Struggle Against Quimbo Dam Reaches Critical Point

Original: Upside Down World

Photos: Polinizaciones, Carolina Caycedo, ASOQUIMBO & Descolonizando La Jagua.

The threat of the Quimbo Hydroelectric Project at its final hour, the Huilense people stand once again in defense of the Yuma River and their territory

In what has been close to eight years of struggle for a territory, a free and dignified river, the communities affected by the Quimbo Hydroelectric Project in the center of the department of Huila, Colombia has reached its most critical point. The multinational company responsible for the hydroelectric project, Emgesa (Endesa-Enel), has only completed a portion of the environmental, social and infrastructure requirements that they are required to have completed prior to the filling of the dam’s reservoir which started at 5am on June 30^th.  Emgesa's director Lucio Rubio told press the dam would be operational by September of this year and will be completely filled in its 8.500 Ha reservoir by early next year.

The communities that have organized and struggled for these years have done so as the Association of Affected Peoples of Quimbo Hydroelectric Project (ASOQUIMBO) and the Movement Ríos Vivos Colombia. Since the beginning when Uribe handing over nearly 10,000 Ha of land to a foreign company as “public utility” in 2008, every single aspect of the environmental license for the Quimbo Hydroelectric project has either been systematically ignored by the ANLA (National Authority of Environmental Licenses), or changed to favor the company´s needs disregarding the people, communities and the ecosystems. One of these cases is of the Ávila Family, the owners and caretakers of the property known as “Las Juntas” in La Jagua, who had their 16 Ha of land used for mixed crops and small scale dairy cattle that has supported the family for over eight decades. “We lost everything, this land is what has supported my family for generations and all we demanded was to relocated or compensated fairly as stated in the environmental license ¨ the same or better condition¨ and now the State expropriates us a forces us to accept less than half of the land´s worth” lamented Jose Ávila one of the brothers who herds cattle on the land.

Mobilization ¡The River of Life!

In March of this year ASOQUIMBO and Ríos Vivos in accompaniment of writer William Ospina organized and traveled the National Mobilization of the Defense of the Magdalena (Yuma) River, the territories, (The River of Life), a territorial journey following the Yuma River through its first bioregions, the Colombian Massif and the Upper Magdalena in the departments of Huila and Tolima, visiting the territories affected by the 17 dams that are intended to be built as part of the Master Advantage Plan of the Magdalena River. The beginning initiated in San Agustin passing through all the places where dams exist or are planned, Pitalito, Timana, La Jagua, Hobo, Neiva, Aipe, going throughout Tolima to Honda and finishing in Dorada (Caldas) with a ceremony in the river.

In the first part of journey following the river there were marches, forums, press conferences where all the aspects and threats related to the Master Advantage Plan of the Magdalena River, which the national government is putting into effect through the entity CORMAGDALENA in conjunction with the Chinese government´s state-owned company Hydrochina. The Master Advantage Plan seeks to turn the upper part of the river into a system of hydroelectric dams (the electricity is for industrial and not social needs) and from the middle to the lower region of the river it will be dredged to allow large container ships to be able to go up from the Caribbean Sea to Honda and connect with railways and highways to the pacific coast port of Buenaventura.

Master Advantage Plan of the Magdalena River

Just as the Quimbo H.P. has been built by consortiums and sub contracts, the group Navelena made up of the Brazilian company Odebrecht and the Colombian Valores and Contratos (Valorcon) will be in charge of the dredging and nagavenatility of the river. According to the magazine Portafolio, the dredging while have to allow for a width, depth, and curvature of a canal that allows container ships with up to 7,200 tons go up from Barranquilla to Barracabermeja; ships with 6,000 tons from Barracabermeja to Puerto Berrio, and ships with 800 tons from Puerto Berrio to Puerto Salgar. With those statistics that responsible entities aim to reach a fluid transport along the 652 kilometers from Barranquilla to Barrancabermeja. The goal is to surpass 1.2 million annual tons in 2014 to 6 million annual tons of our goods for exportation. The terms of the contract with Navelena are for 13.5 years at over 2 billion pesos. According to the National University of Colombia the aims of nagavibility for the river are unattainable do to the natural amount of sediments that the river has as well as the social and environmental impacts since the river.

