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IN THE NEWS

THE CASE OF THE U'WA VERSUS OXY: PROLOGUE TO MURDER

By Danny Kennedy

Three indigenous rights activists from North America Terry Freitas, Lahe'ene Gay, and Ingrid Washinawatok were murdered in Colombia March 4, 1999, by the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a leftist guerrilla organization. They had been on a solidarity mission to visit and work with the U'wa, a tribe of voluntarily isolated indigenous peoples in the Andean cloud forest, who have been bitterly resisting Occidental Petroleum's plans to drill for oil on their sacred homeland since 1988.

Ingrid was a proud member of the Menominee nation, Lahe'ene a leader of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, and Terry a young but long-standing supporter of such struggles. The execution of these three speaks to the dissonance of the goals of Colombia's Marxist guerrilla armies with the needs of its indigenous peoples, and it also draws focus to the threat posed to the U'wa pueblo by Oxy's oil development plans. Since, and as a result of, this tragedy, the plight of the U'wa has garnered greater national and international attention and is moving closer to a resolution.

The battle of the U'wa with Oxy promises to become a test case for the Colombian government's purported commitment to indigenous rights under the 1991 Constitution, as well as for the ability of activists and organizers in North America to hold Occidental accountable to the U'wa's demands. Danger is but one of the difficulties facing activists attempting to support communities threatened by political violence and corporate domination in distant and remote locations. Despite these realities and the setback of these three deaths, the campaign, led by the U'wa traditional authority but embracing environmental, indigenous and human rights organizations around the globe, may become a model for future fights over fossil-fuel development.

Prologue to murder

Politics in Colombia is not simply fraught with violence, it is conducted violently. There are thousands of political assassinations every year. The oil business source of the greatest amount of Colombia's "legitimate" export revenue is a magnet for this violence wherever it is established. Other big business with less mainstream legitimacy coca and poppy production attract comparable violence, and the wrath of the U.S. war on drugs.

But big oil engenders its very own, unique cycle of murder and mayhem. Over its life the Ca–o Limon pipeline Occidental's biggest investment with joint-operating partner BP has been blown up more than 500 times simply to prove leftist opposition to multinational oil companies. The environmental implications of this campaign and the loss of human life has been horrific. Yet another indicator of how central oil is to the political violence in Colombia, both of the key leftist guerrilla armies in the country's three-decade-old civil war earn much of their income from kidnapping and extorting oil company workers.

In response, the oil industry has colluded with the Colombian government to protect their people and infrastructure. For a start, every barrel of oil exported has a "war tax" of about $1 on top of the regular price to pay for the army's efforts to protect them. Then special contracts have been taken to pay and train Colombian soldiers, such as BP's $60 million deal for a battalion of 150 officers and 500 soldiers. A different special force of police contracted by BP has been trained by Defense Systems, Ltd., a British mercenary firm, in anti-guerrilla tactics. As Amnesty International put it: "Given the well-documented role of the police in human rights abuses and the lack of accountability and controls on Colombian armed forces, BP practices are extremely dangerous."

Against this background the U'wa have taken an heroic stand for the people of Colombia and, in fact, for all of us. They are demanding, despite intense pro-development pressure by everyone from the government of Colombia to the paramilitaries, (1) respect for their right to self-determination including the right to say no to the oil project if they so decide; (2) legal title to the Unico Resguardo (a proposed unified reservation representing much of their ancestral domain); and (3) demilitarization of the U'wa homeland and an end to the cycle of violence and intimidation.

As the U'wa themselves have explained, the symbolism of their struggle goes beyond even these three far-reaching demands it is a challenge to the fossil-fuel addiction which drives the opening up of critical ecosystems and indigenous lands in further flung, ever more remote corners of the globe, when fossil-fuel use in and of itself endangers life as we know it with climate change. In an August 8, 1999, statement released in Colombia, the U'wa people declared, "We are seeking an explanation for this 'progress' that goes against life. We are demanding that this kind of progress stop, that oil exploitation in the heart of the Earth is halted, that the deliberate bleeding of the Earth stop."

Not the end

For a Colombian tribe to venture to oppose the development of 1.2 billion barrels of oil under its traditional — but as yet unrecognized — lands has always risked a violent response. For foreigners to get involved was similarly risky. Yet Lahe'ene, Ingrid and Terry were doing what needs to be done to run a credible support campaign for communities in the so-called developing world, fighting multinational corporations from the so-called developed world. They were spending time with the U'wa, getting to know them to build relationships and trust, and most importantly exploring proactive solutions with the U'wa.

Terry who had acted as the central liaison between the Traditional U'wa Authority and the coalition known as the U'wa Defense Working Group in North America for nearly two years was introducing the others to the U'wa for the purposes of a cultural preservation program based on models developed by the Pacific Cultural Conservancy International, which Lahe'ene directed. This was taking the solidarity campaign to another stage of exploring community-based development alternatives as a means to bolster the resistance to Oxy's proposal to drill for oil. Ingrid, with years of indigenous rights work behind her, was there to share experience and insight as well as her connections to resources in North America.

In a car on their way out of the territory to catch a plane for Bogota and the United States on February 25, the three were stopped by hooded men and taken away at gunpoint. After a dreadful week of frustration at the news that the FARC had kidnapped them, and speculation about what they wanted, it was reported their bodies had been found on the Venezuelan border. To date no meaningful explanation has surfaced as to why a field brigade of this supposedly progressive, revolutionary organization would kill such indigenous rights activists and probably none ever will.

Since then, however, and to ensure that their deaths were not in vain, the U'wa Defense Working Group has taken up the campaign against Oxy and in support of the U'wa with new gusto. In an international week of action at the end of April, hundreds of people including Terry's mother and sister and two U'wa leaders protested outside Occidental Petroleum's headquarters in Los Angeles. A shareholders resolution calling on the company to investigate the commercial implications of negative publicity surrounding this case garnered 13 percent of the stockholders' votes. And a letter-writing campaign targeting Occidental's CEO Ray Imrani and the Colombian President Andres Pastrana has generated thousands of messages to these key targets.

The U'wa remain unwavering in their opposition to the proposal to drill on their land. Just 10 days after the murder of their comrades, the U'wa leadership reiterated the community's opposition to oil development on its lands: "We demand from the national government and the multinational oil company, Occidental, an official declaration of cancellation of the oil exploration and exploitation projects on the U'wa traditional territory." Given the intransigence of the corporation and government despite the pain and suffering they have created simply by proposing an oil project there, new plans have been established to apply pressure on the Colombian government and to keep Oxy out of U'wa land.

For more information about these plans, what you can do, or for a copy of the report "Blood of Our Mother" on the U'wa Pueblo, Occidental Petroleum, and the Colombian Oil Industry (which Terry Freitas primarily wrote and researched) please contact Project Underground at (510) 705-8981; steve@moles.org; or locate www.moles.org on the Internet.

Danny Kennedy works with Project Underground, a human rights group that supports communities threatened by the mining and oil industries by exposing corporate human rights and environmental abuses as well as bridging the environmental, indigenous, and human rights movements in support of struggles with the mineral and energy industry.