tribe
The Uwa people of Colombia have a way of life dedicated to saving the planet. For them, the prospect of oil companies drilling their lands portends the end of the world. John Vidal reports
The Uwa are one of South Americas more remote and mystical people. They have lived in the foothills and cloudforests of the Andes in north-east Colombia since, they believe, the world began, and had almost no contact with the outside world until 40 years ago.
And in all that time, in all their immense oral history, there is no record of them ever having fought outsiders or each other, of them causing any pollution, or of them taking anything that was not always theirs. Yet now, this retiring, self-governing society, which believes that it exists only to keep the world in harmony, faces certain apocalypse because of the inroads made into their lands by British and American oil companies.
To reach the small Uwa communities up in the mountains, you have to leave the Colombian plains, ford several rivers and then follow the tracks that lead up to the fields cleared from the forest 35 years ago by colonist farmers. There, you must wait for several days on the edge of the Uwas territory, hoping to gain the trust of their spiritual leaders.
If and when that trust is given, there is another long hike through bog, bush and jungle until you come to a near-vertical 500m escarpment cliff. You then follow the mountain streams up the cliff, led by machete and luminous blue, handkerchief- sized butterflies. Occasionally, the sun breaks through the canopy, but mostly there is no sense of a world beyond.
Exhausted, scratched and bitten, you finally emerge at the top of the cliff. Clouds hang like smoke on the valley sides below. Behind you, the great Cobaria River snakes away to the Orinoco and the Amazon Basin; to the north is Venezuela and the ever-rising hills leading up to the Sierra Nevada de Cocuy and its snow-topped peaks.
In pre-colonial days, the Uwa ranged across an area the size of Wales; today, most of the few thousand people who remain have retreated to the mountains to preserve their culture in the face of incursions by white settlers. Their 100 000ha designated territory is just 10% of their ancestral lands. It is a remote place, far from the cities, the drug and oil economies, and the guerrilla warfare that is now tearing lowland Colombia apart.
An old man, a string bag on his shoulder and with hands coloured orange from pulping fruit, beckons us from the edge of his banana patch and calls with a monkey yelp to his Spanish-speaking son, Betencaro. Betencaro is a tubby, Pan-like figure, with the softest of handshakes and the eagerness of a child. The 400m walk through the forest to his house takes an hour as he stops every few metres to show us his world.
This is what we eat, he says. He bends down, picks and strips a plant, exposes its heart and offers it. Here is a plate he picks off a leaf, bends it four ways like macram, and pierces the corners with a hard, spiky grass. This root is a medicine for the stomach … Here, taste this, its an anaesthetic it leaves my mouth numb within seconds. He calls to the birds and the frogs, and shows us where the aphrodisiacal honey comes from.
There is nothing in the forest that Betencaro and the Uwa do not use. These berries make soap; that fungus (he points to a tree) lights fires. He makes furniture with this creeper, bags from that. Heres a vine for bow strings. This is where the cuchi-cuchi (monkeys) live; where birds collect.
We eat bark and berry, root, tuber, bean, fruit and leaf. Betencaro is laughing his head off, beaming at his sufficiency. Everything in this cloudy Garden of Eden is useful to him.
We reach his house, which, like his fathers, is surrounded by a chaos of coca bushes, bananas and fruit trees. Betencaro regrets that he cannot invite us in because, he says, we will upset the gods who determine his every action and thought. He would have to get a wedhaiya (Uwa spiritual leader) to breathe on our clothes, to purify us and to prevent our culture from contaminating his home. So we sit outside and talk of the one thing that is occupying Uwa minds. Oil.
One hundred and sixty kilometres to the east, where the Cobaria River spills first through the state of Arauca before moving on to a landlocked floodplain, is the Cao Limon oilfield. It is one of the worlds largest, with more than 1 200-million barrels of oil, and it earns Colombia hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The oilfield is licensed to the Occidental (Oxy) oil corporation of the United States, which is in equal partnership with the Anglo-Dutch corporation, Shell. Ecopetrol, Colombias state oil company, has a smaller share.
The diametrically opposed worlds of the Uwa and the petrol companies of consumerism and mysticism, of corporations and the self-sufficient are clashing terribly in South America, and especially in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, which are set to displace the Middle East as the preferred source of US oil.
Where the Uwa depend on the natural inaccessibility of their habitat to protect their culture, these oil companies protect their 5 000ha holding with 3m-high coils of razor wire and kilometres of steel fences. Oxy and Shell pay a war tax of $1 per barrel (about $180 000 a day) to pay for the protection of the Colombian army from the escalating guerrilla war.
At Cao Limon we are met by nervous-looking young men with machine guns who spend their days in concrete pillboxes or in a bullet- splattered guard post. Oxy representatives are waiting for us, too.
