Before dawn on the Dec. 21, 2016, dozens of police raided the headquarters of the Shuar Federation (FISCH) in the Ecuadorian Amazon and arbitrarily detained its president, Agustin Wachapá. The indigenous leader was thrown to the ground and repeatedly stamped on and ridiculed beneath the boots of police in front of his wife. The police then razed the Shuar Federation’s office—turning over furniture and carrying away computers. According to the indigenous leader’s wife, her husband was taken away without any kind of explanation. An arrest warrant for Wachapá was never presented.
Agustin Wachapá has since been accused of publicly calling for the mobilization and violent resistance of the Shuar communities against state security forces in San Juan Bosco, where the indigenous community in Nankints was evicted and had their homes demolished against their will to make way for the Chinese Explorcobres S.A. (EXSA) open-cut copper mine. In the two months since the forced eviction, members of the communities surrounding Nankints have twice attempted to retake the land that was confiscated from them. On Dec. 14, the second attempt to storm the mine resulted in the death of a policeman and wounded seven other members of the state security forces.
The Ecuadorian government also declared a State of Emergency suspending basic rights such as freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, and due process under law, as well as granting the military the exceptional power to enter private residences and arbitrarily detain people without warrants or evidence.
An overwhelming military presence was then deployed across the Amazonian province to bolster security around the Chinese mine and quell all dissent, prompting Domingo Ankuash, the historical leader of the Shuar to call upon the United Nations and other international human rights organizations to monitor the militarization of his people’s ancestral lands, in which he estimates 8,000 high-ranking members of the military—marine, air and land troops—as well as 4 war-tanks, surveillance drones, aerostatic balloons, mobile satellites, and helicopter gunships, have been deployed.
The region—known as the Cordillera of the Condor—is where the cloud forests on the eastern slopes of the Andes drops off into the vast rainforests of the Amazon basin. It contains some of the most richly biodiverse ecosystems in the world. Once operational, the Explorcobres S.A. (EXSA) mine—a joint venture of Tongling and China Railway Construction—will be the second largest copper mine on the planet. It will make an estimated $1.2bn in annual royalties for the Ecuadorian government. It will also consume 41,769 hectares of rainforest and rural agricultural land, much of it belonging to the Shuar Peoples.
Now, almost a month after his arbitrary detention, Agustin Wachupá is being kept in a maximum security prison on the other side of the country near the capital Quito, despite a call from Amnesty International to respect his judicial rights. The State of Emergency within Morona Santiago has been extended for another 30 days, and a media blackout has been imposed, forcing 15 community radio stations to broadcast the state-run Radio Publico.
Meanwhile, the government stepped up its manhunt for the “illegal armed group” involved in the violent incursions onto Explorcobres S.A., but community leaders are claiming a witch-hunt has begun in order to capture and detain people of influence such as teachers or leaders who belong to local committees opposed to the mine, as well as the heads of households whose homes were bulldozed in Nankints. All of these people have one thing in common: they are predominantly indigenous males of military age.
“The government of Rafael Correa is pushing the Armed Forces to play a role that we have never seen before, not even in times of dictatorship,” said Jorge Herrera, an indigenous leader of the Kichwa Peoples from the neighbouring Andes highlands. As president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), Herrera has expressed his increasing alarm at the military buildup inside of the Condor Cordillera on behalf of the 14 other indigenous nations of Ecuador that belong to the confederation. “The military is not defending the security of the population, but rather the transnational corporations that have purchased licenses [to exploit] large hectares of Ecuadorian territory as private property.”
From Dayuma to Sarayuku, President Correa’s government has deployed its overwhelming military might against rural and indigenous communities that oppose the nation’s booming mining industry before; but the current mobilization of state security forces inside Morona Santiago is unprecedented in terms of scale and scope in the country’s modern history. Not since 1995, during the Cenepa War between Ecuador and Peru, has their been such a massive build-up of armed forces along the Peruvian border on the western ridges of the Condor Cordillera, but back in 1995, in a complete reversal of roles, former president Sixto Duran commended the Shuar for working with the military to defend the Ecuadorian homeland from an invading foreign army.
“WE WILL NOT YIELD A MILLIMETER MORE”
The War of the Cenepa was the third military confrontation between Ecuador and Peru since 1941, and Ecuador had already suffered two embarrassing military defeats in both its previous battles with Peru along with the annexation of almost a third of the country’s former territory—hundreds of thousands of kilometres of oil and mineral rich land in the Amazon rainforest. Until its resolution in 1998, the border dispute between the two nation states had become the longest-running international armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere—and back in 1995, when the Amazon rainforest had turned into a theatre of modern warfare—this ancient people known as the Shuar were joining the Ecuadorian military en-masse.
A military anthem called “We will not yield a millimetre more” was being broadcast into television sets across the country to recruit men in their prime to join the Ecuadorian army and defend the nation’s borders against the Peruvians. The televised anthem featured clips of patriotic crowds waving Ecuadorian flags, coffins of the fallen being carried from army-helicopters, as well as soldiers in motorized canoes with mounted machine guns, scanning the thick vegetation on the river banks for Peruvian invaders. The speech of former-President Sixto Durán invokes patriotic fervour, uniting the Ecuadorian people to defend the motherland against a common enemy. The chorus, “Heroes of the Cenepa, we are all heroes” is chanted as an indigenous leader speaks to the Ecuadorian media, his traditional feather-headress proudly flashed across the screen.
The Shuar have always been a proud and fierce nation of warriors—long-feared for their practice of shrinking and mummifying the heads of enemies killed in combat in the days before contact—and they were respected and admired by their military comrades. In the Cenepa War, they were charged with transporting food and munitions over inhospitable jungle terrain, running reconnaissance missions around enemy camps and fighting on the Amazonian frontline—a mineral-rich basin by the river Cenepa within the mountainous Condor Cordillera. While the ancient tradition of head-hunting is no longer practiced by the Shuar, the feats on the Amazonian battlefield of an elite unit of Special Forces made up indigenous Shuar, and their ethnic cousins the Achuar, had captured the imagination of the Ecuadorian people. They were known as the Arútam Brigade, or the Iwia—the Demons of the Jungle—and they had become the pride of the nation. They were the Heroes of the Cenepa.
As night fell over the Condor Cordillera, legend goes that when possessed by the sacred spirit of Arútam, these indigenous commandos could enter the enemy camp with the stealth of the jaguar and the cunning of the anaconda, and then, disappear into the night as silently as they came without alerting the lookouts. When the Peruvian military woke at dawn the next day they discovered evidence of the incursion when members of their regiment would not move—they were still sleeping, lifeless without heads.
These mythical war-stories of the Arútam Brigade on the Amazonian battlefield not only canonized the Shuar as defenders of the motherland at a time when the Ecuadorian people’s confidence in their own military had been shaken by their two previous military defeats—they struck fear into the heart of the invading Peruvian army. The Shuar Peoples helped the Ecuadorian government and its military win the War of the Cenepa. Ecuador did not yield a millimeter more of its territory to its much larger neighbor Peru—and the Shuar were proud to have served for their military and for their country in a time of need.
ECUADOR’S PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS AND BACKLASH TO THE MINING BOOM
The conflict in Nankints could not have come at a worse time for President Correa and his ruling party Alianza Pais. As the incumbent government closes ranks around Correa’s anointed successor—former Vice-President Lenin Moreno—in the upcoming February presidential elections, the Shuar uprising in the Condor Cordillera has again illuminated the dark underbelly of President Correa’s so-called socialist “Citizens Revolution”. The outgoing president has spent unprecedented sums of money on infrastructure projects and social programs on his ambitious socialist agenda, but a perfect storm of plummeting oil prices, economic mismanagement, and numerous corruption scandals, have almost bankrupted the country.
It took multiple billion-dollar loans from China to artificially prop up the Ecuadorian economy – and with it President Correa’s popularity. It will take generations for Ecuador to pay back this debt, and in the last few years the cash-strapped administration of President Correa has sold mining concessions to the Chinese that span a third of the country’s vast Amazon rainforest, as well as opened up large sections of pristine Andes wetlands and cloud-forests for mining in fragile ecosystems such as Intag and Quimsacocha.
These mines have become even more invasive and destructive to Ecuador’s richly biodiverse ecosystems and rural communities, exposing President Correa’s brand of socialism for what it is: militarized neoliberalism where anyone who is unfortunate enough to live above an oil or mineral deposit is stripped of their rights at the point of a gun.
As the leader of the Shuar federation Agustin Wachupa sits in prison, his thoughts have no doubt called upon the memory of Jose Isidro Tendetza Antun – another Shuar leader who fought against another open-cut copper mine along the Condor Cordillera. El Mirador was the first open-cut mine in the country and was widely viewed as establishing a precedent for the nation’s booming mining industry. For years, Tendetza had organized community opposition to the mine, protesting the contamination of the region’s rivers as well as the eviction of rural and indigenous people who lived on the lands now being consumed by El Mirador.
For his opposition against the mine, the late Shuar leader received constant harassment and death threats against him—including in 2012, when his house and crops were set on fire by men his family claimed were employees of the Chinese mine. Tendetza filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. In 2014, as the Shuar leader prepared to leave for Lima, Peru, to give a speech at the 2014 Climate Change Conference, he went missing. After a tip-off, the son of Tendetza found his father in a grave marked “no name”. There were strangulation marks around his father’s throat, as well as broken bones and other signs of torture that marked the Shuar leaders body. His arms and legs were also trussed with a blue rope. Tendetza was the third Shuar leader to be violently murdered for opposing the mining industry since Bosco Wisum in 2009 and Freddy Taish in 2013.
As is the case with many other large scale mining projects across Ecuador, a process of Free and Informed Prior Consent and Consultation was not carried out with the Shuar community over the exploration and exploitation of the minerals beneath the land in Nankints. This means Explorcobres S.A. (EXSA) is now in direct violation of Section 7 Article 57 of the Ecuadorian Constitution, as well as the rights enshrined in Articles 6 and 15.2 of Convention 169 of the ILO, and Article 19 of the U.N. Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
“Our territory is not only Nankints,” the Shuar Peoples stated in a letter. “In fact, more than 38 percent of our territory has been concessioned to large-scale mining. All the riverbanks of the Zamora and Santiago basins have been concessioned to small-scale mining. A gigantic hydroelectric dam is about to be built. So our question is: where do they want us to live?”
“The invasion of oil and mining companies, now Chinese and Canadian and others, are accomplices with this regime and their military police and followers,” said Domingo Ankuash, the historic leader of the Shuar. “The constitution, conventions and international declarations of human rights as well as the United Nations are worthless with no coercive power to stop this aggression. The Shuar Peoples are suffering at this time.”
Published on Esperanza Project: On Christmas Eve, 2018, in a remote corner of the Texan desert, Esperanza Project editor Tracy Barnett interviewed activists organizing a creative resistance against the detainment of thousands of youths at the now defunct Tornillo Child Detention Center. It was deep in winter and the wind bit at the chain-link fence as she spoke withEl Paso native and “artivist”Juan Ortiz, as he put the last decorative touches on a Christmas tree constructed with plastic, barbed wire, and ornaments made with tear gas canisters. At the top of the tree, like an angel of nativity, was the image of 7-year-old Jackelin Caal Maquin, an indigenous Guatemalan child of Qʼeqchiʼ Maya descent, who died in the custody of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The cause of death was listed as septic shock, fever and dehydration.
As he decorated the tree with plastic water jugs left for refugees moving northwards across the desert, Juan told Tracy: “I wanted to highlight the way water has been weaponized and used as a tool of oppression.” The pair were unaware another indigenous child in the custody of Customs and Border Protection would not live to see Christmas Day. Eight-year-old Felipe Gómez Alonzo of the Chuj Maya people from northeastern Guatemala would be pronounced dead at 11:48 p.m that very Christmas Eve. And Felipe wouldn’t be the last child. On the other side of the chain-link fence, the heavily guarded tent city of Tornillo housed over 2,300 migrant children at the height of its operations. And this camp was one of many.
At least 5,400 Central American children were forcibly separated from their parents to appease a vainglorious president and his xenophobic base. Their suffering was needless. Physical and sexual abuse of migrant children inside the government-funded detention facilities was rife. Meanwhile, detention camps ran a profit for shareholders and private contractors. The migration crisis became a multi-million dollar bonanza for a for-profit prison system operating on an industrial scale. Neglect was great for the bottom line. Under President Trump’s “zero tolerance” border policies, the letter and spirit of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was violated on American soil more than at any other point in modern history.
The Tornillo Child Detention Centre was eventually closed, the children it housed were scattered across other detention centers in different parts of the country. One day the stories of these children will be told with their own words through their own eyes. Today we can tell the stories of the men and women who fought for them on the other side of the chain-link fence. This longform article will take you from the march on Tornillo Child Detention Center and the height of President Trump’s child separation policy, to President Biden’s decision to reopen a Trump-era detention centre in Carrizo Springs, Texas, to hold 700 teenagers at the end of February.
A summary of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child helps us adults understand and digest the 43 Articles in the human rights treaty in easy-to-read English without having to know the intricacies and nuances of international humanitarian law. Article 6 of the summary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states: “Every child has the right to life. Governments must do all they can to ensure that children survive and develop to their full potential.”
UNICEF’s “child-friendly” summary of the international human rights convention speaks directly to the child: “You have the right to be alive.”
