February 2005
By Brad Miller (*)
About 400 members of the Embera Katio, a Colombian indigenous group, have been camped out in the offices of the Organizacion Nacional Indigena de Colombia (ONIC) since 23 December to demand that the government protect their natural environment and human rights.
‘So, you want to know why we are here,’ says N, a representative of the Embera Katio, one of Colombia’s 80-plus indigenous groups. N, who requests anonymity for security reasons, toys with a computer mouse, his face bearing several traditional black markings, the elaborate beadwork hanging around his neck depicting two bright green parrots.
The office of the Organizacion Nacional Indigena de Colombia (ONIC) is full of Embera men, women and children sleeping on the floor. Outside, the hallways of ONIC’s Bogota building are filled with more families, hammocks, drying clothes, the smell of rice and chicken, crying babies, and vallenato music on a portable radio.
The approximately 400 Emberas have been camped out in the ONIC offices since 23 December, after being forcibly removed by the National Police from the grounds of the Ministry of Environment. They travelled by bus from their homes in the Cordoba region to pursue their strategy of ‘permanent assembly’, to protest Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s refusal to negotiate a resolution to their demands that the Empresa Urra compensate them for their loss of land and damage to their social and cultural integrity.
It has been 10 years since the Empresa Multiproposito Urra S.A, a multinational consortium of the Colombian government, Scandinavian entities Skanska and Nordic Investment Bank, Russia’s Energomachiexport and the Export Development Corporation of Canada, completed its Urra 1 dam on the Upper Sinu river in the traditional territory of the Embera Katio.
Colombia’s Constitutional Court made two rulings in 1998 to temporarily halt the filling of the dam until the government and Empresa Urra complied with the law and properly consulted with the Emberas’ representatives. But there was no sufficient consultation – the autonomy and tribal authority of the Embera Katio was undermined and in 1999 the Ministry of Environment ordered that the dam be filled.
The filling of the $800 million hydroelectric dam inundated 7,400 hectares of fields and hunting grounds, destroying homes, cemeteries and sacred areas. The subsequent sedimentation and contamination of the river has vastly reduced the quantity of fish, the Embera Katio’s main food supply and symbol of their culture. Medicinal plants have also disappeared.
Children have increasingly suffered from malnourishment and respiratory diseases, and the standing water created by the dam has allowed malarial mosquitoes to propagate. The Emberas say that the Empresa Urra has taken some action to mitigate the damage, but it has been entirely insufficient.
Since his homeland is what N calls a ‘zone of interest to the state’, the presence of guerrillas and government-backed paramilitaries increased in 1998, intensifying Colombia’s 40-year-old civil war in Embera territory. It was then that the campaign of killing and fear inundated the Emberas, shortly before the rising waters of the Urra 1did, as paramilitary units assassinated Embera leaders opposed to the dam.
Alonso Domico Jarupia was murdered in August of 1998, and Alejandro Domico Jumi in January 1999. Lucindo Domico Cabrera was shot eight times in the back and head on 25 April 1999, shortly after the Upper Sinu Assembly of Senators of Embera Katio issued a statement claiming they had no allegiance to any of the armed actors of the war, and that they were concerned that the government had labelled them an impediment to development. Internationally known activist Kimy Pernia Domico was permanently ‘disappeared’ by paramilitaries on 2 June 2001 for his strong opposition to the hydroelectric dam – for being an ‘impediment to development’.
Another reason for the Emberas’ ‘permanent assembly’ is to protest the government’s potential plan to build a second hydroelectric dam, the Urra 2, in the Embera Katio’s homeland. The government denies that it has been negotiating with foreign corporations or embassies regarding a construction deal, but indigenous organisations and activists are taking the threat seriously – ONIC representatives say an Urra 2 would flood as many as 56,000 hectares and displace 10 separate indigenous communities.
Until the government agrees to reconvene negotiations concerning the Empresa Urra’s adequate mitigation for the land and culture they have irreparably damaged, the Embera Katio will not get back on their buses and return to Cordoba, as the ‘state’ has ordered.
To return now, without the government’s commitment to protecting their natural environment and human rights, would be to accept the continued degradation of their homeland and further harassment and assassination by armed groups. But President Uribe’s administration has shown little commitment to the environment or indigenous rights – much more to corporate development and counterinsurgency.
An ONIC member monitoring the front door looks around at the Embera kids spilling out into the street, some plagued with chicken pox or other sicknesses. ‘These people are here because of Uribe’s war,’ he says.
Some young girls sit on the sidewalk, making and selling native artwork as a line of Kevlar-coated riot police look on – there to protect or control, it is hard to tell. – Third World Network Features
--------------
(*) About the writer Brad Miller, who is currently working in Colombia, has written for Pacific News Service, the Progressive, Cultural Survival Quarterly’s Weekly Indigenous News, and others.
When reproducing this feature, please credit Third World Network Features and (if applicable) the cooperating magazine or agency involved in the article, and give the byline. Please send us cuttings.
Third World Network is also accessible on the World Wide Web. Please visit our website at http://www.twnside.org.sg
Related information:
Colombia: massacres, privatisations and Free Trade Agreement
An analysis of violence in Colombia, its roots, the systematic massacres and human rights violations against peasants, indigenous people and workers are denounced by Héctor Mondragón, a “survivor”, within the framework of the World Social Forum 2005.
Emberá Katio information (Spanish)
Source: Etnias de Colombia
