on a piece of ground and converts that land to solely human use.”
The members of this farming community looked back at me. One gave a grim smile, then said, “Those plows paid for our houses.”
I nodded, smiled just as grimly, and responded, “That’s precisely the problem, isn’t it?”
Story two begins with me receiving an issue of my alumni magazine from the Colorado School of Mines, which featured an article titled “Hitting Paydirt.” The article tells stories of several “tremendously rewarding” discoveries. There’s a twenty-six-year-old CSM grad who discovered a “virgin deposit” of 2 million ounces of gold. Another grad discovered what became mines in environmentally ravaged Ireland; environmentally ravaged, war-torn, and rape-plagued Somalia; and environmentally ravaged, war-torn, rape-plagued, and slavery- and child-labor-infested Mauritania (the article, of course, only listed the countries, not their misfortunes, many of which are caused or exacerbated by resource extraction). But the story I want to focus on happened in Bolivia, where CSM grad Larry Buchanan, in the employ of a transnational mining corporation (with an address in the Cayman Islands for tax haven purposes, and having since that time gone through bankruptcy and changed its name, emerging as essentially the same company but without the debt), saw what seemed like a promising geological formation. He looked more closely, and found at the center of the deposit a village, complete with ancient stone church.
Buchanan describes it like this: “The silver deposit lay on the surface, mineralized ledges cropped out everywhere around and below a little indigenous village of rock, adobe and grass thatch, called San Cristobal. The cobblestone streets were paved with silver-bearing rock. The rock walls of the houses literally were laced with silver veins. You couldn’t take a step without touching silver. But somehow [sic] it had been overlooked [sic] by everyone [sic].”
He unintentionally answers his own question as to why these indigenous peoples had never put in an open pit mine: “The Quechua culture of southwestern Bolivia is one of multiple gods and spirits, one with a profound respect for the earth in general and curiously [sic], for rocks in particular. They believe rocks are their direct ancestors, living souls that speak, think, feel emotions, and have distinct personalities.”
Buchanan again: “We discovered nearly a half billion tonnes of those silver-plated ancestors of the Quechua. [Yes, he actually said that.] After a year of work, the engineers calculated it contained nearly a billion ounces of silver, enough ore to last seventeen years of intensive mining. The computer models proved it feasible: the profits would be more than enormous and the mine would become a money-machine. [Yes, he actually said that.] It was a company maker, a world-class discovery, a perfect setup.” The only thing in his way was “that poverty-stricken little village right on top of it. If we wanted to make a mine, San Cristobal had to go.”
But the village didn’t go down without a fight—between white people. Buchanan’s wife was against moving the village and forced Buchanan to sleep on the couch, only relenting when Buchanan agreed that they would move to the village for a while to bear witness to the destruction they were causing (or, to use his words, “the opportunities we were offering the people”). This strikes me as a classic example of the conservative/liberal one-two punch of oppression, with the conservative perceiving the oppression as good in itself, while the liberal bears witness to the oppression without doing much of anything to stop it. So Buchanan and his wife watched as people dug up bones from the village’s four-hundred-year-old cemetery to move to their new compound eleven kilometers away. Buchanan joined village elders as they crawled around the cemetery to beg forgiveness for disturbing the dead. He watched as bulldozers leveled the village in just four hours. It was all very difficult for him: “There were times I was literally brought to tears when I would contemplate what the people lost due to my discovery.”
What was once a living village where people resided with their ancestors in the walls, their gods all around them, is now a huge toxic hole in the ground. But it’s all good. Buchanan believes the people now live better lives in the compound; transnational corporations have made 70 billion dollars; and, best of all, Buchanan and his wife wrote a book about it all. “I came to learn life holds so much more of value than just a few billion dollars worth of silver,” he says. Having learned this valuable lesson, Buchanan moved on to other projects, and believes he has just recently discovered another billion-ounce deposit somewhere else.
Story three involves New Zealand tae kwon do athlete Logan Campbell, who funded his dream of reaching the Olympics through being a pimp. He made a lot of money providing women’s bodies for men to use. He even made a video to recruit women into working for him. The advertisement had lots of pretty pictures of women leaping for joy in fields, standing contemplatively on beaches, and sharing warm hugs with happy children. One female voice-over gushed, “When I was a little girl, I used to dream of a life of liberty.” Another asked, “Did you enjoy that? I sure did.” One said, “I’m living the dream.” And another said, “You deserve it.” The ad never did describe precisely what the “it” is that women deserve, but I think most of us would agree that most little girls don’t dream of economically coerced sexual relations with strangers not of their choosing, of years of post-traumatic stress disorder, of broken psyches and broken genitals and broken lives.
The point, really, is that Logan Campbell did get to live his dream. He went to the Olympics on the bodies of women, just like Buchanan’s “tremendously rewarding find” came at the expense of San Cristobal and its deities, and just as plows pay for houses at the expense of everyone else in the biological community. These are all dreams of fame, accomplishment, money, even what we consider necessities, like the way we feed ourselves and the way we financially accumulate. The problem is, all these dreams are someone else’s nightmare.
