ENVIRONMENT-COLOMBIA: Controversial Dam Begins Operating

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yadira Ferrer

BOGOTA, Feb 15 2000 (IPS) - The Urra dam in northern Colombia began to operate Tuesday after more than 30 years of conflicts over the environmental impact of the project and complaints by the Embera- Katio indigenous community that their rights have been violated.

After the first 60-megawatt unit was successfully tested, the hydroelectric plant, located in the department of Cordoba, was declared officially in operation. It is designed to generate 300 megawatts of power to meet Colombia’s growing energy needs.

The state-owned Urra S.A. is administering the hydroelectric project, and contracted Sweden’s Skanska company and the Russian firm Energomachiexport to build the dam.

Meanwhile, 168 representatives of the Embera-Katio ethnic community remained camped out in downtown Bogota, in front of the Environment Ministry, which issued Urra the licence to dam the river. The protesters are demanding that the government consider proposals to mitigate the impact of the project on their lives.

The hydroelectric plant, which cost around 800 million dollars to build, “will generate 300 megawatts of energy at a lower cost, and reduce the possibility of rationing on the Atlantic coast” of northern Colombia, said Deputy Minister of Mines and Energy Felipe Riveira. Work on the dam began in 1993.

Gloria Rodríguez, at the Institute of Environmental Studies of the public National University, said the dam “radically modifies the system of water control in the Sinu river,” on which it is built, with negative effects for local subsistence farmers, fisherfolk and indigenous communities.

Activists at home and abroad warn that the very survival of the Embera-Katio people is at stake.

In December, Environment Minister Juan Mayr ordered that Urra fill the reservoir to just 119 metres above sea level to prevent the flooding of the huts of local residents who have not yet evacuated. (One portion of the Embera-Katio community accepted the company’s offer of compensation of land and future monthly and yearly cash payments.)

The indigenous protesters, representatives of 16 Embera-Katio communities living in the Rio Verde and Rio Sinu reserves, reached Bogota Dec 14 demanding that a percentage of Urra’s revenues go towards long-term community projects.

The group camped out on the grounds of the Environment Ministry says it represents the majority of the Embera-Katio Indians.

On Dec 29 the leaders of the protesters were summoned to a meeting. But on Jan 3 the government negotiators suspended the talks when the protesters refused to pack up and move to “a safer, more dignified” spot where better hygiene was possible.

Fernando Castrillón, an adviser to the Embera-Katio, told IPS that the start of operations of the Urra dam demonstrated the government’s policy of “trampling the rights of indigenous peoples, as it is also doing with the U’wa community in eastern Colombia.”

The government granted the California-based oil giant Occidental Petroleum an environmental licence to drill for oil in the Samore Block, an area on the border with Venezuela, despite the opposition put up by the U’wa, who claim the area as their ancestral lands and have threatened to commit collective suicide if the project goes ahead.

Both the U’wa and Embera-Katio have won broad international support from environmental and human rights groups for their causes.

Embera-Katio spokesman Kimi Pernía told IPS that only actions by the indigenous community and cases submitted to the Inter- American Commission on Human Rights could pressure the government to address the indigenous group’s demands.

Pernía met last week in the United States with representatives of environmental and human rights organisations and a group of eight lawmakers to seek continued support for the Embera-Katio community.

The indigenous leader, 48, told the gathering that already at the age of eight he heard his elders discussing the planned hydropower project and the damages it would inflict on their livelihood, land and culture.

“We the indigenous people did not know what the word ‘dam’ meant, but now we know that it means killing off the fish and destroying the food and the trees that gave us life,” he said.

Pernía said the nearly four-decade struggle has worn down and divided the Embera-Katio community, and cost several dozen lives.

Human rights groups say 31 Embera-Katio Indians have been killed since 1986 in the departments of Cordoba and Antioquia and Choco in clashes between guerrilla and paramilitary groups fighting for control over the territory in the context of the decades-old civil war raging in this South American country.

The London-based Survival International says local land-owners, who stand to benefit from the dam, brought in a paramilitary group, Cordoba and Uraba Self-Defence, “with the tacit support of the provincial authorities and the army.”

The indigenous group is demanding that the murders be investigated and the culprits punished, and has called on the armed groups to leave them out of the conflict.

The Embera-Katio have the backing of an international network of environmental and rights groups that has campaigned against the companies financing the Urra dam project and raised awareness in their countries.

The network includes the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, Canada’s Development and Peace, the US-based International Rivers Network and Global Exchange, and the London- based Amnesty International and Survival International.

The Embera-Katio protesters are also demanding that Urra S.A. comply with a 1998 sentence handed down by Colombia’s Constitutional Court, which ordered that the firm reach an agreement with the local communities and authorities on the environmental management of the Nudo de Paramillo nature reserve, where the dam has been built.

On that occasion, the Constitutional Court ruled that the rights of the indigenous community had been violated because they were not duly consulted regarding the hydropower project.

The Constitutional Court ordered the company to draw up a report on the measures taken to mitigate the environmental impact of the dam.

The indigenous communities were also to be compensated “for the loss of possession and use of their reserve and are to participate in the economic benefits generated by the project.”

The 460,000-hectare Nudo de Paramillo nature reserve is home to some 2,500 indigenous people and 25,000 peasant farmers.