The Plan also contemplates a cascade of hydroelectric dams starting in the Colombian Massif going all the way down to Honda: Guarapas, 140 MW & Chillurco 180 MW (both in Pitalito), Oporapa 220MW (in Oporapa), Pericongo 80 MW (in Timana), The Quimbo 400 MW (Central Huila), Betania 520 MW (built and functioning in Yaguara), The Manso 140 MW (in Neiva), Veraguas 130 MW (in Aipe), Bateas 140 MW (in Villavieja) and continuing into Tolima with the Basilias 140MW (in Natagaima), Carrasposo 170 MW & Nariño 200MW (in Girardot), Lame 560 MW (in Purificacion),  Ambalema 160 MW (in Ambalema), Cambao 100 MW (in Cambao), Piedras Negras 100 MW and 3 more dams in Honda.

Ecocide in La Jagua and affected animals

In the community of La Jagua, the chainsaws in the hands of the workers of the subcontracted company Refocosta, has progressively deforested nearly all of the area that is projected to be inundated with the Quimbo Hydroelectric Project´s reservoir. Indiscriminately any plant with a trunk over 10 cm is taken down; the screams of the chainsaws have not stopped leaving a devastating landscape everywhere.

The massive deforestation which began in March of this year currently has finished in La Jagua. The first days there was resistance, but soon enough there were hundreds of loggers all over the thousands of hectares of land. What poorly organized forest defense was attempted was overwhelmed. What are left are people taking what wood has not been already taken, but everything is downed, and environmental authorities are harsh applying full force of the law on any one trying to salvage the wood that is rotting in the sun and rain. In La Jagua everything along the Magdalena River from the Juntas of the mouth of the Suaza River into the Magdalena River all the way up to the Peñalta farm. Refocosta has taken down all types of trees, destroying all sorts of dry tropical forest ecosystem from the Paso del Colegio in Gigante to La Virginia in Altamira, epic beings like the ceiba, iguá, cachimbo, raspa yuco, caracoli, dinde, bili bil and cedar lay strewn about on the ground, piled on top of each other flooding the landscape. The largest concentration is in the outskirts of Gigante as the machinery scramble to get as much wood out as they can now that the water is filling. None the less the Autonomous Environmental Corporation of the Upper Magdalena- CAM ordered the dam´s filling to be suspended due to the fact still over 20% of the biomass has not been logged from the reservoir area and what has been chopped down is piled up in the area, the ANLA ignored the CAM´s orders.  Once filled, according to the Investigation Group of Limnology of the National University of Colombia has warned about the possible explosion of cyanobacteria in the reservoir of the Quimbo H.P.

With the exception of the first couple of days in La Jagua, the logging has not had any setbacks. According to the loggers who work for Refocosta the company sells the wood to the multinational company Cartones de Colombia and the big box store chain Home Center. Those who end up buying this wood are buying the massacred and stolen forests of Huila.

Since the logging took place in the areas of La Jagua known as San José, Las Peñas, el Alemán,  Las Cuchas and Peñalta the grape growers and vineyards in llano de virgin have complained about the fruit bats that have migrated and are finishing off their crops. Most growers to deal with the increase in of bats have resulted in applying more pesticides or shooting the bats. The fruit eating and pollinating flying mammals lose their homes and food but also the parrots in the caves of las Peñas have nothing left to eat, the snakes are seen killed and smashed along the high way as the escape the chain saws and the wrath of the falling trees. There are stories of near the wall where the water has already flooded the iguanas, rabbit and quail are perched in the tree tops waiting to be rescued by Emgesa´s boatmen or drown in the rising waters.  Emgesa does not recognize the animals as affected; perhaps it is because the animals do not know how to stand in line outside the office that they have been included on the census of the affected. Emgesa hires veterinarians to relocate animals that they find like snakes, turtles, baby birds, and abandoned pets, though not all have had the best luck, the displaced animals that have had to endure this destruction also included otters, fox, ocelot, armadillo and deer.

