El Dorado Nuevo in Colombia
by Brad Miller

From the heights where condors soared, the legend of the gilded man floated down from Cundinamarca and across the Andes. Each year the chieftain of the Muiscas would cover himself in gold dust and plunge ceremoniously into Laguna de Guativita, rejuvenating his monarchy. The story of "El Hombre Dorado" became the myth of El Dorado, the kingdom of gold, luring the conquistadors of the early 16th century into Colombia. They searched the mountains and jungles for gold, bringing the natives a new world of slavery, killing and pain.

Four and a half centuries later, conquistadors still scour Colombia for riches. But now the mythical man of Cundinamarca is covered in black gold.

The Oil Rush
The US multinational Tropical Oil was granted the first foreign oil concession in Colombia, in Barrancabermeja, in 1916. Tropical was followed by other companies from the US and elsewhere.

In 1960, Texaco, in association with the government's Empresa Colombiana de Petroleos (Ecopetrol), invaded the homeland of the Kofan, Huitoto, Siona, Awa, Inga and Coreguaje people of Putumayo. With the companies came water pollution, malnutrition, skin disease and parasite infection. Subsequent immigration of colonists and coca growers has further marginalized native people and increased social tension.

"The Kofan have lost over 80 percent of their territory," says Benedicto Juaibioy of OPIAC (Organizacion de los Pueblos Indigenas de la Amazonia Colombiana). The native Putumayans have lost much of their hunting and fishing grounds and have struggled to maintain their political structure and cultural identity - dress, language and religious customs. "They have had no cultural, social or environmental control over their lives," says Juaibioy.

Texaco has left Putumayo for other prospects in the mountains of Boyaca, Cundinamarca and off the shore of Guajira. But companies like Argosy Energy, Canadian Petrol, Ram and Citi-Colombia have arrived to fill the vacuum.

The state-run company Ecopetrol runs a project north of Orito, Putumayo, in what is known as the San Juan Norte Block. According to the Oficina Promotoria de Desarrollo Indigena Municipal de Orito, Ecopetrol has been conducting seismic testing, using underground explosions, 600 yards from the Saldado de los Loros, a fragile habitat for native parrots. The Inga and Awa consider the area sacred; they want any exploration to take place at least three miles from the site. They are also concerned with the constant presence of helicopters and the danger that planned logging poses to the highlands' aquifer.

Carlos Landun, Vice President of OZIP (Organización de la Zona Indigena del Putumayo), says that Ecopetrol moved in before consultations were completed, with the blessing of the Ministry of Environment. The Colombian Constitution of 1991 requires that indigenous groups be formally consulted when a project will affect their lives, but subsequent decrees have gutted the law.

"When resources are found, the people are worth nothing, "says Landun, adding that the San Juan area is now heavily militarized. "If you tell them 'no, you can't enter,' you can find yourself dead on the highway." But the indigenous people of Putumayo and the rest of the Amazon basin continue to develop their "plan of life", which includes demanding more autonomy and more thorough and inclusive consultations, resisting new petroleum exploration and benefiting economically from the oil projects already in existence. They also wish to acquire land for a new reserve called La Torre, where the different indigenous groups of Putumayo could hunt, fish and gather plants to make their traditional medicine. What their "plan of life" doesn't include is the expansion of oil companies into other provinces of Amazonia. According to OPIAC's Juaibioy, those companies are already in Guaviare, and are looking at invading Caqueta and Amazona.

It also doesn't include being "caught in the middle of a war," as Juaibioy says. In the current war between the Colombian government and the country's two largest guerrilla groups, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the ELN (National Liberation Army), the losers are indigenous and campesino communities. Areas of oil development and exploration are arenas for intense conflict. Guerrillas have targeted oil refineries, pipelines and personnel for attacks. Insurgents kidnap foreign and Colombian oil workers and have sabotaged the country's vast system of pipelines over 700 times.

To protect investments in Colombia's most lucrative legal export product, the government has deployed military troops to protect oil infrastructure and has enacted a $1 per barrel "war tax."

Oil companies also employ private security companies as liaisons with the military and police, and - some activists say - paramilitary units supported by the army. According to the Andean Commission of Jurists, 70 percent of Colombia's rampant political murders are carried out by these "legitimate" forces. As FARC and the government began peace talks in January, the paramilitaries conducted a series of massacres in the district of Uraba. The US spends over $280 million tax dollars a year to train and equip the Colombian security forces, funding the "war on drugs" and the protection of the oil industry.

Spills
A 1998 report written by Colombia's Ministry of Environment shows that oil spills have devastated the country's rivers and wetlands, killing wildlife and destroying farmland. Over 2 million barrels of oil have been spilled, mainly from the Cano Limon-Covenas pipeline, which serves Occidental Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and Ecopetrol in the province of Arauca.