It takes us half an hour and five radio and mobile telephone calls to pass through three sets of security gates into a manicured colonial compound that would do justice to Club Mediterrane. There are swimming pools, athletic tracks, tennis and racket courts, gymnasia, restaurants, a hospital, helicopter pads, shops. Everything must be brought in from outside to cater for the 150 oilworkers who live here for months at a stretch, not daring to leave for fear of being shot or kidnapped by the competing armies of guerrillas. It is like a war zone mixed with a holiday camp.
At their current rate of output, Shell and Oxy have only about 10 years exploitation left of the Cao Limon, and with the end in sight for this fabulously profitable field, they are searching for new sites. They have been licensed by the Colombian government to explore and exploit a large block of land called Samor. The problem is that Samor includes a sizeable part of the Uwas existing, and much of their ancestral, territory.
The oil companies have spent $16-million on seismic studies, which revealed that Samor holds as much oil as Cao Limon. But for the Uwa, any incursion on to their territory would be devastating, and their response is categorical: if and when Shell and Oxy move in to their mountains, the tribal leaders say that many Uwa will throw themselves off a high cliff called The Cliff of Death in an act of mass ritual suicide. For the Uwa, this would be a positive act better to die with both dignity and culture intact, they say, than to see their world torn apart.
Mass ritual suicide is part of the Uwa culture. The tribes oral history recounts how in the 16th century one large Uwa community, in retreat from the Spaniards, came to The Cliff of Death.
All Uwa territory is considered sacred, but there are some areas, the cliff included, where no one may go. Uwa history relates that, faced with being forced to move on to this forbidden land, the tribe put their children in clay pots and cast them off the cliff before leaping backwards after them. If the Uwa carry out their threat, they will go back to The Cliff of Death.
For the government, the Uwas decision is a philosophical dilemma that is threatening to become an international incident, according to Rodrigo Villamizar, the disgraced former minister of mines and petrol who resigned in August following a corruption scandal. James Niehaus, vice- president of Oxy Worldwide Production in California, calls it tragic.
Colombias Constitution requires it to protect its 84 tribes of indigenous peoples, but the country has an equal duty to develop its resources for the benefit of all. The circle is impossible to square because the Uwa do not want financial recompense, development or anything that the state or the neo-liberal economy can offer. The Uwa way of life is not negotiable, they say. It is the ultimate peaceful protest.
But there are billions of dollars at stake, and oil is now Colombias main export. The Uwa are semi-autonomous, and their lands are protected, but they do not own the mineral rights. Colombias highest constitutional court ruled in February that Occidental and the government were guilty of violating the fundamental right of consultation with the Uwa, and were threatening their ethnic, cultural, social and economic identity.
Within weeks, however, the higher administrative court effectively overruled this verdict and re-instated the Oxy/Shell mining permit. The current legal position is that the Samor oilfield can now be developed whenever Shell and Oxy decide to move in. The result is a tense political stand-off, with the companies and the government believing that they can still persuade the Uwa to accept oil development on their land.
No one has encountered a case like this before, says Eduardo Munoz-Gomez, minister in the Colombian embassy in London. We cant afford one person committing suicide.
Oxys stance is more hardline. The suicide threat is little more than a gesture, a threat, says Gerardo Vargas, an Oxy community-relations officer in Arauca. Besides, says the corporation, there is no written evidence of the Uwa suicides in the 16th century. The Uwa are not going to jump, says Vargas. I will commit suicide myself first. I know them. Suicide is not the philosophy of the Uwa. They have allowed themselves to get cornered. One of the problems of their culture is that they do not agree among themselves. Everyone is completely individualistic.
But who, exactly, has Oxy been talking to? Vargas claims that the corporation has been in continual negotiation and talks with the Uwa since the application was made in 1985. The Uwa, he says, were on the point of signing an agreement as late as 1993. He calls them his friends.
The reality is that Oxy has talked to only one small, geographically isolated Uwa group on a consistent basis, and all of them are more or less integrated with white society, if living in poverty. The corporation has talked to no spiritual leaders and has never visited the main Uwa communities or power centres. Only five people in a community of several thousand seem prepared to say that they want the oil to come. All five have connections with Oxy. Only one of them speaks Uwa, and four live in towns.
In May, these five were the Uwa community representatives at a meeting in Bogot to discuss the situation with a group of senators. The five Uwa representatives signed a document stating that they were in favour of oil exploitation with certain provisions: protection of the environment, social programmes and sustainable development.
When pressed recently, however, one said that she is not exactly in favour of oil exploitation on Uwa land. She sees herself as someone trying to find a solution and avoid conflict.
