by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 10, 2016 | Indigenous Autonomy, Obstruction & Occupation
U’wa struggle against tuberculosis, parasitic worms, climate change and the threats of violent paramilitary repression
Featured image: “The U’wa were sent a photo of a sheep in military gear and carrying a rifle, implying that they are associated with the guerrillas. These are very serious accusations, providing a political rationale for violent paramilitary repression against the U’wa.”
—Andrew Miller, Director of Advocacy at Amazon Watch. Photo: unknown
By Jake Ling / Intercontinental Cry
This is the second installment of “The Guardians of Mother Earth,” an exclusive four-part series examining the Indigenous U’wa struggle for peace in Colombia.
Nestled below the snow-capped mountains on the eastern cordillera of the Colombian Andes is the town of Güicán, known internationally to hikers as the gateway to Colombia’s magnificent Cocuy National Park. To the east of the mountain range the impenetrable tropical vegetation provides cover from air strikes for the guerrilla armies along the Venezuelan border. On the western border of U’wa territory the vegetation disappears with the altitude into a vast network of Andean peaks, valleys, and pristine wetland ecosystems called paramos.
It was here late last year during the October 25 municipal elections when the mountains surrounding Güicán became the scene of an ELN ambush resulting in the deaths of one policeman and 11 soldiers from Colombia’s High-Mountain Battalion. The battalion had left the U’wa resguardo at 3am and marched down a narrow mountain trail while carrying 130 votes cast by the remote indigenous communities of Bachira when they stopped to rest only to come under fire from rifles and guerilla rocket-launchers called “tatucos.” The sergeant leading the group communicated back to base that his security detail of 34 soldiers and two policemen charged with protecting delegates from the voting commission as well as an indigenous U’wa guide were under attack when radio contact was lost.
A coordinated air and ground assault was launched by the Colombian military to rescue the survivors and recover the bodies at an altitude of 9,842 ft where the tough mountain terrain makes helicopter access difficult. Two police were found wounded but alive while two soldiers as well as the U’wa guide and the civilians from the voting office remained unaccounted for as the ELN disappeared into the mountains. Vladimir Moreno, an indigenous U’wa leader, told El Tiempo there was no precedent for such violence in the region and that historically the guerillas had never interfered with the votes of local U’wa. “This is a peaceful community,” he said.
“We will request from national and international organizations to demand that the armed actors in the resguardo withdraw,” Moreno told Caracol Radio, “and we also demand from the Ministry of Defence that the Army clears out of the area within the resguardo because this has violated international humanitarian law.”
The incident, which was the most violent confrontation between the ELN and the state military since peace negotiations between the FARC and government started three years ago in Havana, resulted in the consequent militarization of U’wa and rural communities across the western border of the resguardo.
Now, six months later, Güicán is the epicenter for a non-violent U’wa mobilization: for the last few months the indigenous community has blocked the entrances of the Cocuy National Park. “The U’wa Nation is the Guardian of Mother Earth and from now into the future we will not permit tourism into the national park,” Yimy Aguablanca, an indigenous leader from Güicán, told IC on March 21, 2016. He added that tourism is affecting the water and the entire eco-system around the park and that non-indigenous rural people have joined the protest.
An U’wa Indigenous Guard. Photo: Tatiana Vila Torres / Kinorama Copyleft
The scarce facilities like rubbish bins and toilets in the state-run park mean some of the trails are littered with trash and visitors are forced to defecate beside the mountain streams that supply drinking water for surrounding communities. Outrage over the poor administration of the park was further inflamed in February when a charity match of high-altitude soccer was broadcast over YouTube. The match took place on the glacier of the U’wa’s sacred mountain Zizuma, the resting place of their divine beings. Known as Mount Cocuy in Spanish, an estimated 90 percent of Zizuma’s glaciers have disappeared in the last 150 years due to climate change. What little ice there is left is receding at a rate of 25 meters per year.
“Today we cry as our Zizuma is condemned to disappear,” went out the U’wa Communiqué that was broadcast through social media. Yimy Aguablanca said this latest mobilization of the U’wa will not stop until the state hands over administration of the park to the U’wa. So far, their calls for a direct dialog with the Minister of Environment have been ignored. The Constitution of 1999 allotted 220,275 hectares for the U’wa but this is a fraction of their ancestral lands, which once included the Cocuy National Park and areas rich with oil and gas reserves, which were conveniently left out of the agreement by the Colombian government.
In 2015, the U’wa High-Council made up of indigenous leaders from different communities across their territory, approved the creation of the Indigenous Guard. These guardians are responsible for territorial control and defense, and while unarmed, they have a mandate to ensure that no one enters the reserve without authorization, especially technical staff like geologists. The decision to form the Indigenous Guard came in response to an event in May 2014, when the U’wa detained functionaries from the company ENCOMINING who were in the Campo Hermoso region of their territory attempting to take coal samples. The importance of the current mobilization around the Cocuy National Park to not just the U’wa but also non-indigenous rural communities in the region is evident by the fact that rural farmers are now standing side by side with the Indigenous Guard to block all entrances to the park.
“Today when we look at our rights over our territory it is not the same as that of our ancestors,” Berito told IC. “It has been exploited, violated, distributed, but still even now we must always protect the water, the animals, and the forests.”
It was during ‘la Violencia’ — a dark period in Colombian history that began in 1948 — when the borders of the U’wa Nation’s territory were first reduced as thousands of refugees fleeing conflict from other parts of the country settled on the fertile banks of the Arauca. Instead of seeing enemies that needed to be vanquished, the U’wa saw victims worthy of compassion and retreated further into the mountains. Over the next 10 years, 200,000 people were killed as the civil war engulfed the country. La Violencia was eventually resolved by a power-sharing agreement in 1958 that turned Colombia into a dictatorship and consequently set the stage for a Marxist guerrilla insurgency against the central government.