But something happened that Christmas inside the sprawling and overcrowded immigration detention centers that led to the deaths of Jackelin and Felipe. And these were not isolated incidents: three other children would die in the coming months. Article 6 on the child’s right to life had been violated. The consequences were catastrophic.
8-year-old Felipe Gómez Alonzo died of a staph infection inside Customs and Border Protection. Artist credit: Ruben Guadalupe Marquez
“The purpose of CBP isn’t long-term detention,” Allegra Love, an immigration lawyer and former head of the Santa Fe Dreamers Project, wrote in The Esperanza Project. “In fact, with children, there are rules about how fast they have to be transferred. In the case of the last boy who died, the law required that he be transferred in 72 hours.”
Allegra goes on to detail the death of child after child—five Central American children in five months, inside CPB custody…
– Dec. 8, 2019. Jakelin Caal Maquin, age 8, dies of an infection after being in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody in New Mexico and Texas.
– 16 days later on Dec. 24, 2018, Felipe Gomez Alonzo, age 8, dies of the flu and infection in CBP custody in New Mexico.
-April 30, 11 days after he was apprehended by CBP, Juan de León Gutiérrez, age 16, died of an infection after being transferred to Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) custody in Texas.
-May 14, an unnamed 2-year-old died in the hospital after being in CBP custody in Texas. [Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez, the fourth Guatemalan child to die in as many months]
-Six days later, on May 20, Carlos Hernandez Vasquez, age 16, died in CBP custody in Texas after having flu-like symptoms.
These migrants, as I have mentioned every single time I write or utter a word about them, are not breaking the law. They are lawfully seeking protection from violence. Yet rather than protection, they are met with brutal policies designed to make the journey as difficult as possible. Protection would be apprehending someone and doing a full medical screening and holding them just as long as needed to ascertain their identity and their intention to seek protection in the US. It would mean making sure that while they are in the custody of the US government they have food, water, proper medical care, and a proper place to bathe and sleep. Instead, these people are put in the “hieleras.” If you don’t know what that is, do a Google image search with the terms “hielera CBP” (if you just put “hielera” you will get pictures of coolers).
— Allegra Love
Mother Jones summarized the conditions for Central American children detained in the American borderlands like this: “Migrants—especially unaccompanied kids—allege suffering a lot of harm at the hands of CBP agents: sexual assault, beatings, a lack of basic toiletries. But few forms of abuse are more pervasive than the hielera—the Spanish word for “icebox” that detainees and guards alike use to describe CBP’s frigid holding cells.”
Furthermore: Article 27 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states: “Every child has the right to a standard of living that is good enough to meet their physical and social needs and support their development. Governments must help families who cannot afford to provide this.” The child-friendly text tells children: “You have the right to food, clothing, a safe place to live and to have your basic needs met. You should not be disadvantaged so that you can’t do many of the things other kids can do.”
Two young girls watch a World Cup soccer match on a TV from their holding area where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held (Associated Press / ACLU)
ARTICLE 24 ON THE CHILD’S RIGHT TO HEALTH
Article 24 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child states: “Every child has the right to the best possible health. Governments must provide good quality health care, clean water, nutritious food, and a clean environment and education on health and well-being so that children can stay healthy. Richer countries must help poorer countries achieve this.”
UNICEF’s child-friendly summary of Article 24 speaks to kids: “You have the right to the best health care possible, safe water to drink, nutritious food, a clean and safe environment, and information to help you stay well.”
When a child gets sick, there is a moral and legal obligation for governments to attend to that child’s health. Putting vulnerable migrant children in hieleras or iceboxes is not conducive to Article 24 by any stretch of the imagination. That’s because these policies were designed to be a deterrent, punitive in nature, and not in the interests of children, their health, safety, or development. Ana Tiffany Deveze, a teacher, community organizer, and mother of two, wrote her powerful testimony for The Esperanza Project to illuminate the conditions inside immigration detention on the American borderlands:
“On Dec. 8, 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquín died in El Paso while in Border Patrol custody. Then, on Christmas Eve, Felipe Gómez Alonzo, 8 years old, died in El Paso while in Border Patrol custody. That night we heard reports of hundreds of migrants dumped by officials at the Greyhound station in El Paso’s historic Duranguito neighborhood…”
…
They were covered in dust, bird poop, and their hair was matted and speckled with rubble. They couldn’t form a line, they only sat at the tables and stared, shellshocked, as volunteers mobilized into a type of triage mode. One woman told Claudia that her child was sick while they were under the bridge and she asked for medical assistance but wasn’t seen until her child was projectile vomiting incessantly. A lot of the children were vomiting that night. She told me there were points where she thought the children weren’t eating because they were in shock, but then they would run to the toilet and she realized they couldn’t eat because they were so sick.
…
Consider this, along with the fact that in the weeks following my arrest, reports emerged of vigilante militia members detaining migrant families, including children, at gunpoint at their camp in Sunland Park. They were said to have been camped out at the site for months, detaining people at gunpoint, and posting videos of migrant families on their knees while Border Patrol agents stood aside. The police were reported to have visited the site and asked the militia, who called themselves the United Constitutional Patriots, to leave the site by the week’s end, meaning that they had several days to stop trespassing. The group was evicted the following day and are said to have planned to relocate and continue operations, however.
Ana Tiffany Deveze remembers being given a card with the now iconic image of Jakelin Caal, the 7-year-old Qʼeqchiʼ Maya girl surrounded by foliage, rose petals, and a solar halo. “It was to remind me of why we do what we do, and I thought about the way she died, sick in Customs and Border Patrol custody. These are the conditions that children are being subjected to in the United States, while they get sick and we lose them.”
Jakelin Ameí Rosmery Caal Maquin died on December 6 of septic shock, fever, and dehydration while in US Border Patrol custody. Artist credit: Ruben Guadalupe Marquez
ARTICLE 22 ON A CHILD SEEKING REFUGE
Article 22 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Childstates: “If a child is seeking refuge or has refugee status, governments must provide them with appropriate protection and assistance to help them enjoy all the rights in the Convention. Governments must help refugee children who are separated from their parents to be reunited with them.”The child-friendly text speaks to the heart of it: “You have the right to special protection and help if you are a refugee (if you have been forced to leave your home and live in another country), as well as all the rights in this Convention.”
Jakelin Caal’s now iconic image became a symbol for those who believed that what was happening was wrong. Wrong in the letter and the spirit of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Wrong in every sense of the word. Her image is distributed at peaceful protests, carried around in wallets and purses, and appeared on Juan Ortiz’ Christmas tree beside a chain-link fence. For Gaby Zavala, however, it was the image of a 15-year old Honduran girl broadcast on TV as she sat in her obstetrician’s waiting room in the Texan city of Brownsville that burned into her memory and galvanized her to action.
Across the river in Matamoros, Mexico, the news showed the Honduran teenager swept away by the current as she bathed in the Río Grande. An asylum-seeker filmed the September incident as two others pulled her from the water, trying—and failing—to resuscitate her. Gaby was moved to action in her obstetrician’s waiting room. Inside of two days, she had organized a team of volunteers that raised enough money to set up basic bucket-bathing shelters and bring in a truck of water so that migrants could safely bathe. Within a month, she had put down a deposit on a house across the street from the encampment and opened the Resource Center for Asylum Seekers. Gaby, who was born in Brownsville and grew up on both sides of the river, remembers the moment. “That’s when we said, ‘No más —This can’t happen again.’”
‘It’s easier to control people after they are emotionally and mentally broken down — and that is exactly what is happening inside of these detention centers.’
Gaby Zavala holds a list in her hand as she makes her way through a maze of nearly 100 tents in a plaza in Matamoros, Mexico, looking for asylum seekers to assist that day. Her organization of volunteers, the Asylum Seeker Network of Support, had already identified a number of migrants who needed help with specific tasks such as case management, help finding temporary shelter, and navigating the dangers of living on the streets of Matamoros. Like most of the families she assists that day, a 23-year-old man from Honduras and his toddler have been living in the plaza next to the Brownsville & Matamoros International Bridge. The site is just an hour from the place where they were kidnapped en route to the US and held for ransom.
– Garet Bleir
ARTICLE 33 ON PROTECTION FROM THE DRUG TRADE
Article 33 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states: “Governments must protect children from the illegal use of drugs and from being involved in the production or distribution of drugs.” The child-friendly version for Article 33 tells children: “You have the right to protection from harmful drugs and from the drug trade.”
It’s New Year’s, 2020, a little over a year ago now, and a year after the image of a little Guatemalan girl—like the star of Bethlehem—blessed a Christmas tree beside a chain-link fence to illuminate the way towards a more moral universe. The Tornillo Child Detention Centre is now closed. Thousands more children are still held in an extralegal greyzone in detention camps across the American borderlands. In a number of weeks, the coronavirus would wreak havoc across the country and terrorize the children crammed into caged holding cells and hielera iceboxes across the detention camps in the American borderlands.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, developed in conjunction with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, has forced migrants fleeing cartel violence into camps on the riverbanks of the Río Grande. In the weeks over New Year’s 2020, Tracy Barnett interviewed the migrant families in Matamoros, Mexico:
On the Mexican side of the Río Grande there are no heavily guarded detention camps, military-grade canvas tents or hieleras. On the other side of the border thousands of children aren’t huddled in cages, cocooned in aluminum foil blankets for warmth, like in sprawling detention camps across Texas or New Mexico or Arizona. But the drug wars still rage. Cartels still recruit young boys as foot soldiers for their wars of attrition. Human traffickers still prey on young girls for prostitution like coyotes. Missing persons posters dominate community noticeboards in the makeshift camps that populate the riverbanks of the Río Grande. And American made military grade weapons are still smuggled across the border at an industrial scale to empower organized crime as they cash in on the United States’ insatiable demand for opiates and cocaine.
There is no simple answer to the drug wars and the refugees they cause but there is an obligation to help. Or at the very least do less harm. The United States both fuels and funds the drug wars across Latin America: its high-caliber assault rifles and other weapons of war that are smuggled southward over porous borders combined with the American market’s insatiable demand for billions of dollars of narcotics have both profoundly altered the landscape. Hundreds of thousands are dead and many thousands more are missing and the caravans of refugees fleeing poverty and cartel violence continue to move northwards towards the American borderlands and asylum.
Sarah Towle, the award winning author and contributor for The Esperanza Project, investigates the origins of the migration crisis from its roots in Central American civil wars to Los Angeles prisons in her profile on the pioneering human rights activist Jennifer Harbury:
The gang came for “Sam” on his 15th birthday. He’d said “no” to them before. This time, they gave him an ultimatum: Join us or die. But poor though his family was, Sam did not want to enter a world of crime and brutality from which there was no escape.
The gang, born in Los Angeles and known throughout the Americas as Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, doesn’t give third chances. The next time they came for Sam it was to run him over with a car.
They left him for dead. Remarkably, Sam pulled through. When he awoke three days later, with a head injury and badly bruised body, his mother pressed a wad of cash into his hand — about $30, maybe a little more. It was all she had in the world, plus what she was able to beg off friends. Like so many other Northern Triangle mothers, she faced a Sophie’s choice: unable to protect her boy from the cartel gangs, she had to kick him out of the nest. It was the only way to save his life…maybe. Along with the money, and through a veil of tears, she gave Sam one simple word of parental advice: “Run!”
Sam ran toward El Norte. He traveled on foot and by bus from Honduras through Guatemala, then rode the back of La Bestia, the perilous freight train, through Mexico to Texas. En route, he saw fellow migrants miss their step and get sucked between train and rails, their bodies shredded. He learned quickly how to identify and to steer clear of the gang members who preyed upon the migrants as they made their way north. He met teenaged girls, full with the children of their cartel rapists. He met other boys whose loved ones had been exterminated when they, like him, turned down MS-13 or Barrio 18 or Los Zetas. He met families of means back home who, robbed of every penny they’d painstakingly saved to pay a coyote to get them safely to The Promised Land, were reduced to riding the dangerous rails with him.
Young Sam ran toward the promise of a better life. He made it to the US border at Texas, where he tried to swim across the Río Grande and nearly drowned. He was plucked from the swirling waters by members of one gang or another, but he managed to get away.
At Reynosa, Mexico, a recognized US port of entry, Sam walked across the bridge to the Customs Border & Protections (CBP) office at the northern end. There, he requested asylum. He was labeled a “UAC” — government-speak for an unaccompanied minor — and passed into the bureaucratic tangle that is the Office of Refugee Resettlement. ORR kept him in custody, locked up in a “shelter” — government-speak for an unregulated, off-limits detention center for kids — until his 18th birthday, when they could not legally hold him any longer. There, he received little education and was sexually abused by staff at the shelter in which he was incarcerated, as were a number of other kids.
ARTICLES 5, 9, & 10 ON CHILD SEPARATION AND FAMILY REUNIFICATION
Article 9 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states: “Children must not be separated from their parents against their will unless it is in their best interests.” The child-friendly text for Article 9 says: “You have the right to live with your parent(s), unless it is bad for you. You have the right to live with a family who cares for you.”
Article after article of the convention to protect children was wilfully and negligently violated during the Trump administration, but it was the violation of Article 9 that drew international condemnation and outcry from every corner of the planet.
Sarah Towle’s analysis of the testimonies contained in legal filings illuminates the trail of destruction wrought by the policy of child separation.
