Help the U’wa Defend Their Ancestral Lands!
Indigenous U’wa leaders must travel to the UN to prevent Colombian government from forcibly entering their lands.
The situation for Colombia’s U’wa people is at once more hopeful but also more precarious than it has been in years. This could prove to be a watershed moment – either allowing them to achieve several of their key demands or, conversely, ending in tragedy. The stakes are high, and the support marshaled by friends of the U’wa (that’s you) could be a determining factor in how this ends.
Please consider offering financial support for an international advocacy delegation the U’wa are sending in May to New York City for the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. This will allow them to update the world about their situation and strengthen solidarity ties with other indigenous peoples and allies. They will also travel to Washington, DC to further those goals.
Their current situation, in a nutshell, is this: New oil projects in U’wa territory (the Magallanes exploration platform) are threatening their environment and livelihoods. At the same time, Colombia’s second largest oil pipeline was bombed within U’wa territory on March 25th. Since that time, the U’wa have refused to allow the pipeline to be repaired, meaning the usual 72,000 barrels of oil aren’t flowing through every day. This has cause at least $136 million in lost revenues, and a lot of anxiety on the part of the Colombian government.
Yesterday, 300 U’wa met with high level government authorities, including several ministers and the head of Ecopetrol, the Colombian state-owned oil company, to look for a resolution to the situation. The U’wa laid out a series of demands – completely in keeping with that they have been asking of the Colombian state for several decades now, at least. (You can read their demands here, in Spanish).
Unfortunately, the government’s response was an “insult”, in the words of one U’wa representative. As such, the U’wa ended the meeting after seven hours and issued the following statement.
We are extremely concerned about how the Colombian government will handle this situation. The pressure for them to repair the pipeline increases every day. The degree to which they are unwilling to seriously consider U’wa demands, their other route is to forcibly remove the U’wa from their encampment in La China. Let’s keep building the international solidarity with the U’wa and send a clear message that repression is not an option.
ASOU’WAS – Association of U’wa Traditional Authorities and Councils
U’wa Unified Resguardo (reservation)
April 25th, 2014
Communiqué for Public Opinion:
The people of the U’wa nation would like to inform the national and international community about developments related to the meeting held with high government officials of the Colombian State on April 25th. Once we presented the demands from our official document and heard the responses of the government officials, we concluded that:
- The government commission did not have decision-making power.
- Of the six demands made by the U’wa people none of them received clear or positive responses.
- The lack of commitment and seriousness on the part of the government to resolve the problematic issues that the U’wa live with is evident.
- Once again, we feel deceived by the national government as much as we had hoped that the meeting would be the culmination of a period of uncertainty, chaos and territorial displacement given that within our territory there is an increasing militarization, the implementation of the mining – energy policies and the presence of armed actors that put at risk our lives and threaten the physical and cultural disappearance of the U’wa Nation. Though this, the government ignores the Auto 004 sentence of the honorable Constitutional Court, the ILO Convention 169, the Universal Declaration of Indigenous Peoples, amongst others.
- The U’wa Nation, situated between the departments of Casanare, Arauca, Boyacá, Santander, and Norte de Santander, will continue with our peaceful collective protest.
- We do not authorize the repair of the Caño Limón – Coveñas oil pipeline tube, damaged in the events that happened on March 25th in the area of La China, within the collective property of the U’wa indigenous people as supported by Resolution #056 of August 6th 1999 and our colonial titles.
- We U’wa continue in our expectation of a governmental response in order to put an end to the problems that the U’wa Nation faces.
- We maintain the willingness and open disposition to a dialogue that will lead to a smart and peaceful exit from this conflict.
- The U’wa Nation would like to make clear to Colombia and to the world that the economic proposal that we presented to the national government was a strategy of our people to ratify that the dignity and the territory of our people doesn’t have a price.
- Once again we invite the solidarity of indigenous peoples, campesinos and the other sectors of Colombian society.
Once again we send out a call to the international community to be in solidarity with the reactivation of the demands that historically the U’wa Nation has put forth. Additionally, we would ask that the International Labor Organization (ILO), the United Nations (UN), and the Organization of American States (OAS) also follow up on the commitments made but left unmet by the Colombian State since 2000.