Since 1964, another 260,000 people have been killed in the current incarnation of the Colombian armed conflict, and the war-torn provinces of Arauca, Casanare, Norte de Santander and Boyacá that overlap U’wa territory have become some of the most violent and militarized states in the country. In the north of U’wa territory in Norte de Santander, when word spreads of the Colombian army’s proximity, U’wa men race back from the fields to their families so the women are not alone in their homes.
To the south of the Cocuy National Park in Boyacá province, land that once belonged to the U’wa and is still considered sacred by their people has been violated by turning it into a permanent military base to defend nearby petroleum wells from five divisions of the FARC’s formidable Eastern Block and the heavy concentration of ELN fighters in Arauca and Casanare.
Although U’wa territory falling within the borders of the national park is protected from mining under the constitution, the proximity of these intense large-scale petroleum and gas exploitation projects has greatly affected the region’s fragile and delicately interconnected ecosystems. The Andean paramos that make up much of the terrain in the south and west of U’wa territory as well as the national park absorb water like giant sponges before releasing it into the rivers that nourish all life in the cloud forests on the eastern edge of the cordillera and the vast wetland Savana called Los Llanos that stretches thousands of miles into Venezuela.
An U’wa bi-lingual teacher named Jose Cobaria sharpens his machete in the unusually dry Cobaria river. “The government invests all of its money in guns and war not education and health.” Photo: Jake Ling
These rivers are symbols of spiritual purity in U’wa cosmology, but a severe drought engulfing the region caused by overzealous mining in the Andean paramos, climate change and El Niño has turned these once mighty tributaries flowing through the U’wa ancestral lands into stony creek beds. To make matters worse, the once crystalline waters they carried from the snow-capped peaks and glaciers of the Sierra Cocuy and Güicán have been infected with a parasitic worm that stunts the indigenous children’s growth and swells their bellies, leaving them malnourished and lethargic while depleting their immune systems.
A dose of antibiotics from Cubará hospital can control the worm, but many indigenous families cannot afford the journey down the mountain to the town for a doctor’s prescription. Those that can make the trip to purge their children’s stomachs find out that after drinking one glass of water the worm is back. “We have to defend our health,” Berito told IC, “and this means examining the exploitation and contamination of the water which has cast a shadow over the rivers.”
“U’wa locals say the drinking water didn’t used to make them sick and that the parasitic worm which has recently contaminated the water supply severely affects indigenous children, swelling their stomachs and leaving them malnourished.”
Further up the mountain, 50-year-old Kuiuru Kobeua has worked 8 hours a day for the last 14 days planting seeds on a small plot carved out of the forest to make sure his wife and three children do not go hungry come harvest. Two months ago, when his test for tuberculosis in Cubará hospital turned out negative, he was sent home with a packet of Ibuprofen. Two months later, he has trouble talking between violent coughs and the constant need to clear his phlegm-filled throat and lungs. He can barely afford another trip to Cubará and fears being turned back home again with nothing but another packet of painkillers. Meanwhile, the cough is not going away and he feels increasingly weak.
Until the Colombian government establishes a Tuberculosis Clinic in Cubará, the town’s under-resourced health clinic is unable to properly identify or treat the disease such as in the case of Kuiuru Kobeua, who was sent home from the hospital with nothing but painkillers. Photo: Jake Ling
“To prevent such cases of tuberculosis,” Yimy Aguablanca said, “we need to recognize and tell the world that the actual health policies of this government do not guarantee that our U’wa brothers are protected from the disease.”
On the other side of the U’wa’s ancestral territory the Earth First Journal reports that there are not enough seats for the patients in the tin-roofed off-the-grid medical clinic in Chuscal and that some of the sick are sprawled on the cracked floor tiles. Diseases such as tuberculosis, dysentery and leishmaniasis, a parasite spread by sandflies that attacks people’s internal organs, are rife. “We’re short of everything,” Eusebio Carceres, the head nurse at the isolated healthcare outpost, told Earth First. “Antibiotics, vaccines, lab equipment – we’re even short of clean drinking water because the oil spills have poisoned so many sources around here.”
Although the Colombian government routinely sends mining engineers into and around U’wa territory through state-run petroleum companies, the government’s failure to provide the region with uncontaminated drinking water or medical specialists to heal the community’s sick is striking.
The problems facing the U’wa are compounded by the limited arable land allotted to them in the constitution. It has forced them to change their agricultural practices. In decades past, the U’wa rotated crops to conserve soil quality and left areas to regenerate for up to 12 years before returning to ensure a bountiful harvest. Now the quality of soil is declining along with the quantity of their yields; sufficient food to feed the entire community is becoming increasingly scarce. Given the choice of clearing more of their sacred forests for agriculture or starving, however, the U’wa choose to fast. Amazon Watch neatly summed up the situation: although the U’was are pacifists who are unwilling to kill anyone for their beliefs, they are willing to die for them.
On the western paramos surrounding the sacred Zizuma, Yimy Aguablanca and a hundred other rural and U’wa protesters are standing firm despite the threats sent to the Indigenous Guard. On March 25, they received a cryptic photo of a sheep, grazing below the sacred mountain, dressed in guerilla military fatigues and carrying an assault rifle. The not-so-subtle threat means the U’wa have been categorized as an armed rebel group — and therefore a military target.
“When your protests disrupt an economic activity, you become a target of armed actors who operate on behalf of those interests,” said Andrew Miller, Director of Advocacy at Amazon Watch. He added that local politicians with ties to the tourism industry have been affected economically by the U’wa’s biocultural conservation efforts. Along with the threatening photo, Miller said that rumors are now circulating about the U’wa receiving bribes from the FARC to help them re-establish contraband shipment routes through the national park.
“These are very serious accusations providing a political rationale for a violent paramilitary repression against the U’wa,” Miller told IC. “The notion that the U’wa are associated with an armed group is absurd. They are actually radical pacifists by culture.”