A supposed progress

The roads uphill between Garzón and Gigante are already in use, as is the new longest bridge in Colombia, measuring at 1.8 km is has no lighting at all, railing and a side walk on only one side, and the pavement cracked in less than a week after its opening. The Viaduct that connects Garzón with El Agrado floods with tourists on the weekends taking selfies.

On July 6th the last person was displaced from the reservoir’s basin area. In the year 2013 Constitutional Court ordered sentence T-135 obligating Emgesa to realize another census of the affected population in less the 6 months, the company failed to do so. Just one more example of how Emgesa has washed its hand of so many obligations stipulated in the environmental license and the ANLA has facilitated and been complicit in the destruction and ecocide of the territory.

Francisco Cabrera along with wife Angela Trujillo, their children, grandchildren, pets and farm animals are true symbols of resistance, for a long time they were the last family left in Veracruz. What was once a community rich in crops, tree, water, animals, people and life now lays desolate amongst dead and scattered trees, the rubble of demolished homes, and taken over by private, armed security guards and dogs. Until few days ago the Cabrera Trujillo family, along with the church of Vercruz and some 20 trees were the last outcrop of resistance. In the finals days massive amounts of birds of all varieties took refuge in and around his house now that this was all that was left of their habitat. “Don Francisco put a banana on a branch for the birds to eat, “they have always come here and I have always fed them, forever, where will they go now?”.

For eight years Mr. Francisco a fisherman has demanded the company comply with the environmental license to be relocated to a property in the “same or better condition” then where he was on, something the company has not been able to do and is offering money to wash so they do not have to meet this obligation. As the Cabrera Trujillo family loaded their possessions onto the moving trucked Doña Ángela “We use to live so good, there was good work and a lot of fish. It is just to say the fishing here used to be so good, we could live from this… And now there is nothing left, everyone is gone, everyone has been displaced. It really is awful what has happened to us all. ”

Currently Emgesa has relocated people to illegal resettlements that have no permits or environmental licenses. People were relocated into areas that according to the CAM are of unsuitable ground and some are even to close to the oil pipeline of the Emerald Energy petroleum company. Most settlements do not have clinics or schools and some even lack potable water and in the case of the community resettled in La Galda in the Municipality of el Agrado, at one point they were left for two weeks where the water truck did not bring them the most needed and vital liquid.

Since the beginning the affected communities and academic allies knew and were saying that this huge disaster of an ecocide called the Quimbo would happen, from its inception of its irregular approval, it was already know it would turn out bad. In May of this year ASOQUIMBO held a Public Audience in the main campus of the South Colombian University (USCO) in Neiva. At the Audience representatives from the governor’s office, the CAM and the professor, investigator and spokesperson of ASOQUIBMO Miller Dussán along with Cecilia Quimbayo, from the Comptroller´s Office of the Republic criticized harshly backed up with studies and proof of Emgesa´s but also ANLA´s irregularities and unfufilments of the QUIMBO H.P. According to Dussan, “the tectonic faults near the Quimbo´s wall that if something were to move the disaster would be worse than 54 Armeros” (referring to the volcanic eruption and resulting avalanche in 1985 that destroyed the town of Armero, killing more than 20,000 people).

In terms of arguments presented to the audience there is the lack of restitution of 5,300 Ha of agriculturally productive lands that the company and INCODER (Colombian Government Land Entity) has to distribute to the affected population, the individual and collective resettlements without the adjusting  the Basic Plan of Territorial Order -POT-,  the destruction of 842 Ha of dry tropical forest, the ignoring and refusal to acknowledge the relocating and restoration of the San José de Belen Chapel of el Agrado, on June 10^th president of the community Junta Luz Neldy Bravo  with other community members  effectively stopped two men working for the subcontractor “Bautista & Bautista” in an attempt to “move” items in the church including the statues, the bell, pictures and tiles that was not authorized by the Dioceses or the governor.