“Now Federal Judge Dana Sabraw, ruling in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in the matter of Ms. L. v. US ICE, ordered that all separated families be reunified by the end of July 2018. However, though the cruel policy had been in practice for months before it was publicly rolled out in the Río Grande Valley (RGV) that spring, there had never been a system for keeping track of who was taken from whom. ICE didn’t have the data to comply with Judge Sabraw’s order.”
…
“An immigration attorney, Jodi knew the only way to reunite separated families was to spring the parents from ICE prisons first, while simultaneously tracking down the kids, so reunifications could happen as quickly as possible. ICE was desperate for help.” writes Sarah Towle. “The officer asked if I’d be willing to share my list that located lost parents and children.”
Sarah Towle
Family members had in many cases been incarcerated miles apart. Parents had been fast-tracked for deportation, turning babies and toddlers, too young to provide a parent’s name or country of origin, into orphans and wards of the US government. The government didn’t have a tracking system and migrant children disappeared into the for-profit prisons and risked being lost from their loved ones forever. Children are still missing. The state’s failure on every conceivable level was catastrophic.
At the McAllen Courthouse the following Monday, Jodi saw it with her own eyes: “Moms, dads, they were distraught, beside themselves. They couldn’t attend to the proceedings or respond effectively to the judges’ questions. They just wanted to know what happened to their kids.”
According to a second Federal class-action lawsuit, Dora v. Sessions, “Every single parent described the moment that their children were taken from them as the single most vividly horrifying experience of their lives: ‘shattering,’ ‘unbearable,’ ‘a nightmare,’” (p. 12, para 46). Having fled their home countries, in large part to protect their children, they were emotionally and psychologically traumatized at losing them, most cruelly, to men in uniform.
“Dora” fled with her seven-year-old son after years of extraordinary abuse at the hands of her husband. She arrived at the border and turned herself in to immigration agents, requesting asylum. When a CBP official took her boy, she begged and pleaded, explaining that after all he’d been through, he needed her. The officer told her “she deserved to lose her child and would not see him again until he was 18 years old” (p. 13).
“Alma” was taken to court the day after requesting asylum for her and her two children, aged seven and nine. When she returned to the CBP processing center, her kids were gone. She, too, was told she would never see them again: “that they would remain in the US and she would be deported” (p. 14).
Likewise, “Esperanza,” whose husband “gifted” her to a MS-13 gang leader as a sex slave, ran to save her son, who witnessed her being raped too many times to count. A CBP officer told her, “he belongs to the US government now” (p. 17).
Herself a mother of three, as well as a fluent Spanish speaker, Jodi understood their stories — and their pain — on a deep level. She obtained the “Alien” Identification numbers (A#s) of seven women in court that first day. She followed them to PIDC where they’d been sent. She told them, “I’m going to get your children back.”
Article 5 on UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states: “Governments must respect the rights and responsibilities of parents and carers to provide guidance and direction to their child as they grow up, so that they fully enjoy their rights.” Furthermore, Article 10 on Family Reunification states: “Governments must respond quickly and sympathetically if a child or their parents apply to live together in the same country. If a child’s parents live apart in different countries, the child has the right to visit and keep in contact with both of them.“
ARTICLES 3 AND 4 ON THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE CHILD AND THE LAWS TO PROTECT CHILDREN
Article 3 of the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child states: “the best interests of the child must be a top priority in all decisions and actions that affect children.” Article 4 of the convention states that “Governments must do all they can to make sure every child can enjoy their rights by creating systems and passing laws that promote and protect children’s rights.“
The New York Times reported that: ‘This transformation of the American immigration system has been perhaps the [Trump] administration’s boldest accomplishment, overseen with single-minded focus by Stephen Miller, a top adviser to President Trump with an affinity for white nationalism. Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general in the spring of 2018 when child separation came into force, is on the record saying, “We need to take away children.”‘
Age made no difference. Even nursing mothers were cleaved from their babies to satisfy an affinity for white nationalism over the best interests of the child. Jennifer Senior in the New York Times called out a rap sheet of Trump lackeys—Rod Rosenstein, Jeff Sessions, and Stephen Miller—who were the architects of child separation with these words: “Let’s start by calling this policy what it really was: A state-directed effort to intern immigrant children, some exceptionally young — so young that they were still breastfeeding, so young that they were preverbal, so young that they were not yet aware of their parents’ names. To wrench these children from their mothers and fathers and detain them for months on end required a bureaucracy, with cruel architects at the top — specifically, the former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy adviser — and a dedicated pyramid of helpers directly below.”
The systems and laws to protect children failed. The best interests of the child were not a priority for decision-makers. A toxic cocktail of institutional neglect, bureaucratic ineptitude, and racist malice trickling down from the very top of the Trump pyramid scheme of governance made this possible. There’s no doubt child separation was the touchstone of Trump’s malignant immigration policy, but the culture of child abuse and impunity inside CBP and ICE has been documented for years. Garet Bleir, for Intercontinental Cry and the Esperanza Project, explored the history:
But the abuse did not start with President Trump. There has long been a culture of abuse within CBP and ICE as noted through newly released documents. In mid-October, the ACLU Foundation of San Diego and Imperial Counties published approximately 35,000 pages of heavily redacted material from DHS, ICE, and CBP after a lengthy legal battle. The documents outline abuse and neglect of unaccompanied immigrant children in US CBP and ICE custody between 2009 to 2014 including denial of medical care, verbal threats, physical and sexual abuse, and inhumane detention conditions.
Within these documents, children described being run over with vehicles, stomped on and kicked, tased, and punched as well as a wide range of verbal abuse. One complaint against ICE detailed an agent that told child detainees he was transporting to “’shut the f*** up’ and threatened that ‘if I hear any s*** in the van I’m going to smash your f***ing faces in,’” the documents read.
Throughout the complaints, children noted being deprived both of drinkable water as well as edible food and held in unsanitary and freezing cells with “inadequate bedding and no access to personal hygiene items.” Children also reported being threatened with death and rape, told to remove their clothes before being questioned, and CBP officials inappropriately touching them. After Trump’s inauguration it is clear that these abusive conditions did not improve but in many cases continued and intensified.
RATIFICATION OF THE UN CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD
The United States has signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It even honorably contributed in the drafting of the convention, but it is still the only member state of the United Nations that is not a party to the convention. If a Joe Biden presidency hopes to fulfil its election pledge to restore the soul of America where the best interests of the child are sacred, then it must first ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Joe Biden has generated considerable goodwill at this early stage of his presidency for rolling back the most racist and punitive policies of his predecessor that targeted migrant children. In recent weeks the Migrant Protection Protocols or “Remain in Mexico” policy was reversed, allowing thousands of asylum seekers stranded in border cartel zones to finally reunite with their waiting families in the US. The infamous Matamoros encampment, home to thousands of marooned families, was closed. However, the root problems have not been resolved, and a legal limbo awaits asylum seekers arriving at the border every day, including thousandds of unaccompanied minors. And immigrant advocates insist that the same level of scrutiny should be applied to Biden’s policies as that of his predecessor.
As of March 8, 2021, the number of unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the US border has tripled in two weeks to 3,250. The New York Timesreported that more than 1,360 unaccompanied children have been detained in CBP beyond the 72 hours that the law permits before the child must be transferred to a shelter. According to the New York Times, until last Friday the shelters managed by Health and Human Services were at reduced capacity because of the pandemic. Now as another surge of migrant children reaches the border, these restrictions have been lifted and the CBP holding cells are close to “maximum capacity”.
There is no easy answer to the migration crisis. And there is no airbrushing the fact that these facilities are the same detention centers that attracted global condemnation and were often referred to as child cages or concentration camps. Biden should be applauded for creating a taskforce to reunite migrant children that were forcibly separated from their parents under Trump’s policy of zero tolerance. The reports that a new camp, originally created for oil field workers in Carrizo Springs, Texas, is to be reconverted to hold 700 teenagers, are troubling. The Convention of the Rights of the Child can act as a North Star, guiding policymakers, with deference to Article 3 of the Conventions: “The best interests of the child must be a top priority in all decisions and actions that affect children.”
Until then, The Esperanza Project will continue covering stories from the frontline of the migration crisis across the American borderlands and beyond. And we will leave you with one more story about hope that touches on Article 28 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Childwhich states: “Every child has the right to an education. Primary education must be free and different forms of secondary education must be available to every child. Discipline in schools must respect children’s dignity and their rights. Richer countries must help poorer countries achieve this.”
On a trip to the Matamoros refugee camp on Mexico’s northern border, Tracy Barnett met Nathan Boddy and his wife, Dr. Johanna Dreiling, who were among the surge of grassroots volunteers responding to the migration crisis. Dr. Johanna worked at the camp clinic alongside volunteers, and Nathan chronicled his wife’s work, as well as his efforts to educate migrant children who had made the perilous journey of over a thousand kilometers.
“Twice I brought my two young boys to work with me in Mexico. I felt it important that they be there to see this point in our nation’s history, even if it’s not occurring on our soil. I was glad to see them play with other children in the camp and I fully realize that their impact in the migrant camp might be greater than my own.
During one sunny afternoon I set a table with pencils, crayon and a stack of blank paper. I gave my boys some math problems to tackle and before long there were at least eight children at the table doing the same. I’ll admit that teaching multiplication and division in Spanish might have been more confusing to the children than it was a help, so I was relieved when several kids asked if they could just color instead. Half an hour later one young girl from El Salvador who’d been particularly bright with her math problems, approached me with a sheet of paper. Upon it she’d colored a scene that was easily distinguishable as a grass-lined beach and blue ocean water filled with sea creatures. What struck me most were the structures at the center of the picture: a swing set and monkey bars. She thanked me for teaching her, gave me the picture and disappeared with the others.”
This is the final installment of “The Guardians of Mother Earth,” an exclusive four-part series examining the Indigenous U’wa struggle for peace in Colombia.
The vast wetland savanna called Los Llanos stretches thousands of miles into Venezuela but it begins on the U’wa’s traditional territory at the base of the foothills below the cloud forests and paramos surrounding the sacred mountain Zizuma. For the last few years the worst fears of local environmentalists fighting on this forgotten frontline of climate change have come true: excessive exploitation of petroleum in the Casanare region on the eastern border of the U’wa resguardo helped cause the desertification of large tracts of land in the swamps and grasslands across the province. An estimated 20,000 animals have died of thirst as traditional water holes evaporated and cracked under the strain of complete ecosystem collapse. Now, the only sign of life in places that once teemed with native species such as capybaras, deer, foxes, fish, turtles and reptiles, is the occasional vulture.
As Highway 66 snakes around the base of the mountain range, it passes several fortified military outposts guarding bridges and monitoring the flow of traffic towards Cubará in the Boyacá Frontier District. These bridges that once conquered the massive flows streaming down from the paramos above the clouds in the west now overlook small streams of water between riverbed boulders as Colombia plunges into a severe drought.
One of the many rivers that flow from the mountains in U’wa territory that are now almost dry as Colombia plunges into a severe drought. Photo: Jacob Lyng
Seventeen years ago, in the final week of April, 1999, an international event was organized known as U’wa Solidarity Week. It was the early days of climate change awareness when the world was just beginning to understand Global Warming and its potentially devastating effects on the planet. The international campaign against the oil multinational Occidental Petroleum had hit critical-mass after the kidnapping and assassination of Terry Freitas, the 24 year old co-founder of the U’wa Defense Working Group, and the two renowned native american activists Lahe’enda’e Gay and Ingrid Washinawatok, by FARC guerillas in eastern Colombia. Protests against Occidental Petroleom in support of the U’wa were being held in eight cities across the United States as well as in London, Hamburg, Lima and Nairobi. Meanwhile, in the background, the burgeoning power of a very young cyber-network called the Internet had created a space for the remote U’wa nation, heralding a new age of activism that facilitated vital connections between grassroots indigenous movements and environmental activists abroad.
Berito traveled to Los Angeles with another U’wa leader, Mr. Nuniwa, where the two men were received by organizations such as Rainforest Action Network, Project Underground, Amazon Watch and half a dozen other groups that planned to converge on Occidental Petroleum’s Annual Shareholder Meeting on friday, April 30th, 17 years ago.
At a dinner before the shareholder meeting the two U’wa leaders held hands to say grace with the two-dozen American activists around a feast of primarily vegan salads and vegetarian stews for the activists and dishes of meat for the chiefs. With the assassination of the American activists still painfully fresh in the minds of the the protest movement, the U’wa leaders proclaimed that after his death Terry Freitas had visited the dreams of the Werjayá, the shamanic healers of the U’wa in charge of communicating with the superior powers that flow through nature. In the dream Freitas was clutching a white snail shell, a symbol of spiritual purity and peacemaking, and the Werjayá declared the apparition of a god. The two U’wa leaders Berito and Nuniwa invoked their ancestors at the dinner table and summoned the spirit of Terence Freitas.
The following Wednesday, halfway through U’wa Solidarity Week, about 200 or so people marched from the University of California, where Freitas had studied, to Occidental’s headquarters a mile away. Many of the protestors were led away by the police.
“Why don’t they just finish us off for good, so we don’t have to struggle?” Berito told the Wall Street Journal, while his colleague Mr. Nuniwa expressed surprise that their march lasted as long as it did, considering the extremely aggressive tendencies of Colombia’s riot police.
