Cubara, Colombia – The clatter of two military transport helicopters landing in a nearby mountain clearing signaled that time was up for the ragged band of Indian demonstrators. In short order, heavily armed Colombian soldiers moved in to break up their protest, wresting 26 Indians onto the waiting choppers and scattering perhaps 100 others. Some 300 soldiers took up positions to ensure they wouldn’t return.
The clash in northeast Colombia may mark the final round of the U’wa Indians’ nine-year battle to keep Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum from drilling on their ancestral lands. As he grimly surveys the drill site, Roberto Pérez, president of the U’was’ governing council, contends that the project will bring environmental disaster and the demise of their culture. “What we’re saying is: Respect our territory,” he pleads.
Sympathetic U.S. activists have staged protests at the office of mutual-fund giant Fidelity Investments, a major Oxy shareholder, and even tried to make the controversy a presidential campaign issue: Eight demonstrators were arrested after refusing to leave the New Hampshire campaign headquarters of Vice President Al Gore, whose family owns $500,000 worth of Occidental Petroleum stock and whose father served on its board for 28 years.
In the first visit by a U.S. reporter to the conflict-ridden zone in northeast Colombia since three American activists were killed there by guerrillas last March, U.S. News found the Indians girding for a last stand in a struggle they have all but lost. Backhoes have begun to cut a road that will lead up a steep mountain slope to the site, delineated by orange flags, where Oxy plans to sink its first test well. As much as 1.3 billion barrels of crude may be buried there, a potential windfall for Colombia’s gasping economy.
Suicide threat. A banner strung across the main road here denounces Colombia’s environment minister, saying, “The U’wa people reject you.” Government officials had hoped to placate the tribe last year by quintupling the size of its official reservation, though not including the drill site. But the U’was remained unappeased–and have threatened to commit mass suicide by leaping off a cliff if drilling proceeds. A judge authorized the military’s forcible removal of the U’was from the drill site. But in an 11th-hour gambit, the Indians bought two farms nearby and began a new sit-in last week that drew about 150 Indians–a number that may grow.
The violence and the destruction that the U’was fear comes in part from guerrillas who routinely bomb pipelines in this oil-rich region. The region’s Caño Limón pipeline has been blown up over 600 times, spilling 2.1 million barrels of oil. To keep operations running in this war-torn area the companies hire massive security forces in addition to the Colombian Army. On January 28 the local front of the leftist rebel National Liberation Army broadcast a statement expressing sympathy for the U’was and promising stepped-up military action against multinational oil companies.
