Development & Aid, Environment, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Population

BOLIVIA: Guarani Indians Fight to Keep Oil Company Off Their Land

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Jul 22 2004 (IPS) - The Guaraní community of Tentayapi, in southern Bolivia, one of the last bastions of the indigenous group’s traditional way of life, is fighting to keep a foreign oil company out of its ancestral territory.

One of the community’s leaders, Saúl Carayury, told the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, meeting this week in Geneva, that Maxus Energy, a subsidiary of the Spanish-Argentine firm Repsol-YPF based in Spain, intends to explore and drill for hydrocarbons on communally-owned indigenous land in Tentayapi.

Bolivia’s national law on agrarian reform, enacted in 1996, created a new form of rural property that recognises the communal rights of indigenous peoples over land they have traditionally inhabited, known as Ancestral Community Lands (TCOs, by the Spanish acronym).

The Tentayapi community is opposed to the oil company operating on its land because ”we know that it will bring with it formal education, which leads to the loss of our cultural identity,” Carayury told IPS.

In the case of other communities in Bolivia living in areas that have been granted in concession to foreign oil companies, native lifestyles and cultures have been heavily and negatively affected by environmental damages and the destruction of the areas where they live, said the indigenous leader.

Foreign oil companies including Repsol-YPF were granted contracts to exploit Bolivia’s abundant natural gas reserves – the second-largest in South America after Venezuela – under the partial privatisation of the industry carried out since the mid-1990s.

But the Guaraní Indians in Tentayapi have decided to put up a fight to keep oil firms out of their territory, and are attempting to block access to Maxus Energy, Carayury told the Working Group.

Through that decision, the Guaraní are exercising their rights as an indigenous community, as recognised by the Bolivian constitution and by the national law that ratified International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention 169 on the rights of native peoples.

Tentayapi – which means ”the last people” – is one of the last bulwarks of the Guaraní cultural traditions, said Carayury.

The local residents, proud of never having fallen captive to Spanish conquistadors or invaders, have maintained their traditional form of government, headed by a community assembly.

Some 60 families, totalling around 380 people, live in that island of Guaraní culture which covers a little more than 3,000 hectares in the province of Luis Calvo in the department of Chuquisaca, 320 km south of the central Bolivian city of Santa Cruz.

For generations, the Tentayapi community has fought to defend its identity and culture against outside pressures, said Carayury, who added that it is the only community that truly preserves the Guaraní way of life and traditional form of dress.

The company has been respectfully told that the local community does not want it to enter the area, and has been informed of ”our intention,” he said.

The Tentayapi community holds legal title to the communally-owned territory, or TCO.

Nevertheless, the company has announced its aim of carrying out seismic studies on the lands of the community, and has signed an agreement with the Bolivian government, although it has not formally consulted the local residents, said Carayury.

In order to begin exploring for hydrocarbons in the area, Maxus Energy would first have to open up a road, said the indigenous leader.

The only way to enter the remote territory is on horseback, although the rough tracks could be negotiated by the company’s four-wheel-drive vehicles, said Carayury.

The local economy of the indigenous community is based on subsistence agriculture. The staple crops are corn, beans, yucca, sweet potatoes and squash.

Carayury said the Tentayapi community has turned to the Bolivian Congress in search of a solution to its problems, but has not received a favourable response.

Out of fear that the conflict could escalate, the Guaraní community has now taken its case to the U.N. Working Group to draw international attention to its demand for an end to abuses and the enforcement of provisions aimed at guaranteeing respect for indigenous rights.

This week, the Working Group is discussing international questions of concern to indigenous communities, especially the delay in adopting the U.N. draft declaration on the rights of native peoples.

Only two of the draft document’s 45 articles have been approved in nine years of debate, said Julián Burger, with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Another issue of concern is the fact that the decade of indigenous peoples, declared by the U.N. General Assembly, is drawing to an end this year without any real progress having been made.

Indigenous organisations propose declaring a new decade to draw greater attention to their problems, but the bloc of western nations is opposed to that initiative.

That group of industrialised countries has also objected to the recommendation by the U.N. Human Rights Commission that the Working Group’s mandate be extended, as demanded by indigenous peoples.

The western countries argue that there is overlap between the Working Group and the recently created Permanent Forum for Indigenous Peoples, made up of eight independent experts designated by the governments of the U.N. member nations, and eight others proposed by the world’s indigenous communities.