The third installment in this series turns to recent history centered on Berito Cobaria, catholic missionaries and the international movement against Occidental Petroleum. It will be available soon on Intercontinental Cry.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 8, 2016 | Indigenous Autonomy, Obstruction & Occupation, Property & Material Destruction
This is the first installment of “The Guardians of Mother Earth,” a four-part series examining the Indigenous U’wa struggle for peace in Colombia.
On September 23, 2015, in the Palace of Conventions in Havana, Cuba, his excellency Juan Manuel Santos, the President of the Republic of Colombia, and Commander Timoleon Jimenez, Chief of General Staff of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, signed an agreement on transitional justice and reparations to the victims of the country’s 51 year old civil war, resolving one of the final points in the country’s peace negotiations.
“We are adversaries, we come from different sides, but today we move in the same direction,” said President Santos, “this noble direction that all societies can have, is one of peace.”
In a show of unity, the warring parties all wore white-collared shirts without ties, as they sat on opposite sides of the brown mahogany tables encircling an artificially bright-green shrubbery arrangement. Around the room’s perimeter stood a throng of reporters, crowded together behind a red rope line, snapping photos of the historic handshake between the president and the leader of the country’s largest guerrilla army. A prolonged war that has killed more than 260,000 people and victimized and displaced seven million more seemed to be drawing to an end.
Among the victims of the conflict are the Indigenous Peoples of Colombia. Of the 102 tribal nations in existence today more than half are at risk of disappearing – forced displacement and mining on indigenous territory during the armed conflict have contributed heavily to the widespread demise.
A progressive genocide of negligence and privation is also taking place. The Indigenous Peoples of Colombia are routinely denied basic commodities such as antibiotics, vaccines and clean drinking water that residents of big cities take for granted, not because the country’s indigenous have been targeted for extermination, but because they have become politically insignificant.
During the Havana peace accord, the indigenous nations who trace their Colombian heritage back thousands of years, from before the time of the Spanish conquest, were not mentioned once.
Inside a wooden shack in the isolated cloud forests of eastern Colombia, three kilometers west of the Arauca river on the Venezuelan border, Berito Cobaria, the internationally recognized leader and spiritual guide of the indigenous U’wa, points out the shades on the x-ray scan of his chest. It shows the same strain of tuberculosis that is ravaging his people.
Berito X-ray. Photo: Jake Ling
The single-story hospital in Cubará, the nearest town on the river, is poorly equipped and understaffed. Visits from medical specialists are rare because the hospital is located in the “Red Zone” – conflict areas the Colombian government has declared dangerous due to the heavy concentration of guerrilla forces.
“The government needs to establish a tuberculosis clinic in Cubará,” Berito told IC. He confirmed he is slowly overcoming the deadly disease but despairs for his people as the tuberculosis outbreak rapidly spreads throughout the U’wa Nation’s ancestral lands. The U’wa believe there needs to be harmony in the world for there to be harmony in the cosmos, but the balance of nature has been disturbed and a sickness has fallen upon Berito’s people. Infectious western diseases such as influenza, dysentery, tuberculosis, and the common cold continue to wreak havoc on the unaccustomed immune systems of the U’wa, who up until the late 1940’s lived an isolated existence on the forested cliffs and the remote Andean wetlands and cloud forests of eastern Colombia.
Beginning on February 13th, 2016, Colombia’s second largest guerrilla army, the ELN (Army of National Liberation) imposed a 72-hour armed strike inside Red Zones like Cubará and other towns that border U’wa territory. Under the threat of violence, all stores and businesses in Cubará were closed, the roads were empty and lucky members of the Colombian military got three days’ rest in fortified outposts while their colleagues searched for explosives laid along Highway 66. Despite their dominance in the frontier towns along the Venezuelan border, even the ELN needs to gain permission from indigenous authorities like Berito to enter the ancestral lands of the U’wa. Known as the United U’wa Resguardo, the territory is restricted to all outsiders.
A day after the ELN’s armed strike was lifted, U’wa families on their way to Cubará to stock up on supplies of bread, sugar, eggs and tobacco were traveling barefoot or on the backs of pickup trucks past Berito’s home, which stands sentinel on the eastern border of the resguardo. Ten minutes away at the border town, Colombian soldiers had returned from their outposts to patrol the streets. Stores were serving clients, and locals walked openly with white plastic shopping bags, acts that had been banned and punishable by death during the armed strike. The only trace of the armed strike was the ubiquitous graffiti scrawled on buildings around town: “ELN – 51 YEARS OF RESISTANCE”.
Historically, U’wa territory has been of strategic importance to the Marxist guerrillas because it connects the contraband routes from Venezuela over the Arauca river to the central Andes of Boyacá province, a short drive from the capital Bogotá. Unarmed outside of the agricultural tools they use to cultivate staple crops of yucca, plantains and potatoes, the U’wa authorities will reluctantly grant permission to the ELN to pass through the resguardo on the strict condition they do not set up camp inside their territory. In return the ELN respect U’wa sovereignty, will not enter without permission and will not stop until they have traversed the steep and extremely difficult climb out of the cloud forests and cross the western border of the resguardo, below the snow-capped mountains of the Sierra Cocuy and Güicán.
This region, which is rich in lucrative oil and gas reserves, is also of great strategic importance to the United States’ and Colombian governments, multinationals like Houston-based Occidental Petroleum and Spanish oil giant RepSol, as well as the right-wing paramilitary death squads, which have been historically allied with the central government and big business. For the U’wa Peoples, however, oil is the sacred blood of their Mother Earth, and without its blood their mother will die. For more than two decades U’wa have mobilized aggressive non-violent campaigns to assert more control over their ancestral territory in the midst of one of the most troubled regions of the Colombian Civil War, but it was their struggle against Occidental Petroleum (called Oxy for short) that gained international attention in 1997, when Berito declared that his people “would rather die, protecting everything that we hold sacred, than lose everything that makes us U’wa.”