The Cano Limon-Covenas pipeline crosses the traditional land of the U'wa. For ten years, Occidental has been pressuring the semi-nomadic U'wa to allow them to drill for oil in the Samore block, which also lies within their ancestral territory. Oxy has attempted to persuade the community by meeting with individuals who lack authority to represent the U'wa - a violation of the 1991 Constitution.

Oxy executives claim the ELN is pressuring the U'wa to resist signing an agreement with the company. Occidental of Colombia's President, Stephen Newton, made press statements linking the U'wa to the guerrillas - a virtual death sentence in a region heavily populated with military and paramilitary units.

The territorial dispute remains unresolved. Shell has put its share of the operation up for sale; the U'wa say they will commit mass suicide by jumping off a 1,400 ft cliff if Oxy starts drilling on their land - which contains an amount of oil estimated as enough to supply US consumers for only three months.

The US imports 65 percent of Colombia's exported oil. The industrialized nations of the world consume 70 percent of the Earth's fossil fuels. These "First World" nations, in collusion with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, have driven Colombia to increase its oil production to pay off its foreign debt, and to cut funding for social programs in a country with one of the most polarized distributions of wealth in Latin America.

While the government and oil industry talk of promoting "sustainable development" by extracting an unsustainable resource, what they have made is a "pigsty," says Alvaro Solano, one of 18 Union Sindical Obrero (USO) members incarcerated in La Picota penitentiary for alleged acts of sabatoge on oil pipelines.

In the Amazon jungle, a Siona shaman holds forth a wooden cup of "yaje," a liquid used in a traditional ceremony of cleansing. During the course of the night, the participants will make a journey - maybe to the land of a bright moon, luminous flowers and jaguars, a place unfractured by wealth and greed. Or they may travel up into the sky where blue fades to black and metal satellites search for oil below the crust of the Earth - then descend, to where a corporate conquistador holds a photographic image of a green forest ending abruptly at a cliff and the pile of bleached and shattered bones lying below it, bleeding black gold.

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Activists Murdered

As the bodies of three American activists were found dumped on the Venezuelan border on March 4, the cycle of violence in Colombia spun a little faster.

The three activists were in Colombia to protect the culture and political integrity of the Uw'a. Terrence Frietas, 24, of Oakland California; Ingrid Washinawatok, 41, a member of the Menominee Nation residing in New York; and Lahe'ena'e Gay, 39, of Hawaii were part of a delegation to help the Uw'a create a cultural education system and to help fight oil exploration by the consortium of Occidental Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and Ecopetrol. The three were kidnapped in the province of Arauca by two armed men while returning to Bogota on February 25. Their bodies were found a week later - bound, blindfolded, marked by signs of torture, full of bullets.

Frietas, Coordinator of the Uw'a Defense Working Group, had said in October that he had "the military, paramilitaries and guerrillas showing up at my door." He was being followed by what he believed to be right-wing paramilitaries, and had been interrogated by police. Berito Kuwar'Uwa, Chief of the Traditional U'wa Authority, had previously been beaten by hooded gunmen and ordered to sign an agreement allowing the oil companies to drill on their land.

Despite the continual paramilitary, government and corporate harassment of indigenous activists and their supporters, it was the FARC that eventually admitted to murdering the three Americans. After initial denials, they announced that a low-ranking commander had kidnapped and executed the activists without authorization. They also said that the guilty individuals would be dealt with using their own system of law - which almost certainly means death for those who pulled the triggers, and impunity for anyone else responsible for the murders.

The Indigenous Women's Network, of which Ingrid Washinawatok was Co-Chair, says the US government shares the blame. IWN says the State Department "destabilized negotiations and ultimately cost our sisters and brother their lives… to gain financial support for US policies in Colombia." During negotiations for the three's release, the IWN says, the State Department released approximately $230 million in military support for the anti-drug war in Colombia, then the Colombian government killed 70 members of FARC in an orchestrated attack.

Frietas himself noted a connection between violence and the oil industry in a report, "Blood of Our Mother," which he wrote for Project Underground in 1998.

"As Occidental knows only too well," he wrote, "the growing oil infrastructure has served as a magnet for violence. Human rights observers contend and Occidental officials privately concede that oil activity in the U'wa region will only heighten and focus the violence on a peaceful people caught in the crossfire."

In a statement following the murders, the U'wa Defense Working Group demanded that Occidental immediately withdraw application to drill on ancestral U'wa lands, and called on Occidental "to consider its role in the ongoing cycle of violence in Colombia."

It is this cycle that killed Terry, Ingrid and Lahe'ena'e. But we can celebrate in the knowledge that there are individuals that have the courage to illuminate the truth. And it is from this light that we receive our strength.

Brad Miller is a San Francisco-based writer who recently spent several months in Colombia, funded by a grant from the Patagonia Company.