The movement placed an advertisement in the New York Times — endorsed by Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Earth, Oilwatch, Oxfam-America, Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, the Center for International Environmental Law and others — warning Occidental shareholders of the political and environmental risks of the mining project: “U’wa territory will not be spared the oil wars raging in the nearby Arauca area, where a violent attack on Oxy’s pipeline occurs every eight days. Meanwhile, those familiar with U’wa culture warn that their suicide pact must be taken seriously. U’wa oral histories recount an event four hundred years ago, when an U’wa band leaped from a cliff rather than submit to the Conquistadors.”
As protestors picketed the building hosting the shareholder meeting, inside Occidental’s chairman and CEO Ray Irani, seethed as the U’wa leader Berito lectured him for 45 minutes. Berito sang a sacred song in the U’wa tongue which he told protestors the previous night at dinner would be about “Mother Ocean and her breath, the wind, which sweeps up our words to the gods.” The 1,000 or so shareholders in attendance applauded the U’wa leader. Chairman Irani’s response was to declare: “The fact of the matter is your problems should be discussed with the Colombian government, not here… It doesn’t matter what Occidental does or doesn’t do.”
The Sinsinawa Dominican nuns, who held 100 Oxy shares, proposed that the oil multinational hire an independent firm to analyze the potential impact on the company’s stock if the U’wa people’s pledge to commit mass-suicide was fullfilled. The proposal, which Terry Freitas had helped draft, went on to win approval from 13 percent of Oxy shareholders, totaling over 40,000,000 shares, exceeding the expectations of the activists and forcing those opposed to consider the consequences.
After the meeting, Chairman Irani and the other directors made a stealthy exit out a side door where their limousines waited on the opposite side of the building to the protestors. Irani told the Wall Street Journal, “The U’wa use these activists very effectively.” Meanwhile Oxy Vice President Lawrence Meriage complained that the campaign was a concoction of certain activists up in the Bay Area and suggested the U’wa were being manipulated by U.S. environmentalists dead set against oil exploration, as well as the Colombian guerrillas that his company helped finance since the 1980’s. “We feel as a company that we’re caught in the middle,” said Mr. Meriage.
“We demand an announcement by Occidental that it is canceling its project on our ancestral land,” said Berito, “There is nothing else left for the company to do.”
As outrage over Occidental Petroleum’s behaviour in Colombia continued to grow, the oil multinational pushed ahead with their plans to exploit the petroleum block on U’wa territory. The next year, in February 2000, several hundred indigenous people and thousands of Colombians mobilized to block roads and prevent heavy machinery from arriving at the drilling site. The demonstration ended in tragedy as Colombian security forces violently dispersed the protestors with beatings and tear-gas leading to the tragic death of three U’wa children who drowned in the river while trying to flee government troops.
Occidental Petroleum pulled out of petroleum block on U’wa territory in May 2002, 10 years after the U’wa first threatened to commit mass suicide in protest. That same month, as senior members of the U.S. government publicly rallied against the FARC for the “terrorist murder” of Freitas, Gay and Washinawatok, President George H.W. Bush proposed $98 million in military aid to the Colombian government to protect Occidental Petroleum’s Caño-Limon-Covenas oil pipeline.
“We are dismayed to see the Administration’s cynical and exploitative use of Terence’s murder to justify further U.S. military aid to the Colombian armed forces,” friends and family of Freitas stated in response to the President’s proposal. “Employing Terence’s death as a means to continue perpetuating violence in Colombia grossly contradicts everything Terence believed in.”
“This isn’t about corporate welfare, it’s not about protecting Oxy,” a State Department official said. “It’s a security argument, not a U.S. economic interests argument.” The $4 million dollars that Occidental spent lobbying the U.S. government, however, certainly paid off for the company.
As the U’wa struggle slowly faded from the consciousness of the international community, the oil wars in eastern Colombia continued to escalate with the $98 million injection of U.S. military aid. Despite the U.S. State Department designating the AUC – the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia – as a terrorist group in 2001, these paramilitary death squads formed the vanguard of the Colombian Army’s surge into the ELN stronghold of Arauca province, along the Caño-Limon-Covenas pipeline.
The Colombian army, meanwhile, received additional funds totaling billions of dollars coinciding with the kidnapping and execution of thousands of Colombian civilians, whose bodies were then dressed up in guerrilla uniforms to artificially inflate body counts, a crime known as the “scandal of false positive”. Between 2000 and 2010 the Colombian military kidnapped and executed 164 civilians in Arauca, 122 in Boyaca, 301 in Norte de Santander, 209 in Casanare, the four provinces bordering the U’wa Nation’s territory.
Occidental Petroleum’s direct financial and logistical support to the Colombian military included a specialized meeting room inside the Oxy-fortified compound for the 18th Brigade that operates in Arauca and the Boyacá Fronteir District of Cubara with the mandate of protecting the Cano-Limon-Covenas. Commander César Oswaldo Morales of the military’s 18th Brigade was imprisoned in 2012 for kidnapping and executing civilians years earlier in northern Colombia.
In an effort to deescalate the war, an agreement between the government and right-wing paramilitaries saw the AUC begin to lay down arms in 2003. The demobilization, which is widely viewed as a failure, led to the rise of neo-paramilitary groups called BACRIM that continue to threaten and target the civilian population and indigenous people who protest the contamination of their lands and waters by oil operations in the region.
In 2006, the BACRIM inflicted a reign of terror in the Catacumbo region of Norte de Santander, displacing 8,000 civilians over a few months to the north of the U’wa resguardo’s border. It was the same year that Colombia’s Interior Ministry cleared the way for state-run Ecopetrol to begin new explorations in the U’wa territory on behalf of the Spanish oil giant RepSol, as well as on another site inside U’wa territory to the west of the Gibraltar drilling site.
There is not a pipeline on the planet that has been bombed as many times as the Caño-Limo-Covenas. It is an engineering marvel that reaches deep beneath the war-torn province of Arauca and stretches 780 kms (480 miles) across the country to the Caribbean and the effluent discharged into the rivers and lakes that surround the oil well make them no longer fit for human consumption. The several hundred bombings that have ruptured the length and breadth of the pipeline have also polluted 1,625 miles of rivers with thick cancerous crude, leaving a devastating legacy for the local indigenous and rural populations.
The major river in the region, the Arauca that separates Colombia and Venezuela, is experiencing reduced flows due to the drought and many of its tributaries drying up. It has also been affected by oil spills after bombings of the Caño-limon-covenas. Photo: Jacob Lyng
This particular environmental disaster is a symptom of a larger problem in Colombia with roots that reach deeper into a much darker cause. Across the country indigenous men, women and children from tribal nations both large and small are being murdered and displaced to make-way for mega-mining projects. In the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Kankuamo Indigenous Peoples were the victim of twin arson attacks on separate religious temples two days after they canceled consultations with the government to oppose 400 mining projects in the region that will affect 100,000 indigenous people. In the northern state of La Guajira, the multinational el Cerrajon mine is diverting 17 million liters of river water daily during a severe drought that has decimated rural people’s livestock and responsible for indigenous Wayuu children dying of thirst.
For the Wounaan Peoples on the pacific coast, 63 families have been displaced in the past year as petroleum exploration takes place on their ancestral lands. “We know that the peace process will open the way for megaprojects that bring international investments into our territory,” said one member of the Wounaan, “therefore we know that true peace will not come. For Indigenous Peoples the violence will not end with the peace process.”
The ability of the Colombian government to hold multinationals to account for crimes against the civilian population, Indigenous Peoples and the environment is limited while the country attempts to rebuild its crippled economy and frail state institutions after half a century of war. Despite this, predatory multinationals are currently suing the Colombian government for billions of dollars whenever it attempts to protect the environment: such as the $16.5 billion lawsuit that U.S. Tobie Mining and Energy launched against the government when it declared an area in the Amazon rainforest a National Park, where the U.S. company owns a mining concession; or the lawsuits launched by multinationals protesting the new law banning mining in the country’s paramos.
Seventeen years after her murder, Washinawatok’s words in her essay “On Working Towards Peace” now seem increasingly prophetic: “The roots of war and violence go deep, into the Earth herself. As an indigenous woman, I wish to simply state that until we make peace with Earth, there will be no peace in the human community.”
Written on the side of an U’wa school are the words: “nature is wise and as much as man tries he cannot overcome her.” Photo: Jake Ling
“In the late 90’s the U’wa struggle against Occidental Petroleum resonated with progressive social movements that were fighting corporate domination, the multilateral financial institutions like the World Bank and free trade agreements like NAFTA,” said Andrew Miller, Director of Advocacy at Amazon Watch. “The core U’wa messages have not changed, and once again we see synergies within the global conversations about climate change and the growing movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground.”
It was the multiple bomb attacks on the Caño-Limon-Covenas inside U’wa territory in March and April 2014, which not only showcased the indigenous nation’s vulnerability but also its strength. The subsequent 40-day protest in which petroleum engineers were prevented from accessing the bomb-site to fix the ruptured pipe cost the Colombian government $130 million dollars. The concessions that the state proceeded to make to the U’wa in exchange for stopping the protest included the dismantling of the gas exploration project in Magallanes; other points in the agreement have since been ignored.
A year later, the pipeline was bombed again on U’wa territory, contaminating the Cubogón and Arauca rivers and creating an environmental emergency that left the entire state of Arauca downstream without water. The Colombian government had still not fulfilled its side of the deal leading 40 organizations to sign an open letter to President Santos reminding him of the agreement.
At the end of March, 2016, two weeks after another twin-bomb attack on the Caño-Limon-Covenas, and only days after the U’wa mobilization surrounding the Cocuy National Park received the threatening photograph of the armed-sheep, Amazon Watch issued its highest red-alert to warn its network of concerned global citizens of the dangers facing the protestors. The International Urgent Action has so far received 5,000 signatures from people around the world supporting the U’wa’s demand of a direct dialogue with Colombia’s former Minister of Environment.
The requests were ignored; however, just two weeks ago, on April 25th, President Santos replaced the minister with Luis Gilberto Murillo, the former Governor of Choco province, who is himself a victim of the war after being kidnapped by paramilitaries. The new Minister for Environment is now presented with the opportunity to mend relations with the U’wa Peoples by handing over the administration of the Cocuy National Park, an act that would protect its precious ecosystems while providing a source of income to the communities via sustainable and responsible tourism. The government’s obligations under Colombian law, however, do not end there. The U’wa still urgently need access to better health-care facilities and clean drinking water to prevent the spread of tuberculosis and dysentery — two basic human rights that the international community can pressure President Santos to fulfill.
As the U’wa leader Berito recovers from tuberculosis in his wooden shack in the cloud forests on the eastern border of the United U’wa Resguardo, he is content at having officially changed his name late last year. The indigenous leader passed IC an original copy of his signed and stamped identification papers, issued to him a year earlier when he traveled to Bogotá to change his name from Roberto Cobaria, the name arbitrarily placed on him by Catholic missionaries. Now, the Colombian government must recognize him by the same name his people call him – Berito KuwarU’wa KuwarU’wa – the wise and powerful Werjayá whose life work has been to guide the people who know how to think and speak through the most violent and longest running armed conflict on the South American continent.
In the coming weeks or months when the FARC and Colombian government are expected to finalize a historic peace agreement, the war will not be over for the U’wa people. The Paramilitaries eventually dispersed, more BACRIM may be imprisoned, most of the FARC will probably demobilize, the ELN may lay down arms, the state military might be disciplined with court-martials, but the Colombian government will never give up its relentless thirst for the sacred blood of Mother Earth underneath the ancestral lands of the U’wa. Once again the U’wa are cornered on all sides with their backs against a cliff, but the question remains if the indigenous group will jump or if they will be pushed.
“The U’wa people are reaching out at a national and international level to ask for the unconditional assistance to our struggle that dates back many years,” Berito announced in 2014, before he became sick. “We refuse to be silent and we are going to mobilize ourselves and once again engage in protest actions against the extraction of oil which will damage our Mother Earth.”
Published on IC Magazine: This is the third installment of “The Guardians of Mother Earth,” an exclusive four-part series examining the Indigenous U’wa struggle for peace in Colombia.
In the cloud forests on the eastern cordillera of the Colombian Andes there is no internet, and phone reception is limited to a few lookouts on the craggy cliffs above the tree line. As news from the U’wa mobilization in the paramos surrounding the sacred Mount Zizuma filter down to the base of the mountain range in the Boyacá Frontier District on the Venezuelan border, Berito rests in his wooden shack recovering from tuberculosis. As he slowly convalesces, the indigenous leader has time to reflect on the struggle that has defined much of his life and can take pride in this next generation of pacifist U’wa warriors who have taken up the fight to save Mother Earth in his absence.
“When we start to educate, we need to educate two worlds,” Berito told IC. “One is of the west through its books, then there is the harmonious civilization of the spiritual, our own culture, which teaches peace with the environment and the house of nature.”
Education has been a key strategy to the U’wa leadership to ensure the tribe’s survival into the 21st century. Berito learned the importance of educating U’wa children about Natural Law, which predates and takes precedent over the laws of men, as the result of a childhood trauma: as a young boy, he was kidnapped by Catholic missionaries and forced to live in a convent until, after several years, his mother rescued him. The missionaries named him Roberto Cobaria, after the Cobaria river that ran past the mission. This arbitrary name followed him for most of his life as it was the name officially recognized by the Colombian government.
The massive wooden convent that held the young Berito had enough rooms to house priests, nuns, cooks, cleaners, and at least 80 other abducted U’wa children. Today, however, this place that once perpetuated the cultural genocide of the U’wa has been transformed into a school that teaches their native language inside its classrooms with murals depicting their ancient mythology decorated along the walls. In the playground the unruly grass and patches of moss and lichens cover the cracked base of a neglected statue of the Virgin Mary, but the intergenerational scars left by the missionaries are evident in the survivors and their families.