Oil blocks on U’wa territory. Map by Fidel Mingorance / HREV 2014
As Oxy pushed into the U’wa’s ancestral lands, the indigenous nation collectively threatened to commit mass suicide by leaping off a 15,000-foot cliff if drilling on their territory went ahead. This was not a publicity stunt. U’wa tribal lore tells of their people walking off the “Cliffs of Glory” en masse centuries ago rather than submit to the brutal Spanish conquistadors. The U’wa set up a makeshift village beside Occidental Petroleum’s Gibraltar 1 drilling site, and were clubbed, tear-gassed, threatened with rape, evicted, arrested, and harassed by state security forces on behalf of Oxy. A year later in 1998, Berito was given the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for leading the non-violent campaign against Occidental Petroleum – the same year the US multinational was complicit in the cluster-bombing of a countryside agricultural community, killing 18 civilians including 9 children, near the resguardo’s south-eastern border, in order to protect the Caño-Limon-Covenas oil pipeline.
The pipeline, jointly run by state-owned Ecopetrol and US-based Occidental Petroleum, pumps up to 220,000 barrels of crude daily from the war-torn Arauca province through U’wa territory on its way to the Caribbean coast. It was also the beneficiary of $100 million US military aid that was granted to the Colombian army in 2003, after Occidental Petroleum spent $4 million lobbying the US government to protect it. The ELN, and their ideological ally, the FARC, have bombed the pipeline more than a thousand times. The consecutive attacks over decades have spilt millions of barrels of cancerous unprocessed crude into the rivers and forests of the region, exponentially more than that of the Exxon Valdez environmental disaster.
In a separate bombing incident in March 2014, the U’wa refused to permit repairs to the pipeline until the government began dismantling the Magallanes drilling site on the northern border of the U’wa resguardo, which Ecopetrol had set up in secret months earlier. The Wall Street Journal reported the Colombian government lost $130 million during the 40-day U’wa protest, which was resolved by dismantling the new drilling rig. Ecopetrol has not cancelled the mining license, however, and the threat of exploitation remains. The most recent attack on the pipeline was a twin bomb attack by the ELN on March 15th, 2016, a week before the deadline to finalize the preliminary peace agreement that President Santos and Commander Timoleon Jimenez had agreed to six months earlier in Havana.
As the March 23rd deadline came and went without even a symbolic gesture of unity, both the FARC and government blamed each other for stalling. A week later the government saved face by announcing to the press it had entered formal peace talks with the ELN, but the country’s second-largest guerrilla army watered down public optimism by stating negotiations would not stop them from attacking critical government infrastructure, which include mining assets in the region and oil concessions surrounding U’wa territory such as Oil Block Cor 19 and Cor 45 which extend across the west and north-west of the resguardo; the Arauca oil block; and RepSol and Integra Oil drilling rigs on the resguardo’s eastern border. There is also Ecopetrol’s Siriri Oil Block, which along with Caño-Limon-Covenas is located in the north of U’wa territory.
A small fraction of a percent of the money rolling in from this multi-billion dollar mining bonanza would be more than enough to fund schools, provide fully-stocked healthcare facilities and install piping to provide clean drinking water for every indigenous and rural community in the region. In one isolated U’wa school inside the resguardo, four computers generously donated by the Colombian government gather dust because there is no electricity; here many of U’wa children are malnourished with swollen bellies because a non-native parasitic worm has contaminated the water supply. In a tin-roofed shack that serves as a hospital in Chuscal on the other side of the resguardo, the head nurse complains of the difficulty of caring for patients suffering from tuberculosis and dysentery because of a lack of vaccines, antibiotics and even clean drinking water after an oil spill contaminated the river.
Now while the international community is openly discussing buzzwords like “Peace Colombia” and “post-conflict” in anticipation of a historic peace agreement between the FARC and government, the U’wa people are demanding high-level talks with the government to address their various grievances. The government response has thus far been to ignore the U’wa, or to invite an indigenous delegation to Bogotá where low-level bureaucrats with no authority merely shuffle papers and nod their heads. Meanwhile, the tuberculosis outbreak continues to spread across U’wa territory.
The U’wa, who call themselves the people who know how to think and speak, consider themselves the Guardians of Mother Nature, and large tracts of land inside their territory have become biological reserves for jaguars, spectacled bears, as well as a kaleidoscopic array of endemic plant and bird life that do not appear anywhere else on the planet. As an ambassador for his tribe, Berito has traveled the world recruiting the support of activists of all stripes, from the late Terry Freitas, native American activists Ingrid Washinawatok and Lahe’enda’e Gay, to the founder of Amazon Watch Atossa Soltani, and Hollywood celebrities like Avatar director James Cameron.
The indigenous leader knows that the ability of his pacifist tribe of 7,000 people to defend themselves against these extremely powerful economic and political forces is limited. This is especially true while numerous multinationals and armed groups battle for control around and sometimes inside his people’s land hidden from the eyes of the international community beneath the forest canopies. Non-violence, however, needs an audience and once again the U’wa leader is calling upon the world to watch over his people.
“History is its own kind of law,” Berito said. “They say the land is dead, but it lives yet. It is only wounded by the taking of oil. The dignity of native peoples comes from the land – and like the land it can be saved.”
The second installment in this series examines the U’wa struggles against tuberculosis, parasitic worms, climate change and threats of violent paramilitary repression. You can read it here: They say the land is dead, but it lives yet
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Dec 27, 2015 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Mary Cappelli
Featured image: Wounaan Banner, reading:
Humanitarian and biodiverse territory
Community of Union Aguas Claras
Reservation of Wounaan Burujon, La Union San Bernardo
An exclusive area of civilians and peacebuilding and justice
The Wounaan Tribe of Northwestern Colombia’s San Juan River is the latest casualty of a violent 25 year reign of terror hastened by the convergence of coca growers, gold miners, paramilitaries, guerillas, and government troops—all vying for control of the waterways and resources along the ancestral stretch of traditional Wounaan territories. Until the arrival of mono-crop production for export, Wounaan’s steadfast strategies have thwarted the bloodied battlefields of Spanish colonial impositions, nationalist armies, and Marxist guerrillas.
