Boyaca, Colombia – The U’wa nation has rejected a call from the Colombian government to participate in a “prior consultation” process about an oil project on their cloudforest homelands and is calling for the cancellation of Ecopetrol’s Siriri/Catleya oil project. In recent talks with the government, the U’wa presented colonial land titles which they claim uphold their soil and subsurface rights to their ancestral lands. This announcement is expected to further delay attempts by Ecopetrol, Colombia’s state-owned oil company, to move ahead with the planned project.
Prior Consultation is a statutory requirement in Colombia for any infrastructure project that might adversely affect the territories of indigenous communities. The U’wa, who are one of the most traditional indigenous communities in South America, consider that oil drilling would devastate their environment, culture, and way of life and goes against the tribe’s cultural principles and norms.
“We have decided not to permit petroleum activities on our sacred territory, Kera Chikara, and therefore, we believe that prior consultation as currently being applied by the Colombian Government limits our right to veto,” the U’wa High Council declared in its position statement to the Colombian Government.
The U’wa announced their decision as they handed in a bundle of historic land grant documents dating back to colonial times proving their ownership of their territories in northeastern Colombia.
The documents strike at the heart of the claims by the Colombian government that the rights to all sub-surface resources in national territory belong to the State. In the past, both the Colombian Council of State and Supreme Court have repeatedly upheld the colonial law.
The move by the U’wa, who number 5,600, is the latest chapter in their long stand-off against the oil industry. First, the U’wa successfully blocked the encroachments of Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum (Oxy), which, under intense international pressure, decided to pull out in May 2002. But since January 2006, Ecopetrol, the state-owned Colombian oil company, has been attempting to start oil exploration inside the U’wa Reserve with its Siriri/Catleya project, and pressuring the U’wa to enter into the consultation process.
The news emerged following a recent meeting between the U’wa, Ecopetrol and government representatives, including from the office of the Vice President, Ministry of Interior and Justice, Ministry of Environment, Internal Affairs office, and the Human Rights Ombudsman’s office. More than 500 members of the U’wa Indigenous tribe gathered together from the Departments of Santander, Norte de Santander, and Boyaca to unanimously tell the officials that they would not participate in the consultation, known in Colombia as a “consulta previa.” Although the process can lead to the identification and mitigation of potential adverse impacts, it does not incorporate the right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), the global benchmark human rights standard that would allow the tribal authority to reject a damaging project.
The U’wa also insisted that the consulta previa was inappropriate in this case because the Colombian government had no rights to the subsurface resources of U’wa land, under a series of historic agreements, some dating back to the 17th Century, between the indigenous nation and the Spanish Crown and post-1820 independence authorities. The U’wa explained how they own not only the surface rights officially granted to them when they were granted a Unified U’wa Indigenous Reserve in 1999, covering more than 220,275 hectares, but also the subsurface rights thanks to old Spanish Colonial Land Titles where the Spanish Monarchy recognized the U’wa title to their land in 1734. There are also other Land Titles from 1771 and 1802. In the 1802 Land Title, the King of Spain recognized that the U’wa had preexisting rights, including to the sub-surface. According to the U’wa attorneys, this assertion, is reaffirmed by Colombian Law 153 of 1887.
These rights to their land are also outlined in Article 332 of the 1991 Colombian Constitution which states that: “The State is the property owner of the sub-surface land and of its non renewable natural resources, but only when those State rights do not contradict pre-existing rights that have been acquired and recognized by pre-existing laws to someone else.”
The government delegation also received a report by Stanford Professor Terry Lynn Karl, an expert in the “resource curse” and co-author of a forthcoming book with Joseph Stiglitz, that outlined how the development of petroleum on the U’wa land would devastate the lands and livelihoods of the U’wa, have negative environmental impacts, it will cause social and economic problems, and provoke increased violence.
The Colombian government says it will now analyze the legal documents from the U’wa and consider their position. The U’wa are willing to continue talking with the government but insist the government commits to abandoning the oil project for their cloudforest homelands.
For a copy of the U’wa position paper, please see
http://www.amazonwatch.org/images/posicion.pdf