“They took my mother when she was 6 or 7 years old and kept her there for about 16 years,” Luis Eduardo Caballero, the Fiscal (legal representative) of the U’wa Peoples, told IC. According to Caballero, the Catholic Church invaded from opposite ends of U’wa territory in the late 1940’s via the Andean plateaus of Boyacá as well as the lowlands beside the Cobaria and Arauca rivers. A rival evangelical organization called the Summer Institute of Linguistics, located a short drive outside of U’wa territory, was also involved in the systematic kidnapping of indigenous children.
“They prohibited our rituals, our fasts, our celebrations called the dance,” said Caballero, adding that the missionaries lured the children away under the guise of providing free education. Those inside the convent who spoke their native language were punished. “They weren’t able to make my mother stop speaking U’wa, but many others, yes.”
The Catholic mission that once perpetuated the cultural genocide of the U’wa has been transformed into a school that teaches the U’wa native language. Photo: Jacob Lyng
As Berito grew to adulthood, he served as the governor of the U’wa and became a spiritual authority or Werjayá in the U’wa tongue, a shamanic healer in charge of communicating with the superior powers that inhabit nature: the rivers, the plants, the sun, and the stars. His childhood experience in the convent galvanized him to take the fight for his people’s rights outside the isolated cloud forests to the capital Bogotá and then beyond Colombia’s borders. It was only until December of last year, that Berito traveled to a judicial office in the capital to officially change his name from Roberto Cobaria, that which was placed on him by the Catholics, to Berito KuwarU’wa KuwarU’wa, the name used by his people.
The leaders significance as an influential elder statesmen for Colombia’s Indigenous Peoples has not gone unremarked. “Berito taught Colombia’s indigenous people and the world the importance of the globalization of resistance, how to defend the beloved Earth and how to fight against climate change.” said Luis Fernando Arias, the Chief Councilor of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC).
“Internationally, Berito is the most well-recognized face of the U’wa struggle.” said Andrew Miller, who accompanied the U’wa leader with Amazon Watch to meet Avatar director James Cameron in his Los Angeles living room. “Especially in the late 1990’s, Berito was a global ambassador of the U’wa’s beautifully poetic cosmology that captured many people’s imaginations. He struck up a bond with Terry Freitas, the young activist who helped galvanize the international movement in support of the U’wa, as well as people like Atossa Soltani, Amazon Watch’s founder.”
Terence Freitas was the co-creator and coordinator of the U’wa Defense Working Group that was essential in drumming up international support for the U’wa. The young activist transformed his bedroom at his mother’s house into the de-facto HQ for the U’wa’s international campaign against Occidental Petroleum in the late 1990’s. Even his mother was unaware of the extent of her son’s involvement until one morning she found Berito, the leader of 7,000 indigenous people from the isolated paramos and cloud forests of eastern Colombia, sleeping on the living room floor of her suburban Los Angeles home.
“I noticed that he immediately bonded with Roberto, there was a link between them,” said Francois Mazure from the EarthWays Foundation that hosted Berito during his visit to Los Angeles. “Roberto was the father and Terry was the son.”
In 1997, after meeting with the directors of Occidental Petroleum in Los Angeles, Berito was kidnapped on his return to Colombia by gunmen who tried to force him to sign a drilling agreement. He refused and they beat him. In 1998, Freitas accompanied Berito to Al Gore’s office to meet the environmentalist vice president after the U’wa leader was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize. Unfortunately Al Gore, whose father sat on the board of Occidental Petroleum and owned a small fortune in the company’s shares, never pressured Oxy publicly.
A year later Berito invited Freitas and two native American activists, Lahe’enda’e Gay and Ingrid Washinawatok, to help set up schools to protect the U’wa language and culture and defend their way of life from the oil industry. Washinawatok was a world-renowned 41-year-old indigenous activist known as Flying Eagle Woman of the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin and a rising leader in the struggle for indigenous rights. She also directed the Fund for the Four Directions, which promoted the revitalization of indigenous languages and cultures. Lahe’ena’e Gay was a 39-year-old member of Hawaii’s Kanaka Maoli Nation, as well as the founder and director of the Pacific Cultural Conservancy International, which works to preserve cultural and biological diversity.
Murals depicting their ancient mythology are now decorated along the walls of the reformed Catholic mission. Photo: Jacob Lyng
Freitas knew the risks. On a trip to U’wa territory a year earlier he reported being observed and followed on various occasions by individuals he believed were paramilitaries. During that same trip he was stopped by the Colombian military and forced to sign a declaration that absolved the army of any responsibility for his security. He interpreted the act as a threat. The shared vision of Berito, Freitas, Gay and Washinawatok to develop schools to teach the next generation of U’wa children a non-colonial curriculum; alongside lessons on Natural Law, which was set down by the divine spirit Sira entrusting the U’wa with the guardianship of Mother Earth, outweighed the risks.
As Berito guided the three activists on their way to the airport to leave Colombia, they were kidnapped by masked gunmen. While the U’wa leader was immediately released, the bodies of the activists were found a week later bound and blindfolded with multiple gunshot wounds in a Venezuelan cow field over the Arauca river.
Because the FARC was then in preliminary peace talks in the late 1990’s, presaging more recent events, the guerrilla group appeared to have little to gain and much to lose from the kidnapping and executions. Indeed, the FARC high command was quick to deny complicity, in order to protect those fragile peace talks.
The armed men at the road block where the group were kidnapped also did not fit the profile of the local FARC – they were allegedly much younger, not dressed in fatigues, and had their faces covered – leading some to wonder if they were a rogue group opposed to the peace accords. The stretch of highway through Arauca province where the group had been traveling was dominated by the paramilitaries, who at the time had been waging a campaign of extermination against trade union leaders, human rights activists and suspected guerrilla collaborators. Eventually, however, a rebel commander from the guerrillas acknowledged: “Commander Gildardo of the FARC’s 10th Front found that strangers had entered the U’wa Indian region and did not have authorization from the guerrillas. He improvised an investigation, captured and executed them without consulting his superiors.”
Washinawatok’s Menominee Nation and various other U.S. indigenous rights groups accused the U.S. State Department of destabilizing their own negotiations with the FARC for the release of the activists, which they had believed would be imminent. During the failed peace talks of the 1990’s, the US State Department had released $230 million in military aid to the Colombian army, and fighting in the north between the army and their right wing paramilitary allies against the FARC had left 70 people dead on both sides.
Meanwhile, Occidental Petroleum wasn’t just spending millions to lobby the U.S. government to increase military aid to Colombia – it was providing direct financial and logistical support to the Colombian military. The oil giant was also funding private security firms like Air-Scan, which carried out the cluster-bombing massacre of Santo Domingo on Occidental’s behalf, as well as the paramilitary death squads involved in kidnapping, torture, extrajudicial killings and massacres of civilians across the region.
Most surprisingly, however, was the U.S. multinationals’ links with Colombia’s marxist guerrillas, confirmed when Oxy Vice-President Lawrence Meriage gave testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000. He admitted that Occidental employees regularly made payments to members of the FARC and ELN. Meriage’s acknowledgement of Oxy’s work relationship with the guerillas came three years after the ELN and FARC were declared “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” in 1997, making it a crime to provide material support to these groups.
Meriage’s testimony was also consistent with the actions and admissions by long-time Occidental leader Armand Hammer, who reports in his biography how Occidental’s Latin American security chief, former FBI employee James Sutton, was fired when he spoke out against the company’s payments to the ELN. “We are giving jobs to the guerrillas…” Hammer told the Wall Street Journal in 1985 “…and they in turn protect us from other guerrillas.”
An investigation by the LA Times found that Occidental Petroleum was funneling millions of dollars to the ELN guerillas as well as jobs and food for their members. “The rebels used the money to gain new recruits and weaponry,” the LA timesstated, claiming the ELN were on the verge of being wiped out by the Colombian military in the early 80’s before receiving Oxy’s financial backing. “In effect, Occidental rescued the group that later turned against it.”
After his passing, Freita’s former girlfriend lashed out at Oxy in a letter to Vice President Al Gore, referring to the company’s friendly links with the guerrillas. Berito later testified to Amnesty International and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to complain about the incident that took the life of three of the U’wa People’s greatest friends and allies. An article in the LA Weeklyeulogizing the young activist after his death stated: “In May 1997, Freitas met the man who would change the course of his life: U’wa leader Roberto Cobaria.” Terry Freitas was 24 years old when he was executed.
The international campaign against Occidental Petroleum soon hit critical-mass. With many still reeling over the death of the three activists, protests against the oil giant were launched in London, Hamburg, Lima, Nairobi and several cities across the United States. The U’wa leader Berito Cobaria once again traveled from the cloud forests of eastern Colombia to the west coast of California where he planned to challenge Oxy CEO Ray Irani at the company’s annual shareholder meeting. Meanwhile as Occidental Petroleum funded all sides of Colombia’s brutal civil war, the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars of crude oil to the Caribbean coast continued.
The 450 meter bridge that crosses the Cobaria River is what separates Berito’s house on the eastern border of the resguardo and the now reformed Catholic mission that once held him against his will. Photo: Jacob Lyng
Published on IC Magazine: This is the second installment of “The Guardians of Mother Earth,” an exclusive four-part series examining the Indigenous U’wa struggle for peace in Colombia.
Nestled below the snow-capped mountains on the eastern cordillera of the Colombian Andes is the town of Güicán, known internationally to hikers as the gateway to Colombia’s magnificent Cocuy National Park. To the east of the mountain range the impenetrable tropical vegetation provides cover from air strikes for the guerrilla armies along the Venezuelan border. On the western border of U’wa territory the vegetation disappears with the altitude into a vast network of Andean peaks, valleys, and pristine wetland ecosystems called paramos.
It was here late last year during the October 25 municipal elections when the mountains surrounding Güicán became the scene of an ELN ambush resulting in the deaths of one policeman and 11 soldiers from Colombia’s High-Mountain Battalion. The battalion had left the U’wa resguardo at 3am and marched down a narrow mountain trail while carrying 130 votes cast by the remote indigenous communities of Bachira when they stopped to rest only to come under fire from rifles and guerilla rocket-launchers called ‘tatucos’. The sergeant leading the group communicated back to base that his security detail of 34 soldiers and two policemen charged with protecting delegates from the voting commission as well as an indigenous U’wa guide were under attack when radio contact was lost.
A coordinated air and ground assault was launched by the Colombian military to rescue the survivors and recover the bodies at an altitude of 9,842 ft where the tough mountain terrain makes helicopter access difficult. Two police were found wounded but alive while two soldiers as well as the U’wa guide and the civilians from the voting office remained unaccounted for as the ELN disappeared into the mountains. Vladimir Moreno, an indigenous U’wa leader, told El Tiempo there was no precedent for such violence in the region and that historically the guerillas had never interfered with the votes of local U’wa. “This is a peaceful community,” he said.
“We will request from national and international organizations to demand that the armed actors in the resguardo withdraw,” Moreno told Caracol Radio, “and we also demand from the Ministry of Defence that the Army clears out of the area within the resguardo because this has violated international humanitarian law.”
The incident, which was the most violent confrontation between the ELN and the state military since peace-negotiations between the FARC and government started three years ago in Havana, resulted in the consequent militarization of U’wa and rural communities across the western border of the resguardo.
Now, six months later, Güicán is the epicenter for a non-violent U’wa mobilization: for the last few months the indigenous community has blocked the entrances of the Cocuy National Park. “The U’wa Nation is the Guardian of Mother Earth and from now into the future we will not permit tourism into the national park,” Yimy Aguablanca, an indigenous leader from Güicán, told IC on March 21, 2016. He added that tourism is affecting the water and the entire eco-system around the park and that non-indigenous rural people have joined the protest.
An U’wa bi-lingual teacher named Jose Cobaria sharpens his machete in the unusually dry Cobaria river. “The government invests all of its money in guns and war not education and health.” Photo: Jacob Lyng
The scarce facilities like rubbish bins and toilets in the state-run park mean some of the trails are littered with trash and visitors are forced to defecate beside the mountain streams that supply drinking water for surrounding communities. Outrage over the poor administration of the park was further inflamed in February when a charity match of high-altitude soccer was broadcast over YouTube. The match took place on the glacier of the U’wa’s sacred mountain Zizuma, the resting place of their divine beings. Known as Mount Cocuy in Spanish, an estimated 90 percent of Zizuma’s glaciers have disappeared in the last 150 years due to climate change. What little ice there is left is receding at a rate of 25 meters per year.
“Today we cry as our Zizuma is condemned to disappear,” went out the U’wa Communiqué that was broadcast through social media. Yimy Aguablanca said this latest mobilization of the U’wa will not stop until the state hands over administration of the park to the U’wa. So far, their calls for a direct dialog with the Minister of Environment have been ignored. The Constitution of 1999 allotted 220,275 hectares for the U’wa but this is a fraction of their ancestral lands, which once included the Cocuy National Park and areas rich with oil and gas reserves, which were conveniently left out of the agreement by the Colombian government.