Occupying small thatched huts stilted on posts hovering up to eight feet high along the clearings on the riverbanks, the Wounaan kept to their subsistence livelihoods of hunting, fishing, Werregue Palm basket-weaving, and small-scale agriculture of bananas, pineapples, and yucca. That is until November 2014 when the Wounaan Tribe was forced to leave their village of Unión Aguas Claras along the San Juan river of the Cauca Valley and take up a 12-month residence in El Cristal Sports Arena in Buenaventura, Colombia.
According to Wounaan spokesman Crelo Obispo, “Paramilitaries kicked us out of land” and for twelve months they worked diligently to “find a peaceful way to recover our own indigenous land.” The Wounaan turned their occupation into a form of civil disobedience and refused to return to their lands without adequate protection and security from warring factions. Although on November 29, 2015, they returned home along the San Juan River, their cultural survival signals a critical humanitarian and environmental emergency in which indigenous people living sustainable lives have been caught in a resource war for coca cultivation, gold mining and control of key river tributaries.
Occupy El Cristal
For a full year, 343 Wounaan people, 63 families, occupied the cold hard floor of the basketball courts sleeping in multi-colored hand-woven hammocks strung beneath the stadium bleachers. One of them was a young wearied mother holding a shirtless 11 month-old infant suffering from a burning fever and bouts of diarrhea and vomiting. She recalled: “There wasn’t any medicine.” Herein lies the crisis. Not only were mothers unable to gain access to traditional herbal medicines, they were also unable to gain access to modern health care. Three somber mothers told me they were running out of adequate food and water sources. Buenaventura Officials confirmed the death of two young children, one year-old Neiber Cárdenas Pirza in December 2014 and a two day-old baby in June 2014. The Wounaan claimed the deaths were a result of inadequate health care and living conditions in the sports arena. “Our people practice culture, artistry, spirituality and traditional medicine. We need our lands to do so,” said Obispo.
The affirmative belief that the Wounaan were “occupying” the sports arena and taking a political stand against their dispossession by violence is key to understanding Wounaan resistance. “We arrived November 28, 2014 and since that time we had been in resistance,” Chama Puto said. Because the “the local government hardly did anything, and gave no guarantees of assistance,” he urgently called on international help and social advocacy networks to “get meetings with entities who could make change” and affirmed Wounaan ancestral ties to their lands. “Land doesn’t belong to the government or police. It belongs to the indigenous,” he added.
The occupation of El Cristal is an example of how Indigenous peoples enact visibly distinctive resistance tactics to draw political and social mobilization to defend their right to living in their native territories. Although Wounaan Leaders such as Chama Puto are well versed in Colombia’s constitutional law, they are fully aware of how constitutional decrees have remained rhetorical discourses because of the government’s failure to implement constitutional protections within its infrastructure—an absence of institutional support that has undermined the visionary purpose of the protections. In particular, Article 63 states: “Communal lands of ethnic groups and reservation lands cannot be taken away or attached”; Article 72 states: “Ethnic groups settled in areas of archeological treasures have special rights over that cultural heritage, which rights must be regulated by law”; Article 246 provides that “the authorities of the indigenous peoples may exercise jurisdictional functions within their territories, in accordance with their own standards and procedures, provided they do not conflict with the Constitution and laws of the Republic.”
While in some cases, legal maneuvering and mobilization within Colombian Courts have served to defend indigenous landholdings, the year-long Wounaan occupation of El Cristal is a blatant recognition of the ineffectiveness of Colombia’s legislation and juridical processes. Innovative forms of resistance appeal to wider socio-political networks capable of eliciting support across local, regional, national and global borders; however, it comes with a price.
Rhizomic World
El Cristal Sports Arena was a far cry from the Wounaan’s rhizomic world of heterogeneity and its interconnected relations of all plant, animal, ancestral and human life living within its ecosystems. This dynamic cartography of interconnected networks mapped across their ancestral rhizomic river systems and landscape moves beyond western metaphysical notions of duality to foster a cosmos of inter-being. Wounaan livelihood and well-being rely on their interaction with their landscape, an animistic ethno-geographic interaction grounded in rhizomic thought in which “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (Delueze and Guattari 1988).
These beliefs further their kinship networks across time and space in a continuous state of growth in which identities and relationships extend and merge through a web of intersecting relationships. Bill Ashcroft explains the rhizome in biological imagery as multiplying “root system which spreads across the ground” from varying points reaching out across the nomadic space “rather than a single tap root” (1999).
For the Wounaan, the San Juan River is an essential organizing principle of their rhizomic networking system, rich in its biodiversity in which their cosmology interconnects them to 8000-9000 vascular plants, 577 bird species, 52 snake species, 45 lizard and allied species and 127 amphibian species—all inter-being in an ecosystem without hierarchies. In addition to its cohesive social networks, the San Juan River is the true river (döchaar) and ancestral homeland and thus a material feature in the development of their worldview and their perceptions of themselves (Velásquez Runk 2005).
The fluvial systems crisscross over a three-dimensional topography, which includes portals underworld, the real world and the celestial world. In this way their river-dominated cosmos reflects the comings and goings on the river up (marag), down (badag), to (jerag), and from (durrag) in a world where spirits, beings, plants and animals in the visible and invisible world live in a balance of reciprocal equilibrium (Velásquez Runk 2005).
