Will the U'was Be Forced to Threaten to Commit Mass Suicide Again? | Amazon Watch
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Will the U’was Be Forced to Threaten to Commit Mass Suicide Again?

Gas company wants to drill on indigenous people's ancestral territory in Colombia

June 17, 2014 | David Hill | The Guardian

Say “Gibraltar” to many people in the UK and the first thing they’ll think of is a “British Overseas Territory” at the entrance to the Mediterranean. Say it to one of the 7,000 indigenous U’wa people in north-east Colombia and the reaction would be very different: Gibraltar is a well cluster in U’wa ancestral territory which became the focal point of their opposition to oil operations in the late 1990s and early 2000s involving, among other things, threatening to commit mass suicide and being clubbed, tear-gassed, threatened with rape, evicted, arrested and harassed by Colombian military and police.

The first reported suicide threat came in early 1995 when the operating company was Occidental, partnered by Shell and Colombia’s state oil and gas firm Ecopetrol. Repeated other threats were voiced – to the rest of Colombia, to the media, even to Occidental executives.

One such threat was made outside Occidental’s offices in Los Angeles in 1997. According to Oil Exploitation and Indigenous Rights: Global Regime Network Conflict in the Andes, an award-winning international relations PhD. thesis by American journalist and activist Leslie Wirpsa, who supported the U’was for 15 years:

…[F]lanked by a white, black and red banner blurting “Stop the Oxy-Cution of the U’wa” [leader Berito] Kuwaru’wa reiterated to a group of journalists and a troupe of environmental activists that if Occidental insisted on exploiting oil in tribal territory, the community would commit collective suicide by leaping off a 15,000 foot cliff. He and a Colombian companion, an anthropologist, claimed drilling would damage the delicate cloud forest ecosystem sustaining the U’wa and that it would destroy the cultural and physical integrity of the community.

Elsewhere Wirpsa’s thesis quoted the U’was or Kuwaru’wa directly:

  • In a letter to Colombian citizens: “Before standing by to see sacrilege committed against our sacred elders (earth, oil and others), we prefer to see our own death, the collective suicide of the U’wa people. If in our fight for what is ours we have to take the final step, so it will be. If to defend life we have to give our own, we will do it.”
  • In a meeting with Occidental: “You must understand that to drill for oil is an extremely sensitive matter for us. We would be selling the blood of Mother Earth. We cannot do it. Our Father didn’t authorize us to do it. He didn’t authorize us to negotiate about it. Without Earth there is no life. It cannot be done. We want to know if Oxy will respect our law. If there is no solution, we have a history of suicide.”
  • In a statement to the general public: “…We are claiming our ancestral and constitutional rights to life and to our traditional territory. We demand that the Colombian government and Oxy leave us in peace and that once and for all they cancel the oil project in this area. We U’wa people are willing to give our lives to defend Mother Earth from this project which will annihilate our culture, destroy nature, and upset the world’s equilibrium. Caring for the Earth and the welfare of our children and of future generations is not only the responsibility of the U’wa people, but of the entire national and international society.”

These were no PR stunts. There appears to be a precedent – U’wa oral history tells how a number of U’was committed suicide rather than give themselves up to the Conquistadores – and 400 years later they were serious.

“The U’wa were sincere about their willingness to go to extremes to protect their lands and their livelihoods,” says Wirpsa now. “Knowing them closely, I believe they would have done anything possible to prevent their ancestral lands from devastation from both Occidental and Ecopetrol. You must understand Colombian history to respect the story behind the threat of the U’wa seeing that mass suicide was the only alternative.”

Belief in that sincerity was shared by Terence Freitas, an American who founded the U’wa Defense Project in the 1990s and was murdered by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 1999, together with two Native American activists, while leaving U’wa territory. A report published the year before he died titled Blood of our Mother, which Freitas lead-authored, states:

Four hundred years ago, according to U’wa oral histories, a portion of the tribe committed mass ritual suicide rather than surrender to the Conquistadores. Recently, the U’wa have threatened to repeat that ultimate protest if oil development is allowed to go forward on their land. Over the last decade, the U’wa have watched while the pipeline that runs just north of their reservation has been bombed over 500 times by leftist guerrillas. Over one and half million barrels of crude oil have spilled onto land that borders their sacred home. The U’wa have watched as their oil-rich neighboring territories have become centers of human rights abuses – perpetrated mostly by pro-government paramilitaries. To anyone who is watching, and particularly to the U’wa, the message is clear: Oil equals violence.

Occidental pulled out in 2002, but rights passed 100% to Ecopetrol which now pumps gas – not oil – from Gibraltar 1, according to the company’s Jorge Mauricio Tellez. Move on almost 20 years from the first suicide threat and the pipeline is still being regularly bombed by guerillas, the military presence has increased – following over US$100m from the USA to protect the pipeline – and now Ecopetrol intends to drill elsewhere on U’wa ancestral territory, just to the west of Gibraltar.

Asou’wa, an organization representing 17 U’wa communities, flagged the problem in late February when it issued a statement about “heavy machinery” and increasing numbers of soldiers turning up around a site called “Magallanes”, where Ecopetrol wants to drill three wells. After a series of further statements, guerilla attacks on the pipeline, a stand-off with the government, one attempt to meet that failed, one disastrous meeting, and then another meeting on 1 May during which several “minimal” agreements were reached – including one that operations at Magallanes would be suspended for a month while the U’was prepared a report on the potential social and environmental impacts – the U’was were scheduled to meet again with the government and Ecopetrol’s president on 1 June.

“One month was a very short time to do a rigorous and effective report,” Asou’wa’s vice-president, Heber Tegría Uncaría, told me. “We’re going to ask that the suspension is extended between 8 and 12 months. That’s on the agenda for the 1 June meeting.”

The 1 June meeting ended up taking place five days later, when yet another meeting was scheduled for 27 June.

“No new agreements were made” on 6 June about Magallanes, Asou’wa’s president Bladimir Moreno Torres told the Guardian, but he said that operations remain suspended, that the U’was will continue working on their impact report, and that they continue opposed to “any type of exploitation or drilling.”

Ecopetrol’s Jorge Mauricio Tellez would not comment on the U’wa’s position, but confirmed that a meeting will take place on 27 June and that the Magallanes operations are owned 100% by his company.

Asou’wa recently reported that the number of soldiers in the Magallanes area has increased “considerably”, and that “unnecessary restrictions” have been placed on access to the project area by “private security.” In a subsequent statement, released last week, it said:

[In our meetings with the government] we have emphasized the urgent need for the Colombian government to effectively guarantee our territorial rights, canceling all natural resource extraction projects within our ancestral territory, including…Magallanes…At the same time, we have reminded the government that we are an indigenous people at risk of physical and cultural extinction according to [Colombia´s Constitutional] Court Ruling 004 of 2009, but above all considering the reality we live within our territory: increased militarization, restrictions on our movements, invasions of culturally strategic areas like the Cubogón River, and an increase of illness in recent years…[T]he U’wa People state that we will use all of the legal, political, and cultural resources at our disposal to defend our ancestral territory. We believe that this is a just and dignified struggle not only for the U’wa, but for all of humanity the degree to which humanity needs air, water, earth, and healthy food to be able to continue existing.

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