In 2015, the U’wa High-Council made up of indigenous leaders from different communities across their territory, approved the creation of the Indigenous Guard. These guardians are responsible for territorial control and defense, and while unarmed, they have a mandate to ensure that no one enters the reserve without authorization, especially technical staff like geologists. The decision to form the Indigenous Guard came in response to an event in May 2014, when the U’wa detained functionaries from the company ENCOMINING who were in the Campo Hermoso region of their territory attempting to take coal samples. The importance of the current mobilization around the Cocuy National Park to not just the U’wa but also non-indigenous rural communities in the region is evident by the fact that rural farmers are now standing side by side with the Indigenous Guard to block all entrances to the park.
“Today when we look at our rights over our territory it is not the same as that of our ancestors,” Berito told IC. “It has been exploited, violated, distributed, but still even now we must always protect the water, the animals, and the forests.”
It was during ‘la Violencia’ — a dark period in Colombian history that began in 1948 — when the borders of the U’wa Nation’s territory were first reduced as thousands of refugees fleeing conflict from other parts of the country settled on the fertile banks of the Arauca. Instead of seeing enemies that needed to be vanquished, the U’wa saw victims worthy of compassion and retreated further into the mountains. Over the next 10 years, 200,000 people were killed as the civil war engulfed the country. La Violencia was eventually resolved by a power-sharing agreement in 1958 that turned Colombia into a dictatorship and consequently set the stage for a Marxist guerrilla insurgency against the central government.
Since 1964, another 260,000 people have been killed in the current incarnation of the Colombian armed conflict, and the war-torn provinces of Arauca, Casanare, Norte de Santander and Boyacá that overlap U’wa territory have become some of the most violent and militarized states in the country. In the north of U’wa territory in Norte de Santander, when word spreads of the Colombian army’s proximity, U’wa men race back from the fields to their families so the women are not alone in their homes.
To the south of the Cocuy National Park in Boyacá province, land that once belonged to the U’wa and is still considered sacred by their people has been violated by turning it into a permanent military base to defend nearby petroleum wells from five divisions of the FARC’s formidable Eastern Block and the heavy concentration of ELN fighters in Arauca and Casanare.
Although U’wa territory falling within the borders of the national park is protected from mining under the constitution, the proximity of these intense large-scale petroleum and gas exploitation projects has greatly affected the region’s fragile and delicately interconnected ecosystems. The Andean paramos that make up much of the terrain in the south and west of U’wa territory as well as the national park absorb water like giant sponges before releasing it into the rivers that nourish all life in the cloud forests on the eastern edge of the cordillera and the vast wetland Savana called Los Llanos that stretches thousands of miles into Venezuela.
“U’wa locals say the drinking water didn’t used to make them sick and that the parasitic worm which has recently contaminated the water supply severely affects indigenous children, swelling their stomachs and leaving them malnourished.”
These rivers are symbols of spiritual purity in U’wa cosmology, but a severe drought engulfing the region caused by overzealous mining in the Andean paramos, climate change and El Niño has turned these once mighty tributaries flowing through the U’wa ancestral lands into stony creek beds. To make matters worse, the once crystalline waters they carried from the snow-capped peaks and glaciers of the Sierra Cocuy and Güicán have been infected with a parasitic worm that stunts the indigenous children’s growth and swells their bellies, leaving them malnourished and lethargic while depleting their immune systems.
A dose of antibiotics from Cubará hospital can control the worm, but many indigenous families cannot afford the journey down the mountain to the town for a doctor’s prescription. Those that can make the trip to purge their children’s stomachs find out that after drinking one glass of water the worm is back. “We have to defend our health,” Berito told IC, “and this means examining the exploitation and contamination of the water which has cast a shadow over the rivers.”
Further up the mountain, 50-year-old Kuiuru Kobeua has worked 8 hours a day for the last 14 days planting seeds on a small plot carved out of the forest to make sure his wife and three children do not go hungry come harvest. Two months ago, when his test for tuberculosis in Cubará hospital turned out negative, he was sent home with a packet of Ibuprofen. Two months later, he has trouble talking between violent coughs and the constant need to clear his phlegm-filled throat and lungs. He can barely afford another trip to Cubará and fears being turned back home again with nothing but another packet of painkillers. Meanwhile, the cough is not going away and he feels increasingly weak.
“To prevent such cases of tuberculosis,” Yimy Aguablanca said, “we need to recognize and tell the world that the actual health policies of this government do not guarantee that our U’wa brothers are protected from the disease.”
On the other side of the U’wa’s ancestral territory the Earth First Journal reports that there are not enough seats for the patients in the tin-roofed off-the-grid medical clinic in Chuscal and that some of the sick are sprawled on the cracked floor tiles. Diseases such as tuberculosis, dysentery and leishmaniasis, a parasite spread by sandflies that attacks people’s internal organs, are rife. “We’re short of everything,” Eusebio Carceres, the head nurse at the isolated healthcare outpost, told Earth First. “Antibiotics, vaccines, lab equipment – we’re even short of clean drinking water because the oil spills have poisoned so many sources around here.”
Although the Colombian government routinely sends mining engineers into and around U’wa territory through state-run petroleum companies, the government’s failure to provide the region with uncontaminated drinking water or medical specialists to heal the community’s sick is striking.
The problems facing the U’wa are compounded by the limited arable land allotted to them in the constitution. It has forced them to change their agricultural practices. In decades past, the U’wa rotated crops to conserve soil quality and left areas to regenerate for up to 12 years before returning to ensure a bountiful harvest. Now the quality of soil is declining along with the quantity of their yields; sufficient food to feed the entire community is becoming increasingly scarce. Given the choice of clearing more of their sacred forests for agriculture or starving, however, the U’wa choose to fast. Amazon Watch neatly summed up the situation: although the U’was are pacifists who are unwilling to kill anyone for their beliefs, they are willing to die for them.
On the western paramos surrounding the sacred Zizuma, Yimy Aguablanca and a hundred other rural and U’wa protesters are standing firm despite the threats sent to the Indigenous Guard. On March 25, they received a cryptic photo of a sheep, grazing below the sacred mountain, dressed in guerilla military fatigues and carrying an assault rifle. The not-so-subtle threat means the U’wa have been categorized as an armed rebel group — and therefore a military target.
“The U’wa were sent a photo of a sheep in military gear and carrying a rifle, implying that they are associated with the guerrilla. These are very serious accusations, providing a political rationale for violent paramilitary repression against the U’wa” – said Andrew Miller, Director of Advocacy at Amazon Watch. Photo: unknown
“When your protests disrupt an economic activity, you become a target of armed actors who operate on behalf of those interests,” said Andrew Miller, Director of Advocacy at Amazon Watch. He added that local politicians with ties to the tourism industry have been affected economically by the U’wa’s biocultural conservation efforts. Along with the threatening photo, Miller said that rumors are now circulating about the U’wa receiving bribes from the FARC to help them re-establish contraband shipment routes through the national park.
“These are very serious accusations providing a political rationale for a violent paramilitary repression against the U’wa,” Miller told IC. “The notion that the U’wa are associated with an armed group is absurd. They are actually radical pacifists by culture.”
Published on IC Magazine: This is the first installment of “The Guardians of Mother Earth,” an exclusive four-part series examining the Indigenous U’wa struggle for peace in Colombia.
On September 23, 2015, in the Palace of Conventions in Havana, Cuba, his excellency Juan Manuel Santos, the President of the Republic of Colombia, and Commander Timoleon Jimenez, Chief of General Staff of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, signed an agreement on transitional justice and reparations to the victims of the country’s 51 year old civil war, resolving one of the final points in the country’s peace negotiations.
“We are adversaries, we come from different sides, but today we move in the same direction,” said President Santos, “this noble direction that all societies can have, is one of peace.”
In a show of unity, the warring parties all wore white-collared shirts without ties, as they sat on opposite sides of the brown mahogany tables encircling an artificially bright-green shrubbery arrangement. Around the room’s perimeter stood a throng of reporters, crowded together behind a red rope line, snapping photos of the historic handshake between the president and the leader of the country’s largest guerrilla army. A prolonged war that has killed more than 260,000 people and victimized and displaced seven million more seemed to be drawing to an end.
Among the victims of the conflict are the Indigenous Peoples of Colombia. Of the 102 tribal nations in existence today more than half are at risk of disappearing – forced displacement and mining on indigenous territory during the armed conflict have contributed heavily to the widespread demise.
A progressive genocide of negligence and privation is also taking place. The Indigenous Peoples of Colombia are routinely denied basic commodities such as antibiotics, vaccines and clean drinking water that residents of big cities take for granted, not because the country’s indigenous have been targeted for extermination, but because they have become politically insignificant.
During the Havana peace accord, the indigenous nations who trace their Colombian heritage back thousands of years, from before the time of the Spanish conquest, were not mentioned once.
Inside a wooden shack in the isolated cloud forests of eastern Colombia, three kilometers west of the Arauca river on the Venezuelan border, Berito Cobaria, the internationally recognized leader and spiritual guide of the indigenous U’wa, points out the shades on the x-ray scan of his chest. It shows the same strain of tuberculosis that is ravaging his people.
Berito X-ray, photo Jacob Lyng
The single-story hospital in Cubará, the nearest town on the river, is poorly equipped and understaffed. Visits from medical specialists are rare because the hospital is located in the “Red Zone” – conflict areas the Colombian government has declared dangerous due to the heavy concentration of guerrilla forces.
“The government needs to establish a tuberculosis clinic in Cubará,” Berito told IC. He confirmed he is slowly overcoming the deadly disease but despairs for his people as the tuberculosis outbreak rapidly spreads throughout the U’wa Nation’s ancestral lands. The U’wa believe there needs to be harmony in the world for there to be harmony in the cosmos, but the balance of nature has been disturbed and a sickness has fallen upon Berito’s people. Infectious western diseases such as influenza, dysentery, tuberculosis, and the common cold continue to wreak havoc on the unaccustomed immune systems of the U’wa, who up until the late 1940’s lived an isolated existence on the forested cliffs and the remote Andean wetlands and cloud forests of eastern Colombia.
Beginning on February 13th, 2016, Colombia’s second largest guerrilla army, the ELN (Army of National Liberation) imposed a 72-hour armed strike inside Red Zones like Cubará and other towns that border U’wa territory. Under the threat of violence, all stores and businesses in Cubará were closed, the roads were empty and lucky members of the Colombian military got three days’ rest in fortified outposts while their colleagues searched for explosives laid along Highway 66. Despite their dominance in the frontier towns along the Venezuelan border, even the ELN needs to gain permission from indigenous authorities like Berito to enter the ancestral lands of the U’wa. Known as the United U’wa Resguardo, the territory is restricted to all outsiders.
A day after the ELN’s armed strike was lifted, U’wa families on their way to Cubará to stock up on supplies of bread, sugar, eggs and tobacco were traveling barefoot or on the backs of pickup trucks past Berito’s home, which stands sentinel on the eastern border of the resguardo. Ten minutes away at the border town, Colombian soldiers had returned from their outposts to patrol the streets. Stores were serving clients, and locals walked openly with white plastic shopping bags, acts that had been banned and punishable by death during the armed strike. The only trace of the armed strike was the ubiquitous graffiti scrawled on buildings around town: “ELN – 51 YEARS OF RESISTANCE”.
Historically, U’wa territory has been of strategic importance to the Marxist guerrillas because it connects the contraband routes from Venezuela over the Arauca river to the central Andes of Boyacá province, a short drive from the capital Bogotá. Unarmed outside of the agricultural tools they use to cultivate staple crops of yucca, plantains and potatoes, the U’wa authorities will reluctantly grant permission to the ELN to pass through the resguardo on the strict condition they do not set up camp inside their territory. In return the ELN respect U’wa sovereignty, will not enter without permission and will not stop until they have traversed the steep and extremely difficult climb out of the cloud forests and cross the western border of the resguardo, below the snow-capped mountains of the Sierra Cocuy and Güicán.
This region, which is rich in lucrative oil and gas reserves, is also of great strategic importance to the United States’ and Colombian governments, multinationals like Houston-based Occidental Petroleum and Spanish oil giant RepSol, as well as the right-wing paramilitary death squads, which have been historically allied with the central government and big business. For the U’wa Peoples, however, oil is the sacred blood of their Mother Earth, and without its blood their mother will die. For more than two decades U’wa have mobilized aggressive non-violent campaigns to assert more control over their ancestral territory in the midst of one of the most troubled regions of the Colombian Civil War, but it was their struggle against Occidental Petroleum (called Oxy for short) that gained international attention in 1997, when Berito declared that his people “would rather die, protecting everything that we hold sacred, than lose everything that makes us U’wa.”
As Oxy pushed into the U’wa’s ancestral lands, the indigenous nation collectively threatened to commit mass suicide by leaping off a 15,000-foot cliff if drilling on their territory went ahead. This was not a publicity stunt. U’wa tribal lore tells of their people walking off the “Cliffs of Glory” en masse centuries ago rather than submit to the brutal Spanish conquistadors. The U’wa set up a makeshift village beside Occidental Petroleum’s Gibraltar 1 drilling site, and were clubbed, tear-gassed, threatened with rape, evicted, arrested, and harassed by state security forces on behalf of Oxy. A year later in 1998, Berito was given the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for leading the non-violent campaign against Occidental Petroleum – the same year the US multinational was complicit in the cluster-bombing of a countryside agricultural community, killing 18 civilians including 9 children, near the resguardo’s south-eastern border, in order to protect the Caño-Limon-Covenas oil pipeline.