In addition to these arguments on May 11th there was a trembler of with a reading of 3.8 on the Richter scale in Gigante a few kilometers from the wall of the Quimbo H.P. not to mention the dyeing of fish in the Betania Dam down river due to the lack of necessary oxygen because of the reduced water flow for the dam´s filling.

Land isn't to be sold, it is to be defended!

In early June fisher people from Yaguará, Campoalegre and Hobo started a peaceful protest along the national highway between Hobo and Gigante which escalated to them taking over city hall and chaining themselves shutting down the building. The families that depend on small scale fishing for their livelihood protest the dyeing off of fish in Betania that Emgesa denies and refuses to recognize them as affected by the Quimbo H.P. yet the rich business owners with floating cages for fish farming in Betania were recognized and paid by Emgesa.

The filling of the Quimbo Hydroelectric Project has already commenced and you can see the flooding in of reservoir from the highway. Even though the Administrative Tribunal of Huila ratified a suit filed by the fish farmers of Betania, the filling goes on.  The governor like so many others in the Colombian media who were quiet these eight years that Emgesa trampled the communities and ecosystems of central Huila and did nothing but ignore and speak ill of the communities of that mobilized in defense of the territory, now all of the political class is in an uproar about the illegal filling of the Quimbo. None the less the Ministry of Environment ignored the regional denouncements and has upheld the illegal filling of the Quimbo that is already accumulating large amounts of biomass that was supposed to be removed before the filling. 

On July 6th, after nearly two years being violently evicted,  ASOQUIMBO once again liberated lands in the struggle to establish a Peasant Farmer Reserve with the 5,300 Ha that have not been given to the affected communities.  Over 50 peasant families recuperated some 200 Ha in the area called Llano de la Virgen. That same day ASOQUIMBO reached an agreement with the police and Emgesa to organize a meeting with INCODER to settle the land and census issue in a week or more land liberations will occur.

On Friday, July 10^th, mobilizations occurred in Neiva in the Santander Park in front of the governor´s office and in Garzon in front of City Hall. In Neiva different theatrical actions took over the city´s central park and in Garzon a chalk-in was had on the street in front of city hall. In Los Angeles, California a group of Colombian women took over the Colombian Consulate with signs forcing the Colombian diaspora to what is going on in areas like Huila. On Saturday, July 11^th occurred the last mass at the Chapel in San Jose de Belen bringing together over a thousand people from the region, the Dioceses of Garzon and the different regional Parishes.

The fisher folk and farmers affected by the Quimbo H.P. are on the move and using a variety of tactics to do what they can to protect their territory from the announced disaster. The Colombian government, the multinational and national corporations the plan to continue to impose dams and other projects of displacement and destruction can only expect a growing tide of resistance from the communities that each value and cherish more the true wealth and strength they their territories have given them for so many generations; the rivers, the air, the land, are not to be sold, they are to be defended.

Desangramiento del Huila / Huila´s Bleeding

In southwest Colombia, rural communities have begun using direct action in their struggle against the privatization of natural resources by multinational corporations. This video focuses on inhabitants whose way of life has been threatened by the construction of a major new hydroelectric project on the Magdalena River. 

ORIGINAL SOURCE 

En el Paro: Polinizando junto a ASOQUIMBO / On Strike: Pollinating with ASOQUIMBO

En el mes de noviembre del año pasado personas afectadas por el Proyecto Hidroeléctrico El Quimbo, activaron un bloqueo en las obras de la empresa Emgesa, en el centro poblado de La Jagua (Garzón). El propósito del bloqueo era exigir el cumplimiento del fallo T-135 de la Corte Constitucional, que le ordena a Emgesa de manera inmediata, hacer un nuevo censo de la población afectada. Durante el tiempo que la comunidad se mantuvo movilizada, las abejas de la Colmena, las acompañó socializando la campaña grafica Mesoamérica Resiste. Para más información sobre las actividades en pro de la defensa del territorio en el centro y sur del Huila en el año pasado se puede ver aquí.

