By Luis Carlos Osorio R.
Director of Actualidad Etnica
Bogotá, 27 September 2007
The hypothesis is simple and shared by many specialists in the field: with the sale of stock shares, the Colombian government, on one hand, continues the process of privatization by auctioning the most profitable company in the country at a lower price, quietly turning it over to private investors and pension funds. On the other hand, with the figure of shareholder democratization, it armors itself with ‘an immense social support’ against all those discordant voices. These include the confrontation that the government company sustains with various indigenous populations, among those the U’wa.
Until a few days ago, ECOPETROL was a property company for all Colombians. Since September 25, only 469,290 Colombians can attest to this right [1], at least of one part of the shares placed for sale by the state company, since the other part of the packet of shares was acquired by some pension funds, almost all with participation of foreign capital [2]. In other words, 90% of the shares, still a property of the state, constitute a sort of virtual property of Colombians, since the actual property will be transferred to private oil investors, surely petroleum multinationals.
A large part of the profits from the oil remained in the country and with them “many… social programs were financed, so that we can say that this truly was a company for all Colombians”. However, the process of privatizing ECOPETROL did not begin with the sale of a packet of shares. This process began with measures taken during the government of Pastrana, who lowered the participation of the company in the new contracts and reduced an egalitarian participation with the oil companies (50%-50%) to 30%; and later the government of Uribe lowered said participation practically to zero, dealing a grave blow to the company and to all Colombians upon taking away rights from ECOPETROL and placing it in similar conditions with any other private company, according to the assertions of economist Héctor Mondragón.
The analyst involved in the case of the Cartagena refinery remembers that this process was similar, and today, the company GLENCOR owns the entire refinery. The Congress approved the sale of 20% of the ECOPETROL shares, 10.1% of which have already been sold to more than 400,000 Colombians, but these shares will not have a joint participation either, since it is now known that there are some who had the ability to obtain packets of shares for up to seventy million pesos and others, such as pension funds, even superior quantities, which leaves a large majority with a reduced investment and consequently limited to periodically receive some small dividends.
In this way, the company doubly benefits from this operation. On one hand it collects several billions of pesos with the sale of shares to these new “shareholders” while also creating a protective chain around itself, based on an immense support “army” that claims the company as its own, even if their participation in its affairs is negligible.
This is the new panorama in which the confrontation between ECOPETROL with the U’was and other indigenous peoples in whose territories it is presumed there is oil will develop. If before the resistance process of the U’was there had awoken sympathies in many sectors of the population, today many of these citizens are “co-proprietors of the company” and their feeling of solidarity is conditioned by their own interests. The higher the number of exploratory wells found in the country, the better for them, since this will help the appraisal of their actions.
A few days ago, the debate was centered in a confrontation between a general interest focused in a company considered a Colombian national symbol against the general, but minor, indigenous people’s interests. Today this situation begins to change. The former “major interest” of 44 million Colombians will now become an affair regulated by only half a million for whom the legitimate rights of the indigenous people will become a secondary issue. There might be a switch between the cautious position maintained by the company, that until very recently somewhat admitted to violating the legal rights of the U’was, to a belief that a greater number of private shareholders will give it a greater legitimacy to impose conditions on the said rights. This position is expected given the actual Colombian government’s tendency for prepotency.
This is exactly one of the greatest worries of the indigenous leaders of Colombia. Ati Quigua, the ex-councilor of Bogotá, signals that “the fact that many Colombians acquire shares of ECOPETROL legitimizes in some manner all of the energy and mineral policy that the government has.” For this young native, the country has come to extract oil with a social cost that is too high. Now it is time to search for other alternatives without stopping the process of making a profound evaluation about who are those that until today have benefited from the extraction of oil in the country.
Ezequiel Vitonás, a member of the Nasa indigenous group, cannot hide his worries about the origins of capital generated by the sale of shares in a time where paramilitary, narcotic traffic and guerilla organizations search for financial strategies to legalize their assets. What is certain to him is that the whole operation is “a strategy to win public support in order to support the oil policy against indigenous people.”
Although he recognizes that from a capitalist point of view, ECOPETROL has completed an interesting task and that many Colombians have been converted to shareholders of good faith with the illusion of increasing their revenues, the indigenous ex-senator Gerardo Jumí believes that they are failing to recognize that with this decision they are being converted into accomplices of a policy with immense costs for other Colombians (indigenous communities) who will be displaced and whose territories will be invaded. In essence, he says, these shareholders will be committing “many crimes of the State toward an indigenous leadership that opposes its territories being invaded, that opposes the exploitation of its resources.”