Because of their metaphysical approach which links native individualities, political strategies, and traditional subsistence practices they have been able to maintain their traditional livelihoods and ways of being against the onslaught of land dispossession and acculturation (Velasco 2011). Although their rhizomic community is resistant to rupture where it has fissured and peoples are deterritorialized, the river’s organic networking systems have been capable of reattaching the Wounaan to people, plants, animals within its extended network or creating new connections across its geographical space (Kamash 2008).
Since the 1990s, the San Juan River’s fluvial systems have become reconfigured spaces in which flows of capital, commodities and contraband have brought in a host of nonlocal actors vying for spatial control of its strategic geographies. These vital commercial river networks, which connect the Colombian interior with the Pacific Coast are needed for the production and transportation of gold mining excavation and cocoa cultivation turning the once-peaceful rhizomic ecosystem into a bloody battleground between narco traffickers, gold minders, the FARC, the ELN, the Urabeños, the Rastrojos, and other left wing, right wing, and neo-paramilitary forces.
The result is not only the displacement of indigenous peoples and the disruption of the natural equilibrium of the Wounaan subsistent lifestyle, but the destruction of the biodiverse habitat in which its diverse resources have been transformed to commercial assets and mobilized for monocrop and gold production of surplus value. Added to the actors competing for resources is the introduction of new players from the National Development Plan hoping to position the San Juan River as a key geographic territory for the neoliberal exploitation of resources for free trade agreements. Dispossession for capitalist production has more importantly led to the desecration of ancestral homelands in which families are increasingly intimidated, disappeared and butchered by a collusion of local and nonlocal actors to expedite commodity commerce.
“The government said we are something in the way of development,” said Crelo Obispo further noting, “We’ve been attacked by our conqueror.” Another Wounaan spokesman added, “They want to exterminate us.” Whether it is death by paramilitary, death by narco trafficker, or death in the crossfire between guerillas and the army, there is one certainty as Crelo Obispo declares: There return to their homeland is precarious and must be “met with protection and dignity.”
Amidst these conditions are ongoing negotiations for a bilateral ceasefire between the Government and FARC. Although the Colombian government and FARC rebels have moved towards a comprehensive plan to end an ongoing civil war which, since 1964 has killed 220,000 people, the Wounaan have still been left out in the cold (Rodzinsky). Chama Puto points out that while they are negotiating in Havana, Cuba, “we had been ignored in all negotiation processes.” He believes that conflict resolution can result only when “the government negotiates with all its people.”
As of today, this has not happened and the people the color of the soil who turned their displacement into a political strategy of indigenous resistance to the destruction of their traditional ecosystems still struggle for survival. Chama Puto wants a governmental guarantee of protection and safety in order to survive on their ancestral lands. “We are done negotiating,” he said.
Forceful dispossession underpins the plight of the Wounaan whose homeland has been drained by capital’s international reach for resources in which a “free market exchange relies on and takes advantage of the political and cultural dispossession of certain subjects” (Hennessey 2013). How do indigenous people who make up two percent of Colombia’s population coexist in a global world that renders them disposable, inhuman beings? In this scenario, the two percent making up the indigenous groups of Colombia become eight percent of the dispossessed, displaced, and destined to misery as a form of “human waste”; sadly, a myth narrated and played out in the many parts of the globe.
In El Cristal, the Wounaan were separated from their means of subsistence and vigorously resisted all paradigms of commercial expansion and regional control of their economies—a pattern in which, “more than 5.7 million people have been internally displaced in Colombia since the start of recording official cumulative registration figure” (UNHRC 2015). As of 2014, Colombia’s National Victims’ Unit documented 97,453 cases of forced displacement, mostly along the Pacific region. The El Cristal crisis exposed the systematic layers of political collusion that render Wounaan territories disposable sites of exploitation and economic casualties, which dispossess its peoples from their traditional livelihoods for the benefit of both regional, national, and global markets.
Wounaan Resistance Strategies
Wounaan resistance strategies date back to colonization and manifested in their traditional tactics they implemented to maintain their sense of cultural dignity during their resistance campaign. While living in the Sports Arena women practiced small-scale artesanías in the form of colorful bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and small-carved wooden bowls. The unbroken practice of these customs created communal solidarity and furthered their economic livelihoods, traditional knowledge, and cultural sustainability (Velasco 2012). Although these courageous women were proud to sell their artisans to sports arena visitors, the transactions were soured by the reality of their dispossession. “Collectively and physically the living conditions” were “inadequate, the food inadequate.”
Wounaan resilience to reattach itself to its rhizomic rivers network is precarious and subject to intra-institutional support of regional and national control. It is yet to be seen if this latest mobilization strategy will provide any safeguards and protections for their community. “Promises have been unfulfilled and we have become strangers to ourselves,” sighed a wearied Obispo.
For more information, see CONPAZ.
References
Ashcroft, Bill (1999). “The Rhizome of Post-colonial Discourse” in Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (eds.) Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, London: Longman pp. 111-125.
Deleuze, Giles, and Felix Guattarri (2007). A Thousand Plateus: Capitalism and Schizophreina. Brian Massumi, trans. Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press.
Colombia, Información sobre Derechos Humanos y Libertades Fundamentales de la Poblaciones Indígenas presentada por el Gobierno. (Published in UN.E/CN.4/ Sub.2/AC.4/1991/4).
Hennessy, Rosemary. Fires on the Border. Hennessy, Rosemary. Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Print.
Kamash, Zena (2008). What Lies Beneath? Perceptions of the Ontological Paradox of Water, World Archeology 40 (2) 224-237).
Velasco, Marcela (2011). “Contested Territoriality: Ethnic Challenges to Colombia’s Territorial Regimes.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 30 (2): 213–228.
Brodzinsky, Sibylla. “ Colombia’s government and Farc rebels reach agreement in step to end civil war.” The Guardian. 15 Dec. 2015.