Land is protected by the Uwa not just in the strict environmental sense that they never waste, pollute or take more than the land can bear, but also in ritual chant and dance. They daily sing the world into creation by reciting their myths and their place names. They keep the world alive by, literally, singing it. The birds, too, create places by chanting the names of the areas they fly over. Everything that the Uwa do or think is focused to protect and continue life.
The traditional Uwa still practise rotation agriculture, moving up from the lower slopes to higher ones according to the season. Their many different myths are performed seasonally, accompanied by rituals led by the wedhaiya. Although the tribe has barely enough land for everyone in the reservation, it is largely an unchanging world, in stark contrast to what Uwa leaders refer to as the ever- changing nature of white society.
And as part of their cosmology, the Uwa world above is mirrored below the earth. In this inverted universe live shadow people, alter egos of those living on the surface. Here in the underworld, the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. In psychological terms, this relates with the world of the psyche and the different levels of the conscious and unconscious.
The sense of mystery is everywhere. On reaching puberty, young Uwa women put on head-dresses, or cocaras, made of giant leaves from which they can see only through a small slit in the front. They wear them until someone asks to marry them, which can take four or more years. Then there are the 12 menhirs, great standing stones like those at Stonehenge, the pillars of the Uwas spiritual world. Uwa myth says that when the last one falls, the world ends. Only two still stand.
But what about oil? The Uwa say they have always had a word for it ruiria. For them, it is the blood of Mother Earth, the veins of the land, says Edgar Mendez, an anthropologist who has worked with the Uwa for two years. The invasion of another world into their territory above or below ground is death. To extract it would tear their spiritual world apart.
We return from the mountains, stumbling in the dark, having barely been granted access to the Uwas main communities. Pep, a semi-pet coypu, is being grilled over wood by a lowland Uwa family that farms an old colonist ranch. Berich Kubaruwa, president of the traditional Uwa council, swings in a hammock with a child. In his pocket, he has a clock insect that whistles on the Uwa hour. We had lots of hours before the Spanish came, he quips.
Berich is weary. The communities will die, he sighs. We cant give permission to develop oil. You cant sell Mother Moon. We dont even sell our timber or cattle, so why would we want to try to sell the blood of Mother Earth? We believe that the sun and the moon only work with the earth because she has blood. If you take out the blood, then you damage the earth and cause imbalance.
The Uwa believe that they are doomed because to extract the oil would be to drain the earth of its blood. They are prepared to die for their beliefs, but they are also increasingly aware that, in cold, practical terms, the effective end of their tribe is more likely be caused by the guerrilla warfare that accompanies the oil industry in Colombia. They will have no earthly way of defending themselves.
On July 1, war nearly came to the Uwa living in the small community of Casa Roja. At 9am, a column of 30 armed men came up the track, the first guerrillas seen in the area. A military patrol was waiting for them. Two people died in a brief firefight that ended when a plane dropped four bombs within metres of the houses.
An Uwa villager, Yaquie, shows us the bullet holes in three of her walls. If oil comes, there will be more of this, she says. It is inevitable. We will die.
Yaquie and the other Uwa base their fears on what has happened in other oilfields, especially the Cao Limon field. A recent report prepared by local unions, churches, indigenous and human-rights groups documents the reality of life in the Cao Limon since oil was exploited. Just 15 years ago, this was a sleepy, under-populated frontier land, but the oilfield attracted tens of thousands of displaced people, who flooded into the area in search of work. With them came two full mobile brigades of the Colombian army, paid for by Shell and Oxy, who are accused of atrocities by Amnesty International and Colombian human-rights groups.
Oil has also attracted, like flies to the ointment, the well-armed ELN and FARC, Colombias two main guerrilla groups. Also in the area are shadowy, pro-government paramilitary death squads paid for unofficially by the military or the police. An estimated 6 000 people in Arauca now survive by murder, kidnapping and extortion.
The government, the oil companies and the local authorities say the war is escalating. The 600km oil pipeline paid for by Shell and Oxy and operated by Ecopetrol that starts in Cao Limon and takes more than half of Colombias oil to the Caribbean coast has been bombed and mined 473 times since it was completed in 1986.
There were 47 attacks in the first six months of 1997 alone. The 1,5-million barrels of oil spilt in the bombings have caused irreparable pollution to the environment, says Oxy. Put together, they constitute the sixth-largest oil spill in history. Many of the oil workers have been killed.
The ecological and social situation is disturbing, too. Local unions and churches have documented the side-effects of oil exploitation in the region. These include invasion of land, pollution of the air, rivers and soil, the loss of sacred lakes, birdlife, land degradation and climatic changes. With these ecological problems have come social disintegration prostitution, drugs, alcoholism, malnutrition, delinquency and divisions in society.