 

During the month of November last year, people affected by the Quimbo Hydroelectric Project mobilized a blockade to halt the constructions of the company Emgesa in the village of La Jagua (Garzón). The purpose of the blockade was to demand that the company comply with the ruling T-135 of the Constitutional Court ordering Emgesa to initiate immediately a new census of the affected population. During the time that the affected community was mobilized, the bees of the Beehive accompanied the folks sharing the graphic campaign of Mesoamérica Resiste. For more information about the activities that occurred last year in defense of the territory in central and south Huila, click here.  

Geochoreographies, confronting the Quimbo Hydroelectric Project using the body, the land, and everyday actions in Defense of Territory

In our work with the youth of Jaguos por el Territorio we've been able to experience many creative expressions used as valid tactics in the struggle for the defense of territory; muralism has been one of the most important strategies as well as photography and theater. This year the Jaguos collective received financial support to collaborate with diverse allies in the creation of an art process for land defense called Geochoreographies.

Geochoreography comes from the words geography, or the study of space, the environment, land and territory, and choreography, or the organization or structure of actions within a space. Geochoreographies is made up of two simultaneous processes, one body and the other audio-visual.

The body process consisted of 16 workshops that took place over 4 months in four municipalities nodes of actions, with training in performance arts, theater, puppets, and contemporary dance. The nodes of action were in La Jagua (Garzón), Gigante, El Agrado, and countryside of Paraguay (Oporapa). In La Jagua there were also participants from Tarqui, and in El Agrado there were participants from El Pital. Each hub was its own working group, with a diversity of ages, experiences, knowledge, and interests.

The audio-visual process is still ongoing. Since August, 15 workshops have taken place in La Jagua, with youth from La Jagua, Paraguay, El Pital and Garzón participating. The workshop facilitators for the audio-visual process were the artist La Cloud and professors from the Mother Earth Teaching Program at the University of Antioquia. During this process they've created various shorts about different themes related to territory, including fishing, coffee growing, and displacement. The audio-visual training process will continue in 2015, and will culminate in the First Street Film Screening Series in the middle of this year. This traveling film series will be the official premiere of all the material created in the workshops, and have an open call for film entries from everywhere but directed primarily to audio visual material from Huila, Caquetá and Putumayo.

Just like the diverse participants, each workshop facilitator came from a different background and had experiences and knowledge to offer based on where they are from. The performing arts teacher, Fernando Pertuz from Bogotá, led all of his teaching through workshops about Practices of Resistance. The theater teacher, Lucenith Castillo, who comes from the group Esquina Latina in Cali, started with exercises to analyze reality that gave a basic foundation for presenting scenes through Theater of Neighbors (community/neighborhood based theater).

The contemporary dance teacher, Eduardo Oramas, led workshops in scenic improvisation, and our friends from the Colibrí Collective shared their experience with puppetry in Cauca with a workshop called How to Give Life to Metaphors. Each group evolved in its own way, and the results were very distinct. Struggles in defense of territory were ongoing during the course of these workshops and so they were a big influence. The workshops continued, but also the struggles for land continued in all the many ways that people practice resistance.