Runk, Julie Valasquez. (2005). And the Creator Began to Carve Us of Cocobolo: Culture, History, Forest Ecology, and Conservation among Wounaan in Eastern Panama. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University and the New York Botanical Garden.
__________. (2009). Social and River Networks for the Trees: Wounaan’s Riverine Rhizomic Cosmos and Arboreal Conservation. American Anthopologist 111(4).
2015 UNRCR Country Operations Profile-Colombia. The UN Refugee Agency.
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Oct 21, 2015 | Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying, Mining & Drilling
CASE ON INDIGENOUS LAND RIGHTS AND EXTRACTIVE PROJECTS MOVES FORWARD AT INTER-AMERICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS
Washington, DC – The U’wa Nation has received an admissibility report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights allowing its case against Colombia to move forward, recognizing that the indigenous group can seek the Commission’s help in defending its traditional territory. Although the U’wa have successfully defeated multiple oil and gas projects in the nearly two decades since they first filed their complaint with the Commission, the report recognizes that winning these battles does not end the overall complaint with the Colombian government, which does not fully recognize the U’wa people’s rights to their territory.
In a statement released [on Oct. 16], The U’wa organization Asou’wa said: “Our U’wa Nation has been heard by the natural law, our ancestors and gods that guide and govern our thinking to safeguard, protect and care for our mother earth; While there are U’wa people, we will continue resisting in defense of our ancient rights.” EarthRights International (ERI) has been supporting Aura Tegria Cristancho, an U’wa lawyer who has been working on the case since 2013 from its offices in Lima, Peru, and Washington, DC.
Asou’wa, supported by the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia and the Coalition for Amazonian Peoples and Their Environment, first filed their complaint with the Commission in 1997. At the time, US-based Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) was threatening to drill for oil in their lands. The U’wa, supported by a global campaign against Oxy led by groups such as Amazon Watch and the Rainforest Action Network, secured Oxy’s withdrawal in 2001. More recently, Colombia’s Ecopetrol tried to move forward with a gas project on U’wa land, but pulled out earlier this year. However, U’wa’s title over their ancestral lands have not been yet recognized.
The Commission’s decision comes after the U’wa and their supporters made it clear that, despite these victories, the root of the problem is the government’s lack of recognition and protection of the indigenous group’s ancestral territory.
“With this decision, the Commission recognized that even though Oxy and Ecopetrol pulled out, the U’wa remain threatened by the failure to fully protect their homeland,” said Camila Mariño, a Colombian lawyer and legal fellow with EarthRights International. “We are proud to stand with the U’wa.”
In the decision, dated July 22 but only released [now], the Commission formally accepts the U’wa petition as “admissible.” According to the Commission’s website, only twelve cases have been accepted as admissible so far this year. Following this decision, the case will move to the “merits” stage, in which the Commission will rule on the rights violations at issue.
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Contact:
Valentina Stackl
+1 (202) 466 5188 x 100
valentina@earthrights.org
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Oct 9, 2015 | Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying, Mining & Drilling
By Hannibal Rhoades / Intercontinental Cry
After five years of legal contests and uncertainty, the Colombian Constitutional Court has confirmed that Yaigojé Apaporis, an indigenous resguardo (a legally recognized, collectively owned territory), also has legitimate status as a national park.
The decision is cause for celebration for Indigenous Peoples who call the region home. But it is less welcome news for Canadian multinational mining corporation Cosigo Resources, the company contesting the area’s national park status. The court’s ruling immediately and indefinitely suspends all mining activities in the park, including Cosigo’s license to mine gold from one of Yaigojé’s most sacred areas.
In the broader context of Colombia’s push to expand mining activities in the name of development, the court’s decision is seen as a significant precedent.
Since the 1980s, Colombia has protected more than 24 million hectares of the Amazon, placing an area the size of Britain back in the hands of its traditional owners. By choosing the rights of Indigenous Peoples and a new national park over multinational mining interests, the court’s decision safeguards Colombia’s achievements rather than undermining them.
THE BATTLE FOR YUISI’S GOLDEN LENS
Straddling Amazonas and Vaupés states, comprising a million hectares of the Northwestern Colombian Amazon, the pristine forest region of Yaigojé Apaporis is rich in both biological and cultural diversity.
The area hosts endangered mammals such as the giant anteater, jaguar, manatee and pink river dolphin. It is also home to the Makuna, Tanimuka, Letuama, Barasano, Cabiyari, Yahuna and Yujup-Maku Indigenous Peoples, who share a common cosmological system and rich shamanistic traditions. Together these populations act as Yaigojé’s guardians, a role that was strengthened in 1988 when, with the assistance of Colombian NGO Gaia Amazonas, they successfully established the Yaigojé Apaporis resguardo over their traditional territory. But this status has recently been tested.
Under Colombian law, a resguardo recognition grants its inhabitants collective ownership of and rights to the soil, but the subsoil remains in the control of the state and vulnerable to prospecting. With companies seeking to exploit this loophole, the Colombian Amazon has seen a tidal wave of mining interest since the mid-2000s, with the government declaring mining an “engine for development.”
Riding at the crest of this wave, in the late 2000s Canadian mining multinational Cosigo Resources made clear to local communities in Yaigojé its intention to mine for gold at a site within the resguardo known as La Libertad or Yuisi.
Local indigenous leaders say Cosigo became known to them when company representatives visited their malocas (traditional riverside houses). The indigenous leaders allege that officials offered them money in return for assurance of support the company to mine in Yuisi. These offers were rejected.
At Yuisi, a wide stretch of the Apaporis river cascades over rocks, forming roaring rapids. To the people of Yaigojé it is a vital sacred site, inextricably tied to their story of origin, identity and ability to care for the territory and the planet as a whole. Elders say “Yuisi is the crib of our way of thinking, of life and power. Everything is born here in thought: nature, the crops, trees, fruits, everything that exists, exists before in thought.”