This puts Oxy in a dilemma. While it needs to keep the international community and the global financial markets abreast of production delays and problems with the guerrillas, it has to present a different face to the Colombian people when asked if it will bring a similar destabilisation of society in Samor, and especially Uwa territory, if it begins oil production there. Rather than accept any responsibility for the chaos, Oxy claims to be a good neighbour, and points to the social and financial initiatives it has designed to help local communities.
Does Oxy accept that the same social and ecological disasters will take place in Samor if they and Shell start production? With all the logic of a massive corporation in California, Niehaus says that the Uwa need Oxy and oil. Without the development that the companies will bring, he claims, the Uwa are doomed: Young people will continue to leave the area to seek opportunities elsewhere, and the communities will not be able to continue their traditional way of life. The simple fact is that Uwa society is changing as a result of complex socio-economic factors that have nothing to do with oil development.
The neo-liberal government still cannot believe that the Uwa will carry out their threats, or that the oil development will be stopped.
Nevertheless, Oxy now suggests it may be able to extract oil without going into Uwa lands, by using advanced technologies to drill horizontally from the side. The Uwa are not impressed, and have raised the stakes by saying that they will now commit suicide if any oil is taken out of their ancestral territory. They are now seeking to have their lands extended.
For Oxy and Shell, it must all be rather confusing. In the can-do global economy of oil and international diplomacy, everyone they have encountered so far has had a price; everything can be negotiated and every situation mediated. The Uwas position questions their whole presence and exposes their flaws. They talk a different language and speak from another world, says Mendez.
The companies talk about social responsibility, but they refuse to accept responsibility for the impact of their work, says Martin von Hildebrand, Colombias former environment minister who framed the constitutional laws to protect indigenous peoples rights in 1991 and who now works with the Gaia Foundation in Bogot.
Everywhere else, from South America to Africa, they have got what they wanted by taking advantage of the weakness of institutions, playing one group off against another, dividing people, working on the young, and offering gifts. This time, it is not working.
Yesterdays mirrors and beads have become todays roads, health and education centres, says Von Hildebrand. The Uwa are adamant they would prefer to die in dignity rather than lose their identity and their purpose, which is to keep the world alive. Where the whole of Colombian society is being destabilised by the rush to embrace a global economy, they pose unanswerable questions.
The hot afternoon rain pours down in Casa Roja. D, the daughter of a wedhaiya who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, says that the situation is confusing and dangerous. Are there not simple truths and laws that exist for everyone and everything, she asks. Fundamental laws that cannot be changed on the whim of men in Los Angeles, London or Bogot?
I sing the traditional songs to my children, she says. I teach them that everything is sacred and linked. How can I tell Shell and Oxy that to take the petrol is for us worse than killing your own mother? If you kill the earth, then no one will live. I do not want to die. Nobody does. No, it is not a gesture.
Ann Osborn, an Oxford university anthropologist, went to live in Colombia in 1958 when she was in her early 20s and spent more than 10 years with the Uwa in the 1970s and 1980s, and helped in the tribes fight to secure its territory.
Osborn died in 1988, but her lifes work is two books describing a complex, mystical society rooted in ritual and myth, and led by the purest in the tribe, the elected wedhaiya. The Uwa, says Osborn, attach a spiritual value to everything. They believe that they are the centre of a living earth and that they perpetuate all life by protecting it. Echoing James Lovelocks Gaia theory and radical science that proposes that the earth is holistically a living organism, the Uwa say everything from land, tree and rock to river, sky and place is alive and therefore sacred.
Earlier this year, Berich and Mendez were flown to California by a small US environmental group to confront top Oxy executives at their headquarters. Berich sat on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, studied it for many hours, and then searched and sang his traditional songs to understand what his history had to say. He told the oilmen how the earth is connected to the sun and the moon. There is no sense that they understood.
The militarisation of the area has developed into a feudal war. Government records note that, in the past year, there have been 38 assassinations, 18 massacres, 31 incidents of torture, 44 kidnappings, 151 illegal det- entions, 360 incidents of harassment, 150 displacements of people, and one disappearance. A judicial investigation documents further murders, illegal detentions and human rights abuses. Few believe these figures cover even half the atrocities that have taken place.
Life was tranquil before the oil, says the report, which was carried out on the Uwas behalf. Today . . . people are forgetting the basic principles of togetherness and are unable to adapt . . . With the contamination of the land has come cultural and spiritual contamination.
Rather than accept that their presence has been responsible for the militarisation of the region, Oxy and Shell blame the guerrillas for the plight of the Uwa. The Uwa are virtually hostages in their own land, controlled by groups engaged in illegal and murderous acts, including drug and gun trafficking, says Niehaus, Oxys vice-president. As a result, they are prevented from making decisions about their future without interference and intimidation decisions that could make the difference between survival and the extinction of their community. The Uwa reply that they have had no contact with the guerrillas and that they mostly support their struggle. The guerrillas, they say, target the oil companies, not them.