The pipeline, jointly run by state-owned Ecopetrol and US-based Occidental Petroleum, pumps up to 220,000 barrels of crude daily from the war-torn Arauca province through U’wa territory on its way to the Caribbean coast. It was also the beneficiary of $100 million US military aid that was granted to the Colombian army in 2003, after Occidental Petroleum spent $4 million lobbying the US government to protect it. The ELN, and their ideological ally, the FARC, have bombed the pipeline more than a thousand times. The consecutive attacks over decades have spilt millions of barrels of cancerous unprocessed crude into the rivers and forests of the region, exponentially more than that of the Exxon Valdez environmental disaster.
In a separate bombing incident in March 2014, the U’wa refused to permit repairs to the pipeline until the government began dismantling the Magallanes drilling site on the northern border of the U’wa resguardo, which Ecopetrol had set up in secret months earlier. The Wall Street Journalreported the Colombian government lost $130 million during the 40-day U’wa protest, which was resolved by dismantling the new drilling rig. Ecopetrol has not cancelled the mining license, however, and the threat of exploitation remains. The most recent attack on the pipeline was a twin bomb attack by the ELN on March 15th, 2016, a week before the deadline to finalize the preliminary peace agreement that President Santos and Commander Timoleon Jimenez had agreed to six months earlier in Havana.
As the March 23rd deadline came and went without even a symbolic gesture of unity, both the FARC and government blamed each other for stalling. A week later the government saved face by announcing to the press it had entered formal peace talks with the ELN, but the country’s second-largest guerrilla army watered down public optimism by stating negotiations would not stop them from attacking critical government infrastructure, which include mining assets in the region and oil concessions surrounding U’wa territory such as Oil Block Cor 19 and Cor 45 which extend across the west and north-west of the resguardo; the Arauca oil block; and RepSol and Integra Oil drilling rigs on the resguardo’s eastern border. There is also Ecopetrol’s Siriri Oil Block, which along with Caño-Limon-Covenas is located in the north of U’wa territory.
A small fraction of a percent of the money rolling in from this multi-billion dollar mining bonanza would be more than enough to fund schools, provide fully-stocked healthcare facilities and install piping to provide clean drinking water for every indigenous and rural community in the region. In one isolated U’wa school inside the resguardo, four computers generously donated by the Colombian government gather dust because there is no electricity; here many of U’wa children are malnourished with swollen bellies because a non-native parasitic worm has contaminated the water supply. In a tin-roofed shack that serves as a hospital in Chuscal on the other side of the resguardo, the head nurse complains of the difficulty of caring for patients suffering from tuberculosis and dysentery because of a lack of vaccines, antibiotics and even clean drinking water after an oil spill contaminated the river.
Now while the international community is openly discussing buzzwords like “Peace Colombia” and “post-conflict” in anticipation of a historic peace agreement between the FARC and government, the U’wa people are demanding high-level talks with the government to address their various grievances. The government response has thus far been to ignore the U’wa, or to invite an indigenous delegation to Bogotá where low-level bureaucrats with no authority merely shuffle papers and nod their heads. Meanwhile, the tuberculosis outbreak continues to spread across U’wa territory.
The U’wa, who call themselves the people who know how to think and speak, consider themselves the Guardians of Mother Nature, and large tracts of land inside their territory have become biological reserves for jaguars, spectacled bears, as well as a kaleidoscopic array of endemic plant and bird life that do not appear anywhere else on the planet. As an ambassador for his tribe, Berito has traveled the world recruiting the support of activists of all stripes, from the late Terry Freitas, native American activists Ingrid Washinawatok and Lahe’enda’e Gay, to the founder of Amazon Watch Atossa Soltani, and Hollywood celebrities like Avatar director James Cameron.
The indigenous leader knows that the ability of his pacifist tribe of 7,000 people to defend themselves against these extremely powerful economic and political forces is limited. This is especially true while numerous multinationals and armed groups battle for control around and sometimes inside his people’s land hidden from the eyes of the international community beneath the forest canopies. Non-violence, however, needs an audience and once again the U’wa leader is calling upon the world to watch over his people.
“History is its own kind of law,” Berito said. “They say the land is dead, but it lives yet. It is only wounded by the taking of oil. The dignity of native peoples comes from the land – and like the land it can be saved.”
Five days ago, the tropical island of Holbox, off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, caught fire. Reports of smoke billowing over the uninhabited southern tip of the island were first shared over social media on Saturday afternoon, Sept. 17, while Pedro Canché, known across the Yucatan as “the Maya journalist”, prepared to interview Carlos Joaquin, the Governor-Elect of the state of Quintana Roo.
As Pedro Canché traveled with his star-reporter Mary Hernandez to the island of Cozumel where he planned to meet the Governor-Elect, the first photos revealing the magnitude of the blaze on Holbox were sent to him over WhatsApp by concerned locals. There was still no official word on the fire from a government agency—but it was the long-weekend celebrating Mexico’s independence—and the buzz on social media was that public officials from the outgoing administration of Governor Roberto Borge were still asleep or hungover.
As the Maya journalist tweeted and shared the photos of black-smoke blanketing the sky above verdant green mangroves to his massive social-media following, the blaze in Holbox began to trend across the Yucatan. It was the third time in as many days that Canché and his team of reporters at Pedro Canché News had set the agenda and scooped the region’s own cumbersome local media—with Enrique Huerta’s article on Uber’s arrival to Quintana Roo receiving over 20,000 hits for the newspaper on Thursday alone, and Mary Hernandez’ Friday-night video of police detaining protestors during Mexico’s independence festival racking up a fearsome 80,000 views.
The exclusive interview with Carlos Joaquin, eight days before he assumed the Governorship of Quintana Roo, was another media-coup for the young news organization. Less than a year after Pedro Canché was released from prison on trumped-up charges of “sabotage” and “terrorism” in a court-case that Reporters Without Borders called absurd and human rights organizations denounced as political persecution by Governor Borge’s outgoing government—the online newspaper the Maya journalist founded shortly after his release was now a force to be reckoned with across the Yucatan Peninsula.
As Canché roamed Cozumel’s main plaza waiting for word on the meeting place with the Governor-Elect, a chance encounter with Pedro Joaquin Coldwell, the incoming Governor’s half-brother and powerful Minister of Energy in President President Peña Nieto’s cabinet, was another fortunate turn of events that evening. “Pedro Canché you are very famous.” said the Minister of Energy. “Pedro Joaquin you sir are famous too.” replied Canché, who then goaded the Minister into accepting a live-streamed interview to his Facebook followers.
An hour later, Canché met with the state’s incoming Governor on Cozumel’s main wharf. The interview now has over 42,000 views, 977 shares, and almost a thousand comments. Meanwhile, as the video went viral, the blaze on Holbox continued to burn.
“The current government is saying the fire is under control,” Pedro Canché told IC after the interview, “but I don’t believe it from the photos so we have to find out for ourselves.”
The tropical island of Holbox is home to pristine mangrove ecosystems and shrubby sand-dune forests that form part of the protected Yum Balam biosphere reserve. Designated as a protected reserve 20 years ago, the Yum Balam biosphere stretches from the coast to the island and out into the Caribbean, beating the beginning of the tourism boom in Holbox by 5 years. In the last 15 years, however, the same over-development that has destroyed much of the coastal wilderness around Cancún has caught up to Holbox. It now threatens to overtake the fragile environmental protections in place for the island.
On Sunday, Canché and Hernandez drove four hours from Playa del Carmen to the Yucatan’s eastern coast where they caught the last ferry to Holbox that night. The harvest moon was red as it hung low over the smoke blanketing the horizon while two distinct fires glowed orange in the distance.
At 11:30pm, Pedro Canché’s first live-stream interview with a resident from the island was with Edgardo Zapata, born 72 years ago on Holbox, and part of the Ejido Council on the island in charge of common lands outside the village. He recounted a meeting with government figures, such as Felix Gonzales Canto, and Fernando Ponce, the powerful representative of Coca-Cola on the Yucatan, in which he alleges the local Ejido title-holders were tricked into signing over their common-land-rights, so the private company Peninsula Maya Developments could build hotels on the undeveloped part of the island. “They took advantage of our innocence but not our ignorance,” Zapata proclaimed, calling the politicians ‘bandits’. The case is now in the Mexican Supreme Court.
Illegal land-grabs by powerful robber barons are nothing new to the Maya Peoples; but they have become a frightening modern-day trend under the regime of Governor Borge. The most famous cases are the annexation of private hotels in Tulum and the destruction of Tajamar, an area of mangrove forest in downtown Cancún that was cleared to make way for a high-rise. In both cases, the Government and its cronies have acted with absolute impunity. They’ve even been compared to cut-throat pirates in Mexican media.
Canché estimates that, of the hundreds of thousands of visitors to Pedro Canché News every month, less than 30% are indigenous Maya. While the Editor-in-Chief is himself Maya and his reporter Mary Hernandez’ mother is from the Chol Peoples of the neighboring state of Chiapas, Canché says that his newspaper’s brand of adversarial breaking news and current affairs is for the people—all the people.
There was, however, another angle that Canché wished to pursue while investigating the suspicious origin of the blaze at Holbox. In 2015, 14 Maya from Holbox were charged with clearing slithers of mangrove forest for their motorized canoes and wooden fishing boats and subsequently sent to prison. If the fire was indeed caused by Peninsula Maya Developments to clear land to build massive hotels and nobody was held to account—then it was further proof that in Quintana Roo there are rules for the rulers and rules for the ruled.
On Monday morning, Canché and Hernandez rented a boat to accompany the assembled volunteers who had left at dawn in an attempt to control the fire. Firemen from Conafor (National Commission of Forestry) had used machetes to open up a 500-meter path through the thick shrub toward the smoking periphery of the fire. Estimates from both the air and the ground of the damage caused by the blaze now ranged between 35 to 50 hectares.
It took an hour to cross the ash and charcoaled shrub before the pair of reporters encountered the firemen who were using picks and rakes to scrape the still-smoking embers away from the green vegetation on the fire’s periphery. The firemen were exhausted, but said the blaze was under control. Pedro Canché and Mary Hernandez interviewed the leader and took photos before making their way back to the boat.
In the village of Holbox, Mary Hernandez interviewed Rafael Leon Negrete, the director of Conafor, who said the fire spread more towards the part of land that belongs to the ejido (commons) of the people. “It’s quite suspicious the circumstances of the fire.” he said, “Profepa (Procuraduría Federal de Protección al Ambiente) will investigate the cause once we put it out.”
Pedro Canché News published an eyewitness report with testimonies of the first-responders from ground-zero as well as a video that racked up 11,000 views in 48 hours. On Monday afternoon, the first helicopters from the Mexican Navy arrived and made a late but ostentatious show of rumbling across the sky over the populated part of the island towards the smoke in the south—but the blaze had almost been put out and locals paid little heed.
It was time for Editor-in-Chief Canché to focus his attention on the next most pressing issue for his young and energetic newspaper: the 21,000 hits on Pedro Canché News for Thursday’s article about Uber had overloaded the server and caused it to crash. It was time to upgrade and move to a bigger hosting company.
The blaze in Holbox is all but gone, but the Maya journalist and his team of reporters at Pedro Canché News are still on fire.
As Andean winds carry mild amounts of ash from the mouth of the Cotopaxi volcano toward the Ecuadorian capital city of Quito, 500 kilometers away, a State of Emergency is in full effect. The government declared the State of Emergency last week purportedly in response to Cotopaxi’s eruption. However, many indigenous protesters, currently mobilized in an ongoing National Strike, believe the government is using the volcano as a pretext to lawfully militarize the streets and impose martial law.
Salvador Quishpe, the Prefect of Zamora and member of the Saraguro Peoples of the country’s southern highlands, took to twitter to point out this very concern, commenting, “They want to scare those of us who are with the national uprising with this emergency decree with respect to Cotopaxi. We won’t fall into their trap.”
Since Aug. 3, Quishpe and Jorge Herrera, the head of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), have led a 500km march that embarked from Zamora, where mining concessions make up 53.7% of the provinces territory. Much of it is indigenous land, including the open-cut “El Mirador” mine that will process 54,000 tonnes of mineralized rock a day in the middle of the rainforest. It was here that the indigenous leader of the Shuar people, José Isidro Tendetza Antún, was tortured and assassinated days before he was due to appear at the Lima Climate Talks in Dec. 2014 to protest the mine’s construction.
The march then crossed the Andes mountains over the Panamerican Highway–its ranks swelled by the Cañari people, whose civilization pre-dates the Incas, as well as Ecuador’s largest Indigenous populace, the Kichwa. For the past 8 years, they have together been fighting construction of the Quimsacocha mega-mine on pristine Andean wetlands against a backdrop of government persecution; particularly against the Kichwa lawyer and president of Ecuarunari, Carlos Perez Guartambel.
As the march continued towards Quito, contingents from almost all of Ecuador’s Indigenous Peoples joined the uprising from the Shuar and Achuar Peoples of the south-eastern Amazon, historically fierce enemies who united against the shared threat of oil and mining exploitation; to the Kichwa’s of Sarayaku, who accuse oil companies of ethnocide, and were involved in a military confrontation with the Ecuadorian government in 2014. The Indigenous Peoples from the northern lake district of Imbabura, where locals have been battling violent government suppression over the construction of the Intag Copper Mine for over 20 years, also backed the protests.