Local shaman describe the gold and other minerals that form the bedrock of their territory as ‘lenses’ that allow them to see into the Earth, divine or diagnose any problems and correct them through rituals, prayer and thought. If gold were to be removed from Yuisi, they would lose their ability to cure and manage their territory as they have done for millennia. This is because an integral part of the territory itself would be lost. The notion that territory stops at the soil “as deep as the manioc’s root” is alien.
With negotiation with Cosigo out of the question, the traditional authorities in Yaigojé called an urgent congress of the Asociación de Capitanes Indígenas del Yaigojé Apaporis (ACIYA), an indigenous organization formed of groups living along the Apaporis River, in the area of Yaigojé that lies in Amazonas State. Having discussed the dangers posed by Cosigo’s presence and plans, ACIYA agreed that they must seek help from outside sources to further protect their territory.
“The best way to shield the territory was to call upon the state. In other words: Western disease is cured by Western medicine. If all mining licenses are given by the state, it is necessary to call on the state to defend the territory,” says Gerardo Macuna, a representative of ACIYA.
Advised that achieving national park status would extend protection to the subsoil, ACIYA and its supporters formally requested that the Colombian Government create a national park over their resguardo and traditional territory.
The people’s effort to add a third layer of protection for their territory was successful. In October 2009, Yaigojé Apaporis became Colombia’s 55th national protected area, but celebrations were short lived. Just two days after the area was awarded national park status, Cosigo Resources was granted a mining title for the Yuisi area, catalysing an epic struggle between Colombia’s will to protect the Amazon, with the help of indigenous inhabitants, or exploit it at their expense by prioritizing mining.
DEEP IN THE AMAZON, A SMOKING GUN
Despite having been granted a license, Yaigojé’s new status as a national park remained an obstacle to Cosigo. The national park status, and its accompanying legal protections for the subsoil, would need to be revoked before mining could begin.
Facing stiff opposition from both ACIYA and the Colombian National Parks authorities just as Cosigo appeared to be fighting an uphill battle, the company got what seemed an almost impossible stroke of luck. A few months after Yaigojé was declared a national park, members of indigenous organization ACITAVA from the region of Yaigojé lying in Vaupés State launched a legal challenge to Yaigojé’s status at the Colombian Constitutional Court. Led by a local settler named Benigno Perilla, the challengers said that they had not been fully or adequately consulted in the process of creating the national park and it therefore violated their right to Free Prior and Informed Consent.
With an apparently complex conflict unfolding between Yaigojé’s Indigenous Peoples and the area’s national park status–its ecological and social integrity held in the balance–a legal deadlock ensued. This situation persisted for three years, until January 2014, when in an unprecedented move, three judges from Colombia’s Constitutional Court made the decision to travel to the heart of the Colombian Amazon to hold a hearing and consult with communities first hand.
Jorge Iván Palacio, president of the court, explained the court’s decision to make the journey by stating that “there is no justice unless we know what they think in the communities.” The ensuing hearing thoroughly vindicated his observation.
Before 160 indigenous inhabitants from along the Apaporis River and the judges, Benigno Perilla publicly admitted that his and ACITAVA’s legal strategy was encouraged, organized and paid for by Cosigo Resources. In what would prove the critical turning point in the case, the indigenous members of ACITAVA who had supported the challenge made a public apology, said they had been misled and declared their support for the creation of the national park.
A NEW DAWN FOR INDIGENOUS-LED CONSERVATION
Although it has been more than another year coming, the Colombian Constitutional Court has ousted Cosigo and legitimized the declaration of Yaigojé Apaporis as a national park. The decision recognizes the authority of the area’s Indigenous Peoples and protects their fundamental rights to culture, identity and consultation.
The decision is regarded as a significantly positive precedent for future conflicts between mining operations, protected areas and their indigenous inhabitants, at a time when Colombia has declared mining to be in the national interest.
The judges found sufficient evidence of wrongdoing by Cosigo to ask Colombia’s Justice Minister to open an investigation into the company’s consultation processes and interactions with communities in the Yaigojé area. Recently published revisions to Colombia’s projects of national interest have seen Cosigo’s project removed from the list. The company is said to be reviewing its legal options.
Confirming the compatibility of indigenous resguardos and national parks, the court has also opened up the possibility for others to follow Yaigojé’s example and enhance the protection of their territories from destructive or unwanted “development.”
Since Yaigojé was declared a national park, and in spite of the legal wrangle over its future, ACIYA and local indigenous youths have been pioneering a powerful new conservation paradigm that values indigenous knowledge and places it at the root of national park management.
ACIYA’s work to find a method of conservation that both works for them and allows for close collaboration with Colombia’s national park authorities is the subject of a recent film and won the group the prestigious UNDP Equator Prize in 2014. Their approach stands in stark contrast to technocratic, neo-colonialist conservation norms founded on a misplaced belief in pristine, unmanaged wilderness. These have been criticized by Indigenous Peoples and rights groups for excluding and forcibly displacing indigenous communities, fencing them out of their own lands and so obstructing their right to practice their cultures.
As part of their program, 27 young indigenous leaders from nine communities in Yaigojé have engaged in a deep process of cultural research. Advised by their elders, they have documented, mapped and recorded their peoples’ traditional practices for safeguarding and conserving the forest. In the words of one researcher, the aim has been to “transmit traditional knowledge to the younger generations and protect our ancestral territory.” So far, they have succeeded in doing both.
The research produced by ACIYA will now be used to define the management of the Yaigojé Apaporis National Park, further legitimizing local indigenous knowledge systems that have protected the life-support capacities of this rainforest region for generation after generation.
“Indigenous people are the natural allies of the rainforest and the whole environmental movement,” says former director of Gaia Amazonas Martin Von Hildebrand. “They have the traditional knowledge, they are organized. We just need to support them with what they need to run their own territories.”
