Colombia Passport

Conflicts of interests between multinationals and indigenous groups are not only confined to legal debate over property rights. If you ask the indigenous Embera in Choco, their fight against a mining project isn’t just a conflict about their legal ownership of the land, but a project that threatens to completely demolish their culture.

Muriel Mining started the exploration of Cerro de Caraperro, a mountain in the Jiguamiando River Basin in Colombia’s north-western department of Choco on January 5, 2009 after the Colombian government awarded the US-based company a 30 year mining concession to explore the sacred Embera site.

According to members of the Embera communities from surrounding areas, the company has entered their land illegally, without proper consultation as stipulated by a law that specifically states that any implementation of national laws in indigenous territories must be conducted in accordance to any customs and laws of the indigenous communities.

In the case of the Embera, any decisions on the exploitation of their land that face the community as a collective must be reached through a general consensus, which in this case, according to Embera leaders, was taken out of their hands when representatives of the Embera based in the cities unlawfully gave permission for the exploration without any prior consultation with the rest of the community.

This is a perfect example of the lack of understanding of the core beliefs of indigenous groups by ‘normal’ western companies. Intent on bypassing a law that is supposed to protect indigenous communities, here is another instance of how vulnerable these traditional groups are when up against laws created for them by the white man, and powerful foreign companies whose short term economic agenda is at absolute odds to a group concerned with a long term vision of preservation of the land.

The exploration has currently been suspended whilst lawyers representing the community through the organization Justicia y Paz continue to fight for the rights and autonomy of the indigenous group. In the interim, fears are raised in the already twice-displaced community that their culture and way of life might once again be in jeopardy.

At the heart of the struggle of Colombia’s often ignored and endangered indigenous groups against corporate intrusion is a misunderstood intrinsic and deep-rooted connection they have to their territory. Fear of losing access to ancestral lands or their ‘mother earth’ goes far beyond the legality of property rights as we know it today. For the indigenous, this is not a property conflict whereby a family must leave their property for the construction of a new motorway. Not only is there a much greater dependence on the land by the indigenous groups, a deep-rooted spiritual connection means that being torn away from the land is like losing a part of themselves.

The very nucleus of the indigenous existence is threatened by these mega-projects which are on the increase in Colombia’s rural areas, be they mining projects, hydro-electic or agricultural. All in the name of ‘development’  from a government that supports the opening of new trade options, but the repercussions for the local indigenous inhabitants are severe as they see their rivers polluted and their natural environment demolished, both life-lines for their survival in these isolated regions.

In Choco, the stage has been set for a bitter struggle between a community and Muriel Mining Company. At the root of this particular dispute is the excavation of a deeply sacred site for the Embera. The mountain, Cerro Caraperro (the mountain of the dogface), not only contains great riches, but is revered as a symbol of the inextricable link between the Embera and their territory.

As legend has it, a revered shaman, or Jaibana, that once lived in the mountain practicing traditional medicine, rose up through the mountainside in the afterlife with the face of a dog to represent the attachment humans have with earth’s creatures. Ever since, the plants and the animals that live on the mountain protect the spirits of the deceased Embera from being released.

If the mining goes ahead, which is planned as an open pit excavation, the community believe that the project will allow the release of the spirits, both good and evil that inhabit the land, which will have severely detrimental consequences for the surrounding communities.

The current Jaibana, Alberto Martiniro, tells me, ‘If the mountain is exploited, all of the spirits will leave, good and bad. It will cause illness and maybe death in the nearby population. Plants which we use to cure disease will be killed, and our waters will be contaminated. After the Spanish arrived, the government allocated to us only a small amount of land for the indigenous, and now they want to destroy what we have left’.

“We are tired of saying that we are absolutely against all types of mega-projects on our territory. It’s our future we have to protect. If we lose our land, we will lose our culture, our language and it will create internal conflicts within us. We have to fight or we we will see all of the forest privatized and no one will look after it,” explains Bailarin, the legal representative for the community.

The legal battle continues but what is for certain is that there remains a conflict in Colombia between the progress or development by a government open to new trade and the rights and ideals of an ancient people whose version of progress widely differs. “These people don’t think of the future for the community. We want to protect our land for our children and future generations. The economic progress that is encouraged by the government isn’t progress for us.”

“We lived on these lands before the ‘conquistadores’ arrived,” says one of the leaders of the community. “We were born here, we grew up here. If we, the owners of the land, lose our territory, where are we going to live?”

What for a government or commercial enterprise is a dispute that can be settled (or won) by the application of law, for the indigenous inhabitants of the region can mean the complete extinction of their identity and culture. There is not one constitution or set of laws of one country that takes into account the core values of the different indigenous communities, making it impossible for this legislation to protect the interests of the natives. Their connection to the land they live on is hard to comprehend by those that took the land in the centuries after the arrival of the Spanish and is impossible to protect without undermining the development of a country according to western standards.

Bailarin sums up the fear of the future for the community, “Without our land we lose our culture. Without our land we are no longer Embera.”