In La Jagua on November 1^st a blockade began on the road to Tarqui, which effectively paralyzed the Escalereta resettlement work in the neighborhood and the oxidation ponds in La Jagua, as well as their respective areas of preventive archeology. This blockade demanded compliance with ruling T-135 of the Constitutional Court, which ordered Emgesa to immediately open a new census of the affected population. The blockade lasted until November 25^th, when there were no longer guarantees from the State, which through ESMAD (riot police) was going to use violence against people to move them. The blockade coincided with a gathering of Ríos Vivos [the Living Rivers Social Movement], and people from the Ríos Vivos Movement arrived from all over Colombia: from Bajo Sinú (Córdoba), the Cauca River Canyon (Antioquia), the Sogamoso River (Santander), the north of the Department of Cauca and also from Neiva, Oporapa and Isnos, Huila. At the same time, the final action of Geochoreographies was taking place in La Jagua, which included a night of street theater in public space in town. During this action more than 300 people joined hands and created a human spiral, to close with an activity of offering and a fire at the site of Las Peñas on the Yuma (Magdalena) River. The next day there was a paseo de olla con sancocho (an outing to cook stew by the river) for everyone, that included demonstrations of throwing fishing nets, artisanal miners showing samples of their work, hanging a banner on the cliffs, puppet theater, rock painting, tubing on the river, and spelling out the phrase “ríos vivos” with our bodies on the warm rocks by the side of the river.

The group from El Agrado and El Pital, who were mostly adolescents and some children, did two days of action. The first day was in public space in a rural area at the bridges over the Yaguilga creek and the Balseadero Bridge over the Yuma River, and the second day was in parks in El Agrado and El Pital. During the geochoreography at the bridges they did some spontaneous graffiti, a human spiral, a presentation of River Theater (as oppose to street theater) called “the Bombarded Frog” and decorated the Balseadero Bridge with paper lanterns and a banner. On both days of action they made dozens of purple fabric bands painted with the names of native species of flora and fauna that are impacted by the Quimbo Hydroelectric Project, raising awareness at the bridges and in the main public parks about the other affected populations that aren't being recognized by the company Emgesa. In the parks they presented a couple of works of invisible theater, the Burial of the Land and the Displaced Fishing Net, and made a human spiral that incorporated the public.

In Gigante children and youth from the Casa de la Cultura theater group did an invisible theatre intervention in the market plaza that grabbed a lot of attention. Some pretended to be working for a multinational company, selling bottles of water from Páramo de Miraflores or from the Yuma River for 1 million Colombian pesos each to people in the market, while groups of thirsty children followed them around begging for water. At the same time, another group was walking around the market gifting hugs and bracelets that say Territorio Matambo (Matambo being the patron Peak of the region) and inviting people to the next play happening in the central park after mass. In the park they made another human spiral, and did a play where the Ceiba of Freedom came to life, talking to the people of Gigante from the heart, inviting them to liberate the land. This activity culminated with a paseo de olla con sancocho in the El Arado creek.

In Oporapa, San Ciro and Paraguay they presented the river-serpent, a 25 meter long blue puppet that wove through the streets until it confronted a dam that blocked its path. They also did the street coreographies of Los Macheteros y Los Cafeteros (The Machete Wielders and Coffee Growers), as well as human spirals. Between the Geochoreographies of Oporapa and San Ciro they took a break at the El Guayabo Creek, and in Paraguay after the presentation there was a community stew cooking where everyone was invited. These last actions coincided with protests against the COP20 in Lima, Peru, and also the participation of representatives from ASOQUIMBO and Ríos Vivos in the People's Summit on Climate Change in Lima. All of the participants in the final presentations received posters, Territorio Matambo bracelets and a Certificate of Participation.

Geochoreographies as a project has come to an end, but the audio-visual process is just taking a break and will be continued in 2015, ending its first cycle in the middle of the year. After much work and reflection it is clear that these kinds of projects in rural communities are needed and desired, especially those that are impacted by extraction projects. We hope to evolve this first experience into an arts and communication school for the defense of territory, in the not too distant future. It is clear to us that there is no lack of interest or energy for participating in these projects in the communities that relate to an intangible cultural inheritance that reinforces rootedness to the land. Now the challenge is to facilitate a second round, and deepen political formation and artistic and cultural creation as tactics for direct action and for personal and collective transformation of communities in the process of defending their territory, their lives, and life itself.