This is the U’wa people’s situation, being on the wait for the government to realize the first oil drillings, concludes the indigenous leader. His view is shared by Armando Tegría (Berúa), another U’wa leader, who does not hesitate to say that the situation is a fatal wound to an indigenous group fighting for its territory. “No member of the indigenous population of this country nor anyone belonging to the lower classes will benefit from this policy or have access to the advantages of its establishment. The worst part is that people are not thinking about what is going to happen, they should reflect on the costs and consequences that this situation is going to create”. To which Luis Evelis Andrade, the ONIC’s president, seems to respond: “They will renew the conflicts and the indigenous people’s right violations because it won’t exactly be a state company anymore but will actually function like any other multinational company.”
It may seem Machiavellian, but perhaps without itself proposing it, the government has incorporated a perfect scene in which to place in conflict the indigenous communities and the majority of the country. In the belief of the great benefit that it represents for the new associates to enter into the select group of shareholders of ECOPETROL, the rejection of the native peoples toward the excavation of oil in their territories can be depicted as a retrograded position in front of the paradigms of development, seeking an unconditional national support in order to apply a policy that passes as the ignorance of its rights, very much in spite of the achievements that have been obtained since 1991.
“Imagine Colombia’s majority against the indigenous groups” asks the AICO president. “Who is right? The indigenous people who oppose this exploitation or the virtual owners of a company?” The indigenous leader does not want to envision the answer to this question but believes that “this is where the impasse lies and to be honest, nobody knows who will be right… I see it as an approach to make believe that the general rights of the Colombian trumps the particular interests of the indigenous people and that in this sense, there can’t be an opposition to the agreement.”
The president of Aso Bari, in representation of the indigenous peoples of the North of Santander who also have a conflict with the development of oil-bearing explorations in their territory is more convincing: “I believe that this is a strategy that utilizes ECOPETROL in order to put the people against us.”
There is an abundance of reasons to believe that these statements are part of the government’s strategy to extract oil from indigenous territories. It was not for nothing that Colombia refused to sign the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, even when violating a constitutional mandate that not only recognizes the rights of the indigenous peoples in a way that no other Latin American country does but that also sets forth Colombia as the nation most deeply rooted in multiethnicity and pluriculturalism in the continent.
At the center of this decision, like ghosts, are the U’was, who claim property of the subsoil, invoking colonial titles awarded before the creation of the State; it is the U’was that have argued about the legitimacy of the State to carry out a previous consultation “that consults them,” but that does not concede any right for them to waive, to refrain from using a word as inconvenient as veto; it is the U’was, who have claimed the right to exercise their territorial autonomy, and finally, it is the U’was, who, invoking their own cultural principles from their ancestry, have seen themselves obligated to oppose any government position, because, among other reasons, the oil that is said to lie underneath them could hardly illuminate a night in a city like New York, while their own lives would slowly fade away. And it is the U’was who dared to tell the government that if the State were in the disposition to revise the actual oil policy, which, among other things, gently delivers the country’s energetic richness to the big multinational figures, the indigenous group would be willing to reconsider their position, but, for a stubborn government, this is nonnegotiable.
Therefore, how can we not agree with the indigenous groups that this must be a strategy to place the majority of the population against them? It is clear that ECOPETROL is privatizing and conveniently arming itself against the indigenous people’s rights.
According to Mondragón, “ as long as ECOPETROL continues to privatize itself, this is going to continue in a similar manner, we will see how the particular interests of very few people are going to put the pressure on in order to break the cultural integrity of the U’wa people…. The privatization of ECOPETROL in general and the extraction of oil in Colombia determine what capacity the U’was have to influence in respect to their territory. This is debilitating insofar as a few private proprietors are going to control the company and their rights are going to be much less respected. The national government has manifested its desire for the extraction of oil by means of the militarization of the U’wa territory, against their will and causing them cultural and environmental prejudices.” And in foresight, we could conclude with Mondragón that “in any case, the will of any indigenous group is going to face a great risk of being ignored and violated if the property of the company falls into the hands of a few shareholders and not as it was until now, under the direction of all Colombians.”
[1] El Tiempo, 27 September 2007[2] Robledo, Jorge Enrique. http://www.moircolombia.org/?qnode/376
[3] 8.4% of shares were acquired in the department of Boyacá, a territorial entity where the municipality of Cubará is located. It is also the regional headquarters of AsoU’wa, the social organization of the U’wa. El Tiempo, 26 September 2007. P. 1-11. [Translated by]: Isabel Ramirez, Marc Lanthemann
[Edited by]: Cristina Balbas