While each distinct group have demands that coincide with the needs of their respective regions, the official list of demands released by CONAIE includes bringing an end to mining on indigenous lands and repealing the controversial water law. Carlos Perez Guartambel, the president of Ecuarunari, an organization that represents the Kichwa people, told Intercontinental Cry, “The water law that this government approved was not able to remove the privatization of the water; the water is in the hands of multinationals that commercialize bottled water. It’s in the hands of Coca-Cola, Nestle, and Interagua.”
“With the regulation of the water law, the autonomy of community water systems is removed and in some cases promotes privatization,” Perez continued. “This is completely against the constitution which prohibits the privatization [of water].”
Other demands by CONAIE include the right to free university education, the rejection of a free-trade agreement with Europe, stopping the President’s unilateral changes to the constitution, and ensuring the continuation of bilingual education in state-run schools to prevent the extinction of their mother tongues.
“The absorption of everything that represents the institutions of Indigenous Peoples is our main complaint, the primary reason” for the protests, CONAIE’s Director for Women, Katty Betancourt Machoa, told Intercontinental Cry, adding that, “The biggest toll on us is that of bilingual education because [the government] has closed thousands of schools and following the plan of Senplades [Secretaria Nacional de Planificación y Desarrollo] which continues its policy of closing schools–at this moment closing almost 5,000 schools or about 25%, which means another 75% of schools are yet to be closed. This is an outrage for lots of reasons because it’s a form of ethnocide; bilingual schools are centers of cultural generation and community development.”
CONAIE’s Director of Territory, Severino Sharupi, whose role is to defend indigenous territory against external threats, told Intercontinental Cry, “In the last 8 years of this government they have been taking away our rights, rights of the indigenous nationalities and rights of workers, rights of students and retirees, as well as violating the constitution.”
Marlon Santi, the former president of CONAIE, told EFE, “President Correa has to shelve the draft of constitutional amendments submitted to Parliament,” that allow publicly elected officials to run for indefinite re-election, adding that President Correa “cannot remain in power for life, that is not the way, the way of the constitution, democracy.”
MARCH CONVERGES ON QUITO AS POLICE USE OVERWHELMING FORCE
On Aug. 13, an estimated 10,000 protesters converged on Quito where they surrounded the Government Palace in the Plaza de Santo Domingo. The protest was peaceful until it was met with overwhelming police force after allegedly being infiltrated by supporters of President Correa. After being released from detention, Salvador Quishpe, speaking to reporters in a ripped shirt that was covered in black dust and dirt, commented that the police “Dragged me, they hit me, they humiliated me.” Just prior to the altercation, he was peacefully beating his drum at the head of the march.
Carlos Perez Guartambel was also beaten and detained by the police along with his partner, Manuela Picq, the French Brazilian journalist for Aljazeera and contributor to Intercontinental Cry. Carlos Perez told Intercontinental Cry, “I am still bruised over my left eye where the police kicked me in the head, hit me with their batons and punched me, and my partner also suffered aggressions and was forced out of the country.”
The beating that Manuela Picq received from the police was severe enough to send her to a hospital for medical treatment. While friends kept vigil in the waiting room, the police arrived to remove her from her hospital bed. At the time, her friends shouted, “They do not have an arrest warrant, this is a kidnap.”
This is not the first time Picq or Perez Guartambel have been targeted for their defense of indigenous rights and the environment; Picq has even written on Intercontinental Cry about the government persecution of her partner. When news spread that the government was attempting to deport the French Brazilian national–who has lived in Ecuador for 8 years–a Change.org petition was published gathering 8,000 signatures, most of it within the 90 hours of her detention.
Manuela Picq is a scholar of international standing on indigenous woman’s issues. Had she not been detained and then forced to leave Ecuador, she would have no doubt written on the violent acts against women by state security forces, which includes indigenous women being, “beaten and violently dragged out of their traditional clothing.”
“Women of the Strike” proclaimed, “We strongly condemn the macho and criminal brutality with which the State has attacked and criminalized women participating in the demonstrations.”
Three more high profile victims of the government’s violent targeting of women are the caricaturist Vilma Vargas, whose house was broken into in an attempt to intimidate her to stop drawing political cartoons that sympathize with the protesters; the president of CONAIE’s daughter, Liliana Herrera, who lost a tooth after being beaten by police; and the violent incarceration of the feminist and indigenous and environmental rights activist, Margoth Escobar.
“The woman is my mother and she is being unjustly detained at this moment, she is a political prisoner,” Escobar’s son told Intercontinental Cry. “She is a woman of 61 years and was beaten by more than six police. She has scars from this beating over her entire body and she is gravely suffering from hypertension in prison.”
Margoth Escobar has campaigned for indigenous rights in the Ecuadorian Amazon since the late 1980s. Her legacy is widely regarded as having stopped the unilateral colonization of indigenous lands by delineating their ancestral borders and defending them from the threats of colonization, logging, and petroleum exploitation during the 1990s. She is considered a hero among many indigenous Kichwa, Shuar, Achuar and Waorani.
“The abuse of power by this government is immense with regards to my mother. They have beaten her, they have completely violated her rights, there is no guarantee for her life at this moment. The doctors have demanded that she should be hospitalized with at the very least 15 days rest but not even 24 hours passed before the order arrived to remove her from the hospital in a huge police and military operation as if she was a common day criminal.”
“It is outrageous to be in this situation beneath this regime where there is no guarantee of democracy,” the son told Intercontinental Cry, “Today more than ever I request from the people respect for human rights because we all carry the responsibility for what we do in this life. And to you Mr. Rafael Correa, I hold you directly responsible for what is happening to my mother.”
Katty Betancourt explained, “There hasn’t been due process because many of our colleagues that are being detained won’t have their first court date until after a month. How much longer will they be imprisoned?”
After photos of the bruising covering Margoth Escobar’s body and a Youtube video about her legendary accomplishments for indigenous rights went viral she was released from prison, on Aug. 21, a full week after her incarceration. This was the same day that journalist Manuela Picq was forced to leave the country.
INDIGENOUS LEADERS RATIFY THE “RADICALIZATION” OF THE PROTESTS
One day after the National Strike began, a joint statement from CONAIE and Ecuarunari ratified the “radicalization” of the protests after the government refused to listen to their requests. Jorge Herrera, president of CONAIE, said the protests have been such a success that it should be called the uprising of the Ecuadorian people and not just the indigenous movement, “There are people of all social conditions, small-time business entrepreneurs, retirees, professors, students.”
While the protests consist of Indigenous Peoples of almost every ethnicity, popular support within indigenous populations like the Kichwa is far from universal. “Ecuador is a country of micro-businesses and family companies,” Chasqui Olmedo, a Kichwa whose family run tourism business, Kingdom Kichwa, has been adversely affected by the strikes, told Intercontinental Cry. “We depend on the daily activity of the economy and this is the reason that cows do not understand mobilizations, national strikes, and political protests. Cows will produce milk in the morning and the afternoon but if the highways are closed the milk goes bad. The only people who benefit from these national strikes are the big companies and economic monopolies of the country.”
Olmedo believes CONAIE should sit down with President Correa with a printout of demands to negotiate and resolve the protests. CONAIE’s Director of Territory, Severino Sharupi, told Intercontinental Cry, “We have tried during the eight years of this government to include our approaches and proposals as well as simultaneously for them to also respect our rights won in past uprisings and in the constitution. We tried to talk over the past 8 years and we have some practical examples of this intention to negotiate,” adding that, “Our provincial and regional organizations have signed countless agreements with the government, of which very few have been fulfilled, and have been primarily used to blackmail and condition our people.”
CONAIE’s Director for Women, Katty Betancourt, added that, during these protests, “The government has revealed its dictatorial character, its character of centralizing power, and this we can prove through the decree 755, which gives the necessity of creating a State of Emergency on the national level, instead of just in the provinces [surrounding the Cotopaxi Volcano]”.
The government decree puts all of Ecuador’s armed forces and police under the command of two government ministries and permits the suspension of “constitutional rights to the inviolability of home, to movement, to assembly and to correspondence.” After analyzing the points used to justify the State of Emergency decree, human rights lawyer Daniela Salazar said, “There is absolutely no justification for the State of Emergency to be declared in all of [Ecuador’s] national territory.” Reporters Without Borders criticized the government’s decision to censor all news on the Cotopaxi volcano in the Ecuadorian media and over social networks that does not come from official bulletins of the Security Ministry.
A video released by CONAIE shows an indigenous woman screaming as the police and military forces invade her private home, asking. “Why are you in my house?” and “Why did you hit her?” Under this extraordinary decree, such brute force runs the risk of becoming common practice.
On Aug. 19, an assembly of indigenous leaders led by Salvador Quishpe, Carloz Perez Guatembel, and Jorge Herrerra convened to coordinate the next course of action for the strike which has already included the occupation of public buildings.
In the province of Morona Santiago, where the strikes have been strongest, Marlon Vargas, the Director of Communication for the Achuar Nationality, told Intercontinental Cry, “For four days we have been here and now the people are asking what is happening? Why doesn’t the governor come to speak with us? Why doesn’t he come to resolve this problem? We want to speak, we want to know what is happening in our province and in our country so the people met this morning and decided to symbolically take the GAD Provincial building and later the District of Education.”
Morona Santiago governor Rodrigo Lopez, refusing to negotiate with the protesters, decided to send in the army. An estimated 200 Shuar and Achuar people, armed with spears, responded by chasing both the military and police out of the Amazonian city of Macas. While the Shuar and Achuar left the government building peacefully, tensions are still simmering in Morona Santiago.
On Aug. 20, in the province of Tungarahua, where the Andes mountains rise out of the Amazon rainforest, an indigenous community captured a military truck and detained 25 military personnel. The community released those being held when news spread that another 300 members of the military were on their way to the community, foreshadowing a potentially violent confrontation. It was here that the government declared a State of Emergency in 2010, when the Tungarahua volcano erupted; however, in sharp contrast to the recent State of Emergency, none of the constitutional rights of freedom of assembly and the inviolability of home and movement were revoked in 2010 and it only affected areas in proximity to the volcano.
In Ecuador’s north-eastern Amazon, CONAIE reported that protesters paralyzed 28 petroleum wells on the Oso B platform–run by state owned PetroAmazonas–in the Kichwa Zone of Puerto Murialdo, Orellana Province, with 11 protesters being detained. A heavy military presence is being maintained in the area. Elsewhere in the same province, the presence of the Waorani people and their confederation Nawe is noticeably absent. The Waorani, one of the last nationalities to be “contacted” during colonization of the Ecuadorian Amazon, have been severely affected by petroleum drilling on their lands, much like the Indigenous Peoples of Sucumbíos Province during the ecological disaster caused by Chevron Texaco.
According to a book that the Ecuadorian government attempted to censor, A Hidden Tragedy by Miguel Cabodevilla and Milagros Aguierre, the state’s divide and conquer strategies to remove obstacles that hinder its petroleum and mining projects are considered to be one of the causes of the massacre of the uncontacted Taromenane tribe of the Yasuni National Park. The Ecuadorian government also changed the meaning of genocide in its constitution in order to absolve themselves of legal responsibility for the extinction of the uncontacted Taromenane, who some experts believe will be wiped out now that the government has begun drilling into the 7 billion dollar oil reserves inside the Yasuni National Park.
On Friday, Aug. 21, as CONAIE president Jorge Herrera gave a press conference in Quito’s Park of the Little Tree, he was informed that the Ecuadorian state intends to pursue criminal charges against him as well as Romulo Acacho, the vice president of CONAIE; Franco Viteri, the president of CONFENIAE; and Augustin Guachapá, the president of the Shuar Federation. The group of leaders are being charged with the crime of paralyzing public services under article 346 of the Organic Integrated Penal Code, a charge that carries with it a maximum penalty of three years in prison. “We have not committed any crime,” Herrara said at the press conference.
As of Aug. 24, there are a total of 60 protesters being held in prison and a total of 92 people, including indigenous leaders like Jorge Herrerra, who are being pursued with criminal charges by the judicial system. 44 protesters are being accused of the crime of paralyzing public services and 36 for the crime of attack or resistance.
“The violence generated by the state is progressive and systematic,” Carlos Perez told Intercontinental Cry, adding that a total of 400 people are being persecuted by the state’s judiciary. In addition to the 90 people from the current mobilization, there are another 250 who have been criminalized in protests over the last seven years.
In Salvador Quishpe’s homeland of Saraguro, there are 26 people being held in prison, where reports are emerging of police abandoning protesters in their cells without food for as long as 18 hours. Additionally, there is at least one case of police threatening an indigenous woman under their custody with rape. “This is not fair, we aren’t animals,” said one man as families of the detained protesters gave a video testimony of the conditions inside the prison, adding that those detained are, “suffering from hunger, suffering from the cold, they aren’t even giving them food.”
President Correa’s popularity hangs in the balance, precariously hinging on the hundreds of millions of dollars being invested into social programs and public works around the country. As the price of oil plummets and the money to fund these programs dries up, the President has chosen to mine more instead of spend less. His strategy includes selling a third of its Amazon rainforest to China for mining as well as large sections of the Andean paramos without the permission of its ancestral owners.
Now, instead of gold bars being sailed back to the Spanish Monarch, this modern day conquest of indigenous land is President Correa’s plan to pay back the billions of dollars of debt his government owes the Communist Party of China, in the form of barrels of oil and shipping crates of minerals, irrespective of the consequences to the people, to the environment, and to the basic freedoms and rights enshrined in the Ecuadorian constitution.