These stories are not merely what is wrong with this culture, they are the fundamental ethos of this culture: the fulfillment of personal, social, and cultural dreams at the expense of all others. No sane culture would in any way extol any of these stories. So long as these stories are seen as the fulfillment of dreams, where the subjugation of others is not seen as subjugating them but rather as helping them to “live the dream”; so long as this culture considers actions that lead to the destruction of ancient ways of life as “rewarding finds,” where your own murderous behavior is seen as “offering opportunities” for the victims; so long as we find it not only acceptable but right and just to convert the lives of others and the life-support system of the entire planet itself into fodder for us, there is little hope for life on this planet.
Originally published in the January/February 2013 issue of Orion
After having been brutally evicted and forced into government camps between 1997 and 2002, the Bushmen won a historic court victory in 2006 recognizing their right to live on their land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
Since then, however, this right has only been extended to the small number of Bushmen named in court papers. Their children and close relatives are forced to apply for permits just to visit them, or risk seven years in prison, and children born and brought up in the reserve have to apply for a permit when they turn 18. Many fear that once the current generation has passed away, the Bushmen will be shut out of their land forever.
On the subject of the fiftieth anniversary, one Bushman told Survival: “I don’t even know anything about these celebrations. They are doing this so that people will not think they are a bad government. They are celebrating; we are not. We’re still feeling the same way. They’ve been celebrating for the last 49 years.”
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “The Botswana government has viciously persecuted the Bushmen for decades, first with violent evictions and then with a permit system designed to break families apart. If Botswana still wants to be seen as a “shining light” of democracy in Africa, it needs to listen to the Bushmen, uphold its own court’s ruling and end this appallingly unjust restriction on the Bushmen’s right to live on their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari reserve. I hope that this historic year will mark the end of the decades long persecution of the Bushmen.”
This Thursday morning, March 3rd 2016, was stained with blood at the hands of the murderers who took Berta Cáceres’ life. Berta was a Honduran Indigenous leader who has been deeply involved in the protection of Indigenous land rights in Honduras, well known for her activism leading a campaign against the construction of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam in the Gualcarque River, a sacred site for the Lenca people. It was a result of her work that the largest contractor of this dam at the international level, Sinohydro, pulled out of the process.
After many years of organizing in the face of repeated death threats and the assasinations of her colleagues, Cáceres herself was killed at her home in La Esperanza, Intibucá, Honduras. The attackers entered into her home at approximately 1:00 AM Thursday morning, informed Tomas Membreño, member of Commission of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPINH) of which Berta was the Coordinator. Berta, a Lenca leader from Honduras, had spent many months in hiding, after receiving threats to her life over the years for her work accompanying movements that defended her community, in addition to suffering from political persecution, and multiple calls for her arrest. The international community had strongly condemned the threats to her life; Berta’s fight, together with COPINH and her community, was recognized with the highest recognition on an international scale for Environmental defenders with the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize. Berta had applied for and received Precautionary Measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, meaning that the government of Honduras was obligated to provide police protection. However, there was no police detail protecting her on the night of her death, reported The Guardian.
UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Vicky Tauli Corpuz recently met with Berta in Honduras during a country visit. “I condemn this dastardly act and I urge the Honduras authorities to investigate this case and bring the perpetrators to justice. I condole and deeply sympathize with Berta’s family, relatives and community. Such impunity is totally unacceptable and the State has to do something about this,” she commented.
Berta held the role of Coordinator of Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPINH) and as a member of coordinating team of the National Platform of Social and Popular Movements of Honduras (PMSPH). She was a major contributor to Cultural Survival’s campaign work against the Patuca III Dam in La Moskitia in 2011, and had tirelessly documented the extensive human rights abuses experienced by her community and Indigenous Peoples across Honduras in order to bravely denounce these actions at the national and international level via reports to the United Nations. She was also active in leading protests against the 2009 US-backed coup d’etat against former president Manuel Zelaya, who has also condemned her murder: “The assasination of Indigenous leader Berta Cáceres removes all possibility of dialogue and the responsibility lies with current president Juan Hernandez,” said Zelaya in a statement this morning.
During protests against the construction of the Agua Zarca dam, Cáceres demonstrated her strength and courage in stating “Our people come face to face here with dignity, capacity, resistance, intelligence and ancient strength.” Berta leaves behind her four children and husband Salvador Zuñiga, Executive Committee member of the Council of Central American Indigenous Community Radio network.
“When a bright star of hope and power goes out, we grieve deeply because we know our pain and loss is much larger than ourselves and timeless over generations in our struggle. Berta Cáceres devoted her life to her people, to Indigenous people worldwide, and to life itself. Her murder is a criminal act of violence, is senseless, and a deliberate attack on what Berta stood for — the rights of Indigenous Peoples. It should be condemned at every level from the state to the international and the perpetrators brought to justice,” said Suzanne Benally, Executive Director of Cultural Survival
Cultural Survival sends our deepest condolences to her family, colleagues, and the entire Lenca community. Rest in power, Berta.
